Eighth Avenue and 56th Street today looks nothing like it did when painter Lucille Blanch captured this otherwise ordinary block south of Columbus Circle 93 years ago.
Today, modern office buildings and apartment towers obscure the view of the Argonaut Building—the castle-like white structure that still stands down the block on Broadway and 57th Street. The enormous billboards are long gone, too. The church below it, the flamboyant Broadway Tabernacle, met the wrecking ball in the 1970s. The tenement with the empty storefront next to the tire shop has also disappeared, replaced by a McDonald’s. This stretch of West Midtown in the 1920s was known as the automobile showroom district, which explains the tire store and what look like car dealerships on the left-hand corner and in the middle of the block.
Lucile Blanch made a living as a painter, departing her Minnesota hometown to study at the Art Students League on West 57th Street on scholarship. She then became involved with the Fourteenth Street School, a group of artists with a social realist bent.
In 1930, she would have been 35 years old. Why she chose this corner to paint remains a mystery. But her depiction of the bright, colorful cityscape dwarfing the small, low-key residents might be saying something about the power of the urban environment over its residents caught in the toll of the Depression.
(Hat tip to Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog, which included this painting recently in a post about unheralded female artists living and/or working South of Union Square.)
STAINED GLASS WINDOWS IN THE NARTHRAX OF CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT!
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
Shop girls, down and out men, lone pedestrians on the way to the elevated train—from the 1930s to the 1980s, Isabel Bishop observed these men and women from her Union Square artist’s studio, painting them in soft tones that reveal their humanity and fragility.
Born in 1902 in Cincinnati, Bishop moved to Manhattan at age 16 to attend the New York School of Applied Design for Women. She then took classes at the Art Students League, developing her talents as a printmaker and painter.
Bishop married in 1934 and moved to Riverdale. But she kept her studio first at Nine West 14th Street and then another at 857 Broadway. The Union Square area in those pre- and postwar decades was home to lower-end department stores, offices, and cheap entertainment venues.
And of course, there was the park itself, a gathering place for everyone from soap-box agitators to workers on their lunch hour to derelict men with no where else to go.
The subject matter right outside her studio suited Bishop perfectly.
“It was in New York’s pulsating environment that Bishop combined her admiration for the old masters with a contemporary taste for urban realism,” states the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
“With her discerning eye, she portrayed ordinary people in an extraordinary manner, often monumentalizing her figures within spaces that barely created context or indicated a location.”
“She chose average models from the streets of Manhattan and often rendered them in a state of physical activity—a sharp departure from the idealized, passive nudes of previous traditions.”
[“Fifteenth Street and Sixth Avenue,” 1930]
Bishop focused many of her paintings on women—the otherwise ordinary women who passed through Union Square, coming in and out of offices or catching a train. Neither mothers nor sex symbols, they “exist for themselves,” as one critic put it.
“On the street corner, in the automat, in the subway and on park benches in fine weather, Miss Bishop proved herself a perceptive observer,” wrote the New York Times in her obituary. “For young women in the big city who were as yet unmarked by life, she had a particular feeling.”
[“Fourteenth Street,” 1932]
As time went on, Bishop’s style seemed to become more muted, with figures of women in what looks like perpetual motion—perhaps a comment on the rise of women in American society.
Bishop kept her Union Square studio until 1984; she died in 1988. This self-portrait was done in 1927, when she was just 25.
She isn’t as well-known as she should be, but her amber-hued men and women caught in ordinary, fleeting moments speak to the anonymity and motion of urban life in the 20th century.
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
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The other day we featured a photo of the island’s Holy Spirit Chapel with an adjoining pergola. While examining it, I was curious about the photographer Shirley Carter Burden. That is a familiar name. Check out his famous family history below.
Plaque on side of brick building: Erected 1906 for D.P.C., Robert W. Hebberd, Commissioner; etc.
Plaque on rusticated wall: Pathological Laboratory of Metropolitan Hospital, completed in 1910. William J. Gaynor, Mayor
Side of stone 3-story building with turrets and balustrade, pointed arched windows. of Smallpox Hospital
Wall of above building with turrets and pointed arched windows, attached to brick building with coins and bays. Smallpox Hospital
Smallpox Hospital: Closer view of above photograph. 2nd story balcony over door.
Close-up of gnarled branches of large tree alongside of building fire escape.
Fire escape of unidentified stone building.
Fire escape of unidentified brick building, looking SE. Queensboro Bridge in background, street lamp foreground.
Side view of small rusticated building. (A chapel?) Looking West, huge apartment building under construction. Ramp foreground.
Large tree trunk in foreground, wooden stool at foot of tree. Blurry church door in background.
Rectangular pergola in foreground; chapel in background.
Stained glass window seen from exterior.
Smallpox Hospital: 3 1/2 story stone building. Arched windows, 2nd story balcony with columns.
Looking SW across East River. Posted on street lamp: One-Way arrow and To Bridge arrow. Manhattan skyline in background.
SHIRLEY CARTER BURDEN
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
FROM WIKIPEDIA
Shirley Carter Burden (December 9, 1908 – June 3, 1989) was an American photographer,[1][2] author of picture essays on racism, Catholicism, and history of place.[3][4] He served on advisory committees of museums, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, and was the Photography Committee chairman at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and of Aperture,[5] which named the Burden Gallery (New York) in his honor.
He was at the Browning School in New York City until 1926, but did not go on to college or university education.[8]
Career
Beginning in 1924, Burden assisted at Pathé News. In 1926, he and his cousin filmed an Ontario Indian tribe for their The Silent Enemy, and from 1927 held a minor position at Paramount Studios. A 1929 meeting with Edward Steichen inspired his interest in photography and later gained his mentorship. He sought better motion picture prospects in California and Hollywood[9] and from 1929 to 1934 used his contact Merian C. Cooper to gain associate producer work, most significantly at RKO on Academy Award nominated “She“.
Commercial career
During World War 2 Burden established Tradefilms in 1942, successfully producing training films which were then in demand from the US Navy, the Office of Education, and Lockheed Aircraft. This business was unsustainable postwar and Burden and Tradefilms partner Todd Walker opened a photography studio in Beverly Hills, California, in 1946, producing advertising and architectural photography for magazines Architectural Forum, House and Garden, Arts and Architecture.
Fine art career
Dissatisfied with commercial photography, and having embraced Roman Catholicism, Burden decided on a more fulfilling fine art career, encouraged by Minor White[10] whom he met in 1952. The friendship developed into his patronage of White’s Aperture magazine. He assisted Edward Steichen in gathering photography for, and subsequently contributing images to, MoMA‘s highly successful, international travelling Family of Man (1955), working on this also with Dorothea Lange whom he befriended.
These contacts and experience launched a successful fine art photography career.; his photo-essay on the all-but-abandoned Ellis Island,[11] was exhibited under the auspices of the City of New York, and an invitation to exhibit his essay on the Weehawken ferry at MoMA in Diogenes With a Camera IV in 1958, curated by Steichen, who encouraged Burden to photograph Trappist monks at the abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky (God Is My Life).[12] Travel to Lourdes in 1960 resulted in Behold Thy Mother, published by Doubleday in 1965, and notoriety continued with the well publicised I Wonder Why, which documented racism experienced by a young black girl.[13]
He continued with his photo essays (on Japan, and his ancestors, the Vanderbilts[14]) and he repaid his success by chairing or advising a range of photography organisations, and teaching (1978–81, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.).
Personal life
In 1934, Burden married Flobelle Fairbanks, an actress and niece of actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr.[15] Together, they were the parents of two children, a daughter and a son:[6]
Margaret Florence (1936–2019), who married Daniel Childs.[16]
After the death of his first wife Flobelle on January 5, 1969,[16] Burden married Julietta Valverde Lyon in 1971.[8][19]
Burden died June 3, 1989 above Teterboro Airport, on a Los Angeles to New York flight.[6] His grandson, S. Carter Burden III, is the founder of the managed web hosting provider Logicworks.[20] His granddaughter, Constance Childs, married celebrity chef and Food Network host David Rosengarten.[21]
Legacy
He gifted or exchanged, in memory of his first wife Flobelle, large numbers of photographs from his generous and eclectic collection of modernist works to MoMA, The Centre for Photography and other institutions. In 1989, 5 years after Aperture moved headquarters to a five-story brownstone at 20 East 23rd Street in New York,[22] the building’s second floor was devoted to the Burden Gallery, in recognition of Burden’s longtime support.[6]The Burden Professorship in Photography at Harvard University in 1999 was established posthumously by his family.
THREE VISITORS AT THE LGHTHOUSE IN THE 1950’S PLEASE NOTE: NO SEAWALL PEDESTRIANS BEWARE! GLORIA HERMAN AND ALEXIS VILLAFANE GOT IT RIGHT
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
NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES WIKIPEDIA
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
SAVE THE DATE-TUESDAY, MARCH 7TH, IN PERSON PRESENTATION NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED ALL ARE WELCOME
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND,MARCH 4-5, 2023
ISSUE 930
REFORMING WOMAN OF
BLACKWELL’S ISLAND #7
MARY BELLE HARRIS
Superintendent of Women
and
Deputy Warden of the Workhouse
on
Blackwell’s Island
NYC CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT
JUDITH C. REVEAL
Harris, Mary Belle (1874–1957)
American prison administrator. Born on August 19, 1874, in Factoryville, Pennsylvania; died on February 22, 1957, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; the only daughter of John Howard and Mary Elizabeth (Mace) Harris; graduated from Bucknell University, A.B. in music, 1893, A.M. in Latin, 1894; earned Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative philology from the University of Chicago, 1900.
