Design in NYC and Traces 100 years of Urban Planning Grand Central at New Exhibition
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Photos courtesy of Regional Plan Association
In celebration of its centennial, the civic group Regional Plan Association has opened a free public exhibition in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall. Designed by James Sanders Studio and curated by RPA, The Constant Future: A Century of the Regional Plan explores 100 years of New York City’s development from 1922 to the present day. The two-story display will be on view through October 24.
Established in 1922, the Regional Plan Association is a non-profit group that develops ideas and recommendations to improve the quality of life in New York City and its surrounding area.The exhibition will include photomurals and a series of large display panels that present text, images, and archived videos that tell a story of NYC throughout its history. All of the photos and information come from the RPA’s extensive archive.The Constant Future covers events starting with the rise of the automobile, the social, economic, and racial tensions of the 1960s, Superstorm Sandy and climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a press release.The Vanderbilt Hall exhibit will revolve around four landmark Regional Plans from 1929, 1968, 1996, and 2017. Visitors will learn about “cultural products of their own time” and “bold, imaginative, and influential responses to formidable challenges of metropolitan life.” This includes things like housing, public health, jobs, and transportation.
The exhibit is designed by James Sanders Studio, whose principal James Sanders co-produced with Ric Burns PBS’s award-winning series, New York: A Documentary Film.
Concluding the exhibition is a QR display that asks New Yorkers to imagine the future of New York and the region, as the area continues to recover from the pandemic. RPA will host a series of public programs this month that will explore the past, present, and future of New York.
FROM ED LITCHER: The New York Curb Market had a tradition of street trading. Its brokers had unwritten territorial rights to lampposts and other easily-recognized street structures where they could be easily picked out by their clerks. Except for the coffered roof above the brokers’ heads, Starrett & Van Vleck were to recreate the outside Curb Market.
The $1.2 million building rose rapidly and on Saturday, June 25, 1921 the Curbstone brokers held their last outdoor session. The following Monday an impressive ceremony opened the new New York Curbstone Market. Around 8:00 in the morning the Curbstone brokers assembled on Broad Street as they always had, along with their clerks. Each broker was assigned his position in the new building. In 1931, now known as the New York Curb Exchange, the group remodeled the main façade at No. 86 Trinity Place, giving it an up-to-date modernistic face. Perhaps to save money, however, the Greenwich Street façade was left as-is. Change came again to the Curb when in 1953 the name was changed to the American Stock Exchange.
Massive lettering was affixed to the Trinity Place front announcing the new name. But on Greenwich Street “NEW YORK CURB MARKET” still remained carved into the stone.
In 2008 the exchange was absorbed by NYSE Amex Equities and it abandoned its old headquarters for Wall Street. The massive building sits unused and largely ignored, the last remnant of an uncanny and quirky time in New York stock trading.
GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT TOO!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Jones’s Wood was a block of farmland on the island of Manhattan overlooking the East River. The site was formerly occupied by the wealthy Schermerhorn and Jones families. Today, the site of Jones’s Wood is part of Lenox Hill, in the present-day Upper East Side of New York City.
History
Tomb of David Provoost (1857)The farm of 132 acres (53 ha), known by its 19th-century owners as the “Louvre Farm”, extended from the Old Boston Post Road (approximating the course of Third Avenue) to the river and from present-day 66th Street to 75th Street.[1][2] It was purchased from the heirs of David Provoost (died 1781)[3] by the successful innkeeper and merchant John Jones, to provide himself a country seat near New York.[1][4] The Provoost house, which Jones made his seat, stood near the foot of today’s 67th Street.[5] After his death the farm was divided into lots among his children. His son James retained the house and its lot. His daughter Sarah, who had married the shipowner and merchant Peter Schermerhorn on April 5, 1804, received Division 1, nearest to the city. On that southeast portion of his father-in-law’s property, Peter Schermerhorn, soon after his marriage, had first inhabited the modest villa overlooking the river at the foot of today’s 67th
19th centuryIn 1818, Peter Schermerhorn purchased the adjoining property to the south from the heirs of John Hardenbrook’s widow Ann, and adding it to his wife’s share of the Jones property—from which it was separated by Schermerhorn Lane leading to the Hardenbrook burial vault overlooking the river at 66th Street—named his place Belmont Farm. They at once moved into the handsomer Hardenbrook house looking onto the river at the foot of East 64th Street;[7] there he remained, his wife having died on April 28, 1845. The frame house survived into the age of photography, as late as 1911.[8] It survived an 1894 fire that swept Jones’s Wood almost clear and remained while the first building of The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now Rockefeller University, was erected to its south. The block of riverfront property now occupied by Rockefeller University is the largest remaining piece of Jones’s Wood. The house was razed after 1903.[8]
Bills to acquire as park
In 1850 Jones’s Wood became the subject of suggestions for setting aside a large public park, which was eventually to result in the creation of Central Park. The first choice for the park’s site was the wooded Jones/Schermerhorn estate on the East River.[9] Intermittent editorials in Horace Greeley‘s New York Tribune and William Cullen Bryant‘s Post had offered rosy images of rural Jones’s Wood. State senator James Beekman, who had a share in the grand Federal-style Beekman house between today’s 63rd and 64th Streets that abutted the modest Hardenbrook-Schermerhorn villa,[10] lobbied the city aldermen in 1850. A resolution was duly passed in 1851 to acquire the Jones’s Wood property, which, the New York Herald said, “would form a kind of Hyde Park for New York”.[11]When the Joneses and Schermerhorns proved reluctant to part with the property, Beekman introduced a bill into the state Senate to authorize the city to appropriate the land by eminent domain. Beekman’s bill passed unanimously on June 18, 1851; it passed the Assembly as well, and the governor signed it into law on July 11.[12] The proposal for paying for the improvements through a general assessment met stiff opposition, since half of the cost of Jones’s Wood would be paid for through property assessments paid by all uptown property owners, including those who lived as far away as Harlem.[13] Residents of Manhattan’s West Side also objected for a different reason: it would be too far away for them to reach, compared to a centrally located park.