Our city probably built the most wonderful comfort stations. Most are gone or in poor condition. Enjoy the tour.
Description: Comfort Station under elevated train Date: 1910-1920
Commemorative Plaque above comfort station. Jeanette Park was adjacent to the Seaman’s Church Institute near South Street. Apparently the comfort station was in back of the band-shell, 1924
Dedication on dome to merchant seamen of World War I, man in door
Public Comfort Station, Crotona Park, East Tremont Avenue and 3rd Avenue, Bronx, 1926
Comfort Station, Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, 1928
Comfort Station at Tremont Avenue and 177th Street, Bronx; newly completed, 1926
Pelham Bay Park: Concessions Building and comfort station 1941
Comfort station, benches in foreground, large apartment houses on 85th Street in background, 1951
Comfort Station by El tracks, Brooklyn,1938
Seward Park: Girl’s side Comfort station with decorative stars above the door and patterned brick , 1941
Corlear’s Hook Park: East River Comfort Station, 1941
COMFORT STATION UNDER CONSTRUCTION ,1941 BUILDING PRIOR TO DEMOLTION NEW BUILDING 2020
Combined Ticket Office-Concession-Comfort Station, Battery Park; Rendering by Aymar Embury II, 1944
TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY JAPAN VILLAGE FOOD HALL, INDUSTRY CITY, BROOKLYN
ED LITCHER AND GLORIA HERMAN 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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Lots of sushi in New York. Sometimes seems as many sushi places as pizza or Chinese take-outs. One big difference is that Japanese restaurants in New York cover a wide price range – from sushi joints to very heavy-duty upscale restaurants (though there are probably fewer at the high end since the era of rich Japanese firms in NYC ended) – and many offer more varieties of Japanese cuisine. The influence of Japanese food has spread widely:
You Tube, New York street food tips
Like the Chinese, Japanese restaurants have adapted. Japanese restaurants in Japan serve one type of food. You would not expect to find soba and katsu or udon and sushi in the same place. Here, menus in many Japanese restaurants cover a much broader range of dishes. And, as in Chinese restaurants, tastes tend to conform to American parameters. But food is still served plated – not family style as in Chinese restaurants and in upscale Japanese restaurants here, plating is still considered an art form.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Americans were familiar with Japan in the late 1800’s. Interest in Japan’s art, culture and lifestyle was widespread. Japan was exotic but “clean” and, in a way, sort of European – as opposed to China which was “dirty” and weird. Americans cheered on the Japanese at war with Russia. Japanese food was not completely unknown, even raw fish. One article, “The Great Sushi Craze of 1905”, notes that “the Japanophile craze had been building for a long time. From 1898 through 1907, the social pages of American newspapers were filled with descriptions of Japanese-themed social events, while the women’s pages had instructions on how to organize your own Japanese soirees and teas. During the same period, home design magazines told you how to convert your sitting room into a Japanese tea-house (a fad of the late 1890s) and gardening journals discussed Japanese plants and landscaping.” One of the silent films’ leading heart throbs was Japanese, Sessue Hayakawa.
Japanese immigration to the US began in the 1880s. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 left room for “cheap labor” and Japanese were recruited to replace Chinese laborers. Between 1886 and 1911, more than 400,000 men and women left Japan for the US – mainly to Hawaii and the West Coast. But anti-Japanese feeling heightened, and the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the door to Japanese immigrants.
Only in 1952 did the McCarran-Walter Act allow Japanese immigrants to become naturalized US citizens. And significant Japanese immigration did not occur again until the Immigration Act of 1965 which ended 40 years of bans against immigration from Japan and other countries.
Japanese came to NYC slowly, and only a few businessmen were here before the late 1950s when Japanese connected with the UN and Japanese corporate executives began to arrive. By 1988, 50,000 Japanese businesspeople worked in Greater NYC, 77% temporary employees who planned to return to Japan. Employees of Japanese companies and their families made up over 80% of the Japanese residents of the New York City area – the others were a varied assortment of artists, students and wanderers.
The first Japanese cuisine restaurant we know of (Japanese ran American food restaurants on the West Coast, well known because of their low prices) is Maikoya in San Francisco which served Japanese dishes like sukiyaki and tempura. A 1925 guidebook, “The Restaurants of New York,” includes one Japanese restaurant, Miyako (originally at 340 West 58th Street, later 20 West 56th Street). By 1931, “Tips on Tables,” another guide, lists Daruma, Tokiwa and Yama, all in Midtown, all serving sukiyaki and tempura. Yama also had chow mein on the menu.
