Every summer during the early 20th century, Coney Island visitors could be found feasting on Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and homemade Coney Island custard, wading through the Atlantic Ocean, or taking a ride on the rickety cars of the Cyclone. For some, a trip to the world-famous Brooklyn beach also included a visit to a fully functional neonatal intensive care unit. Paying a quarter, they gained admission into a room displaying the frailest of infants as they slept in individual incubators.With few treatment options available for premature babies, pioneer of neonatal technology Martin Couney created an incubator showcase that remained one of the babies’ best chances for survival. Once admitted into Couney’s care, the babies received a bath and if they could swallow, a small dose of brandy. Afterward, they were swaddled and placed in incubators where they remained on view all day except when being fed breast milk by extensively trained nurses every two hours.
Little is known about the early life of Couney, largely due to the editorializing of his past to fit his desired narrative. Born in Krotoszyn, Poland in 1869, Couney immigrated to the United States in 1888. Though Couney claimed to have obtained a European medical license after studying in Leipzig and Berlin, he would have been too young to obtain said degree before leaving Europe at the age of 19. In addition, novelist Dawn Raffel’s nonfiction book The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, revealed that Couney changed his name on multiple occasions.
Couney also allegedly studied under Dr. Pierre-Constant Budin, whose research on breastfeeding, perinatal care well, and umbilical cord blood revolutionized the neonatal medicine field. Adding to his tale, Couney claimed that he served as Budin’s intermediary to exhibit his Kinderbrutanstalt or “child hatchery” at the 1896 Great Industrial Exposition in Berlin. Instead, it is more likely that if Couney had even attended the event or known Budin, he served as a medical equipment technician for the exhibition.
Though Couney might not have worked alongside Budin, the doctor’s early incubators quickly grew in popularity after debuting in 1897 at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Celebration and in 1901 at the Buffalo, New York Pan-American Exposition. Cashing in on the incubator’s growing reputation, Couney took the machines on the road, traveling across the country to major fairs and amusement parks to offer his services.
Beginning in 1903, Couney established two permanent incubator exhibits at Coney Island, one in Luna Park and another in Dreamland. Along the way, he hired nurse Annabelle Maye Segner, who later became his wife and focused on ensuring the exhibit’s cleanliness. Later on, Couney’s own daughter, Hildegard — who was born prematurely — assisted in the show’s operations as well.
While displaying helpless babies for crowds to gawk at comes off as unthinkable today, Couney’s showcase was just another iteration within the long tradition of medical and freak spectacles of the 19th and 20th centuries. As historian Bert Hansen discusses in his article “America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress,” medical spectacles such as the incubator babies strategically worked to “satisfy the public’s curiosity about the new miracles of medicine.” In a world beset by rapid changes to standard medical practices, public showcases at the turn of the century kept the masses informed and intrigued. In turn, the showcases secured monetary support.
Men and women looking at babies in incubators. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collection. Another crucial role that incubator shows played was in helping to fight against the growing eugenics movement. Proponents of this movement viewed premature babies as weaklings that would pollute the gene pool should they live to adulthood. Across the country, Better Babies contests awarded medals to babies who represented the fittest example of American offspring — many taking place at the same fairs where Couney’s preemies were displayed. Through his shows, Couney worked to disprove these beliefs and turn public opinion in favor of protecting and providing for premature babies.Though Couney’s program had an 85 percent success rate, medical professionals remained skeptical about the efficacy of incubators. Significant scientific research on the machines had yet to be conducted, and the machines were incredibly expensive to build, costing $75,000 or $1.5 million today. Wariness on the part of doctors also stemmed from incidents of machine malfunction. Particularly, a 1904 St. Louis incubator show run by one of Couney’s rivals turned deadly.
A few years later in 1911, shortly before the opening day for Couney’s show in Dreamland that summer, the amusement park burned down. Though all the babies were miraculously saved by the NYPD, the president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children argued that premature infant care should only take place within the confines of a hospital. Even so, hospitals at the time lacked the necessary resources and staff to provide the around-the-clock care Couney and his associates guaranteed their patients. In New York City, for example, a given hospital often only had one available incubator into the 1930s. If said incubator was not already in use, it was often prohibitively expensive for everyday families. In turn, Couney became known for accepting desperate cases, giving children the treatment they needed until they became well enough to return home or his operation was forced to close for the season.Lucille Horn, born in 1920 at only 2 pounds, owed her life to Couney. After doctors told Horn’s father that his daughter had no chance of surviving — her twin sister had just died at birth — he rushed her to Couney’s Coney Island show. There, she remained for six months under the watchful eye of nurses and spectators alike before being declared strong enough to go home. Horn eventually went on to live another 96 years, dying on February 11, 2017.
Though many in the medical community see Couney as absurd, his methods eventually found an ally in Dr. Julius Hess, considered today to be the father of American neonatology. Within the preface of his 1922 textbook Premature and CongenitallyDiseased Infants, Couney’s work is cited and 11 years later in 1933 the doctor also pledged his support for Couney’s show at Chicago’s Century of Progress.
In 1943, just as Cornell Hospital opened the first dedicated premature infant station, Couney’s Coney Island show was permanently shut down. Having lost his wife in his old age, Couney lacked the support and stamina to keep the operation open. Additionally, he was broke, having blown through most of his funds to pay for his show’s operating expenses during the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Rather than making the parents of his patients pay for their children’s care, Couney relied on the donations of spectators to make money — a financial strategy that fell apart when his showcase began declining in popularity.
Between 1896 and 1943, it is believed that Couney and his family took in around 8,000 newborns of which they were able to rescue 6,500. While Couney’s accomplishments may have been under-appreciated during his lifetime, for the thousands of preemies he saved and their families, he was nothing short of a miracle worker. Today, one in ten babies in the United States are born prematurely, but thanks to Couney’s medical innovations, these children now have a chance at living a full and healthy life.
SUGGESTION OF THE DAY
LET’S STOP PASTING SIGNS ON THE TRASH CONTAINERS LET’S ORDER METAL SIGNS WITH SATURDAY PARKING RULES TO BE POSTED ON THE LAMP POSTS.
PHOTO:ROOSEVELT ISLAND DAILY
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
SEND YOUR MEMORIES TO: rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
CHAPEL PLAZA WITH REFRESHED PICNIC BENCHES AND SEATING!!! GLORIA HERMAN, JANET KING, NINA LUBLIN,NANCY BROWN GOT IT RIGHT AND ED LITCHER GOT THE GRAND PRIZE: A single Feral pigeon – (Columba livia domestica), also called a city dove, a city pigeon, or a street pigeon.
Irene Madrigal is a sophomore at Barnard College intending on majoring in English and History with a minor in Spanish. As a native New Yorker, she can be found guiding her friends across the city and showing her love for her home borough, Brooklyn. When’s she not doing this, Irene can be found painting, baking apple pie in her kitchen, or writing her next article for the Columbia Daily Spectator and Untapped New York.
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This was a last minute visit. Yesterday the word was out (at the PS217 pollsite) that the mayor was visiting today to discuss Pickle Ball.
