Name Werner DrewesBorn Canig, GermanyDied Reston, VirginiaBborn Canig, Germany (now Kaniów, Poland) 1899-died Reston, VA 1985Nationalities American
Werner Drewes was born in Canig, Germany, and began studying art in 1920 at the Stuttgart School of Architecture. A year later he transferred to the Stuttgart School of Arts and Crafts. From 1921 to 1922, he studied with Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, and Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in Weimar. After visiting the United States in 1924 and 1925, Drewes returned to work at the Bauhaus. In 1930 he came back to the United States, where he was introduced by Wassily Kandinsky to Katherine C. Dreier, a founder of the Societe Anonyme, and exhibited his work in Buffalo, New York. From 1934 to 1936, Drewes taught at the Brooklyn Museum under the auspices of the WPA Federal Art Project. In 1936, the year he became an American citizen, Drewes joined the American Artists Congress, exhibited at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and helped found the American Abstract Artists group. A member of the faculty at Columbia University in New York from 1937 to 1940, Drewes also served as director of graphic art for the WPA Federal Art Project in New York in 1940. In 1944 he studied printmaking at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. The following year he taught at Brooklyn College. In 1946 he joined the faculty of the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained until 1965.
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MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2022
THE 754th EDITION
WERNER
DREWES
ABSTRACTIONIST ARTIST
Werner Drewes, Pointed Brown and Floating Circles, 1933, oil, pen and ink, and pencil on wood panel, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.17
Werner Drewes, Black Curve on Yellow Horizontally Connected (Variation), 1938, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Wolfram U. Drewes, Harald Drewes and Bernard W. Drewes, 1990.105.55
Werner Drewes, Loose Contact, 1938, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Wolfram U. Drewes, Harald Drewes and Bernard W. Drewes, 1990.105.40
Werner Drewes, Still Life with Bananas, 1952, color woodcut and celloprint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Wolfram U. Drewes, Harald Drewes and Bernard W. Drewes, 1990.105.10
Werner Drewes, Industrial, 1961, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Wolfram U. Drewes, Harald Drewes and Bernard W. Drewes, 1990.105.15
Werner Drewes, Stepping Up, 1984,Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Wolfram U. Drewes, Harald Drewes and Bernard W. Drewes, 1990.105.27
There are over 200 images of the works of Werner Drewes on the Smithsonian American Art Museum website:
FORMER BANKER’S TRUST BUILDING AT 14 WALL STREET ED LITCHER GOT IT RIGHT
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Caroline Astor, Alva Belmont, Alice Vanderbilt—the names of these famous and formidable women conjure images of Fifth Avenue chateaus, luxurious balls, and other trappings of the Gilded Age good life.
Hetty Green, probably around the turn of the century
While all three women flaunted their deep wealth in an era that encouraged ostentatious display, none can claim the title of the richest women in Gilded Age New York City. That honor goes to Hetty Green, a legendary figure in Gotham who was almost the polar opposite of these society doyennes.
Instead of moving into a Manhattan mansion, Hetty lived in unpretentious hotels and boardinghouses in Brooklyn and Hoboken, hoping to avoid paying high property taxes, according to Atlas Obscura. Rather than swanning around in Charles Frederick Worth gowns, she dressed in plain black clothing, reportedly donning the same garments every day. And she turned a family inheritance into a fortune equal to $3.8 billion today with shrewd, long-term investments on Wall Street and in real estate.
Young Hetty Robinson, undated
Hetty’s story isn’t a rags to riches tale. Born Henrietta Robinson in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1834 into a Quaker family that made millions in the whaling and shipping industries, she took a strong interest in business and finance as a young girl, according to the Library of Congress.
During her teenage years she became her family’s bookkeeper, and she accompanied her father to counting houses and stockbrokers. Her father’s influence was strong: “she shared his pleasure in making money,” wrote Janet Wallach, author of The Richest Woman in America.
Hetty in 1905
After attending finishing schools in New England, Hetty went to New York City to live with the family of Henry Grinnell, her mother’s cousin. Grinnell was “wealthy and well-connected,” stated Wyn Derbyshire in Hetty Green: The First Lady of Wall Street. The plan was for Grinnell, who lived on tony Bond Street, to introduce Hetty to young men suitable for marriage.
But unlike most women of her age and class, Hetty wasn’t interested. She went back to New Bedford, using much of the $1200 her father had given her to buy fashionable clothes to invest in bonds, …
Hetty at 40, in her New York Times obituary in 1916
In 1860, her mother died, and she and her father relocated to a brownstone on West 26th Street in New York City, where her father was now a partner in a shipping firm. He died five years later. How much of his roughly $6 million fortune was left to Hetty seems to be in dispute, but she was awarded at least $1 million or perhaps all of it.
In 1867, Hetty was 33 years old. With her parents gone, she married Edward Henry Green, a 44-year-old millionaire trader introduced to her by her father before his death. Hetty’s father had worried about her status as an unmarried woman, but before his passing, she and Green announced their engagement. Hetty’s father was canny enough to stipulate in his will that Edward Green would receive nothing from his estate. Hetty herself also made her new husband swear off any claims to her fortune.
“It was an odd match: Green was a wealthy silk and tea merchant who’d lived in the Philippines for 20 years,” stated the New England Historical Society. “And he liked to live large. He dressed well, enjoyed clubs, appreciated fine food and tipped generously.” Her husband’s large lifestyle left him in debt some years into their marriage. Hetty used her own money to bail him out, which led to a long estrangement whereby the couple lived apart for several years.
Hetty around 1910, on a stoop of a house she likely did not own
Now a mother of two, Hetty began building her fortune. “She developed a strategy of investing for value, which made her the richest woman in the world,” according to the New England Historical Society. “Hetty Green didn’t buy stocks on margin. She invested in real estate and bonds, railroads, and mines. She bought cheap, sold dear, and kept her head during financial panics.”
Unsurprisingly, New York newspapers began taking note of Hetty, who was so unusual for several reasons, including the fact that she was the rare woman on Wall Street. In 1885, the New York Times dubbed her “the millionaire in hoopskirts.” A few years later, she was called “the queen of Wall Street.” The nickname that stuck throughout her life was “the witch of Wall Street,” thanks in part to her black clothes and the magic she had for making money.
Hetty (left) with her son and daughter, now grown
Stories circulated about her penny-pinching ways. One rumor had it that her son’s leg was amputated after an injury because Hetty wasted precious time searching for a free clinic rather than taking him to a doctor, and gangrene had set in. Another claimed she regularly ate cold oatmeal for lunch at her office at Chemical Bank, where she handled her investments. It was also said that she had no office at all; to save money on rent, she sewed pockets under her skirts and stashed documents there rather than in a desk.
What most New Yorkers didn’t know is that she was generous. Yet she kept her charitable gifts private. “She loaned money at below-market rates to at least 30 churches,” wrote the New England Historical Society. “According to her son, she secretly gave many gifts to charitable causes and supported at least 30 families with regular incomes.” She took care of her husband before he passed away in 1902. She credited her business acumen and simple, frugal lifestyle to her Quaker upbringing.
Hetty Green died in 1916 at age 82 after suffering a series of strokes. At her death, this legendary New Yorker who continues to fascinate us wasn’t just the richest woman in New York—she was the richest woman in America.
