Traveller is an Australian publication that covers interesting and historic sites all over the world. Step away from New York and learn the good and bad history of the Liverpool landmark.
Once considered the grandest building in all of Britain, St George’s Hall in Liverpool has a dark underbelly with a strong connection to Australia. Photo: iStock
“They were very clever, the Victorians. They were also incredibly cruel.”
The words are spoken by John, a volunteer guide at St George’s Hall in Liverpool, England, as he shows me the building’s air conditioning vents.
An ingenious system of air shafts, water fountains and canvas flaps kept the occupants cool in summer. Opened in 1854, the enormous Neoclassical building is widely considered to be the world’s first to feature an air conditioning system.
The History Whisperer tour takes you into the underbelly of St George’s Hall.
But the engineering and architecture, as clever as it is, is not what I’m here for. Today I’m getting a taste of that Victorian cruelty instead.
Once considered the grandest building in all of Britain, St George’s Hall in Liverpool has a dark underbelly with a strong connection to Australia.
The History Whisperer tour takes you into the underbelly of St George’s Hall.
But the engineering and architecture, as clever as it is, is not what I’m here for. Today I’m getting a taste of that Victorian cruelty instead.
Once considered the grandest building in all of Britain, St George’s Hall in Liverpool has a dark underbelly with a strong connection to Australia.
In 1839 the city announced a competition to design a grand hall for public events. Then 25-year-old architect Harvey Lonsdale Elmes won, but before starting work he won a second competition to also design Liverpool’s courthouse. In the end, they decided to combine the two.
But it’s this latter part of St George’s Hall that is the focus of a new interactive exhibition, The History Whisperer, telling the stories of some of the prisoners who found themselves facing justice, if that is the right word, in the courts.
Thousands of prisoners were sentenced to transportation to Australia here, often for minor offences like the theft of a pen.
The History Whisperer takes you through the holding cells, which were often packed with up to 30 prisoners in each cramped space. Each one uses projections and lighting effects to tell stories of various people who passed through, what their crimes were and how they were each sentenced.
Throughout, we’re also given the narrative story of Livie, a young Irish immigrant whose brother Jack is arrested and sentenced to transportation. While the characters are fictional, their experiences are not. It’s a heart-rending look at a terrible time for common people living in Britain, where judges were ordered to meet quotas for transportation in order to deliver a workforce to the new colony and reduce the overcrowded prisons of the UK.
While there’s plenty of information to be had through the exhibits, there are often volunteer guides like John on hand to offer further detail. After the cells, I ascend a spiral staircase that leads into the Crown Court, the same way prisoners would have entered, where clever use of projections recreates a trial from the era (the average “trial” reportedly lasted just eight minutes).
The courtroom is in remarkably good condition, but perhaps it’s not all that surprising when I learn they were still in regular use until 1984 and even temporarily went back into use after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in order to cope with a backlog of cases.
Interactive exhibits tell the stories of those who faced justice (if that’s the word) at the hall. Photo: Supplied
The verdict (guilty, of course) and sentence (transportation, of course) handed down, my visit is at an end.
It strikes me that, right next door in the same building is the Great Hall – an opulent space with an ornate vaulted ceiling, chandeliers and a spectacular mosaic-tiled floor (consisting of 30,000 tiles, it was once the world’s largest and is now covered with a wooden removable floor, unveiled to the public for a limited time once a year). Behind this, the Concert Hall is smaller but no less impressive, with its Greek-style caryatids and 2824-piece chandelier.
It is a cruel irony that in these grand spaces, where many attended pleasurable events, others faced such pain in the adjacent room. Cruel indeed.
The courtroom, where the History Whisperer tour ends. Photo: kenb
DETAILS
The History Whisperer experience at St George’s Hall is open hourly from 10am to 3pm, Tuesday to Saturday. Tickets are £6 for adults.
St George’s Hall is directly opposite Liverpool’s main train station, Lime Street at St George’s Place.
ONE OF THE 5 KIOSK ENTRANCES AT THE FOOT OF THE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE. JUDY SCHNEIDER, ELLEN JACOBY, NINA LIBLIN
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
TRAVELLER
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
On May 10, 1869 the first United States Transcontinental Railroad was completed when a 17.6-karat gold ceremonial spike was driven into a railroad tie by Leland Stanford.
Begun in 1863, the “Pacific Railroad” or “Overland Route” was a joint, although competitive, endeavor between the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR), moving east from San Francisco to meet the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) which headed west from Council Bluffs, Iowa. The two railroad lines finally met at Promontory Point, Utah, after workers laid 1,912 miles of contiguous track.
The meeting of the rails was something of a coming-out party for Schenectady, a city which, at the time, was mostly known for its broom production. Indeed, many aspects of the transcontinental railroad – from the locomotives involved, to the railroad magnates, to the governor of California – had strong connections to New York’s Capital District, and to Schenectady County in particular.
The Jupiter and Driving of the Golden Spike
The Jupiter locomotive is perhaps the most famous of Schenectady’s attendees at the driving of the Golden Spike. Manufactured in 1868 by the Schenectady Locomotive Company (a forerunner of ALCO), the 4-4-0 Jupiter was a wood-burning engine designed to travel 4’8.5″ gauge track.
After construction, the Jupiter (Schenectady Locomotive serial #505) was disassembled and shipped to California around Cape Horn. Joining the Jupiter on this voyage were three similar locomotives constructed by Schenectady Locomotive: Storm (SLW Central Pacific #61), Whirlwind #62), and Leviathan (#63). Jupiter was put into service on March 20, 1869, as SLW Central Pacific #60.
The Jupiter’s fame is derived from its participation in the Golden Spike ceremony, and for carrying California Governor and Central Pacific President Leland Stanford to the event. Otherwise, there was nothing special about the engine.
Its fame was unintended as it was not supposed to be the locomotive to carry Governor Stanford. Another locomotive, the Antelope, was meant to bear this honor. However, tragedy struck as the two trains made their way to Promontory Point, Utah.
Jupiter led the way on the trip to Utah with Antelope following a moment behind. As Jupiter made its way through a construction camp, workers either missed or misread the flags posted on the locomotive that noted another locomotive was following behind. Believing the track to be clear, the workers rolled a large log down a hill and onto the track, which struck the Antelope broadside.
While no one was seriously injured, Antelope was knocked out of commission, leading to the Jupiter’s big moment. Governor Stanford and his staff changed trains and continued to Promontory Point, Utah.