Assembly member Seawright had arranged this visit and she and Shelton Haynes hosted the mayor.
Well, other items were on the agenda including self governance and re-districting. We were seated in the Senior Center art room with the Zumba class providing music. Mayor Adams took questions, listened attentively and asked for notes to be taken.
The scouts officially welcomed him and presented him with artworks.
After about 30 minutes the intimate meeting was a crowd in the Senior Center. After a brisk walk we were in the NYPL branch and Tony Marx greeted him. A brief stop and we were hoofing it to the Tram.
The tram ride was fun, though the mayor could barely see out the windows with a crowd around him,.
On the platform he was gone, one hour total visit. He was due to make 23 stops today!!
Welcome roundtable discussion at the CBN Senior Center. Got to welcome the mayor and remind him that Queens residents (the Blackwell family) sold the island to the City in the 1820’s and we do not want to be redistricted back to that borough.
The mayor and party walked past the kiosk at a brisk pace and missed stopping in for a quick shopping spree and history lesson.
The mayor was greeted by our youngest scout members.
A quick stop at our library where Carlos Chavez-Branch Manager, Mayor Adams, Member Seawright, Tony Marx-President NYPL, and Shelton Haynes-President-RIOC had a quick visit.
The toddlers were so engaged in their song, the entourage was barely noticed.
The island in the 1800’s when we were part of Queens.
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
JUDITH BERDY CHRISTINA KIRKMAN
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
August Mosca, Elevated Structure, ca. 1946-1956, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Monroe Kornfeld, 1977.95
August Mosca, Subway Tunnel, ca. 1946-1956, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1988.35.1
August Mosca, Subway No. 3, ca. 1946-1956, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1988.35.2
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
From the David Ramsey Map Collection — a 1836 view of Blackwell’s Island and Ravenswood.
THE LAST TIME THIS ISLAND WAS PART OF QUEENS…. WHEN THE BLACKWELL FAMILY OWNED IT IN THE 1800’S!!
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
MANHOLE COVER NEAR EAST SIDE OF COLER WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED TOMORROW.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
“Give me comrades and lovers by the thousand! … Give me the streets of Manhattan!” —from ‘Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun’ by Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Most street signs in New York City are attached to light posts or traffic signal poles. In Paris and Tours, Madrid and Granada, Rome and Florence, as well as other cities across the Continent, street name signs are affixed to buildings. Occasionally, a more European version of street identification can be seen in NYC. Here are a few, all of them below 14th Street, that bring a touch of Old World charm to the Big Apple. We begin Downtown, move north up the west side to Greenwich Village, and then travel east to the East Village.
A reminder of a former campus.
Now serving as a residential building, with commercial space at the ground level, 84 West Broadway, is an ordinary-looking, red-brick building at the northwest corner of West Broadway and Warren Street. On its West Broadway-facing side is a reminder of a former name for the street, College Place. What began as King’s College in 1754 by royal charter granted by Britain’s George II, and then renamed Columbia College in 1784 because a kingly association was not wanted in a newly independent country, and is now Columbia University had its first campus here. Columbia relocated to what would become Rockefeller Center in 1857; by 1900 the school moved again to its present-day campus on Broadway in Morningside Heights. A little-noticed street sign, although hiding in plain sight, is not the only reminder of Columbia’s 18th- and 19th-centuries days in downtown. At the nearby Chambers Street subway station for the numbers 1, 2 and 3 lines a 1914, ceramic-tile mosaic depicts the school’s first building; discover this original subway art when you take our Subway Art Tour Four.
A street sign using fancy terra-cotta.
On the northwest corner of Hudson and Beach Streets, Number 135 Hudson is an 1886 red brick building. A simple, rectangular warehouse was given interest with Roman arches, created with squat brick columns, at street level. Unique craftsmanship was used to great effect for the cross-street identification. Leaf motifs surround the street names in a mix of high and low relief. Now used for residential purposes visitors can easily find the building.
More street sign using fancy terra-cotta.
The name ‘Beach’ is a corruption of the surname of Paul Bache, the son-in-law of an area landowner. Traveling east-west Beach Street covers but a three block stretch without a beach in sight. The name first appears in 1790. Once part of tony St. John’s Park, Beach Street attracted genteel families from the late 18th century until the Hudson River Railroad came to this part of town in the 1860s. Because the land was outside the crowded city citizens moved there to escape the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s and early 1800s; it was the country!
A painted street sign.
The street signs are painted at the corner of the former headquarters for the Grocers Steam Sugar Refining Company, which then sold it to the United States Sugar Refining Company, when the area, which has been called Tribeca since the 1980s, was undergoing industrialization. Now an upscale condo, it is known as the United States Sugar Building; its ten stories were the tallest in the city in 1853 when it was built. Washington Street, running north and south, begins at its southernmost point at Battery Place in Battery Park City, and ends in the north at 14th Street in the Meatpacking District. Named for America’s first president George Washington (1732–1799), Trinity Church ceded its land for the street to the city in 1808.
Another painted street sign.
And across the street 414 Washington Street, home to the Pearline Soap Factory in the late 1880s, has had a recent celebrity tenant, Justin Timberlake. He has since moved because the paparazzi were hanging around outside to snap his photo. The building has one condo loft unit on each of its seven stories. Although the painted Washington Street sign is mostly worn away, the one for Laight Street (the building is co-numbered 78 Laight) is clearly readable. Named by Trinity Church in 1794 for one of its vestrymen, Edward William Laight (1753–1852), a successful merchant, Laight Street is five blocks long in the Tribeca (which is an acronym from the three words, TRIangle BElow CAnal) neighborhood.
One building, two address.
Built in 1910, 420 Hudson Street/One St. Luke’s Place is a four-story, four-unit residential building. It has both addresses listed on this thin piece of stone. Hudson Street is a north-south running commercial thoroughfare; St. Luke’s Place, on the other hand is residential and most unusual. When Trinity Church was granted a charter in 1696 by England’s William II gave the church land, extending along the west side of Manhattan from present-day Wall Street to Greenwich Village. The church established St. John’s Cemetery, covering a two-block area east of Hudson Street, in 1812. For ease of access the city wanted to extend Leroy Street, which stopped on the east side of the burial ground and continued on the west side of it. Using its power of emanate domain to push through the cemetery in the early 1850s, half the cemetery remained; the other half had some of its graves moved, others not. On the north side of the street Trinity developed the land with a string of elegant houses. To help sales this newly-created stretch of Leroy Street was given some cachet by renaming it St. Luke’s Place; a consecutive, rather than alternating, numbering system was used too. After a succession of wealthy,19th-century merchants home owners, like the rest of Greenwich Village St. Luke’s Place took on a bohemian air in the early to mid-20th century. Max Eastman (1883–1969), editor of the revolutionary journal “The Masses,” lived at 11 St. Luke’s Place. Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) began his novel “An American Tragedy.” At No. 16. Marianne Moore (1887–1972), Pulitzer Prize winner poetess, lived at No. 14 in the 1920’s when she was editor of the literary magazine, “The Dial” and working at the NY Public Library branch across the street. Painter Paul Cadmus (1904–1999) lived at No. 5 in 1934 when the U.S. Navy censored his painting “The Fleet’s In,” from an exhibition of WPA artists at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC.