JUST ARRIVED KIDS AND ADULT TEE SHIRTS SHOP AT THE KIOSK
COLLEGE OF MOUNT SAINT VINCENT RIVERDALE,BRONX, NEW YORK
LAURA HUSSEY 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)
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EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
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]
New York City’s parks are open for all to enjoy year-round but the number of visitors skyrockets in the summer season. Those interested in exploring park histories are invited to research Municipal Archives’ collections for information and inspiration. Of these, the most significant is the Parks Drawings Collection which documents sixty parks, parkways, and playgrounds in Manhattan including more than 1,500 drawings of Central Park.
View at Mount St. Vincent, ca. 1863. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.For the Record has highlighted Central Park drawings in several blogs including Skating in Central Park, The Belvedere Castle in Central Park and Central Park, a Musical Destination for all New Yorkers. This week’s article looks at the area of the park that has the richest history of use and settlement—the quiet and rustic northeastern corner. It is adapted from our book, “The Central Park: Original Designs for New York’s Greatest Treasure.”
Plan of Buildings at Mount St. Vincent, 1856. Parks Drawings Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.Established in 1673, the old Boston Post Road—the original mail-delivery route from New York City to Boston—meandered between two rocky ridges in this area just west of what is now 105th Street and Fifth Avenue. It was here, in the mid-1750s that John Dyckman built a tavern to serve travelers on the road. Not long after, Andrew McGown purchased the land and tavern, running it successfully through the Revolutionary War giving the area its name at the time: McGown’s Pass.
McGown’s Pass Tavern, Central Park, ca. 1905. Photo Courtesy New York Public Library.The McGown family ran a prosperous business until 1845, when they deeded the land and buildings to the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. The nuns renamed the area Mount St. Vincent’s and within a few years, they established a convent and school. They added a two-story residence for the chaplain to the existing structures, as well as a stately brick convent house that contained a beautiful chapel and large dining rooms. The land also included a small Jewish cemetery. In 1856, before the nuns had consecrated their new chapel, they received word that the city would be acquiring their land for the creation of the new park.
Chapel and buildings at Mount St. Vincent, ca. 1865.The nuns relocated to The Bronx, and their buildings became the early park headquarters. At one point the families of both Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux lived in the premises while the two men had offices in the main building. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the US government took over the complex for use as a hospital for wounded soldiers who were, curiously enough, tended by the same Sisters of Charity who had previously owned the buildings.
Mount St. Vincent Art Museum, 1863. Parks Commission Annual Report, NYC Municipal Library.After the war, the main building returned to its original use when it was leased as a restaurant, while the chapel was transformed into a museum until it burned down in 1881. Two years later, the Mount St. Vincent Hotel, based on designs by Julius Munckwitz, was built on the site. The new building proved to be immediately popular with wealthy New Yorkers, as the New York Times reported in 1886: “No matter how fast the team nor how elegant the equipage a turn ‘on the road’ is not done in proper shape unless it includes a bite or a sip in the Mount St. Vincent
Mount St. Vincent, Central Park, Design for a Refreshment House, 1883. Julius Munckwitz, Architect. Parks Drawings Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
Mount St. Vincent, Central Park, Design for a Refreshment House, 1883. Julius Munckwitz, Architect. Parks Drawings Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.Now that it was a playground for drinking and dancing for the city’s elite, the Sisters of Charity asked that their name no longer be associated with the establishment. Renamed for the family most associated with the site, McGown’s Pass Tavern remained a popular destination through the turn of the century, but as automobiles replaces horse and carriages the business took a downturn. In 1915, Parks Commissioner Cabot Ward felt that the location would be better suited for a police station. Owner Max Boehm was ordered to vacate the premises and its contents were put up for auction. While the police station was never relocated to area, in 1917 the building was torn down. In more recent history, the location of the former convent, tavern and swanky hotel is now the home of the Central Park composting operations. Throughout the year, fallen leaves and branches are brought here and turned into nutrient-rich compost, which is used for plantings and horticultural projects throughout the Park.Take a few minutes to view some of the exquisite drawings of Central Park in the gallery.
LINCOLN BATHS AT SARATOGA STATE PARK CLARA BELLA AND TRACY ROBIOTTO 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
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This article was originally published in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on September 21, 1878.
I was awfully glad when a friend proposed a trip to Saratoga. I had been awfully jolly in New York, but New York had gone out of town, leaving nothing but its streets and its tram-cars behind it. In London we have such a perpetual flow of visitors — over one hundred thousand daily — that a fellow doesn’t so much miss the “big crowd” as here, consequently when Saratoga was decided upon I felt extremely pleased indeed. I had heard much of the palatial river steamers, and expected much.
I was down at Pier 41 [at the foot of Canal Street] at an early hour, and found the whole place occupied by one boat. Such a boat! white as the driven snow, and larger than many an English village. The people kept going into her until I imagined some game was up, and that they were stepping out at the other side. No such thing; there was room for all ay, and more.
It was something immense to see the men getting into line for the ticket-office, with as much precision as if they were on parade. No hurry, no crush, the regular “first come, first served” business, not as with us, when the biggest man comes to the front, and muscular Christianity tops over everything. And the luggage! Mountains of it, from enormous nickel-bound boxes, fit to carry Cleopatra’s Needle, to dainty hand-bags, such as Queen Victoria’s take with them when rushing at sixty miles an hour “Upon Her Majesty’s Service.’
It was awfully amusing to see this mountain gradually dissolving, as truck after truck bore its load within the recesses of the palpitating [steamer] Drew. For the first time I made acquaintance with a Saratoga trunk [a large traveling trunk, usually with a rounded top], and from what I see of it, it seems a first class invention — for another man’s wife. Near the gangway stood a handsome, gentleman-like man, whose semi-naval uniform looked as though cut by [the tailor and draper] Smallpage, of Regent Street. This, I was informed, was Captain [Stephen R.] Roe, one of the most courteous and best-respected captains of the sea-like rivers of America. I was instructed by my friend to take a state-room — at home I would have asked for a berth — and, having paid my money, became entrusted with the key of a charming little bedroom, better fitted up than that of my club, and boasting an electric bell.
As I turned out of my newly acquired apartment I was much struck by a very stylishly attired young lady, gotten up to the pitch of traveling perfection, and as new as Lord Beaconsfield’s [recently awarded Order of the] Garter. The man with her was also as if recently turned off a lathe. He carried a couple of hand-bags that had never seen rain or shine before. He hung lovingly around the lady, bending over to her, whispering into her ear, touching her hand, or her dress, or her parasol. “By Jove!” thought I, “this is a brand-new bride and bridegroom, and what a doosid [devilish; confounded; damned] queer place to select for the [honey]moon.” Mentioning this to Captain Roe, with a smile, he ordered a portly colored stewardess to open a door tight opposite to where I stood. “This,” he said, “is the bridal chamber — we have two on board. As the pink one happens to be occupied, I can show you the blue.”
Availing myself of the captain’s kindness, I entered the [room], which is a symphony in blue and white, with a ceiling resembling a wedding-cake. It is sixteen feet long, twelve broad, and nine feet high, and piquante as a boudoirette in Le Petit Trianon [a chateau at the Palace of Versailles which served as a retreat for Marie Antoinette]. The walls are white, supported by fluted pillars with gilt capitals; the cornices of gold, and in each corner stands a statuette of Cupid. The ceiling is a perfect [em]broidery of white and pink and gold, frozen lace-work, ornamented with medallions representing appropriate scenes in mythological history. Wreaths of orange blossoms entwined with forget-me-nots decorate it, within which are amorous love-birds, while in the center of the ceiling, in relief, a pair of turtle doves bill and coo upon a perch composed of hymeneal torches, and the new spent arrows of the rosy god [Cupid].