After a collection of speeches, four ceremonial spikes cast of gold were driven into the completed track to symbolize both the joining of east and west, and the wealth and prosperity it would bring to the country. As president of the Central Pacific Railroad, Stanford was given the honor of driving in the fourth and final golden spike. Once the ceremony was completed, engineers drove forward the Jupiter and Locomotive #119 cowcatcher to cowcatcher, as shown in the photo, now known as “East Meets West.”
It should be noted that Locomotive #119 was manufactured by the Rogers Locomotive and Machine Company in 1868. In 1905, Rogers would become a part of the American Locomotive Company (ALCO) headquartered in Schenectady. The Rogers Company stayed in the ALCO family as a parts warehouse and storage facility into the 1920s.
The Jupiter and Locomotive #119 are just two pieces of the tale that link back to Schenectady and the Capital District. The presidents of both the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads have local ties.
The Stanford Family and the Railroad
Amasa Leland Stanford, the 8th governor of California (1862-83), and a president of the Central Pacific Railroad was born in the town of Watervliet in 1824. His involvement with the railroad started early; his father, Josiah, owned the Bull’s Head cattle market between Albany and Troy and was involved in the construction of the railroad between Albany and Schenectady.
It’s not hard to imagine seven-year-old Leland’s mind being fired by the trailblazing trip of the DeWitt-Clinton locomotive in its inaugural run from Albany to Schenectady. And, this was not young Leland’s only brush with the railroad. In 1844, the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was ceded land that had been part of Elm Grove, the family farm in Roessleville, in the town of Colonie.
When returning home, Leland would have heard train whistles passing by his house.
The Stanford family connection to Schenectady was expanded in March 1859 when Josiah purchased the Locust Grove Estate. Locust Grove, bordering what is now Route 5 and Balltown Road in Niskayuna, had previously been owned by luminaries including John Duncan, General Philip Schuyler, and John I. Vrooman. Although quite rural at the time, the property has since been transformed into Mansion Square, a commercial shopping center. The Schuyler-Stanford Mansion is now a Berkshire Bank.
Leland Stanford, Governor, and Railroad President
After graduating from the Clinton Liberal Institute in Oneida County in 1841 and attending the Cazenovia Seminary in Madison County, Leland was admitted to the New York Bar in 1848. He moved west to Port Washington, Wisconsin, in 1851, where he set up a law office, which was lost in a fire the following year.
The next year, Leland moved further west to Cold Spring, California, a gold rush town, where he ran a general store. This venture failed as well when the mines petered out. Leland moved yet again, setting up shop in another mining town called Michigan Bluff. There, he ran a general store and was named justice of the peace by the board of supervisors.
It was in Michigan Bluff that Stanford joined the Republican Party of California. He ascended its ranks quickly, and served as the party’s nominee for governor of California in 1859 – ultimately losing the contest. Leland ran again in 1861, this time successfully.
He became friends with Collis P. Huntington through his involvement with the Republican Party of California, as well as William Seward. His dealings with Huntington led to his part in the creation of the Central Pacific Railroad, with Stanford as president, and Huntington as vice president.
Archer Huntington (1870-1955), the adopted child of Collis Huntington inherited his fortune and purchased what is now Huntington Wildlife Forest, part of SUNY-ESF’s Newcomb Campus in the Adirondacks.
Thomas Durant (1820-1885), Stanford’s counterpart in the Union Pacific Railroad, also had Capital District roots, having graduated from Albany Medical School. Durant retired to Blue Mountain Lake after the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended his involvement with the Union Pacific Railroad.
After the Golden Spike
Leland Stanford served as Governor of California for just two years (1862-63) and served part of two terms as a US Senator (1885-1893). He remained president of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads until his passing in 1893. His only son, Leland Stanford, Jr. died tragically of typhoid fever while traveling in Italy.
Leland Jr. was just shy of his 16th birthday. In 1887, on what would have been Leland Jr.’s 19th birthday, Governor Stanford and his wife Jane Lathrop dedicated Leland Stanford Junior University. The Stanfords donated $40 million to the cause and brought in Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out the campus.
Olmstead had Schenectady ties as well, having designed Schenectady’s Central Park, as well as Central Park in New York City, Albany’s Washington Park, and Congress Park in Saratoga.
So, what became of the Jupiter after its role in the Golden Spike ceremony?
It stayed in service with Central Pacific until 1891, when it was sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad and numbered 195. It was then acquired by the Gila Valley, Globe and Northern Railway (GVG & N) in 1893, where it became Locomotive #1 and was converted into a coal engine. It returned to the Southern Pacific fold in 1901 when they bought GVG & N. In 1909 it was consigned to scrappers.
In 1974, the National Park Service contracted with O’Connor Engineering Labs of Costa Mesa, California, to build a nearly exact replica of the Jupiter. Completed in 1979, the new Jupiter is on permanent display at Golden Spike National Historical Park at Promontory Point, Utah
Photos, from above: the recreated Jupiter locomotive; East and West Shaking Hands at the Laying of Last Rail by Andrew J. Russell – Yale University Libraries; and Leland Stanford in the 1870s.
Chris Leonard wrote this essay for the Schenectady County Historical Society Newsletter, Volume 63. Become a member of the Society online at schenectadyhistorical.org.
CITY HOSPITAL AT THE SOUTH END OF THE ISLAND WITH THE OUTBUILDINGS SURROUNDING THE HOSPITAL ED LITCHER 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
NEW YORK ALMANACK
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
According to his monument at Albany Rural Cemetery, Samuel Schuyler was born in 1781. Although part African-American, he may have also been a descendant of Philip Schuyler, one of Albany’s most prominent families.
In 1805 he received a manumission from Dirck Schuyler (who is thought to be his white father).
By 1805, he married Mary Martin-Morin listed an Albany directories as a “Mullatto woman” and their son Richard March Schuyler was born and baptized in the Dutch Church. By 1825, Samuel and Mary had ten more children.
Samuel supported the family by working along the Albany waterfront at Quay Street and, by about 1810, he operated his own sail vessel hauling produce, including lumber, south to the city of New York. He had come to be known as “Captain” Schuyler.
In 1812, his son, Samuel, Jr. was born. By 1813, Samuel Sr. owned his home at 204 South Pearl Street and began to acquire surrounding properties in a growing Black neighborhood in Albany’s South End. By 1815, he owned several lots between Bassett and Schuyler Streets and over the next 20 years his holdings spread east to control most of a two-block area from South Pearl Street to the waterfront.
