Achelous and Hercules, 1947, tempera and oil on canvas mounted on plywood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Allied Stores Corporation, and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program, 1985.2
Intense colors and writhing forms evoke the contest of muscle and will between Hercules and Achelous, the Greek god who ruled over the rivers. In flood season, Achelous took on the form of an angry bull, tearing new channels through the earth with his horns. Hercules defeated him by tearing off one horn, which became nature’s cornucopia, or horn of plenty.
Thomas Hart Benton saw the legend as a parable of his beloved Midwest. The Army Corps of Engineers had begun efforts to control the Missouri River, and Benton imagined a future when the waterway was tamed, and the earth swelled with robust harvests. Benton’s mythic scene also touched on the most compelling events of the late 1940s. America’s agricultural treasure was airlifted to Europe through the Marshall Plan as part of Truman’s strategy to rebuild Europe and contain communism.
Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait, 1971, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1972.102
PHILIP EVERGOOD
Philip Evergood, Workers Houses, Flushing Bay, 1935-1945, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Arnold and Augusta Newman, 1982.130
Many of Philip Evergood’s images protested the exploitation of America’s laborers, but this painting has a different quality. It focuses on the idea of home and community in the working-class neighborhood of Flushing Bay, in Queens. The settlement is not prosperous, but each house has its own plot of land and a few trees to soften the landscape. Smoke billowing from chimneys echoes the stacks of factories in the distance, where the people of Flushing Bay earn their living. The artist gave the painting to photographer Arnold Newman, and Newman later recalled his visit to pick it up in Evergood’s Greenwich Village studio. Evergood had decided that it needed “a spot of red here … He took out his paints and brushes and for four or five hours, long into the night, he reworked the canvas while I watched.” (Augusta and Arnold Newman to Adelyn Breeskin, December 28, 1982, SAAM curatorial file)
Dowager in a Wheelchair
Philip Evergood, Dowager in a Wheelchair, 1952, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.90
Evergood’s art reflected a deep commitment to social equality and sympathy for human frailty. Recollecting the genesis of Dowager in a Wheelchair, he wrote, “Once I saw a tragic old lady being wheeled on Madison Avenue. She was alive in spirit but her body was only half functioning. She wanted still to be young. A young, gentle, fascinatingly fresh companion was wheeling her.
As I passed, spring was in the air, a delicate whiff of lilac perfume mixed with a faint background of crushed rose petals reached my nostril & then my brain. I was disturbed. I stopped when they’d passed and followed their progress through the crowds with my eyes. Taxis & cars were too noisy. I lost sight of them in a few moments. I went sadly on my way with a vivid memory which lingered on. I consider the painting to be one of the very best I ever painted.”
Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, 2014 Philip Evergood was a political radical who throughout his career sympathized with this country’s less privileged citizens. But his sympathy also extended to those whose wealth could not shield them from the realities of life.
Philip Evergood, Woman at the Piano, 1955, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.57
Philip Evergood
was born in New York City. His mother was English and his father, Miles Evergood, was an Australian artist of Polish Jewish descent who, in 1915, changed the family’s name from Blashki to Evergood. Philip Evergood’s formal education began in 1905. He studied music and by 1908 he was playing the piano in a concert with his teacher.
He attended different English boarding schools starting in 1909 and was educated mainly at Eton and Cambridge University. In 1921 he decided to study art, left Cambridge, and went to London to study with Henry Tonks at the Slade School.
In 1923 Evergood went back to New York where he studied at the Art Students League of New York for a year. He then returned to Europe, worked at various jobs in Paris, painted independently, and studied at the Académie Julian with André Lhote. He also studied with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17. Hayter taught him engraving. He returned to New York in 1926 and began a career that was marked by the hardships of severe illness, an almost fatal operation, and constant financial trouble.
It was not until the collector Joseph H. Hirshhorn purchased several of his paintings that he could consider his financial troubles over. Evergood worked on WPA art projects from 1934 to 1937 where he painted two murals: The Story of Richmond Hill (1936–37, Public Library branch, Queens, N.Y.) and ‘Cotton from Field to Mill (1938, post office in Jackson, Ga.. He taught both music and art as late as 1943, and finally moved to Southbury, Connecticut, in 1952. He was a full member of the Art Students League of New York and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was killed in a house fire in Bridgewater, Connecticut, in 1973 at the age of 72.[3] He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.[5]
FRANCIS CRISS
Francis Criss, Sixth Avenue “L” (mural, Williamsburg Housing Project, New York), 1937, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Newark Museum, 1966.31.3
Francis Criss, City Store Fronts, 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.35
Francis Criss Jefferson Market Courthouse 1935 Note that the Women’s House of Detention is in the background.
FRANCIS CRISS
Criss was born in London and immigrated with his family at age four. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1917 to 1921 on a scholarship, and later the Art Students League of New York and the Barnes Foundation, and he took private classes with Jan Matulka.
In addition to doing work for the U.S. Government under the New Deal, and contributing a mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn for the Federal Art Project, Criss taught at the leftist American Artists School in the 1930s. His pupils there included Ad Reinhardt. He also held teaching positions at numerous other institutions, including the Albright Museum School, Buffalo; the Art Students League; the New School for Social Research; and the School of Visual Arts.[3] Criss was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934.
The work from his best-known years, the 1930s and 1940s, is characterized by imagery of the urban environment, such as elevated subway tracks, skyscrapers, streets, and bridges. Criss rendered these subjects with a streamlined, abstracted style, devoid of human figures, that led him to be associated with the Precisionism movement. With distorted perspectives and dream-like juxtapositions, as in Jefferson Market Courthouse (1935), these empty cityscapes also suggest the influence of Surrealism. A turn towards more commercial work later in his career—including a November 1942 cover for Fortune Magazine—led to a decline in his reputation.
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EDITORIAL
The other day a friend and I wandered over to Long Island City. Parked by the Gantry NYS Park were a dozen food trucks. I could have had any variety of choices from empanadas to vege to Mexicano.
Why 12 food trucks here and ZERO on Roosevelt Island?
I am sure there is no reason to have 12 vendors on one site when a few of them could be on Roosevelt Island. We have to stop the RIOC bureaucracy from scaring away any kind of vendor. After 7 months of Pandemic I am very tired of the poor choice of dining and the sad state of our restaurants. BRING ON VARIETY AND FOOD TRUCKS!!!
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society WIKIPEDIA (C) SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM (C)
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NEWTOWN CREEK ROUTE MEANDERING THRU BROOKLYN AND QUEENS.
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
OUR 128th ISSUE
OF
FROM THE ARCHIVES
A CREEK WITH MANY
BRIDGES
PULASKI BRIDGE
Pulaski Bridge over Newtown Creek
The Pulaski Bridge, which carries six lanes of traffic and a pedestrian sidewalk over Newton Creek and the Long Island Expressway, is orientated north-south and connects Greenpoint in Brooklyn to Long Island City in Queens. McGuinness Boulevard approaches the bridge from the south and Eleventh Street from the north. The Pulaski Bridge is a 54m double leaf, trunnion type bascule bridge. It has two 10.5m roadways divided by a concrete median barrier. It also carries a 2.7m pedestrian sidewalk. The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 45.7m and a vertical clearance of 11.9m in the closed position at MHW and 13m MLW. The Pulaski Bridge was opened to traffic on September 10, 1954. The bridge was reconstructed in 1994 at a cost of approximately $40 million. The project included new approach roadways, new superstructure and approach spans, and upgrade of the bridge’s mechanical/electrical systems. The drawbridge was named for Kasimierz Pulaski, a Polish national who fought alongside General Washington during the American Revolution and who founded what would become the Calvary division of the United States Army. Recently, the general also returned to the spotlight when researchers who exhumed Pulatski’s body discovered evidence that Pulaski may have been female or intersex.
Opened in September of 1954 to replace the failing and inadequate Vernon Avenue Bridge, the current six-lane double bascule draw bridge also features a combined pedestrian and bicycle lane. It’s the 13.1 mile mark of the New York City Marathon, and is one of the busiest crossings between Brooklyn and Queens.
It opens several times a day to allow maritime traffic access to the Newtown Creek from the East River.
GREENPOINT AVENUE BRIDGE
GREENPOINT AVENUE BRIDGE
The bridge is located between Gardner Avenue in Brooklyn and 47th Street in Queens. The Grand Street Bridge is a 69.2m long swing type bridge with a steel truss superstructure. The general appearance of the bridge remains the same as when it was opened in 1903.
The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 17.7m and a vertical clearance, in the closed position, of 3.0m at MHW and 4.6m at MLW. The bridge structure carries a two-lane two-way vehicular roadway with sidewalks on either side. The roadway width on the bridge is 6.0m and the sidewalks are 1.8m wide. The height restriction is 4.1m. The approach roadways are wider than the bridge roadway. For example, the width of Grand Avenue at the east approach to the bridge (near 47th Street) is 15.11m.
The first bridge on this site, opened in 1875, quickly became dilapidated due to improper maintenance. Its replacement, opened in 1890, was declared by the War Department in 1898 to be “an obstruction to navigation.” Following a thorough study, a plan was adopted in 1899 to improve the bridge and its approaches.
The current bridge was opened on February 5, 1903 at a cost of $174,937.
The first bridge on this site, a drawbridge known as the Blissville, was built in the 1850’s. It was succeeded by three other bridges before a new one was completed in March 1900 at a cost of $58,519. That bridge received extensive repairs after a fire in 1919 damaged parts of the center pier fender, the southerly abutment, and the superstructure. Until that time, the bridge had also carried tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. The current bridge was built in 1987.
METROPOLITAN AVENUE BRIDGE
Metropolitan Avenue Bridge
Over English Kills View of the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge Metropolitan Avenue is a two-way local City street in Kings and Queens Counties. The number of lanes varies from two to four along the entire length of Metropolitan Avenue, which runs east-west and extends from River Street in the Southside section of Brooklyn to Jamaica Avenue in Queens.
The bridge, the only one over English Kills, carries both Metropolitan Avenue and Grand Street. The bridge is situated between Vandervoort and Varick Avenues in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The Metropolitan Avenue Bridge is a double leaf bascule bridge with a span of 33.8 m. The general appearance of the bridge has been significantly changed since it was opened in 1931.
The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 26.2 m and a vertical clearance, in the closed position, of 3.0 m at MHW and 4.6 m at MLW. The bridge structure carries a four-lane two-way vehicular roadway with sidewalks on either side. The roadway width is 16.2 m and the sidewalks are 1.8 m. There are no height restrictions on the bridge.
After the City acquired Metropolitan Avenue from the Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike Road Company in 1872, the existing bridge was replaced by a swing bridge, which was also used by the Broadway Ferry and Metropolitan Avenue Railroad Company. Growth in the area made the bridge inadequate by the early 20th century.
The current bridge was built in 1931. Modifications since then have included upgrading the mechanical and electrical systems and the replacement of deck, bridge rail, and fenders. The stringers were replaced and new stiffeners added in 1992.
BORDEN AVENUE BRIDGE
Borden Avenue Bridge
Over Dutch Kills is located just south of the Long Island Expressway between 27th Street and Review Avenue in the Blissville neighborhood. The roadway width is 10.5m and the sidewalks are 2.0m wide. The west approach and east approach roadways, which are wider than the bridge roadway, are 15.3m and 13.0m respectively.
The bridge provides a horizontal clearance of 14.9m and a vertical clearance in the closed position of 1.2m at mean high water and 2.7m at mean low water.
Borden Avenue Bridge is a retractile bridge, meaning that the bridge deck opens by sliding diagonally back to shore. It is one of four remaining bridges of its type in the nation. Another example is the Carroll Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.
As part of the construction of Borden Avenue in 1868, a wooden bridge was built over Dutch Kills. This bridge was soon replaced with an iron swing bridge, which was removed in 1906. The current bridge opened on March 25, 1908 at a cost of $157,606.
The deck’s original design consisted of creosote-treated wood blocks, with two trolley tracks in the roadway. The characteristic features of the bridge include the stucco-clad operator’s house and a rock-faced stone retaining wall. The gable-on-hip roof of the operator’s house retains the original clay tile at the upper part. Although alterations have been made, the bridge is a rare survivor of its type and retains sufficient period integrity to convey its historic design significance.