A word about sushi. It’s strange how Japanese food here is identified with sushi. The roots of sushi can be traced deep into Japanese history, but what we eat now – nigiri sushi – is a fairly recent creation. Sushi is not the national dish of Japan, is more regional than national, and not the standard go-to meal (good sushi is expensive in Japan), like ramen or even katsu. But here, food historians speak of the arrival of sushi as if it meant the birth of real Japanese food. And talk about adaption, look at “rolls” the other half of sushi menus. Some credit the California roll with making sushi accessible to Americans. The roll evolved in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and used local avocados paired with crab meat to replace hard-to-find fresh, fatty tuna, ingredients familiar to Americans. Another classic example, the spicy tuna roll, was also invented in Los Angeles in the early 1980s by mixing tuna scraps with chili sauce and rolling the result with seaweed and rice. Today, the tuna roll is usually sauced with sriracha, which is produced in the nearby suburb of Irwindale, California. The result is a mix of Japanese and “American” flavors.
https://restaurantclicks.com/best-sushi-nyc/
In any case, sushi did not arrive in NYC until the late 1950’s and did not become pervasive until the early 80’s. Obviously, sushi appeared first in LA, when in 1966, Noritoshi Kanai and his partner, Harry Wolff, opened Kawafuku Restaurant in Little Tokyo – the first to offer traditional nigiri sushi. The sushi bar was successful with Japanese businessmen, who then introduced it to their American colleagues.
When Craig Claiborne reviewed two new Japanese restaurants, Nippon and Saito, in 1963 he noted that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Nippon was owned by Nobuyoshi Kuraoka, much honored by the Japanese government for “outstanding contributions to the promotion of Japanese culture through Japanese food.” I knew him at his other restaurant, Soba Nippon, because I had lived in a sake-soba rich region in Japan, and we spoke often about our mutual love for soba.
The number of Japanese restaurants increased rapidly. A 1974 Times article said there were just 10 Japanese restaurants in NYC in 1964 but over 100 by the mid-1970’s. But they grew in many directions. By this time, a second wave of Japanese restaurants had broken on our shores – very Japanese, very upscale, very expensive boutique restaurants largely patronized by Japanese businessmen and lucky clients. One of the first of these was Hatsuhana blessed with a 4-star review by Mimi Sheraton in April 1983. Hatsuhana’s elevation coincided with the great wave of Japanese investment in Manhattan that saw Tokyo-based companies buy Rockefeller Center and brought Japanese fashion to Madison Avenue. Some of these restaurants were associated with very Japanese clubs, which I never visited. (Do you recall the last train out to Westchester, stocked with boozey Japanese salarymen heading home?)
And another arrival, Japanese sort-of, were new restaurants which catered specifically to American tastes. Surely the most famous example is Benihana, a chain of teppanyaki restaurants which opened its first place in 1964 on West 56th Street. For many New Yorkers who would not think of raw fish or even ramen, this was “Japan.”
At the other end of the “authenticity” scale, were Japanese restaurants which opened in the 1990s, driven by the explosion of interest in Japanese cuisine and a growing sophistication especially for high-end sushi and kaiseki – restaurants like Masa (the first Japanese restaurant to earn 3 Michelin stars in America) followed by Sushi Yasuda, Sushi Ko, Kurumazushi, Kanoyama and others; and Japanese-American fusion sushi at Nobu, Zuma, Sushi of Gari, Sushi Seki, and many others.
Japanese restaurants took over much of the high end of New York cuisine. The 2017 Michelin guide for NYC listed one 3-star (Masa), and out of a total of 61 Michelin 1-star restaurants, fourteen are Japanese. By comparison, Michelin only lists five 1-star Italian restaurants, and just two traditional French 1-stars. The 2018 Michelin guide was the same. Out of 56 Michelin 1-star restaurants, fourteen remain Japanese.
Meanwhile, ramen restaurants popped up across the City. Packaged ramen noodles arrived with the Japanese and became a staple of low-cost dining. (The current available variety of packaged noodles dishes is amazing.)
www.raspberrykiss.co.uk
And then a wave of Japanese chains hit the city. Ippudo opened in 2008. Ootoya helped “integrate traditional home cooking” to the States and Gyu-Kaku did the same for Japanese barbecue. Udon-noodle specialists TsuruTonTan took over the spacious Union Square Café digs in 2016. At least three Japan-based ramen shops — Tonchin, Ichiran and EAK Ramen — opened in New York City in 2017. Chain restaurants come and go but the taste lingers on.
Finally, Japanese restaurants have spread widely, and sushi has become an ingredient in our local cuisine, but the funny end to the story is that most of them aren’t run by Japanese. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture estimated that only about a tenth of Japanese restaurants in the US were run by people of Japanese descent. Most are owned by Chinese Americans or Korean Americans.
HOFFMAN AND SWINBURNE ISLANDS QUARANTINE HOSPITALS GLORIA HERMAN 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
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Before Central Park was created, the landscape along what is now the Park’s perimeter from West 82nd to West 89th Street was the site of Seneca Village, a community of predominantly African-Americans, many of whom owned property. By 1855, the village consisted of approximately 225 residents, made up of roughly two-thirds African-Americans, one-third Irish immigrants, and a small number of individuals of German descent. One of few African-American enclaves at the time, Seneca Village allowed residents to live away from the more built-up sections of downtown Manhattan and escape the unhealthy conditions and racial discrimination they faced there.