By the 1830s, Captain Schuyler had been joined in business by his sons and by 1835, Samuel Schuyler & Company opened a flour and feed store located at Bassett and Franklin Streets and advertised in the City Directory. The Schuylers also operated a coal yard in the South End. In the 1830s, Samuel Schuyler also continued his shipping business adding newer paddle-wheeled steam-powered towboats.
His son, also known as Captain Samuel Schuyler, succeeded him and renamed the shipping company the Schuyler Steam Towboat Company. Samuel Jr. operated the steam towboats America, Syracuse, Connecticut, Niagara, Belle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jacob Leonard, Carrie, G.E. Winants, Robert T. Banks, Ontario and Pontiac. Most of them were among the largest towboats of the period. All except the Pontiac were side-wheel steamboats. The Pontiac was a newer model steamboat with a screw propeller.
Captain Samuel Schuyler’s towboats towed packs of as many as 50 canal boats at a time to the city of New York and back. Schuyler’s company was the second largest towboat company to the Albany & Canal Line (A&C Line) owned by J.J. Austin and then when the A&C Line closed, Schuyler was second to the Cornell Line.
In 1891, seventy-nine year old Captain Samuel Schuyler, Jr. retired and the Schuyler Steam Towboat Company closed. It was said that competition from the railroads and also from the newer screw-propeller towboats made it hard for Schuyler’s older and larger paddle-wheeled boats to compete.
At the time the company closed, The New York Times reported that it was the oldest towboat line on the Hudson River. Samuel Jr. was listed as president and his son, James B. Schuyler, was vice president. They had a New York office at 15 South Street. The Beverwyck Towing Company, also an Albany company, continued the Schuyler operation in 1892 with several of the same boats.
From 1848-1894, Samuel Jr. lived at 2 Ash Grove Place, one of Albany’s most picturesque residences crowned by a large belvedere that provided a 180-degree view of the city and river. Samuel Jr. died in 1894 and is buried in lot 33, section 32 at Albany Rural Cemetery with other family members, near Erastus Corning and Philip Schuyler.
ELEVATOR STOREHOUSE BUILDING AT QUEENSBORO BRIDGE SAMUEL LEVITAN ARCHITECT
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 ALMANACK PETER HESS
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Hell’s Hundred Acres was the early to mid-20th century moniker for today’s SoHo, thanks to all the fires that broke out in the cast-iron buildings then used for manufacturing. Hellgate Hill was an East 90s enclave named for the narrow East River channel separating Queens from Ward’s Island, where perilous rocks and currents sunk many ships.
Let’s not forget Satan’s Circus, the Gilded Age vice district that straddled the Chelsea-Flatiron-Midtown borders, and Spuyten Duyvil, the northern Bronx enclave that translates into “spite of the devil” or “spouting devil” due to its treacherous waters.
Today, we’re left with one hell neighborhood: Hell’s Kitchen, on the West Side of Manhattan. The name conveys a sense of danger, depravity, and chaos—fueled by the post–Civil War development here of tenements, factories, elevated trains, slaughterhouses, waterfront activity, and railroads. Poor people and immigrants moved in, and crime was rampant.
So where did the illustrious name actually come from? Several intriguing theories abound.
In the late 19th century, Hell’s Kitchen might have first referred only to the down and dirty block of 39th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. “Legend has it that one rookie cop commented to his more seasoned partner, ‘This place is hell itself,’” explains NYC Parks.
“‘Hell’s a mild climate,’ his partner replied. ‘This is hell’s kitchen.’” Soon, the name spread across the neighborhood—which early on spanned roughly 34th Street to 42nd Street west of Eighth Avenue and today runs all the way up to West 59th Street.
Another possibility is that Hell’s Kitchen the neighborhood was named after the Hell’s Kitchen Gang, which in the late 19th century specialized in stealing from railroad yards, breaking and entering, extortion, and “general mayhem,” according to a 1939 book produced by the Federal Writers Project.
Could a New York Times reporter be responsible for the name? The first appearance of “Hell’s Kitchen” in newsprint dates back to September 22, 1881.
“A Notorious Locality,” is the title of the article, which goes on to describe some of the tenement houses on the blocks between 38th and 40th Streets and Tenth and Eleventh Avenue.
“Within the square are a collection of buildings…known to the police as ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ ‘The House of Blazes,’ ‘Battle Row,’ and ‘Sebastopol.’ The entire locality is probably the lowest and filthiest in the city, a locality where law and order are openly defied, where might makes right, and depravity revels riotously in squalor and reeking filth.” Ouch.
Probably the strangest theory posits that a remark by Davy Crockett—the early 1800s frontiersman—inspired the name.
“I said to [my friend]…these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab hell’s kitchen.” Somehow the name was applied decades later to the West Side neighborhood, and it fit.
In recent years, Hell’s Kitchen has lost its once-notorious edge. The gangs are gone; apartments in formerly rundown tenements are now pricey. Bars and restaurants make it a prime nightlife area. An attempt to rebrand the neighborhood the bland “Clinton” years ago never really panned out.
Hell’s Kitchen will continue to be Hell’s Kitchen, albeit a more law-abiding and expensive version.
[Top image: Louis Maurer, 1883, “View of 43rd Street West of Ninth Avenue”; second image: Jacob Riis, 1890; third image: New York Times; fourth image: MCNY/Charles Von Urban, 1932; 33.173.319, 1881; fifth image: Jacob Riis, 1890; sixth image: MCNY, 1930, X2010.11.6065]
ARCHITECTURAL RENDERING OF STRECKER MEMORIAL LABORATORY WITHERS AND DICKSON THOM HEYER AND GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT RIGHT
A COMMENT FROM A READER:
This is terrible!! There are other ways to keep the dogs happy without this awful white window. Please change it Sharon Bermon 575
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
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
Tags: Hell’s Kitchen Name Origin, Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Name, Hell’s Kitchen, Hell’s Kitchen history, Hell’s Kitchen street, How Hell’s Kitchen Got Its Name
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1934: A New Deal for Artists February 27, 2009–January 3, 2010 SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created the Public Works of Art Project—the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America’s spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict “the American Scene.” The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects—ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life—that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism.
