Novelist Hedwig “Vicki” Baum was born in January 1888 in Vienna into a Jewish family. She attracted international attention in 1929 with her novel Menschen im Hotel which started off a vogue for the “hotel novel.” It was staged as a play in Berlin by the great director Max Reinhardt that same year.
Translated into English as Grand Hotel, the story was turned into an Academy Award winning film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932, starring Greta Garbo. The author had moved to Los Angeles whilst writing the screenplay, but the rise of fascism stopped her from returning to Europe. By 1935 the Nazis had banned her work. She became an American citizen three years later and began writing in English rather than in German.
In 1941 Baum published The Christmas Carp, a story set in Vienna that evokes a nostalgic image of past family festivities with memories of home baked cookies and a Christmas dinner that had carp as its highlight. Austrian painter Ernst Novak had captured a similar theme early in the century in a picture entitled “Cooking the Christmas Carp.”
Fish Migration
The wild ancestor of the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) originated in the Black, Caspian, and Aral Sea drainages. From there the species dispersed east into China and Japan and swam west as far as the Danube and Rhine Rivers.
The Romans were among the first to farm it in specially built ponds. The skill of building and maintaining piscinae (pools or ponds) was preserved in monasteries. Religious restrictions on eating meat made fish an important food source.
Salmon, trout, lampreys, shad, sturgeon, and other species characteristic of unpolluted running water featured in medieval meals. In parts of Eastern Europe carp became a staple food.
Czech cleric and humanist scholar Janus Dubravius, Bishop of Olomouc, penned Libellus de piscinis et piscium (Booklet about fishponds and fish) in 1547. Its publication coincided with a rise in aquaculture in South Bohemia, the country’s “lake district.”
Carp became part of the national cuisine and still is the key ingredient of a traditional Christmas meal today (as it is in Slovakia, Poland, and in parts of Hungary and Croatia).
Carp figured strongly in Jewish cuisine. Gefilte fish was traditionally prepared on Rosh Hashanah, the religion’s New Year holiday. Balls made of minced carp were blended with seasoning and matzah (an unleavened flatbread).
In Galicia, Southern Poland, they were sweetly flavored; in the north the balls had a spicy seasoning. This dividing line of sweet versus spicy regions was known as the “gefilte fish border.”
The geographical sources of the Danube and Rhine Rivers are close to each other. The Rhine once consisted of extensive flood plains and plant-rich channels that were suitable for the recruitment and reproduction of carp. At some time in the tenth or eleventh century carp migrated from the Danube to the Rhine basin, making its way from there into the Low Countries.
The first written evidence of carp in the Rhine dates from 1158 when the Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen (the “Sybil of the Rhine”) composed her Physica in which she discussed the “therapeutic” virtues of plants, animals, and metals. She found stocks of carp in the Rhine-Meuse delta.
The enjoyment of carp meals was at first restricted to the gentry and clergy. During the Middle Ages and early modern period, carp à la broche (spit roasted carp) was served in Europe at aristocratic banquets. Cooking fish on a skewer over an open fire was a common technique at the time.
By the fourteenth century carp had become part of the culinary trade in the Low Countries. During the early seventeenth century carp appear in Flemish and Dutch still life painting.
Antwerp-born Clara Peeters was prominent among the painters who shaped the traditions of ontbijtjes (breakfast pieces) with plain food and simple vessels, and banketjes (banquet pieces) with stylish cups and crockery. Her 1611 still life of a carp and cat is a fine example.
Ponds & Fishmongers
Carp appeared on London tables towards the end of the fourteenth century. Refugees from the Low Countries were running the fish farms. In 1381, locals attacked a Flemish lessee of fishponds in Southwark and wrecked his property. These merchants had become a target as they were associated with privilege.
Throughout the 1370s, Flemish settlers were accused of seeking unfair economic advantage over English-born workers and they became victims of xenophobic rioting at the time. It did not hamper the industry’s growth. By the mid-fourteenth century there were various plots known as “The Stews” on the southern bank of the River Thames created for the cultivation and fattening of carp. Operated by professionals, it heralded the start of commercial fish keeping.
East Anglia has a long history of connections with the Low Countries. Not surprisingly, the first mention of an English carp pond goes back to 1462 on the Duke of Norfolk’s estate. By the late sixteenth century, carp had become the nation’s most popular freshwater fish. Dubravius’s book was translated in 1599 as A New Booke of Good Husbandry and sparked interest (mentioned by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy).
John Taverner in his capacity as surveyor of the King’s woods was the first author to extol the virtues of rearing carp in a book on Certaine Experiments with Fishe and Fruite (1600). Carp was associated with the Crown. If any fish escaped from the Royal rearing ponds into local waterways, Henry VIII offered rewards to those who returned the “carpes to the King.”
The presence of carp was reported in Ireland soon after its arrival in England as monastic orders or members of the gentry introduced the non-native species to the country. It was food meant for the landowning nobility as distinct from the common Irish staple diet of grains, milk, and potatoes. Ponds stocked with carp signified wealth. At elaborate dinners, guests enjoyed carp alongside game and meats.