[14]Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the first American landscape designers and a strong advocate for Central Park stated that he would prefer a park of at least 500 acres (200 ha) at any location from 39th Street to the Harlem River.[15]: 452–453 [16] In any case, the Jones and Schemerhorn heirs subsequently brought a lawsuit and successfully obtained an injunction to block the acquisition, and the bill was later invalidated as unconstitutional.[17]The clamorous arguments fought in the newspapers over a city park then shifted to proposals for the modern day Central Park.[18] Another suggestion was to enlarge the existing Battery Park, a move endorsed by most of the public but opposed by wealthy merchants. As a compromise, New York City’s aldermen also voted to expand Battery Park to 24 acres (9.7 ha).[19][14] Even as the coalition to build Central Park grew, supporters of Jones’s Wood Park continued to advocate for the site’s acquisition, though there were still disputes even within this group. Landowner James Crumbie wanted the southern border to be set at 66th Street so that his property would directly abut the park, while the Schermerhorns wanted the southern border two blocks north at 68th Street so their land would not be taken. State senator Edwin Morgan introduced another bill to acquire Jones’s Wood in 1852, but the bill died after Morgan shifted his support to the Central Park plan.[20]As support for Central Park increased, advocates for Jones’s Wood Park, such as nearby landowner James Hogg and the then-incipient New York Times, claimed that Central Park’s supporters were motivated by property speculation.[20] Central Park had a wider coalition of support than Jones’s Wood Park did. This was partially because of the former’s central location, and partially because the site of Central Park was inhabited by a low-income community called Seneca Village, which, Central Park’s supporters claimed, needed to be redeveloped.[21] Supporters of Jones’s Wood Park continued to lobby for their site, using increasingly misleading tactics to do so. During the 1853 session of the New York State Legislature, Beekman convinced both state senators and assemblymen to reconsider the Jones’s Wood bill, and then bribed a court clerk to prevent media from reporting on the vote. Hogg held interviews with several newspapers to ensure media support for Jones’s Wood Park, though there was considerable prejudice from newspapers on both sides of the debate.[22] These papers created petitions to support each position, and the petitions each gained at least 20,000 signatures, but ten percent of these were said to have been falsified.[22][23] The general public was mostly apathetic to the dispute as long as the result was a large city park.[22]The dispute peaked in mid-1853 when Beekman and Morgan presented competing bills that respectively advocated for Jones’s Wood and Central Park. Unlike the 1851 act, Beekman’s amended bill would not take property assessments into consideration, which was seen as a move to retain support from neighboring landowners. Both bills ultimately passed, but after the passage of the Jones’s Wood bill, Beekman amended it so that the city was obligated to take the land for Jones’s Wood rather than merely creating a commission to examine the feasibility of doing so.[24] The Schermerhorns and Jones sued to stop the bill from taking effect, and New York Supreme Court judge James I. Roosevelt invalidated the second Jones’s Wood bill in January 1854, to the consternation of Beekman and other Jones’s Wood supporters.[24][25][26]
Jones’s Wood Hotel
Peter Schermerhorn died on June 23, 1852,[1] and during the next decade the Jones and Schermerhorn cousins soon discovered that though they had retained possession of their landscaped estate, the pressures of the city’s inexorable northward growth soon hemmed them on two sides. Casual pilferage of fruit from their orchards and the presence of German beer gardens along the Post Road at the gates of their shaded country lane encouraged them to lease a portion of the land for a commercial picnic ground and popular resort hotel, the Jones’s Wood Hotel; the hotel extended the old Provoost house,[27] adding a dance pavilion, shooting range and facilities for other sports. Jones’s Wood became the resort of working-class New Yorkers in the 1860s and 70s, who disembarked from excursion steamers and arrived by the horsecars and then by the Second Avenue Railroad, to enjoy beer, athletics, patriotic orations and rowdy entertainments that were banned by the prim regulations of the city’s new Central Park.[28]Valentine Mager, the proprietor, pointedly advertised in the New York Times on April 25, 1858, that his grounds (enlarged by additional leases from Joneses and Schermerhorns) were “on the whole, the only place on the Island where a person can enjoy or make himself comfortable.”[29] Here the Caledonian Society repaired for Highland games, and the daredevil Charles Blondin performed, who “sought out perilous localities, eligible for his performance, in various parts of the Republic ; and, among other famous spots, Jones’s Wood—a sort of wild and romantic Vauxhall or Cremorne, on the banks of the Hudson,” George Linnaeus Banks (Blondin: his life and performances, 1862, p. 42) had it, slightly misplacing the riverside site. Thomas Francis Meagher‘s address to the “Monster Irish Festival” at Jones’s Wood on August 29, 1861, was memorable enough for excerpts to be printed among inspiring exemplars of oratory in Beadle’s Dime Patriotic Speaker (1863, p. 55).The northern section of the Louvre Farm, as the families still termed it, from 69th to 75th Streets,[30] was divided into lots in 1855, advertised to the public as part of the “beautiful property so well known as Jones’s Wood” and sold for residential development.[31]The year 1873 marked the last of the old Wood, as trees were being felled to allow for construction.[32] Several proprietors succeeded to the leases of the amusement park, and John F. Schultheis, who had purchased some Schermerhorn lots outright, erected his “Colisseum” about 1874. It occupied the full frontage on Avenue A (now York Avenue) between 68th and 69th Streets, providing an entrance to Jones’s Wood, and extended over most of the ground towards the river. It had seating for 14,000 spectators.[33] To the north, Schultheis established a second picnic ground, which he called “Washington Park.” Below the bluff, right on the river’s edge, a single-story Greek Revival structure behind a colonnade, alleged by a New York Times journalist to have been a riverfront chapel erected by the Schermerhorns for Sunday services for their neighbors along the river, was rented as a bathing house by the Pastime Athletic Club in 1877;[34] they remained there for twenty years, while Schultheis gradually raised their annual rent from $180 to $1250,[8] then decamped for 90th Street and the East River.[35]“Jones’s Wood, the general and inclusive term for the neighborhood, was razed by fire in 1894”, Hopper Striker Mott recorded in 1917. “At break of day on May 16th the East River bluffs from 67th to 71st Street were practically swept of buildings”.[36][33] The fire covered 11 acres (4.5 ha). Fifty horses perished in the stables, and the “Silver King” fire engine was overtaken by flames and incinerated. The Jones house, occupied by John F. Schultheis, Jr, was burnt, but the Schemerhorn house, standing in the path of 67th Street, was spared. On the site now stand several institutions: Weill Cornell Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery.