The chamber is lighted by two windows, hung with blue satin curtains trimmed with gold fringe, the inner curtain being of lace. A mirror, whose gilt frame is composed of Cupids and orange-blossoms, extends from floor to ceiling; an inlaid table upon which is placed a richly chased tray, with ice pitcher and goblets, an easy-chair a caressing lounge, a rosewood toilet-stand fitted n blue, and the bed, constitute the furniture of this fairy-like apartment. Such a bed! rosewood, gilt to the carpet, with a blue satin spread covered with real lace, pillows to match, and a rug as soft as the tenderest sigh ever breathed by love-stricken swain. The president of the company, too, is the happy possessor of a special room fitted up in the extremity of good taste.
A gong sounded for dinner, and, following a strong lead, as we do at whist, I found myself in a large, brilliantly-lighted apartment, set with several tables. The menu was extensive enough to meet the requirements of the most exacting appetite, while the viands bore witness to skillful cookery. After dinner I went for a stroll, yea, a veritable stroll — always striking against the bride and bridegroom — in a saloon picked out in white and gold, the chandeliers burning gas, and the motion being so imperceptible that the glass drops did not even waggle — on a carpet fit for Buckingham Palace, and in a grove of sumptuous furniture; then forward, where many gentlemen in straw hats were engaged in discussing the chances of General [Ulysses S.] Grant for something or other, I know not what [Grant was considered a candidate for a third term as President in the coming 1880 election]; then aft, where many ladies sat in picturesque traveling attitudes, gazing at the soft outlines of the shore on either hand, some alone and some doing the next best thing to flirting.
What a sleep I had! No more motion than if I was at the club. No noise, no confounded fume of train-oil and its rancid confrères. I slept like a humming-bird, and next morning found myself at Albany. This place is on a hill, surmounted by a white marble building, and Capitol, which, when competed, will be an awfully imposing affair. I took the train for Saratoga — a drawing-room car — and such a boudoirette on wheels! — I felt as if I was in a club-window all the time.
Saratoga is awfully jolly. It is the best thing I have seen, with its main street as wide as the Boulevard Malesherbes or Haussman [in Paris], and lined for a mile and a half with magnificent elms, which shade hotels as big as some European towns. It is always thronged with carriages just like Rotten Row [an upper-class riding ground in London’s Hyde Park] in the season, and lots of people on horseback. The piazzas of the hotels are crowded with stunningly pretty girls, dressed, all over the place. Overhead is an Italian sky, blue as sapphire, and a golden tropical light falls around, picking out the shadows in dazzling contrast.
“I guess,” as the Americans say, I’ll drive my stakes pretty deep here.
Illustrations, from above: Steamboat “Drew” underway; and Steamer “Drew” courtesy Donald C. Ringwald Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum.
Thanks to Hudson River Maritime Museum volunteer researcher George A. Thompson for finding and transcribing this article. If you enjoyed this post and would like to support the Hudson River Maritime Museum become a member or make a contribution.
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)
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A circa 1940s postcard shows Eastern Parkway. Acacia Card Company, collection of Susan De Vries
Developed in the early 20th century, a time when the apartment house was coming into its own, Eastern Parkway is a panorama of grand apartment buildings.This was something of an accident. The area was originally intended by the city of Brooklyn to become Prospect Park and then, when that didn’t pan out, a Parisian-style boulevard lined with mansions on spacious grounds. But litigation prevented development in the area until World War I.The Park That Wasn’t.In 1858, the new Brooklyn parks commissioner, James Stranahan, hired engineer Egbert Viele to design a public park that would surpass Manhattan’s new Central Park in every way. Viele, who was muscled out of designing Central Park by the superior talents of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, was eager to prove himself in Brooklyn. He envisioned a large park bisected by Flatbush Avenue that included Mount Prospect and its city reservoir to the east and the Revolutionary War’s Battle Pass to the west, both the highest points in Brooklyn
Grand Army Plaza and the entrance to Prospect Park, with Eastern Parkway in the background, in a circa 1901 photograph. Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress
The city bought the land needed, but before work could begin, the Civil War started. Viele went off to design battlements for the Union Army. While he was gone, Stranahan had Olmsted and Vaux look over the plans. The pair totally changed the placement and configuration of the park, moving it completely to the other side of Flatbush Avenue. When Viele came home, they had upstaged him again.
Changing the park’s location left the city with a lot of newly acquired land it no longer needed. The city kept the area around Mount Prospect, but sold off the rest, which became most of today’s neighborhood of Prospect Heights.
Olmsted and Vaux’s plans for the park included Grand Army Plaza and two new, European-style boulevards lined with trees and equipped with service lanes, Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway. They were to be Brooklyn’s Champs-Élysées.
Work started on Eastern Parkway in 1870 and was finished in 1874, meant to coincide with the opening of Prospect Park. Both the designers and Stranahan intended that Eastern Parkway, especially near the park, would soon be lined with large mansions on spacious grounds, making it the wealthiest and most desirable address in Brooklyn.
Architects Shampan & Shampan added Gothic flair to their 1924 Art Deco-style building The Woodrow Wilson
But it didn’t happen. Litigation over property that had been seized by eminent domain caused the land across from the reservoir to remain undeveloped into the 20th century. Prospect Heights developer William Reynolds planned a huge mansion for himself on the corner of Underhill Avenue, well touted in the papers, but seemingly never constructed. The areas between Grand Army Plaza and Washington Avenue remained empty scrub land as the new Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, designed by McKim, Mead & White, rose next to the reservoir.
A New Subway Line Heralds Apartment Construction.
It took the 1903 announcement of a new subway line under the parkway to finally jumpstart the first development. And that development was not across from the museum; it was farther east in what was being called the “Eastern Parkway District.”
Several large development companies began building limestone row houses and flats buildings along the parkway, especially on the north side of the street between Franklin and Utica avenues. Soon, medium-sized walk-up apartment buildings followed, most four stories tall. As the open-trench subway construction stepped up, more and more of these apartment buildings rose in anticipation of thousands of new middle-class renters. Advertisements abounded in the papers touting apartments of four to five rooms, with “cedar wardrobes, parquet floors, electric lights, vacuum cleaner, maid’s toilet, heat and hot water.” They were just a precursor of the splendor to come.
Eastern Parkway’s First Luxury Elevator Buildings.
In 1916, the Martinique Apartments at 163 to 169 Eastern Parkway opened for business. The complex was built and owned by the Taggart Building Company and was designed by Clarence L. Sefert. Located directly across from the museum, the Martinique was the forerunner of the many buildings to follow. Clad in white limestone, this six-story Renaissance Revival elevator building was elegantly festooned with ornamental columns, swags, and cartouches.
Standing alone on the block, the Martinique complemented the museum and exuded class and good taste. Advertisements for the building noted that the apartments were divided into suites of “three, four, and six rooms, which may be connected in a way, making nine, 10, and 12 rooms. In finish and details, nothing has been overlooked.” There were no prices listed — if one must ask, then one obviously can’t afford it.
The building filled up quickly, with many of the renters mentioned in Brooklyn’s society pages. The success of the Martinique was a permission slip to other developers, who eagerly began building six-story or higher elevator apartment buildings along Eastern Parkway, on Lincoln Place and around the park oval. Many of the developers built multiple buildings here.
By 1929, the Belcher Hyde map of this area shows wall-to-wall apartment buildings lining the parkway and surrounding streets. Some buildings were enormous, others much more modest, all catering to those of middle-class income up to the wealthier individuals who would have purchased houses on the Gold Coast of Park Slope a generation before.