Borden Avenue was built as a plank road in 1868; at first it extended east only as far as Calvary Cemetery, but by the 1920s, it had been built as a main traffic route as far east at Grand Avenue and 69th Street in Maspeth. When the Queens-Midtown Expressway was built after World War II, Borden Avenue became the service road on the north side of the expressway and it still terminates at Grand and 69th — east of that, the service road is labeled Queens-Midtown Expressway. All service roads change to Horace Harding Expressway east of Queens Boulevard.
When the plank road was begun in the Andrew Johnson Presidential Administration, engineers were immediately met with a problem in that Dutch Kills, an inlet of Newtown Creek trafficked by cargo vessels and other shipping lay in the way. A wood bridge was hastily slapped up, but the dangers of such a structure were realized almost immediately and an iron bridge was built in 1872.
That bridge, as well, was replaced in 1908 by the current structure, a retractile bridge that can swing diagonally along tracks that greatly resemble railroad tracks to open the bridge if a vessel wishes to pass down Dutch Kills. Though there had not been reason to retract the bridge since 2005, in 2007 the structure had been judged too deteriorated to allow heavy truck and bus traffic to continue to use it, and it closed for repairs for two years.
A streetcar line ran east on Borden Avenue from Hunters Point to Newtown. Amazingly enough the street layout of 1909 is still intact in 2011, though the streets have been numbered except for Borden Avenue (which would be 52nd Avenue if it were numbered). The Queens Midtown Expressway now soars high above the area between 50th and 51st Avenues. Meadow Street has become Skillman Avenue, and Dutch Kills Creek was recognized as a redundant name and is now plain old Dutch Kills.
HUNTERS POINT AVENUE BRIDGE
Hunters Point Avenue Bridge
Over Dutch Kills View of the Hunters Point bridge Hunters Point Avenue is a two-lane local City street in Queens. Hunters Point Avenue is oriented east-west and extends from 21st Street to the Long Island Expressway/Brooklyn Queens Expressway interchange in Queens. The avenue is parallel to and approximately one block south of the Long Island Expressway.
The Hunters Point Bridge over Dutch Kills is situated between 27th Street and 30th Street in the Long Island City section of Queens, and is four blocks upstream of the Borden Avenue Bridge. It is a bascule bridge with a span of 21.8m. The general appearance of the bridge has been significantly changed since it was first opened in 1910.
The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 18.3m and a vertical clearance, in the closed position, of 2.4m at MHW and 4.0m at MLW. The bridge structure carries a two-lane, two-way vehicular roadway with sidewalks on either side. The roadway width is 11.0m, while the sidewalks are 1.8m wide. The width of the approach roadways vary from the width of the bridge roadway. The west approach and east approach roadways are 13.4m and 9.1m, respectively.
The first bridge at this site, a wooden structure, was replaced by an iron bridge in 1874. That bridge was permanently closed in 1907 due to movement of the west abutment, which prevented the draw from closing. It was replaced in 1910 by a double-leaf bascule bridge, designed by the Scherzer Rolling Lift Bridge Company. The bridge was rebuilt in the early 1980’s as a single-leaf bascule, incorporating the foundations of the previous bridge.
GRAND STREET BRIDGE
Grand Street Bridge
Over the East Branch of Newtown Creek View of the Grand Street Bridge Grand Street is a two-lane local City street in Queens and Kings Counties. Grand Street runs northeast and extends from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in Brooklyn to Queens Boulevard in Queens. The road is known as Grand Street west of the bridge and Grand Avenue east of the bridge.
The bridge is located between Gardner Avenue in Brooklyn and 47th Street in Queens. The Grand Street Bridge is a 69.2m long swing type bridge with a steel truss superstructure. The general appearance of the bridge remains the same as when it was opened in 1903. The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 17.7m and a vertical clearance, in the closed position, of 3.0m at MHW and 4.6m at MLW. The bridge structure carries a two-lane two-way vehicular roadway with sidewalks on either side. The roadway width on the bridge is 6.0m and the sidewalks are 1.8m wide. The height restriction is 4.1m. The approach roadways are wider than the bridge roadway. For example, the width of Grand Avenue at the east approach to the bridge (near 47th Street) is 15.11m.
The first bridge on this site, opened in 1875, quickly became dilapidated due to improper maintenance. Its replacement, opened in 1890, was declared by the War Department in 1898 to be “an obstruction to navigation.” Following a thorough study, a plan was adopted in 1899 to improve the bridge and its approaches. The current bridge was opened on February 5, 1903 at a cost of $174,937. Grand Street Bridge Facts.
GREENPOINT AVENUE BRIDGE
Greenpoint Avenue
is a four-lane local street in Queens and Brooklyn, running northeast from the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Roosevelt Avenue in Sunnyside, Queens. The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, also known as the J. J. Byrne Memorial Bridge, is located approximately 2.2 km from the mouth of Newtown Creek.
The bridge is situated between Kingsland Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and Review Avenue in the Blissville section of Queens. The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge is a double-leaf trunnion bascule, with 21.3 m wide leaves. This bridge is a steel girder structure with a filled grid deck. The bridge provides a channel with a horizontal clearance of 45.4 m and in the closed position a vertical clearance of 7.9 m at MHW and 9.4 m at MLW. The bridge structure carries a four-lane two-way vehicular roadway with a 1.2m striped median and sidewalks on either side. The roadway width is 8.6m and the sidewalks are 4.0m and 3.7m for the north and south sidewalk respectively. The approach roadways are narrower than the bridge roadway. The west approach and east approach roadways are 17.1m (including 1.4m center median) and 11.9m respectively.
The first bridge on this site, a drawbridge known as the Blissville, was built in the 1850’s. It was succeeded by three other bridges before a new one was completed in March 1900 at a cost of $58,519. That bridge received extensive repairs after a fire in 1919 damaged parts of the center pier fender, the southerly abutment, and the superstructure. Until that time, the bridge had also carried tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. The current bridge was built in 1987.
Back of Pepsi sign in LIC Jay Jacobson, Alexis Villefane, Nancy Brown and Jinny Ewald got it right!
EDITORIAL
Why worry about bridges over the Newtown Creek? Our industrial areas were centered in these areas and we needed cheap and easy water born transportation. We did not know the pollutants that were tossed and piped into the waterway. Maybe, with so many advocacy groups the creek will again be a little more safe.
More to come tomorrow,
JUDITH BERDY
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Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff
THANKS TO THE NYC DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION FOR NARRATIVES, THANKS TO MITCH WAXMAN AND NEWTOWN PENTICLE FOR THEIR EXPERTISE. THANKS TO FORGOTTEN NEW YORK, TOO. All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Well, not exactly. But there is a connection. Perhaps you have seen the work of the artist Louise Bourgeois. She’s world famous for her sculpture and paintings, but most of all she is known for her spiders – especially the very big ones.
Louise Bourgeois, sculpture, Maman. Bourgeois in the 1950s was a member of the American Abstract Artists Group along with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. She was friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. But her work transcended even contemporary categories. As she said, “I have met important figures from this century’s art: Brancusi, Léger… I have lived next to the most radical art movements, but I have always tried to make art that was my own.” (And, by the way, you can visit her home and studio downtown, precisely as it was when she left it at her death in 2010.)
Ah yes, but Roosevelt Island.
Well, in 1936, Bourgeois had opened a print shop beside her father’s tapestry gallery, and one day Robert Goldwater walked in, bought a couple of Picasso prints from her and, as she put it: “In between talks about surrealism and the latest trends, we got married.” Goldwater, a young American academic, turns out to be an interesting and soon to be influential guy.
As war clouds rose in Europe, the couple moved to New York City, where Goldwater taught in New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Bourgeois attended the Art Students League of New York,
Goldwater was one of the first art history students to study modern art when the subject was not considered worthy of serious graduate research. His doctoral dissertation at NYU dealt with “primitivism” and Modern art. A year later, a revised version of his dissertation appeared as Primitivism in Modern Painting, a pioneering and now classic study that examines the relationship between tribal arts and 20th-century painting. His analysis, we are told, distinguishes the romanticism of Gauguin; an emotional primitivism exemplified by the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups in Germany; the intellectual primitivism of Picasso and Modigliani; and a “primitivism of the subconscious” in Miró, Klee, and Dali.
Later, after establishing himself as one of our leading authorities in the study of modern Western art, Goldwater became a scholar and connoisseur of the art of Africa. In the sixties, he published monographs on “Bambara Sculpture from the Western Sudan” and “Senufo Sculpture From West Africa” in addition to books on modern sculpture and surrealism.
In 1957 he became a full professor of art history at NYU, and in the same year became the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art, founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller and derived in part from Rockefeller’s personal collection. Goldwater organized the first exhibition of African art by a New York museum, which opened in 1957 in a town house on West 54th Street. In 1969, Rockefeller offered the entire Museum of Primitive Art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which established a curatorial department for the care, study and exhibition of the works. A new wing was proposed, to be named in honor of Rockefeller’s son Michael who disappeared in 1961 during an expedition in New Guinea. Goldwater served as Consultative Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Primitive Art from 1971 until his death. The wing, which contains both the Metropolitan Museum’s existing holdings with those of the Primitive Museum’s former holdings, opened to the public in January 1982. The departmental library was renamed the Robert Goldwater Library in Goldwater’s memory.
Bourgeois and Goldwater lived among entered the innermost circles of the period’s advanced culture in New York and abroad, surrounded by writers, scholars, critics and curators.
Louise and Robert Goldwater in Long Island, 1984.
Courtesy Fondazione Prada
But what about Roosevelt Island? Ah yes. Well, the name “Goldwater” is the clue. Robert Goldwater’s father was Dr. Sigmund Schultz Goldwater, City Commissioner for Hospitals in New York from 1934 to 1940. Dr. Goldwater played a significant role in the modernization of the New York City hospital system. At his death, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia stated, “For him was due the credit for the rehabilitation of the hospital system of the City of New York. He was a great force for progressive medicine and the outstanding authority on hospital construction.”
Earlier, Goldwater had served a NYC Commission of Health. He was also a registered architect and an honorary member of the American Institutes for Architects. He served as a consulting expert to the US Public Health Service and to the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad, in the USSR. At his death he was advisory construction expert for 156 hospitals in the United States, Canada, Newfoundland and British Columbia.
So here is where the story has led. In 1939, the Welfare Island Hospital for Chronic Diseases opened, as a nursing, chronic care, and rehabilitative facility with 986 beds, replacing the Blackwell Island penitentiary. Designed by Isadore Rosenfield, Butler & Kohn, and York & Sawyer under Goldwater’s oversight, the hospital was known for its modern structure and facilities. It was renamed Goldwater Memorial Hospital in honor of Dr. S. S. Goldwater.
Hang on. There’s a little more. Before the hospital’s construction, Goldwater and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses debated intensely on how to use the land throughout the island. Moses wanted to tear down everything that remained on the island, and make a great public park here. Goldwater wanted a hospital park. Since Moses, however, had already opened parks on Randall’s and Wards Islands, the scale tipped in Goldwater’s favor. Dr. Goldwater originally planned to build seven modern medical facilities. Only a Nurse’s Residence (built in 1938, north of the current subway station) and this hospital materialized, while all other construction was postponed by World War II. Bird S. Coler Hospital opened in 1952, the last of the pre-Roosevelt Island constructions.
So there we are – giant spiders and Roosevelt Island. Check under your bed. You never know.
Robert and Louse Goldwater on Long Island in 1984 (Fondazione Prada)
OPOSSUM WHO WAS RESCUED AND NOW A RESIDENT OF WWF SANCTUARY ALEXIS VILLEFANE GUESSED RIGHT
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EDITORIAL
Thanks to Stephen Blank for today’s article on Robert Goldwater. Fascinating stories seem to come to us so frequently and mysterious questions get answered.
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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PEGGY BACON LADY ARTIST 1925 DRYPOINT THIS IMAGE IS PROPERTY OF THE METROPOLITAN
EXCERPT FROM WIKIPEDIA
PEGGY BACON
From 1915-1920, Bacon studied painting with Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan, George Bellows, and others at the Art Students League. While at the League, Bacon became friends with several other artists. Her circle of friends and acquaintances included Dorothea Schwarcz, Anne Rector, Betty Burroughs, Katherine Schmidt , Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Molly Luce, Dorothy Varian, Edmund Duffy, Dick Dyer, David Morrison, and Andrew Dasburg.