20th century
In 1903 John D. Rockefeller purchased the remaining block of the Schermerhorn farm, which had already been subdivided into about 110 lots, preparatory to sale, and extended from 64th Street to 67th Street, and from Avenue A to the newly plotted “Exterior Street”, for $700,000.[8] 65th Street and 66th Street had never been cut through the property and were de-mapped. The projected Exterior Street along the river was subsumed into today’s FDR Drive. This is the site today of Rockefeller University.[37]By 1911, “The Schermerhorn country place at Jones Wood, where until recently also there was a Schermerhorn residence, is now the site of model tenements. The real estate holdings of the family rank about third in the scale of those having ownership for two centuries,” stated Town & Country on May 26, 1911, exaggerating by about a century.[38] The name of Jones’s Wood was retained in Jones Wood Gardens, an ultra-exclusive private garden established in 1920 at 65th and 66th Streets between Third and Lexington Avenues. The garden only had twelve keys, and was meant for the residents of 157-167 East 65th Street and 154-166 East 66th Street, a group of thirteen row houses built by Edward Shepard Hewitt in 1920.[39]
WHILE WAITING FOR A BUS ON THIRD AVENUE, I SPOTTED THIS ROLLS ROYCE 2022 GHOST RETAILS FOR $345,000 OR THE COST OF 125,000 BUS RIDES, APPROXIMATELY.
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
Sources
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When I visit NYU physicians office on East 41st Street, there is an odd street on the corner. Not Second Avenue or Third Avenue, it is Tunnel Exit Street.
Had to find out more about this street from 34th to 41st Streets
When the Queens Midtown Tunnel was built in 1940, connecting Hunters Point, Queens, to Murray Hill, Manhattan, two streets were constructed with it. Tunnel Entrance Street (formerly Tunnel Approach) and Tunnel Exit Street are exactly what they sound like. The former leads to the tunnel’s entrance, and the latter allows exiting cars to diffuse into Second or Third Ave gradually over eight blocks. What’s interesting is that, despite the surrounding neighborhood having blossomed over the past seven decades, Tunnel Entrance and Tunnel Exit Streets have no street addresses. Perhaps this is because of the area’s unpopularity: one online reviewer called a nearby park “the saddest park in New York.” She goes on to cite noise and traffic as the vicinity’s biggest nuisances.
This Brooklyn road (or series of connected roads) is adjacent to the Floyd Bennett Field, which once was New York’s first municipal airport. Opened in 1931, it went on to be the most active US airport during World War II. The field is currently part of the Gateway National Recreation Center and commemorates aviation history. Recently, the field held the Brooklyn Tomato Battle. In addition, the aptly named Aviation Road is the only remaining entrance to the field, since the airport and WWII Navy entrances are now closed to the public.
No, there weren’t any famous New Yorkers named “Extra.” The street got its name because it was simply unclaimed, extra land. When Philip Minthorne, who owned this land as part of an 110-acre farm, passed way in the early nineteenth century, his children split up the land but left out a small piece for whatever reason. For a while, this 3-feet wide, 120-feet long piece was home to seedy establishments, like low-end speakeasies and metalworking garages. After a brief stint as the back door of punk venue CBGB, the place declined into shabbiness once more. Now, the small street is revitalized again, with restaurants, shops, and artsy events.
Queens has a Conduit Avenue, Brooklyn has Conduit Boulevard. It’s really the same road that crosses both boroughs and was named after a water conduit (aqueduct) run by the now-defunct Brooklyn Water Works that was replaced by this road. The entire length of the road stretches from Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Queens/Nassau County border.
Force Tube Avenue was also built onto the same water conduit as Conduit Avenue/Boulevard. It warranted a separate listing just because it’s name is so awesome. It’s currently separated from Conduit Boulevard by an empty grassy lot but on a map you can easily see that it’s the same right of way, cutting against the regular Queens street grid.
Division Street in Chinatown gets its name from a colonial border between two landowners, James deLancey and Henry Rutgers who, according to Forgotten NY, “between them owned most of the Lower East Side in the 18th Century.” The Second Avenue Elevated train once ran down Division Street, demonstrating just how long borders can linger, long after the people who create them are gone.
Meanwhile, Division Avenue in Brooklyn marked a former municipal boundary between Brooklyn and Bushwick (which included Williamsburg at the time).It should be noted that Queens is particularly full of functionally named streets, like Junction Boulevard, Railroad Avenue (next to Cavalry Cemetery), North Loop Lane (near Fort Totten), Traffic Avenue (in Ridgewood), and Trotting Course Lane. There’s also a “Zoo Bridge” which is just next to the World’s Fair Pavilion ruins in Flushing Meadows Corona Park
RIHS KID’S BOOK GIVEAWAY ON SATURDAY AT RIVERCROSS LAWN
FALL FOR ARTS COORDINATED BY RIVAA
FOR RIOC
GREAT ART NOW ON VIEW ON RIVERCROSS LAWN
4 NYU BIOLOGISTS ARE SOLVING ALL KINDS OF PUZZLES
THE DARK CITY IS SURROUNDED BY OUR ISLAND GREENERY
THE BEAUTY OF MANY CULTURES
THE SUPER PAINTING TEAM FROM OUR YOUTH CENTER
MARGIE SMITH, MATT KATZ AND SHERRIE HELSTEIN, LONG TIME ISLANDERS STAFFED THE PAIN DISTRIBUTION TABLE.
FROM: ED LITCHER A bank draft dated July 28, 1828 from the City of New York to James Blackwell for $13,900.00, which completed the Blackwell Island transfer of ownership from the family to the City of New York.
The next big transfer of ownership for our island will happen on 12/24/2068 when the current City/State 99-year lease will expire and the island will be returned to full City control. ALEXIS VILLAFANE ALSO GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
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We know about Blackwell’s Island and the Blackwell House, the family home on the island. But there was another Blackwell House, across the river in Queens – in what was known as Ravenswood. It was a large and important house, and one with a particular story. A door! Read on.
First, about the Blackwell family and our island. Note, some of the material in the next paragraphs is lifted from earlier RIHS materials, a truly wonderful collection.
Under Dutch rule, our island was known as Varckens Eylandt, or Hog Island. Amsterdam Governor Wouter van Twiller purchased it from two Indian chiefs in 1637. Just 2 years later, it was being farmed under land grants from the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company to Jan Alteras, Francois Fyn, Jonas Bronck and finally Laurens Duyts. The last in this line, Duyts, defaulted on his lease and, worse, was banished from the province for “selling his wife into immoral slavery and for gross immoralities committed by himself.”