THE FORMATION OF SENECA VILLAGE
Detail of map of the pre-Central Park landscape showing the area of Seneca Village. Courtesy of New York City Municipal Archives
There is some evidence that residents had gardens and raised livestock in Seneca Village, and the nearby Hudson River was a likely source of fishing for the community. A nearby spring, known as Tanner’s Spring, provided a water source. By the mid-1850s, Seneca Village comprised 50 homes and three churches, as well as burial grounds, and a school for African-American students.
A THRIVING AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
For African-Americans, Seneca Village offered the opportunity to live in an autonomous community far from the densely populated downtown. Despite New York State’s abolition of slavery in 1827, discrimination was still prevalent throughout New York City, and severely limited the lives of African-Americans. Seneca Village’s remote location likely provided a refuge from this climate. It also would have provided an escape from the unhealthy and crowded conditions of the City, and access to more space both inside and outside the home.
Compared to other African-Americans living in New York, residents of Seneca Village seem to have been more stable and prosperous—by 1855, approximately half of them owned their own homes. With property ownership came other rights not commonly held by African-Americans in the City—namely, the right to vote. In 1821, New York State required African-American men to own at least $250 in property and hold residency for at least three years to be able to vote. Of the 100 black New Yorkers eligible to vote in 1845, 10 lived in Seneca Village.
The fact that many residents were property owners contradicts some common misperceptions during the mid-19th century that the people living on the land slated for the Park were poor squatters living in shanties. While some residents lived in shanties and in crowded conditions, most lived in two-story homes. Census records show that residents were employed, with African-Americans typically employed as laborers and in service jobs, the main options for them at the time. Records also show that most children who lived in Seneca Village attended school.
THE CREATION OF CENTRAL PARK
During the early 1850s, the City began planning for a large municipal park to counter unhealthful urban conditions and provide space for recreation. In 1853, the New York State Legislature enacted a law that set aside 775 acres of land in Manhattan—from 59th to 106th Streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues—to create the country’s first major landscaped public park. The City acquired the land through eminent domain, the law that allows the government to take private land for public use with compensation paid to the landowner. This was a common practice in the 19th century, and had been used to build Manhattan’s grid of streets decades earlier. There were roughly 1,600 inhabitants displaced throughout the area. Although landowners were compensated, many argued that their land was undervalued. Ultimately, all residents had to leave by the end of 1857. Research is underway to determine where Seneca Village residents relocated—some may have gone to other African-American communities in the region, such as Sandy Ground in Staten Island and Skunk Hollow in New Jersey.
Seneca Village extended as far east as Seventh Avenue, and would have bordered the present-day Arthur Ross Pinetum (mid-Park between 84th and 86th Streets).
This is one in a series of posters by the artist Pashabo all with the same message Be Responsible and Vote. Each of the images contain one white star in a field of blue surrounded by a white and red circle. 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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
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Central Park Conservancy
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Lee started working as a chemist, but gave up the position to become a painter. Originally he used photography as a precursor to his painting, but soon became interested in photography for its own sake. He recorded the people and places around him. Among his earliest subjects were Pennsylvanian bootleg mining and the Father Divine cult.[3]
http://Grading cotton at cotton compress, Houston, Texas, 1939
Life (Photography Work)
In the fall of 1936, during the Great Depression, Lee was hired for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic documentation project of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He joined a team assembled under Roy Stryker, along with Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Walker Evans. Stryker provided direction and bureaucratic protection to the group, leaving the photographers free to compile what in 1973 was described as “the greatest documentary collection which has ever been assembled.”[2] Lee created some of the iconic images produced by the FSA, including photographic studies of San Augustine, Texas in 1939, and Pie Town, New Mexico in 1940.
Drinking at the bar, crab boil night, Raceland, Louisiana.
Street dancing, National Rice Festival, Crowley Louisiana, 1938
Over the spring and summer of 1942, Lee was one of several government photographers to document the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. He produced more than 600 images of families waiting to be removed and their later lives in various detention facilities, most located in isolated areas of the interior of the country.[4]
After the FSA was defunded in 1943, Lee served in the Air Transport Command (ATC). During this period, he took photographs of all the airfield approaches used by the ATC to supply the Armed Forces in World War II. In 1946 and 1947, he worked for the United States Department of the Interior (DOI), helping the agency compile a medical survey in communities involved in mining bituminous coal. He created over 4,000 photographs of miners and their working conditions in coal mines.[5] In 1946, Lee completed a series of photos focused on a Pentecostal Church of God in a Kentucky coal camp.[6]
While completing the DOI work, Lee also continued to work under Stryker. He produced public relations photographs for Standard Oil of New Jersey.[2]
In 1947 Lee moved to Austin, Texas and continued photography. In 1965 he became the first instructor of photography at the University of Texas there.[2]
Los Angeles, California (1942) — Japanese-American family waiting for train to take them to the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley, California.