Looking back at her time at the League Bacon said, “The years at the Art Students League were a very important chunk of life to me and very exhilarating. It was the first time in my life, of course, that I had met and gotten to know familiarly a group of young people who were all headed the same way with the same interests. In fact it was practically parochial.”
In 1917, she exhibited two works in the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (April 10-May 6, 1917). Around 1917 Bacon also became interested in printmaking and taught herself drypoint as there was no one teaching etching at the Art Students League at the time. Bacon’s first caricature prints were featured in single-issue, satirical magazine Bad News, which was published by Bacon and her fellow art students in 1918. Drypoint was Bacon’s primary medium until 1927, and pastels until 1945
.Athough Bacon had trained as a painter, she eventually became famous for her satirical prints and drawings. Her caricatures were first published in a single issue spoof, entitled Bad News. Her early portrait caricatures in Bad News, like her early drypoints, depended upon a hard, controlling outline, filled in with shading or an obscure pattern. The intensity of the hues, the highly selective and organized palette, and her visually satisfying compositions all contribute to the high quality and formal aspects that distinguish Bacon’s pastel portraits from others. Bacon was also featured in solo shows in prominent galleries such as; Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery, the Weyhe Gallery, and the Downtown Gallery. In the summer of 1919, Bacon studied with Andrew Dasburg, in Woodstock, New York.
That same summer she was engaged to American painter Alexander Brook and the two married on May 4, 1920.[8] After marrying, Bacon and Brook moved to London for a year, where their daughter, Belinda, was born When they returned, the family divided their time between Greenwich Village and Woodstock, New York, two vibrant artist communities.
In 1922 a son, Sandy, was born in Woodstock. In 1940, Bacon and her husband divorced. Bacon was a very prolific artist. In 1919, at the age of 24, she wrote and illustrated her first book, The True Philosopher and Other Cat Tales.[9] She went on to illustrate over 60 books, 19 of which she also wrote, including a successful mystery book, The Inward Eye, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award in 1952 for best novel. Bacon’s popular drawings appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, New Republic, Fortune, and Vanity Fair and she exhibited in galleries and museums frequently.[6] Bacon had over thirty solo exhibitions at such venues as Montross Gallery,
Alfred Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery, and the Downtown Gallery. In 1934 Bacon was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative work in the graphic arts.[11] During her time as a fellow she completed 35 satirical portraits of art world figures for a collection called Off With Their Heads!, which was published that same year by Robert M. McBride & Company.[6] In 1942 she was granted an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1980 the Academy awarded her a gold medal for her lifelong contribution to illustration and graphic art.[ In 1947, Bacon was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1969. In December 1975, the National Collection of Fine Arts, now the National Museum of American Art, honored Bacon with a yearlong retrospective exhibition titled, “Peggy Bacon: Personalities and Places.” In addition to her artistic career, Bacon taught extensively during the 1930s and 1940s at various institutions, including the Fieldston School, the Art Students League, Hunter College, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and summers at the School of Music and Art in Stowe, Vermont. For more images see: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/peggy-bacon-195
ELIZABETH OLDS
ELIZABETH OLDS HARLEM RIVER BRIDGE 1940 SCREENPRINT ON PAPER
EXCERPT FROM WIKIPEDIA
ELIZABETH OLDS
Olds’s art was first documented in her high school yearbook, featuring a cartoon sketch of a goose at tea. She studied Home Economics and Architectural Drawing at the University of Minnesota from 1916-1918, and received a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1918-1921. In 1921, Olds received another scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York where she studied under George Luks.
The early style of Olds reflects Luks’s influence on her art. The pair experimented with the style and themes of the Ashcan school, visiting the Lower East Side of New York to observe the exotic urban immigrant During the summers from 1923-1925, Olds was invited to the circles of The Roots and their friends and the Percy Saunders of Clinton, New York. In 1925, with the help of Elihu Root and some bankers, Olds was funded to travel to France. While in France, she observed and sketched the famous circus family, the Fratellini family, and their show, “Cirque d’Hiver.”Olds later joined the troupe as a trick bareback rider.
In 1926, Olds became the first woman awarded with the Guggenheim Fellowship, and was granted further travel in Europe
Two Boys, a painting by Elizabeth Olds for the United States Works Progress Administration Olds was fairly sheltered from the Great Depression when she returned to the U.S. in 1929. In 1932, Olds viewed José Clemente Orozco’s nearly finished murals at Dartmouth College, and was inspired by his expressive use of form and political themes.[6] The same year, she moved to Omaha, Nebraska to paint portraits of the family of Samuel Rees, a local industrialist. Olds completed the project, but she became frustrated with the monotony of painting portraits. At the same time Olds was studying the basics of lithography at Rees’s printing business.
From 1933-1934, Olds was invited to join the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in Omaha. Under the PWAP, Olds created a series of lithographs featuring the bread lines, shelters, and clinics of the Great Depression. Olds’s break from portraiture was fruitful as she developed her style and content, which like Orozco’s murals, used broad, expressive lines and portrayed political themes.[7] Later, Olds studied at a meat packing plant, which inspired her ‘’Stockyard Series’’.\ “Sheep Skinners,” one of the ten black-and-white lithographs, was exhibited in 1935 in the Weyhe Gallery in New York as one of the “Fifty Best Prints of the Year.”
From 1935 until the early 1940s, Olds was a nonrelief employee for the Works Progress Administration-Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP) in the Graphic Arts Division in New York,[9] where she helped younger artists in the silkscreen unit She also joined the American Artists’ Congress, Artists Union, and other groups with similar interests. Olds became friends with Harry Gottlieb, another nonrelief artist who also focused on industrialism. Together, they observed the mining and steel industries of New York, and their research lead to Olds’s creation of her award-winning print, “Miner Joe.” Olds used both silkscreen and lithography for the prints for ‘‘Miner Joe,’’ but it was her lithograph that won first place for the Philadelphia Print Club competition in 1938. Olds and Gottlieb experimented with silkscreen printing as a fine arts medium.[They accomplished this with a few other artists in the silkscreen unit of the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA-FAP in New York. From 1939 until 1941, Olds and Gottlieb opened and ran the independent Silk Screen School for students interested in learning the newest printmaking technologies. or Prints Under $10. The show was organized as a vehicle for bringing affordable fine art prints to the general public.Olds submitted and reproduced 10 prints in The New Masses in 1936 and 1937, a leftist magazine at the time.[8] In the United American Artists under the Public Use of Art Committee,
Olds and other artists worked to produce murals along New York City Subway walls, but the murals were never installed.[15] Olds’s art reflected her leftist political views, but also her social and political awareness at the time. As a WPA-FAP employee, Olds’s prints were intended to go to the government for their purposes, but she selectively sent her leftist prints to George C. Miller, an independent lithographer.
GRACE ALBEE THE STORM-OLD CHELSEA DISTRICT 1946 WOOD ENGRAVING ON PAPER
Albee was born in Scituate, Rhode Island to Henry Cranston Arnold and Susanne Arabella Thurston. Despite her father’s resistance towards her artistic creativity, Albee was awarded two Saturday Scholarships to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) during her high school education at Providence, Rhode Island between 1906 and 1907. She entered the Rhode Island School of Design in 1910 and graduated in 1912.[2] At RISD, Albee enrolled in the Department of Freehand Drawing and Painting, where she was recognized for her artistic achievements.
Additionally, Albee learned the basics of woodcutting that would later lead to her artwork in printmaking. She married muralist Percy F. Albee on May 10, 1913 and gave birth to five sons over a period of nine years. Despite her role as a mother, Albee successfully balanced her time between her art and her domestic affairs. Albee began making relief prints in 1915 when she and Percy created a staged puppet show called “Percy F. Albee Marionettes.” Albee crafted posters made from large linoleum in order to promote the show, which toured for the next eight years around Providence before permanently setting down in their house on Benefit Street. These earlier prints depicted the show’s marionettes during performance. From 1915 to 1919, Albee entered a short four-year hiatus from art to focus on motherhood.
Shift to Lithography (Linocuts)- 1920s In 1919 Albee returned to art and created one of her earliest linocuts “The Bath” (1919) and “In the Studio, Percy Albee” (1922). Additionally, the print “A Kitchen Window” was created as well. Besides large-scale prints, Albee also used linocuts to craft Christmas cards titled “Greetings from 102 George Street” (1921.) In the 1920s, Albee’s husband began focusing on arts involving linocuts, during which Albee was allowed to further experiment in her own lithography.
Because of her husband’s interest, Albee was able to showcase her work in block-printing without seemingly interfering with her husband’s own artist career. In 1923 Albee submitted her works “In the Studio,” “The Bath”, and “A Kitchen Window” to the Providence Art Club’s Nineteenth Annual Exhibition of Little Pictures (All of her works were on sale for ten dollars.) Additionally, Albee and her husband experimented in printing colored linoleum blocks on silk, which gained them recognition from the Providence Journal in 1926. The collaborated works consisted of multi-colored, tapestry-like hangings that measured several feet in height and length. The technique required from Albee’s husband a year of practice so the color from the ink would not flake, fade, smear, or bleed into the silk.
These works included a displayed image of “Grand Turk” (the American privateer from the War of 1812), a large map depicting the battle of Rhode Island in 1778, and a tapestry titled “Perch”. All the designs were cut by Albee herself. The tapestries were exhibited at the Providence Art Club in 1927 under Grace Albee’s name (not Percy Albee.). In 1927 Albee was recognized by the Providence Art Club for her twelve linocuts. She was praised for her expert technique and her handling in relief cutting. Eleven of these linocuts showcased the landscape and fishing industry of Rockport, Massachusetts. The twelfth print was a portrait of her husband Percy Albee. On March 1928 Albee left for Paris, France with her family, printing before she left “Old Providence” and “To Each His Own.” While abroad, Albee further developed her interest in depicting urban and rural landscapes in her engravings. From 1928 to 1929 Albee studied at the Institut d’Esthétique Contemporaine
During her five years in Paris Albee created and exhibited her works at several Paris Salons, where they were met with positive reviews. In 1932 Albee held her first one-woman exhibition at the American Library in Paris, exhibiting her works by themselves rather than next to her husband’s as she had done in the U.S. While in France, Albee associated with fellow expatriate artists including Norman Rockwell and engraver Paul Bornet. 1930s-40s Albee and her family returned to the United States in the 1933 and lived in New York City where she continued to produce prints. Her prints during her time in New York depicted the city’s architecture.
Her linocut “Contrast-Rockefeller Center” (1934) depicted one of the city’s Gothic churches placed dramatically in the foreground of the city’s skyscrapers. In 1937, Albee and her family moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania and her prints switched back to rural subjects, such as stone houses and farms. In 1946 she produced the linocut “The Boyer Place” which pictured the farm scape of Pennsylvania.[5] In 1937 Albee received first place for her print “Housing Problems” at the Fifteenth Annual Exhibition of American Prints at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.
In 1942 Albee was elected into the National Academy of Design in New York City as an Associate member and made a full member in 1946.[5] In 1976, eighty of Albee’s works were displayed in the Brooklyn Museum. Albee was also a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. 1960s
Her preferred subjects were nudes, interiors, and urban landscapes—often Union Square in New York City—inhabited by shoppers and working people. She was a member of the Fourteenth Street School of social realist painters, which included Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Morris Kantor, and Moses and Raphael Soyer.
Hoping to become an illustrator, Bishop came to New York in 1918 and enrolled in the School of Applied Design for Women. In the early 1920s she transferred to the Art Students League to study painting with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Guy Pène du Bois. In 1934 she leased a studio at Union Square, where she observed and recorded the everyday activities of the derelicts and working-class people of the city. Subject matter was always important to Bishop, and she studied Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, and Chardin for their ideas of structure and composition.
By the 1930s, her impeccably drawn figures brought Bishop recognition as one of the outstanding urban realists of the “Fourteenth Street School,” a loosely affiliated group named for the area where Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and the Soyer brothers, among others, lived and portrayed the local scene. In later years Bishop turned from painting the female nude, a primary theme during the 1950s and 1960s, to portraying groups of figures in motion.