The British took over New Amsterdam and confiscated Hog Island in 1667. In 1668, a Captain John Manning was granted a “patent” on the island by the British. Five years later, after mismanaging his command of New York’s Fort James during a Dutch attack (I believe he surrendered it to the Dutch), he was tried by court martial and publicly disgraced. (His sword broken over his head?) Manning moved to his island retreat and evidently found solace there. Reverend Charles Wolley, writing in 1701, tells us that he had often gone to Manning’s Island to visit the Captain, “whose entertainment was commonly a bowl of rum-punch.”
The ownership of our island passed to Robert Blackwell, who had come from England in 1661 and started a business in Elizabethtown, NJ. He married Robert Manning’s daughter Mary, moved to the island and renamed it Blackwell’s Island. Robert Blackwell owned a plantation on the mainland in Newtown (Ravenswood) in Queens, opposite the island.
His son, also Jacob, was born in 1717 in Ravenswood (and in 1780, died there as well). I assume, but don’t really know for sure, that this was the same property built by his grandfather. Jacob Blackwell was an enterprising businessman and active in the miliary. Prior to the French and Indian War, he held a Captaincy in the Newtown militia. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he was a member of the committee of correspondence in 1774-75, organized the Queens County militia and served in the 1st, 3rd and 4th provincial congresses. When Queens County was overrun by foreign troops, he returned to Ravenswood, trusting the British assurances but the privations and pecuniary losses which he continued to suffer from the enemy are believed to have hastened his death.
A brief sidebar about the Revolution and Blackwell’s Island. In a History of Queens County with illustrations, Portraits & Sketches of Prominent Families and Individuals, published in 1882, we learn that during the exchange of canon fire across the East River between the British in Queens and the Americans in Manhattan, the British actually invaded Blackwell’s island. But they were forced to retreat: “This cannonading continued for several days, by which the enemy were so emboldened that on Tuesday they crossed in considerable numbers to Blackwell’s Island, but the shot from our batteries proving too warm for them they soon recrossed the river.”
Jacob willed the island to his sons, James and Jacob. But it’s interesting to learn that the will also indicates that, like many New Yorkers of that time, Jacob Blackwell was a slave owner. He willed “a negro girl named Isabel to his daughter Mary” and stipulated “that a ”8-acre tract on York Island near Harleam with negroes not already devised to be sold, proceeds to payment of debts and legaices”
The brothers fought their way through financial problems after the war. Their situation seems to have improved and by 1796 the Blackwell House was built on our island. The Blackwell family owned and farmed the island until 1828 when it was sold to the City of New York. Jacob Blackwell became the owner of the Ravenswood house – again, where he and his brother had been brought up, presumably the same Blackwell house built by Robert Blackwell a century earlier.
Ravenswood and the other Blackwell House
Ravenswood runs along the East River, now part of Long Island City between Astoria and Hunter’s Point. European settlers drove away Native Americans who were there and farmed the area. A Colonel George Gibbs bought much of the land in Ravenswood in 1814. After his death in 1833, the land was divided into nine estates and by 1848 villas and mansions dotted the shore. By this time, this part of Long Island was connected by ferry to New York City, still perched at the southern tip of Manhattan island. (Astoria was also becoming a summer estate haven for wealthy New Yorkers.)
The Roach Brothers also purchased land in Ravenswood a bit later, and commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis, widely considered America’s greatest architect of the mid-nineteenth century, to draw up schemes for a planned community that would attract wealthy Manhattanites. (We recall that Davis also designed the Blackwell Island Lunatic Asylum.)
In a few years, Ravenswood became of the most exclusive neighborhoods on Long Island and even on the entire East River. New York merchants enriched with the city’s growing fortunes moved in, stimulated by the construction of the Erie Canal. Almost none of them came from old families (who had manors in other parts of the region).
A unique feature was the public promenade. While lots were granted to the edge of the East River, a public walkway was carved into the properties so that neighbors could enjoy the impressive views
Blackwell House as it was in the 1920s, 27th Avenue and 8th Street, 1923. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Archives, Eugne L. Armbruster Photographs
Ravenswood as a Neo-Classical bucolic Arcadia had a short lifespan. An 1894 New York Times article notes, “Not more than 20 years ago famous families of that period filled these great houses with life and fashion. Black clouds of smoke now hang over these once beautiful homes, which are streaked and seamed… Manufactories and other industries gradually drove nearly all the old-time residents out of their great houses.” The wealthy moved eastwards on Long Island. Their mansions were left behind and by the late 1870s many ended up as orphanages and asylums. As the LIRR moved in along Newtown Creek, hundreds of small factories sprang up in Ravenswood which prospered along the busy East River. Finally, during the 1930s and 40s, vast tracts of public housing (and Queensbridge Park) were erected, and the recognizable shape of modern Ravenswood was formed.
The Blackwell door on exhibit at the Greater Astoria Historical Society
So, what about the Door??
After the Battle of Brooklyn (aka the battle of Long Island) in August 1776, British and Hessians swept into Queens from the south and east. Colonel Jacob Blackwell had to flee. The British hacked a mark on his front door – the “Arrow of Confiscation” – announcing that it had been appropriated by the crown.
This arrow marking still exists in the door’s exterior. The story continues:
Jacob Blackwell returned to the house and lived there through the worst of the British occupation, and died there in October 1780, still a British subject in a land not yet the independent United States.
In the 1820s, our old friend George Gibbs owned the Ravenwood Blackwell house and property. James Fenimore Cooper, the famous American novelist and a friend of Col. Gibbs, spent time at the old stone house in 1825. (Is this, “the old stone house”, the Blackwell house in Ravenwood?) Cooper worked on the outlines of his novel, “The Water Witch” or “Skimmer of the Seas” during his stay. This is significant in that Cooper wrote about dueling ships racing up the East River and through the treacherous Hell Gate.
Over time, the Blackwell House became a boys’ boarding school from 1845-46, a picnic grove/park in 1882 and was occupied until its demolition in 1901. National Grid’s Big Allis power plant now occupies its site.
Back to the Door. The door was part of the house from about 1765 to its demolition in 1901. (So presumably, it was always the same structure.) The door was rescued by the prominent Tisdale family of Astoria, who may have displayed it or stored it at their lumber yard on the Astoria peninsula from 1901 to 1951. James Tisdale donated the door to the Brooklyn Museum in 1951 which possessed the door until December 3, 2007, when the Museum donated it to the Greater Astoria Historical Society.