When he was twelve, Dewey Albinson was shot in the leg by a group of boys who had stolen his bicycle. He left high school and spent a lot of time at home, sketching and painting to fill his free time. He studied at the Art Students League in New York, then spent most of the 1920s and ’30s painting the towns, landscapes, and mines of Minnesota. He joked once that he had painted “every outhouse from Minneapolis to Canada” (Loran, “Minnesota Artists,” American Magazine of Art, January 1938). Albinson created images for the Public Works of Art Project and also acted as state director of the Minnesota educational division. In the late 1930s he spent several summers as a “recluse” on a small island on Lake Superior, leaving in the fall only after an inch of ice had formed in his wash pail. Albinson lived the last years of his life in Mexico, where he suffered paralysis caused by his childhood injury and had to pull himself around on a dolly in order to paint. (Swanson, “A Study of Dewey Albinson,” n.d., unpublished ms., SAAM curatorial file)
J. Theodore Johnson is best known for the four murals he created for the Oak Park Post Office in Chicago while working for the Works Progress Administration.
The paper plant where these men are laboring was the mainstay of Glens Falls, New York, where Douglass Crockwell had his studio. Crockwell, like many artists on the Public Works of Art Project who anticipated the public exhibition of his painting, proudly depicted the chief industry of his town. The workers are smoothing and stamping an enormous roll of newsprint, the plant’s principal product.
Crockwell noted that in this scene dominated by mighty iron machinery he took “some liberties with the human form” because “the whole composition of the picture requires hard structural forms.” By showing the workers as blocky figures that appear to be roughly carved out of wood, the artist visually likened the men to the source of the wood pulp from which they made newsprint. The workers appear powerfully identified with their work. The question “what do you do for a living?” became a poignant one during this time when so many had no answer. Crockwell, a busy illustrator for much of his life, recalled that when “the depression arrived . . . there wasn’t much work.”
1934: A New Deal for Artists exhibition label
These workers are demolishing a St. Louis building as evening falls and street lights begin to glow. In the midst of the Great Depression, modest houses and shops around Market Street gave way to wider streets, graceful parks, and the Municipal Auditorium. The pointed tower of the new Civil Courts Building in the background, built in 1930, shows how the city was being transformed.
A few months before Joe Jones made this painting, he had told the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, “I am not interested in painting pretty pictures to match pink and blue walls, I want to paint things that will knock holes in walls.” Yet the warm light on the dilapidated street and the industrial smoke that veils the new buildings in the background suggest that the artist did not embrace these changes uncritically. Jones lived in a houseboat on the Mississippi not far from the construction around Market Street; he knew the old neighborhood that was vanishing and would miss the people and businesses pushed aside in the name of progress.
GLORIA HERMAN GOT THE RIGHT COVER FROM 1980 MARVEL SPIDERMAN COMIC
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
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
In response to the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the founding of a new federal agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which began forcibly removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast and relocate them to isolated inland areas. Around 120,000 people were detained in remote camps for the remainder of the Second World War.
Among those interned were artists. Chiura Obata had settled in America in 1903 and built a career as a painter and art teacher at the University of California. In the wake of events, he and his family were taken from their home and interned, first in Tanforan Centre, California, and then in Topaz Centre, Utah. Obata was involved in attempts to bring some “normality” into an existence of exclusion. He organized the creation of art schools for inmates. In addition to teaching, he created some 350 works during this period, including sketches that documented camp life. He communicated the spirit of survival, the unwillingness to accept defeat in the face of prejudice and humiliation.
An artist of mixed Japanese descent who managed to stay out of grasp of the WRA (in spite of persistent attempts by the FBI to “nail” him) was one of the most flamboyant characters in American cultural history of the early twentieth century.
Hamburg & Philadelphia
Sadakichi Hartmann was born in 1867 in Deshima, Nagasaki. That year also marked the end of the Edo period in which the artificial island was the sole territory in Japan open to Westerners. His father Carl Hartmann was an affluent Prussian merchant; his Japanese mother died shortly after giving birth.
Raised in Hamburg in the care of his grandmother and uncle, Sadakichi received a solid Lutheran education and was pressed as a teenager to attend the Imperial Naval Academy in Kiel. An independent mind, he rebelled against the academy’s Teutonic discipline and ran off to Paris. His furious father sent the youngster to Philadelphia.
Arriving in in June 1882, he spent three years with his paternal grand-uncle and wife, an elderly childless couple living at 806 Buttonwood Street. Hartmann struggled to cope with the dramatic change in lifestyle, especially since he – a spoiled young man shy of hard labor – was forced to earn a living by working at a lithographic printing house.
Books offered solace. He read voraciously at the Philadelphia Mercantile Library, eventually discovering Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Overwhelmed by his stylistic power, he visited the sixty-five-year-old poet at Camden, New Jersey, in 1884, starting what would become an intense relationship (as related in 1895 in his Conversations with Walt Whitman).
Having settled in Boston in 1887, Hartmann spent much of the following year in Europe. On return in 1889, he moved to New York City, residing in Washington Square, Greenwich Village, where he struggled with depression. After a suicide attempt, he met and married his nurse, Elizabeth Blanche Walsh.
Paris on a Tuesday
Whitman served as a model for Hartmann’s career. His early poems bear traces of Whitman’s influence; the title of his Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (1904) is a reference to Leaves of Grass. His development as a poet was further enriched by his passion for the French avant-garde.
In 1891, Hartmann traveled to Paris as foreign correspondent for the monthly McClure’s Magazine, interviewing artists and covering scenes of cultural events in Paris. As “Japonisme” was all the rage in the visual arts then, he received a cordial welcome in the city’s artistic circles. Through his friendship with Stéphane Mallarmé, the chain-smoking poet, teacher of English and translator of Edgar Allan Poe, he was introduced to most prominent Parisian authors and painters.
Mallarmé, the “Prophet of Modernism,” was central to the avant-garde for the Tuesday night gatherings held +at his house on the Rue de Rome. Having visited one such occasions, Hartmann dedicated an essay (‘A Tuesday Evening with Stéphane Mallarmé’) to a description of the literary salon. He continued corresponding with the French poet as late as 1897. The impact of his stay was reflected in much of his subsequent art criticism and also in his plays and poetry.
In 1893, Hartmann issued 1,000 copies of his drama Christ, a symbolist treatment of Christ’s life complete with nudity and orgies. Almost all copies of the play were burned in Boston by morality activists of the New England Watch and Ward Society. Hartmann was arrested and spent Christmas week in the city’s infamous Charles Street Jail.