With a curious abbreviation of “Washington” this sign identifies this street corner on the sides of 92 Horatio Street, located in the West Village. Built in 1920 when this area was still rough not only around the edges but at its heart because of its proximity to the active piers of the waterfront; 100 years on this is now called in real estate lingo ”a boutique cooperative apartment building.” Divided into 77 units spread out over five floors this building is on the edge of the gentrified Meatpacking District.
A most unusual wooden street sign.
Not a vehicular street but a secluded, gated courtyard off Sixth Avenue, Milligan Place is only big enough to hold four late 1840s dwellings. This area of Greenwich Village was part of the 300 acres belonging to Vice Admiral Sir Peter Warren (1703–1751). Some of the estate was sold to Samuel Milligan in 1799. Aaron Patchin, who married Mr. Milligan’s daughter, Isabella, surveyed the land that same year. The father-in-law gave his name to cute little Milligan Place and the son-in-law gave his to Patchin Place, around the corner and backing onto the former. Tradition tells us that the three-story structures on both places were originally built as housing for the Basque staff of the first hotel built on Fifth Avenue, the 1854 Brevoort Hotel, only three blocks away.
A Beaux-Arts street sign.
Known as the Waverly Building, 24 – 28 Waverly Place is one of four corner Beaux-Arts buildings at Waverly Place and Greene Street. New York University’s Department of Music is located here, and the building is used for classrooms. Named in 1833 for Sir Walter Scott’s 1811 novel, though spelled differently, Waverly Place runs between Broadway to the east to Bank Street in the west. Number 24 Waverly Place is close to Broadway. For fans of “Mad Men,” Don Draper’s bachelor pad is located on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village.
A second Beaux-Arts street sign.
A general-office, multi-tenant building, 99 University Place dates from 1900. Running north and south University Place travels from Washington Square Park at its southern end and comes to an end at East 14th Street, near Union Square. Once part of Wooster Street, it was renamed in 1838, the year after New York University moved to the east side of Washington Square. The street has been the location of several education-related institutions, the Union Theological Seminary in 1838, the New York Society Library in 1856, and the Industrial Education Association, the precursor to Teachers College, in the late 1880s. The street is home to shops and restaurants, many catering to students at NYU and The New School.
A third Beaux-Arts street sign.
On the East 12th Street side of 99 University Place, the Beaux-Arts flourishes continue for this street sign. Part of the NYC’s east-west street grid, adoped in 1811, East 12th Street at this point is a mix of residential, commercial, and business properties. The neighborhood is kept young and lively with students from NYU and the New School.
Notice the periods following ‘Avenue’ and ‘Street.’
With a double address—101 Second Avenue and 240 East Sixth Street—this five-story apartment building dates from 1877. Its ground floor houses Block Drug Store, which was established in 1881. The street names are chiseled into two of the original stone quoins. Although this part of town is known today as the East Village, from 1870 to the mid-20th century it was Little Ukraine. Centered on Sixth and Seventh Streets between First and Third Avenues at its height 60,000 Ukrainian immigrants called this area home. A more diverse neighborhood in the 21st century, and few remember its nickname, some reminders, such as the Ukrainian Museum and some restaurants, such as Veselka, remain of the time when this area was a magnet for Ukrainian immigrants.
Set in stone, likely marble.
As part of the limestone trim, the stone identifying the corner of First Avenue and Nineth Street is set into the façade of what was originally Public School 122. Built in 1885 by the architect and superintendent for school buildings, Charles B.J. Snyder (1860–1945), the school was abandoned in 1976. A community center was established at 150 First Avenue soon after; and it still operates within the building. Artists, including Keith Haring, and dancers, including Charlie Moulton, Peter Rose, Charles Dennis, and Tim Miller began to work there. Director Alan Parker filmed “Fame” there in 1979. Money paid to use the former school for filming allowed for renovations, including a dance floor. In 1980 Performance Space 122 was established within the building, and “performance art” in the early 1980s was defined by artists who worked there. The careers of Karen Finley, Spalding Gray, John Leguizamo, and others got their start and encouragement at Performance Space 122.
A standout sign, white against red.
Dating from 1883 the building at 36 Bleecker Street has a white marble street identifier that stands out against the red brick. Built to house the Schumacher and Ettinger Lithography Studio, it has housed the operations of other printer-related businesses during its lifetime. The seven-story, Queen Anne and Romanesque-styled building was converted to condos in 2013. Since 1991 the corner of Mott and Bleecker has been co-named for Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), the founder of Planned Parenthood, which has its executive offices at 26 Bleecker Street. Named for Anthony Lispenard Bleecker (1741– 1816), an early 19th-century landowner and farmer, travels from The Bowery in the east to Eighth Avenue in the west. Tradition tells us that Mott Street was named for Joseph Mott, a butcher and innkeeper; but the name is of uncertain origins.
See unusual and unexpected sights when you take our guided walking tours of New York City. Take the Tour; Know More!
BOSTON CITY HALL ANDY SPARBERG, M.FRANK AND HARA REISER 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
Illustrations, from above: view of a PoW Camp, Isle of Man, April 1918 by George Kenner; Ellis Island in 1903 as seen from New York Harbour (New York Historical Society); Omne Bonum, a fourteenth century bishop instructing clerics with leprosy: Medieval depictions of leprosy commonly showed the patient to have red spots by James le Palmer (British Library); The leper (Lazarus clep), 1631 by Rembrandt; the island of Spinalonga and its abandoned leper colony; and abandoned North Brother Island (background) and South Brother Island in the middle of East River, less than a mile from Manhattan.
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
TUESDAY IS ELECTION DAY FOR OUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVE, DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY. WE WILL SEE YOU AT PS 217 FROM 6 AM. UNTIL 9 P.M.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2022
THE 760th EDITION
LUNCHING
IN A
LABORATORY
(IN BOSTON)
JANE WHITAKER
April 1913. “Old Colony Trust Co., Boston. Temple Place branch.” If the main course here is the bank, dessert would the Laboratory-Kitchen “licensed victualler” upstairs at left — part of the lunchroom chain started by chemist-breadmaker Bertha Stevenson, offering “delicious home cooking” for 15 cents. 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
Bertha Stevenson was born at a time when a woman’s interest in chemistry, or any scientific field, could only be channeled into the limited confines of women’s realm. That was the same era in which Ellen Richards, the first woman admitted to MIT, became “the mother of home economics.”
Even though Stevenson was younger than Richards, she ended up directing her postgraduate study of chemistry to bread making. On the bright side, she was quite successful, not only at marketing bread but also in creating a string of high-quality lunch rooms with prices low enough that young working women could afford them.