Japanese Americans in their living quarters at a Farm Security Administration camp, July 1942, Rupert, Idaho. Photographer Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-073843-D) Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-russelll-apt-1/ (accessed May 13 2014).
Japanese Americans harvesting lettuce before mass removal, May 1942, San Benito County, California. Photographer Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34- 072646-E) Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-russelll-lettuce-1/ (accessed May 13 2014).
Farm Security Administration mobile camp, July 1942, Shelley, Idaho. Photographer Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34- 073778-D) Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-russelll-fsacamp-1/ (accessed May 13 2014).
Our friend Ron Crawford has produced a wonderful print of our cherry trees. Copies are available at the RIHS Kiosk.
West staircase leading to Vanderbilt Avenue entrance Grand Central Terminal Jinny Ewald, Hara Reiser, Jay Jacobson, Andy Sparberg, Aron Eisenpreiss, Ed Litcher, Alexis Villafane, Gloria Herman, Vicki Feinmel, all got it right
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
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Kodak 2A Beau Brownie, 1930-1933, Art Deco designed by Walter Dorwin Teague. Box-shaped apparatus, covered with imitation leather, for film 116. It measures 13 x 13 x 8 cm. It has two viewfinders (landscape and portrait format) as well as two tripod threads and 3 diaphragm openings selected by means of a rod.
Kodak 2A Beau Brownie, 1930-1933, Art Deco designed by Walter Dorwin Teague. Box-shaped apparatus, covered with imitation leather, for film 116. It measures 13 x 13 x 8 cm. It has two viewfinders (landscape and portrait format) as well as two tripod threads and 3 diaphragm openings selected by means of a rod.
This Kodak Instamatic 33 camera had two shutter speeds, 1/40 and 1/80 of a second, a simple fixed focus lens, and a hot shoe for mounting a flash cube on top.
IN 2010, THE TRAM TOKEN BOOTHS WERE UNCEREMONIOUSLY REMOVED FROM THE STATIONS.
ED LITCHER GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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Lewis Wickes Hine (September 26, 1874 – November 3, 1940) was an American sociologist and muckraker photographer. His photographs were instrumental in bringing about the passage of the first child labor laws in the United States.
Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates (photographs) and came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform.[1]
Documentary photography
In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey.
Child laborers in glasswork. Indiana, 1908 Little Lottie, a regular oyster shucker in Alabama Canning Co. (Bayou La Batre, Alabama, 1911) In 1908, Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont,[3] to aid the NCLC’s lobbying efforts to end the practice.[4] In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton’s composite portraits.
Hine’s work for the NCLC was often dangerous. As a photographer, he was frequently threatened with violence or even death by factory police and foremen. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but also posed a serious threat to the industry.[5] To gain entry to the mills, mines and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or even an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery.]
Soldier Thrown in Air, 1917, National Gallery of Art During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hine made a series of “work portraits,” which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry. In 1930, Hine was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building. He photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks that the workers endured. To obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially-designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue.[7] At times, he remembered, he hung above the city with nothing below but “a sheer drop of nearly a quarter-mile.”
“Power house mechanic working on steam pump” (1920) During the Great Depression Hine again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration’s National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
Later life
In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was not completed.
The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage. Hine hoped to join the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite writing repeatedly to Roy Stryker, Stryker always refused.] Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died on November 3, 1940, at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation. He was 66 years old.
Legacy Hine’s photographs supported the NCLC’s lobbying to end child labor, and in 1912 the Children’s Bureau was created. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 eventually brought child labour in the US to an end.[5]
After Hine’s death, his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures and did not accept them, but the George Eastman House did.[11]
In 2006, author Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop’s historical fiction middle-grade novel, Counting on Grace was published by Wendy Lamb Books. The latter chapters center on 12-year-old Grace and her life-changing encounter with Hine, during his 1910 visit to a Vermont cotton mill known to have many child laborers. On the cover is the iconic photo of Grace’s real-life counterpart, Addie Card12, taken during Hine’s undercover visit to the Pownal Cotton Mill.
In 2016, Time published colorized versions of several of Hine’s photographs of child labor in the U
IMAGES FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
Lewis W. Hine, N.Y. tenement. Little ones helped in homework., 1910, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, 2018.23
Lewis W. Hine, Handyman in Washington, DC, 1909, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1994.91.83
Lewis W. Hine, Little Orphan Annie in a Pittsburgh Institution, ca. 1910, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1994.91.82
Lewis W. Hine, Biloxi, Mississippi, ca. 1925, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1994.91.80
Lewis W. Hine, Young Russian Immigrants Hoeing Sugar Beets, Colorado, ca. 1910, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1994.91.81
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
http://Lewis Hine – Spinners in a cotton mill, 1911.jpg
Cable worker, by Lewis Hine.jpg
Child workers at Brookside Mills in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, photographed by Lewis Hine in 1910.