Although detailed records of consumption are scarce, they do point at intervention from the Low Countries. Peter de Latfewr was an Amsterdam-based merchant who, in 1626, supplied eight carp to Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, for his fishponds at the Doneraile Estate on the banks of the Awbeg River, County Cork. Several years after its introduction, carp had bred sufficiently to allow Boyle to supply family and friends across Ireland with samples for their respective ponds, principally for food but also for ornamental purposes.
Gradually the fish reached middle class plates and palates. In 1653, Izaak Walton lauded carp as the “Queen of Rivers” in chapter nine (“Observations of the Carp”) of his famous treatise The Compleat Angler.
Cultivating carp became a commercial success. Professional fish farmers praised its hardiness and rate of fattening as compared to other freshwater species.
We Do Not Want You Here
Carp reached England and Ireland from Europe through human intervention as was its introduction to the United States during the mid-1800s. Newly arrived immigrants could scarcely believe that there was no carp in this vast continent.
Whilst in many European countries the fish was on the menu at weddings, birthdays, Christmas and New Year, in their new home settlers were deprived of a delicacy that tasted of a past they had left behind them.
Some settlers made attempts to start its culture. In 1831, imported carp was raised in New York City ponds or stocked in the Hudson River throughout the 1840s. Local entrepreneurs lacked the experience of fish culture and public demand completely outstripped supply.
There was some success elsewhere. Berlin-born fish farmer Julius Poppe succeeded in expanding a stock of five common carp imported in 1872 from Reinfield, Germany, into a thriving farm at Sonoma, California, within a period of five years.
The availability of carp remained limited and excluded to the rich. Celebrated as a delicacy, expensive hotels and restaurants in New York City served carp as a festive offering. The luncheon menu of April 16, 1902, at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel offered “Carp in Rhine Wine Sauce.”
When in 1876 Pennsylvanian naturalist Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823-1887) took on the post of director of the newly formed Commission of Fish and Fisheries, he received countless requests for the importation of carp.
At the same time, he struggled with the challenge that enormous quantities of native species netted from the Illinois, Mississippi or Ohio rivers were shipped to markets of cities along the East Coast. Baird agreed to the introduction of carp into the nation’s lakes and rivers as a replacement of flagging stocks.
Carp would supplement traditional supplies and serve as an inexpensive source of protein for the benefit of the whole nation. The market was extensive and receptive; soon there was carp in abundance. Natives and newcomers snatched up carp from fish stalls in New York, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere.
For urban fishing enthusiasts, there were plenty of common carp thriving in local outlets. New York City’s Reservoirs and Manhattan’s Central Park lakes (The Lake, Harlem Meer, or The Pond) made angling both a pastime and a means of (illegal) family food supply. The experiment seemed a success, but the love affair with carp would not last.
Carp tends to destroy vegetation in shallow wetlands and dominate distressed aquatic environments, crowding out other fish. In America, the species became a pest. Running a pond was no longer a workable enterprise as commercial anglers were hauling carp in from public waters that had been stocked intentionally or accidentally. Prices plunged. Fish farmers gave up the trade in carp.
The Asian carp added to the problem. Introduced in North American waterways to control algae blooms in aquaculture facilities, many of them escaped either through human mismanagement or natural events (flooding). Their numbers exploded, disrupting ecosystems especially in the Mississippi and Great Lakes region, endangering native species such as yellow perch, bluegill, or black and white crappie.
In the South hunger had been major issue since the collapse of the plantation cotton economy. As protein-rich carp was plentiful, many African American and other struggling families consumed it.
In the cities of the northeast, it became a staple for immigrants and poor minorities. Public perception connected hardship and low social status with carp which became a metaphor for poverty.
Many consumers rejected “poor man’s fish” as a cheap replacement of proper food driven forward by the federal government’s support for fish farming (much like the European introduction of the potato had once been an alternative for bread).
Dislike of carp coincided with growing unease about both the rate of mass immigration and the resistance against Black integration. The four-letter “carp” word expressed social and cultural disharmony.
In America at least, its association with Christmas was fading from memory.
NOTHING IS BETTER THAN WATCHING THE ART ON THE NEW JP MORGAN CHASE BUILDING
CREDITS
NEW YORK ALMANACK
JUDITH BERDY
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NYC’s Forgotten
‘War on Christmas Trees’
WEEKEND, DEC. 20-22, 2025
ISSUE #1597
One of the best parts of Christmastime in New York City is being enveloped in the festive scent of pine as you walk past Christmas tree vendors on the sidewalk. These stands of fluffy evergreens signal that the holiday season has arrived…but they were almost outlawed!
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia notoriously disliked street vendors clogging up New York City’s roadways. During the early years of his mayoral term, which coincided with the Great Depression, there was a proliferation of unlicensed pushcart vendors as out-of-work New Yorkers tried to make ends meet by selling vegetables, fruits, meats, and other goods on the streets (and skirting pushcart permit fees). Declaring pushcarts “a menace to traffic, health, and sanitation,” LaGuardia made it his mission to get those vendors off the streets.
