The architect James Renwick Jr. was closely associated with our Island. He designed our famous smallpox hospital; he was the supervising architect for the building of our lighthouse and possibly responsible for the design of Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. Of course, Renwick also designed St Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue.
Few of us know more about him. So, let’s delve a bit more into the story of one of New York’s most successful architects and one much involved in our history.
Renwick was born in 1820, into a wealthy and well-educated family. His mother, Margaret Brevoort, came from an affluent and socially prominent New York family. His father, James Renwick, was an engineer, architect, and professor of natural philosophy at Columbia College, now Columbia University.
A gifted kid, Renwick attended classes at Columbia at age 12, graduating with a degree in engineering in 1836 and earning a master’s degree three years later. When he graduated, with his father’s connections, he became a structural engineer with the Erie Railroad and then served as supervisor on the Croton Reservoir, acting as an assistant engineer on the Croton Aqueduct. Renwick may have been involved with the High Bridge, but his only known completed work was a fountain in Bowling Green.
He received his first major commission at the age of twenty-three in 1843 when he won the competition to design Grace Church. This was a big deal. The Grace Church congregation was one of the wealthiest in the city, composed of many prominent New Yorkers. The Church had been located at Broadway and Rector Street since its formation in 1808, but the Rector and his congregation were thinking of moving uptown, following the northern migration of its fashionable members.
Renwick was not formally trained as an architect. His Wikipedia biography tells us “His ability and interest in building design were nurtured through his cultivated background, which granted him early exposure to travel, and through a broad cultural education that included architectural history.” (If this is what it takes, I could have been an architect!) Is there a back story? Maybe.
Grace Church would be built on the Brevoort country estate, composed of 86 acres between East 9th and 18th Streets and Fifth Avenue to the Bowery. This was Renwick’s mother’s family. When Henry Brevoort died in 1841, his son, Henry, Jr., began selling off the family lands and, two years later, the Grace Church trustees purchased the large plot at the northeast corner of Broadway and East 10th Street. The abrupt bend in Broadway, attributed to Brevoort’s stubbornness in keeping the new Broadway off his property, provided a perfect site for the church.
As seen here in around 1890, the site at the abrupt turn of Broadway provided an advantageous setting — photo NYPL Collection
Brevoort, Jr.’s nephew was James Renwick Jr., a young engineer with an interest in architecture, but without formal credentials. Nonetheless, Renwick was given the commission to design the new Grace Church – an example of architectural nepotism?
The rector, Thomas House Taylor, had toured Europe looking at church designs. He determined that the new church would be in the Gothic style, a style which sought to revitalize medieval Gothic architecture, competing with the neoclassic style which had dominated public construction since the early days of the Republic. (Until the last decades of the 19th century, Gothic Revival was the preeminent style in Europe and North America.) And so, Grace Church would be the first significant Gothic Revival structure in Manhattan.
Renwick’s youth and inexperience notwithstanding, Grace Church was a huge success. Clearly, Gothic Revival clicked with him, and he became a major actor in this new movement. His Grace Church design was much praised, and for a full generation after it was built, it was the most fashionable church in New York. Construction immediately began on the church rectory and this, too, emerged as a Renwick triumph. And Renwick was launched on a remarkable career.
New contracts came quickly. In 1846, Renwick won the competition to design the Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Institution had been established with funds from James Smithson (1765–1829), a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to create “at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” (Interestingly, Smithson had never been to the US and had no connections with anyone here.) “The Castle,” as it was commonly called, was built between 1847 and 1855, designed in Romanesque style, as requested by the Smithsonian Board of Regents
Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington, DC. Wikipedia
In 1849, Renwick designed the Free Academy Building (City College of New York) at Lexington and 23rd. It was one of the first Gothic Revival college buildings on the East Coast. The building was plumbed for both water and illuminating gas and on each floor was found the last word in modern innovations—drinking fountains supplied with fresh water from the Croton Reservoir.
photograph from the collection of The New York Public Library
Soon, he went on to design what is considered his finest achievement, and his best-known building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He was chosen as architect for the Roman Catholic cathedral in 1853, construction began in 1858, and the cathedral opened in May 1879. St Patrick’s was built in what was the rural fringe of the city. It faced Columbia University gardens across 5th Avenue, and hospitals, asylums, and other public institutions were found along the nearby blocks on the avenue. The church’s design included references to the variety of Gothic styles from European nationalities that had become part of the New York Catholic Diocese.
Renwick’s commissions included the Corcoran Gallery of Art (now home to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery), in the Second Empire style, in Washington DC (1859–1871); first major buildings on the of Vassar College campus (1861–1865); Saint Bartholomew’s Church (1871–1872) at Madison Avenue and 44th Street (now demolished); All Saints’ Roman Catholic Church (1882–1893) in Harlem. Renick was responsible for the main building of the Children’s Hospital on Randall’s Island, the Inebriate and Lunatic Asylums on Wards Island and, of course, his work on our island.
Not all of Renwick’s creations were public buildings. He designed the St. Denis Hotel, completed in 1853, which stood at the corner of East 11th Street and Broadway. The property, owned by the Renwick family, had been given to them by Henry Brevoort and the hotel was named for its first proprietor, Denis Julians. It was said to be “one of the handsomest buildings on Broadway” by Miller’s New York As It Is, Or Stranger’s Guide-book to the Cities of New York, Brooklyn and Adjacent Places. The St. Denis originally featured elaborate terracotta ornament, meant to compliment and reference Grace Church across the street. It was host to numerous historical figures over the course of its lifetime, including President Abraham Lincoln, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, Roscoe Conkling, Chester A. Arthur, P.T. Barnum, and Sarah Bernhardt.
The St. Denis as seen on a postcard, circa 1908.
The Renwick is a loft building, running the entire block from Broadway to Fourth Avenue behind Grace Church, designed in 1887. It was meant as a utilitarian structure for offices, storage, and manufacturing, but it features vivid Gothic detail to serve as an appropriate backdrop to Grace Church. Aside from signage, the building is almost completely intact to its original design, from the gothic arches and tracery to the more robust, industrial Romanesque detailing of the Fourth Avenue façade. One architectural historian writes, “The harmony between this structure, built as a store and manufacturing building, and one of the most delicate and important Gothic Revival structures in the United States, is nothing short of remarkable”.
Renwick was involved in several housing developments this same area, south of Union Square. One is what is sometimes called “Renwick Row,” ten houses at 20-38 West 10th Street built in 1856 (except for No. 38, built in 1858). This row or “terrace” of houses was built in the Anglo-Italianate style and clad in brownstone, with a continuous rusticated base and second-floor balcony originally spanning the entire row.
Another terrace attributed to Renwick is the Renwick Triangle, at the intersection of East 10th Street and Stuyvesant Street. Also Angle-Italianate in style, this terrace fronts both Stuyvesant Street (Nos. 23-35) and East 10th Street (Nos 114-128), with a dramatic, acutely cornered building at the tip of the triangle.