Records of the Work Projects Administration. (69-RP-4K-1) By Lewis Hine, 1930. Old-timer, — keeping up with the boys. Many structural workers are above middle-age. Empire State [Building]. New York City, New York.
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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“For the Record” introduced the Manhattan Building Plans Project in 2018, and provided an update in April 2020, In the Details. This important work is continuing. With funding from the New York State Library Conservation and Preservation Program, two more staff have joined the project. To date, the team has completed processing almost 40,000 plans.
Surrogate’s Court, 31 Chambers Street, central atrium and staircase, 2018. Photographer: Matt Minor. NYC Municipal Archives.
Recently, they inventoried an 1897 alteration plan submitted to the Department of Buildings by architect A. F. Leicht for a hotel located at 270 South Street. According to the application, a “Mrs. Emma Meyer” owned the building; notable because a woman-owned business property at that time was very unusual.
This led to wondering about a related topic, women architects. Reviewing the inventory of the processed plans revealed exactly one building with a woman, Marie Frommer, listed as the primary architect on a 1946 building alteration plan. One goal of the processing project is to provide multiple ways to research the collection: location, date, and architect’s name. The inventory also includes the landmark status of the building, quantity and condition of the plans, as well as remarks, e.g. exceptional façade elevation, or, “woman-owned.”
Continuing the search for woman architects led to an excellent resource, Architects in Practice: New York City, 1900-1940, compiled by James Ward for the Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records in 1989. The preface to the volume included a list of architects with “feminine” names. It’s a short list. Of the more than 5,000 names in the directory, Ward identified a total of twenty women.
Would the Archives collection provide information about any of the women architects on this list? The answer is yes, and the journey led unexpectedly close to home, and the fascinating story of Fay Kellogg.
Since 1984, the Municipal Archives has been headquartered in the Surrogate’s Court building at 31 Chambers Street. Designed by John Rochester Thomas in 1899, the Beaux-Arts-influenced structure has long been celebrated as one of the most beautiful public buildings in the city.
First floor rotunda, detail, Hall of Records, 31 Chambers Street, architect John R. Thomas, 1897. NYC Municipal Archives.
What is less well-known is that Thomas’ staff included a young woman architect named Fay Kellogg who is credited with the design for the grand staircase that is one of the highlights of the central atrium.
Piecing together the history of a person often requires many sources. In the case of Kellogg, it is fortunate that she was written about during her career. Those contemporaneous reports supplement the archival records needed to tell her story. Born in 1871 in Milton, Pennsylvania, Kellogg attended Columbian University, now known as George Washington University, in Washington D.C. to pursue a career in medicine. In a 1907 article in the New York Times entitled, “Woman Invades Field of Modern Architecture: Remarkable success of Miss Kellogg in profession exclusively followed by men scores triumph for her sex” Kellogg explained that her father had concluded that the study of medicine was long and difficult and urged her to give it up. Instead he offered to pay for her to study architectural drawing and mathematics with a German tutor followed by a year of study at the Pratt Institute.
After her initial training, Brooklyn architect Rudolph L. Daus hired Kellogg in 1892 to help design the 13th Regiment Armory and the Monastery of the Precious Blood. She also spent a year with the firm of Carrere & Hastings before heading to Paris. While working at the atelier of Marcel de Monclos she applied for admittance to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Had she been successful, she would have been the first woman at the Ecole. And it was through her petitions to the French government that the Ecole began accepting women students in 1898.
After Paris, Kellogg returned to Brooklyn. According to census records, she resided with her family at 295 MacDonough Street. The 1910 federal census records her occupation as ‘artist,’ but the 1915 King County census (available in the Municipal Archives) more accurately lists her profession as ‘architect.’
A 1915 story in Pearson’s Magazine, “Two Women Who Do Things,” by Kate V. St. Maur, described how Kellogg joined the architectural firm of John R. Thomas, designer of 31 Chambers Street, and stated “… the great staircase in that building was designed by her.” The 1907 Times story related how Thomas had also approved her plan for a sculptural program made up of four early Dutch governors placed in niches that would “represent them looking out on the Greater City, with its skyscrapers, subways and other features of its wonderful growth.” Sadly, Thomas died before construction began and the work was turned over to the Tammany Hall architects Horgan & Slattery who scrapped her plans for the sculptures.
After Thomas’ death in 1901, Kellogg went into business for herself, with an office at the newly-built 30 Union Square. She started off quickly with a commission to renovate and construct seven buildings for the American News Company in Manhattan on Park Place. They soon placed her in charge of all their work in New York City.
Throughout her career, Kellogg designed hundreds of buildings, cottages, suburban railway stations, and helped to design the Woman’s Memorial Hospital (now the Interfaith Medical Center) in Brooklyn. During World War I, Kellogg was one of three female architects, including Julia Morgan and Katherine Budd, who were contracted to design “hostess houses” for military camps in the South.