There’s more! More was learned about the door after its “rediscovery”. It sports two porthole-like windows, which experts say the colonists created from melted-down bottles to avoid a glass tax levied via the British Townshend Acts. “The colonists clearly were thumbing their nose at the British authorities,” said Bob Singleton, a past president of the Greater Astoria Historical Society. “For the British, it would’ve been like a pebble in their shoes.”
Finally, it was learned that the original doorknocker was among a collection of artifacts held by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Residence in Hyde Park, NY. The historical society is hoping to acquire the doorknocker and reunite it with the door.
PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL , 1941 HARA REISER, ARON EISEPREISS, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, ED LITCHER, ANDY SPARBERG , NINA LUBLIN, GLORIA HERMAN ALL GOT IT RIGHT.
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Streamline Moderne was all the rage in the 1940s. Architect A.S. Arrasmith was a leading proponent—designing more 60 Greyhound stations with exceptional post-Deco grace and style.
“Greatest Bus Terminal in World,” barked the Cleveland News when the Greyhound Bus Terminal opened its doors on March 30, 1948. And why not? Replacing a shabby and outmoded terminal on East 9th Street, the new Chester Avenue station, like many others nationwide, brilliantly channeled a design movement called Streamline Moderne (an offshoot of Art Deco). Across the US, homes, cars, trains, bicycles, furniture, clocks, radios and even telephones were being “streamlined.” Think Airstream trailers, Buick Roadmasters, butterfly chairs, and even the Cleveland Coast Guard Station (built in 1940). Faced in light Indiana limestone, the Cleveland Greyhound station epitomized the trend: Prominent horizontal lines. Undulating walls. Smooth exterior surfaces. Curved staircases leading to a curved balcony. All these features worked together to create the fluid effect Greyhound execs wanted—the home of an innovative, forward-moving transportation services provider.
The brains behind the building was architect William Strudwick Arrasmith (1898-1965) for whom designing Greyhound stations was almost a career. Arrasmith’s first Greyhound commission work was a Louisville terminal that opened in 1937. During World War II, Arrasmith commanded forces in Europe and served with the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, he and his family moved to Cleveland where he began work on the Chester Avenue terminal. Altogether Arrasmith designed more than 60 Greyhound stations, along with several hospitals, hotels, and even a prison.
Today, Greyhound continues to operate out of the Chester Avenue building. Although many things have changed, the basic interior is intact. Originally, the west end of the terminal had a Post House restaurant with 17 booths and three U-shaped counters. A Gray Drug Store in the east wing had a 45-foot soda fountain. A ticket counter used to be where the restrooms are now located. The facility also had an onsite barber shop. The second floor continues to house sleeping rooms for Greyhound drivers. The gold and tan terrazzo floor remains unchanged and two giant pillars still frame the entrance.
The 1948 opening was quite the affair. Ohio Governor Thomas Herbert, Cleveland Mayor Thomas Burke and copious press and spectators celebrated the 250-foot-long station, ringed with 21 bus docks—a “landlocked ocean liner,” according to Cleveland historian Carol Poh Miller. Also unveiled at the 1948 ceremony was a sleek new Greyhound model: the Highway Traveler. Nowadays bus travel is no longer considered a dashing way to travel. However, the terminal remains a model of architectural style and grace. The station was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
A Speedy Building The horizontal lines created by the rows of windows, the edges of the roofs, and the curved walls at the end of the first and third levels of the structure all add to the Streamline Moderne Style. The style is characterized by an aerodynamic look and a feeling of speed. As can be seen in this 1950s photograph, these elements are clearly present in the Greyhound Terminal building. Image courtesy of Cleveland State University. Michael Schwartz Library. Special Collections.
The Largest Lobby This photograph of the Greyhound Terminal lobby demonstrates the size of the station itself. Built as the largest bus station in the United States, the terminal lobby has the ability to accommodate 300 travelers at one time. Image courtesy of Cleveland State University. Michael Schwartz Library. Special Collections.
Capital Design 1. The Greyhound Bus Terminal in Washington, DC, was completed in 1940 for a cost total cost (land and building) of $1,000,000. This photo was taken in 1976 during an extensive remodeling.
Early Streamline Moderne The Louisville Bus Terminal—completed in 1937—was William Arrasmith’s first Greyhound commission.
Great Lines Arrasmith’s Cincinnati station, since demolished, was completed in 1942.
“Go Greyhound” This 1950s postcard depicts the Norfolk, VA, Greyhound station which was built in 1942.
Going to the Source In 2011, retired Cleveland attorney Frank E. Wrenick wrote “The Streamline Era Greyhound Terminals: the Architecture of W.S. Arrasmith.”
J. FREDERICK MUGGS “CO-HOST” WITH DAVE GAROWAY ON THE ORIGINAL “TODAY” SHOW GUY LANDIS AND ED LITCHER GOT IT RIGHT!!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
CLEVELAND HISTORICAL
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Douglas DC-3 airliner (1935) The DC-3 had many exceptional qualities compared to previous aircraft. It was fast, had a good range, was more reliable, and carried passengers in greater comfort. Before the war, it pioneered many air travel routes. It was able to cross the continental US from New York to Los Angeles in 18 hours, with only three stops. It is one of the first airliners that could profitably carry only passengers without relying on mail subsidies.[2][3]
The Lockheed Constellation (“Connie“) is a propeller-driven, four-engined airliner built by Lockheed Corporation starting in 1943. The Constellation series was the first pressurized-cabin civil airliner series to go into widespread use. Its pressurized cabin enabled commercial passengers to fly well above most bad weather for the first time, thus significantly improving the general safety and ease of air travel.
TRAINS
The train was streamlined after wind tunnel experiments, a sort of research which was pioneered by the developers of the high-speed interurban railcar Bullet a couple of years before. The Fliegender Hamburger design was very similar to the Bullet’s. Its lightweight, articulated construction and Jakobs bogies were also known on the US interurban scene. However, the Fliegender Hamburger had diesel-electric propulsion. Each of the two coaches had a 12-cylinder Maybach diesel engine with a direct current generator directly coupled to it, which drove a Tatzlager traction motor. The two engines developed a combined power of 604 kW.
The 1931 WIKOV Supersport, Prostějov Moravia was one of the first produced truly aerodynamically designed automobiles.
Stout Scarab (1935) on display at Houston Fine Arts Museum
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Streamline style can be contrasted with functionalism, which was a leading design style in Europe at the same time. One reason for the simple designs in functionalism was to lower the production costs of the items, making them affordable to the large European working class.[13] Streamlining and functionalism represent two different schools in modernistic industrial design.