This controversial play was followed by another symbolist drama Buddha (1897). In addition to a number of other “religious” plays, he published various volumes of poetry. A collection of short stories entitled Schopenhauer in the Air appeared in 1899. All these works reflect the intense impact of his Parisian experience.
An American Art
Hartmann had begun writing newspaper articles on art and literature in the 1880s. Whilst living in Boston, he launched his magazine The Art Critic. Its three volumes published in 1893/4 had a small readership of subscribers that included artists such as Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and others. Describing himself as an “American by choice,” Hartmann was on a mission. The magazine’s subtitle made his intention clear: “Dedicated to the Encouragement of American Art.”
His first article was “An Appeal to All Art Lovers” in which he called for the creation of a national art that would contribute to the “task of building up a new race from the waste of other nations.” A National Art would unite the country, making life richer for all. In an essay in the final issue he returns to the subject, stressing that a sense of Americanness could only be developed by cultivating a regional character and choosing local subjects – in other words: by challenging Europe.
Hartmann’s plea for an American Art coincided with his personal wish to obtain US citizenship, but there were serious obstacles. Until the 1952 Immigration Act, Federal law racially restricted naturalization which concerned citizens of Asian descent in particular as they were viewed as a group whose loyalty was in doubt. In 1894, a court held that Japanese people were not white; in 1909 and again in 1912, courts decided that people of half-Asian and half-white descent were not white.
In spite of that, Sadakichi obtained American citizenship in 1894. He most likely fooled the authorities. On his 1891 marriage certificate he was listed as “White.” Half a century later he would once again bamboozle officials about his background and status.
His art magazine was discontinued that same year, partly because he was too far ahead in his appreciation of Continental artists. His readers were (as yet) unreceptive to developments in France and Europe. Moreover, the legal defense costs of his Boston obscenity case had left him bankrupt. Hartmann was forced to take up journalism again. He returned to New York.
Prime Time NYC
Between 1898 and 1902, he penned more than 350 sketches on New York life for the New York Staats-Zeitung. Founded in the mid-1830s and nicknamed “The Staats,” it was at the time one of the city’s major daily newspapers.
Alfred Stieglitz launched his Camera Notes in 1898 and invited Hartmann to join the staff. During the next two decades, the latter was a prolific writer on art and photography for this journal and its successor, the more innovative Camera Work. Many of his pioneering contributions were published under the pen-name of Sidney Allan. He praised Eduard Steichen for showing the “courage to experiment and the ambition to break with conventional laws and to create new formulae of expression.” Art to him was about breaking rules.
Hartmann also covered New York’s visual art scene. His History of American Art (1901; revised 1938) was used as a standard textbook for many years. Other works of criticism include Shakespeare in Art (1900), Japanese Art (1903) and The Whistler Book (1910). Crowned King of Bohemia, he spent much of the 1910s in the Roycrofters Arts and Crafts colony in Upstate New York.
In 1904, he published an essay on “The Japanese Conception of Poetry,” discussing the precision and suggestiveness of forms such as tanka and haiku before similar ideas started circulating in French literary circles and among the Anglo-American Imagist poets. That year he included seven tanka in Drifting Flowers of the Sea. In 1926, he produced a limited edition of Japanese Rhythms.
Hartmann’s introduction of Japanese stylistic principles had an impact on the development of modern American poetry. Poets like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell searched for alternatives to the pompous grandeur of Victorian poetry. Lowell modeled her work after ancient Greek and Latin examples, but Pound – thanks to Sadakichi’s intervention – found inspiration in Japanese precedents to push the boundaries of literary tradition. In Canto LXXX of his 1948 Pisan Cantos, Pound refers to Hartmann.
San Francisco & Hollywood
Hartmann arrived in San Francisco at the beginning of the First World War and quickly became a fixture in the city’s artistic community. As he refused to enlist or join the war effort, he was brought before a county judge who ordered him to work in the city’s Potrero Point shipbuilding yards. He sat on a rope coil and stared out at the Bay. He was returned to court and threatened with prison, but managed to talk his way into to giving public art lectures as his contribution to the cause.
Throughout his life, Hartmann had suffered from asthmatic attacks which became gradually worse, forcing him in 1923 to move to San Gorgonio Pass, a desert stretch between Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley. He became fascinated by Hollywood and worked for a while as a columnist for the English monthly theater magazine The Curtain. He even appeared in the bit role of court magician in Douglas Fairbanks’s “The Thief of Baghdad,” but his acting career was uninspiring and short lived. His creative powers were also fading.
In Hollywood, Hartmann found himself adopted as a drinking companion by the actor John Barrymore and his mates, a group that often gathered in the Bundy Drive studio of John Decker, the painter who would create an iconic portrait of the ageing Sadakichi. As his health steadily deteriorated, he became dependent upon patronage from friends and admirers. His best work had passed into oblivion. By the 1920s, even former friends looked upon him as a scrounger.
Obituary & Legacy
With the outbreak of the Second World War the FBI started inquiring into Hartmann’s Japanese-German background. In numerous letters and confrontations, Hartmann pleaded with the authorities not to intern him. In the end, he confused them. What could they make of a mixed race person who in appearance was Japanese, who spoke English with a heavy German accent and who showed the refined manners of a French decadent; a person who, at the same time, was a proud American who had penned the first history of American art? Although the harassment never ceased, he escaped incarceration.
Hartmann retreated to Catclaw Siding, a shack adjoining his daughter Wistaria Linton’s home on the Morongo Reservation in Banning, California. There he composed his own idiosyncratic obituary, one that evokes the sounds of ringing bells and ocean waves that rise in disquiet at the poet’s imminent death. Its finale transforms into a more muted tone: “Sadakichi Hartmann is gone a new scene is on / Sounds like flowers drop one by one / Bing! Bang! Bung! Bing! Bong! / Bung! Bing! Bing! Bong! Bang!”
Hartmann died in 1944 while visiting another daughter, Dorothea Gilliland, in St Petersburg, Florida. Among possible titles for an unfinished autobiography Hartmann included Success in Failure (predating Bob Dylan’s classic line “There’s no success like failure”).
Today, he occupies a niche in cultural historiography. Hartmann failed in finding an audience for his work, because he never sacrificed his aesthetic principles for the sake of public approval. He published most of his poetry in limited editions, sharing his art with a select circle of readers. As he put it himself: “When only material progress is at stake, poetry does not function.” Hartmann fits the profile of a Continental modernist, but placed in the midst of an unprepared American setting. He acted as an intermediate in the transfer of cultural trends from Paris to the United States.