Woman’s Place Is, if You Insist, in the Home; but Who’s Going to Fuss About It If She Wants to Earn $10,000 Or So, a Year, Somewhere Else?” Illustrated article, New York Herald, December 17, 1916
. In addition to her work, Kellogg strongly supported women’s suffrage and the fight for the equal rights of women in the workplace. In 1909, she was included in a delegation of “self-supporting” or professional women, the only architect included in the group, invited to sit on the stage at Carnagie Hall to hear British Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. She often spoke eloquently about the role of women in architecture. For example, in a 1911 interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer, Kellogg was asked if there were any specific fields suitable for women in architecture, to which she replied, “I don’t think a woman architect ought to be satisfied with small pieces, but launch out into business buildings. That is where money and name are made. I don’t approve of a well-equipped woman creeping along; let her leap ahead as men do. All she needs is courage.” ‘
In 1907, Kellogg purchased property in Greenlawn, Town of Huntington, Long Island. She built a home there, as well as the town post office. On April 21, 2021, Town of Huntington officials unveiled a historical marker honoring Kellogg, describing her as “…the foremost woman architect of the early twentieth century.”
Fay Kellogg, death certificate, no. 14819 of 1918, Brooklyn. NYC Municipal Archives.
Kellogg became ill in Atlanta, Georgia in the spring of 1918 while supervising the construction of hostess houses at Camp Gordon. She died in July 1918 at her home in Brooklyn, aged 47. According to her death certificate (on file at the Municipal Archives), the cause of death was asthenia from a sarcoma of the spine, and not the flu epidemic, as has been more recently reported The certificate also recorded her occupation: architect.
Kellogg was not always credited for her work. It is not clear how many other women worked in architectural firms without being acknowledged. By presenting this information, it is hoped that Kellogg’s contribution to the glorious 31 Chambers building will be recognize
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:
NEW YORK DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
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In 1907, the developers behind Alwyn Court announced their plans to build this 12-story luxury apartment house on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 58th Street. “It will have ornamental facades of limestone, with terra cotta trimmings,” the New-York Tribune dutifully reported.
That ho-hum description of the facade hardly did the Alwyn justice. When the aristocratic edifice opened to well-to-do tenants two years later—advertising itself as a place of “city homes for people with country houses”—the limestone and terra cotta facade proved to be one of the most ornate ever unveiled.
Alwyn Court’s exterior is an “intricate stone tapestry” of baroque scrolls, floral motifs, grotesques, angels, and crowned salamanders. The salamanders represent Francois I, the French king during the Renaissance whose style the building emulates. (The Alwyn is one of two New York buildings that feature salamanders on the facade, both by the same architects, Harde & Short.)
“This is the finest building of its type in New York City,” states the 1966 Landmarks Preservation Commission report, which designates Alwyn Court a city landmark.
Most luxury apartment buildings of the era only used terra cotta on the base of the facade and thus didn’t have excessive room or ornamentation, the LPC report explains. “Here at Alwyn Court, instead of limiting the decoration, the architects went to the other extreme, leaving hardly any surface undecorated,” states the report.
A lot has changed at the Alwyn since 1909. Originally the building had two apartments per floor with at least 14 rooms and five baths each, along with personal wine cellars for tenants and other exclusive amenities. (Remember, apartment living for the rich was still a new concept, so they tried everything to lure in residents.)
But that layout was eventually altered in favor of more apartments per floor that had fewer rooms. In the 1930s, the lobby was redone, then remade again in 1982 when an air shaft was turned into a central atrium. After a protracted battle with longtime tenants (including many senior citizens living in rent controlled units), Alwyn Court went co-op in the early 1980s.
The airshaft is now an interior atrium
By Berenice Abbott in 1936 Now, following a long stint behind construction scaffolding, Alwyn Court’s filigreed facade is fully on view. It looks as beautiful as it did in 1936, when Berenice Abbott photographed a portion of the building for her book, Changing New York. [Last photo: Sotheby’s]
Although it is know that the Blackwell Island Lighthouse was built by the City of New York in 1872 under the supervision of architect James Renwick Jr., who also designed several other buildings on the island for the Charities and Correction Board as well as more famous works such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Legends abound about the actual construction of the lighthouse. Two names, John McCarthy and Thomas Maxey, are associated with the various legends. The 1870 report of the warden of the lunatic asylum indicated that an industrious patient had built a seawall near the Asylum that had reclaimed land. The legends indicate that an inmate of the asylum built a fort to defend the island against a British invasion that he feared. Some versions indicate that he had incorporated Civil War cannons. The legend indicates that the builder was bribed with bogus money to demolish the fort for the construction of the lighthouse. Other stories indicate that an Asylum inmate constructed the lighthouse. For many years, this stone could be found near the lighthouse, with the following inscription: This is the work – Was done by – John McCarthy – Who built the Light – House from the bottom to the – Top All ye who do pass by may – Pray for his soul when he dies. ED LITCHER GOT IT!