The 1920s are often seen as a golden age for New York City apartment buildings. Advances in steel construction and building technology made it possible to build larger and taller. Real estate sections of the paper that once touted fine townhouses in the best neighborhoods now shouted out the glories of apartment living. Every building offered features and amenities making their address the best of the best. Many of these ads were specifically written to lure Manhattanites back to Brooklyn.
At 61 Eastern Parkway, The Abraham Lincoln’s exaggerated neo-classical details stand out in white against a red brick facade
Most of these buildings were developed and designed by first-generation success stories, men who knew what the majority of their customers – people just like them – wanted. The apartments had everything: large rooms, the latest in modern conveniences, full concierge service, maid’s quarters, elevators and impressive marble-filled lobbies.
The names of the buildings were impressive too. Past U.S. presidents, their wives and swanky upper-class-sounding monikers abounded, all harkening to the realization of the American Dream: The Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, Martha Washington, Coolidge, Harding and four named after Abraham Lincoln. There was also the Traymore, Gray Court, Vassar Hall, Vassar Court, the Park Lane and the Copley Plaza Apartments. And then there was the grand Turner Towers.
Turner Towers: The Ultimate Eastern Parkway Apartment Building.
Turner Towers was the brainchild of the Turner Brothers Building Company, whose president was Samuel Turner. Previously, the firm was responsible for modest apartment buildings in East New York, Brownsville, and Flatbush. Turner was “moving on up” himself. The complex was built in 1927, a relative latecomer, and was designed by Morris Henry Sugarman and Albert Berger, both born in Eastern Europe. They also designed the Plaza Lane and Park Lane Apartments located nearby.
While Turner Towers didn’t have a posh name draw, it certainly became one. It was huge at 15 stories with four wings. It initially had 181 apartments ranging from three rooms to nine rooms, the latter with five bathrooms and 13 closets! It was touted in newspaper headlines as “Bringing Park Avenue Ideals to Brooklyn Home Seekers.”
A cast stone detail with a foliate border and head from Turner Towers. Image via Brooklyn Museum
Turner explained, “While in Manhattan there is also an adequate supply of the truly luxurious kind of apartments such as you see on Park Avenue, there are none such in Brooklyn…The people who come to us…are people who seek a degree of luxury, an amount of space, and the kind of service which, until our building opens, will have been unknown in the history of Brooklyn.”
He thought his building would draw not only Manhattanites but Brooklynites as well. He was right. Some of the first new tenants were wealthy people from Park Slope who abandoned their townhouses for apartment living. The society pages announced every new arrival. They also printed sketches of the lobby and entrance and ran stories about some of the more colorful residents.
The story of the battle between Turner and residents Mr. and Mrs. James W. Samuels ran in several papers in 1928. They couple had a pampered Pomeranian named Peggy. Building policy said dogs were not allowed in the passenger elevators because of complaints from other tenants. The Samuels, who lived on a high floor, refused to use the service elevators like other dog owners and sued Turner. Mrs. Samuels, who told reporters that she was a countess and a member of the Romanov family, and her husband, who bragged of being the nephew of a British peer, were apoplectic. “I won’t ride in the service elevator,” he said. “I am not a servant.”
The case finally went to a judge, who told the Samuels that the dog could ride in the passenger elevator with them only if they held her. Her feet could not touch the ground. The papers ate it up.
Eastern Parkway apartment living may have arrived late, but it certainly did arrive. Today, Turner Towers is still one of the most desirable addresses on Eastern Parkway on a street of desirable addresses.
As the 20th century advanced, many of these same Eastern Parkway addresses changed demographics, as the post-World War II mass exodus to the suburbs left a lot of vacancies along the parkway. The Martinique became a popular striver’s row-type destination for immigrants from Martinique, coincidentally, and other Caribbean countries. The parkway’s annual Labor Day weekend West Indian Day Parade is a reflection of the large Caribbean American presence in Crown Heights and beyond.
The Lubavitch Hasidic community is centered around its world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, near Kingston Avenue. That community has expanded along the parkway and the adjacent streets, and in addition to apartment buildings and homes, includes the modern Jewish Children’s Museum and several large yeshivas and meeting halls on Eastern Parkway.
In 2017, Prospect Heights residents proposed the Prospect Heights Apartment House District, whose southern border includes blocks on Eastern Parkway. The parkway itself was designated one of New York’s few scenic landmarks in 1978. Today, the thoroughfare Olmsted described as a “shaded green ribbon,” despite automobile traffic, remains an elegant and bucolic approach to the heart of Brooklyn’s cultural institutions and Prospect Park.
[Photos by Susan De Vries unless noted otherwise]
Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Fall/Holiday 2021/22 issue of Brownstoner magazine.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Cooper Hewitt Museum Arlene Bessenoff, Ed Litcher, Hara Reiser & Ellen Jacoby got it right!!!
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All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated:
The Brownstoner
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Harriete Estel Berman uses post consumer, recycled materials to construct jewelry, Judaica to sculpture with social commentary. Berman’s art work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Africa. Her work has been acquired for the permanent collections of 16 museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Detroit Institute of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Jewelry uses post-consumer recycled materials to reflect the values of our consumer society.
Judaica by Harriete Estel Berman focuses on the concept of Tikkun Olam “repair the world” with the use of post-consumer recycled tin cans.
Sculptures include domestic appliances remarking on the roles of women, the influence of advertising and commentary about our consumer society. Environmental commentary issues include the impact of lawns, and plastic waste in our oceans. Social commentary includes sculptures about our K-12 educational system.
“For nearly three decades, Harriete Estel Berman has made it her sacred mission to create work that addresses cultural issues and political hot buttons.” *
Harriete’s artwork turns ordinary materials from the waste stream of our society and recycles it into something extraordinary.
“Using every last scrap as a source of energy and inspiration she up-cycles her materials in uber-crafted, intens-ellectual objects of art and social commentary that are the ultimate expressions of sustainability.”*
Berman’s jewelry examines value and identity in our consumer society. Grass/gras‘ is a nine-foot square lawn about the unsustainable green lawn. Measuring Compliance and Pick Up Your Pencils, Begin critiques our educational system built on standardized testing. A new Judaica series is about the10 Modern Plaques.
An ongoing series of necklaces about identity in our consumer society using thin lines of black and white plastic made to look like a UPC code around your neck.
The Identity Collection uses colors, patterns, and UPC Bar Code as a commentary about how we create an identity in our consumer society by what we buy and why we buy it.
Since 1988, I have decided to use recycled materials diverted from their destiny as trash. Sculpture social commentary includes women’s roles in society, identity in our consumer society, environmental issues, a critique of our current educational system, gun violence, consumer debt and our unstable economy.
On the face of it, it’s a RIOC Bus Stop Sign pointing in the wrong direction, but I still think that RIOC secretly and intentionally created the sign to commemorate Douglas Corrigan an American aviator, who in 1938 was nicknamed “Wrong Way.” He received his nickname after completing the first half of a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, California, to New York City, in a plane that he rescued from a trash heap, but on his return trip, he had a navigational problem that sent him from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to Ireland.
Ed Litcher
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 PBS CRAFTS IN AMERICA
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Renewable energy is coming. Sooner or later; sun and wind. So far, New York has not done much with wind energy. Big changes are now occurring. But many possible slips exist between windmills and wires. Blow on…..
New York is ranked as a windy state (Albany?) but was only 11th in the US at the end of 2013 for installed wind power capacity, with 1,722 megawatts (MW) installed. In 2016, wind power provided 2.94% of in state energy production. This increased to 3.66% in 2019.