Mary Belle Harris was born in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, the oldest of three children. Her father John Howard was a Baptist minister and president of Bucknell University from 1889 to 1919. Her mother Mary Mace Harris died when Mary Belle was only six. John Howard married Lucy Adelaide Bailey —a close family friend—a year later. Their family grew by six sons as a result of this second marriage, and Bailey was a much-loved stepmother to Mary Belle. Harris and her brothers received an education at the Keystone Academy, a Baptist secondary school founded by her father.
Harris did not actually start in the career for which she became famous until she was nearly 40. She worked as a scholar and teacher after earning an A.B. in music, an A.M. in Latin at Bucknell University, and a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative philology from the University of Chicago. Harris taught Latin in Chicago and Baltimore between 1900 and 1910. In Baltimore, she studied archaeology and numismatics at Johns Hopkins University. In 1912, she traveled to Europe to teach at the American Classical School in Rome.
When Harris returned to America in 1914, a close friend from her years at the University of Chicago, Katharine Bement Davis— now commissioner of corrections in New York City—offered Harris the post of superintendent of women and deputy warden of the Workhouse on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), a strip of land in the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. Harris, who had no job prospects, accepted the post, even though she lacked experience in corrections administration. The Workhouse, severely overcrowded with a daily population of 700 women, was known for its grim atmosphere. Harris, who believed that prisons should teach employable skills and rehabilitate, dedicated herself to prison reform. She created a library and permitted card playing and knitting in the women’s cells in order to alleviate boredom; she also facilitated daily outdoor exercise by fencing off a section of the prison yard. She quickly earned a reputation for success based on common sense.
Harris remained at the Workhouse for three years. In 1917, the defeat of reform mayor John Mitchel forced her resignation, and, in February of 1918, she assumed the superintendent’s position at the State Reformatory for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. She continued her reforms, which included a system of self-government in the cottages and an Exit Club for women preparing for parole.
In September of 1918, Harris was granted a leave of absence to join the War Department’s Commission on Training Camp Activities. She became assistant director of the Section on Reformatories and Detention Houses, where she was responsible for dealing with women arrested in camp areas. She set up detention homes and health facilities in various cities in the South, including Florida, South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia.
In May of 1919, Harris became superintendent of the State Home for Girls in Trenton, New Jersey, a juvenile institution notorious for its dangerous inmates. Although plagued with continual problems, Harris was successful in establishing a system of self-government, then resigned from the State Home in 1924. The following year, on March 12, 1925, Harris was sworn in as the first superintendent of the Federal Industrial Institution for Women, a new establishment to be built at Alderson, West Virginia. She worked with the architects, overseeing all aspects of construction to ensure that Alderson would be a place of education for the inmates. It opened November 24, 1928, and, under Harris’ direction, became a model institution. The innovative features of the prison included the absence of a large surrounding wall or heavily armed guards, the establishment of farming and other physical activities, a system of self-government, and the promotion of education and vocational training. Despite the relative freedom of the institution, there were few disciplinary problems or escapes.
Following Harris’ retirement from Alderson in March 1941, she returned to Pennsylvania and served on the state Board of Parole until it was abolished in 1943. She then settled in Lewis-burg, Pennsylvania, served as a trustee for Bucknell University, and lectured and wrote about her activities in the world of female incarceration. In 1953, she began an extended tour of Europe and North Africa, visited her nephew in Cyprus, and inspected two Libyan prisons. She returned to Lewisburg in July of 1954 and died there on February 22, 1957, of a heart attack.
Harris was outspoken in her quest for re-form in women’s penal institutions, emphasizing the need for women to “build within them a wall of self-respect,” to learn employable skills which they could use upon their release, and to free themselves from dependency upon the community and/or men. She was considered a tough and powerful administrator and was recognized for her positive contributions to penal reform.
sources:
Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.
PERGOLA SOUTH OF HOLY SPIRIT CHAPEL, NOW THE SANCTUARY .
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
Katharine Bement Davis, (born Jan. 15, 1860, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 10, 1935, Pacific Grove, Calif.), American penologist, social worker, and writer who had a profound effect on American penal reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Davis graduated from the Rochester (New York) Free Academy in 1879 and for 10 years thereafter taught high-school science in Dunkirk, New York. In 1890 she entered Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, as a junior, and after graduating in 1892 she pursued further studies at Columbia University, New York City. She then served as head resident at the St. Mary’s Street College Settlement in Philadelphia (1893–97). In 1897 she undertook doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, and, after work there and at the University of Berlin and Vienna University, she received her Ph.D. in economics in 1900.
In January 1901 Davis began work as superintendent of the newly opened state reformatory for women at Bedford Hills, New York. Over the next 13 years the institution became famous for its experimental approach to penology. Davis instituted a prison farm, courses in various vocational subjects, and a cottage system. She was particularly interested in identifying various classes of reformable, habitual, and incorrigible offenders, and her work in that field induced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in 1912 to establish a Laboratory of Social Hygiene on property adjacent to the reformatory to further such research. In 1909, during a European trip, she won international acclaim for her work in organizing self-help relief programs following a disastrous earthquake in Messina, Sicily.
In January 1914 Davis was appointed commissioner of corrections for New York City. She was the first woman to hold a top-level post in the government of that city, and she moved quickly to improve conditions in its 15 penal institutions, especially to suppress drug traffic, segregate women prisoners, and upgrade dietary and medical facilities. She established the New Hampton Farm School for delinquent boys and laid plans for a separate detention home for women (ultimately opened in 1932). In 1915, principally as a result of her efforts, the New York legislature enacted a program of indeterminate sentencing and parole supervision, and in December of that year Davis was named first chairman of the city parole board to direct the new system. She held the post until the end of the reform administration in 1918.
From 1918 until her retirement in 1928 Davis was general secretary and member of the board of directors of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the department of the Rockefeller Foundation that had operated the Bedford Hills laboratory. There she directed research into narcotics trade and addiction, the “white slave trade,” various forms of delinquency, and other aspects of public health and social hygiene. In 1929 she published Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women; she was also author of a great many articles in professional and popular journal.
Commissioner Davis visiting Blackwell’s Island institutions
JAY JACOBSON, GLORIA HERMAN, ED LITCHER, ANDY SPARBERG & ELLEN JACOBY GOT IT RIGHT
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
Mollie Steimer (Ukrainian: Моллі Штаймер; 1897–1980) was a Ukrainian Jewishanarchist activist. After settling in New York City, she quickly became involved in the local anarchist movement and was caught up in the case of Abrams v. United States. Charged with sedition, she was eventually deported to Soviet Russia, where she met her lifelong partner Senya Fleshin and agitated for the rights of anarchist political prisoners in the country. For her activities, she and Fleshin were again deported to western Europe, where they spent time organising aid for exiles and political prisoners, and took part in the debates of the international anarchist movement. Following the rise of the Nazis in Europe, she and Fleshin fled to Mexico, where they spent the rest of their lives working as photographers.
Biography
On November 21, 1897, Mollie Steimer was born in Dunaivtsi, a village in the south-west of the Russian Empire (modern-day Ukraine). At the age of 15, she and her family emigrated to the United States, settling in a ghetto of New York City and setting to work at a garment factory. At this time, she started to read radical political literature, such as Women and Socialism by August Bebel and Underground Russia by Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky.[1]
Early activism
By the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Steimer had gravitated towards anarchism, inspired by the works of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. Together with other Jewish anarchists, Steimer helped form a clandestine collective called Der Shturm (“The Storm”), which published radical works in the Yiddish language. Following some internal conflict, in January 1918, the group reorganized and launched a new monthly journal titled Frayhayt (“Freedom”), which published articles by Jewish radicals such as Georg Brandes and Maria Goldsmith. The journal’s motto was a Henry David Thoreau quote: “That government is best which governs not at all” (Yiddish: Yene regirung iz di beste, velke regirt in gantsn nit).[2]
Several of the collective’s members, including Steimer, lived and worked together in a six-room apartment on Harlem‘s East 104th Street. Due to the political repression brought by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the tense political climate that preceded the First Red Scare, the collective was forced to distribute Frayhayt in secret, as it had been among the papers banned by the federal government for its anti-war and far-left political stances.[3] By the summer of 1918, the group had drawn the attention of the authorities, after they had begun distributing leaflets denouncing the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and calling for a social revolution in the United States by means of a general strike.[4]
Arrest, trial and imprisonment
Steimer herself distributed thousands of copies around New York, including at her own workplace. On August 23, she threw a handful of the leaflets out of a window, which alerted the police, who arrested Steimer after receiving information from an informant within the Frayhayt group. Their apartment was subsequently raided and a number of their other members were arrested, on charges of conspiracy, under the Sedition Act of 1918.[5] During their trial, which came to be known as the case of Abrams v. United States, Steimer gave a speech in which she declared:[6]
“By anarchism, I understand a new social order, where no group of people shall be governed by another group of people. Individual freedom shall prevail in the full sense of the word. Private ownership shall be abolished. Every person shall have an equal opportunity to develop himself well, both mentally and physically. We shall not have to struggle for our daily existence as we do now. No one shall live on the product of others. Every person shall produce as much as he can, and enjoy as much as he needs—receive according to his need. Instead of striving to get money, we shall strive towards education, towards knowledge. While at present the people of the world are divided into various groups, calling themselves nations, while one nation defies another — in most cases considers the others as competitive — we, the workers of the world, shall stretch out our hands towards each other with brotherly love. To the fulfillment of this idea I shall devote all my energy, and, if necessary, render my life for it.”