NBC TV STUDIO IN ROCKEFELLER CENTER, NEXT TO FORMER GARAGE ENTRANCE.
NOW CHRISTIES AUCTION HOUSE
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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6SQFT
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Streamline Moderne is an international style of Art Deco architecture and design that emerged in the 1930s. Inspired by aerodynamic design, it emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements. In industrial design, it was used in railroad locomotives, telephones, toasters, buses, appliances, and other devices to give the impression of sleekness and modernity.[1]
In France, it was called the style paquebot, or “ocean liner style”, and was influenced by the design of the luxury ocean liner SS Normandie, launched in 1932.
Front and southern side of the former Blytheville Greyhound Bus Station, located at 109 N. Fifth Street in Blytheville, Arkansas, United States. Built in 1937, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
As the Great Depression of the 1930s progressed, Americans saw a new aspect of Art Deco, i.e., streamlining, a concept first conceived by industrial designers who stripped Art Deco design of its ornament in favor of the aerodynamic pure-line concept of motion and speed developed from scientific thinking. The cylindrical forms and long horizontal windowing in architecture may also have been influenced by constructivism, and by the New Objectivity artists, a movement connected to the German Werkbund. Examples of this style include the 1923 Mossehaus, the reconstruction of the corner of a Berlin office building in 1923 by Erich Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra. The Streamline Moderne was sometimes a reflection of austere economic times; sharp angles were replaced with simple, aerodynamic curves, and ornament was replaced with smooth concrete and glass.
The style was the first to incorporate electric light into architectural structure. In the first-class dining room of the SS Normandie, fitted out 1933–35, twelve tall pillars of Lalique glass, and 38 columns lit from within illuminated the room. The Strand Palace Hotel foyer (1930), preserved from demolition by the Victoria and Albert Museum during 1969, was one of the first uses of internally lit architectural glass, and coincidentally was the first Moderne interior preserved in a museum.
Coca-Cola factory, Los Angeles by Robert V. Derrah (1936)
Streamline Moderne appeared most often in buildings related to transportation and movement, such as bus and train stations, airport terminals, roadside cafes, and port buildings. It had characteristics common with modern architecture, including a horizontal orientation, rounded corners, the use of glass brick walls or porthole windows, flat roofs, chrome-plated hardware, and horizontal grooves or lines in the walls. They were frequently white or in subdued pastel colors.
An example of this style is the Aquatic Park Bathhouse in the Aquatic Park Historic District, in San Francisco. Built beginning in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration, it features the distinctive horizontal lines, classic rounded corners railing and windows of the style, resembling the elements of ship. The interior preserves much of the original decoration and detail, including murals by artist and color theoretician Hilaire Hiler. The architects were William Mooser Jr. and William Mooser III. It is now the administrative center of Aquatic Park Historic District.
Although Streamline Moderne houses are less common than streamline commercial buildings, residences do exist. The Lydecker House in Los Angeles, built by Howard Lydecker, is an example of Streamline Moderne design in residential architecture. In tract development, elements of the style were sometimes used as a variation in postwar row housing in San Francisco’s Sunset District.
WILLIAM VAN ALEN, ARCHITECT OF THE CHRYSLER BUILDING DRESSED UP AS HIS STRUCTURE
ALEXIS VALLAFANE AND JOYCE GOLD GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Sources
WIKIPEDIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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Like swallows coming back to Capistrano (admittedly that happens in March, but you get the idea), New Yorkers come back from their summer homes. Could be Maine, Upstate New York (anything north of Westchester), Cape Cod or Out East. Like the swallows, this return is nothing new. New Yorkers have been coming back from their summer homes almost since the very beginning of the City.
They went not just for a change from the crowded, dirty streets of what was then New York City, tucked at the far bottom of the Manhattan island, but rather more pressing, to escape from the continuing epidemics of yellow fever and cholera that racked the City. Where in these early days – the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries – did they go?
Some went up the island.
One of the most famous summer homes in what now is the UES belonged the wealthy merchant and shipowner Archibald Gracie. Born in Scotland in 1755, Gracie arrived in New York in 1784 with a cargo of goods that netted him enough money to invest in a trading company and soon he was very rich. His regular residence was a State Street townhouse known as “The Pillars”. But like other wealthy city residents, he wanted a summer house, too.
For $3,700, Gracie bought 11 acres of rolling land facing Hell Gate, the section of the East River between Astoria and Randall’s Island, just beyond the northern tip of our own Island.
It took a day to sail from the Battery to reach his house at today’s East 88th Street. But Gracie and his family made the trip often, entertaining political and literary figures such as Alexander Hamilton (a business partner and the owner of a lovely summer estate in Harlem), James Fenimore Cooper, John Quincy Adams, and Washington Irving. Irving wrote of the Gracies, “Their country seat was one of my strongholds last summer, as I lived in its vicinity. It is a charming, warm-hearted family, and the old gentleman has the soul of a prince.”
Alas, but not the purse. Gracie lost much of his fortune by 1819 and the home. Through the mid- to late-19th century, the house changed owners at least twice. As the area’s summer estates were sold off and parceled out and Yorkville became more urbanized, the house fell into disrepair. And then, thanks to Robert Moses, it became the home of our Mayors.
John Jacob Astor build a mansion close by Gracie’s place, a modest summer home for America’s first multi-millionaire. It became known more for its literary and musical associations than for its architectural grandeur. When Washington Irvin wasn’t enjoying Gracie’s hospitality, he lived here, writing Astoria, a patriotic account of Astor’s failed fur-trading colony at Oregon. (Makes you think about long term summer guests.)
Nathaniel Prime also lived in this prime real estate hood. By 1830, Prime was one of New York’s five millionaires and first President of the New York Stock & Exchange Board. His country home stood near the East River facing east over Hell Gate and Long Island, situated between William Rhinelander’s estate to the north and the Astor Mansion to the south and close on to Gracie’s mansion.
And the UWS too. We have a contemporary photo of a spectacular summer palazzo owned by Dr. Valentine Mott.
Dr Mott was the most prominent physician in 19th century New York—a pioneer of heart surgery who at the age of 75 helped Civil War battlefield hospitals implement anesthesia. His year-round residence was on fashionable Gramercy Park. But during the summer, he left behind the hot city and fled to today’s West 94th Street and the former Bloomingdale Road – just about as far away as could be managed then. Today, the house would be smack in the middle of Broadway. Back then, this was the country; the Upper West Side was a collection of estates and small villages in the mid-1800s.