Renwick was well connected in society from his birth, with family wealth so that he never had to work, clearly extremely intelligent, enjoyed a very active and impressive career and was highly regarded during his lifetime. He married once, to Anna Lloyd Aspinwall, had no children, and so far as I can tell, was involved in neither financial nor marital hanky-panky. He died in 1895 at his home at 28 University Place and his obituary in The New York Times described him as “one of the foremost architects in this country.”
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On this national holiday in France, we will travel without tickets, passports or TSA. Enjoy our look at this once grand rail hall now a wonderful museum. Fasten your seatbelt
HistoryThe site was occupied by the Palais d’Orsay [fr], intended for the Council of State. It was begun in 1810 but not completed until 1840, when its ground floor was occupied by the Council. In 1842 the Cour des Comptes was housed in the first floor. After the fall of the French Second Empire in 1870, the Paris Commune briefly took power from March through May 1871. The archives, library and works of art were removed to Palace of Versailles and eventually both the Conseil and the Cour des Comptes were rehoused in the Palais-Royal.The largely empty Palais d’Orsay was burned by the soldiers of the Paris Commune, along with the Tuileries Palace and several other public buildings associated with Napoleon III, on the night of 23–24 May 1871, an event which was described by Émile Zola.[2] Electric trains operating in the Gare d’Orsay, ca. 1900The site was purchased by the Compagnie Paris-Orléans, which erected the monumental terminus station for its railways to southwestern France. The station had electrified tracks, modelled on the Baltimore Belt Line electrified railway which had been completed in 1895. The station was constructed in Beaux-Arts style and the western and southern sides of the building included the 370-room Hotel Palais d’Orsay.
By 1939 the station’s short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains that had come to be used for mainline services, and the Gare d’Orsay was closed to long-distance traffic, though some suburban trains of the SNCF continue to use its lower levels to this day. The Hotel Palais d’Orsay closed at the beginning of 1973.The former station was used as a collection point for the dispatch of parcels to prisoners of war during the Second World War, and after the war as a reception centre for liberated prisoners on their return; a plaque on the side of the building facing the River Seine commemorates this latter use.The structure served as the setting for several films, including Orson Welles‘ version of Franz Kafka‘s The Trial, and is a central location in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Conformist. General Charles de Gaulle held a press conference in the ballroom of the Hotel Palais d’Orsay on 19 May 1958 at which he announced his “availability to serve his country”, ushering in the end of the French Fourth Republic.As well, it was the inspiration for the larger Penn Station in New York City when Alexander Cassatt, president of Pennsylvania Railroad, traveled on his annual trip to Europe in 1901.
In the 1970s work began on building a 1 km-long tunnel under the station as part of the creation of line C of the Réseau Express Régional with a new station under the old station. In 1970, permission was granted to demolish the station but Jacques Duhamel, Minister for Cultural Affairs, ruled against plans to build a new hotel in its stead. The station was put on the supplementary list of Historic Monuments and finally listed in 1978. The suggestion to turn the station into a museum came from the Directorate of the Museum of France. The idea was to build a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre. The plan was accepted by Georges Pompidou and a study was commissioned in 1974. In 1978, a competition was organized to design the new museum. ACT Architecture, a team of three young architects (Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon), were awarded the contract which involved creating 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) of new floorspace on four floors. The construction work was carried out by Bouygues.[6] In 1981, the Italian architect Gae Aulenti was chosen to design the interior including the internal arrangement, decoration, furniture and fittings of the museum. The arrangement of the galleries she designed was elaborate and inhabited the three main levels that are under the museum’s barrel vault atrium. On the main level of the building, a central nave was formed by the surrounding stone structures that were previously the building’s train platforms. The central nave’s structures break up the immense sculpture and gallery spaces and provided more organized units for viewing the art.[7] In July 1986, the museum was ready to receive its exhibits. It took 6 months to install the 2000 or so paintings, 600 sculptures and other works. The museum officially opened in December 1986 by then-president François Mitterrand.
At any time about 3,000 art pieces are on display within Musée d’Orsay. Within the museum is a 1:100 scale model created by Richard Peduzzi of an aerial view of Paris Opera and surrounding area encapsulated underneath glass flooring that viewers walk on as they proceed through the museum. This installation allows the viewers to understand the city planning of Paris at the time, which has made this attraction one of the most popular within the museum.Another exhibit within the museum is “A Passion for France: The Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection”. This collection was donated by an Marlene and Spencer Hays, art collectors who reside in Texas and have been collecting art since the early 1970s. In 2016 the museum complied to keeping the collection of about 600 art pieces in one collection rather than dispersed throughout other exhibits. Since World War II, France has not been donated a collection of foreign art this large. The collection favors mostly post-impressionist works. Artists featured in this collection are Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Aristide Maillol, André Derain, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.[8] To make room for the art that has been donated, the Musée d’Orsay is scheduled to undergo a radical transformation over the next decade, 2020 on. This remodel is funded in part by an anonymous US patron who donated €20 million to a building project known as Orsay Grand Ouvert (Orsay Wide Open). The gift was made via the American Friends of the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie.[9] The projected completion date is 2026, implementing new galleries and education opportunities to endorse a conductive experience.[10]
BROADWAY AND HOUSTON STREET NINA LUBLIN, ED LITCHER, GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE 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)
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Where life in New York City was lived “on the steps”
Between the cramped spaces, poor ventilation, and shadowy hallways, life inside a New York City tenement could be hard to bear, especially in warm weather. For relief, people headed to their outside steps: men buried themselves in the newspaper, women rocked babies, small kids played games. In a pre-air conditioned city, front stoops were lively places. It’s unclear exactly where Ashcan painter George Luks captured this scene outside a rundown building. But he appropriately named the painting “On the Steps”—where much of life played out in New York’s tenement districts.
It’s unclear exactly where Ashcan painter George Luks captured this scene outside a rundown building. But he appropriately named the painting “On the Steps”—where much of life played out in New York’s tenement districts.
MORE ART BY GEORGE LUKS OF THE NEW YORK STREET SCENES
Houston Street
George Luks – Armistice Night – Google Art Project.jpg
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NINA LUBLIN GOT IT!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated:
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In 1906 Milan hosted the World Exhibition which, significantly, focused on the theme of transportation. The occasion for the exhibition was the inauguration of the spectacular Simplon Tunnel, connecting Milan to Europe’s major cities.
The opening up of commercial and cultural connections unleashed a burst of buoyancy. Milan became associated with the first aesthetic movement to praise the potential of the modern metropolis.
The cult of technology was central to Italian Futurism. Whereas the Romantics had recoiled in horror from the machine, the Futurists embraced it with zeal. Futurist artists were inspired by the spectacle of industrialism. They intended to wrench Italy from her retrospective dream of an antique past into the dynamic world of the industrial present.
