The video of the February 15th presentation by Rosemary J. Brown and Amanda Matthews on the book FOLLOWING NELLIE BLY and the GIRL PUZZLE installation is now available on this link:
The passing of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 resulted in the establishment New York City’s Federal Reserve Bank within a year. Starting out in leased space at No. 62 Cedar Street, the bank’s responsibilities and roles rapidly multiplied. When the United States was pulled into the First World War, the Federal Reserve Bank became the government’s fiscal agent and oversaw the sale and distribution of war bonds. As the bank grew, additional offices were leased until in 1918 it was spread throughout lower Manhattan in six locations. That year, in May, the Federal Reserve Bank purchased the first property in what would be the site of a monumental banking structure. The aggressive buying continued until, on January 11, 1918, the Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide reported on the purchase of the Fahys Building, at Nos. 29-31 Liberty Street. The paper called it “Substantial enlargement of the site acquired last May.” The Federal Reserve Bank now controlled “twenty buildings of various heights, but principally obsolete structures, aside from the one just purchased and the former home of the Lawyers’ Title & Trust Company, an eleven-story structure of modern construction.” Some of the Federal Reserve Bank’s offices were already located in the Lawyer’s Title building. The Bank had spent nearly $5 million in accumulating the real estate. Within the week the Bank was ready for Phase 2. On January 18 The Real Estate Record & Buiders’ Guide said “Plans for this structure have not been definitely decided upon, but it has been state that the designers will be selected through a paid competition that will include the best architectural talent of the country.” The periodical felt it was “doubtful” that the construction could cost less than $10 million. The New-York Tribune hinted at the guidelines given to hopeful architects. The Trustees “also explained that the structure would have to be dignified, as no sensational type of building would be entertained by the bank.” Consideration of the many architectural submissions took nearly a year; but on November 7, 1919 the New-York Tribune reported on the decision. And in doing so the newspaper announced its surprise at the 14-story design. “It has been the general impression that it would be not more than four stories. Apparently the architects who were asked to submit plans for the bank building were not limited as to height.”
On November 16 the New-York Tribune said “The designs submitted by York & Sawyer were accepted as providing the kind of serviceable, dignified loft building which the directors wanted, and now the builders are awaiting the word to rip and tear away the old landmarks which have encumbered the block for years and years.”
The planned structure would be the largest banking building in the world. The Guide now revised its construction estimate—saying it might cost as much as $15 million. The Federal Reserve Bank worked with the City to address the narrow, irregular streets surrounding the site; which would negatively impact the proposed building.
The New-York Tribune reported “Ten feet are to be added to the width of Nassau Street at Maiden Lane and eight feet to Liberty Street at Nassau Street, and the hip in the south side of the building and street line of Maiden Lane is to be straightened. The space is to be sliced off the Federal Reserve property that the building may have a better setting and also to eliminate structural defects that would be if the present building lines were to be the lines of the new structure.”
The newspaper mentioned the grand two-story lobby to come. “Toward Nassau Street the lobby, or corridor, will open out into a general reception room, as it will be at this end of the floor that the executives of the institution will have their offices. This reception space will be thirty-four feet wide and seventy-one feet long and, of course, will reach through two floors of the building. It will be a magnificent room.”
Each floor of the 15-story structure encompassed just under 32,000 square feet. Plans called for an immense conference room, engulfing the entire Nassau Street side of the second floor. The Bank set space aside for unexpected amenities for the thousands of employees who would be working in the building. “Above the twelfth floor are to be located restaurants, promenades, hospital, gymnasium and other recreation features.”
Propriety mandated that the dining areas for men and women were segregated. “There will be three restaurants, or, rather, dining rooms, one for officers of the bank, one for the men employees and one for the women folks. The women’s restaurant will be on the thirteenth floor. It will be large enough to seat 700 diners at one time.” The women’s dining room faced the loggia, high above street level, where an outdoor Promenade circled the entire floor.
The wheels of progress, at least as far as construction of the Federal Reserve Bank was concerned, ground slowly. On July 17, 1921 the Tribune noted that the nearly $5 million project of removing the existing structures had gotten underway. By now the cost of the building had been set at $12 million.
Three years later, in September 1924, the mammoth banking palazzo was completed. Philip Sawyer stepped away from norm in creating a polychrome façade by mixing different colored limestone and sandstone blocks. These were deeply grooved, adding dimension to the otherwise flat surface.
Sawyer commissioned Polish-born Samuel Yellin to execute the ornamental ironwork. The architect was specific in his desires—insisting on Italian Renaissance decorations appropriate for the Florentine-style structure. The Philadelphia firm produced ironwork of exceptional craftsmanship, the most outstanding being the two immense, ornate branched lanterns flanking the entrance—exact copies of those mounted on the Palazzo Strozzi.
In 1925 the Maiden Lane Historical Society met with officials of the bank and with York & Sawyer to compose an inscription for a bronze tablet to be affixed to the façade. On March 28 it was unveiled; informing passersby who cared to pause about the history of the site and the origin of the street names.