LaGuardia used WPA funds to construct indoor retail markets, such as the Essex Street Market and Arthur Avenue Market, where vendors could sell their wares in a new, clean environment, and leave the streets open for traffic. Along with the opening of those municipal markets came an ordinance that banned all unlicensed pushcarts from operating on the streets…including vendors selling Christmas trees!
The public (and the tree vendors) did not like this. How would New Yorkers get their trees for the holiday season?! In response to the ill-advised ban, the City Council passed an exemption to LaGuardia’s pushcart ordinance, overriding the mayor’s veto.
Dubbed the “coniferous tree exception,” the law specifically allowed Christmas tree vendors to operate their stalls on the street without a license, but only in December. That law is still on the books today! It’s NYC Admin Code Sec. 19-136 (a)(4).
The law states that “storekeepers and peddlers may sell and display coniferous trees during the month of December and palm branches, myrtle branches, willow branches, and citron during the months of September and October on a sidewalk.” The caveats are that the seller must have “permission of the owner of the premises fronting on such sidewalk,” and must keep a clear passageway for “the free movement of pedestrians.”
So it’s thanks to an obscure Depression-era law that we get to enjoy the refreshing aroma of Christmas trees as we stroll the city streets every holiday season!
NOTHING IS BETTER
THAN GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL DECORATED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
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PROBABLY THE LARGEST MENORAH IN THE CITY AT THE JP MORGAN CHASE BUILDING
FROM THE ARCHIVES
THE LOWER LEVEL ROADWAY OF THE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE SHOWING ROOM ACCESS ON STOREHOUSE BUILDING WITH TROLLEY IN BACKGROUND.
THE LOWER LEVEL ROADWAY OF THE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE SHOWING ROOM ACCESS ON STOREHOUSE BUILDING FROM LOWER LEVEL ROADWAY.
ROOFTOP OF ELEVATOR STOREHOUE BUILDING
NEWLY CONSTRUCTED GOLDWATER HOSPITAL WITH CITY HOSPITAL IN BACKGROUND
THE “MAIN STREET” WITH THE CITY HOME BUILDINGS.
DEMOLITION OF FORMER NURSES QUARTERS IN EARLY 1970’S
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NYC MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
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Central Park after a snowfall has always been magical—trees frosted white, soft tufts blanketing hills, and New Yorkers treading carefully across icy pathways, taking in the luminous enchantment.
In the 1850s, the designers of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, seemed to anticipate this wintertime beauty. They gave thought to park features that could enhance the charms of frigid temperatures and convince New Yorkers to enjoy the park in all seasons.
The skating pond Olmsted and Vaux created accomplished this. It was a smash hit when the pond opened in 1858, not long after the two designers got the go-ahead to build their vision of a park. The pond attracted an estimated 30,000 people to try out this new form of recreation.
Their other idea was more atmospheric: a long scenic road spanning 72nd to 102nd Street “along the low grounds west of the reservoirs,” according to an 1858 New York Times story. This appropriately named road was called the “Winter Drive.”
The Winter Drive would consist of a mile and a half of thick rows of evergreens, so sleigh riders would feel like they were in snow-covered conifer countryside, not an urban park.
“Large open glades of grass are introduced among these plantations of evergreens, as the effect aimed at is not so much of a drive through a thick forest, crowded with tall spindling trees, as through a richly wooded country, in which the single trees and copses have had plenty of space for developing their distinctive characteristics to advantage.”
The Winter Drive would be marked by its own bridge near West 82nd Street, Winterdale Arch. This graceful stone bridge, constructed in 1861, “is named for its location on the Winter Drive, between Seventy-Second Street and 102nd Street,” states a post from NYC Department of Records & Information Services.
“When planning the west side of the park, Olmsted and Vaux intended for this section to be planted with a variety of evergreens, to add color throughout the winter for carriage- and sleigh-riders,” per the department.
In the early years, the Winter Drive was put to good use. Sleigh riding for leisure was a popular winter activity in the 19th century city, and a drive on steel rails must have been a thrilling way to experience this 843-acre green space wonderland.
Unfortunately, all the conifers Olmsted and Vaux planted along the Winter Drive in 1861 were lost by the end of the century, states the Central Park Conservatory.
Over time, it seems that the Winter Drive name was forgotten. Winter Drive was absorbed into West Drive, which winds along the west side of the park.
Walk along the West Drive today, however, and you’ll see conifer trees similar to those that would have lined the drive in the post-Civil War era.
In the 1970s, “philanthropist Arthur Ross returned pine trees to the area, funding the planting of the Arthur Ross Pinetum just to the north,” states the Central Park Conservatory.
“Additional evergreen plantings by the Central Park Conservancy have also returned the look and feel of the ‘Winter Drive’ to this area of the Park.”