Futurists aimed at “killing the moonlight” in the surge towards a dynamic future of technological advancement. The moon was synonymous with superstition and Romantic myth. It had to be erased by the glare of man-made light bulbs. Giacomo Balla’s 1909 painting “Lampada ad arco” (Street Light) is the movement’s iconic image of the moon being subsumed by artificial street light. Tiny vectors of red, blue, and yellow spring forth from the radiating source of electrical illumination. The future was a light switch.
Milan & New York
The future began on February 20, 1909 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his “Manifesto of Futurism” on the front page of Le Figaro. Written in assertive and quasi-militaristic style, it celebrated machine civilization. In this, his first of countless manifestos, he called for the replacement of an “anachronistic” and backward-looking society (promising to “destroy the museums, libraries, and academies of every kind”) with an alternative reality based on the ethic of speed and technology.
Marinetti, known as the “caffeine of Europe,” was a master in attracting attention. Launching a series of raucous campaigns, he traveled back and forth across the Continent, giving interviews, arranging meetings where he mocked “passéist” artists (his attack on John Ruskin during his visit to London was a notorious example). Champion of the grand tradition of “being booed,” he welcomed hostile responses to his crusade, viewing those as symptoms of its artistic vitality. Following in his footsteps, Futurist artists advocated radical social and cultural reform.
Inevitably, the noise reached New York. On December 24th, 1911, the magazine section of the New York Herald carried a full-page illustrated article entitled “The New Cult of Futurism Is Here.” The story was based on an interview with French-born André Tridon that took place at the artist’s studio in East 19th Street, Gramercy Park, Manhattan. Tridon was introduced as America’s “archpriest of Futurism.”
Paying tribute to Marinetti for naming the group of rebels, Tridon insisted that members of the movement shared a sound “contempt for tradition.” Shifting attention to the American cultural landscape, he attacked the “piffle” of literature because authors slavishly followed a “feeble” English tradition rather than looking ahead. In good Futurist fashion (Marinetti had declared “war” on pasta an absurd gastronomic religion), he drew a parallel with cooking: American cuisine was “almost as dreadful as cooking in England.” Art and literature needed a stronger stomach.
America’s greatest contribution to the arts according to Tridon was its capacity for creating a self-reliant architecture. Ridiculing the tendency to build banks and stock exchanges upon the models of ancient Greek temples, he juxtaposed a photograph of a cumbersome Neo-Classical building against a soaring skyscraper. Hygienic, attractive, and an economiser of effort and time, the skyscraper perfectly suited the needs of a metropolitan setting – it was ‘a perfect machine.’
Interestingly, Tridon’s reflections on modernist architecture preceded those of Marinetti. In 1913 the latter admitted that despite grand ambitions, Futurist architecture was a construct that remained unrealized. It was Milanese architect Antonio Sant’Elia whose name would become synonymous with Futurist urban planning. In 1914, he exhibited a series of visionary drawings for the “New City” and published a “Manifesto of Architecture” in which he envisaged the city as an integrated entity condensed around the central presence of a power station, the “cathedral of the electric religion.”
Sant’Elia died in October 1916 at the age of twenty-eight, killed in a war he and other Futurists had so enthusiastically embraced, thus leaving his imagined future for others to explore.
Armory No Show
Futurist painting first manifested itself outside Italy in a major touring exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912 and then, after its London showing in March, moved on to Berlin, Brussels, and other European cities.
In London, the exhibition was shown at the Sackville Gallery and included thirty-four works by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini. It received extensive press coverage. Marinetti gave a lecture at the Bechstein Hall in Wigmore Street, Westminster, which according to The Times reviewer was read in French with such an impassioned torrent of words that some of his audience “begged for mercy.”
By the time that the organizers of New York’s ground-breaking Armory show started their preparations (the exhibition opened in February 1913), American art lovers were relatively well informed about the new movement. They had seen reproductions of some paintings, come across citations from Futurist manifestos, and read an English translation of Boccioni’s preface to the original exhibition catalogue. All this produced a flurry of hostile commentary in the popular press.
The concept of Futurism that emerged from Tridon’s interview was that modernists should follow the Italian example, discard obsolete lessons from the past, and welcome the dynamic originality that modern technology brought to bear. From there it was a small step to conclude that Futurism was a mere manner of thinking that placed emphasis upon doing away with a stagnant past whilst glorifying movement and mobility.
Tridon was the first to articulate the persistent dichotomy between a definition of Futurism as an Italian manifestation and one encompassing avant-garde activity in general. It was this application of the term “futurist” to vanguard European art in general rather than specifically denoting the motion-driven movement originating in Milan, that infuriated Marinetti. He refused the invitation to take part in the Armory show.
By insisting that Futurism was a uniquely northern Italian movement, Marinetti proved himself to be as “parochial” as the idolaters of the past he so vehemently attacked. He failed to grasp the fact that New York could be precisely the fertile metropolitan environment that members of his movement yearned for.
Panama Pacific
In 1915 the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) was organized in San Francisco to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and showcase to the world the city’s recovery from the devastating 1906 earthquake. The Fair offered visitors (almost nineteen million people paid a visit in the ten months of its duration) a view of the latest industrial developments; they could ride around a replica Grand Canyon; sail on a model of the Panama Canal; or be entertained by a rotation of bands and performers. The Palace of Education and Social Economy presented public health programs by promoting eugenics. Celebrating mankind’s forward march, attendees could enter a living Pueblo Village (Arizona) that was occupied by members of the Zuni and Hopi tribes. Progress was in that sense a sadly misconceived concept.
The PPIE also exhibited over 11,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. Housed in national sections at the Palace of Fine Arts, visitors were presented with walls of paintings and large-scale murals.
A Norwegian by birth and a former student at Antwerp University, John Nilsen Laurvik had been an American resident since 1901. A prominent photographer, art critic for such papers as the New York Evening Post and the New York Times, and translator of Henrik Ibsen’s correspondence, he was a cosmopolitan intellectual. He served on the PPIE Art Commission and acted as Director for the Palace of Fine Arts. With war spreading throughout Europe, he still managed to secure works of art from a range of countries.
Having traveled to Venice, Laurvik arranged a meeting with Marinetti and persuaded him to send a collection of works to the Fair. The inclusion of a Futurist gallery was also supported by Marinetti’s friend Ernesto Nathan, Mayor of Rome, and Head of the Italian Commission to the PPIE. Assigned a gallery to themselves (Gallery 141), forty-seven paintings and two sculptures were exhibited. None of these works was reproduced in the official Fair’s catalogue, but Boccioni’s essay “The Exhibitors to the Public” which had appeared previously in exhibition catalogues in Paris and London was reprinted for the occasion.