An enigmatic personality, his life was a restless search for identity, assuming various masks and guises: the French inspired dramatic poet of the 1890s; the prolific art critic of the turn of the century; the rebel who frequented Julius Schwab’s anarchist saloon at East First Street; the boozing King of Greenwich Village; and finally the ageing court jester in Hollywood. It was racial profiling and the bigoted reception of his work from the 1930s onward that damaged his reputation most. He was denied what he wanted most – to be acknowledged as an American author.
COVERED WINDOWS ON MAIN STREET. SOON TO BE A STREET WITH OUT IDENTITIES PUP CULTURE, RIOC OFFICE, DR. RESNICK OFFICE
ALEXIS VILLAFANE GOT IT CORRECT
HIDING ANOTHER STOREFRONT
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
Illustrations, from above: Conversations with Walt Whitman; Sadakichi Hartmann, c. 1910 by Marius de Zayas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Alfred Stieglitz Collection); Cover of The Art Critic, (no. 1, November 1893); portrait of Sadakichi Hartmann, before 1934 by Ejnar Hansen (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Sadakichi in one of his Mongol prince getups c. 1923; and portrait of Sadakichi Hartmann, 1940 by John Decker (Laguna Art Museum).
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The 1872 plan to get around Manhattan via elevated pneumatic tubes
The 19th century, not unlike today, New York City had a mass transit problem.
As the city’s population boomed and the urbanization of Manhattan continued northward, it was clear that the horse-pulled omnibuses and horse-drawn streetcars—which carried thousands of people to their destinations every day and contributed to enormous, epic traffic jams—were not going to cut it.
Enter the Gilbert Elevated Railway (above and below, in proposed illustrations). Introduced in 1872 amid a flurry of other ideas for elevated transit, this railroad would run high above the surface of the city on elegant, decorative wrought-iron archways, ferrying passengers in cars powered by compressed air.
Basically, it would be an elevated railroad shuttling uptown and downtown through pneumatic tubes.
The man behind the much-talked-about idea was Rufus H. Gilbert, a former doctor in the Union Army who was troubled by the high rates of sickness in tenement districts.
“Gilbert’s answer to the cholera, typhus, and diphtheria rampaging among the downtrodden classes was, elliptically, rapid transit,” wrote Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin in an article for The Gotham Center for New York City History.
“He reasoned that fast and cheap public conveyances would allow the poor to flee their teeming, disease-infested neighborhoods, and live in the hinterlands, where they could enjoy clean air and water, and plentiful sunshine,” continued Lubell and Goldin.
The idea of mass transit via pneumatic tube sounds a little crazy, especially if you think of pneumatic tubes as an old-fashioned system banks and department stores used to carry cash and receipts through a vacuum-powered network.
But it had precedent. Two years earlier, a pneumatic-tube underground subway opened for business. Running just one block from Warren to Murray Streets under Broadway, the city’s first subway, built by inventor Alfred Ely Beach, attracted curious riders—but not the funding (or political clout) needed to extend the line any farther. Beach’s subway closed in 1873.
Gilbert (above) may have borrowed the pneumatic tube idea, but he also put a lot of thought into how his railroad would run. He proposed putting his stations roughly one mile apart and providing pneumatic elevators for passengers to ascend to each station, according to Lubell and Goldin, who authored the 2016 book Never Built New York.
“He also planned a telegraph triggered by the passing cars, which would automatically signal arrivals and departures from all points along the line,” they wrote.
Though Gilbert got the go-ahead from the city to start constructing his pneumatic railway along Sixth Avenue, his plans had the misfortune of colliding with the Panic of 1873—a terrible depression that left him without investors. With no capital, he was forced to abandon his idea.
Gilbert persisted over the next few years, modifying his elevated railroad so it would be powered by steam engines, not compressed air. In 1875 he received a charter to begin building. Three years later, the first leg of the Gilbert Elevated opened from Rector Street to Central Park. (Above, the debut of the railroad as it approached Jefferson Market Courthouse.)
By 1880, almost all of New York’s avenues had steam-powered elevated trains roaring and belching overhead. Traffic congestion was relieved—but a decade later, plans for a faster, less obtrusive, and more efficient underground subway would be in the works.
What became of Gilbert? Sadly, after his elevated railroad opened, he was ousted from his own company, which was renamed the Metropolitan Elevated Company. Gilbert threatened to sue his former colleagues, charging that they defrauded him. Ultimately he died in his home on West 73rd Street in 1885.
[Top illustration: Alamy; second illustration: Library of Congress; third illustration: NYPL; fourth illustration: Library of Congress; fifth illustration: Library of Congress]
ANOTHER BLOCKED WINDOW MAIN STREET HAS TURNED WHITED-OUT
FORMER DAY NURSERY AND P.I. 217 SIGN THAT USED TO BE ON RIVERCROSS WALL
NINA LUBLIN 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
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The first Blacks arrived in New Amsterdam in 1626, imported from Africa as slaves by the Dutch West India Company. During the British occupation of New York City in 1776 the population soared after the Crown promised freedom to slaves who deserted their rebel masters. It resulted in thousands of runaway slaves flocking into the city. By 1780 there were more than 10,000 Blacks living in New York. Finally, in 1827, slavery was abolished in New York. But freedom did not necessarily translate into improvement in the lives of Black citizens.
The city, of course, was tasked with the education of all children; but integrated classrooms was not conceivable. “Colored schools” were established, staffed by Blacks. They were an offshoot of the first African Free School, established in 1787 on Mulberry Street. Seven Colored Schools were organized in 1834.
In 1853 Primary Schools No. 27 and 29 shared the new 25-foot wide building at No. 98 West 17th Street (renumbered 128 in 1868). Three stories tall and faced in brick, it had two entrances–one for boys and the other for girls–as expected in Victorian school buildings. In the basement was a small living space for the janitress, Mary Sallie.
There were four teachers in each school, all unmarried women. Their wages in 1855 ranged from $400, earned by H. A. McCormick (about $12,200 a year today), to the $100 salaries earned by Abbie M. Saunders and Eliza Ideson. How the women survived on the equivalent of $3,000 a year in today’s money is remarkable.