Gloria Herman, Aron Eisenpreis and Laura Hussey also 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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Anyone remember when it was called an “ice box?” And some of us remember when the iceman delivered ice to your flat.
Ice man on Mott Street, 1943. Marjory Collins photographer, Library of Congress
Ice was a big business in New York City. Block ice was once a necessary piece of American culture. For about a century beginning in the 1830s, keeping food and beverages cold in New York City depended on it. New York City’s hotels, businesses, and restaurants consumed more ice than any other city in the United States. After a recent stay in Manhattan in 1832, the English novelist and travel writer Fanny Trollope observed, “I do not imagine there is a home without the luxury of a piece of ice to cool the water and harden the butter.” Of course, because it’s the City, all this ice came with scandals, scams and dirty politicians. And the interesting backstory is that throughout much of the 19th century, the ice business in New York City was just one part of a global industry.
So, sit back, have a cold drink and chill.
Ice wasn’t small potatoes. Demand grew so rapidly that by 1855 New Yorkers were consuming 285,000 tons of ice annually. During a typical week in the 1880’s, an iceman might deliver as much as 80 tons of ice, much of it carted up multiple flights of stairs. Manhattan and Brooklyn consumed 1.3 million tons in 1879, more than a quarter of the national market.
Much of New York ice was “harvested” from the Hudson River and nearby lakes. At its height in the 1880s, an estimated 20,000 workers cut out huge blocks of ice for storage in 135 specially built structures lining the river between Poughkeepsie and Albany. When the warm weather set in, barges carried the ice to the Manhattan docks, where it was transferred to icehouses around the city and then distributed to customers by ice wagons.
Ice man on Mott Street, 1943. Marjory Collins photographer, Library of Congress
Cheap ice changed New Yorkers’ basic diet. Butchers, fishmongers and dairymen began to use ice to preserve their stocks, leading to significant improvement in food quality and public health. Ice also greatly increased the diversity of culinary offerings available to New Yorkers as importers found ways to preserve previously exotic delights like freshwater fish. Ice cream, once the rarest of treats, became so popular that in 1850 a leading women’s magazine declared it a necessity. Ice had the additional effect of transforming New York into the nation’s first beer capital by allowing for year-round brewing.
In 1896, the ice market boiled over. New Yorkers were outraged when the ice companies – the Knickerbocker was the biggest – were absorbed into a massive national trust, the Consolidated Ice Company. Prices jumped 33% that spring, and more than doubled by midsummer. Hardest hit were the poor, who could afford to buy their ice, like their winter coal, only in small quantities.
Citizens brought the ice but loathed the companies that provided it, and in the 1880’s and 1890’s, critics charged these firms with price gouging and monopolistic practices. In response, Knickerbocker and its competitors blamed the summer price increases on mild winters that produced insufficient stocks – “ice famines,” in the parlance of the day. And to frost the issue came Consolidated and soaring prices.
Of course, there’s a bad actor behind all of this. Charles Morse was an American businessman and speculator who specialized in fraud and corrupt business practices. At one time he controlled 13 banks. Morse organized the Consolidated Ice Company in 1897 and, in 1899, merged it with several other companies to form the American Ice Company which held a virtual monopoly for ice in New York. Morse quickly became known as “The Ice King”.
The ice hit the fan when the New York Journal and Advertiser revealed that Mayor Robert Van Wyck and other city officials had conspired to create a virtual monopoly for Consolidated. As the price of ice doubled, new revelations showed that the mayor and his brother had been given $1.7 million in Consolidated stock. Van Wyck and the suspected city officials appeared before Justice William Jay Gaynor and told the court that Morse had advised him to purchase these stocks, which he said, he never did. The investigations produced no convictions, but the mayor, hounded by catcalls of “Ice! Ice! Ice!” whenever he appeared in public, was soundly defeated by a reform ticket in the election of 1901.
Morse walked away: Having formed a holding company called the Ice Securities Company, he manipulated its stock and left the ice business with a profit of some $12 million. Morsew eHMorse went on to other dastardly deeds – said to have been one of the causes of the Panic of 1907. He was convicted of violations of federal banking laws and sentenced to 15 years in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in November 1908 but remained free on appeal until January 1910. Freed again because of “severe illness,” Morse recovered enough to be indicted for profiteering during World War I.
In 1911 the American Ice Co. split up “to avoid the expenditure of time and money necessary to defend the pending action of People vs. American Ice Company.” The distribution business ended up becoming the Knickerbocker Ice Co, and the production business spun off as the Ice Manufacturing Co.