She began making bread in Cambridge MA around 1902. Her shop was quite fashionable in a refined way. According to one description, “The furniture is of the hand made order, simple in line, artistic in design. A few big copper vessels, gleaming red, a few palms, a rug or two, good, but not extravagant, a Ruskin portrait in a black oak frame, one or two Millet pictures, numerous quotations from Ruskin, Tolstoy, Morris.” About a year later, stories appeared in newspapers around the country describing her Samore Bread Laboratory, and congratulating her and her female associates for finally showing the world that college-educated women were good for something after all.
The following year they moved the bakery to Boston. A lunch room was opened with it, sponsored by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU), a non-profit organization in Boston founded in 1877 to advance the well-being of women.
The lunch room, known as the Laboratory Kitchen, was on Temple Place in Boston’s shopping district where it could serve women workers and shoppers. It carried over the Arts & Crafts style of the former Cambridge bakery, with muted greens and browns and touches of copper and brass. Servers dressed in Puritan costumes with white caps and kerchiefs. In addition to producing bread and inexpensive lunches, the plan was to set up a hot dinner delivery service that would free homemakers from kitchen drudgery.
Problems cropped up almost immediately. The Laboratory Kitchen was located on the 2nd and 3rd floors of an elevator building. Unfortunately the elevator often was out of service. Next, another restaurant physically resembling the Laboratory Kitchen opened on the ground floor, causing many lunchers to patronize it thinking they were in the Laboratory Kitchen. Meal delivery turned out to be much more difficult than expected and the delivery zone had to be cut back. As far as I could determine the delivery project was abandoned after the three-year WEIU contract expired.
But the lunchrooms proved to be successful. When Temple Place started up, a second Laboratory Kitchen, not under WEIU sponsorship, was opened on Bedford St. It was operated as a cafeteria, a type of eating place popular in Chicago but then unknown to Bostonians. Ellen Richards and a group of Boston’s progressive women pioneers attended an opening luncheon there where they learned how to handle a cafeteria tray.
Subsequent lunchrooms of the chain – of which there were eventually five or six — were all based on self service or counter service and were less expensive than the full-service Temple Place location. Stevenson used technological advances to cut costs and speed service. At one address outfitted with a lunch counter [location shown above on Bedford St., viewed from Kingston St.], guests ordered by number. Waitresses then relayed the number to kitchen workers on the floor below by punching the number in a machine and the order was sent up via a dumbwaiter under the counter. At another of the lunch rooms, she employed a simplified “Automat”-style set of heated or cooled boxes that she patented. Workers filled them from the back while patrons lifted a glass window in front and removed what they wanted. [see patent illustration]
I stumbled across a story of someone who was a regular at one of the Laboratory Kitchens in the early days. She began working at the Filene’s department store at age 15, getting $4 a week, which barely allowed her to pay for a ride on the “T” and a 15-cent lunch at the Laboratory Kitchen. Eventually she became a department store buyer and a women’s rights activist.
As popular as the lunch rooms were with women, they also attracted men, particularly after one opened in 1919 on Washington Street in the stretch then known as Newspaper Row.
The dishes served at Laboratory Kitchens, such as vegetable plates, chowders, and beefsteak pies, were not fancy. Bertha Stevenson was dedicated to providing lunches that were hot, healthful, and hygienically prepared. In one of the articles she wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine she chided young office workers who ate sweets for lunch, asking, “How can a girl who feeds herself on cream puffs be anything but mercurial?”
She retired in the 1940s but the last Laboratory Kitchen, on Lincoln St., survived until the late 1960s, still advertising its “real lunch without frills.”
“Digester Eggs” at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This plant is the largest of New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plant. The eight digester eggs process up to 1.5 million gallons of sludge every day.
ARON EISENPRESS, ED LITCHER AND GLORIA HERMAN 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)
SHORPY PHOTOS JANE WHITAKER (C) 2020
GRANTS
CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Photo of water towers on East 57th Street via Wikimedia
For over 100 years, water towers have been a seamless part of New York City’s skyline. So seamless, in fact, they often go unnoticed, usually overshadowed by their glassy supertall neighbors. While these wooden relics look like a thing of the past, the same water pumping structure is still built today, originating from just three family-run companies, two of which have been operating for nearly this entire century-long history. With up to 17,000 water tanks scattered throughout NYC, 6sqft decided to explore these icons, from their history and construction to modern projects that are bringing the structures into the mainstream.
Image via 6sqft
Water tank fundamentals When the Dutch settled New York City they found an island rich with waterways and natural streams. However, as the city’s industrial sector grew, so did its polluted waters. With no proper drainage system, standing pools of grime would form in the streets. The harm of these unsanitary conditions was not revealed until a group of wealthy New Yorkers formed the Citizens Association of New York to focus on public health reform. After the group’s survey revealed dangerously unhygienic conditions, a campaign was launched to improve the quality of water and people’s access to it.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1937). West Side Highway and Piers 95-96-97-98, looking west from roof of 619 West 54th Street, Manhattan. NYPL Digital Collection.
The Department of Public Works was later founded in 1870 to improve the drainage system and access to water. During the 1880s, indoor plumbing began replacing well-drawn water, and roughly 50 years later, top-floor storage tanks started popping up all over the city. Tanks were placed on rooftops because the local water pressure was too weak to raise water to upper levels. When construction started to grow taller, the city required that buildings with six or more stories be equipped with a rooftop tank with a pump.
About 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of water can be stored in the tanks. The upper layer of water is used for everyday use, with water at the bottom reserved for emergencies. When the water drops below a certain level, an electric pump is triggered and the tank refills. Gravity sends water to pipes throughout the building from the roof. A water tank usually lasts roughly 30-35 years. It can be built within 24 hours and takes just two or three hours to fill with water.
Photo via Rosenwach Tank Company
It’s a family business Only three companies construct NYC’s wooden water tanks: Rosenwach Tank Company, Isseks Brothers, and American Pipe and Tank. All three are family-run, operating for at least three generations. The Rosenwach Tank Company, the best known of the group, first began on the Lower East Side in 1866 by barrel maker William Dalton, who later hired Polish immigrant Harris Rosenwach. After Dalton died, Rosenwach bought the company for $55 and, along with his family, expanded services over the decades to include historic building preservation, outdoor site furnishings, and new water technologies. Rosenwach says it’s the only company that mills its own quality wood tanks in New York City.
Isseks Brothers opened in 1890 and are now overseen by David Hochhauser, his brother, and sister. As Scott Hochhauser told the NY Times, there have been few changes to their water tank construction process over the past century. Despite this, a lot of people are curious about the tanks. “Some are interested in the history; a lot of artists like them, for the beauty; and there are people who are into the mechanics of them. But I don’t get too many people call up to say, ‘Hey, tell me about those steel tanks.’”
According to their website, American Pipe and Tank is all about “sons apprenticing with their fathers,” proudly claiming their business as being generational. While the company has since expanded from its original services, the American Pipe & Tank Lining Co. remains the group’s oldest. They prepare, install and repair hot water tanks and fuel oil tanks in the New York City area.