Our wind power has come from onshore wind farms, the first of which, Madison Wind Farm in Madison County, with a generating capacity of 11.55 MW, came online in in 2000. Soon to follow were the 6.6 MW Wethersfield Wind Farm (Wyoming County) and the 30 MW Fenner Wind Farm (Madison County). Good, but these are still small projects.
Expanding this production faces lots of problems. One is that wind farms take up a lot of real estate. Another is that while some people think the turbines are beautiful, at least from a distance, few people want to live next door to them. And the generated power must be transformed and distributed along wires. Transformation infrastructure is big and, if more distribution capacity isn’t created, then a growing percentage of newly generated power will be “bottled up” – undeliverable. But no one wants to live next to large new transformer stations or under new, long electric lines that would be needed to carry more wind generated power.
Offshore wind farms deal with some of these issues.
In 2009, state utilities such as the New York Power Authority and Long Island Power Authority explored the possibility of large-scale offshore facilities, either in the ocean or in the Great Lakes. In 2011, The New York Power Authority cancelled the Great Lakes Offshore Wind project and now, the focus would be on offshore generation in the Atlantic Ocean.
Lots of difficulties must be overcome. Aside from enormous technological hurdles, the siting of large facilities in New York state generates controversy, a problem accentuated by a catalog of diverse municipal efforts to zone or ban wind farms. (Remember the fuss over turbines off Cape Cod, which disturbed the view of many wealthy residents.) Such conditions helped to produce in summer 2009 a Code of Conduct promulgated by Andrew Cuomo, then state Attorney General, and embraced by wind developers responsible for most of the state’s facilities. In a significant reform aimed at encouraging investment in clean energy technology, Governor Andrew Cuomo on August 4, 2011, signed the Power New York Act of 2011, establishing a unified siting review process for major electric generating facilities; that is, facilities with a generating capacity of 25 MW or more.
Spurred by a $4.37 billion federal auction of more than 488,000 acres of offshore leases in the New York Bight (basically the continental shelf), these wind farms will help New York realize its 2019 mandate to generate 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Fourteen miles off the New York coast, vast fields of offshore wind turbines are planned.
Before we go on, let’s look at these offshore turbines. They are really big! Wind turbine blades can be longer than a football field, and turbine towers can be 100 meters or taller – nearly twice as tall as the average onshore turbine and almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower. The specialized specialized boats that deliver and install turbines also have extendable legs that can measure 100 meters.
This past February, New York State broke ground on its first offshore wind farm. The South Fork Wind project off the Long Island coast is expected to be operational by the end of 2023. New York has the most offshore wind projects underway of any state, with five in active development. South Fork Wind is being billed as one of the first-ever commercial-scale offshore wind farms in North America. Once completed, it should be able to generate 130 MW of power — enough to power 70,000 homes in nearby East Hampton.
That alone amounts to a major scaling up of offshore wind capacity in the US. The nation so far only has two operational wind farms along its coasts — off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia — with a combined capacity of just 42 MW.
That’s set to change dramatically over the next few years. Ørsted and Eversource, the energy companies developing South Fork, have an even bigger project in the works nearby: Sunrise Wind, a 924-MW wind farm that’s expected to break ground next year.
Altogether, the offshore projects under development in New York state’s current portfolio total over 4,300 MW of clean energy. By 2035, the state hopes to harness more than twice as much renewable energy from offshore wind. To get there, Governor Kathy Hochul in January announced $500 million in funding to build up manufacturing and supply chain infrastructure for offshore wind. The money will also go towards updating the state’s ports to prepare for the boom in wind farms.
New issues have arisen – fear that the turbines will disrupt maritime life and interfere with ship traffic. Studies have shown that these new constructions will not harm maritime life – and, around the large underwater bases, may support it. The Coast Guard says offshore wind turbine grid designs will not require changes to shipping routes nor will projects interfere with radar. But these remain constant concerns.
Also, while turbines lie offshore, the whole operation depends on onshore infrastructure. Offshore power needs an elaborate infrastructure onshore to assemble and maintain the turbines and then to distribute the power over existing – or new – lines. Growing an offshore wind industry will require the transformation of the shoreline to construct and maintain the giant turbines.
The two city sites under development for this lie along the Arthur Kill on Staten Island, a shipping channel with direct access to the Atlantic, and are part of a larger plan to develop an offshore wind supply chain network in New York City. Both proposed sites – the Rossville Municipal Site and the Arthur Kill Terminal – have the acreage needed to build the enormous components of offshore wind turbines. Both are also home to wild woodlands and marshes that have grown undisturbed for decades, becoming home to vultures, deer, geese and other wildlife. These would be replaced by enormous new port facilities, for manufacturing and assembling wind turbine components.
A conceptual rendering of the Arthur Kill Terminal layout. COURTESY OF ATLANTIC OFFSHORE TERMINALS
To support the construction of near-ocean turbine ports, the City created a plan in September 2021 that would invest $191 million to repurpose publicly and privately owned marine terminals, piers, shipyards and vacant waterfront lots. These areas would be transformed into new manufacturing facilities, ports and assembly stations, where thousands of workers can build and service the enormous wind turbines.
If completed, the two Staten Island sites would join the city’s first onshore facility designed to support offshore wind farms at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. This city-owned property will be renovated by Equinor, a Norwegian state-owned energy company, and BP, a British oil and gas company. The site will also be a power interconnection site, where underwater cables will deliver the electricity generated at the seabound wind farms.
New York aims to build 9 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, enough to meet about 30% of the state’s total electricity needs. For densely populated areas like Long Island and neighboring New York City, the ocean represents one of the few available areas for installing large amounts of renewable energy capacity to meet demand from millions of households. More than 4.3 gigawatts of offshore wind projects are already under development, including the planned 1.2-gigawatt Beacon Wind farm and the 2.1-gigawatt Empire Wind project, which is divided into two phases.
Planned offshore wind developments in southern New England and New York Bight waters are shown here, along with areas under consideration for future wind leases (in purple). Tufts University School of Engineering image.
Generating clean energy is one thing, moving it is another. Expansive dreams about renewable energy bump up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
New York State’s electrical transmission network, we understand, can add up to 8,000 MW of wind energy without affecting reliability. But this looks at the State as a whole. New wind energy is not distributed evenly across the network. The issue is will network capacity be available where new power is delivered onshore? Moreover, the power grid is balkanized, with many miles of power lines divided among many owners. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments and numerous permits. Every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners.
Finally, the State’s goal of generating 9 gigawatts of wind energy seems far larger than what the network can absorb, even given that much of this will replace existing fossil power. Given the new geography of wind power production, it’s hard to think that this will not demand an extensive remodeling of the state grid.
A footnote. A Times article today notes that seven Bitcoin companies use some 1,045 MW of power in their cryptomining business. Jes notin’…
ED LITCHER: Skyline Ceremony in Brooklyn : [Brooklyn Heights Promenade Dedication] October 7, 1950 HARA REISER 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)
CITY COUNCIL REDISTRICTING WOULD MOVE OUR DISTRICT FROM MANHATTAN TO QUEENS.
IT IS YOUR TIME TO WRITE AND COMMUNICATE WITH THE REDISTRICTING COMMITTEE
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, AUGUST 6-7, 2022
THE 747th EDITION
CITY COUNCIL
DISTRICTS
DUE TO BE CHANGED
WE COULD BE IN QUEENS!!
QUEENS???
WE DO NOT LIVE IN QUEENS!