It might be hard to find a sleigh these days. But walk along this stretch of Central Park after a snowfall, and you’ll see the newer conifers laden with fluffy snow—part of a lovely winter landscape park visitors in the 1860s to 1890s would have well recognized.
PHOTO OF THE DAY OSCAR AND HIS NEW COAT
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CREDITS
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
[Second image: hand-colored woodcut of a Thulstrup illustration; third image: MCNY, 93.1.1.17790; fourth image: MCNY, F2011.33.922; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections]
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When you think of a canal, images of the romantic waterways of Venice and Bruges might come to mind.
But Canal Street in New York City? It doesn’t exactly conjure up romance. True, an actual canal did exist here in the early 1800s. It was pleasantly designed—surrounded by trees, crossed by a footbridge dubbed the “kissing bridge,” and flanked on either side by tidy houses.
But whatever positive feelings New Yorkers may have had about the canal at first disappeared quickly. The water it carried was fetid, the ditch became an open sewer, and the residents of the newly opened Canal Street were relieved when it was permanently covered over.
The story of this short-lived canal starts in the 1790s, when New York City was grappling with a serious drinking water problem.
During its days as a Dutch colonial outpost, residents got their water from the many streams that crossed Lower Manhattan. By the time the English occupied Manhattan, a freshwater pond known as Collect Pond (above), roughly centered in today’s Chinatown, became a main source of safe water.
Collect Pond was picturesque, 60 feet deep, and fed by an underground spring, according to NYC Parks. Families picnicked beside its shore, and when the pond froze in the winter, skaters would take to the ice.
But as the 18th century progressed, industry began using the pond as a dumping ground. Waste from tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, and other manufacturers eventually transformed Collect Pond into a foul-smelling body of water that bred disease.
In the early 1800s, the city decided to drain this former water source, then fill it in and turn the new land into useable real estate. To properly drain the pond, a wide ditch needed to be built that would carry away the foul waters to the Hudson River.
By 1810, city officials began engineering “a plank-sided canal eight feet wide following a straight line from Centre Street to the Hudson, with a roadway on both sides,” wrote Oliver E. Allen in a 2013 article in the Tribeca Trib.
The canal had a promising start, with its charming footbridge and tree-lined promenade, states NYC Parks. “The canal was popular among the residents of what was by now a lively neighborhood surrounding it,” wrote Allen. That neighborhood would have been on the outskirts of the city center.
But thanks to sluggish water flow, the canal (above in 1811, at Broadway) became more like a cesspool. Stagnant water and rancid odors made nearby residents disgusted and angry.
By 1820, the decision was made to cover the canal and bury it under the street. Residents complained that it still emitted a foul smell, which makes sense, because the former canal was never actually filled in. Enclosed in a brick-arched tunnel, it became the city’s first sewer, according to New York water ecology organization NYCh2o.org.
As time went on, Canal Street’s fortunes didn’t change. Thanks to its proximity to the Five Points slum—built on the marshy land of the former Collect Pond—the street developed a rougher edge. Property values plunged, though commercial activity kept Canal Street a main business artery.
These days, Canal Street serves as kind of Lower Manhattan demarcation line. On one end, it’s the southern border of SoHo and the northern end of Chinatown. On the other end, it divides SoHo and Tribeca.
Each end of Canal Street still has a handful of early 19th century residences, the kind that would have lined the street when the canal existed. The canal is history, but the houses that once flanked it have been standing for roughly two centuries.
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OUR HEARTS ARE SADDENED BY THE TRAGEDY AT BONDI BEACH, NSW, AUSTRALIA. OUR SUPPORT TO ALL THOSE TOUCHED BY THIS HORRIBLE DEATH.
Johann Adam Boller, Hanukkah Lamp, Frankfurt am Main (Germany), 1706–32, silver: cast, filigree, cloisonné enamel, engraved, traced, punched, and parcel-gilt; enamel inlays on copper alloy, 17 3/8 × 14 1/8 × 7 1/8 in. (44.1 × 35.9 × 18.1 cm). The Jewish Museum, New York. Gift of Frieda Schiff Warburg, S 563
The influential but little-known older brother of George Pullman (1831-1897) and the craftsman of the family, Albert designed the first luxurious Pullman railroad cars and hosted promotional trips to show them off. In those heady early days, he met national business and political leaders and hired the first Pullman porters.
For the earliest of it’s 100 years (1867-1968) the Pullman Company was known for its sleeping and dining cars. These were designed after the Erie Canal packet boats the Pullmans’ saw in their youths in Albion, NY, the county seat canal town of Orleans County.
Around 1800 the Pullman family had migrated from New England to New York and found their way to Onondaga, where new settlers were exploiting the salt springs on former Onondaga land.
The brothers’ parents Lewis (a carpenter) and Emily Caroline Minton Pullman were married id briefly in Auburn, NY, on Owasco Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in Central New York’s Cayuga County, where Albert was born. They moved to Albion after the Erie Canal was well established, probably to avoid the higher costs in the boom-town of Auburn.