Why wood? While the hand-made wooden barrels make us sentimental, they’re actually the most effective for the water tank’s job. Even the city’s most luxurious buildings, like 15 Central Park West, for example, have wooden tanks. Rosenwach uses Western cedar for their tanks, a cheap, lightweight material.Plus, wood is much better at moderating temperature than steel tanks. Steel tanks, while sometimes used, are more expensive, require more maintenance, and take more time to build. A wooden tank that can hold 10,000 gallons of water costs roughly $30,000. A steel tank of the same size can cost up to $120,000. And water stored in the wood will not freeze in the winter and stays cool during the hot summer months.Eventually, the wood will rot and will need to be replaced after 30-35 years. Kenny Lewis, a Rosenwach foreman, explained the process of the tank infrastructure to amNY: “When you first set them up they leak, but when they fill [with water], the wood expands and becomes watertight. Then, it’s like a giant toilet. When people use the water, the level goes down. All ballcock lets more in, and that water is pumped from the basement.”
Photo by Peter Burka on Flickr
Turning a basic need into an art form As part of a 2014 Water Tank Project, water tanks became an awareness campaign through art. To call attention to the global water crisis, the project enlisted support from artists and students from NYC public schools to create art on water towers. In addition to the world of art and public advocacy, water tanks have been seen in the architecture and real estate world. A steel water tank was converted into a fully functional rooftop cottage in Greenwich Village. The tank-turned-cottage sits above a two-bedroom condominium and sold for roughly $3.5 million. In 2012, artist Tom Fruin created a monumental sculpture of a water tower decked out in colorful plexiglass and steel. Situated at 20 Jay Street in Dumbo, the sculpture was part of Fruin’s “Icon” series. Editor’s note: The original version of this story was published on July 12, 2017, and has since been updated
CHEROKEE APARTMENTS EAST RIVER DRIVE AND 77 & 78 STREETS
are beautiful – and beautifully maintained – apartments designed specifically for families with tuberculosis patients. Originally known as Shively Sanitary Tenements (aka East River Homes, aka Vanderbilt model tenements), the buildings have rare features you’ll probably never see elsewhere.
Dr. Henry Shively, a prominent physician who advocated home treatment of tuberculosis, persuaded Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt to endow $1.5 million to build and maintain a model healthful living environment. Henry Atterbury Smith designed the four interconnected buildings.
You might say the apartments are built of air – providing abundant fresh air dictated many design features. The roofs had open-air recreation facilities; most street-facing windows were triple-sash floor-to-ceiling affairs opening on to balconies – to encourage open-air sleeping. Gas stoves were all equipped with forced-air ventilating hoods; even the staircases were open-air. (The staircases were also notable for having two handrails – one for children, one for adults – and seats on each landing in case you needed to rest.) The “lobbies” are Guastavino tile-lined vaults open at each end.
The sanitary, airy housing was intended to alleviate living conditions of the poor. But no sooner than the buildings were completed, architect Henry A. Smith declared all such housing a failure. “The model tenements are too expensive. They are built for the very poor, but the very poor do not live in them. They can’t afford it,” declared Smith in a New York Times feature.
The New York Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor leased 48 of the 383 apartments as a “Home Hospital.” In 1923 the charitable trust that governed East River Homes was dissolved and the buildings sold to City and Suburban Homes Company. In the 1930s the rooftop recreational facilities were removed and apartments were extensively remodeled. In 1986 the buildings were converted to a co-op, and renamed Cherokee Apartments.
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)
Top image: New Bedford Guide; second image: unknown; third image: MCNY, 93.1.1.8934; fourth image: New York Times 1916; fifth image: Bain Collection/LOC; sixth image: NPS]
In 1905, former steel magnate Henry Phipps donated $1 million to construct cleaner, more spacious apartments—”model tenements” as they were known at the time—for poor and working-class New Yorkers.
Henry Phipps’ Fifth Avenue home
At about the same time, he had embarked on another ambitious house-building project: that of his own new Fifth Avenue mansion. It would be across the street from the five-story townhouse he moved into at 6 East 87th Street after relocating to New York City from Pittsburgh a few years earlier, according to Christopher Gray in the New York Times.
The mansion appears to have been completed first. Described by Gray as “a low, broad Renaissance design of marble with a wide garden and driveway,” the magnificent house at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 87th Street sat just four blocks from the colossal mansion of his former partner at Union Iron Mills, Andrew Carnegie.
Like Carnegie’s mansion, Phipps’ house resisted the hideous architectural flourishes of some of the other Gilded Age palaces on Fifth Avenue, such as the ghastly mansion built by mining millionaire and senator William A. Clark ten blocks south at 77th Street.
The mansion’s second floor hallway
Facing away from Fifth, the Phipps house was surrounded by a gated low brick fence, behind which was a circular driveway. The mansion conveyed a sense of elegance but also privacy—perfect for Phipps, a low-key philanthropist who began funding research on tuberculosis after earning a reported $40-$50 million from the 1901 sale of Union Iron Mills, which became U.S. Steel.
Henry Phipps and his wife, Anna, 1910-1915
Not long after the mansion was done, the first of Phipps’ model tenements, 325-335 East 31st Street, was move-in ready. Roughly 800 residents occupying 150 new, airy apartments enjoyed steam heat, hot water, laundry facilities, tub baths, and rooms with windows that opened to the outside. The new flats even had a hedged roof garden, where kids could play.
“Henry Phipps, the millionaire philanthropist whose name has been so prominently associated with the war against tuberculosis, built the tenement as a place of comfortable living and of education,” wrote the New York Times in 1911.
Phipps Houses, East 31st Street, east of Second Avenue
In 1907, another Phipps model tenement went up on West 63rd Street (below), in the impoverished, mostly African-American neighborhood of San Juan Hill. In 1911, a third Phipps building was completed a block away on West 64th Street, according to Mike Wallace’sGreater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898-1919.
Other Phipps model tenements were planned, but nothing was built until 1931, when the company “put up Phipps Garden Apartments in Sunnyside, Queens, an intelligent and idealistic complex,” wrote Gray. “Rather than trying to solve the housing problem of the inner city—which was the goal in 1905—the Sunnyside apartments sought to draw its residents to an entirely new environment.”
Phipps Model Tenements, 235-247 West 63rd Street
After that, Phipps’ model tenement movement unfortunately fizzled out. As other idealistic builders of model tenements discovered, it seems that middle class folks ended up moving in. Inevitably the rent on a flat would become out of reach for the poor, who are forced back into dank, dark tenements, a Times article from 1912 explains. The nonprofit Phipps Houses still exists, providing affordable housing and other services to low-income New Yorkers.
Phipps house in 1927, destined for the wrecking ball
Phipps’ Fifth Avenue mansion didn’t last very long either. In 1930, the highly respected philanthropist died at 91. His obituary says of his mansion, “it gave way to the apartment house builder four years ago.”
Congregation Shaaray Tefila, 127 West 44th Street. Henry Fernbach, arch. (1869).
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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In our article the other day on Mount Saint VIncent, there was a mention of a small Jewish cemetery located on the site. Here is the history of the Shaaray Tefila Cemetery.