It was the first time that a collection of Italian Futurist paintings was exhibited in the United States, but the movement was not made welcome in San Francisco. Futurism’s first decade had been its most explosive and innovative period, but the works on show received little attention other than journalistic derision and ridicule (a similar disinterest was evident in 1917 when Severini exhibited his work at New York’s Gallery 291 on Fifth Avenue).
After the First World War, the members’ intense nationalism led to an alliance with Italy’s National Fascist Party. Although Futurism continued to develop new areas of focus and attracted a ‘second generation’ of Futurist artist, its political association with Benito Mussolini was a further obstacle to a wider appreciation of the movement in American art circles.
With Italy’s return to democracy, a political push was advocated for the re-establishment of cultural exchange between the two nations. It was decided that New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) would hold an exhibition of Twentieth Century Italian Art in 1949, but its curators Alfred Barr and James Thrall Soby were confronted with a major hindrance: the sparsity of modern Italian art in American museums. From May to June 1948 they made a “grand tour” of Italy, not only to select exhibition materials but also to make a determined effort to fill the gap in MoMA’s holdings. Their endeavors made an impact. Today the Museum has a rich public collection of Futurist art.
WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION JOYCE GOLD, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER AND MANY MORE!! WE NOTICE THE BUILDING NAME WAS ON THE IMAGE…OOPS!!
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
JAAP HARSKAMP NEW YORK ALMANACK
Sources
Illustrations, from above: Lampada ad arco, 1909 by Giacomo Balla (Museum of Modern Art); Marinetti’s foundation manifesto of Futurism; portrait of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1915 by Carlo Carrà (Private collection); Power Station, In: La città nuova, 1914 by Antonio Sant’Elia; Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913 by Umberto Boccioni (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); Danseuse blue = Blue Dancer, 1912 by Gino Severini (Private collection); Panama-Pacific International Exposition poster; and George Giusti’s catalogue cover for Twentieth-Century Italian Art exhibition. (MoMA).
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August Robert Ludwig Macke (3 January 1887 – 26 September 1914) was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him.[1] Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in the First World War.
August Macke – Three girls in yellow straw hats 1913
August Macke 1914
Early life August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Germany on 3 January 1887, in Meschede, Westphalia. He was the only son of August Friedrich Hermann Macke (1845–1904), a building contractor and amateur artist, and his wife, Maria Florentine, née Adolph, (1848–1922), who came from a farming family in Westphalia’s Sauerland region. Shortly after August’s birth the family settled at Cologne, where Macke was educated at the Kreuzgymnasium (1897-1900) and became a friend of Hans Thuar, who also became an artist. In 1900, when he was thirteen, the family moved to Bonn, where Macke studied at the Realgymnasium and became a friend of Walter Gerhardt and Gerhardt’s sister, Elisabeth, whom he married a few years later.The first artistic works to make an impression on the boy were his father’s drawings, the Japanese prints collected by his friend Thuar’s father and the works of Arnold Böcklin which he saw on a visit to Basel in 1900. In 1904 Macke’s father died, and in that year Macke enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under Adolf Maennchen (1904-1906). During this period he also took evening classes under Fritz Helmut Ehmke (1905), did some work as a stage and costume designer at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, and visited northern Italy (1905) and Netherlands, Belgium and Britain (1906).
August-Macke1900 Artistic career 1907–1914 Rokoko,1912, oil on canvas, 89 x 89 cm, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway Tightrope walker, 1913Thereafter Macke lived most of his creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent at Lake Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, the Netherlands and Tunisia. In Paris, where he traveled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw the work of the Impressionists, and shortly after he went to Berlin and spent a few months in Lovis Corinth‘s studio. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and later went through a Fauve period. In 1909 he married Elisabeth Gerhardt. In 1910, through his friendship with Franz Marc, Macke met Kandinsky and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter.Macke’s meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was to be a sort of revelation for him. Delaunay’s chromatic Cubism, which Apollinaire had called Orphism, influenced Macke’s art from that point onwards. His Shops Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay’s Windows, combined with the simultaneity of images found in Italian Futurism.The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in April 1914 with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet was fundamental for the creation of the luminist approach of his final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces. August Macke’s oeuvre can be considered as Expressionism (in its original German flourishing between 1905 and 1925), and also as part of Fauvism. The paintings concentrate primarily on expressing feelings and moods rather than reproducing objective reality, usually distorting colour and form.Macke’s career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914. His final painting, Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war. This was also the same year that he painted the famous painting Türkisches Café in München (1914).
WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION 6TH AVENUE AND 8TH STREET, MANHATTAN SEE TUESDAY EDITION FOR ANSWERS
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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Finally, at 2 p.m. on Friday, 4 days after the sidewalk was fenced off,( probably with the nudging by our local politicians who were contacted) a pathway was established.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, JULY 9-10, 2022
THE 723rd EDITION
Mae West and Sex Updated
Stephen Blank
I thought it would be interesting to write an RIHS essay about Mae West’s Broadway play, Sex, the play that led to her arrest and brief incarceration in our island’s jail. What research revealed was a more interesting tale. Sit back in your seat and enjoy the show.
Here’s what we knew. On February 9, 1927, Mae West was charged with obscenity for a play she had written and was starring in. The play was called Sex. Cops closed it down and hauled in Mae, who wound up here in our jail.
The story turns out to be much more than that. Mae is not the only player in this drama-comedy and Sex is not the main subject.
Irving Lippman/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
First, West wasn’t busted after just a few performances. The play had been poorly reviewed. But bad press had not kept audiences away and it had been open for more than a year.
The New York Times considered it to be a “crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted” while Billboard condemned it as “the cheapest most vulgar low show to have dared to open in New York this year.” In a 1925–26 New York theater season with new plays by O’Neill (The Great God Brown), O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock), and Coward (Hay Fever), critics agreed that Sex was the rock bottom.
Nonetheless, for more than a year, Sex drew full houses, playing 375 performances. The play outlasted nearly all the competition and was the only play on Broadway to stay open through the summer 1926 season into the following year. Variety christened its heroine, a Montreal lady of the evening with a fondness for sailors, “the Babe Ruth of stage prosties.” Thousands (some say 325,000!) people had already been in the audience, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff before the New York Police Department decided it was obscene.
Mae explained, “When you tell people a play is naughty, they rush to see it. I can’t help that, can I? People thought it vulgar, ridiculous, or funny, or a perfectly terrible play, laughed—and sent their friends to see the show”. The New York Times explained in 1928 that “It became the fad in not a few quarters to see ‘Sex’ two or three times, and some of our best people were caught entering or leaving Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theatre.”
Newspapers were reluctant to advertise the play. No problem, Mae said, and plastered the town with posters. “When the newspapers refused my advertisin’, they gave me headlines about my havin’ my nerve producin’ such a play,” West said in a March 1934, interview with Movie Classic magazine. “I couldn’t’ve bought that space for any amount of money. That sent my prices up and packed ‘em in.