Palace Cars, Pullman Porters, and Great Strikes
Albert and George’s first grand “palace car,” named (as a canal boat would be) The Pioneer, was finished in 1864 in Chicago. In 1867, the Pullmans introduced a “hotel on wheels,” the President, a sleeper with an attached kitchen and dining car. The food and service were said to have rivaled the best restaurants of the day.
As sales exploded, their labor force grew. They built a company town near Chicago following the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. That ultimately led to the national 1894 Pullman Strike over high company town rents and low wages, which occurred the year after Albert died, and three years before George died.
Notably, that strike engulfed Buffalo, NY, where the American Railway Union (ARU) local joined the nationwide boycott of Pullman cars. They halted rail traffic which led to clashes and federal intervention. The strike was one of the inspirations of Labor Day as a national holiday.
No biography of the company’s founders can fail to mention the Pullman Company was also widely known for it’s use of Black American workers as “Pullman Porters,” who were themselves American cultural icons. They performed luxury services for wealthy white travelers on trains, who often derisively called them all “George” or other epithets.
Despite severe racism, long hours and low wages, the job was seen as one of the best opportunities for Black men due to its stable income and culminated in the formation of the first successful Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925, long after the death of the Pullman brothers.
Albert and George Pullman made a formidable team, they supported Republican candidates and took advantage of workers and their political connections and contracts.
But as the Pullman Company grew along white American workers’ resistance to exploitation nationally, Albert Pullman’s role shrank. His self-interest inspired more close association with the returning power of the Democratic Party. He turned to his own investment portfolio, often with disastrous results.
Beginning with the industrial laundry that cleaned sleeping-car linens, Albert appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court after a catastrophic insurance investment, ran afoul of federal banking regulations, and failed in an attempt to corner wheat futures.
With evermore unsuccessful speculations, Albert was tempted by illegal land sales and entered exploiting silver mines.
Finally, his own family in crisis and his relationship with George shattered, Albert Pullman launched into one last round of adventurous investments – including both the early electricity and telephone industries – with mixed results.
Although it largely misses his role in the labor and race struggles of the era, Gilded Age Entrepreneur does instead focuses on the idea that Albert Pullman embodied the small-time investors who were legion after the Civil War.
“From banking and insurance to manufacturing and mining, a host of hopeful dreamers like Albert Pullman fueled the circulation of capital by forging political connections, creating and losing businesses, issuing shares, and longing for profit,” the book press materials say.
Although much of this history is focused on Chicago (where he made significant arts investments with his wealth), the book is well-placed on a New York bookshelf as a biography of those against whom New York workers and Black Americans struggled for dignity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
SPARKLING AT THE MET OPERA
PHOTO BY JUDITH BERDY
CREDITS
NEW YORK ALMANACK JUDITH BERDY
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OUR HEARTS ARE SADDENED BY THE TRAGEDY AT BONDI BEACH, AUSTRALIA. OUR SUPPORT TO ALL THOSE TOUCHED BY THIS HORRIBLE DEATH.
Johann Adam Boller, Hanukkah Lamp, Frankfurt am Main (Germany), 1706–32, silver: cast, filigree, cloisonné enamel, engraved, traced, punched, and parcel-gilt; enamel inlays on copper alloy, 17 3/8 × 14 1/8 × 7 1/8 in. (44.1 × 35.9 × 18.1 cm). The Jewish Museum, New York. Gift of Frieda Schiff Warburg, S 563
WINTER SCENES FROM EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
Playing in the snow in Tompkins Square Park
Is this painting from 1934 or 2013? Tompkins Square Park and the colorful row of buildings bordering it on East 10th Street have barely changed in 89 years in Saul Kovner’s “Tompkins Park, N.Y. City.”
Kovner was a Russia-born painter; like so many other struggling artists, he worked for the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project in the 1930s.
“The PWAP encouraged their commissioned artists to capture ‘the American Scene,’ and in this painting Kovner conveys strong messages of community spirit and American values,” states the web site for the Smithsonian Institution, which owns this painting.
“Children and adults enjoy winter in the park, building snowmen and playing with sleds; the presence of the Stars and Stripes in the center of the work places this as a uniquely American scene.”
A winter twilight in the snow on 57th Street
This is 57th Street in 1902, painted by Robert Henri, whose Ashcan School work depicted a moody New York in all of its grit and glory.
Could the cross street with the elevated train be Sixth Avenue? It would have been close to the Art Students League, where Henri taught.
Looking at “Blue Snow, the Battery,” from 1910, you can just feel the chill coming off New York Harbor, and how much colder it must be for the men standing in those shadows
You can practically feel the biting wind and snow in this raw 1911 New York winter street scene
There’s a lot of white in this depiction of a blustery winter day in the New York City of 1911: white snow on the street, stoops, and light poles; white-gray skies filling with factory smoke (or smoke from ship smokestacks?) across a grayish river.