This detail from an 1856 plan for Central Park depicts Shaaray Tefila’s cemetery (denoted as “Jews’ Cemetery”) at 105th Street west of Fifth Ave
In 1845, a group of about 50 English and Dutch members of B’nai Jeshurun seceded from the synagogue to form Congregation Shaaray Tefila (Gates of Prayer). Shaaray Tefila built their first synagogue in 1846 on Wooster Street and continues today at their present temple on 79th Street in the Upper East Side.
The first concern of the new organization was the purchase of property for a burial ground and in January of 1846—before Shaaray Tefila was yet legally incorporated—two founding members, Morland Micholl and John I. Hart (both former presidents of B’nai Jeshurun) acquired land for this purpose. Situated on the south side of 46th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, the property purchased by Micholl and Hart was quickly found not to be suitable for burials and was resold. On November 24, 1846, Louis Levy (Shaaray Tefila’s first president) purchased another parcel, on 105th Street near Fifth Avenue, that would go on to serve as Shaaray Tefila’s cemetery for the next decade. Levy transferred ownership of the property to the congregation when they received their charter in 1848.
Diagram from an archaeological survey of Central Park, showing the location of the site of Shaaray Tefila’s former cemetery within the modern Conservatory Garden
Shaaray Tefila’s cemetery was located on the south side of 105th Street, west of Fifth Avenue, at the north end of today’s Central Park. The burial ground, 100 x 100 feet, was in the area now part of the Conservatory Garden. Just west of the former cemetery site is the Mount, where the Sisters of Charity established the religious community of Mount St. Vincent in 1847. Construction of Central Park forced both the Sisters of Charity and Shaaray Tefila to abandon their properties here. In 1856, Shaaray Tefila purchased a portion of the land held by its parent congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, at Beth Olam Cemetery in the Cypress Hills area of Brooklyn, and the two congregations decided to administer their burial grounds together. Remains from Shaaray Tefila’s 105th Street Cemetery were removed to their new burial ground at Beth Olam in 1857, at “very heavy expense to the Congregation,” according to an auditor’s report from June of that year.
A notice for the dedication of Morland Micholl’s monument at Shaaray Tefila’s 105th Street cemetery in 1854
It is not known how many members of Shaaray Tefila were interred in the 105th Street cemetery before its closure, but among their number was founding member Morland Micholl (mentioned above). A native of Chesham, England, Micholl was interred at the 105th Street cemetery when he died of a “short and severe illness” at age 56 in 1853. He was a prominent member of the city’s Jewish community for 30 years, and his obituary in The Asmonean asserts “his integrity as a merchant, his uprightness as a citizen, his piety as a religionist, and his charity as a man.” Friends of the late Mr. Micholl assembled at the 105th Street cemetery on October 29, 1854, to dedicate his monument—a 10-foot-tall marble obelisk that faced the cemetery’s entrance. Micholl’s monument would stand for just a few years before the cemetery’s removal to Beth Olam, where he is now laid to rest.
2018 aerial photo of the Conservatory Garden at Central Park; arrow shows approximate location of the Shaaray Tefila cemetery site (NYCThen&Now)
Associated Press Building Completed. Soaring above the entrance to the Associated Press Building is Isamu Noguchi’s News, the first heroic-sized sculpture ever cast in stainless steel.
CLARA BELLA, VICKI FEINMEL,LAURA HUSSEY, JINNY EWALD, EL LITCHER & ARLENE BESSENOFF ALL GOT IT RIGHT!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources
Sources: Plan of Buildings at Mount St. Vincent, Fourth Division—Central Park (Bacon 1856); New York County Conveyances, Vol 467, p520-522, Vol 489 p212-214, Vol 485, p207-208, Vol 668, p256-258 “United States, New York Land Records, 1630-1975,”FamilySearch; “Morland Micholl,” The Asmonean, Apr 22, 1853; “Special Notice,” The Asmonean, Oct 27 1854; “Monument to the late Morland Micholl,” The Asmonean, Nov 3, 1854; “The Cemeteries,” The Asmonean, Feb 22, 1856; “Shaaray Tefilla and the Cemetery Question,” The Asmonean, Jul 4, 1856; “The Cemetery Question,” The Asmonean, Aug 29, 1856; “Auditor’s Report: Congregation ‘Gates of Prayer,’” The Jewish Messenger, Jun 5, 1857; A Preliminary Historical and Archaeological Assessment of Central Park to the North of the 97th Street Transverse…(Hunter Research, Inc.1990); Shaaray Tefila: A History of its Hundred Years, 1845-1945 (Cohen 1945); National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form—Beth Olam Cemetery, Jan 2016; “Prepare for Death and Follow Me:”An Archaeological Survey of the Historic Period Cemeteries of New York City(Meade 2020)
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THE BEST PUBLIC ART INSTALLATIONS IN NYC TO SEE IN AUGUST 2022
UNTAPPED NEW YORK
This summer and fall, Thomas Paine Park will host artist Jaime Miranda-Bambarén’s sculpture installation Seeds (13 Moons). Situated in front of courthouses and the Jacob Javits Federal Building are 13 wooden seed sculptures. Interactive in nature, the sculptures invite their viewers to explore their unique crevices with every part of their body.
Raised_The Floating Playground. Courtesy of Eirini Linardaki.
Located at Owl’s Head Park is Eirini Linardaki’s faux-marble sculpture, Raised_The Floating Playground. Through her art, Linardaki brings memories of her childhood to life, creating works that represent lived experiences and feelings that are both unique to her own life and universal in nature as a means of addressing the human condition. Splitting her life between the Grecian island Crete and the New York island Manhattan, Lindarki uses rafts as a metaphorical vehicle to encourage viewers to find new meaning in their everyday lives while also remaining true to their roots.
Created in collaboration with the Hellenic Republic, Ministry of Culture and Sports, The Red Sand Project, and SHIM Art Network, Raised_The Floating Playground reflects on migration by sea over the last century and the inherent nomadic disposition of humanity. The sculpture draws inspiration from Owl Head Park’s position overseeing the New York Bay with its design featuring an assemblage of ambiguous objects ranging from handmade rafts to playground toys. Raised_The Floating Playground can be viewed through April 15, 2023.
Wall of Silence. Photo by Mark Peterson.
Photographer Donna Ferrato, alongside steel fabricator Amanda Willshire and architect Margie Soo Lee, created the sculpture Wall of Silence as a platform to bring awareness to the realities of gender-based violence while simultaneously encouraging viewers to reflect on how they can stand up for individuals who are criminalized for defending themselves against their abusers. The sculpture is strategically situated inside Collect Pond Park, located south of Canal Street between the New York County Family Court and the Criminal Court Building. In having placed the sculpture here, the artists prompt viewers to consider which individuals American institutions were built to protect and who they continue to serve to this day.