On October 25, 1918, Steimer and her co-defendants were found guilty, with Steimer herself being sentenced to 15 years in prison and a $500 fine (equivalent to $9,000 in 2021).[7] With support from a wide range of society, notably including Zechariah Chafee and the entire staff of Harvard Law School, the sentence was appealed and the defendants were released on bail.[8] Steimer returned to activism, for which she was arrested multiple times over the following year. On March 11, 1919, during a police raid against the Russian People’s House on New York’s East 15th Street, Steimer was arrested on charges of incitement and subsequently transferred to Ellis Island.[9] Following a hunger strike against the conditions of her solitary confinement, Steimer was released before she could be deported, although the government kept her under surveillance. Back in New York, she met Emma Goldman, with whom she developed a lifelong friendship.[10]
On October 30, 1919, Steimer was arrested again and imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island. For six months, she was again held in solitary confinement, which she likewise protested with another hunger strike and by loudly singing revolutionary songs. When the Supreme Court upheld her conviction, her co-defendants informed her of a plan to flee the country into exile, but Steimer herself refused to cooperate, as she didn’t want to dishonor the workers that had paid her $40,000 in bail (equivalent to $625,000 in 2021).[11] In April 1920, Steimer was transferred to Jefferson City, Missouri, where she was held for a year and a half. By this time, she had learnt of the death of her brother from influenza and her father from shock.[12] Her lawyer managed to secure her release, on the condition of her deportation. But she initially refused to accept this, due to her staunch opposition to state borders and her concern for fellow political prisoners of the United States.[13] Nevertheless, after some convincing, she arrived back at Ellis Island, where she eagerly awaited her chance to participate in the Russian Revolution.[14]
Deportation and exile
On November 24, 1921, Steimer and her co-defendants were deported to the Russian Soviet Republic on the Estonia. By the time they arrived in Moscow, on December 15, 1921, there were no anarchists left to greet them. Emma Goldman had left for exile, Peter Kropotkin had died of old age and any left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks had been suppressed by the Red Army, while hundreds more anarchists were still held in the prisons of the Cheka.[15] Despite the climate of political repression, Steimer made a new home in Petrograd, where she met and fell in love with Senya Fleshin, a veteran of the Makhnovist movement.[16] Together they established an organization to aid political prisoners in Russia, for which they were arrested on November 1, 1922 and sentenced to exile in Siberia. But after they carried out a hunger strike, they were released on November 18, on the condition that they remain in Petrograd and report regularly to the authorities. Despite these conditions, they continued their activities, and were again arrested on July 9, 1923. Following another hunger strike and protests made to Leon Trotsky by anarcho-syndicalist delegates of the Profintern, they were again released, although this time they were to be deported.[17]
Fleshin; Steimer; Voline 1930
On September 27, 1923, Steimer and Fleshin were deported to Germany, where they were reunited with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in Berlin. From the German capital, Steimer wrote articles about her experiences in Russia for the British anarchist newspaper Freedom, to which she denounced the authoritarianism of the Communist Party.[18] The couple also continued their activities in aiding Soviet political prisoners, now as members of the International Workers’ Association. In 1924, they joined their fellow exile Volin to Paris, where they established a mutual aid society for anarchist exiles from all countries and participated in the debate around the Platform, which Steimer criticised as authoritarian.[19] During this period, Steimer also met a number of other anarchsts, including Harry Kelly, Rose Pesotta, Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop, and was briefly reunited with her co-defendants Jack and Mary Abrams, who had also left Russia out of disillusionment with the Revolution.[20]
In Mexico City, the couple operated a photographic studio, became close with a group of Spanish anarchist exiles and were once again reunited with Jack and Mary Abrams. In 1963, Steimer and Fleshin retired to Cuernavaca, where they kept up with the development of the international anarchist movement and received visitors from the United States. In the late 1970s, Steimer was interviewed by a number of film crews about Emma Goldman and her anarchist convictions, to which she remained a stalwart into her old age.[25]
Mollie Steimer died of heart failure in her Cuernavaca home on July 23, 1980, aged 82.[1] Senya Fleshin died less than a year later.[25]
COVER OF BROCHURE COMMENORATING THE OPENING OF THE EAST RIVER DRIVE IN 1941, A WPA PROJECT (NOW THE FDR DRIVE). THIS IS A COMPOSITE IMAGE OF DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE DRIVE. ARON EISENPREISS, GLORIA HERMAN, HARA REISER AND NINA LUBLIN GOT IT RGHT!!!
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
WIKIPEDIA
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Ida C. Craddock (August 1, 1857 – October 16, 1902) was a 19th-century American advocate of free speech and women’s rights.[1] She wrote extensively on sexuality, leading to her conviction and imprisonment for obscenity. Facing further legal proceedings after her release, she committed suicide.
Ida Craddock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ida Craddock
Born1 August 1857 Philadelphia, United StatesDied16 October 1902 (aged 45) New York City, United States
EARLY LIFE
Ida Craddock was born in Philadelphia; her father died before she was five months old. Her mother home-schooled her as an only child and provided her with an extensive Quaker education.[3]
In her twenties, after passing the entrance exams, Craddock was recommended by the faculty for admission into the University of Pennsylvania as its first female undergraduate student. However, her entrance was blocked by the university’s board of trustees in 1882.[4] She went on to publish a stenography textbook, Primary Phonography, and to teach the subject to women at Girard College.
In her thirties, Craddock left her Quaker upbringing. She developed an academic interest in the occult through her association with the Theosophical Society beginning around 1887. Through her writing, she tried to synthesize translated mystic literature and traditions from many cultures into a scholarly, distilled whole. As a freethinker, she was elected Secretary of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Secular Union in 1889.[5] Although a member of the Unitarian faith, Craddock became a student of religious eroticism, then proclaimed she was a Priestess and Pastor of the Church of Yoga. Never married in a traditional sense, Craddock claimed to have a blissful ongoing marital relationship with an angel named Soph. Craddock stated her intercourse with Soph was so noisy, they drew complaints from her neighbors.[3] Her mother responded by threatening to burn Craddock’s papers, and unsuccessfully tried to have her institutionalized.
Craddock moved to Chicago, and opened a Dearborn Street office offering “mystical” sexual counseling to married couples via both walk-in counseling and mail order. She dedicated her time to “preventing sexual evils and sufferings” by educating adults, achieving national notoriety with her editorials in defense of Little Egypt and her controversial belly dancing act at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago during 1893.[6][7]
Craddock wrote many serious instructional tracts on human sexuality and appropriate, respectful sexual relations between husband and wife. Among her works were Heavenly Bridegrooms, Psychic Wedlock, Spiritual Joys, Letter To A Prospective Bride, The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living. Aleister Crowley reviewed Heavenly Bridegrooms in the pages of his journal The Equinox, stating that it was:
…one of the most remarkable human documents ever produced, and it should certainly find a regular publisher in book form. The authoress of the MS. claims that she was the wife of an angel. She expounds at the greatest length the philosophy connected with this thesis. Her learning is enormous. …This book is of incalculable value to every student of occult matters. No Magick library is complete without it.[8]
These sex manuals were all considered obscene by the standards of her day. Their distribution led to numerous confrontations with various authorities, often initiated by Craddock. She was held for several months at a time on morality charges in five local jails as well as the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.
Her first two full-length books, Lunar & Sex Worship and Sex Worship, were on comparative religion.
Her writings on supernatural topics also continued throughout her life. One of her last books on this subject was Heaven of the Bible, published in 1897.
INDICTMENTS
Mass distribution of Right Marital Living through the U.S. Mail after its publication as a featured article in the medical journal The Chicago Clinic led to a federalindictment of Craddock in 1899. She pled guilty, and received a suspended sentence. In 1902, a subsequent trial in New York on charges of sending The Wedding Night through the mail during a sting operation ended with her conviction. Craddock refused to plead insanity in order to avoid being incarcerated, and was sentenced to three months in prison, serving most of her time in Blackwell’s Island workhouse.[3] Upon her release, Anthony Comstock immediately re-arrested her for violations of the Comstock Act. On October 10, Craddock was tried and convicted, with the judge declaring The Wedding Night to be so “obscene, lewd, lascivious, dirty” that the jurors would not be allowed to see it during the trial.
At 45 years old, Craddock saw her five-year prison sentence as a life term. On October 16, 1902, the day before she was due to be sent to a federal penitentiary, Craddock died by suicide after slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas from the oven in her apartment. She penned a final private letter to her mother as well as a lengthy public suicide note condemning Comstock, who had become her personal nemesis. Comstock had opposed Craddock almost a decade before during the Little Egypt affair, and effectively acted as her prosecutor during both legal actions against her in federal court. He had sponsored the Comstock Act, which was named after himself, under which she was repeatedly charged.
AFTER DEATH
Theodore Schroeder, a free speech lawyer from New York with an amateur interest in psychology, became interested in Ida Craddock’s case a decade after her death. During his research of her life, he collected her letters, diaries, manuscripts, and other printed materials. Although he never met Craddock, he speculated she had at least two human lovers, although Craddock insisted she only had intercourse with Soph, her spirit husband.[3]
Sexual techniques from Craddock’s Psychic Wedlock were later reproduced in Sex Magick by Louis T. Culling.[9]
Today, Ida Craddock’s manuscripts and notes are preserved in the Special Collections of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her battle with Anthony Comstock is the subject of the 2006 stage play Smut by Alice Jay and Joseph Adler, which had its world premiere at Miami’s GableStage in June 2007.