Hi, I am writing to you to tell you that if you live east of First Avenue from 54th street to I believe 79th street (not sure whether it is south or north on 79 Street, Roosevelt Island, down to Sutton Place, down to 54th street — there are some places where it changes, it is not a straight line), the new City Council map puts you in a city council district in Queens which will be folded into an existing Queens City Council district (primarily Sunnyside and Long Island City
There is nothing wrong with Queens, except, of course, that you don’t live there — the practicality of it is that when you have a problem you will have to call your Queens councilperson, and they will be busy with issues from 75% of their consituency that lives in another borough.
It is very important that as many people from the affected area go on record with the Commissioners with respect to their opposition to this redistricting plan as soon as possible. We need as many people as possible to send letters to each of the Commissioners (list attached), as well as to attend and testify at the public hearing, which will be held on Monday August 22, 2022 from 5-9:30 (again details are in the information below and we don’t know yet whether there will be a zoom).
The redistricting plan puts Hunter College in two City Council Districts and all of the hospitals in the Queens district. If you have a small park or perhaps a school or a library that gets the benefit of participatory budgeting, how will that happen when your council person is in Queens?
Also attached is a sample letter (tailor how you wish but remember to mention the criteria in the charter, that is critical).
We need as many people as possible to send the letters and to testify at the public hearings. Please spread this to everyone in your building and in neighboring buildings and any friends you may have in the affected areas. Please email to let me know whether you are writing letters and in addition if you are going to sign up to testify. We are doing this with other concerned community groups and neighborhood assns.
Also annexed is a resolution adopted by Manhattan Community Board 8 which gives an excellent overview of what is happening, opposes the redistricting plan, and offers an alternative that would keep Manhattan i.e., the UES in tact.
THIS IS URGENT AND NEEDS TO GET DONE BEFORE THE HEARING ON AUGUST 22.
JUST ARRIVED CAPS BUCKET HATS AND VISORS SHOP THE R.I.H.S. KIOSK
FROM ED LITCHER Ron and Fay-Vidra Vass – Another brick in the foundation has been lost.
If memory serves, their early connection to the island grew from their connection to Goldwater. They were always a dynamic duo. In the community’s early days, if anything was happening on the island Ron and Fay were always present and were probably in-charge.
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
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
GRANTS
CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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I don’t usually write about subjects that have been well covered elsewhere. Mark Kurlansky’s, The Big Oyster, his history of oysters in New York, is really a good read. But the book came out almost 20 years ago, so let’s take a look at what’s happened to oysters in our fair city since then and what we can (and can’t) expect in the future.
Dear reader, I confess that I love oysters – raw, ultra-fresh, with just a drop of lemon juice – none of the wicked hot sauce that disguises the glorious taste of the sea, which is why we eat them. And yes, I’ve heard the joke – “The bravest man in history was the guy who first ate an oyster.”
New York was Oyster Heaven.
We are told that 350 square miles of oyster beds lined the lower Hudson. Some biologists estimate that our harbor contained half of the world’s oysters. Archaeological evidence gathered from tremendous mounds of oyster shells (“middens”) indicates that our oysters were not only plentiful, but they were huge. Shells from these middens measure up to 10 inches, and early European travelers describe the shellfish as being about a foot in length. So big that the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray wrote that eating a New York oyster was like eating a baby.
The Landing of Henrick Hudson, based on a painting by Robert Wise, Gilder Lehman Collection’
The Dutch hoped to find pearls among all these oysters, but, alas, not to be. Only good for eating and for some construction – the lime used in Trinity Church was made from ground-up oyster shells.
And New York became the world’s Oyster Capital.
Local varieties included Blue Points, Saddle Rocks, Rockaways, Lynnhavens, Cape Cods, Buzzard Bays, Cotuits and Shrewsburys. People ate them raw on the half shell, as oyster pie, oyster patties, oyster box stew, Oysters Pompadour, Oysters Algonquin, Oysters a la Netherland, a la Newberg, a la Poulette, roasted on toast, broiled in shell, served with cocktail sauce and stewed in milk or cream. They ate fish with oyster sauce, poultry stuffed with oysters, oysters fried with bacon, and oysters escalloped, fried, fricasseed, and pickled. Oystering, from gathering to marketing, was a major New York City industry.
Early on, our oyster became world-renowned. Kurlansky writes, “Before the 20th century, when people thought of New York, they thought of oysters. This is what New York was to the world—a great oceangoing port where people ate succulent local oysters from their harbor. Visitors looked forward to trying them. New Yorkers ate them constantly. They also sold them by the millions.” In the 19th century, when Europe and America were in the throes of an oyster craze, tons of oysters were shipped abroad from New York and many more carried to the far reaches of our country. (Pickled oysters were a huge export product.)
New Yorkers dined on oysters in restaurants (we are told that Delmonico’s popularized oysters raw on the half shell). In oyster cellars (the equivalent of our papaya bar, but most were seedier and often much rougher). In Canal Street oyster cellars, the price was All You Can Eat for 6 Cents (but if you pushed this too far, you might find a bad oyster slipped into the pile). Oysters were our street food, peddled at all hours from pushcarts, along with hot corn, peanuts, and buns. Floating oyster markets were built that could tie up along the Hudson and East Rivers. By the 1880’s the barges had become two stories high, with elaborate ornaments
Thomas Hogan. “Up Among the Nineties.” From Harper’s Weekly, August 15, 1868. Library, Bard Graduate Center.
Oysters were the supremely democratic food: Rich and poor New Yorkers slurped the same oysters, often from the same pushcart. Although not many could keep up with Diamond Jim Brady, the legendary New York gourmand, who started his pretheater dinner with three dozen. It was claimed that the very poorest New Yorkers “had no other subsistence than oysters and bread”. Fortunately, oysters are nutritious—rich in protein, phosphorus, iodine, calcium, iron, and vitamins A, B, and C.
Nicolino Calyo. “New York Street Cries: The Oyster-Stand,” 1840–44. Watercolor on paper. Museum of the City of New York
But it was too good to last. New Yorkers overfished (the Dutch had attempted to regulate the oyster catch) and, of course, polluted the oysters’ watery homes. In 1900, we harvested a billion oysters from the lower Hudson. In 1921, the New York City Health Department closed the Jamaica Bay oyster beds, then responsible for 80 million oysters a year, due to fears of food borne illness, including typhoid. From there the end came fast, and six years later, in 1927, the last New York City oyster bed was closed in Raritan Bay.
But change may be on the way. Our waters are much cleaner and wildlife – birds, fish, whales – are returning. Maybe oysters, too.
Just a bit of background here. Oysters reproduce unromantically. Male oysters release sperm into the water, hopefully meets up with eggs released by female oysters. Those that connect become “spat” and spend the next three weeks or so drifting on currents and tides feeding on phytoplankton or microscopic algae. They will develop a thin shell and a slimy foot to help find a location in which to stick itself in place and settle down – an old oyster shell works fine. Once a baby oyster has found a perfect spot, it will secrete a liquid cement-like substance that fixes or glues itself in place to spend the rest of its life in one place.
The sex life of an oyster is striking. Most spat are males with some individuals transforming into females after the first or second spawning. Oysters may go back and forth between sexes several times during their lifetime. (One article says that female oysters are just older male oysters – “their gender is very fluid.”) This all sets the mind to wandering.. An oyster can live between 10 to 20 years, but most will only survive about four or five years. Which years do you think it likes the best?