Then there’s the violent white brushstrokes of howling wind against the red brick buildings. The wind is painted so viscerally, you can almost feel the icy snow and biting cold (and sympathize with the woman shielding her face in her coat, holding on to her hat).
“City Snow Scene” is an early work of Stuart Davis, a Pennsylvania native born in 1892 who is much better known as a Modernist painter. As a 17-year-old launching a career in New York, he fell under the thrall of early 20th century Ashcan artists and their gritty depictions of urban life.
The painting was auctioned by in 2012 by Christie’s, which had this to say about it: “Through bravura brushwork and a simplified muted palette, Davis succeeds in rendering a dreary winter’s day in lower Manhattan.”
“With a generous application of whites, Davis works up the surfaces to portray the texture of the snow which is juxtaposed with the more carefully applied reds he employs to develop the architecture in the background,” per Christie’s website.
“Broad, heavily applied strokes of black are the only device Davis employs to represent the pedestrians with the exception of a few simple touches of orange that delineate the faces of the primary figures in the foreground.”
It’s how a New York City winter used to be—and is once again in winter 2025
The Cordova family is facing an incredibly difficult time after losing their home in a fire on December 1st. Thankfully, no one was home, and their cat, Nemo, escaped safely. However, everything inside the house was destroyed, leaving them with nothing. They now need help to replace essential items like clothing, shoes, warm coats, personal hygiene products, and prescriptions that were lost.
This is a heartbreaking situation, and any support you can offer will make a real difference. Your contribution will go directly toward helping Miriam and Armando as they begin to rebuild their lives. Thank you for considering this.
ON DISPLAY AT COLER ART BY THE LATE RESIDENT ARTIST YVONNE SMITH
PHOTO BY JUDITH BERDY
CREDITS
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK JUDITH BERDY
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*WIKIPEDIA FOOTNOTES ARE AVAILABLE ON THE PARK WIKIPEDIA PAGE
Stuyvesant Square is the name of both a park and its surrounding neighborhood in the New York Cityborough of Manhattan. The park is located between 15th Street, 17th Street, Rutherford Place, and Nathan D. Perlman Place (formerly Livingston Place). Second Avenue divides the park into two halves, east and west, and each half is surrounded by the original cast-iron fence.[1]
Manhattan Community Board 6 does not mark neighborhood boundaries on its map, but centers “Stuyvesant Park” in the area south of 20th Street, north of 14th Street, east of Third Avenue, and west of First Avenue.[6] In city documents, New York City census tract 48.97 (later known as tract 48) has been used as an approximation for Stuyvesant Park.[7] To the east of the neighborhood is Stuyvesant Town, to the west is the Union Square area, and to the south is the East Village.[2][8]
The Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association serves residents “from East 14th Street north to East 23rd Street and from Stuyvesant Town west toward Irving Place and Gramercy Park.”[10]
In 1836, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant (1778–1847) – the great-great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant[11] – and his wife Helen (or Helena) Rutherfurd reserved four acres of the Stuyvesant farm and sold it for a token five dollars to the City of New York as a public park, originally to be called Holland Square, with the proviso that the City of New York build a fence around it. As time passed, however, no fence was constructed, and in 1839, Stuyvesant’s family sued the City to cause it to enclose the land. Not until 1847 did the City begin to improve the park by erecting the magnificent, 2800 foot long cast-iron fence, which still stands as the oldest cast-iron fence in New York City.[12] (The oldest fence in New York is that around Bowling Green.[13]) In 1850 two fountains completed the landscaping, and the park was formally opened to the public. The public space joined St. John’s Square (no longer extant), the recently formed Washington Square and the private Gramercy Park as residential squares around which it was expected New York’s better neighborhoods would be built.
The opening of St. George’s Church, located on Rutherford Place and 16th Street (built on land obtained from Peter Stuyvesant, 1848–1856; burnt down in 1865;[11] remodeled by C.O.Blesch and L. Eidlitz, 1897)[9][15] and the Friends Meeting House and Seminary (to the southwest) (1861, Charles Bunting) attracted more residents to the area around the park. The earliest existing houses in the district, in the Greek Revival style, date to 1842–43, when the city’s residential development was first moving north of 14th Street, but the major growth in the area occurred in the 1850s.[1] Fashionable houses were still being built as late as 1883, when Richard Morris Hunt‘s Sidney Webster House at 245 East 17th Street – now the East End Temple synagogue[16] – was completed,[1] but already German and Irish immigrants, had begun moving into new rowhouses and brownstones in the neighborhood, followed by Jewish, Italian and Slavic immigrants.[2][17]
Other than Beth Israel, other hospitals were located in the neighborhood as well. The New York Infirmary for Women and Children was founded at 321 East 15th Street by the pioneering woman physician, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.[17] The New York Lying-In Hospital on Second Avenue at 17th Street, is now condominiums, but the Hospital for Joint Diseases, a unit of NYU Medical Center is located across the avenue. Other now non-existent hospitals included the Salvation Army‘s William Booth Memorial Hospital, Manhattan General, and St. Andrew’s Convalescent Hospital.[17] Because of the number of hospitals in the district, there were many doctor’s offices on the side streets, along with quacks and midwives who preyed upon the area’s immigrant population.[17]
Stuyvesant Square Park, like many other city parks, was extensively rehabilitated in a more populist manner during the 1930s, when the 19th-century plan was modified by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses‘ landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke, with the addition of comfort stations, playgrounds and other built amenities. The park reopened in 1937; the 1980s saw restorations of the two 1884 fountains, the preservation of the cast-iron fence, and relaying the original bluestone sidewalks in two ellipses, with renovated lawns, shrubs and flower beds. A few old trees, English elm and Little-leaf linden, still flourish. Further contributions to the park have included Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney‘s Peter Stuyvesant (1941) and Ivan Mestorvic’s Antonín Dvořák (1963, moved here 1997).