In 2010, after a century of her works remaining almost completely out of print, Teitan Press published Lunar and Sex Worship by Ida Craddock, edited and with an introduction by Vere Chappell. Also in 2010, Vere Chappell wrote and compiled “Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock”. He describes this as “an anthology of works by Ida Craddock, embedded in a biography.” The book reprints “The Danse du Ventre (1893), Heavenly Bridegrooms (1894), Psychic Wedlock (1899), “The Wedding Night” (1900), “Letter from Prison” (1902), “Ida’s Last Letter to Her Mother” (1902), “Ida’s Last Letter to the Public” (1902). Another biography of Craddock, “Heaven’s Bride” by Leigh Eric Schmidt was also published in 201
NEW ELEVATOR AT MANHATTAN TRAM STATION GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, NINA LUBLIN & JAY JACOBSON ALL GOT IT RIGHT
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
WIKIPEDIA
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Michael Hennessey Higgins and Anne Higgins had a family with eleven children.[1] They had an Irish American background. Ethel and Margaret were two of the children. Her mother preferred Ethel. Margaret did not like this, and it caused problems in their relationship..[2]
Ethel had a short and unhappy marriage to Jack Byrne, a glassworker.[3] They had two children, Jack and Olive. In 1906, Ethel left her children in the care of their paternal grandparents to protect them from their abusive father;[4] Ethel only visited her daughter once in sixteen years. Olive grew up to become an important muse to the creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, and more details of Ethel Byrne’s life came to light when Jill Lepore wrote about the superheroine character in 2014.[5]
Ethel Byrne’s background in nursing was very important to her activism. It directly contributed to her desire to make birth control accessible to women of varying backgrounds. She was a trained nurse who assisted immigrant women who needed medical care in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, New York in 1916.[6]
Birth control activism
Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne leaving a courthouse
The two sisters and theatre artist Fania Mindell opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn in October 1916.[7] They made flyers in different languages, including English, Yiddish and Italian,to advertise their cliniic. Byrne is not widely known today. Despite this, her early activism had a big impact on raising awareness of the importance of access to information about birth control. When Ethel Byrne was arrested, a group of politically active New York women wanted to meet President Woodrow Wilson. They wanted Wilson to undo laws that made distributing bith control a crime.
Arrest and hunger strike
The clinic was highly controversial because the Comstock Laws were enforced. Byrne and Sanger distributed pessaries and would show their clients how to use this method of contraception in direct violation of these laws.[8]
This was the first birth control clinic in the United States.[9] The clinic caused an immediate sensation in the press. It got national attention, and all three women were arrested and tried for “distributing obscene materials”.”The police monitored the Clinic from its opening and sent in a female undercover agent to purchase contraceptive supplies. On October 26 (1916) an undercover police woman and vice-squad officers raided the clinic, confiscated an assortment of contraceptives from pessaries to condoms, along with 20 ‘books on young women’, and arrested Sanger, Byrne and Mindell. After being arraigned, Sanger and Mindell spent the night in the Raymond Street jail, Byrne at the Liberty Avenue station. All were released the next morning on $500.00 bail.”
All three women were found guilty. After some time, the verdicts were overturned, and their campaign was successful in the end. This caused major changes in social policy and to the laws governing birth control and sex education around the world. The clinic closed but later became the basis for what was to become known as Planned Parenthood.
Byrn was arrested for distributing information about bith control. She was sentenced to 30 days in Blackwell’s Island prison.[10] She was jailed at Blackwell Island workhouse on January 22, 1917 for her activism and subsequently went on a hunger strike.[11] Sanger was concerned her sister would die as a result of this hunger strike and Byrne was force fed while serving her sentence after 185 hours without food or water.[12] As historian Jill Lepore reports in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Ethel Byrne was the first female political prisoner in the United States to be subjected to force feeding.[13] Mrs. Byrne was prepared to starve herself to death in support of her cause. Her case was the first of a group of cases known as the “Sanger cases” to be brought to trial.
Sanger supported Byrne’s activism. Their confinement helped bring national attention to their push for the legalization of birth control.[14] It also hurt their relationship as Sanger’s notoriety grew after this arrest and she was sometimes known to take credit for Ethel’s infamous hunger strike.
Later years
Although her sister went on to become world-famous for her advocacy of birth control, Byrne’s legacy is not well known. This is apparent on the Planned Parenthood website, as it is noted Sanger opened her 1916 clinic with “her sister”.[15] Ethel is not even mentioned by name and unlike her older sister is not well known
Ethel Byrne had a stroke and died in 1955. She did not live to see the legalization of the birth control pill, as she died five years before it received FDA approval.[16]
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PART OF TRAM TOWER WAITING TO BE INSTALLED, 2010 JAY JACOBSON, ELLEN JACOBY, ARLENE BESSENOFF, GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, AND NINA LUBLIN ALL GOT IT RIGHT
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
A likeness of Madame Restell, published in the National Police Gazette, 1847 The Wickedest Woman in New York
VICTORIAN era women experiencing “female trouble” could pick up a daily newspaper, scan the advertisements and translate the euphemisms. A dash of “uterine tonic,” an application of a “female wash,” a brushing of “carbolic purifying powder” or any product with “French” in the title promised to prevent conception, while a “female regulator,” “rose injections” or a dose of “cathartic pills” could alleviate “private difficulties” and “remove obstructions.” They knew the key ingredients—pennyroyal, savin, black draught, tansy tea, oil of cedar, ergot of rye, mallow, motherwort—as well as the most trusted name in the business: Ann Lohman, alias Madame Restell, whose 40-year career as a “female physician” made her a hero to desperate patients and “the Wickedest Woman in New York” to nearly everyone else.
Restell, like many self-proclaimed physicians of the time, had no real medical background. Born Ann Trow in May 1812 in Painswick, England, she had little formal education and began working as a maid at age 15. A year later she married a tailor named Henry Summers. They had a daughter, Caroline, in 1830, and the following year sailed for New York City, where they settled on William Street in Lower Manhattan. A few months after they arrived, in August 1831, Henry died of bilious fever. Ann supported herself as a seamstress, doing piecework at home so she could look after Caroline while she worked, all the while longing for something better. Around 1836, she met 27-year-old Charles Lohman, a printer at the New York Herald. He was well-educated and literate, a habitué of a bookstore on Chatham Street where the city’s radical philosophers and freethinkers gathered to debate, and he began publishing tracts about contraception and population control.
It’s unclear how Ann first embarked upon the patent-medicine business, but Charles encouraged her fledgling career. Together they concocted a story of a trip to Europe where Ann allegedly trained as a midwife with her grandmother, a renowned French physician named Restell. Upon her return, she assumed the moniker “Mrs. Restell” (soon tweaking it to “Madame Restell”), and Charles encouraged her to advertise in the newspapers. Her first notice ran in the New York Sun of March 18, 1839, and read, in part:
TO MARRIED WOMEN.—Is it not but too well known that the families of the married often increase beyond what the happiness of those who give them birth would dictate?… Is it moral for parents to increase their families, regardless of consequences to themselves, or the well being of their offspring, when a simple, easy, healthy, and certain remedy is within our control? The advertiser, feeling the importance of this subject, and estimating the vast benefit resulting to thousands by the adoption of means prescribed by her, has opened an office, where married females can obtain the desired information.
Clients arrived at her Greenwich Street office from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and if they couldn’t seek treatment in person, Restell responded by mail, sending Preventative Powder at $5 per package or Female Monthly Pills, $1 apiece. Her pills (as well as those of her competitors) simply commercialized traditional folk remedies that had been around for centuries, and were occasionally effective. Restell counted on clients returning for surgical abortions if the abortifacients failed—$20 for poor women, $100 for the rich.
As her practice flourished it attracted other aspiring “female physicians,” male and female, and Restell began warning prospective clients to “beware of imitators.” To remain competitive she began expanding her range of services. In addition to selling abortifacients, she opened a boardinghouse where clients with unwanted pregnancies could give birth in anonymity. For an additional fee, she facilitated the adoption of infants. Restell placed more newspaper ads, many referring to the thousands of letters she’d received from grateful customers.
Madame Restell’s residence, on the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and 52nd Street. The Wickedest Woman in New York
When Madame Restell began her practice, New York State law regarding abortion reflected contemporary folk wisdom, which held that a fetus wasn’t technically alive until “quickening”—the moment when the mother felt it first move inside the womb, usually around the fourth month. An abortion before quickening was legal, but an abortion after quickening was considered to be second-degree manslaughter. Restell tried to determine how far along a patient was in her pregnancy before offering her services; if she intervened too late, she risked a $100 fine and one year in prison.
She had her first major brush with the law in 1840, when a 21-year-old woman named Maria Purdy lay on her deathbed, suffering from tuberculosis. She told her husband she wished to make a confession: While pregnant the previous year, she decided she didn’t want to give birth again; they had a ten-month-old child and she couldn’t handle another so soon. She had visited Restell’s office on Greenwich Street and joined several women waiting in the front parlor. When her turn came, Restell listened to her story and gave her a small vial of yellow medicine in exchange for a dollar.
Purdy took one dose that night and two the next day but then stopped, suddenly worried about the potential consequences. A doctor analyzed the medicine and concluded it contained oil of tansy and spirits of turpentine and advised her to never take it again. She returned to Restell, who told her that for $20 an operation could be performed without pain or inconvenience. Purdy had no cash, and instead offered a pawn ticket for a gold watch chain and a stack of rings, which Restell accepted. She led Purdy behind a curtain to a darkened room, where a strange man—not Restell’s husband—placed his hands on her abdomen and declared she was only three months along (if Purdy was past the first trimester, she didn’t correct him). She had the surgery, and was convinced that her present illness was a result. After hearing her deathbed confession her husband went to the police, who arrested Restell and charged her with “administering to Purdy certain noxious medicine… … procuring her a miscarriage by the use of instruments, the same not being necessary to preserve her life.”
The case launched a debate that played out in the press, and the debate was as charged as it is today. One antiabortion advocate called Restell “the monster in human shape” responsible for “one of the most hellish acts ever perpetrated in a Christian land.” She was a threat to the institution of marriage, allowing women to “commit as many adulteries as there are hours in the year without the possibility of detection.” She encouraged prostitution by removing the consequences. She allowed wives to shirk the duties of motherhood. She insulted poor women by providing abortions when they could seek aid and solace from their church. She not only abetted immoral behavior but also harmed misguided and naïve women, acting as a “hag of misery” preying upon human weakness. The word “Restellism” became synonymous with abortion.