Others chose Harlem for their summer estate.
Why Harlem? The flat, rich, eastern portion of Harlem was fertile farmland, and some of New York’s most illustrious early families, like the Delanceys, Bleekers, Rikers, Beekmans, and Hamiltons kept large estates in the high western section. Harlem recovered slowly from the Revolutionary war struggles that took place there and remained largely rural through the early 19th century. Some of the estates were available at knockdown prices, and Harlem also attracted new immigrants to the City. Undeveloped, but not poor. It is said that Harlem was “a synonym for elegant living through a good part of the nineteenth century.”
To reach Harlem from lower Manhattan Island by stagecoach and later by horse car took a hard hour and a half to two-hour ride. But by boat, there was no lovelier vista than the banks of the East River from Jones’ Wood north, where the shore was dotted by splendid country homes with large grounds of well-to-do New Yorkers – except when steaming past Blackwell’s Island. “Sylvan” steamboats raced up and down the East River from Peck’s Slip to 120th and 130th Streets in Harlem via a stop in Astoria and through Hell Gate.
Alexander Hamilton’s uptown estate was called the Grange, after his father’s ancestral home in Scotland. In 1802, disenchanted with Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he “threw himself into building a house in northern Manhattan nine miles from town,” writes Richard Brookhiser in Alexander Hamilton, American. Hamilton commissioned architect John McComb Jr. (who also designed Gracie’s mansion) to build a Federal-style mansion on 32 acres near today’s 143rd Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem.
It was a simple, dignified house on a high foundation amid fields and woods. “The bay windows had sweeping views of the Harlem River to the east and the Hudson River to the West,” writes Brookhiser. Front and rear porticos were complemented by side piazzas. On the lawn, Hamilton planted 13 sweet gum trees (for the 13 colonies), gifts from George Washington.
Aaron Burr lived in Halem, too – but briefly – in Manhattan’s now oldest surviving house. The Morris-Jumel Mansion was built in 1765 as a summer retreat for British colonel Roger Morris and his American wife Mary Philipse. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Morris, a Loyalist, left for England. His home, which he called “Mount Morris,” was occupied by George Washington and then British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton, and the Hessian commander Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen.
In 1810, Stephen and Eliza Jumel bought the property. She was poor, he wasn’t. The Jumels spent several years in France, where they made friends in the elite circle around Napoleon’s court. They returned to the United States in 1828 to settle in the mansion. Inspired by cutting-edge French fashion, Madame Jumel bought new furniture and redecorated her home in the elegant Empire style. One year after her husband’s death in 1832 from injuries sustained in a carriage accident, Madame Jumel married former Vice President Aaron Burr in the mansion’s front parlor. The marriage was not a success, and the couple formally divorced in 1836.
And Astoria
By the 1830s, wealthy New Yorkers were finding that bucolic Queens made for a convenient escape from the ever more crowded and sometimes unhealthy conditions of their own tiny island. Between 1835 and 1841, streets in the townships along Long Island’s East River coast were laid out and buildings erected. By this time, ferries connected with Manhattan. Soon, these coastal areas would become refuges for wealthy New Yorkers, particularly Astoria and Ravenswood. Country estates with names like Bodine Castle and Mount Bonaparte served as getaways for rich Manhattanites. The Jacob Blackwell family (our Blackwells) lived there during the Revolution, in a large house at 37th Avenue overlooking the river.
These waterfront villas, built in Ravenswood during the 1800s, were abandoned and crumbling a hundred years later. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. These wealthy residents swam in the coves, sailed in local yacht clubs, fished in the river, and hunted ducks, plover, and snipe in the nearby marshes of Sunswick Creek (roughly along today’s 21st Street.)
The New York Times urged New Yorkers to make the trek out to Queens. In 1852, the New York Times urged New Yorkers to take a day trip to the countryside: Queens was underrated, fancier than Broadway, a great place to explore, and worth the trip from Brooklyn. “There are charming residences and delightful lawns at Ravenswood and Astoria,” said the paper as it urged people to take long walks to Astoria. “It is lamentable that with such fine weather and pleasant country promenades at hand, our fair friends, especially of Brooklyn and Williamsburg, do not avail themselves of their privileges. They would find an agreeable change from the usual hackneyed routes…Throw off this deathly indolence that is benumbing your physical and spiritual faculties”
On this last day of September, welcome home dear readers, from your summer estates and world travels. Thank you for reading.
PIGEONS FEASTING ON NEWLY LAID GRASS SEEDS AT THE TRAM LAWN. AFTER THE RAINS, THE GRASS SEED WILL BE LAID AGAIN
GLORIA HERMAN HAD THE RIGHT ANSWER.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Occasionally we hear from descendants of doctors who worked on Blackwell’s Island. This is part of the story of Dr. Arthur Mc Farland. Thanks to Laura Mc Kibbin for sharing the photos and story of her grandfather’s connection to our island.
Judith – attached are photos from my grandfather’s photo album.His name was Dr. Arthur H. McFarland, and he attended medical school at Columbia University.
I found him in the 1915 New York Census data and could not make sense of why he was living at the same place as other doctors, students, nurses, prisoners and asylum patients until I learned about Roosevelt Island.
He was an intern there at what he called “New York City Hospital” from June 1915 to June 1917. Some of his photos are labelled with the names of the people if anyone is interested in that information.
Laura McKibbin
Top row: Joe Smith, Pop Snyder, AH McFarland, John Webster, Stanley Boller, Joe Price, Lockrey, A.H. Smith2nd Row: Chief Bender, Price, Weiss, Bert Bastedo, John Lisa, Hayes, Sam Bayer, Brewster Doust, Amry Ellington 1st Row: D.A. Quick, Howe, Fluker, Damraus, Crawford, Donaldson, Cady, Larry Blake
Here are the people in the photos labelled RI 5 f: Top Row: Bostanian, unknown, Potter, Scoreson, Anderson, Weiss, Hayes, Roth, Greaves Third Row: Boller, Simpson, Miles, Rosenprang, Smith, Amett, Siebert, Price, Snyder Fourth Row: Newfield, AH McFarland, Lopez Bottom Row: Ellington, Bender, Boller Jr., Lisa, V. Weiss
I do not know much about the child in the photo, except that my grandfather labelled him “Boller Jr.,” so I imagine he is the son of the man in the left in the black pants, also labelled “Boller.”