Collect Pond Park also encapsulates the feminine spirit in its location: it is nestled among streets where early suffragettes, such as Sojourner Truth, once strolled. Given this characteristic of the public art installation, Wall of Silence can also be viewed as a symbol of the power women and gender-nonconforming people have in mobilizing to enact change within systems of oppression. The art installation was made possible by the support and collaboration of the NYC Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. Wall of Silence will be on display through November 20, 2023.
Wall of Silence. Photo by Mark Peterson.
Photographer Donna Ferrato, alongside steel fabricator Amanda Willshire and architect Margie Soo Lee, created the sculpture Wall of Silence as a platform to bring awareness to the realities of gender-based violence while simultaneously encouraging viewers to reflect on how they can stand up for individuals who are criminalized for defending themselves against their abusers. The sculpture is strategically situated inside Collect Pond Park, located south of Canal Street between the New York County Family Court and the Criminal Court Building. In having placed the sculpture here, the artists prompt viewers to consider which individuals American institutions were built to protect and who they continue to serve to this day.
Collect Pond Park also encapsulates the feminine spirit in its location: it is nestled among streets where early suffragettes, such as Sojourner Truth, once strolled. Given this characteristic of the public art installation, Wall of Silence can also be viewed as a symbol of the power women and gender-nonconforming people have in mobilizing to enact change within systems of oppression. The art installation was made possible by the support and collaboration of the NYC Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. Wall of Silence will be on display through November 20, 2023.
Wanderlust. Courtesy of Norah Swartz. For the month of August, the Garment District Alliance will present Wanderlust, a public art exhibition featuring 18 mixed-media works created by Philadelphia-based high school student Norah Swartz. A rising senior at Springfield Township High School, Swartz specializes in mixed-media and 3D compositions including ceramics, sculpture, and glasswork. Her art has been previously exhibited at the Wharton Esherick print show.
Over the course of her junior year, Swartz created the pieces featured in Wanderlust, utilizing various mediums and materials such as glass, ink, glaze, and watercolor. At its core, Wanderlust represents the courage it takes to continue persevering in spite of life’s many hardships. Wanderlust also aims to show its viewers how positive influence from the right group of individuals can have the power to give people the support they need to pursue their dreams. The exhibition can be viewed in a street-level window at 215 West 38th Street until September 2, 2022.
Crochet mural of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Courtesy of Carmen Paulino. Hanging along the fence inside Cherry Tree Park is a crochet mural of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who on August 8, 2009, became the first Hispanic woman to serve in the position. Before ascending to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor also became the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State and the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S. federal court. As a tribute to Sotomayor’s historic legacy, artist Carmen Paulino created a crochet mural in her likeness.
The crochet mural is composed of crocheted contributions from over 100 artists from around the world ranging in age from 9 to 91 years old. In combining the efforts of so many people, the project represents the linking of distant communities together one stitch at a time. Besides Sotomayor’s mural, Paulino also creates crocheted artwork as the Hospital-Artist-In-Residence for The Creative Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the creative arts to people of all ages with cancer and other chronic illnesses. The crochet mural can be viewed until April 11, 2023.
Leaf, Boats, and Reflection. Courtesy of Yvonne Shortt.
Until June 17, 2023, MacDonald Park will host Leaf, Boats, and Reflection, a public sculpture created in remembrance of those who have lost loved ones to COVID-related deaths. To create the sculpture, artist Yvonne Shortt, known for other public artworks such as Pavillion Landing and Rigged?, worked in collaboration with artists Mayuko Fujino and Joel Esquite.
Leaf, Boats, and Reflection’s pond is made from a mirrored acrylic pane that reflects the sky above and the individuals looking down to examine its contents. Situated inside the pond is the sculpture of a woman’s head, looking up to the sky with her eyes closed in silent contemplation and prayer. Surrounding the head are various white boats holding candles, serving as a vigil for the dead. Stories collected from the local community by RPGA Studios inspired the ceramic relief tiles attached to the concrete border of the sculpture’s reflection pond. Overall, Leaf, Boats, and Reflection serves as a space for community members to place flowers and silent notes in the hopes of reaching out to lost loved ones.
THE CABIN THAT TYPHOID MARY LIVED IN ON NORTH BROTHR ISLAND LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated:
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The exclusion of “undesirables” to remote lands has a long history. The shameful attempts by contemporary governments to “solve” the refugee problem in that manner has had precedents.During the mid-1930s Mussolini dumped socialists and anti-fascists in the inaccessible and malaria-ridden southern areas of the country.The use of islands as off-shore detention centers has a parallel history. The government of Charles I locked up its opponents at Jersey, Guernsey, or the Isles of Scilly. Having lost the English Civil War, Charles I himself was incarcerated in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Faced with continuing sedition and agitation, Charles II sent several former leaders of the Interregnum into island isolation.Cut off from the mainland, prisoners were deprived of contact with family and friends and doomed to a solitary life. Remoteness allowed the authorities to install a hostile regime without legal checks and balances. Island detention became a tool in expelling criminals or political opponents (Robben Island for example) from society. The reputation of Alcatraz Prison until its closure in 1963 was a notorious one. To this day, Rikers Island in the East River remains the location of New York’s main jail complex.In the twentieth century island detention emerged in two different guises, one to quarantine those who were suffering from contagious diseases, the other to intern enemy aliens during two world wars.
Isle of ManAn “enemy alien” is a foreign national coming from a country at war with his/her country of residence. In 1766 William Blackstone published his influential Commentaries on the Law of England in which he stressed that during a time of war “alien enemies have no rights, no privileges.” The Crown exercised absolute power.On August 4th, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The next day Parliament passed the Aliens Restriction Act, declaring every citizen born in Germany or Austria-Hungary an enemy alien who was not permitted to mail a letter; travel more than five miles from their local police station; or own a camera or a car. Only suspect aliens were to be detained.That intention changed on May 7th, 1915 when a German submarine torpedoed the British liner Lusitania, killing more than a thousand civilians. Resistance to mass internment vanished overnight.The government announced that all male enemy aliens aged seventeen to fifty-five – naturalized or not – would be locked up for the duration of war. Many of them had settled in Britain years before, some families had been resident for generations. Internment damaged the lives of those detained, breaking up families, and disrupting social networks. It resulted in the destruction of well-established German communities in Britain.How does society deal with large numbers of internees? Due to their natural remoteness, islands have been used as prison sites throughout history, from Patmos to St Helena or Devil’s Island. The British authorities sent the German prisoners across the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man where the tiny village of Knockaloe became a complex of wooden sheds, housing 25,000 internees behind barbed wire.The same policy of interning those civilians who were born in enemy countries on the Isle of Man was followed during the Second World War. When Winston Churchill made his infamous call to “collar the lot,” the British government interned almost 30,000 German and Austrian – mostly Jewish – exiles in May and June 1940.Originally classified as refugees from Nazi persecution who posed no threat to national security, they became victims of a hysterical right-wing press that portrayed them as a potential fifth column of Fascist agents.