Restell decided to defend herself, placing an ad in the New York Herald in which she offered $100 to anyone who could prove that her medicine was harmful.“I cannot conceive,” she wrote, “how men who are husbands, brothers, or fathers can give utterance to an idea so intrinsically base and infamous, that their wives, their sisters or their daughters, want but the opportunity and ‘facility’ to be vicious, and if they are not so, it is not from an innate principle of virtue, but from fear. What is female virtue, then, a mere thing of circumstance and occasion?”
She was found guilty at trial, but the case was appealed on the ground that Maria Purdy’s deathbed statement was not admissible. The appellate court ruled that such depositions were admissible only in civil suits. Restell was retried, with Purdy’s statement removed from the evidence, and found not guilty. Emboldened, Restell opened branch offices in Boston and Philadelphia and increased her advertising, targeting “married ladies whose delicate or precarious health forbids a too rapid increase of family.”
Classified advertisements from the New York Herald and the New York Sun, December 1841 From www.librarycompany.org
In 1845, the New York State legislature passed a bill stipulating that providing abortions or abortifacients at any stage of pregnancy was a misdemeanor punishable by a mandatory year in prison. Women who sought abortions or attempted to self-abort would also be liable, subject to a $1,000 fine, a prison sentence of tree to 12 months, or both. The legislators apparently overlooked the possibility that this provision would discourage testimony from women who had undergone abortions, making it more difficult to prosecute abortionists.
Public scrutiny of Restell continued unabated—she was accused in the press, on the basis of an anonymous letters, of performing a fatal abortion on Mary Rogers, the real-life inspiration for the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—but she managed to avoid legal trouble for two years. In the fall of 1847, a woman named Maria Bodine visited her clinic, having been referred by an anonymous “sponsor.” Restell decided she was too far along for an abortion and suggested the woman stay and board instead, but Bodine’s lover insisted. Restell refused several times before allowing the surgery. Afterward, in pain, Bodine consulted a physician, who suspected an abortion and reported her to the police. She turned state’s evidence, and Restell was arrested for second-degree manslaughter.
Restell was found guilty of misdemeanor procurement and sentenced to a year on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Upon her release she claimed she would no longer offer surgical abortions, but would still provide pills and stays in her boardinghouse. In an attempt to improve her image she applied for United States citizenship—one had to be a “person of good character” to be approved—and was naturalized in 1854. The mayor of New York, Jacob A. Westervelt, officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
But Restell wasn’t able to escape her reputation. Newspaper reports seemed as bothered by her wealth as by how she obtained it, detailing her collection of diamonds and pearls, her furs, her ostentatious carriage with four horses and a liveried coachman, her brownstone mansion on the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue (built in part, it was said, to annoy the first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who had denounced her from his pulpit and who had bought the next block on which to build St. Patrick’s Cathedral). She was now so infamous nationwide that she was included in several guidebooks to the city, one of which dubbed her “the Wickedest Woman in New York.” Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, likened pornography to cancer and drew no distinction between birth control and abortion. A federal passed in March 1873, which became known as the Comstock Law, made it a misdemeanor to sell or advertise obscene matter by mail, and made specific reference to “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” Telling someone where they could find such information carried a prison sentence of six months to five years and a fine of up to $2,000. Comstock embarked on a personal campaign to hunt down violators. In 1878 he rang the bell of Madame Restell’s basement office on East 52nd Street, claiming to be a married man whose wife had already given him too many children. He was worried about her health and hoped Restell might be able to help, he said. She sold him some pills. Comstock returned the following day with a police officer and had her arrested. During a search he found pamphlets about birth control and some “instruments,” along with instructions for their use. Once again Restell defended herself in the press. “He’s in this nasty detective business,” she said of Comstock. “There are a number of little doctors who are in the same business behind him. They think if they can get me in trouble and out of the way, they can make a fortune. If the public are determined to push this matter, they will have a good laugh when they learn the nature of the terrible items of the preventative prescriptions. Of course, if there’s a trial it will all come out.”
In 1845, the New York State legislature passed a bill stipulating that providing abortions or abortifacients at any stage of pregnancy was a misdemeanor punishable by a mandatory year in prison. Women who sought abortions or attempted to self-abort would also be liable, subject to a $1,000 fine, a prison sentence of tree to 12 months, or both. The legislators apparently overlooked the possibility that this provision would discourage testimony from women who had undergone abortions, making it more difficult to prosecute abortionists.Public scrutiny of Restell continued unabated—she was accused in the press, on the basis of an anonymous letters, of performing a fatal abortion on Mary Rogers, the real-life inspiration for the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—but she managed to avoid legal trouble for two years. In the fall of 1847, a woman named Maria Bodine visited her clinic, having been referred by an anonymous “sponsor.” Restell decided she was too far along for an abortion and suggested the woman stay and board instead, but Bodine’s lover insisted. Restell refused several times before allowing the surgery. Afterward, in pain, Bodine consulted a physician, who suspected an abortion and reported her to the police. She turned state’s evidence, and Restell was arrested for second-degree manslaughter.Restell was found guilty of misdemeanor procurement and sentenced to a year on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Upon her release she claimed she would no longer offer surgical abortions, but would still provide pills and stays in her boardinghouse. In an attempt to improve her image she applied for United States citizenship—one had to be a “person of good character” to be approved—and was naturalized in 1854. The mayor of New York, Jacob A. Westervelt, officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
The reformer Anthony Comstock The Wickedest Woman in New YorkBut Restell wasn’t able to escape her reputation. Newspaper reports seemed as bothered by her wealth as by how she obtained it, detailing her collection of diamonds and pearls, her furs, her ostentatious carriage with four horses and a liveried coachman, her brownstone mansion on the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue (built in part, it was said, to annoy the first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who had denounced her from his pulpit and who had bought the next block on which to build St. Patrick’s Cathedral). She was now so infamous nationwide that she was included in several guidebooks to the city, one of which dubbed her “the Wickedest Woman in New York.”Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, likened pornography to cancer and drew no distinction between birth control and abortion. A federal passed in March 1873, which became known as the Comstock Law, made it a misdemeanor to sell or advertise obscene matter by mail, and made specific reference to “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” Telling someone where they could find such information carried a prison sentence of six months to five years and a fine of up to $2,000.Comstock embarked on a personal campaign to hunt down violators. In 1878 he rang the bell of Madame Restell’s basement office on East 52nd Street, claiming to be a married man whose wife had already given him too many children. He was worried about her health and hoped Restell might be able to help, he said. She sold him some pills. Comstock returned the following day with a police officer and had her arrested. During a search he found pamphlets about birth control and some “instruments,” along with instructions for their use.Once again Restell defended herself in the press. “He’s in this nasty detective business,” she said of Comstock. “There are a number of little doctors who are in the same business behind him. They think if they can get me in trouble and out of the way, they can make a fortune. If the public are determined to push this matter, they will have a good laugh when they learn the nature of the terrible items of the preventative prescriptions. Of course, if there’s a trial it will all come out.”
An artist’s rendering of Restell’s suicide, 1878 The Wickedest Woman in New YorkThis time there was no trial. On April 1, 1878, Restell’s chambermaid found her nude body half-submerged in the bathtub, her throat slit from ear to ear. House servants told reporters that Restell had been restless and despondent, pacing her home and crying, “Why do they persecute me so? I have done nothing to harm anyone.” Since it was April Fool’s Day, Comstock initially believed the report to be a tasteless joke. When he realized it was true, he reached for his file on Ann Lohman and penned a final comment: “A bloody ending to a bloody life
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AMERICAN FLAG FLYING OVER THE FDR FOUR FREEDOMS PARK SITE IN 2010.
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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I WAS CALLED BEFORE THE HEAD MATRON, A TALL WOMAN WITH A stolid face. She began taking my pedigree. “What religion?” was her first question. “None, I am an atheist…… Atheism is prohibited here. You will have to go to church.” I replied that I would do nothing, of the kind. I did not believe in anything the Church stood for and, not being a hypocrite, I would not attend. Besides, I came from Jewish people. Was there a synagogue?
She said curtly that there were services for the Jewish convicts on Saturday afternoon, but as I was the only Jewish female prisoner, she could not permit me to go among so many men.
After a bath and a change into the prison uniform I was sent to my cell and locked in.
I knew from what Most had related to me about Blackwell’s Island that the prison was old and damp, the cells small, without light or water. I was therefore prepared for what was awaiting me. But the moment the door was locked on me, I began to experience a feeling of suffocation. In the dark I groped for something to sit on and found a narrow iron cot. Sudden exhaustion overpowered me and I fell sleep.
I became aware of a sharp burning in my eyes, and I jumped up in fright. A lamp was being held close to the bars. “What is it?” I cried, forgetting where I was. The lamp was lowered and I saw a thin, ascetic face gazing at me. A soft voice congratulated me on my sound sleep. It was the evening matron on her regular rounds. She told me to undress and left me.
But there was no more sleep for me that night. The irritating feel of the coarse blanket, the shadows creeping past the bars, kept me awake until the sound of a gong again brought me to my feet. The cells were being unlocked, the door heavily thrown open. Blue and white striped figures slouched by, automatically forming into a line, myself a part of it. “March!” and the line began to move along the corridor down the steps towards a corner containing wash-stands and towels. Again the command: “Wash!” and everybody began clamouring for a towel, already soiled and wet. Before I had time to splash some water on my hands and face and wipe myself half-dry, the order was given to march back.