Bishop established a studio in Union Square in Manhattan, and worked there for the rest of her life, commuting every day from her home in Riverdale. She created paintings that show the ebb and flow of life on the streets of New York as seen from her fourth-story window. Her images capture fleeting moments of people walking and chatting, which she described as “never heroic, never in the ‘grand manner.’” (Lunde, Isabel Bishop, 1975)
KYRA MARKHAM WELL MET IN THE SUBWAY 1937 LITHOGRAPH ON PAPER
Kyra Markham (1891–1967) was an actress, figurative painter and printmaker. Markham was briefly married to the architect Lloyd Wright, and five years later, married the scenographer David Stoner Gaither. She worked for the Federal Arts Project, creating works of social realism that documented American life in the 1930s.
During World War II, her art was focused on the propaganda effort against the Nazis. She studied drawing at the Chicago Art Institute from 1907 to 1909, and subsequently worked as a muralist and printmaker. In addition to her work as an artist, Markham was an accomplished actress. She appeared with the Chicago Little Theater from 1909 to the 1920s, with the Provincetown Players from 1916, and in movies in Los Angeles. She lived with the author and playwright Theodore Dreiser in Greenwich Village from 1914-1916, helping him with his writing, editing, and typing. Through Dreiser she became acquainted with H.L Mencken, Edgar Lee Masters, and other writers. Due to Dreiser’s womanizing tendencies, Markham left him in 1916 and moved to Provincetown to escape his desperate pleas of reconciliation. While there, Markham continued acting alongside George Cram Cook, Susan Giaspell, and Eugene O’Neill, who founded the Provincetown Playhouse
During this early stage, Markham supported herself by making bookjackets and illustrations, and later working as an art director for film companies like Fox and Metro. In 1922 she married the architect Lloyd Wright and briefly had Frank Lloyd Wright as a father-in-law.[
In 1927, she married David Gaither and collaborated with him on the set design for a children’s play, The Forest Ring, staged at the Roerich Museum Theatre in 1930. Gaither encouraged Markham to pursuit “her first love, painting.”[3] Markham returned to the Art Students League in New York City in 1930, where she studied with Alexander Abels. Before the stock market crash, Markham was a successful bathroom muralist. From the 1920s until the Depression she obtained commercial commissions from clubs and restaurants.
During the 1930s, Markham’s artistic career began to gain momentum, regularly winning prizes for her lithographic work.In 1934, Markham organized her first solo exhibition in Ogunquit, Maine, featuring prints, murals and lithographs.[4] Markham created works of social realism depicting street beggars, musicians, actors and scenes from department stores. In recognition of her work, Markham received the prestigious Mary S. Collins Prize at the Philadelphia Print Club’s annual exhibition the following year for her lithograph Elin and Maria (1934).[3] Markham sold work to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From 1935 to 1937, she worked in the Graphic Arts Division for the Federal Arts Project, a New Deal program designed to provide employment for artists during the Depression. The Hall of Inventions at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York included 40 dioramas by Markham. During World War II she created propaganda satirizing the Nazis and promoting patriotism at home. In 1946 Markham and Gaither moved to Halifax, Vermont.
Markham stopped making prints after moving to her new Vermont farm, but continued to work in more accessible mediums such as painting and drawing.[8][7] She was a member of the Southern Vermont Artists Associated and participated in their annual exhibitions in Manchester.
Over the next twenty years she sold her designs to a postcard company, American Arts, Inc., and had her prints published in prestigious publications. Markham also worked as an illustrator for Children’s books during this time.Markham moved to Port-au-Prince in Haiti as a widow in 1960. She was still enthusiastic for her work, and her later work reflected Markham’s new home.[4] While living in Haiti, Markham continued to paint and established a salon for local celebrities, American expatriates, and island visitors.[Markham died in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1967.
Helen Gerardia, Russian/American (1903-1988) An early Russian / American Modernist artist and painter, Helen Gerardia was born in Ekaterinislav (Russia) in 1903 and died in New York City in 1988. Gerardia studied at the Brooklyn Museum school and at the Art Students League of New York. Helen Gerardia is one of the important and influential early American Constructionist / Modernist artists. From 1967-1969 Helen Gerardia was president of the American Society of Contemporary Artists. Various exhibitions in the Bodley Gallery (NY) between 1957 and 1972. Helen Gerardia’s work is on display in many Museums among which the Miami Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, NY), the Whitney Museum of Art (Illinois). Some of her work is part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
This equipment is like its predecessors, great cloth lines, park benches and works of art. I have seen guys using the stuff by Octagon Field, but none of the stuff by Cornell Tech……..JAY JACOBSON, NANCY BROWN AND SHELLY BROOKS GUESSED IT
A NOTE FROM A NEIGHBOR
Hi Judy, Your August 6 edition of the newsletter was a knockout! The artwork terrific! Harry Scheuch’s “Finishing the Cathedral of Learning,” struck a deep chord in me because it’s the building where I taught linguistics courses for nineteen years (that building is part of the University of Pittsburgh, and is an iconic feature of the Pittsburgh city scape). From my 12th floor office I looked out onto the main branch of the Carnegie Library, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and Schenley Park (the nearest equivalent of NY’s Central Park). While the views from all the office windows were striking, the building had the disadvantage of not having air-conditioning, and in the years that I taught there, the outside of the building was black with grime from the soot of the city’s steel mills. But soon after I moved away, the University paid $1 million to have the stone exterior power cleaned, and to everyone’s surprise, it ended up dazzlingly white. Leaving Pittsburgh was painful, it’s such a special city.
Susan Berk Seligson
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The Design of Our Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument Featuring Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, And Elizabeth Cady Stanton
MEREDITH BERGMANN
SCULPTOR
SUNFLOWERS SYMBOLIZED THE VOTES FOR WOMAN MOVEMENT. THESE ARE ON THE STEPS OF THE FDR FOUR FREEDOMS PARK’S STEPS WITH A QUOTE FROM THE 19TH AMENDMENT.
RENDERING OF THE STATUE TO BE BUILT IN NEW YORK’S CENTRAL PARK
#MONUMENT WOMEN (C)
Artist’s Statement from Meredith Bergmann
As an artist working in the public realm, I approach this project with an eye on integrating four compatible but different concerns: the people and history to be commemorated, the site, our contemporary needs, and my own interest in creating the artwork.
My own interest is the easiest to describe: I have worked for decades for social justice and historical redress through my art, using my artist’s imagination to create empathic representations of diverse, inspiring people.
The historical record is complex, as are the people I’m portraying. Professor Margaret Washington, historian and author of Sojourner Truth’s America, (University of Illinois Press, IL, 2011) summarized the complexity beautifully when she wrote to me: “There ought to be a way to depict that; to capture the sisterhood as well as differences.”
Central Park is visited by over 42 million people each year. I’ve used some of the vocabulary of the existing statuary near our site on Literary Walk so that this monument will speak to and harmoniously coexist with the Park’s art collection. In this design, as throughout the Park, recognizable bronze figures sit and stand on a granite pedestal with inscriptions. Within this structure, my design also departs from the other monuments in ways that are appropriate to the entry of women into a sphere from which they were previously excluded. Three figures (instead of one) share a pedestal and relate to each other. They are not dreaming, but working. They are an allegory of sisterhood, cooperation and activism but they are not just an allegory, as so many sculptures of women are. In this way I am making a contemporary work that will, as required, harmonize with its 19th Century surroundings.
This requires not just research but imagination. Nick Capasso, as curator of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, has written: “As a contemporary artist, Meredith Bergmann relies on her knowledge of history and art history, as well as her considerable talent as a figurative sculptor, to forge enriching links between the past and the concerns of the present. Her success as a creator of public art stems from her ability to make free, imaginative use of the forms and symbols of traditional sculpture to address, in complex yet accessible ways, the multi-layered personal and societal concerns of modern life.”
SOJOURNER TRUTH, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
Our contemporary needs are not simple either. We need statues of real women in Central Park. We need to be true to our new understanding of the historical record which does not shrink from calling out injustice and oppression, or minimize the contributions of people of color or the harms done to people of color. We need to correct the injustice done to women of all races and their invisibility in public spaces. We need to commemorate an important landmark in the so-far-endless struggle for justice in America without forgetting that had America been true to its founding principles, movements for equal rights would never have been necessary. None of the women depicted on the monument lived to see the ratification of the 19th Amendment, let alone the Voting Rights Act of 1965, whose work is still incomplete. But as we struggle towards greater justice, we need and deserve a monument commemorating some of the important work that has come before us.
Sojourner Truth is speaking, Susan B. Anthony is organizing, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is writing, three essential elements of activism. Truth sits with Stanton at a small table, perhaps on the occasion of a conference for the abolition of slavery or for women’s rights or for both, as these movements were, for much of their history, joined in activism. Anthony is standing behind the table with her traveling bag, bringing documentation of injustices to help focus the discussion. The women might be meeting in Stanton’s home, where both Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony were guests. The monument represents an indoor space because much of women’s political work originated in the home– in the 19thCentury women were not commonly seen in the public sphere.
Statues serve many purposes in addition to portraying a likeness of a person, and the best portraits evoke a whole life and are not fixed in a particular moment. Sculptural portraits can do this well because they are made as composites, formed from many impressions, and because they are designed to be seen from many angles at different times of day in changing light. I never copy a photograph but photographs inspire me to use my imagination to tell a more encompassing story.
My portraits of these women are complex, showing their attention to and respect for each other and, through their body language and subtle aspects of their facial expressions, some of the tensions among them. Their gestures are significant but not definitive. My intention is that viewers will decide for themselves what Sojourner Truth is saying and what Elizabeth Cady Stanton is thinking and what Susan B. Anthony wants them to consider.
Sojourner Truth is gesturing with her hands for emphasis, and may have just thumped table to make her point. Or she might be merely resting her left hand between gestures. Stanton is about to dip her pen and write. Is she taking down what Truth is saying? Has she just been interrupted in mid-thought? Anthony is handing a document to Stanton. Has she just read it out loud, as friends and collaborators did for Truth? Like the women I’m portraying, my work is meant to raise questions and to provoke thought. My hope is that all people, especially girls and boys, will be inspired by this scene of women of different races, different religious backgrounds and different economic status working together to change the world.
BERGMANN AT WORK IN HER STUDIO.
FDR HOPE MEMORIAL
THIS TRIBUTE TO FDR AS A PERSON WHO WAS DISABLED WILL SOON BE COMPLETED IN SOUTHPOINT PARK ON ROOSEVELT ISLAND.
This article is from MONUMENTAL WOMEN (C) meredithbergmann.com
WEEKEND PHOTO
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STEPS AT BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK WITH GRANITE STONE FACINGS TAKEN FROM SUPPORTS OF THE R.I. BRIDGE
FOUND!!
T. BURNS IS FINE. THE STONES ARE AT THE END OF SOUTHPOINT PARK ADJOINING THE FDR PARK. THE CONTRACTORS WILL RELOCATE THESE LARGE OBJECTS.
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Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
IN 2008, A FORMER R.I.O.C EMPLOYEE TOOK THIS PHOTO OF THESE ENGRAVED STONES ON THE EASTERN SHORE IN SOUTHPOINT PARK. WITH THE WORK BEING DONE IN THE PARK, WE UNDERSTAND THE STONES ARE STILL THERE AND ARE HOPING TO PRESERVE THEM. WE DO NOT KNOW WHO T. BURNS WAS AND WHO ENGRAVED THE NAMES IN THE STONE. STAY TUNED………………THIS PART ONLY TOOK 12 YEARS!
1930’S AERIAL PHOTO OF THE NEW GOLDWATER HOSPITAL, CITY HOSPITAL AND REMAINING BUILDINGS IN THE NOW SOUTHPOINT PARK.