The street address was not the only thing about the school building that would change. By 1861 it was renumbered Primary School No. 14 (H. A. McCormick was still teaching here at the time), and within two years it became Colored School No. 7. That year it was staffed by seven teachers–four teachers in the Boys’ Department and three in the Primary Department.
By 1866 the name was changed yet again, now known as Colored Grammar School No. 4. Schools across the city staged a yearly exhibition of the children’s work and this one was no exception. On May 30 that year the New York Herald reported “The exhibition of Colored Grammar School No. 4 took place last evening at the Cooper Institute. The audience was quite large, and included a few white persons, both male and female, and was well pleased with the exercises embraced in the programme.” The newspaper was careful to point out that the school was “formerly No. 7.
” Rather surprisingly, two specialized teachers were added to the staff in 1868. William Appo, a renowned Black musician, taught music and S. Anna Burroughs taught drawing.
Graduating from grammar school was an important milestone, especially for Black children who were often pulled from school in order to work and help their families financially. On March 5, 1869 The Sun reported “In Colored Grammar School No. 4, in Seventeenth street, Mrs. Sarah J. S. Thompkins, the principal, treated her pupils to an inauguration celebration. Remarks were made by the Rev. Charles B. Ray, Fred Sill, C. E. Blake, Jacob Thomas, and William F. Busler.”
The position of music teacher was taken by Joan Imogen Howard, who came from Boston, Massachusetts. Like William Appo, she was recognized as an accomplished musician. She was as well an ardent worker for integration and racial rights. On October 30, 1892 The World reported “Miss J. Imogen Howard, the only colored women on the Board of Lady Managers of the [Chicago] World’s Fair, is busily engaged in gathering statistics concerning colored women in New York State.
Reflecting the innate racism of the time, the reporter asked Howard if it were possible for a Black woman to become a member of “the learned professions here.” Her reaction was visible. “Miss Howard looked surprised,” said the article. She replied “I know of a great many. In Brooklyn there are three doctors, each of them enjoying a large practice and doing well…I am personally acquainted with one colored woman who graduated from law school with honors…Miss Ida B. Wells, a young colored girl, is assistant editor of the New York Age, a weekly paper devoted to the interests of the colored people.” She went on to list a number of other successful professional women.
In 1873 the attendance of Colored School No. 4 was 120 pupils. The school building was showing the effects of two decades of use. An inspection by the School Board that year found in part: “ceilings cracked through and need repairing; ventilation by windows; water closets of wood, in poor condition; heated by seven wood stoves, properly shielded with tin.”
The tin-lined flues of the cast iron stoves would cause problems at least twice. On January 6, 1879 The New York Evening Express entitled an article “Scared Colored School-Children” and reported “A defective flue caused a fire this morning in Colored School No. 4, at 128 West Seventeenth street. The fire occurred just before the assembling of the school, and a panic was thus averted, although the children collected around the building were considerably frightened.”
It may have been that incident that prompted Principal Sarah J. S. Garnet to routinely instruct the pupils on how to react to a fire. (Sarah Garnet was the widow of the Rev. Dr. Henry Highland Garnet, the former Minister to Liberia.) It proved to be worthwhile instruction. On February 14, 1883 The Sun reported that another flue fire had broken out.
At around 10:30 that morning children on the second floor noticed wisps of smoke “and became restless.” Mrs. Garnet told a reporter “I had frequently told the children that if fire broke out they would have sufficient warning from me to enable them to walk safely out of the school building. Their faith in me is what saved them from a panic.”
There were a total of 150 children in the building. Garnet instructed a teacher to arrange the pupils on the second floor in straight lines, while she went upstairs to do the same with the youngest children. “At a signal the pupils marched down the narrow, wooden stairways and stood quietly in the inner court yard.” One child ran three blocks to the nearest fire station. The fire was quickly extinguished and the pupils were marched back to their desks. “They were as busy in the afternoon as though nothing had happened,” said The Sun.
In 1884 Joshua S. Lawrence published an article in Ballou’s Monthly Magazine entitled “The Negroes of New York.” He praised racial advances, beginning, “What a contrast between now and twenty years ago! Then they were vassals, now they are clamoring for the offices and other perquisites of a free government.” His out-of-touch assessment was highly biased and he insisted “The negro in this city is not debarred or hindered in any way…Their children are allowed to enter public schools all over the city, besides having separate ones, taught by their own teachers.”
The article pointed out that integration was slowly coming about. “In order to show that the color line is breaking in this regard, an idea encouraged by the Board of Education, is not to take notice of complaints when two or more negro children happen to be near the offspring of some fastidious parent.” Lawrence mentioned Colored School No. 4, saying it combined “both primary and grammar,” levels.
At the time of the article the prospects for the school were dim. The Board of Education had already proposed closing the school. The minutes of the Board of Education on March 5, 1884 documented the receipt of a petition “From the Teachers of Colored Grammar School No. 4, asking that said school be continued for a longer period than that assigned by the action of the Board in 1883.” The petition was forwarded to the Committee of Colored Schools. Its decision was no doubt disheartening.
The teachers were permitted to continue to teach “in other premises than the school building, but without incurring any expense on the part of the Board.” In other words, if the teachers wanted to continue the school, they were responsible for all aspects of it, including funding.
But there was obviously a change of heart. The facility continued, now known as Grammar School No. 81. Sarah J. S. Garnet was still principal and Joan Imogen Howard was still teaching here in 1892. Another inspection that year reflected the poor sanitary conditions. It said “the sinks are defective and cannot be cleaned and flushed regularly. The closets [i.e. toilet rooms] are not ventilated, but are filled with sewer gas and foul air.”
The push to discontinue the school in the 17th Street property continued. In December 1894 Mayor William L. Strong received a resolution from the Board of Education “requesting the sale of property No. 128 West Seventeenth street.” By the following year the building was unoccupied.
Finally on March 24, 1896 the City signed a deal with the Civil War veterans of the 73rd Regiment to lease the ground floor as its clubhouse. Four months later renovations had been completed and on July 6, 1896 the New-York Daily Tribune reported “The members of the Veteran Association of the 73d New-York Volunteers-2d Fire Zouaves–held a celebration in honor of the opening of their new headquarters, No. 128 West Seventeenth-st–the old schoolhouse.” Among the entertainment that night was John J. Moloney, who “gave his bone solo, which elicited much applause.”