Then breakfast: a slice of bread and a tin cup of warm brownish water. Again the line formed, and the striped humanity was broken up in sections and sent to its daily tasks. With a group of other women I was taken to the sewing-room.
The procedure of forming lines — “Forward, march!” — was repeated three times a day, seven days a week. After each meal ten minutes were allowed for talk. A torrent of words would then break forth from the pent-up beings. Each precious second increased the roar of sounds; and then sudden silence.
The sewing-room was large and light, the sun often streaming through the high windows, its rays intensifying the whiteness of the walls and the monotony of the regulation dress. In the sharp light the figures in baggy and ungainly attire appeared more hideous. Still, the shop was a welcome relief from the cell. Mine, on the ground floor, was grey and damp even in the day-time; the cells on the upper floors were somewhat brighter. Close to the barred door one could even read by the help of the light coming from the corridor windows.
The locking of the cells for the night was the worst experience of the day. The convicts were marched along the tiers in the usual line. On reaching her cell each left the line, stepped inside, hands on the iron door, and awaited the command. “Close!” and with a crash the seventy doors shut, each prisoner automatically locking herself in. More harrowing still was the daily degradation of being forced to march in lock-step to the river, carrying the bucket of excrement accumulated during twenty-four hours.
I was put in charge of the sewing-shop. My task consisted in cutting the cloth and preparing work for the two dozen women employed. In addition I had to keep account of the incoming material and the outgoing bundles. I welcomed the work. It helped me to forget the dreary existence within the prison. But the evenings were torturous. The first few weeks I would fall asleep as soon as I touched the pillow. Soon, however, the nights found me restlessly tossing about, seeking sleep in vain. The appalling nights — even if I should get the customary two months’ commutation time, I still had nearly two hundred and ninety of them. Two hundred and ninety — and Sasha? I used to lie awake and mentally figure in the dark the number of days and nights before him. Even if he could come out after his first sentence of seven years, he would still have more than twenty-five hundred nights! Dread overcame me that Sasha could not survive them. Nothing was so likely to drive people to madness, I felt, as sleepless nights in prison. Better dead, I thought. Dead? Frick was not dead, and Sasha‘s glorious youth, his life, the things he might have accomplished – all were being sacrificed — perhaps for nothing. But — was Sasha‘s Attentat in vain? Was my revolutionary faith a mere echo of what others had said or taught me? “No, not in vain!” something within me insisted. “No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal.”
One day I was told by the head matron that I would have to get better results from the women. They were not doing so much work, she said, as under the prisoner who had had charge of the sewing-shop before me. I resented the suggestion that I become a slave-driver. It was because I hated slaves as well as their drivers, I informed the matron, that I had been sent to prison. I considered myself one of the inmates, not above them. I was determined not to do anything that would involve a denial of my ideals. I preferred punishment. One of the methods of treating offenders consisted in placing them in a corner facing a blackboard and compelling them to stay for hours in that position, constantly before the matron’s vigilant eyes. This seemed to me petty and insulting. I decided that if I was offered such an indignity, I would increase my offence and take the dungeon. But the days passed and I was not punished.
News in prison travels with amazing rapidity. Within twenty-four hours all the women knew that I had refused to act as a slave-driver. They had not been unkind to me, but they had kept aloof. They had been told that I was a terrible “anarchist” and that I didn’t believe in God. They had never seen me in church and I did not participate in their ten-minute gush of talk. I was a freak in their eyes. But when they learned that I had refused to play the boss over them, their reserve broke down. Sundays after church the cells would be opened to permit the women an hour’s visit with one another. The next Sunday I received visits from every inmate on my tier. They felt I was their friend, they assured me, and they would do anything for me. Girls working in the laundry offered to wash my clothes, others to darn my stockings. Everyone was anxious to do some service. I was deeply moved. These poor creatures so hungered for kindness that the least sign of it loomed high on their limited horizons. After that they would often come to me with their troubles, their hatred of the head matron, their confidences about their infatuations with the male convicts. Their ingenuity in carrying on flirtations under the very eyes of the officials was amazing.
My three weeks in the Tombs had given me ample proof that the revolutionary contention that crime is the result of poverty is based on fact. Most of the defendants who were awaiting trial came from the lowest strata of society, men and women without friends, often even without a home. Unfortunate, ignorant creatures they were, but still with hope in their hearts, because they had not yet been convicted. In the penitentiary despair possessed almost all of the prisoners. It served to unveil the mental darkness, fear, and superstition which held them in bondage. Among the seventy inmates, there were no more than half a dozen who showed any intelligence whatever. The rest were outcasts without the least social consciousness. Their personal misfortunes filled their thoughts; they could not understand that they were victims, links in an endless chain of injustice and inequality. From early childhood they had known nothing but poverty, squalor, and want, and the same conditions were awaiting them on their release. Yet they were capable of sympathy and devotion, of generous impulses. I soon had occasion to convince myself of it when I was taken ill.
The dampness of my cell and the chill of the late December days had brought on an attack of my old complaint, rheumatism. For some days the head matron opposed my being taken to the hospital, but she was finally compelled to submit to the order of the visiting physician.
Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary was fortunate in the absence of a “steady” physician. The inmates were receiving medical attendance from the Charity Hospital, which was situated near by. That institution had six weeks’ post-graduate courses, which meant frequent changes in the staff. They were under the direct supervision of a visiting physician from New York City, Dr. White, a humane and kindly man. The treatment given the prisoners was as good as patients received in any New York hospital.
The sick-ward was the largest and brightest room in the building. Its spacious windows looked out upon a wide lawn in front of the prison and, farther on, the East River. In fine weather the sun streamed in generously. A month’s rest, the kindliness of the physician, and the thoughtful attention of my fellow prisoners relieved me of my pain and enabled me to get about again.
During one of his rounds Dr. White picked up the card hanging at the foot of my bed giving my crime and pedigree. “Inciting to riot,” he read. “Piffle! I don’t believe you could hurt a fly. A fine inciter you would make!” he chuckled, then asked me if I should not like to remain in the hospital to take care of the sick. “I should, indeed,” I replied, “but I know nothing about nursing.” He assured me that neither did anyone else in the prison. He had tried for some time to induce the city to put a trained nurse in charge of the ward, but he had not succeeded. For operations and grave cases he had to bring a nurse from the Charity Hospital. I could easily pick up the elementary things about tending the sick. He would teach me to take the pulse and temperature and to perform similar services. He would speak to the Warden and the head matron if I wanted to remain.
Soon I took up my new work. The ward contained sixteen beds, most of them always filled. The various diseases were treated in the same room, from grave operations to tuberculosis, pneumonia, and childbirth. My hours were long and strenuous, the groans of the patients nerve-racking; but I loved my job. It gave me opportunity to come close to the sick women and bring a little cheer into their lives. I was so much richer than they: I had love and friends, received many letters and daily messages from Ed. Some Austrian anarchists, owners of a restaurant, sent me dinners every day, which Ed himself brought to the boat. Fedya supplied fruit and delicacies weekly. I had so much to give; it was a joy to share with my sisters who had neither friends nor attention. There were a few exceptions, of course; but the majority had nothing. They never had had anything before and they would have nothing on their release. They were derelicts on the social dung-heap.
I was gradually given entire charge of the hospital ward, part of my duties being to divide the special rations allowed the sick prisoners. They consisted of a quart of milk, a cup of beef tea, two eggs, two crackers, and two lumps of sugar for each invalid. On several occasions milk and eggs were missing and I reported the matter to a day matron. Later she informed me that a head matron had said that it did not matter and that certain patients were strong enough to do without their extra rations. I had had considerable opportunity to study this head matron, who felt a violent dislike of everyone not Anglo-Saxon. Her special targets were the Irish and the Jews, against whom she discriminated habitually. I was therefore not surprised to get such a message from her.
A few days later I was told by the prisoner who brought the hospital rations that the missing portions had been given by this head matron to two husky Negro prisoners. That also did not surprise me. I knew she had a special fondness for the coloured inmates. She rarely punished them and often gave them unusual privileges. In return her favourites would spy on the other prisoners, even on those of their own colour who were too decent to be bribed. I myself never had any prejudice against coloured people; in fact, I felt deeply for them because they were being treated like slaves in America. But I hated discrimination. The idea that sick people, white or coloured, should be robbed of their rations to feed healthy persons outraged my sense of justice, but I was powerless to do anything in the matter.
After my first clashes with this woman she left me severely alone. Once she became enraged because I refused to translate a Russian letter that had arrived for one of the prisoners. She had called me into her office to read the letter and tell her its contents. When I saw that the letter was not for me, I informed her that I was not employed by the prison as a translator. It was bad enough for the officials to pry into the personal mail of helpless human beings, but I would not do it. She said that it was stupid of me not to take advantage of her good-will. She could put me back in my cell, deprive me of my commutation time for good behaviour, and make the rest of my stay very hard. She could do as she pleased, I told her, but I would not read the private letters of my unfortunate sisters, much less translate them to her.
Then came the matter of the missing rations. The sick women began to suspect that they were not getting their full share and complained to the doctor. Confronted with a direct question from him, I had to tell the truth. I did not know what he said to the offending matron, but the full rations began to arrive again. Two days later I was called downstairs and locked up in the dungeon.
I had repeatedly seen the effect of a dungeon experience on other women prisoners. One inmate had been kept there for twenty-eight days on bread and water, although the regulations prohibited a longer stay than forty-eight hours. She had to be carried out on a stretcher; her hands and legs were swollen, her body covered with a rash. The descriptions the poor creature and others had given me used to make me ill. But nothing I had heard compared with the reality. The cell was barren; one had to sit or lie down on the cold stone floor. The dampness of the walls made the dungeon a ghastly place. Worse yet was the complete shutting out of light and air, the impenetrable blackness, so thick that one could not see the hand before one’s face. It gave me the sensation of sinking into a devouring pit. “The Spanish Inquisition come to life in America I thought of Most‘s description. He had not exaggerated.