1937 AERIAL VIEW OF SOUTH END
1930’S VIEW FROM MANHATTAN
RECEPTION BUILDING, CITY HOSPITAL, FEMALE SOLARIUM, FEMALE DORMITORY
1951 AERIAL VIEW OF THE SOUTH END BEFORE ANY LANDFILL WAS PLACE THERE.
1970’S AERIAL VIEW
PHOTO OF BUILDINGS FROM THE NORTH SOUTH
GOLDWATER HOSPITAL ACTIVITIES BUILDING UNDER CONSTRUCTION CITY HOSPITAL WEST NURSES RESIDENCE, STAFF HOUSE, CITY HOSPITAL ANNEX WITH OVERPASS, STRECKER LAB. POWER PLANT ON EAST SHORE AND PIER
WEST STAFF HOUSE CENTER STAFF HOUSE
SMALLPOX HOSPITAL WITH BRENNAN HALL IN REAR (BRENNAN HALL DEMOLISHED)
CITY HOSPITAL
FRONT VIEW OF HOSPITAL
SERVICE BUILDING OF HOSPITAL WITH OVERPASS NYC MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
OVERPASS TO BUILDINGS
SMALLPOX HOSPITAL NY TRAINING SCHOOL FOR NURSES
1904 IMAGE OF NEW YORK TRAINING SCHOOL FOR NURSES
FEMALE DORMITORY
CITY HOSPITAL:FEMALE DORMITORY OF RUSTICATED STONE WITH 2-STORY COLUMNED PORCH. BUILDING HAS 42 BEDS.
STAFF HOUSE (DOCTOR’S RESIDENCE)
STAFF HOUSE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
STAFF HOUSE WITH STAFF ON PORCH
RECEPTION BUILDINGS ON THE PIERS
RECEPTION BUILDING WAITING ROOM
FEMALE SOLARIUM
SUPERINTENDENT’S COTTAGE
CITY HOSPITAL: SUPERINTENDENT’S COTTAGE. TWO STORY RUSTICATED HOUSE WITH SMALL CIRCULAR PORCH.
MATERNITY HOSPITAL
DESCRIBED AS ONE STORY WOODEN PAVILION WITH L-SHAPED BUILDING WITH EXTENSIONS FOR THE MATERNITY PAVILION.
DESCRIBED AS OLD ONE STORY WOODEN FIRETRAP USED AS MATERNITY BUILDING
STRECKER LABORATORY
MALE DORMITORY
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC CHARITIES MALE DORMITORY
MALE DORMITORY
THE SAD END
THE COLONNADE OF THE NURSES RESIDENCE BEING PULLED DOWN IN 1969
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EDITORIAL
For years I have been attempting to use the Municipal Archives Digital Collection. Today, I figured out how to reproduce the photos. Enjoy all the images of the many structures that were once at the south end or our island.
Judith Berdy
The NYC Municipal Archives Online Gallery provides research access to more than 1,600,000 digitized items from the Municipal Archives’ vast holdings, including photographs, maps, blueprints, motion-pictures and audio recordings All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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“What kind of highway signs did they have in Minnesota in 1934?” was just one of the questions Ann Prentice Wagner, guest curator of the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, needed to answer to place the paintings in context. “I was asking and answering questions of the kind that I hadn’t had previously,” Wagner told an enthusiastic audience who attended her lecture the other night at American Art. Artwork Image Media – 1975.
The exhibition marks the seventh-fifth anniversary of the Public Works of Art Project, a short-lived New Deal program that began in December 1933 and shut its doors the following June. (The Federal Works Project—same idea, different program–began in 1935 and ended in 1943.)
Artists were employed to create artworks that would adorn public buildings and received weekly paychecks to help keep them going during the Great Depression. In December 1933, thousands of artists became workers. They were free to riff on the theme of “the American Scene.” What’s amazing to me is that artists joined the ranks of everyday workers, and their efforts were valued, and helping them was considered vital to reviving the nation’s soul.
“Artists were proud to be American workers, practical workers who produced something valuable for the country,” Wagner said. “America could have lost a generation of artists, a grim prospect.” And what did they produce? Mostly scenes of American life in the city as well as in the countryside. You get Manhattan but you also get Minnesota. “They were showing you where they came from and where they worked. They were showing you what they knew best,” added Wagner. But they didn’t just document, they often reinterpreted the scene.
They were artists first. With the help of Berenice Abbott’s black-and-white photographs taken in the mid-1930s in New York, for example, Wagner was able to show the actual setting for John Cunning’s Manhattan Skyline. Not only did Cunning remove some coffee-factory signs from the sides of the warehouses and replace them with red brick, he also moved the Brooklyn Bridge to better fit his composition. Cunning, indeed!
In April 1934, five hundred works from the Public Works of Art Project were displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an event hosted by President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Government agencies could choose artworks for their buildings. The Roosevelts chose thirty-two paintings for the White House, seven of which are on view in the exhibition, including the New York scene Christopher Street, Greenwich Village by Beulah Bettersworth.
KENNETH M. ADAMS JUAN DURAN 1933-1934
Kenneth Adams grew up the youngest of five children and spent his time copying pictures from books in the public library. After art school and military duty, he moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he opened a studio and joined the Taos Society of Artists, a group of painters from Chicago and New York in search of an “authentic” America. Adams became an Associate of the National Academy of Design by the time he was twenty eight and worked for the Federal Art Project in the 1930s. Over the course of his career he completed murals in Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico and held teaching positions at several schools. (Coke, Kenneth M. Adams: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1964)
CHARLES L.GOELLER THIRD AVENUE 1934
Charles Goeller would often have passed the dramatic Manhattan vista looking north from East 19th Street along 3rd Avenue to the soaring Chrysler Building. The artist lived just a few doors east of this corner, yet his rendition of the familiar scene is strangely dreamlike.
Like his fellow painters in the precisionist movement, Goeller stressed the clean geometry of the modern city. All elements of his painting direct attention to the rising spire of the Chrysler Building, a vision of an ideal future shaped by American engineering. Such foreground details as trash lying by the curb and scarred red paint where a sign has been removed from a wall seem deliberately introduced to contrast with the flawless edifice in the distance.
Trained in engineering and architecture, Goeller crisply rendered the elevated rail tracks and building facades in precisely receding perspective. He neatly situated pedestrians, like the structures around them, to lead the viewer’s eye back to where the white and silver tower rises against the blue sky. Goeller perfected the shapes in his painting, even removing the gargoyles from the Chrysler Building itself to avoid breaking its sleek outline. 1934: A New Deal for Artists exhibition label Charles Goeller completed several easel paintings while working for the Public Works of Art Project, including this painting of Third Avenue with the Chrysler Building visible in the distance. To enliven the image he included details such as a crumpled newspaper page on the street and a conversation in front of the Laundromat between two New Yorkers, one of whom energetically waves his hands, as if to make a point.
HARRY W. SCHEUCH FINISHING THE CATHEDRAL OF LEARNING 1934
Harry W. Scheuch moved from New Jersey to Pittsburgh in 1928 to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He described his new home as a painters town and stayed there his entire life, leaving only once to visit Paris in the summer of 1952. Scheuch created murals for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, and painted many scenes of outdoor life in and around Pittsburgh. (Gigler, Humble Artist in A Painter’s Town, The Pittsburgh Press, April 5, 1981)
CARL REDIN A MADRID COAL MINE NEW MEXICO 1934
Carl Redin fell in love with the vibrant New Mexico landscape and began to paint southwestern scenes. He was part of Albuquerque’s first community of artists that included Ben Turner, Nils Hogner and Carl Von Hassler. Of all of these artists, Redin was the only one who has had a one-man show at the Albuquerque Museum. The Museum featured his work in a show from September 1984 until January 1985. Redin remained in Albuquerque, painting the Sandias, the volcanoes and New Mexican scenes for most of his life. A heart condition forced him to leave New Mexico in 1940. He moved to California and died 4 years later. To quote an article from the Christian Science Monitor written in 1926: Redin’s work has always a happy mood. Whether in the vivid colors of Jemez Canyon or A Mountain Village, he seems to pick with unerring instinct the moods that only an artist could find. Mountains, trees, seasons, adobe houses, Indians—all these are truly a part of the New Mexican life, and these he paints.
Carl Redin was born in Sweden in 1892. As a youngster, he was fascinated with the American west. His talent was recognized at a young age and he was afforded the opportunity to study art for a short period of time in Stockholm when he was 14. He was drafted into the Swedish Navy and when he had 3 years left to serve, he immigrated to the US and settled in Chicago. In 1916, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and, like many others of the time period, decided to “take the cure” at Albuquerque’s Methodist Deaconess Sanitorium. He passed away in 1944.
MORRIS KANTOR BASEBALL AT NIGHT 1934
Born in Russia, brought to the United States in 1906, lived in New York City. Painter who explored futurism, Cubism, and other styles as alternatives to the realism that characterizes his best-known work. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993)
Russian-born Morris Kantor learned to support himself at a very young age when he came to the United States, in 1906. By the time he was twenty, he had saved enough money working in the garment district to enroll at the Independent School of Art in New York. Kantor went on to become a prominent artist and teacher in New York City, where he taught at the Art Students League for thirty years. He continued to travel and study, and in 1928 married fellow artist Martha Ryther, a recognized master of the difficult medium of painting on glass. A prolific artist, Kantor produced a diverse body of work. He explored many different styles, ranging from abstraction to realism, as seen in Synthetic Arrangement (1922) and Baseball at Night (1934), both in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
JULIA ECKEL RADIO BROADCAST 1933-1934RAY STRONG GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE 1934
Ray Strong began painting as a high school student, and following graduation in 1924, Strong entered the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and later studied at the Art Students League in New York City. In the early 1930s Strong returned to San Francisco and, along with Maynard Dixon, Van Sloun, and George Post, formed an Art Students League there in 1934. That same year he became a W.P.A. artist and later executed murals for the 1939 World’s Fair. Strong’s first solo exhibition took place at the Stanford University Art Gallery in 1941. In addition to teaching at the Art Students League that he co-founded, he has taught at Marin Community College and the Art Institute of Santa Barbara. Strong’s paintings usually depict the California landscape. He resides in Santa Barbara, where he has completed mural commissions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and other sites.
ROBERT BRACKMAN SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA 1934
Figure and portrait painter. He held portrait commissions from the du Ponts, Helen Morgan and the Lindberghs. His work characteristically combined still lifes with portraiture. Robert Brackman came from Russia to the United States with his family when he was eleven years old. He studied art with Robert Henri and George Bellows in New York, and went on to specialize in portraiture and figure painting. Brackman taught at a number of schools including the Art Students League and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he lectured widely about art education. He was very conservative in his opinions about art and disdained abstraction, warning his students that “it is for the dilettante and good conversationalist, and not for a student who wishes to become a professional artist.” (Bates, Brackman, His Art and Teaching, 1951)
O. LEWIS GUGLIELMI MARTYR HILL 1934
Born in Egypt, brought to New York City in 1914. Artist who worked as a WPA muralist in the 1930s, compassionately portrayed the poor in his own paintings, but later adopted a much more abstract style. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993)
Guglielmi’s early childhood was spent in Milan and Geneva. When he was eight his parents (his father was a musician) brought him to the United States. They settled in Harlem. Guglielmi began to attend night classes at the National Academy of Design in 1920, while still attending high school. By 1923 he was a full-time student at the Academy, where he remained until 1926.
He met Gregorio Prestopino in a life drawing class and the two first shared an unheated studio, and later moved into better accommodations. The years after he left school were financially difficult, but the depression proved to be an ideological watershed for him; he found its economic devastation a great stimulus to art. Guglielmi went to New England in 1932, the first of eleven summers he spent at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Because of his new commitment to social causes, he viewed this year as the beginning of his life as an artist. During summers in New Hampshire, he found both the solitude and social interaction that “helps to form and give direction to our rising native culture,” a characterization that echoed the MacDowell’s stated purpose when establishing their colony in the first decade of the century. They hoped to unite New England’s inspirational beauty with an understanding of the region as the foundation of American culture. He worked for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s and spent many summers in New Hampshire, where he found the peace and solitude necessary for his painting. Guglielmi’s images of city life expressed the harsh realities of the Depression, showing desolate streets and haggard people. People often viewed his work as unpatriotic, however, and one image caused controversy in 1947 when Look magazine published it with the headline: “Your Money Bought These Paintings.”