Our waters are now clean enough that oysters have reappeared here and there around the lower Hudson. Spat were discovered living on a healthy Eastern oyster shell attached to a mushroom anchor in the Navesink River in New Jersey; a large living oyster reef in the Hudson River was removed near the Tappan Zee Bridge before construction began on the new bridge; oysters can now be found growing in Upper New York Bay. Around the Statue of Liberty are some of the plumpest and fastest growing in the whole of New York Harbor. But while welcome, this is still small stuff.
The biggest oyster restoration effort is the Billion Oyster Project, a recovery program from the non-profit New York Harbor Foundation that hopes to restore oyster populations throughout the tidal waters of New York City. The project began in 2012, and so far has returned around 47 million live oysters to the harbor, primarily around Governor’s Island and at the mouth of the Bronx River. The Project is affiliated with the New York Harbor School and teaches New York City teenagers about maritime vocations and ecology by way of oyster restoration.
The Project begins by collecting oyster shells from restaurants around the City. Fifty-five restaurants donate their discarded oyster shells to BOP which hauls them to Governors Island. Once there, they’re dumped at the very end of the pile, where they’ll sit for years. The shells get rained on, snowed on, crisped in the sun and blown around by the wind. Insects pick them clean as possible which ultimately makes them receptive to oyster spat which latch on and grow. The cleaned shells are moved to Billion Oyster Project’s hatchery at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island that offers technical and vocational training in the marine sciences. In an aquaculture classroom’s hatchery, student-grown oysters produce larvae in an artificially induced springtime environment. Each larvae grows its foot and then is moved to a tank full of the shells. This phase is critical: If larvae can’t find a place to attach, they die. One reclaimed shell can house 10 to 20 new live oysters, depending on shell size. The students tend to the spat and recycled shells in floating cages that serve as breeding grounds for the oysters before they are returned to the harbor
Billion Oyster Project has collected more than 1 million pounds of oyster shells so far. Courtesy of Agata Poniatowski
Oysters are not just food. They’re also habitat builders. When oysters join up, they build an “oyster reef,” diverse ecosystems that protect coastlines from the damaging effects of wave action from storms. Oyster reefs provide habitat and shelter for many marine organisms. Our own coral reefs.
Oysters are also filters that naturally clean waters. Oysters use their gills to absorb oxygen and strain food out of the water. One adult can strain plankton and organic matter at a rate of up to 50 gallons per day (or 1500 times its body volume). A healthy oyster reef contributes significantly to overall water clarity in the estuary.
So good to welcome back to New York harbor our friend the oyster. But we’re not going to be able to eat them for a long time. Still too much sewage for the industrious fellow to clean and in any case, they don’t filter out a bunch of toxic substances. A parting thought. I’ve just written on flooding in New York. Odd that some decades out, the oyster may triumph over people, as more and more of the city is under water, with more lovely places for spat to rest and grow.
Yours, as ever,
Stephen Blank RIHS July 28, 2022
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
IN MEMORY OF RON VASS, WHO PASSED AWAY ON WEDNESDAY RON AND HIS LATE WIFE FAY WERE WONDERFUL MEMBERS OF OUR COMMUNITY. ALWAYS ACTIVE IN THE ’80’s and ’90’s, RON AND FAY WERE AT THE FOREFRONT OF OUR NEW AND YOUNG ISLAND.
SEND YOUR MEMORIES TO: rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
NEW AMSTERDAM THEATRE IN ITS PRE-DISNEY DAYS
LAURA HUSSEY, ED LITCHER, HARA REISER, ARON EISENPREISS, GLORIA HERMAN, JAY JACOBSON
FROM ARON:The New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street. Wow, what an interesting history (see wikipedia!), and literally saved by Disney. The 11-story building on the 42nd St side is an office building as well as the theater entrance, and the theater itself is on the 41st St side with a much larger footprint. At one time home of the famous Ziegfeld Follies, later NBC broadcast studios used part of the space. The photo’s in the wikipedia article and says it’s from 1905 so that would be the original appearance. Neat!
FROM ED:Photo of the New Amsterdam Theater 42nd Street NYC Circa 1905. One of the oldest surviving Broadway venues, the New Amsterdam was built from 1902 to 1903 to designs by Herts & Tallant and was opened on opening on October 26, 1903.
FROM JAY:Still going strong on 42nd Street, the New Amsterdam Theater is what a theater interior should look like. I think it is now playing “Aladdin”
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:
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS STEPHEN BLANK
Gwynne Hogan, Millions of baby oysters get a new briny home off the shores of Hudson River Park, NYT, JULY 21, 2022
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Plastered on walls in public spaces and civic buildings, scattered in hotels and restaurants, hidden in private mansions, a plenitude of murals form part of New York City’s infrastructure.
Although American interest in the medium originated in the 1893 World Fair which presented visitors with numerous large-scale murals, the vogue for this form of artistic expression dates back to the Great Depression. With the introduction of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, federal funds were made available to support and promote public art. Muralism became fashionable.
During the 1930s political painting as a “tradition of the people” had been re-invented by Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera or José Clemente Orozco. Their output influenced many American artists and curators of that era and reinforced the emergence of a socially engaged art.
Political murals energized New York’s visual cityscape. Community walls became prime spaces of interaction from which “site-specific” works emerged. Art was a weapon. Murals were a call to action, an attempt to motivate and organize the residents of a neighborhood. As such, they complement the “official” records that contribute to our historical understanding.
Chicago & Mexico
The 1893 World’s Fair at Chicago featured a large number of murals. Mary Cassatt, the Pittsburgh-born impressionist artist who had made a notable career in Paris, was commissioned to paint a mural for the Woman’s Building at the Exhibition. The neoclassical building itself was designed by Sophia Hayden, the first woman to graduate in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The exhibition may have been a male dominated affair, but women were at last allowed (grudgingly) to make their presence felt.
Cassatt contributed a triptych presenting “Modern Woman.” The mural depicted contemporary women passing knowledge to a new generation (central panel), women creating art, and women pursuing their dreams. The work was not well received. It disappeared after the end of the Fair and was destroyed in a fire shortly after. It may well have been the first American mural with a socio-cultural message.
The sight of colorful murals did create a stir. At a time that Gilded Age industrialists and speculators started building their grand urban mansions, large areas of wall and ceiling space were available for decoration. Architects and artists were eager to embrace the medium. Harry Siddons Mowbray painted a mural on the ceiling of the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park and another one at J.P. Morgan’s Library on Madison Avenue.
Murals were created on a variety of themes and included classical scenes; topographical images (around 1900 William de Leftwich Dodge painted views of ancient and modern New York for the lobby of the Astor Hotel in Times Square); events in American history; and stories of migration.
In 1930 José Clemente Orozco painted a series of murals at the New School for Social Research (NSSR) at West 12th Street. During this same period Diego Rivera presented himself with murals in San Francisco and Detroit. In 1932, he caused a storm in New York City when his mural at the Rockefeller Center was destroyed because it contained a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. Having refused to remove the portrait, Diego was sacked by his patron.
The invasion of Mexican mural art set a precedent. Activist artists found a new way of making highly visible political statements. The ambition to create an “art for the people” proved to be a powerful aesthetic impetus. Muralism seemed to offer an alternative to the traditional relations between the arts, the public, and the political economy.
New Deal
The 1929 economic crash and the subsequent Great Depression struck American culture hard. Artists lost their sources of income as the number of clients dwindled. In that climate, the patronage of the New Deal between 1933 and 1943 proved effective in aiding both established and emerging artists. Many thousands paintings and fine prints were created as well as large numbers of sculptures, innumerable posters, and countless objects of craft. New Deal support for the visual arts helped to establish a program of mural painting similar to that initiated in the 1920s in Mexico.