1926 Show Posters advertising Sex
Second, Sex wasn’t the only play that was closed that night. Three curtains were rung down and 40 actors and actresses, managers and producers were hauled off by the police to the 54th Street night court on charges of participation in immoral productions – Sex and also The Virgin Man and The Captive. All had been denounced as “dirt plays” by the city’s moral guardians. Mae wasn’t the only top name arrested: “The star turns of the late-night show at 54th Street were the respectable Helen Menken, playing a lesbian in The Captive, and the most unrespectable Mae West, writer and star of Sex.”
Sunday News front page, February 10, 1927
The raids didn’t just happen. The struggle between morals reformers and theater owners had boiled up in the past year. In the 1925-26 Broadway season, an unusually large number of plays had treated sexual issues. The French writer, Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, starring the glamorous Helen Menken, dealt with a lesbian love affair. The Shanghai Gesture focused on the travails of Mother Goddam, a corrupt Chinese madame; Lulu Belle presented the story of a mulatto hooker who seduces everyone she meets, and, of course, Sex.
Unlike Sex, The Captive had been praised by critics: “Bourdet has wrought a play of gigantic proportions, of compassion and candor, and, above all, of terrific dramatic effect… From the moment that the sullen mystery is invoked until it lands its ultimate smash, the play proceeds with adroit balance and cunning. … Adapted sensitively by Arthur Hornblow, Jr. … The movement is intense, swift and perpetually provocative.” —John Anderson in the New York Evening Post (For movie fans, Basil Rathbone was the male lead of The Captive.)
Helen Menken and Basil Rathbone photo by Vandamm
Tension heightened when West’s second play, The Drag, opened in Bridgeport. Its plot involved a young woman married to a gay man, with lots of female eroticism and what, for the time, was a sympathetic view of gay men. West wanted to bring it to Broadway – and reformers were determined to keep it away.
All of this came to a head in February. The flamboyant mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker – no friend of the reformers – had left town with a girlfriend on a holiday in Florida. His deputy, Joseph V McKee, was in charge. McKee, a devout Catholic whose nickname was “Holy Joe”, launched the raids. The reformers didn’t stop with these three plays. On February 26, several burlesque theaters were raided, accusing entertainers of giving indecent performances.
It’s interesting that both The Captive and Sex had been acquitted of immorality by the Citizens’ Play Jury which was sponsored by the NYC DA. The DA had pledged acceptance of their verdicts, prior to the drive against immoral shows. This pledge was ignored in February.
The raids sheltered under New York State’s existing anti-obscenity statute which was a broad umbrella but lacked teeth since actions which would “tend to the corruption of the morals of youth or others” was charged only as a misdemeanor. In March 1927, reformers surprisingly won the support of Governor Al Smith to pass the Wales Padlock Bill, which allowed the DA to padlock a theater if it produced an “indecent” production featuring “sex degeneracy” or “sex perversion”, and to prosecute everyone associated with such a production. The Padlock law remained in force until 1967.
Like Sex, The Captive had been a major feature on Broadway for months. But it stayed closed. As one paper reported, “The leading lady, the manager and director, the stage director, another actress, and one elderly actor walked out of the limelight today among the central figures in the police raided public censored play, ‘The Captive,’ promising they would no longer appear in the play or try to put it on again in New York. The withdrawal of Gilbert Miller as manager, George Mondolf, Jr., as stage director, and Helen Menken, Winifred Fraser and Arthur Lewis meant the closing down of the show at the theater where it has been a big box office drawing card for several months. These members agreed not to appear again in their roles under any management… The closing of ‘The Captive’ was interpreted as the first victory of the city authorities in their moral crusade along Broadway.”
Like the others, Sex stayed closed. But, West, far from being shamed, knew she had an opportunity on her hands. So, when given the option to close Sex and have all charges dropped, she declined. She knew that in showbiz, crime paid. The grand jury’s claim that her “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama” would tend to “the corruption of the morals of youth” was better than any rave review.
At West’s trial, “12 stout citizens, all male, made up the jury, and the chief prosecution witness, Sergeant Patrick Keneally of the Midtown vice squad, began reading out lines from the play in a thick Irish brogue. Unable to find actual profanities in the text, the prosecution alleged that the offence was in the way Mae West moved on the stage, and the hapless sergeant was requested to demonstrate this too. He declined, prosecution counsel explaining primly that ‘everyone in the police force is not a dancer’. ‘Nor an actor,’ retorted the defence.”
Mae West and Barry O’Neill, two of the principal actors of “Sex,” in the courtroom. Bettmann
West played her conviction and 10-day jail sentence (she was released two days early on good behavior) into an experience that would create Mae West, the social critic, satiriser of the age-old battle of the sexes and advocate of the primacy of the surviving woman. Even bedecked with gems, as Diamond Lil, she remained a model for all those who felt that her sassy rebellion against conventional morality was a precious gift in a prudish, harsh world, which soon plunged into the Depression.
Mae’s last words: “’Some of the papers called my earlier plays garbage, but that sort of garbage was what my patrons wanted and I gave it to them,” West told The New York Times in 1928. “And, besides, Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Sappho’ were called garbage and worse names than that when they were produced, and look at them now. ‘Ghosts’ is a classic, and maybe ten years from now they’ll want to see ‘Sex’ again and call it a classic ”
QUILT MADE BY RUTHIE STEVENS FOR HER SON’S CLASSROOM IN 1978, AT THE R.I. DAY NURSERY
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)
This morning I decided to check out the Visitor Center to see if we could open today.
The kiosk had 26 barriers in front of it on the sidewalk
There was not one barrier on the street between the bus drop-off location at the Tram and the fenced off construction area which ended by the kiosk sidewalk. People were left to walk in the street…..
The entire Tram area is fenced off, with no sidewalk on the north side leaving pedestrians and tram riders to have to walk around the site to access the Tram.
By this afternoon, the “scaffolding” was above the kiosk.
We have closed the kiosk due to OVERHEAD CONSTRUCTION, until we consider it safe to re-open. We have never been told by RIOC about the construction and have the move for the safety of our staff and visitors. This would be one of the busiest weeks of the year with thousands of visitors on the island.
TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY
Parked in the temporary bus stop on the West Road is our favorite hot dog vendor.
This is the vendor with no price list, a vague “permit”. no trash container (just a bag tied to the railing, and photos flying in peoples faces as they walk by. It seems that RIOC is more concerned that he be parked in a bus stop and the residents be damned.
Today is the 45th anniversary of my moving to Roosevelt Island (0n 7/7/77) and I have never been so distressed as to the complete lack of any kind of administration and staffing of the island. We are being left to our own devices by a group of persons who are absent and ignoring their responsibility to the thousands who live and work here. How sad!!!!