J. THEODORE JOHNSON CHICAGO INTERIOR 1934
J. Theodore Johnson is best known for the four murals he created for the Oak Park Post Office in Chicago while working for the Works Progress Administration. The United States government called him in New York and commissioned him to depict a series of historically significant moments in Oak Park’s history. Having studied at the Chicago Art Institute, Johnson saw this as a homecoming, but some community leaders expressed concern that he had not lived in Chicago long enough to depict its history effectively. The murals ultimately won praise, and Johnson exhibited his work widely during his lifetime. Later in his career he taught at the Minneapolis School of Art and the San José College in California.
AGNES TAIT SKATING IN CENTRAL PARK 1934
Agnes Tait was born in New York City in 1894. She enrolled at the National Academy of Design in 1908, leaving in 1913 after the death of her mother. A year later she returned to the academy and took a life drawing class taught by Leon Kroll, whose emphasis on craftsmanship and balanced design was a major influence on Tait’s own work. She finished her training at the academy in 1916. During this time she searched for whatever art-related employment she could find, eventually modeling for the illustrator Tenny Johnson and for George Bellows.
In 1927 she traveled to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, where she learned lithography. The following year she returned to New York, where she had her first exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries. She traveled to Europe a second time in the early 1930s and returned via Haiti and Jamaica, which fostered an interest in tropical scenes. Her first solo exhibition, of portraits, took place in 1932 at the Ferargil Galleries. In early 1934 Tait was employed by the Public Works of Art Project, for which she executed what is considered her most famous work, Skating in Central Park [SAAM, 1964.1.15].
Throughout the 1930s Tait worked on small lithographic editions and mural work. In 1941 she and her husband moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She continued to travel extensively in Mexico, France, Spain, Ireland, and Italy and worked on portrait commissions, book illustrations, mural commissions, and her own paintings and lithographs. In the late 1960s and 1970s Tait limited her output to smaller works depicting mostly cats and flowers.
E. MARTIN HENNNGS HOMEWARD BOUND 1933-1934
Painter, printmaker. After graduating from high school, Hennings left his native Pennsgrove, New Jersey, for five years of study at the Art Institute of Chicago. His training continued with two years at the Royal Academy in Munich. Fellow art students in Munich included Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Hennings returned to Chicago, where he made his living as a muralist and commercial artist.
At the urging of former Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Hennings spent a few months in Taos in 1917. Four years later, he made Taos his permanent home, joining the Taos Society of Artists in 1924. Hennings’s favorite subject was the Indian, whom he often posed singly or in groups against a bright foliage curtain. His compositions, featuring stylized line, decorative patterns, and warm colors, won him twelve national prizes between 1916 and 1938.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY NYC FERRY PARKING LOT FOR BOATS AT THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD WINNERS ARE ALEXIS VILLAFANE AND JAY JACOBSON
THIS CAME FROM OUR LOYAL READER JAY JACOBSON….
I just couldn’t pass up the chance to recognize this home of the NYC Ferry in what I recall as the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
When I was a youngster (say, about 1943 or so), Rear Admiral Cowdrey came to command the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then engaged full tilt in building and outfitting vessels for the U.S. Navy during World War II. Admiral Cowdrey and his wife moved into the Commanding Officer’s Quarters at the Yard.
Coming into New York, and the various social events to which the Cowdrey family was invited, was a new experience for them. The Admiral, of course, could always appear in his formal uniform, but Mrs. Cowdrey had lived a more modest life, and felt that she needed to to upgrade her wardrobe to be an active participant with the Admiral at events, many of which involved the sale of War Bonds.
Encore Dresses was the name of a firm owned by my dad, Seymour Jacobson. It sold women’s fashions as “dressy dresses”. These were clothes that could be worn by women who did not have personal dressmakers, and who did their purchasing at Bergdorf’s, at Saks, and, in smaller cities across the country, from the “fine clothing” shops for women.
They were designed, and manufactured in New York City in the “Garment Center”. Different locations in the Garment Center had tenants who sold sports and leisure clothing, and working dresses, skirts and blouses for women who worked then as teachers and as secretaries in offices; dressy dresses were displayed in “showrooms” located in 525 and 530 Seventh Avenue. There, the garments were sold to professional buyers who represented the stores that sold the dresses at retail to women around the country.
I don’t know how it happened, but Mrs. Cowdrey was introduced to my dad, who invited her to the Encore Dresses showroom. Mrs. Cowdrey chose a few dresses; they were altered while Mrs. Cowdrey waited by one of the dressmakers who worked for Encore Dresses, and packed up for her to take with her back to the Navy Yard. When Mrs. Cowdrey asked for the invoice, SJ said that there was no charge, that it was his honor to provide the dresses to her. Mrs. Cowdrey explained to my dad that while she was grateful for the gesture, she could not accept the dresses as a gift.
She told him that Navy Regulations would not permit her, as the spouse of a Base Commander, to accept such an expensive gift. As I have heard the story from my dad, there was an awkward silence. Then, he asked if it were possible to arrange for a trade for the dresses. Mrs.Cowdrey pondered the issue for a bit, and then she said that she thought such a thing could be arranged. And that’s how my parents, my brother and I got to visit the Brooklyn Navy Yard during 1943 (?) as the guests of Admiral and Mrs. Cowdrey. The trip included tea at their home (with ice cream for my brother and me).
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EDITORIAL
After shopping at Macy’s this morning I decided it was a perfect day to take a cruise. I caught the Soundview Ferry from the NYC Ferry pier on East 34th Street and had a lovely sail up the west channel of the East River, past our island, past Ward’s Island, Randall’s Island, North Brother and South Brother Islands with great view of Riker’s Island and then the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. On the return trip, the views were in reverse but a great way to socially distance from the world and admire tour city from afar.
REMINDER: GO TO STORES TO SHOP. THEY NEED YOUR SUPPORT!!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society WIKIPEDIA (C) SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM (C)
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1934: A NEW DEAL FOR ARTISTS SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM EXHIBITED IN 2009
ALL IMAGES ARE PROPERTY OF THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, D.C.
In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created the Public Works of Art Project—the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America’s spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict “the American Scene.” The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects—ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life—that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism.
1934: A New Deal for Artists was organized to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Public Works of Art Project by drawing on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection of vibrant artworks created for the program. The paintings in this exhibition are a lasting visual record of America at a specific moment in time. George Gurney, curator emeritus, organized the exhibition with Ann Prentice Wagner, curator of drawings at the Arkansas Art Center.
ROSS DICKINSON
Long before Ross Dickinson received any formal training, he experimented with oil paint and educated himself through reading. Awarded a scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Dickinson studied with Frank Tolles Chamberlin (1873–1961) and became interested in mural painting.
In 1926 Dickinson spent nine months in New York City studying with John Costigan at the Grand Central School of Art and Charles Hawthorne at the National Academy of Design; he also received a scholarship from the Tiffany Foundation. Dickinson returned to California later that year and studied at the Santa Barbara School of Fine Arts, where he received his first mural commission. He soon married sculptor Daisy Hanson, and they established themselves, albeit under adverse financial conditions, as artists and teachers in Santa Barbara. Dickinson depicted the varying California landscape and men and women at work, which often aligned him with California regionalism.
By 1934 he was involved in the Public Works of Art Project, which led to numerous mural commissions in the mid-1930s. His later work displays a stylistic change, as he moved toward freer brushwork in fast-drying acrylics through the 1950s and 1960s. He continued to work and exhibit in the southern California area until his death in Santa Barbara in 1978.
MARTHA LEVY WINTER SCENE 1934
New York artist Martha Levy trained at the Art Student’s League and attended their summer program in Woodstock, NY from 1926 to 1932. There she focused on landscape painting and honed her skills with her chosen medium, oil over a base of tempera. During the 1930’s, Levy joined the Public Works of Art Program to supplement her income. in 1935, she joined the WPA Federal Art Project where she worked on murals commissioned as part of the New Deal program. Her views of the Maine seaside are painted in the same style as her Woodstock work and are similar to the Realism employed in many WPA mural projects of the time. (Invaluable.com)
MILLARD SHEETS TENEMENT FLATS 1934
Born and lives in California. Painter, etcher, illustrator, designer, who has received numerous prizes for his work. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993) Millard Sheets studied art in California and became one of the state’s foremost artists and architects during his lifetime. He worked hard to make a name for himself early in his career, and by 1935 he had already shown his work in twenty-seven museums across the country. One critic titled a review of Sheets’s New York debut “A Name to Remember.”
Sheets supplemented his income working with architects as a color consultant and designer, and during World War II he worked as an illustrator for Life magazine, traveling to India and Burma. When he returned from the war, he organized an exhibition featuring the work of German and Japanese artists as a gesture of reconciliation. Over the course of his career, Sheets designed numerous buildings, including banks, malls, schools, and private homes. He also produced watercolors, prints, and mosaics while serving as chair of the art department at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School, and he later directed the Otis Art Institute. (Steadman, Millard Sheets, Scripps College, 1976
CARL GUSTAF NELSON CENTRAL PARK 1934
Carl Gustaf Simon Nelson , born January 5, 1898 in Hörby , Skåne, died in 1988 in Elmhurst , Illinois, was a Swedish-American painter and illustrator . He was the son of the carmaker Johan Nilsson and Christina Olsson. Nelson came to America at the age of five and grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. He began studying art around 1920, first for two years at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then at the Art Students League in New York for five years. He then undertook a study trip through 15 of Europe’s countries.
Since 1935, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York, Boston and Phiadelphia and in the Swedish-American exhibitions in Chicago. He was awarded the Tiffany Foundation Scholarship 1931-1933. In addition to his own creations, he worked as a teacher at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston 1945-1947 and the Cambridge School of Design in Cambridge 1948-1952. His art consists of still lifes , figurative motifs,landscapes and non-figurative compositions in oil , gouache and tempera .
Nelson is represented at the US Department of Labor in Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts.
HERMAN MARIL SKETCH OF OLD BALTIMORE WATERFRONT 1934
Maril was a modernist painter whose style reduced figures and objects to their essence. Subjects ranged from urban landscapes to coastal seascapes. Maril’s art from the beginning showed a consistent development: it was nature-based, abstractly organized, and simplified in form and content. The noted artist and critic Olin Dows, wrote about the then 26-year-old artist, “Herman Maril’s painting is reserved, and, like most good painting, it is simple. He is interested in the essentials. Each picture has its core; each is beautifully conceived and organized. It is clothed in a certain poetry.”
KARL FORTESS ISLAND DOCKYARD 1934
Karl Fortess came to America from Belgium and studied art in Chicago and New York. In 1937 the Works Progress Administration sent him and several other artists to Alaska to document the towns, villages, and remote wilderness landscapes (Pemberton, “Alaska art museum collects WPA’s Depression works from the territory,” Columbia Daily Tribune, November 9, 2003). Fortess taught at many different schools, including Boston University School of Fine Art, where he also created an archive of interviews with more than two hundred and fifty American artists.
THOMAS JAMES DELBRIDGE LOWER MANHATTAN 1934
New Yorkers, including the city’s artists, through the worst hardships of the Great Depression. Looking from the dock of a harbor island, Thomas Delbridge showed the dark mouths of Manhattan’s ferry terminals; above them ever taller buildings climb out of red shadows into gold and white sunshine. The crisply outlined forms evoke such famous structures as the Woolworth Building to the left and the Singer Building to the right without placing the buildings precisely or describing specific details. The skyscraper at the center suggests the mighty Empire State Building as it had stood incomplete before its triumphant opening on May 1, 1931. Even as the stock market foundered and thousands were thrown out of work, New Yorkers had gathered in excited throngs to watch their tallest tower rise. The Manhattan skyscrapers in the painting appear to be pushing back dark clouds, creating an oasis of brilliant blue around the island. Image: Thomas James Delbridge, Lower Manhattan, 1934, oil on canvas 26 1/8 x 30 ¼ in. (66.3 x 76.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor.
JOHN CUNNING MANHATTAN SKYLINE 1934
Many of us recognize the Empire Stores in t he foreground. The buildings were used as coffee and sugar warehouses from the 1920’s to 1950’s. Abandoned for decades, the buildings were re-imagined into communal and dining spaces in the last few years and continue the restoration of the Brooklyn waterfront, minus the ships, cargo and heavy industry.