Born into a family of Islandic immigrants, Holger Cahill started his career at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under founding Director Alfred H. Barr. He was subsequently appointed National Director of the Roosevelt initiated Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project. From the outset he stressed the social relevance of mural art.
In the introduction to the 1936 catalogue of New Horizons in American Art, an exhibition at MoMA of WPA-commissioned work, Cahill stressed that murals are “associated with the expression of social meanings, the experience, history, ideas, and beliefs of a community.” As a result muralism began to flourish in the United States. The Federal projects supplied both the funds and the walls.
Nearly three thousand artists produced over four thousand murals on various New Deal projects, the greatest concentration of which was to be found in New York. The exact number of murals executed in the city is not recorded, but it may have been close to four hundred. Many have been destroyed, but a substantial number has lasted (some in a better state than others) to inspire later generations.
Edward Laning was member of a group of artists known as the Fourteenth Street School. He and his friends ran inexpensive studios near Union Square, Manhattan, where they specialized in depicting “rough” scenes from their neighborhood which was a hotbed of radical politics. In November 1935, he was commissioned by the WPA to paint a mural for the Alien’s Dining Room on Ellis Island. Completed in May 1937, it depicts the role of the immigrant in the building of America and consists of eight episodes, each showing a phase of the immigrant’s contribution to the nation. The mural was seen as a first welcome by thousands of newcomers entering the country.
The WPA funded many murals to be painted for hospitals. In 1936, three African-American artists were commissioned to create a collection of paintings for Harlem Hospital. Vertis Hayes’s eight-panel Pursuit of Happiness follows the history of African-Americans, transporting viewers from Africa to America, then from the agrarian South to the industrialized North. Charles Alston painted two murals, titled “Magic in Medicine” and “Modern Medicine” which form a dialogue between African folk and Western scientific practices.
Georgette Seabrooke’s 1937 mural was named “Recreation in Harlem.” In a series of vignettes, the work depicts people reading, children playing, a couple dancing, a group of women chatting, and other scenes of leisure. More than half of the two dozen figures in the mural are women. The mural was meant to show black residents in Manhattan but, at the insistence of hospital officials, she added white figures as well.
Old King Cole in Manhattan
Early visibility of murals in New York’s public life inspired hoteliers and restaurateurs. They introduced a different and pre-political type of “community” art. It all started in 1906 when John Jacob Astor IV commissioned Maxfield Parrish to create a mural for the bar-room in The Knickerbocker Hotel, Astor’s new flagship hotel on 42nd Street & Broadway. The owner stipulated that the subject of the painting had to be the nursery-rhyme character of Old King Cole and that he himself would stand as model for King Cole’s face.
Parrish was not keen to accept the commission. He was an independent mind, unwilling to take instructions. Coming from a non-drinking Quaker family, Parrish was reluctant to create a painting to decorate a bar. Moreover, he had already painted a version of King Cole for the Mask and Wig Club, a private theater society in Philadelphia. However, a generous fee of $5,000 was too tempting to refuse as he and his wife had just resettled from Philadelphia to Cornish, New Hampshire, where they built a house and studio which they named “The Oaks.”
He began work on “Old King Cole” in a studio that was too small to hold the whole mural, so he painted the three panels one at a time. He placed the king in the center, flanked by jesters and guards. When it was installed at the hotel in 1906, it instantly became part of the fabric of a vibrant city that was eager for amusement. The Roaring Twenties were around the corner.
When the Knickerbocker closed in 1920, the mural went into storage, then briefly hung in a museum in Chicago, and was finally installed at the St Regis Hotel at 2 East 55th Street in 1932. There, at the heart of “Millionaires’ Alley,” it made the transition from artwork to icon.
The mural served as backdrop for scenes in The Godfather and other movies and the bar was frequented by the likes of Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe, who were happy to enjoy a Red Snapper (the original name for a Bloody Mary concocted in 1934 by the hotel’s bartender Fernand Petiot) and pose in front of King Cole.
Café des Artistes
The studio-style residential edifice named Hôtel des Artistes at 1 West 67th Street, near the west side of Central Park, was designed in 1916 and completed a year later. This ornate seventeen-story Gothic building had squash courts, a swimming pool, a theater, and a ballroom. It has been home to a long list of artists, performers and writers, including Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward, Fannie Hurst, Alexander Woollcott, and Norman Rockwell.
Located on the ground floor of the Hôtel was a restaurant. The Café des Artistes served the tenants who lived upstairs (their apartments did not have kitchens) as well as the general public. Among other patrons of the restaurant were luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Rudolph Valentino, and others.
One of the residents of the Hôtel des Artistes was Howard Chandler Christy, a painter and illustrator who today is remembered for his Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States (1940), hanging in the US Capitol. Much in demand as a portrait painter, Christy had a long list of sitters, from William Randolph Hearst and Edward VIII (Prince of Wales) to Benito Mussolini and the First Lady Grace Coolidge.
In the early 1930s, the Café fell on hard times as New York suffered from the effects of the Great Depression. Christy offered to paint a mural with the promise that it would bring back “crowds” of curious customers. He composed nine panels of nudes in bucolic settings (the first of which was completed in 1935), frolicking in water, playing on swings, or posing with parrots. One of his models was Elise Ford, his companion in later life. The dreamlike quality of the work and its salacious nature both shocked and enticed the public. Christy’s prediction was correct. The Café became a hub where the creative, business and press communities met and mingled.
George Lang’s Stewardship
Restaurateur and food writer George Lang was born György Deutsch in Székesfehérvár, Hungary, the son of a Jewish tailor. He was trained to become a violinist, but war intervened. Aged nineteen, he was imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Second World War. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz. György survived the war, changed his name to George Lange (using his mother’s maiden name), and moved to the United States in 1946.
He settled in New York to pursue a musical career but failed. Reflecting on that stage in life, Lang remembered in his delightfully titled autobiography Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen (1998) that on the occasion he heard Jascha Heifetz play a Mendelssohn concerto, he tossed his violin aside, realizing that he would “never be able to play like that.”
Instead, he used his creative drive to achieve perfection in the kitchen. After a successful career as a chef and banquet manager at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel that included preparing state dinners for Queen Elizabeth II (1957) and Nikita Khrushchev (1959), he was awarded the Hotelman of the Year Award in 1975. The same year, he bought and revitalized the Café de Artistes without damaging its original ambience.
Sadly, the Café des Artistes was hit by the Great Recession of 2007. Steadily mounting losses forced him to close the famous restaurant in 2009. Two years later, the restaurant was re-opened under a new (Italian) management team and renamed The Leopard at des Artistes. Howard Chandler Christy’s nudes survived and the murals remain there to excite new generations of diners.
AMDY SPARBERG, ARON EISENPREISS, JAY JACOBSON, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, HARA REISER, LAURA HUSSEY, & GLORIA HERMAN GOT THIS ONE! HOT DOG!!
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
NEW YORK ALMANACK JAAP HARSKAMP
Illustrations, from above: Harry Siddons Mowbray’s ‘Renaissance’ murals at J.P. Morgan’s Library on Madison Avenue; Edward Laning and assistants working on his mural project at Ellis Island, January 1937 (Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 12); Recreation in Harlem, 1937 by Georgette Seabrooke; Maxfield Parrish, Old King Cole at the St Regis Hotel, East 55th Street. (View from the hotel bar); and the Leopard at des Artistes, formerly: Café des Artistes on West 67th Street, with one of Howard Chandler Christy’s murals.
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