Judith Berdy
FROM THE ARCHIVES
722nd Edition
Frederick Zobel’s 1913
Colony Arcade Building
BUILDING
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
At the turn of the last century the block of West 38th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was lined with brownstone rowhouses. By now the millinery district would reached this far north, engulfing the once fashionable neighborhood. As the homeowners fled, the businesses moved in. That quickly changed, as well. The old houses were quickly snapped up by developers who razed them for soaring loft and store buildings. On March 25, 1911 The Sun made note of the changes. “Before the development of the section began most of the structures in the district were of the old fashioned brownstone front type, with here and there a small business building. There were many milliners and dressmakers in the section, and these used their parlor floors and basements for show and workrooms. Now, however they have fine quarters in these new light and airy structures and the old time building is rapidly a thing of the past.” Developer William H. Wheeler seemed to be determined to transform the block of West 38th Street alone. At the time of The Sun’s article, he had replaced four brownstones at Nos. 8 through 14 with the Murray Hill Building; two at Nos. 28 and 30 for his Wheeler Building; and the day before had purchased Nos. 24 and 26 where he intended to build “a twelve story store and loft building.” But Judson S. Todd would make his mark on the block as well. Like Wheeler, Todd and his Holland Holding Co. were a major force in Manhattan real estate. On January 21, 1912 The New York Times reported that Mrs. M. J. Parrott had sold Todd the two houses at Nos. 65 and 67 West 38th Street, and that Dr. J. E. Serre sold him the house next door at No. 63. The newspaper pointed out that Todd “last week purchased…the abutting property, 62 and 64 West Thirty-ninth Street.”
In 1911 brownstones like these at Nos. 60 and 62 still lined West 38th Street. from the Collection of the New York Public Library
The developer now owned a large plot running through the block and he immediately put architect Frederick C. Zobel, to work on designs. The choice of architect was no doubt influenced by the organization of the Colony Construction Company, of which Zobel’s brother, Robert P. Zobel, was president. Two months later plans were filed for a “twelve-story store and light manufacturing building” with an anticipated cost of $400,000—about $9.3 million today. “The façade will be of brick and terra cotta, and it will be fireproof through,” reported The Times. The building was completed in 1913. Although the 38th Street side was wider that the 39th—62 feet as opposed to 46 feet—Zobel masterfully designed identical facades. Within the past decade terra cotta had been used to create elaborate Gothic Revival commercial structures like the Woolworth and World’s Tower Buildings. It now appeared on Zobel’s Colony Arcade. The lower three floors were embellished with Gothic arches, heraldic shields, and quatrefoils. Demanding the most attention, however, were the magnificently-executed pairs of spread-winged eagles that perched above the entrances.
The Colony Arcade Building quickly filled with tenants and, as expected, most were millinery firms. Shortly after its doors opened it was home to The Crest Brand Bandeau Co “makers of bandeaux and hat linings.” The Illustrated Milliner reported in June 1913 that “The offices and sample rooms are being tastefully fitted up and all the appurtenances of manufacturing this line of goods have been installed.”
Jos. Levin Co moved in during the building’s first year of operation. The Illustrated Milliner, June 1913 (copyright expired)
Simultaneously, Jos. Levin Co., Inc. was in the building, manufacturing tailored hats; as was Bonhotal Co. Once settled in, Bonhotal Co. advertised that its “early Fall lines” were ready, including “tailored and fancy hats” and 150 styles of “black and mourning hats.” Soon other ladies’ hat manufacturers were here, including Richard Sentner; Sternberger & Marks; and H. Goldfarb (advertising “Every new idea in shape, material and trimmings—clever models with ribbons, gold and silver ornaments, fancies, flowers, ostrich, etc.”). A manufacturer not in the millinery industry was Harry Rothleder who leased space toward the end of 1913. The firm manufactured and sold furs in the building.
Sentner’s $36 price tag was for a dozen hats — Dry Goods Economist, July 1914 (copyright expired)
Little by little over the years, as the Garment District crept into the area, the Colony Arcade Building would see more apparel firms. In the meantime, however, the enormous ground floor space—a full 20,000 square feet—was leased by Winifred T. McDonald “for a term of years” in October 1914. In reporting on the deal, The New York Times felt it was a reflection of the “growing importance of the Thirty-eighth Street block, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, due to the Lord & Taylor store at Fifth Avenue and the new elevated station at Sixth Avenue.”
Cast metal spandrels carried on the Gothic motif.
McDonald shared the newspaper’s enthusiasm. With the rapid rise of commercial buildings and the migration of department stores northward from the old Ladies’ Mile; the neighborhood was flooded with workers and shoppers. All of them needed to be fed. The perceived potential was enough to induce the female entrepreneur to sign the $400,000 aggregate lease. The Times said “After extensive alterations the place will be opened as a restaurant and tearoom.” Winifred McDonald hired architect Patrick Reynolds to do the $7,000 in alterations. The tearoom and café was opened early in 1915. To separate the working men from the female shoppers and shop girls, the tearoom and café were separate from the “men’s grill.”
Winifred T. McDonald offered music to her patrons — The Sun, May 23, 1915 (copyright expired)
Later that year the 39th Street block was closed off for a 4th of July block party thrown by workers in the area. Hattie Meyer worked as a seamstress and the 35-year old participated in the Vacation Committee’s plans for the event. When the day came, she left her house at No. 228 East 12th Street dressed all in white with a red, white and blue badge, and excitedly headed off to the festivities. “She had entered the block in West Thirty-ninth street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, where the celebration was taking place, when she became ill and started to fall,” reported The Sun on July 6. People passing by saw her drop to the pavement and helped her into the hallway of the Colony Arcade. “An ambulance was called from the New York Hospital, but before it arrived Miss Mayer died.” The seamstress’s body was removed to the West 13th Street police station. The Sun said “The band kept on playing and none of the Fourth of July dancers knew of the fate of one of their committee members.” Harry Silverstein was working for Freundlick & Sons in the building in 1916. Around 1:00 on a Saturday in February that year he was walking along Fifth Avenue nearby at 45th Street, when he noticed a necklace on the ground. The honest worker took it to a lawyer, David Lewis, and the pair searched the lost and found ads in The World. The newspaper reported on February 21 that “they noticed that a necklace answering the description of the one Silverstein found had been lost by Mrs. Emil Sperling, who lives at the St. Regis Hotel.” The pearl necklace with a silver clasp had dropped from her neck while walking down Fifth Avenue. The attorney took the necklace to Mr. Sperling who handed him a $600 reward for Silverstein. “The necklace was valued at $12,000,” said The World. The garment worker’s honesty earned him what would be essentially that same amount in today’s dollars.
The wonderfully detailed facade survives, even at street level.