Ellis Island
Opened in 1892, Ellis Island served as a stopping point where immigrants were processed. During the first two decades of its existence, the island was not a detention center for unwanted aliens. That changed in 1917 when America entered the First World War. The Justice Department prepared a list of some 480,000 German aliens. Accused of spying for or supporting the enemy, more than 4,000 of them were detained on Ellis Island.On December 8th, 1941, one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war. Immediately afterwards New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who also acted as Federal Director of the Office of Civil Defense, ordered Japanese-Americans to be “held in custody indefinitely.” More than 1,000 businessmen and community leaders were arrested and interned on Ellis Island and later at Camp Upton on Long Island.The Mayor directed that Japanese nationals be confined to their homes pending a decision as to their status. Clubs and meeting places were put under police guard. The New York Times reported that officers went to every Japanese restaurant in the city, let diners finish, and then shut the business down. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was issued on February 19, 1942, and triggered the internment of 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent in ten different “relocation” camps across the United States.La Guardia knew Ellis Island well. Born in New York into an Italian immigrant family, he had worked from 1907 to 1910 as an interpreter at Ellis Island’s inspection station while attending law school at night. Having qualified, he began representing those who appealed against repatriation. Supporting immigrants gained him the respect of newcomers and their communities. It would launch his political career in a metropolis where more Italians lived than in Naples, more Irish than in Dublin, and more Greeks than in Athens.The Mayor rejected restrictionist policies in a climate of anti-(East European) Jewish and anti-Italian bias. He was less open-minded when it concerned Asian Americans, a group that had long suffered prejudice and discrimination (prevented from buying land or voting). No Japanese-American citizen or Japanese national residing in the United States was ever found guilty of sabotage or espionage.News of suffering at Ellis Island shifted public perception. The New York Times reported that the island’s name had become ‘a symbol for being unwanted by America’. Soon after the war the camp was closed. Acknowledging that mass internment of Japanese-Americans could not be justified, either morally or militarily, President Jimmy Carter eventually apologized for the draconian measure.
Leper Islands
Mass internment of enemy aliens was driven by anxiety rather than evidence. A climate of panic led to a whole group of individuals being treated as guilty, allowing for the creation of legal methods that violated its civil liberties. Islands of exclusion however were not just installed in times of war. Fears of infectious disease also caused calls for sufferers to be banned from society.Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by the “mycobacterium leprae” (identified in 1873 by the Norwegian scientist Gerhard Armauer Hansen). It affects the patient’s nerves, respiratory tract, skin and eyes. The illness causes the deformation of features, especially of the face and limbs. Segregation was recommended for prevention.For thousands of years this “mysterious” disorder had invoked a disturbing imagery of disfigured bodies. The Old Testament identified leprosy as a visible manifestation of a transgression against God, sent by Him as punishment for sin (Book of Leviticus). This portrayal of leprosy contributed to stigma-formation. Persons with the disease were isolated, ostracized, and condemned to a lifetime at the margins of society. Leprosaria were built in remote lands to quarantine patients. Leprosy was dreaded, not because it killed but because it left one alive with no hope or prospect.The bacterium responsible for leprosy is believed to have spread from East Africa, reaching Europe by the late fifth century when the first leper houses were documented. Lepers were treated as pariahs who were quarantined from society until the Church intervened. Managed by religious orders, clerics took care of the afflicted. Lazar houses offered a monastic refuge for the leprosy affected – religious isolation in order words.
Sufferers were kept away from the general public partly because it was believed that the disease was contagious and partly because of the public anxiety associated with the “divinely ordained” condition. The fear of lepers returned during the nineteenth century as increased travel in conjunction with intense colonial activity led to a growing number of infected. It forced governments to take action. When the First International Leprosy Conference took place in Berlin in 1897, it was agreed that isolation was the best method protecting the public from the “scourge.” The island idea re-emerged.In 1865, the Hawaii authorities passed an “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy.” Land on the island of Molokai was purchased to receive the first contingent of leprosy-affected people in January 1866. Between that year and 1905, nearly six thousand patients were exiled into life-long quarantine to leprosaria at Kalawao and Kalaupapa. It was not until 1969 that the legislation requiring involuntary lifetime isolation come to an end.Molokai set a precedent. In Europe the example was followed on Spinalonga, a barren island just of Crete’s coast. Nicknamed the “island of the living dead” or “walking corpses,” it housed a leper community from 1903 until 1957 where, as in all colonies, patients were deprived of all civil liberties.
North Brother Island
With the rapid increase of immigration from Russia, the Middle East and Asia, the number of leprosy cases in America increased. In 1921, the United States Public Health Service took over the state-controlled leprosy hospital in Louisiana (the first known cases of leprosy there were recorded in 1758). It was renamed the National Leprosarium, but became better known as Carville. At its peak, the institution housed four hundred patients.As New York was assimilating huge numbers of immigrants, many were forced to reside in overcrowded and unsanitary living quarters. Contagious diseases spread quickly. The afflicted were removed from the city’s teeming streets and forced into quarantine at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, located on a treacherous section of the East River named Hell Gate.
From 1885 until its closure in 1963, the hospital was home to hundreds of patients who suffered from various communicable diseases. One of those was Typhoid Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant cook who spent over thirty years in quarantine there. Patients lived under poor conditions in tents and huts around the hospital. Life at Riverside was the “black hole of Calcutta.” Those struggling with leprosy were confined to shacks on the perimeter. They were outcasts amongst the shunned.
Stigma & Language
Stigma is a social process characterized by blame, rejection, and – eventually – exclusion of a person or group identified with a particular health problem or mental disorder. It is a “dynamic” process as stigmas can be reduced over time and even eradicated.The advent of effective drugs in the 1940s drastically changed the course of disease and in many countries compulsory patient isolation was deemed no longer necessary. Elsewhere outdated laws remained in force. In the United States leper colonies continued to operate until 1975 when policies of isolation were finally disbanded (Japan revoked mandatory isolation of patients as late as 1996).The “cursed” term leprosy (the L-word) had become a synonym for suffering and isolation. Language plays a fundamental part in the fostering of social stigmas. At the Fifth International Leprosy Congress in Havana (1948), a resolution was unanimously passed recommending that use of the term “leper” be abandoned.Clinicians and professional researchers then insisted that the word leprosy be banished and replaced with “Hansen’s disease.” It was a vital step in changing government policies that would finally lead to the abolishment of leprosaria and the reintegration of patients into the community.
CLARA BELLA, ANYD SPARBERG, M FRANK, LAURA HUSSEY, VICKI FEINMEL, A BESSENOFF ALL HAVE A BROOKLYN CONNECTION
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
Illustrations, from above: view of a PoW Camp, Isle of Man, April 1918 by George Kenner; Ellis Island in 1903 as seen from New York Harbour (New York Historical Society); Omne Bonum, a fourteenth century bishop instructing clerics with leprosy: Medieval depictions of leprosy commonly showed the patient to have red spots by James le Palmer (British Library); The leper (Lazarus clep), 1631 by Rembrandt; the island of Spinalonga and its abandoned leper colony; and abandoned North Brother Island (background) and South Brother Island in the middle of East River, less than a mile from Manhattan.
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