DANIEL CELENTANO FESTIVAL 1934
Daniel Celentano (1902–1980) was an American Scene artist who made realistic paintings of everyday life in New York, particularly within the Italian neighborhood of East Harlem where he lived. During the Great Depression he painted murals in the same style for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project.
The son of Italian immigrants, Daniel Celentano was born into a large family within an Italian neighborhood of Manhattan. A childhood polio attack left him with only partial use of his right leg. Made homebound by this disability he was unable to attend school and, recognizing his artistic skill while he was still a boy, his parents were able to arrange for art teachers to tutor him at home. Through hard work and perseverance he regained control over his leg by the age of twelve and at that time became the first pupil of the social realist painter Thomas Hart Benton.
In 1918 he won scholarships that enabled him to attend Charles Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, New York School of Fine And Applied Art in Greenwich Village, and the National Academy of Design in New York’s Upper East Side. The Cape Cod School taught students during the summer months and the other two gave classes during the rest of the year.
This painting is also called “Festa di Monte Carmela.” It was included in an exhibition called “1934: A New Deal for Artists,” in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During the 1930s and until the outbreak of World War II Celentano participated in group shows at galleries in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other American cities. His work was first shown to the public in an exhibition of works selected by Alfred Stieglitz that was held at the Opportunity Gallery in 1930. His painting, “Festival,” of a few years later, shows the boisterous community of East Harlem in holiday mode. The Smithsonian’s exhibition label says, “This painting fairly bursts with the raucous sounds, pungent smells, and vibrant characters of Manhattan’s ethnic street life.” Wikipedia
GERALD SARGENT FOSTER RACING 1934
With exhilarating speed yachts sweep across the choppy waters of Long Island Sound, the water foaming white against their hulls. In the foreground, three small Atlantic-class boats lean precariously to stay on the course of their race. In the middle ground, a pair of larger craft catch the wind in bellying spinnakers as they sail in nearly the opposite direction.
Artist Gerald Sargent Foster, an avid yachtsman, often depicted yacht races. He knew every rope and spar of these boats, but minimized such technical details to avoid distracting the eye from the clean geometric shapes that dominate the painting. The artist repeated and overlapped the streamlined hulls and taut sails of the boats, creating an elegant pattern silhouetted against blue sky and water. Yet the geometry is not cool and detached—every line and color speaks of the keen excitement of yacht racing. Even in the teeth of the Depression, this sport of New York’s wealthy continued to be popular.
LILY FUREDI SUBWAY 1934
Lily Furedi (May 20, 1896 – November 1969) was a Hungarian-American artist. A native of Budapest, she achieved national recognition for her 1934 painting, The Subway, which is a sympathetic portrayal of passengers in a New York City Subway car. Light-hearted in tone, the painting depicts a cross-section of city dwellers from the viewpoint of a fellow commuter.
When Lili Furedi was 31 years old she debarked from the ship Cellina at the port of Los Angeles. She came from Budapest by way of Trieste and on the ship’s manifest she reported her occupation as painter. There is no record of art training she may have received either before or after her arrival in the United States. There is no doubt she was working as a professional artist, however, because in 1931 she won a prize for her painting, The Village, at the annual Christmas show held by the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors at the Argent Gallery in January of that year.
In 1932 and for much of the rest of the decade she placed paintings in group exhibitions, including: a 1932 exhibition by Hungarian-American artists in which she showed works called Hungarian Village and Hungarian Farm,a 1935 exhibition of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in which she showed a painting called Interior,(3) a 1936 exhibition by the New York Municipal Art Committee, and a 1937 exhibition at the Woman’s Club of Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Reviewing the 43rd annual Women Painters and Sculptors show of 1934,
Lily Furedi, The Subway, 1934, oil on canvas, 39 x 48 1/4 in. (99.1 x 122.6 cm.), created for the U.S. Public Works of Art Project Early in 1934 Furedi was accepted into the Public Works of Art Project. This pioneering federal program employed artists at craftsmen’s wages to make pictures on the theme of “the American scene.
“Her contribution to the project was the painting called The Subway. The picture was one of twenty-five selected for presentation as gifts to the White House. It was also in a group that President and Mrs. Roosevelt had themselves selected as being among the best in the show. Beginning in 1935, when it accompanied a book review in The New York Timeshe painting has frequently been used as an illustration in books, articles, news accounts, and Internet web sites. In examining Furedi’s The Subway, critics and other observers have found much to say. The painting was said to be cheerful and the artist’s interest to be sympathetic. It was seen as vibrant, bright, and optimistic. Its scene was said to be playful, clean, and decorous and its design elements as idealistically deployedOne reviewer saw an influence of “Cézanne’s cubes and cones” in a scene which tells a compelling story of a projected “society in which sex and race are comfortably, if nervously, aligned”and a poet, using the ekphrastic poetic technique, declared that the painting showed the “best in mass transit,” in which “we get to meet, greet, / and saunter through / time and space together.” The poem, by Angie Trudell Vasquez, is called “Eyes Alive.” It closes: “see what beauty / we can make / when all is lit up with color / warm and welcoming, / beckoning you / into the picture, / offering you a seat.” Following the 1934 touring show in which it appeared, The Subway was not again included in a public exhibition until 1983 when it appeared in “Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s” at Gallery 1199 in New York’s Martin Luther King Labor Center. It appeared again in “1934: A New Deal for Artists,” a touring exhibition put together by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2009
After the Public Works of Art Project was closed down in 1934 Furedi joined the Federal Art Project. She is recorded as being employed in this program in 1937–1939[39] and, specifically as a muralist, in 1940. Furedi’s work was reviewed infrequently after the mid-1930s. In 1941 she painted an altar mural called The Galley Slave which she donated to a Hungarian church in New York. She died in New York at the age of 73 in November 1969.
PAUL KIRKLAND MAYS JUNGLE 1934GALE STOCKWELL PARKVILLE MAIN STREET 1934
Gale Stockwell was a cartoonist for his high school paper, then studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1933 he was hired by the Public Works of Art Project, which paid a small wage to many struggling artists during the Depression. He lost track of a lot of his work after giving it to the government and many years later was not only surprised to find one of his images on a jigsaw puzzle, but also discovered that this same painting was hanging at the White House! Stockwell worked in advertising until 1954, when he retired to devote all of his time to painting colorful images of Missouri towns and landscapes
Unidentified (American), (Underpass–New York), 1933-1934,
Oil on photograph on canvas mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Internal Revenue Service through the General Services Administration , 1962.8.41
The street and sidewalks are empty; not a person, car, or even a stray dog is to be seen. What is the viewer supposed to see in this unpopulated street illuminated by glowing street lamps? Do the yellow street sign and the modest fireplug have some unexpected significance? The real subject of the painting turns out to be a newly built underpass designed to safely route cars under the train tracks in Binghamton, New York. During the 1930s several underpasses around Binghamton were upgraded by federal and New York State agencies working to improve city infrastructure while providing employment to those thrown out of work by the Great Depression.
The stark lighting of street lamps at night shows off the clean lines of the freshly cast concrete as if the underpass were a modernist sculpture or an elegant new office building. The Smithsonian owns two other paintings documenting railroad underpasses built elsewhere in the country during the same era. All three were painted by Smithsonian American Art Museum artists working over photographs printed on canvas. Through documentary projects of this kind civil works became allied to artworks, providing employment for builders and artists alike. 1934: A New Deal for Artists exhibition label
This painting was created for the Federal Art Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration developed to give financial and moral support to artists during the Depression. There is no information about who the painter was, but in 1981 a visitor to the Museum recognized the underpass as one near his home in Binghamton, New York. The artist printed a photograph of the scene onto the canvas, then painted over it in careful detail. The glowing streetlights are like stars brought down to earth from the distant skies, drawing the viewer into the image and through the brightly lit tunnel. The road seems less like an ordinary street in the city and more like a portal into the great empty blackness above
DOUGLAS CROCKWELL PAPER WORKERS 1934
Born Columbus, Ohio Died Glens Falls, New York born Columbus, OH 1904-died Glens Falls, NY 1968 Nationalities American Linked Open Data Linked Open Data URI Douglass Crockwell spent a good part of his career creating illustrations and advertisements for the Saturday Evening Post. His paintings appeared in promotions for Friskies dog food and in a poster for the American Relief for Holland, which won him a gold medal from the Art Director’s Club in 1946. Crockwell created murals and posters for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, and also experimented with short flip-card films that could be viewed through a mutoscope. A few years before he died, Crockwell estimated that he had drawn four hundred full-page images, of which more than three billion prints had been made (New York Times, December 2, 1968).
DECK AT THE HUNTERS POINT PARK NEAR FERRY TERMINAL
EDITORIAL
We thank the Smithsonian for having marvelous resources of art and the exhibits that were on view . Enjoy these works from 1934. The stories behind these works are fascinating, especially Lily Furedi’s “Subway”. The painting was exhibited and admired and then vanished for decades. Furedi’s other works are just as wonderful as this non-social distancing view or the New York subway in 1934.
Millard Sheets has quite a collection of mosaics. Anyone who has visited Los Angeles has see the Home Banks buildings with mosaics on them. They were done by Sheets.
The mystery behind the “Underpass” is fascinating and many of us know highways that look like this underpass image. Remind me of road leading to the George Washington Bridge in NJ.
More to come tomorrow,
JUDITH BERDY
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Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff
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THOMSON AVENUE SKILLMAN AVENUE AND INDUSTRIAL NEIGHBORHOODS OF LONG ISLAND CITY
Above and Below The Sunshine Biscuit Company Now La Guardia Community College Thomson Avenue
Following Thomson Avenue Through LIC Long Island City
Mitch Waxman
Newtown Penticle
A dizzying display of industrial and architectural might, on display above, distracts the eye from the subject of this post. Empire State, Chrysler, the entire shield wall of Manhattan – even the sapphire spire which distinguishes modern Long Island City – are all screaming for attention. At the sapphire tower’s base is a white building, a former printing plant and later an Eagle Electric factory, which has long been converted over to luxury condominiums and is known as the Arris Lofts.
At the bottom of the shot is Skillman Avenue, and the tracks of the Sunnyside Yard An enormous concrete and steel bridge, 500 feet long and 100 feet wide, it is hidden in plain sight.
That’s the Thomson Avenue Viaduct. From 1877′s “Long Island and where to go!!: Long Island City is the concentrating point upon the East river, of all the main avenues of travel from the back districts of Long Island to the city of New York. The great arteries of travel leading from New York are Thomson avenue, macadamized, 100 feet wide, leading directly to Newtown, Jamaica and the middle and southern roads on Long Island, and Jackson Avenue, also 100 feet wide, and leading directly to Flushing, Whitestone and the northerly roads. Long Island City is also the concentrating point upon the East river, of the railway system of Long Island.
The railways, upon reaching the city, pass under the main avenues of travel and traffic, and not upon or across their surface. To begin with, lets start with the end.
Thomson Avenue disappears into the modern street grid when it is rudely interrupted by and becomes Queens Boulevard. This is the actual slam bang intersection where the “automobile city” of the 20th century meets the “locomotive city” of the 19th, at the intersection where Thomson avenue meets Queens Boulevard and Van Dam Street.
The “Great Machine” slithers past Thomson, and hurtles eastward along the more modern thoroughfare.
(From Wikipedia: “Queens Boulevard was built in the early 20th century to connect the new Queensboro Bridge to central Queens, thereby offering an easy outlet from Manhattan. It was created by linking and expanding already-existing streets, such as Thomson Avenue and Hoffman Boulevard, stubs of which still exist.”)
Thomson adjoins Jackson Avenue on the northern side of its run, where their junction forms the so called “Court Square,” where the 1990 vintage Citigroup structure might be noticed. There used to be a hospital where the colossus now stands. Overwhelming and out of character with its surroundings, it is the tallest structure on Long Island, and the 56th highest building in New York City – if you’re impressed by that sort of thing.
Across the street is why they call it Court Square, and a historic building discussed in this Brownstoner Queens post is found. Moving in an easterly direction from Court Square, Thomson finds another connection to the automobile city, as one of the off ramps for the upper level of the Blackwell’s Island… Queensboro… Ed Koch… Bridge empties out here, allowing tens of thousands of vehicles to vomit onto Thomson’s parabola every day.