The aggressive development of the district had an unexpected and undesired consequence. The hundreds of factory and shop workers mobbed the sidewalks and spilled onto upscale Fifth Avenue. Refined shoppers were loathe to battle the hoards of workmen and the fashionable tone of the avenue was threatened. The Save New York Movement was born. The Movement established a “restricted zone” and encouraged manufacturers to avoid it. The mayor supported the program and initiated zoning restrictions for construction going forward from 32nd Street to 59th Street, from Third to Seventh Avenue. J. H. Burton, Chairman of the Save New York Committee, explained to Buildings and Building Management magazine that the movement was designed “to preserve the character of our shopping, retail and residence sections.” The Movement made itself known in the Colony Arcade Building in 1916 when one of its largest tenants moved out. On November 14 that year The New York Times reported “Hollow & Perlow, one of the largest manufacturers of silk waists in the city, who moved uptown when the northward movement of trade began several years ago, have declared their allegiance to the ‘Save New York Movement,’ and will move out of the restricted zone.” The firm, “which employs a large force” had decided to move south to 25th Street.
Millinery and apparel workers cram the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue in 1917 — Buildings and Building Management, February 1917 (copyright expired)
“We are in hearty sympathy with the ‘Save New York Movement,’ and believe that this wonderful business section of New York City should not be marred or depreciated by the manufacturing industry,” said D. Parlow. “Success to the movement, which should be supported by every manufacturer who has the interest of the trade at heart, even if they do entail a sacrifice of choice location.” In 1922 Robert P. Zobel sold the building to Brooklyn real estate operators Levy Brothers. The $1.25 million all-cash deal drew understandable attention. The New York Times noted that the building “is occupied almost exclusively by the millinery trade and shows a gross annual rent of about $150,000.”
While the Colony Arcade Building continued to be occupied by hat manufacturers, a vastly different firm moved in within a few years. The Radiovision Corporation was among the pioneering television firms. On July 9, 1928 it conducted a public demonstration at the Hotel Mayflower of the Cooley “Rayfoto” system. Invented by Austin G. Cooley, The New York Times reported that “The apparatus demonstrated transmitted and received four by five inch pictures in less than three minutes each.” Later that year, in August, Radiovision Corporation announced the invention of “a new light cell, which…will greatly aid the realization of practical radio television.” During a demonstration of the cell, the company’s vice president, Edgar H. Felix said “it can be utilized to perform such functions about the house as turning on the hot-water heater, starting the furnace or closing the windows at sunrise.” That never happened. The building continued to house hat firms through the last quarter of the 20th century. Most amazingly, however, the ground floors of the handsome structure were never destroyed by modernization. The building was converted by in 2012 to a boutique hotel, the Refinery Hotel. Zobel’s eye-catching terra cotta façade survives astoundingly intact on a block that was almost entirely transformed during the first decades of the 20th century.
Today, The Refinery-a Boutique Hotel
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY DO YOU REMEMBER THIS IS IN THE R.I. DAY NURSERY? QUILT MADE BY RUTHIE STEVENS IN 1978 SEND YOUR ANSWER TO: rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY Playing ball in front of the Central Nurses Residence, where 475 Main Street now stands. ELLEN JACOBY ALEXIS VILLAFANE GOT IT RIGHT!!
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
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This magical Coney Island building was home to an early New York restaurant chain. It’s a Spanish Colonial–style festival of terra cotta: an imaginative building with a beach-white facade, enormous arched entryways, and colorful images of seashells, fish, seaweed, ships, and Neptune himself looking out over the Coney Island boardwalk.
With such rich ornamentation and design, you’d think the dreamlike structure at West 21st Street served as a movie theater, a casino, perhaps an arcade featuring some of the outrageous exhibits Coney Island was famous for in the early 20th century.
But the building was actually home to a pioneering restaurant called Childs—one of New York’s first restaurant chains and a forerunner of the kind of clean, reliable, and inexpensive eateries found all over the city today.
To get a sense of how integral Childs was to Gotham’s restaurant culture, go back to New York City after the Civil War, when dining in a restaurant (rather than cooking meals at home, or eating at a tavern if you were traveling) was something reserved only for the wealthy.
As the Gilded Age progressed, restaurants began opening to middle class and working-class residents as well. These were the army of clerks, shop girls, factory workers, and others who powered the industrialized city. But not all of the new lunch counters and saloons they patronized were inviting, nor were they always sanitary.
Then in 1889, brothers Samuel and William Childs opened the first Childs restaurant downtown on Cortlandt Street. Within a decade, dozens more Childs outlets opened up, all with “white-tiled walls and floors, white marble table-tops, and waitresses dressed in starched white uniforms, to convey a sense of cleanliness,” explains a 2003 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report.
The chain was a runaway success and expanded even further. “Originally intended to provide a basic, clean environment for wholesome food and reasonable prices, the company eventually varied its restaurant designs and menus to reflect the unique location of each outlet,” states the LPC report. This Coney Island boardwalk Childs opened in a prime location in 1923. The site was close to Steeplechase Park, according to Andrew Dolkart’s Guide to New York City Landmarks. Steeplechase closed in the 1960s, but its most iconic ride, the Parachute Jump, still looms large nearby.
Childs vacated Coney Island in the 1950s. The chain gave rise to countless imitators, and eventually the company was sold and stores across the city shut down. The building on the boardwalk became a candy factory, which operated there until the early 2000s. Since its designation as a historic landmark in 2003, the site has served as a short-lived roller rink, then was transformed back into a restaurant space. It now sits empty. Still, the nautical-themed facade—so appropriate for the boardwalk of the nation’s most fantastical beach resort—continues to dazzle.
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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SS El Estero with a full load of ammunition resting on the bottom of New York Harbor after being filled with water to put out a fire that threatened a major explosion. She is still flying the red signal flag B indicating dangerous cargo.
SS El Estero was a ship filled with ammunition that caught fire at dockside in New York Harbor in 1943, but was successfully moved away and sunk by the heroic efforts of tug boats and fireboats, averting a major disaster.
The ship
The El Estero was built as a general cargo steamship for the Southern Pacific Steamship Lines at the Downey Shipbuilding Yard in Staten Island, New York and delivered for service in September 1920. The first of three sister ships built for the line, El Estero was operated by the Morgan Line in the Coastwise trade primarily between the ports of New York City, Baltimore and Galveston for much of her commercial service life.
Acquired by the US Maritime Commission on June 10, 1941 as part of an effort to increase US-Flag merchant marine shipping capacity, El Estero was purchased from Southern Pacific and placed operation with United States Lines under a Panamanian registry. Pressed into service carrying war supplies from the United States to Europe during World War II, the ship made several Atlantic crossings in convoys which frequently came under U-boat attack, including Convoy PQ 13 in March 1942. Continuing this duty into 1943, El Estero put into New York Harbor in early April 1943 where she waited her turn to load munitions at the long finger pier of the New York Port of Embarkation’sCaven Point Terminal off Jersey City, New Jersey.
Upper New York Bay with Caven Point Pier (thin white line in the center), where El Estero was moored when it caught fire.