We usually think that a business is local before national, not to mention international. But before the ice business began here, it was an international industry. The ice trade was started by the New England businessman Frederic Tudor in 1806. Tudor’s plan was to export ice as a luxury good to wealthy residents of the West Indies and southern US states, where he hoped they would relish the product during their sweltering summers. He first shipped ice to Martinique, using a specially built icehouse. (Profit from ice was slippery for Tudor. He made his first profits by 1810, only to be swindled by a business partner and land in debtor’s prison.)
Over the coming years the ice trade widened to Cuba and southern United States, with other merchants joining Tudor in harvesting and shipping ice from New England. During the 1830s and 1840s the ice trade expanded further, with shipments reaching England, India, South America, China and Australia. Tudor made a fortune from the India trade, while brand names such as Wenham Ice became famous in London. (We’re told that Queen Victoria got her ice from Massachusetts.) By the middle of the 1820s, around 3,000 tons of ice was being shipped from Boston annually, two thirds by Tudor.
In 1833 Tudor and several partners had launched a new business to export ice to Calcutta. The Anglo-Indian elite, concerned about the effects of the summer heat, quickly agreed to exempt the imports from the usual East India Company regulations and tariffs, and the initial net shipment of around a hundred tons sold successfully. With the ice fetching for three pence (£0.80 in 2010 terms) per pound, the first shipment produced profits of $9,900 ($253,000), and in 1835 Tudor commenced regular exports to Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. The prospect of a steady supply of Tudor’s clear, solid blocks prompted English residents in the city to throw parties serving claret and beer chilled with his New England ice. The India Gazette thanked him for making “this luxury accessible, by its abundance and cheapness.”
Booming international business notwithstanding, the ice trade increasingly began to focus on supplying the growing cities on the US east coast and the needs of businesses across the Midwest. These large summer-scorching cities became major markets for ice. Ice became a major component in industries as well. It began to be used in refrigerator cars by the railroad industry, allowing the meat packing industry around Chicago and Cincinnati to slaughter cattle locally, before sending the dressed meat onward to either US domestic or international markets. Chilled refrigerator cars and ships created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could previously only have been consumed locally. US and British fishermen began to preserve their catches in ice, allowing longer voyages and bigger catches, and the brewing industry became operational all-year around.
An 1870 refrigerator car, showing the ice stored at both ends, Wikipedia
Ice also delivered medical benefits. Doctors soon discovered that ice could save lives and began prescribing it as a means of lowering the body temperature of fever victims, especially the young. During the summer, city hospitals issued free ice tickets to the poor, and crowds often grew so anxious outside free ice depots during heat waves that free-for-alls known as ice riots erupted.
At its peak at the end of the 19th century, the US ice trade employed an estimated 90,000 people in an industry capitalized at $28 million ($660 million in 2010 terms), using ice houses capable of storing up to 250,000 tons each.
Competition had slowly been growing, however, in the form of artificially produced plant ice and mechanically chilled facilities. Unreliable and expensive at first, plant ice began to successfully compete with natural ice in Australia and India during the 1850s and 1870s respectively, until, by the outbreak of World War I, more plant ice was being produced in the US each year than naturally harvested ice.
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)
Colonial New Yorkers hunted them in estuaries and salt marshes, putting turtle soup on every restaurant menu. Contemporary city residents know them as the scaly native reptiles who occasionally pop their heads up while feasting in city waterways.
Considering the role they’ve played in Gotham’s history and their presence in the modern city, it’s no wonder that images of turtles can be found on building facades, fence posts, and the sculptures in Manhattan parks.
You would expect a neighborhood called Turtle Bay to have its fair share of ornamental turtles. The turtle above is one of several on the iron fences surrounding Turtle Bay Gardens, a posh collection of restored brownstones flanking a private garden between Second and Third Avenues and 48th to 49th Streets.
The Turtle Bay Gardens iron fence turtles are a lot more stylized than this stegosaurus-like critter, one of three lifelike bronze turtles in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on East 49th Street off Second Avenue.
Outside of Turtle Bay, turtle sculptures abound. One of my favorites is the circa-1916 turtle at the base (one of four) of the Pulitzer Fountain beside the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. Its mouth serves as one of the fountain’s spouts—a nice bit of whimsy.
Farther uptown at 973 Fifth Avenue is a sculpture with a base resting on the backs of two rather round turtles. The sculpture is in the rotunda of a former Gilded Age mansion now occupied by a French-English bookstore called Albertine (operated by the French Consulate, which has long owned the mansion).
Full-size view of The Young Archer, resting on turtles
The turtles supporting the sculpture are impressive. But the sculpture itself might have more of a pedigree. Acquired by Stanford White and called The Young Archer, it’s been in the rotunda for decades and has recently been identified as a possible early work of Michelangelo, according to the Albertine website.
Joseph Cornell, Untitled, mixed media: wood: stained, paper, paint, decal…, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1985.64.51
OCTAGON BUS STOP WITH NEWLY INSTALLED LAMPPOST OFF THE SIDEWALK ALEXIS VILLAFANE GOT IT!
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)