Young doctors who worked at City Hospital
Three photos made into a composite of City Hospital
The former Smallpox Hospital , the Nursing School
Nurses from the New York Training School for Nurses.
Nurses in front of residence
Page from 1915 New York Census listing doctors
Dr. Arthur H. McFarland was born in 1891 As a boy in Merriam Park Neighborhood, St. Paul, MN
Working on the survey crew for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, about 1910
In the Bugle Corps at the University of Minnesota, 1911
If I understand correctly, the hospital in 1915 specialized in treating Tuberculosis? After his internship on Roosevelt Island, my grandfather was stationed in the Army in Jacksonville Florida, 1918-1919. This was at the height of the Spanish Flu in that area, and I have read many of the soldiers returning from WW1 that year were infected. I imagine grandpa treated many with Spanish Flu. He must have had a hearty immune system!
After the war, he moved back to Minnesota and joined the practice of Dr. Louis Nippert in Minneapolis. He was also on staff at Eitel Hospital, Later Abbott Hospital. He was married to Lilian Ferguson McFarland and they raised two children in Minneapolis. They had six grandchildren (I am one of their grandchildren.)
LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA HERMAN AND VICKI FEINMEL GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
LAURA MC KIBBIN
GRANTS
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When the little Congregation Ahawath Chesed decided to move from their Ludlow Street synagogue where they had been since 1846, they set out to impress.
And impress they did.
Numbering only 150 families, the German Reform congregation chose Henry Fernbach to design their new building. Fernbach was a Jewish German immigrant who had come to the U.S. in 1855 and would go on to make his mark in two widely divergent architectural venues: cast iron commercial buildings and Moorish Revival synagogues.
The fashionable 19th Century architectural styles had posed a problem for synagogue designers for decades. Gothic Revival was heavily used for Christian churches, while Greek Revival smacked of a tradition of pagan worship. Moorish Revival, however, harkened back to the pre-Inquisition days when Jews enjoyed relative freedom in Spain.
Central Synagogue 1892 — photo NYPL Collection
On the site at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street, Fernbach built for the tiny congregation a grand synagogue inspired by the Dohany Street Synagogue of Budapest. Twin octagonal towers rose 122 feet, topped by polychromed and gilded onion domes. A huge central rose window dominated the Lexington facade while two-story arched stained glass windows lined the sides.
Fernbach, reportedly the first Jewish architect in the U.S., used contrasting horizontal bands of stone, Moorish stone arches and exuberant roofline crenellation for dramatic effect. When it was completed in 1872 with only a few buildings around it, the synagogue was — as intended — impressive.
More so, however, was the spacious interior which could accommodate 1000. Fernbach’s High Victorian interpretation of the Moorish theme blanketed the surfaces with colorful and intricate stenciling. Deep, vivid colors like crimson and cobalt, burst from the walls. Gold stars against the deep blue ceiling represented the heavens above the worshippers.
Fire damaged the synagogue in 1886; however the interior was restored using the original 1872 plans; reclaiming the inticate stenciling and colors.
In 1898 Shaar Hashomayim merged with Ahawath Chesed and in 1915 the name was changed to Central Synagogue.
As the middle of the 20th Century neared, the congregation decided to refurbish the aging building. In 1949 they engaged Ely Jacques Kahn, who designed several skycrapers and simliar commercial structures. Not a fan of historic preservation, Kahn’s plan instead was a make-over.
His updating called for, among other things, the painting over of the Victorian stencilwork and replacing the Moorish chandeliers with Art Deco fixtures. Much of Ferbach’s lavish ornamentation was stripped away. The exterior was, happily, relatively untouched save for the removal of the roofline crenellation. Years later architect Hugh Hardy would explain Kahn’s renovation to The New Yorker as “He was embarrassed by all this decoration—you can see how he simplified it.”
Kahn’s mid-century designs would still be in place were it not for the devastating fire that tore through Central Synagogue in 1998. Started by a welder’s torch, the fire destroyed the roof, which collapsed into the interior. Because of water damage, 85 percent of the decorated surfaces were destroyed.
To many it appeared that Central Synagogue was lost. But for the intrepid congregation “lost” was not an option.
Hugh Hardy, who had restored several other New York City landmarks like Radio City Music Hall and The Rainbow Room, took up the challenge. The stained glass windows were in shards. Shattered pieces of encaustic tiles littered the ashes.
Sunlight streamed through the void where the ceiling had been. Molds were made of the chunks of decorative plasterwork before they were discarded. Drawings were done to document the sequence and placement of the ornamentation. Enough original glass from the windows was salvaged to restore one full window — which was dedicated to the firemen who saved the building. The remaining windows were reproduced using the original designs, photographs and matching glass
Referring to as much pre-Kahn documentation as could be found, Hardy’s plan to bring Central Synagogue back to its Victorian splendor took shape. When completed, the mid-20th Century constraints were gone. “What we have done is much more exuberant than what people here are used to, but it is original to the building,” Hardy told The New Yorker. “Now the building is as raucous as ever.”
Craftsmen, using 19th Century methods, painstakingly revived the interior. More than 5000 stencils were applied to the walls and ceiling by hand, using 69 colors. The pews were reproduced in walnut and ash to match the originals and they sit on flooring consisting of 4,000 square feet of multi-colored encaustic and quarry tiles. Of the 40,000 tiles only 10,000 of the originals could be salvaged. The remaining tiles were hand-made in England. While the exquisite ark miraculously survived the fire, it required careful cleaning, reguilding, refinishing, and partial repainting. Today the stars twinkle on a cobalt sky over the heads of the worshippers at Central Synagogue once again.
On Sunday, September 9th, 2001,I stood outside Central Synagogue and attended the celebration for the re-opening of the Central Synagogue. It was a wonderful afternoon and we all admired the restoration. Just 2 days later our world stopped, It was September 11th, 2001.
The Normandie at Hudson River Pier 38 – the Transatlantic Ocean Steamship Terminal of the French Line. FROM ED LITCHER:
On 9 February 1942, French Lines’ Normandie caught fire and capsized in New York Harbor. Normandie was in New York when France fell to the Nazis. She languished at her pier there, nor returning to France because of the war. She was seized by the U.S. government and it was decided to convert her into a troopship named Lafayette in honor of the Frenchman who aided the U.S. in its Revolutionary War struggle to escape from British rule.
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
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