The club rooms were decorated with war relics, perhaps the most significant of which was the first Confederate war flag captured by the North. On March 11, 1907 The Yonkers Statesman explained that it had been taken by Corporal Daniel Boone on May 2, 1862 at Yorktown, Virginia.
Other than the sign announcing the Veteran Association, little had changed in the school building. Note the small-paned windows of the upper floors. Real Estate Owned by The City of New York, January 1, 1908 (copyright expired)
Interestingly, the city retained possession of the old school house property. On January 19, 1921 The City Record announced that renovations would be made “to properly place the premises…in a state of occupancy for the Veteran Fire Association.” The 73rd Regiment Veterans remained in the ground floor while $5,000 was spent in renovations on the upper floors for the Veteran Fire Association.
The new residents renamed their portion of the building Firemen’s Hall. Like its downstairs neighbor, it was a social club. On February 17, 1923, for instance, The Brooklyn Standard Union reported “The Veteran Firemen’s Association held its annual banquet last Saturday night, at Firemen’s Hall, 128 West 17th street, Manhattan. There were 300 members and their guests present, and it was a most unique affair.”
Around 1941 the remarkable holdout still retained its schoolhouse appearance. from the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services
The two organizations remained in the building at least into the 1930’s. A renovation in 1931 made “general repairs to the toilets, urinals and all the fixtures.”
The building was later acquired by the New York City Department of Sanitation, which utilizes it today. At some point a a veneer of yellow brick was applied. Remarkably, the small paned windows survive. The little building with its remarkable history is easily passed by today with little notice.
“WE LOVE THE COOK” IS THE CAPTION ON THE PHOTO OF THE EFFLER CHILDREN WHO LIVED IN BLACKWELL HOUSE IN 1917.
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
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The pedestrian and bike path on the north side of the George Washington Bridge opened on Tuesday following a renovation and accessibility upgrades. The project, led by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, included widening approach paths, bigger entry plazas, and removing stairs that prevented access to cyclists and users with mobility challenges. The upgraded north walk also features two new viewing platforms, one on the New York side and one on the New Jersey side.
Improvements to the bridge fall under a $2 billion “Restoring the George” program which includes nearly a dozen structural repair projects on the 96-year-old bridge. As part of the project, the bridge’s original steel suspender ropes will be replaced for the first time in its history.
As part of the work, the Port Authority built a new plaza at the entry of the bridge’s northern path on West 180th Street and Cabrini Boulevard in Washington Heights that leads onto the new curving onramp. The new plaza and onramp have replaced the 171 steps travelers had to climb to get onto the bridge.
The revamped entrances also have new lighting, signs, surveillance cameras, and higher fencing. A new set of viewing platforms on either end of the bridge allows for impressive views of the Hudson River and the Palisades.
While the new onramps are ADA-compliant and give cyclists and pedestrians more space to get onto the bridge, the actual width of the shared lane is the same as it was before the construction project, according to Streetsblog.
Starting this Wednesday, the southern path of the bridge will close for similar renovations, projected to take roughly four years to complete. Once those repairs are finished, pedestrian traffic will move to the south side and cyclists will stay on the north side, according to Ken Sagrestano, the Port Authority’s general manager for the George Washington Bridge.
As Streetsblog reported, the revamp project doesn’t address the narrow promenade on the bridge’s south path which is said by locals to cause a large number of crashes involving walkers, runners, and cyclists. Despite calls from advocates, community members, and local politicians, widening the bridge’s bike paths is not part of the Port Authority’s plans.
“We didn’t change the width because it would’ve been hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars,” Sagrestano told the website. “It was not something that the Port Authority was actively looking at as an alternative.”
RIVERCROSS UNDER CONSTRUCTION 1973 ED LITCHER GOT IT
Years ago I walked over the George Washington Bridge. These were the days of polluting fuels and heavy traffic. It was not a pleasant experience with the roar of traffic. The new path seems better and now is time to walk to NJ again.
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
Today, October 11th is the birthday of the trailblazing Eleanor Roosevelt. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is unmissable, rising from the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. But did you know there is a memorial to Eleanor Roosevelt, lying forgotten inside the United Nations Sculpture Garden? The bust of FDR at Four Freedoms Park was positioned to be aligned with Eleanor’s memorial across the East River. Not only is there very little easily accessible information about the memorial in general, the memorial is located under a grove of trees in a distant corner of the nearly nine-acre United Nations Sculpture Garden which contains gifts from member countries. Public access to the garden, which was originally private, has been scaled back from when it was open daily in the 1950s.
Inside the United Nations Sculpture Garden
A few years ago, while there was some effort underway to potentially restore the memorial, we were given access to photograph the monument before limited public access was reinstated. Located in the northeast corner of the United Nations Sculpture Garden, the memorial was dedicated on April 23rd, 1966. The memorial features a curved granite bench engraved with “1884 — Anna Eleanor Roosevelt — 1962” and a slab across from the bench that contains a bas-relief of a flame. An inscription reads, “She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the worlds.”
The memorial was a gift of the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, an organization created through an Act of Congress on April 23, 1963, three years before the memorial was dedicated. The act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy who said at the time, “Mrs. Roosevelt, I believe, would be pleased to know that her friends and associates have chosen this way to continue her work, especially because it enables all citizens to take part in deeds rather than just words.”
According to the text of the act, the charter decrees that the “Foundation will work in the areas of Mrs. Roosevelt’s principal interests: relief of the poor and underprivileged; promotion of public health; promotion of economic welfare; and furtherance of international good will.” The initial Board of Trustees included Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson, who served as chairman. Mrs. Roosevelt’s five children served as ex officio trustees. No federal funds were allocated to the Foundation, with all funds were to be through private fundraising.
The Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial is in need of a restoration, but we have been informed by someone close to the effort that the main road block here is that the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation is basically defunct. The gifting country/organization for the United Nations Sculpture Garden is required to maintain it for perpetuity, but in this case the line of succession has been lost. Efforts to re-establish a link did not materialize, as no group would accept responsibility for the sculpture. Hopefully, this is the first effort to raise awareness for this memorial so that it does not become too dilapidated over time. However, one positive outcome of the effort was to open up access to the garden to the public. Though you cannot simply walk in to the garden, you can now take a guided tour, only in the summer, during one time slot, on one day a week.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION BARRY SCHNEIDER, ELLEN JACOBY, HARA REISER GOT IT RIGHT
CONTENTS COURTESY OF UNTAPPED NEW YORK, NY EDC
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.