The fireWith loading completed on April 24, 1943, El Estero had taken on 1,365 tons of mixed munitions and was preparing to depart at approximately 5:30PM when a boiler flashback started a fire on oily water in her bilges which quickly grew out of control.[2]The initial report of fire aboard El Estero brought an immediate response of five fire trucks from the Jersey City Fire Department, two 30-foot fireboats and roughly 60 volunteers from the U.S. Coast Guard to battle and contain the flames aboard the ship, which was moored directly opposite two other fully loaded ammunition ships and two ammunition-laden consists of railroad boxcars. With over 5,000 tons of ammunition (comparable to a tactical nuclear weapon[3]) now in immediate danger of being set off by the fire on El Estero and with memories of the Black Tom explosion fresh on the minds of many at the scene, fire fighting efforts began in earnest. It was quickly discovered that the location and intensity of the fire prevented access to the ships’ seacocks, making any attempt at scuttling the ship impossible, and the call went out to the New York City Fire Department, which in turn dispatched its two most powerful fireboats; Fire Fighter and John J. Harvey, to the scene.Arriving at 6:30 pm and immediately running hoses up to Coast Guardsmen on the burning ship, the fireboats took positions directly alongside El Estero as a trio of commercial tugboats made up a towline to her bow and began pulling her off the Caven Point Pier towards open waters on through The Narrows. Despite the high probability of the ship’s volatile cargo exploding at any moment, the Coast Guardsmen, fire fighters and tug crews continued their efforts to contain the fire on El Estero to save as much of the ship and cargo as possible, but shortly after the tow began the Port Admiral of New York Harbor ordered the ship sunk. Shifting to a shallow area of water near Robbins Reef Light in Upper New York Bay, the fireboats began pumping their combined maximum capacity of 38,000 gallons of water per minute into El Estero’s cargo holds, which succeeded in swamping the ship and sent her to the bottom shortly after 9PM with much of her superstructure still above the surface. With all hotspots declared extinguished by 11:30PM on the 24th, the all-clear for residents and businesses ringing New York Harbor was transmitted over the radio and what is considered to have been the single greatest threat to New York City during World War II passed without major incident or loss of life.[4]
FIREBOAT JOHN J. HARVEY
Aftermath
With a shroud of secrecy soon in place over the events surrounding the sinking of El Estero due in large part to the then-classified mission of the Caven Point Army Depot, public knowledge of the near disaster remained low until 1944 when the first of several awards for heroism were distributed to the first responders. El Estero herself would remain in her sunken state for the better part of four months before the still-loaded ship was finally raised from the seafloor and towed out of the harbor for use as a naval gunnery target.
Her untimely end and its legacy are still very much visible today in the modern-day Sandy Hook Bay, where in August 1943 the US Navy began construction of a new ammunition depot in New Jersey, now known as Naval Weapons Station Earle which features a 2.9-mile pier designed to move the hazardous activity of loading and unloading munitions away from densely populated areas. Over half a century later, both the Fire Fighter and John J. Harvey, the latter then a museum ship, helped fight fires at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT RIGHT FROM ED LITCHER: The Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House is a French Renaissance revival mansion at 867 Madison Avenue on the corner of East 72nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Completed in 1898, it was designed by the architecture firm of Kimball & Thompson and has been more specifically credited to Alexander Mackintosh, a British-born architect who worked for Kimball & Thompson from 1893 until 1898. Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo, the New York heiress who commissioned the mansion, never actually moved into it, but chose to reside with her sister in a row house across the street from the mansion. The building remained vacant until 1921, at which time the first floor was converted into stores and two apartments were carved out of the upper four floors.
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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Genevieve Naylor was born in 1915 in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended Miss Hall’s School and later, at age 16, the Music Box, an art school, where she studied painting. It was at the Music Box that Genevieve met Misha Reznikoff, her teacher.
Early life and educationGenevieve Naylor was born on February 2, 1915, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her father, Emmett Hay Naylor, a trade association lawyer and her mother, Ruth Houston Caldwell, were married on January 17, 1914. Genevieve was given the middle name of Hay as a reference to family member John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary. Her parents divorced in 1925, when Genevieve was 10 years old.[3] She attended Miss Hall’s School and later, at age 16, the Music Box, an arts school, where she studied painting.[4] It was at the Music Box that Genevieve met Misha Reznikoff, her teacher. Two years later, in 1933, they were in love, and when Misha moved to New York, Genevieve soon followed, and they settled into the Bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village living in a studio apartment – a huge converted stable strewn with colorful painting and cigarette boxes and often home to parties with musicians, artists, and fans that lasted for days. In 1934, Naylor attended an exhibit by photographer Berenice Abbott and so admired Abbott’s work that she switched from painting to photography. Naylor became Abbott’s apprentice in 1935, and they maintained their professional relationship until Naylor’s death.
Brazilian Photographs of Carnaval by Genevieve Naylor:In the early 1940s, as the conflict between the Axis and the Allies spread worldwide, the U.S. State Department turned its attention to Axis influences in Latin America. As head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller was charged with cultivating the region’s support for the Allies while portraying Brazil and its neighbors as dependable wartime partners. Genevieve Naylor, a photojournalist previously employed by the Associated Press and the WPA, was sent to Brazil in 1940 by Rockefeller’s agency to provide photographs that would support its need for propaganda. Often balking at her mundane assignments, an independent-minded Naylor produced something far different and far more rich—a stunning collection of over a thousand images that document a rarely seen period in Brazilian history
A Carnival celebration. IMAGE: GENEVIEVE NAYLOR/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES Dancers hold a Carnival celebration at Praca Onze, a busy square in Rio de Janeiro. IMAGE: GENEVIEVE NAYLOR/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESNaylor later spent 15 years as a photographer with Harper’s Bazaar and from 1944 to 1980 was a freelance photographer for Vogue, McCall’s, Town and Country, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Women’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Collier’s, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Elle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, House Beautiful, Holiday, Mademoiselle, American Home, Seventeen, Better Homes and Gardens, Charm, Bride’s, amongst others. She was a war time photographer, covering parts of the Korean War for Look magazine. Mainbocher is a fashion label founded by the American couturier Main Rousseau Bocher, also known as Mainbocher. Established in 1929, the house of Mainbocher successfully operated in Paris, and then in New York To see more of the fashion photographers taken by Genevieve Naylor: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/genevieve-naylors-fashion-photos/
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY NAVAL WEAPONS STATION EARLE Naval Weapons Station Earle’s Pier complex is one of the longest “finger piers” in the world. The trident-shaped pier complex extends 2.2 miles into Sandy Hook Bay (New Jersey) and comprises 2.9 miles of pier/trestle area. Two Fast Combat Support ships, USS Supply (AOE 6), and USS Arctic (AOE 8), are home sported at the pier complex.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
Sources WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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