After the door shut behind me, I stood still, afraid to sit down or to lean against the wall. Then I groped for the door. Gradually the blackness paled. I caught a faint sound slowly approaching; I heard a key turn in the lock. A matron appeared. I recognized Miss Johnson, the one who had frightened me out of my sleep on my first night in the penitentiary. I had come to know and appreciate her as a beautiful personality. Her kindness to the prisoners was the one ray of light in their dreary existence. She had taken me to her bosom almost from the first, and in many indirect ways she had shown me her affection. Often at night, when all were asleep, and quiet had fallen on the prison, Miss Johnson would enter the hospital ward, put my head in her lap, and tenderly stroke my hair. She would tell me the news in the papers to distract me and try to cheer my depressed mood. I knew I had found a friend in the woman, who herself was a lonely soul, never having known the love of man or child.
She came into the dungeon carrying a camp-chair and a blanket. “You can sit on that,” she said, “and wrap yourself up. I’ll leave the door open a bit to let in some air. I’ll bring you hot coffee later. It will help to pass the night.” She told me how painful it was for her to see the prisoners locked up in the dreadful hole, but she could do nothing for them because most of them could not be trusted. It was different with me, she was sure.
At five in the morning my friend had to take back the chair and blanket and lock me in. I no longer was oppressed by the dungeon. The humanity of Miss Johnson had dissolved the blackness.
When I was taken out of the dungeon and sent back to the hospital, I saw that it was almost noon. I resumed my duties. Later I learned that Dr. White had asked for me, and upon being informed that I was in punishment he had categorically demanded my release.
No visitors were allowed in the penitentiary until after one month had been served. Ever since my entry I had been longing for Ed, yet at the same time I dreaded his coming. I remembered my terrible visit with Sasha. But it was not quite so appalling in Blackwell’s Island. I met Ed in a room where other prisoners were having their relatives and friends to see them. There was no guard between us. Everyone was so absorbed in his own visitor that no one paid any attention to us. Still we felt constrained. With clasped hands we talked of general things.
My second visit took place in the hospital, Miss Johnson being on duty. She thoughtfully put a screen to shut us out from the view of the other patients, she herself keeping at a distance. Ed took me in his arms. It was bliss to feel again the warmth of his body, to hear his beating heart, to cling hungrily to his lips. But his departure left me in an emotional turmoil, consumed by a passionate need for my lover. During the day I strove to subdue the hot desire surging through my veins, but at night the craving held me in its power. Sleep would come finally, sleep disturbed by dreams and images of intoxicating nights with Ed. The ordeal was too torturing and too exhausting. I was glad when he brought Fedya and other friends along.
Once Ed came accompanied by Voltairine de Cleyre, She had been invited by New York friends to address a meeting arranged in my behalf. When I had visited her in Philadelphia, she had been too ill to speak. I was glad of the opportunity to come closer to her now. We talked about things nearest to our hearts – Sasha, the movement. Voltairine promised to join me, on my release, in a new effort for Sasha. Meanwhile she would write to him, she said. Ed, too, was in touch with him.
My visitors were always sent up to the hospital. I was therefore surprised one day to be called to the Warden’s office to see someone. It proved to be John Swinton and his wife. Swinton was a nationally known figure; he had worked with the abolitionists and had fought in the Civil War. As editor-in-chief of the New York Sun he had pleaded for the European refugees who came to find asylum in the United States. He was the friend and adviser of young literary aspirants, and he had been one of the first to defend Wait Whitman against the misrepresentations of the purists. Tall, erect, with beautiful features, John Swinton was an impressive figure.
He greeted me warmly, remarking that he had just been saying to Warden Pillsbury that he himself had made more violent speeches during the abolition days than anything I said at Union Square. Yet he had not been arrested. He had told the Warden that he ought to be ashamed of himself to keep “a little girl like that” locked up. “And what do you suppose he said? He said he had no choice — he was only doing his duty. All weaklings say that, cowards who always put the blame on others.” Just then the Warden approached us. He assured Swinton that I was a model prisoner and that I had become an efficient nurse in the short time. In fact, I was doing such good work that he wished I had been given five years. “Generous cuss, aren’t you?” Swinton laughed. “Perhaps you’ll give her a paid job when her time is up?” “I would, indeed,” Pillsbury replied. “Well, you’d be a damn fool. Don’t you know she doesn’t believe in prisons? Sure as you live, she’d let them all escape, and what would become of you then?” The poor man was embarrassed, but he joined in the banter. Before my visitor took leave, he turned once more to the Warden, cautioning him to “take good care of his little friend,” else he would “take it out of his hide.”
The visit of the Swintons completely changed the attitude of the head matron towards me. The Warden had always been quite decent, and she now began showering privileges on me: food from her own table, fruit, coffee, and walks on the island. I refused her favours except the walks; it was my first opportunity in six months to go out in the open and inhale the spring air without iron bars to check me.
In March 1894 we received a large influx of women prisoners. They were nearly all prostitutes rounded up during recent raids. The city had been blessed by a new vice crusade. The Lexow Committee, with the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst at its head, wielded the broom which was to sweep New York clean of the fearful scourge. The men found in the public houses were allowed to go free, but the women were arrested and sentenced to Blackwell’s Island.
Most of the unfortunates came in a deplorable condition. They were suddenly cut off from the narcotics which almost all of them had been habitually using. The sight of their suffering was heart-breaking. With the strength of giants the frail creatures would shake the iron bars, curse, and scream for dope and cigarettes. Then they would fall exhausted to the ground, pitifully moaning through the night.
The misery of the poor creatures brought back my own hard struggle to do without the soothing effect of cigarettes. Except for the ten weeks of my illness in Rochester, I had smoked for years, sometimes as many as forty cigarettes a day. When we were very hard pressed for money, and it was a toss-up between bread and cigarettes, we would generally decide to buy the latter. We simply could not go for very long without smoking. Being cut off from the satisfaction of the habit when I came to the penitentiary, I found the torture almost beyond endurance. The nights in the cell became doubly hideous. The only way to get tobacco in prison was by means of bribery. I knew that if any of the inmates were caught bringing me cigarettes, they would be punished. I could not expose them to the risk. Snuff tobacco was allowed, but I could never take to it. There was nothing to be done but to get used to the deprivation. I had resisting power and I could forget my craving in reading.
Not so the new arrivals. When they learned that I was in charge of the medicine chest, they pursued me with offers of money; worse still, with pitiful appeals to my humanity. “Just a whiff of dope, for the love of Christ!” I rebelled against the Christian hypocrisy which allowed the men to go free and sent the poor women to prison for having ministered to the sexual demands of those men. Suddenly cutting off the victims from the narcotics they had used for years seemed ruthless. I would have gladly given the addicts what they craved so terribly. It was not fear of punishment which kept me from bringing them relief; it was Dr. White’s faith in me. He had trusted me with the medicines, he had been kind and generous — I could not fail him. The screams of the women would unnerve me for days, but I stuck to my responsibility.
One day a young Irish girl was brought to the hospital for an operation. In view of the seriousness of the case Dr. White called in two trained nurses. The operation lasted until late in the evening, and then the patient was left in my charge. She was very ill from the effect of the ether, vomited violently, and burst the stitches of her wound, which resulted in a severe hemorrhage. I sent a hurry call to the Charity Hospital. It seemed hours before the doctor and his staff arrived. There were no nurses this time and I had to take their place.
The day had been an unusually hard one and I had had very little steep. I felt exhausted and had to hold on to the operating-table with my left hand while passing with my right instruments and sponges. Suddenly the operating-table gave way, and my arm was caught. I screamed with pain. Dr. White was so absorbed in his manipulations that for a moment he did not realize what had happened. When he at last had the table raised and my arm was lifted out, it looked as if every bone had been broken. The pain was excruciating and he ordered a shot of morphine. “We’ll set the arm later. This has got to come first.” “No morphine,” I begged. I still remembered the effect of morphine on me when Dr. Julius Hoffmann had given me a dose against insomnia. It had put me to sleep, but during the night I had tried to throw myself out of the window, and it had required all of Sasha‘s strength to pull me back. The morphine had crazed me, now I would have none of it.
One of the physicians gave me something that had a soothing, effect. After the patient on the operating-table had been returned to their bed, Dr. White examined my arm. “You’re nice and chubby,” he said; “that has saved your bones. Nothing has been broken — just flattened a bit.” My arm was put in a splint. The doctor wanted me to go to bed, but there was no one else to sit up with the patient. It might be her last night: her tissues were so badly infected that they would not hold the stitches, and another hemorrhage would prove fatal. I decided to remain at her bedside. I knew I could not sleep with the case as serious as it was.
All night I watched her struggle for life. In the morning I sent for the priest. Everyone was surprised at my action, particularly the head matron. How could I, an atheist, do such a thing, she wondered, and choose a priest, at that! I had declined to see the missionaries as well as the rabbi. She had noticed how friendly I had become with the two Catholic sisters who often visited us on Sunday. I had even made coffee for them. Didn’t I think that the Catholic Church had always been the enemy of progress and that it bad persecuted and tortured the Jews? How could I be so inconsistent? Of course, I thought so, I assured her. I was just as opposed to the Catholic as to the other Churches. I considered them all alike, enemies of the people. They preached submission, and their God was the God of the rich and the mighty. I hated their God and would never make peace with him. But if I could believe in any religion at all, I should prefer the Catholic Church. “It is less hypocritical,” I said to her; “it makes allowance for human frailties and it has a sense of beauty.” The Catholic sisters and the priest had not tried to preach to me like the missionaries, the minister, and the vulgar rabbi. They left my soul to its own fate; they talked to me about human things, especially the priest, who was a cultured man. My poor patient had reached the end of a life that had been too hard for her. The priest might give her a few moments of peace and kindness; why should I not have sent for him? But the matron was too dull to follow my argument or understand my motives. I remained a “queer one,” in her estimation.