The park is operated and maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association works on behalf of park patrons in the surrounding neighborhoods to preserve the park’s historic beauty.
LONG – TIME TRAM MANAGER ARMANDO CORDOVA’S HOME DESTROYED BY FIRE OUR HEARTS AND PRAYERS ARE WITH THEM AT THIS TRAGIC TIME
The Cordova family is facing an incredibly difficult time after losing their home in a fire on December 1st. Thankfully, no one was home, and their cat, Nemo, escaped safely. However, everything inside the house was destroyed, leaving them with nothing. They now need help to replace essential items like clothing, shoes, warm coats, personal hygiene products, and prescriptions that were lost.
This is a heartbreaking situation, and any support you can offer will make a real difference. Your contribution will go directly toward helping Miriam and Armando as they begin to rebuild their lives. Thank you for considering this.
ON DISPLAY AT COLER ART BY THE LATE RESIDENT ARTIST YVONNE SMITH
PHOTO BY JUDITH BERDY
CREDITS
WIKIPEDIA JUDITH BERDY
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.
Gracie Mansion, the gracious Federal-style mansion that overlooks the East River from Yorkville’s Carl Schurz Park, has been New York’s Mayoral residence since 1942. But the house had a long history before it started hosting municipal magistrates. Since construction began in 1799, Gracie Mansion has served as a residence, a museum, and even an ice cream stand. As the city prepares to welcome a new mayor to the mansion, here are 10 secrets of the People’s House.
1. The New York Post was founded on Gracie’s front porch
Archibald Gracie was a prosperous New York merchant who made his money first as an import-export man in the East India Trade, then as a banking executive. He worked and socialized with New York’s elite, counting John Jay as a friend and Alexander Hamilton as a business partner. In 1801, after the Mansion was completed, Gracie hosted a meeting of fellow Federalists. There, Alexander Hamilton recruited investors for The New-York Evening Post (now The New York Post), and Gracie became a partner in the venture.
2. John McComb Jr. might have inadvertently designed both the Mayor’s home and his office
We know for certain who designed the Mayor’s office: Joseph Mangin and John McComb Jr. won the commission to design City Hall in 1802. But nobody can say for sure who designed his house. The Gracie Mansion Conservancy holds that the building was built by Ezra Weeks and was probably designed by McComb, who had already designed Hamilton Grange and St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery and would go on to design other landmarks, including Castle Clinton.
3. Alexander Hamilton died in front of the fireplace now in the Mansion’s ballroom
Following his duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey, in July 1804, Alexander Hamilton was brought to Bayard House on Jane Street in what’s now the West Village. He died there, in front of the fireplace, on July 12th. That fireplace was installed in Gracie Mansion’s Ballroom in 1966.
4. Gracie Mansion spent nearly 28 years as an ice cream stand
The War of 1812 limited overseas trade and effectively sank Archibald Gracie’s shipping business. To settle debts, Gracie sold the house in 1823. The mansion had a succession of private owners until the city appropriated the estate in 1896 and incorporated its 11 acres into East River State Park, renamed Carl Schurz Park in 1910. As part of the park, Gracie Mansion spent decades as an ice cream stand and public restroom.
5. Gracie Mansion was the first home of the Museum of the City of New York
In 1923, the building was renovated again, going from hawking ice cream to housing artifacts, serving as the first home of the Museum of the City of New York. The Museum continued to use the Mansion until its permanent home was completed on 5th avenue in 1932.
6. La Guardia did not want to move into Gracie Mansion
Before Gracie Mansion became the Mayor’s residence on May 26, 1942, New York’s Mayors simply lived in their own apartments. Before he moved, La Guardia was living in an East Harlem tenement. Following Pearl Harbor, Robert Moses decided that it was no longer appropriate.
Powerful New Yorkers had been trying to get La Guardia to move for years. When the industrialist Charles M. Schwab offered to donate his 75-room personal castle on Riverside Drive as the Mayor’s residence, La Guardia scoffed, “What! Me in that?”