The rapid progress being made in the grading of Sunnyside yard in Long Island City, the future great terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad system in New York, and the rapid construction of the eight massive viaducts to provide for the highway and railroad crossings, insure the completion of that section of the great undertaking early next fall. The most massive of the overhead highway crossings is the Thomson Ave. steel viaduct, 100 feet in width and 500 feet in length, passing over the network of tracks of the Long Island and Pennsylvania Railroads at a height of 30 feet.
The Queensboro Bridge extension viaduct, crossing diagonally to the street system of Long Island City, but at right angles to the railroad, is 80 feet in width, and has massive steel girders. The Thomson Ave. crossing, which will be completed next month, and the bridge extension will provide for the traffic over the main arteries of travel, extending through the borough from north to south.
On the side streets which dead end off of Jackson Avenue, like Dutch Kills or Queens or Purves Streets, one can gain an appreciation for the altitude of this Thomson Avenue Viaduct. These roadway artifacts used to proceed through what is now the rail yard, and the historical record is full of lawsuits brought by LIC residents against the Pennsylvania Rail Road or Long Island Railroad companies for damages based on the grade situation or for “dead ending” their street. These lawsuits detail and define the complicated questions of who owns what around and above the yards. Then – however – as now, you can’t fight City Hall if it wants to do something in your neighborhood.
The Sunnyside Yard tends to insulate Long Island City from the rest of western Queens, forcing its residents and businesses to pass through narrow or crowded choke points when leaving or entering the locale. The landward vehicular passages along the East River are defined by Queensboro and the Midtown Tunnel, while the southern ridge (Skillman Avenue) that overlooks the yard leads to residential Sunnyside. The Yard complex allows locomotive access to the both the East River tunnels and to the New York Connecting Railroad, which links Long Island rail to the rest of the continent via the Hell Gate Bridge. Sunnyside Yard continues all the way to Woodside, and sits on an astounding 8,500 foot plot which consumes 192 acres and offers an unbelievable 25.7 miles of track. The viaducts which cross the yards — Hunters Point Avenue, Thomson Avenue, Queens Boulevard are all orientated in a mostly easterly direction, while the 35th Street or Honeywell Bridge, and the 39th Street or Harold Avenue Bridge at Steinway Street offer rare and spread out pinch-points of north south egress across the facility.
The businesses which set up shop around Sunnyside Yard in the early 20th century didn’t much care about auto traffic, they were part of the locomotive city and were here for the rail connections. From 1913′s “Greater New York: bulletin of the Merchants’ Association of New York, Volume 2,” courtesy Google Books: “After luncheon, which was held in the cosy quarters of the Queens Chamber of Commerce on the Bridge Plaza, Long Island City, the party were taken on an automobile drive of about fifty miles, covering the principal points of Industrial interest in Queens. The first stop was made on Diagonal Street which crosses the Long Island Railroad yards. From this point it is possible to see all the features of the industrial development in that part of Queens, especially the development of the Degnon Terminal Company and the new factory of the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company”.
‘The party then proceeded along Thompson Avenue to Newtown Creek, passing some of the largest factories in Queens, and also the most important industries in New York City, such as the Nichols Copper Company, the General Chemical Company, the National Enameling and Stamping Company, the General Vehicle Company, which is just erecting a large new building, and the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company. ‘
The naming of Thomson Avenue has always been a bit of a mystery for me. Skillman Avenue, for instance, was named for a farmer that supported the British during the American Revolution and whose lands were confiscated by the victorious rebels (much like DeLancey over in Manhattan). Apparently, there were one or two LIRR and or Pennsylvania RR executives named Thompson – certain older documents refer to this road as “Thompson Avenue” but this is a common typographic error which favors the more widespread surname. There was a Thomson that was an important member of the Queens Chamber of Commerce and LIC community during the 1920′s – but the street dates back to the beginnings of Long Island City and must be named for someone from earlier times.
Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.
THOMSON AVENUE MAP
Chiclets Advertising on a wall
THOMSON AVENUE LEADING TO THE VIADUCT TO THE RIGHT AS YOU EXIT QUEENSBORO BRIDGE
CHICLETS FACTORY THE GUM AND SUGAR CAME DIRECTLY INTO THE BUILDING BY RAILROAD.
Now the home of the NYC Department of Design and Construction
DO YOU REMEMBER THE CHICLETS FACTORY?
SKILLMAN AVENUE MAP
ADVERTISED AS OPPOSITE 42 STREET, MANHATTAN
MANY OF THESE AREAS ARE DISAPPEARING AND BEING DEVELOPED
Neptune Meter Works Building was occupied by the company until the 1950’s. It was recently the famous 5 POINTZ Building, famed for its graffiti, now demolished.
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EDITORIAL
Looking east out of my window, one does not imagine that the land beyond is where so much of American industry was born. Many were family businesses that developed into large corporation and companies we all recognize now. It might have been chic and glamorous with landscaped parks and facilities. They had no computers, consultants and tech geniuses to work, just hard labor and ingenuity.
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
THANKS TO MITCH WAXMAN WHO CONTRIBUTED SO MUCH TO THIS POST. CHECK OUT THE NEWTOWN PENTICLE FOR THE LATEST EDITION. All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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MORE TREATS FROM THE PAST THEY BUILT THE BEST CARS IN LONG ISLAND CITY
The American Mercedes was made by Daimler Manufacturing Company of Long Island City, New York, USA from 1904 to 1907. They were licensed copies of German Mercedes models. Some commercial vehicles, such as ambulances, were also made. The company was in direct competition with Mercedes Import Co. of New York, which handled the imported Mercedes for the entirety of the United States, at least in 1906.
Manufactured on Steinway Avenue
The Brewster Building is a 400,000-square-foot (37,000 m2) building at 27-01 Queens Plaza North in Long Island City, Queens, New York City. Once an assembly plant for Rolls Royce cars and Brewster cars and Brewster Buffalo airplanes, it is now the corporate headquarters for JetBlue. The building, designed by Stephenson & Wheeler opened in 1911 to handle the assembly of the chassis for the Brewster cars that were being built since 1905 at 47th Street and Broadway in Times Square in nearby Manhattan.
The building was one of the first major developments at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge, opened in 1909, which reduced car transport from Queens to Times Square to a matter of minutes. In 1915 it began building the Brewster Knight.
In 1925, the company was bought by Rolls-Royce of America, which had been operating out of a plant in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1931, the Rolls Royce Springfield operation ended. From 1931 to 1934, Rolls-Royce Phantom II chassis were shipped directly to the Long Island City plant when Rolls Royce terminated its United States assembly program. From 1934 to 1936, under J. S. Inskip, Brewster automobiles using Ford chassis were built at the plant.
The Brewster operation ceased in 1936. The Brewster Aeronautical Corporation manufactured the Brewster F2A Buffalo and a version of the Vought F4U Corsair known as the F3A-1 during World War II at the plant. The multi-story layout of the building limited airplane production efficiency. The aircraft were flown from Roosevelt Field in Mineola.
PLANES WERE BUILT AT QUEENS PLAZA
The Brewster F2A Buffalo[1] is an American fighter aircraft which saw service early in World War II. Designed and built by the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation, it was one of the first U.S. monoplanes with an arrestor hook and other modifications for aircraft carriers.
PIERCE ARROW BUILDING 34 01 38 AVENUE LONG ISLAND CITY
Pierce-Arrow. The company, based in Buffalo from 1903 to 1938, evolved from a luxury birdcage manufacturer established in 1865, Heinz, Pierce and Munschauer. Henry N. Pierce bought out his two partners and began building and retailing bicycles and motorcycles in 1896, with the leap to automobiles in 1901.
The company’s first success, a two-cylinder auto, named the Arrow, appeared in 1903. The company’s first commercial success, the four-cylinder Great Arrow, arrived in 1904. Though George Pierce sold all his company rights in 1907 and passed away in 1910, the company was known as Pierce-Arrow from 1908 to 1938
Pierce-Arrow Society, dedicated to the preservation of Pierce-Arrow Motor Cars and trucks Pierce-Arrow became known for its luxury autos, as film stars and heads of state made sure to have at least one Pierce in their collection (William H. Taft made the Arrow the first official car associated with the White House). Later, however, since Pierce-Arrow didn’t have a moderate-priced line the company suffered during the Depression and closed its Buffalo factory, which has since been declared a landmark, in 1938.
PHOTO WURTS BROTHERS (C) MUSEUM OF THE CTIY OF NEW YORK, 1921
THE FORD BUILDING THE CENTER BUILDING 33-00 NORTHERN BLVD.
The Ford Building in LIC’s “Carridor” Architecture MITCH WAXMAN
To begin with, the only people who would commonly refer to this enormous example of early 20th century industrial architecture as “Ford” are Kevin Walsh and myself (and possibly Montrose).
Modernity knows it simply as “The Center Building” and it’s found at 33-00 Northern Boulevard at the corner of Honeywell Street (Honeywell is actually a truss bridge over the Sunnyside Yard, just like Thomson Avenue, but that’s another story).
This was once the Ford Assembly and Service Center of Long Island City, which shipped the “Universal Car” to all parts of the eastern United States and for cross Atlantic trade. The recent sale of the building in December 2014, for some $84.5 million, was discussed by Q’Stoner back in 2013.
The term Carridor is one that’s entirely of my own invention. A couple of blocks northeast is the Pierce Arrow Building, and about six blocks from here the Standard Motor Products Building cannot help being noticed. In the early 20th century, this part of Queens was commonly referred to as “Detroit East” for all the automobile companies which manufactured and serviced vehicles here.
The structures built along Northern Boulevard, in particular, were gargantuan. That’s not because of the street, it’s because they backed up on the Sunnyside Yard. The original 1912 section of the building is at Honeywell, and you can see the seam it shares with the 1913-14 expansion by counting three window banks in from the corner.
The Center Building is a multi-tenant combination use office property with ground floor retail and light industrial located on busy Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, borough of Queens, New York City. Located directly on the M&R subway lines and minutes to Midtown Manhattan, the eight-story office building consists of approximately 444,606 rentable square feet situated on 1.44 acre-site.
The Ford Service Center and Assembly Plant, original section, was designed by architect Albert Kahn. Kahn enjoyed a long collaboration with Henry Ford, and designed more than 1,000 commissions for the industrialist. The addition, which continued the motif and overall treatment of the original, was by architect John Graham and expanded the plant’s capacity some 400 percent. This created 500,000 square feet of industrial space. What’s missing from the structure? The large cranes which once transported raw materials into the building from Ford’s 34 car long rail spur.
This was designed as a “fireproof factory,” with five stairwells constructed behind fireproof partitions and self closing doors. The stairs all led to an external exit, and one of the iconic features found on the addition is no mere facade – these balconies over Northern Boulevard are actually a fire tower. Don’t forget that the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire had just taken place over in Manhattan in 1911, which changed EVERYTHING in New York City, as far as industrial architecture and the fire code was concerned. For that generation, the Triangle fire loomed large, just as 9/11 does for ours.
The Ford plant was sold to Goodyear Tires by 1920, as Ford shifted his operations over to a far larger location in Newark. Goodyear sold the place to the Durant Motor Co. of New York in 1921.
STANDARD MOTOR PARTS
The Standard Motor Parts Building has been rebuilt into a contemporary office spaces with a farm on the roof.
Standard Motor Products, Inc. (NYSE: SMP) is a manufacturer and distributor of automotive parts in the automotive aftermarket industry. The company was founded in 1919 as a partnership by Elias Fife and Ralph Van Allen and incorporated by Fife in 1926. It is headquartered in Long Island City, New York, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Standard Motor Products, Inc. sells its products to warehouse distributors and auto parts retail chains around the world, under its own brand names such as Standard, BWD Automotive, Blue Streak Automotive, Blue Streak Wire, TechSmart, Intermotor, Factory Air, and Four Seasons, as well as under private labels for key customers.
We sometimes forget the enormous industrial history or Long Island City. Every few months I visit Material for the Arts at 33-00 Northern Blvd. They are located in the former car factory. As one looks out the window you can see where there were railroad sidings to load and unload the delivers to the factories located on the buildings along Northern Blvd. and facing the tracks.
The building with rail sidings and the Sunnyside Yards.
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Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All materials in this publication are copyrighted (c)
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