Before my patient died, she begged me to lay her out. I had been kinder to her, she said, than her own mother. She wanted to know that it would be my hand that would get her ready for the last journey. I would make her beautiful; she wanted to look beautiful to meet Mother Mary and the Lord Jesus. It required little effort to make her as lovely in death as she had been in life. Her black curls made her alabaster face more delicate than the artificial methods she had used to enhance her looks. Her luminous eyes were closed now; I had closed them with my own hands. But her chiselled eyebrows and long, black lashes were remindful of the radiance that had been hers. How she must have fascinated men! And they destroyed her. Now she was beyond their reach. Death had smoothed her suffering. She looked serene in her marble whiteness now.
During the Jewish Easter holidays I was again called to the Warden’s office. I found my grandmother there. She had repeatedly begged Ed to take her to see me, but he had declined in order to spare her the painful experience. The devoted soul could not be stopped. With her broken English she had made her way to the Commissioner of Corrections, procured a pass, and come to the penitentiary. She handed me a large white handkerchief containing matzoth, gefüllte fish, and some Easter cake of her own baking. She tried to explain to the Warden what a good Jewish daughter her Chavele was; in fact, better than any rabbi’s wife, because she gave everything to the poor. She was fearfully wrought up when the moment of departure came, and I tried to soothe her, begging her not to break down before the Warden. She bravely dried her tears and walked out straight and proud, but I knew she would weep bitterly as soon as she got out of sight. No doubt she also prayed to her God for her Chavele.
June saw many prisoners discharged from the sick-ward, only a few beds remaining occupied. For the first time since coming to the hospital I had some leisure, enabling me to read more systematically. I had accumulated a large library; John Swinton had sent me many books, as did also other friends; but most of them were from Justus Schwab. He had never come to see me; he had asked Ed to tell me that it was impossible for him to visit me. He hated prison so much that he would not be able to leave me behind. If he should come, he would be tempted to use force to take me back with him, and it would only cause trouble. Instead he sent me stacks of books. Walt Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and many other English and American authors I learned to know and love through the friendship of Justus. At the same time other elements also became interested in my salvation — spiritualists and metaphysical redeemers of various kinds. I tried honestly to get at their meaning, but I was no doubt too much of the earth to follow their shadows in the clouds.
Among the books I received was the Life of Albert Brisbane, written by his widow. The fly-leaf had an appreciative dedication to me. The book came with a cordial letter from her son, Arthur Brisbane, who expressed his admiration and the hope that on my release I would allow him to arrange an evening for me. The biography of Brisbane brought me in touch with Fourier and other pioneers of socialist thought.
The prison library had some good literature, including the works of George Sand, George Eliot, and Ouida. The librarian in charge was an educated Englishman serving a five-year sentence for forgery. The books he handed out to me soon began to contain love notes framed in most affectionate terms, and presently they flamed with passion. He had already put in four years in prison, one of his notes read, and he was starved for the love of woman and companionship. He begged me at least to give him the companionship. Would I write him occasionally about the books I was reading? I disliked becoming involved in a silly prison flirtation, yet the need for free, uncensored expression was too compelling to resist. We exchanged many notes, often of a very ardent nature.
My admirer was a splendid musician and played the organ in the chapel. I should have loved to attend, to be able to hear him and feel him near, but the sight of the male prisoners in stripes, some of them handcuffed, and still further degraded and insulted by the lip-service of the minister, was too appalling to me. I had seen it once on the fourth of July, when some politician had come over to speak to the inmates about the glories of American liberty. I had to pass through the male wing on an errand to the Warden, and I heard the pompous patriot spouting of freedom and independence to the mental and physical wrecks. One convict had been put in irons because of an attempted escape. I could hear the clanking of his chains with his every movement. I could not bear to go to church.
The chapel was underneath the hospital ward. Twice on Sundays I could listen on the stairway to my prison flame playing the organ. Sunday was quite a holiday: the head matron was off duty, and we were free from the irritation of her harsh voice. Sometimes the two Catholic sisters would come on that day. I was charmed with the younger one, still in her teens, very lovely and full of life. Once I asked her what had induced her to take the veil. Turning her large eyes upwards, she said: “The priest was young and so beautiful!” The “baby nun,” as I called her, would prattle for hours in her cheery young voice, telling me the news and gossip. It was a relief from the prison greyness.
Of the friends I made on Blackwell’s Island the priest was the most interesting. At first I felt antagonistic to him. I thought he was like the rest of the religious busybodies, but I soon found that he wanted to talk only about books. He had studied in Cologne and had read much. He knew I had many books and he asked me to exchange some of them with him. I was amazed and wondered what kind of books he would bring me, expecting the New Testament or the Catechism. But he came with works of poetry and music. He had free access to the prison at any time, and often he would come to the ward at nine in the evening and remain till after midnight. We would discuss his favourite composers — Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — and compare our views on poetry and social ideas. He presented me with an English. Latin dictionary as a gift, inscribed: “With the highest respect, to Emma Goldman.”
On one occasion I asked him why he never gave me the Bible. “Because no one can understand or love it if he is forced to read it,” he replied. That appealed to me and I asked him for it. Its simplicity of language and legendry fascinated me. There was no make-believe about my young friend. He was devout, entirely consecrated. He observed every fast and he would lose himself in prayer for hours. Once he asked me to help him decorate the chapel. When I came down, I found the frail, emaciated figure in silent prayer, oblivious of his surroundings. My own ideal, my faith, was at the opposite pole from his, but I knew he was as ardently sincere as I. Our fervent was our meeting-ground.
Warden Pillsbury often came to the hospital. He was an unusual man for his surroundings. His grandfather had been a jailer, and both his father and himself had been born in the prison. He understood his wards and the social forces that had created them. Once he remarked to me that he could not bear “stool-pigeons”; he preferred the prisoner who had pride and who would not stoop to mean acts against his fellow convicts in order to gain privileges for himself. If an inmate asseverated that he would reform and never again commit a crime, the Warden felt sure he was lying. He knew that no one could start a new life after years of prison and with the whole world against him unless he had outside friends to help him. He used to say that the State did not even supply a released man with enough money for his first week’s meals. How, then, could he be expected to “make good?” He would relate the story of the man who on the morning of his release told him: “Pillsbury, the next watch and chain I steal I’ll send to you as a present.” “That’s my man,” the Warden would laugh.
Pillsbury was in a position to do much good for the unfortunates in his charge, but he was constantly hampered. He had to allow prisoners to do cooking, washing, and cleaning for others than themselves. If the table damask was not properly rolled before ironing, the laundress stood in danger of confinement to the dungeon. The whole prison was demoralized by favouritism. Convicts were deprived of food for the slightest infraction, but Pillsbury, who was an old man, was powerless to do much about it. Besides, he was eager to avoid a scandal.
The nearer the day of my liberation approached, the more unbearable life in prison became. The days dragged and I grew restless and irritable with impatience. Even reading became impossible. I would sit for hours lost in reminiscences. I thought of the comrades in the Illinois penitentiary brought back to life by the pardon of Governor Altgeld. Since I had come to prison, I realized how much the release of the three men, Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab, had done for the cause for which their comrades in Chicago had been hanged. The venom of the press against Altgeld for his gesture of justice proved how deeply he had struck the vested interests, particularly by his analysis of the trial and his clear demonstration that the executed anarchists had been judicially killed in spite of their proved innocence of the crime charged against them. Every detail of the momentous days of 1887 stood out in strong relief before me. Then Sasha, our life together, his act, his martyrdom — every moment of the five years since I had first met him I now relived with poignant reality. Why was it, I mused, that Sasha was still so deeply rooted in my being? Was not my love for Ed more ecstatic, more enriching? Perhaps it was his act that had bound me to him with such powerful cords. How insignificant was my own prison experience compared with what Sasha was suffering in the Allegheny purgatory! I now felt ashamed that, even for a moment, I could have found my incarceration hard. Not one friendly face in the court-room to be near Sasha and comfort him — solitary confinement and complete isolation, for no more visits had been allowed him. The Inspector had kept his promise; since my visit in November 1892, Sasha had not again been permitted to see anyone. How he must have craved the sight and touch of a kindred spirit, how he must be yearning for it!
My thoughts rushed on. Fedya, the lover of beauty, so fine and sensitive! And Ed. Ed — he had kissed to life so many mysterious longings, had opened such spiritual sources of wealth to me! I owed my development to Ed, tied to the others, too, who had been in my life. And yet, more than all else, it was the prison that bad proved the best school. A more painful, but a more vital, school. Here I bad been brought close to the depths and complexities of the human soul; here I had found ugliness and beauty, meanness and generosity. Here, too, I had learned to see life through my own eyes and not through those of Sasha, Most, or Ed. The prison had been the crucible that tested my faith. It had helped me to discover strength in my own being, the strength to stand alone, the strength to live my life and fight for my ideals, against the whole world if need be. The State of New York could have rendered me no greater service than by sending me to Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary!
The ZINE is available at the RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk…$5-
PHYLLIS THOMPSON, A LONG TIME ISLANDER WHO WAS ALWAYS AT THE COMMUNITY EVENTS, PASSED AWAY A FEW YEARS AGO. ONE OF THE PIONEERS THAT MADE OUR COMMUNITY BETTER.
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
JUDITH BERDY MANDY CHOI
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