But the war made the move particularly prudent. Since New York City was considered a prime target for Nazi bombing squadrons, Moses argued that living on 5th Avenue, at the center of the island, would make La Guardia more susceptible to attack than if he lived on the edge of the island, where he could be more easily evacuated by air or water. Though he did finally agree to move in, La Guardia wrote, “My family is not keen about it, and it has no personal advantage for me.”
7. WNYC had permanent lines installed in Gracie Mansion for direct broadcast
As WWII helped push La Guardia into Gracie Mansion, it also prompted the federal government to order a citywide “dim out” to protect New York from enemy fire. While we can thank that dim out for Brooklyn Blackout Cake, the situation was a dark one for nervous New Yorkers. To reassure his city, La Guardia addressed New York via radio every Sunday. When he moved into Gracie Mansion, WNYC followed suit, setting up permanent lines so the Mayor could broadcast his “Talks to the People” directly from home.
8. The original Yule Log was filmed at Gracie Mansion
Speaking of fire and broadcasting, Gracie Mansion made history on both those fronts. In 1966, WPIX debuted new Christmas programming: The Yule Log. The broadcast was the first of its kind in the world. The footage, 17 seconds of fire blazing merrily in Gracie Mansion’s festively decorated fireplace, played on loop for three hours.
9. Gracie Mansion’s expansion was controversial for being too traditional
In 1964, Mayor Wagner decided to add a two-story addition to Gracie Mansion so that the home’s public rooms could be separate from the Mayor’s private residence. In an effort to be respectful to the Mansion’s original Federalist style, the Mayor commissioned an addition that would be designed along those same principles. In 1964, in a city that had recently torn down the original Penn Station in favor of the new Madison Square Garden, such historicism proved highly controversial. Modernists were frankly appalled that the new addition would not follow their International Style principles and decried the project.
10. Bloomberg didn’t live in Gracie Mansion, but he did renovate it
Michael Bloomberg was the only Mayor since La Guardia to opt out of Gracie. He chose to remain in his Upper East Side townhouse during his 12 years as Mayor, but paid to give Gracie Mansion a $7 million Federalist facelift. The period-perfect restoration proved much less divisive in 2002 than the addition had been in 1964.
A WONDERFUL EVENING AT BLACKWELL HOUSE DAVID LAVECCHIA PROVIDED AN EXCITING EVENING ON THE HISTORY OF TEAS.
ON DISPLAY AT COLER ART BY THE LATE RESIDENT ARTIST YVONNE SMITH
PHOTO BY JUDITH BERDY
COLER’S TREE IS A WINTER WONDERLAND
CREDITS
6SQFT
Editor’s note: The original version of this article was published on October 24, 2018, and has since been updated.
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.
There is a statue of Samuel Sullivan Cox in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park. The statue originally was near Cox’s home on East 12th Street but in 1924 it was moved.
A plaque accompanying the statue reads “Samuel Sullivan Cox, the Letter Carrier’s Friend, Erected in Grateful and Loving Memory of his Services in Congress by the Letter Carriers of New York, his Home, and of the United States, his Country.”
While researching a project on slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan, I came across a quote attributed to S.S. Cox. “When laws become lawless contrivances to defeat the ends of justice, it is not surprising that the people resort to lawless expedients for securing their rights.”
I traced the quote to a book published by Samuel Sullivan Cox in 1885 while a member of Congress representing a district in New York City.
In Union-Disunion-Reunion: Three Decades Of Federal Legislation 1855 To 1885 (Tecumseh, MI: A. W. Mills), Cox argued that post-Civil War Reconstruction was an “unconstitutional exercise of the military power” and the end of Reconstruction “was one good result of the compromises which grew out of the Great Fraud perpetrated by means of the Electoral Commission.”
Cox recognized there were “outrages perpetrated upon the negroes,” but attributed this to the “partial disfranchisement of the whites” and the elevation of “ignorant and brutal negroes” to positions of power in Southern states.
Cox argued “No people, least of all such a proud and intolerant people as that of the South, could see their local governments transferred from their own hands into the hands of their former slaves without being goaded into violent resistance.”
He labeled Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress in the 1860s and 1870s the “chief provocation to Ku-Klux atrocities.”
These were not the first outrageous statements made by Cox. In February 1864, while a Representative from Ohio, Cox warned in a speech to the House of Representatives against emancipation that “millions unfit for freedom are yet to become free” and with freedom “the black will perish.”
Cox believed that in the event of racial mixing, long a practice under slavery in the South as white masters raped enslaved Black women, “the mulatto does not live; he does not recreate his kind; he is a monster. Such hybrid races, by a law of Providence, scarcely survive beyond one generation.”
While in Congress, Cox voted against the 13th Amendment ending slavery and all three major Reconstruction-era enforcement laws written to protect rights granted to African Americans by the 14th Amendment. Cox was not in office when the 14th and 15th Amendments came up for votes.
The Cox statue was erected on July 4, 1891. It should be removed by July 4, 2026.
Editor’s Note
According to a recent study 99% of statues in American have NOT been removed. Fifty percent of the top 50 most memorialized people in the United States enslaved other people.
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.