The bank runs and lost savings that accompanied the onset of the Great Depression, prompted some to hoard gold. On October 18, 1931 The New York Times noted “There is no way of estimating even remotely the amount of currency that has been hoarded in the United States, but some calculators have placed it between $800,000,000 and $1,000,000,000. It was a problem that the government and the Federal Serve Bank would soon address.
But in the meantime another problem had been addressed–and solved–by the reporters of rediscount rates. On the same page as the article about hoarding, The Times said that every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 the doors to the executive offices at one end of the 10th floor of the Federal Reserve Bank Building opened and the changes in rates were announced.
The problem was that the telephone booths (both of them) were located at the other end of the hall, several hundred feet away. “In reporting for financial tickers, seconds, not minutes, count, so that each of the rival organizations posts a man at the telephones and another at the opposite end of the corridor to receive the announcement from the spokesman of the Federal Reserve,” explained The Times. “To obviate shouting to their colleagues at the telephones or engaging in a dead heat down the corridor, the men at the fountain source of the news have evolved a system of signals which convey the information quickly and accurately.”
The ingenious system involved hand signals and handkerchiefs. The men stationed at the telephone booths watched intensely toward the far end of the hall. If the rate were unchanged, a handkerchief was waved. If it were one-half of a percent, a hand was raised. If the increase amounted to a full percent, both hands were waved. Eugene M. Lokey, the Times writer, joked “If the day should come when the rate jumps 1-1/2 per cent, the men are to fall to the floor, and should it be 2 per cent, the plan is to fall kicking frantically.”
On April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” Two weeks earlier, realizing that their hoarding was about to become criminal and subject to prosecution, thousands of New Yorkers descended on the Federal Reserve Bank.
On March 11 The New York Times reported on the events of the previous day. “A gold stampede in reverse, unlike anything within the memory of the downtown financial community, developed yesterday as repentant hoarders swarmed into the Federal Reserve Bank.
“Realizing, suddenly, that the hitherto desirable yellow metal had become ‘hot’—in the underworld sense that its holders are in danger of punishment—men and women waited in long lines for the privilege of shoving coin and gold certificates through the tellers’ windows. Extra guards in the corridors shepherded newcomers into the receiving departments.”
The bank was kept open until 5:00 and $20 million in gold and certificates was received. That amount, added to the receipts of previous days, brought the total for the week to $85 million. It seems that almost everyone in the line had a good excuse for the gold they had kept in their homes.
The original plans included a Promenade within a handsome loggia which encircled the building. The severe incline of the site can be seen in the line of the foundation. Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide December 13, 1919 (copyright expired)
On December 13, 1919 a sketch from the winning firm, York & Sawyer, was made public. The architects worked with an irregular plot, bounded by Nassau Street, William Street, Maiden Lane an Liberty Street, that sat on a steep incline.
Their design, according to The Guide, was “a modified Florentine style of architecture, adapted to American ideas and the peculiarities of the downtown business district.” In fact, Sawyer & York recalled the imposing banking houses of Florence in an effort to impart stability and safety. The architects borrowed heavily from the Palazzo Strozzi.
“One man who came with a satchel, which a friend helped to carry, protested that he was not a hoarder, but a patriot, putting gold back for the good of the country. ‘I am married,’ he said. ‘I would not want the shame of hoarding to rest upon my children.’”
Nevertheless, the newspaper noted that it was all a somber affair. “There was little smiling, virtually no laughter, and no disorder.”
Two decades after the completion of the Federal Reserve Bank Building, Sawyer & York were called back. The bank required a full five additional floors. With great foresight, however, the architects had designed the structural plan to support additional floors if needed. The firm estimated the cost of the addition to be $750,000—just under $10 million today.
The addition upset the proportions of the structure; but sympathetically melded with the original design. photo by Wurts Brothers, from the collection of the New York Public Library
The additional floors took out the charming loggia and promenade; but carried on the general design of the lower bulk of the building. Even the stonework—truly appreciated only by workers in high office buildings—continued the multi-colored motif. At one corner a round turret which enclosed a staircase prompted one passerby to call it “that building with the castle on top.”
photograph The Market Oracle, March 19, 2011
In 1995 the Federal Reserve started a floor-by-floor modernization initiative. The 15-year project resulted in renovations that upgraded the infrastructure and technological functions; while preserving the period details like paneling. Surrounded by glass and steel, York & Sawyer’s 15thth century banking palazzo captures the fascination of anyone pausing to take in the “building with the castle on top.”
Louise Nevleson Plaza.jpg Louise Nevelson Plaza (formerly Legion Memorial Square), a triangle between Maiden Lane, Liberty Street and William Street, was created in 1978 to showcase the sculpture of Louise Nevelson. It is managed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
THE NEW YORK TIMES PRINTING PLANT IN COLLEGE POINT, QUEENS LAURA HUSSEY, THOM HEYER AND GLORIA KNOW WHERE ALL THE NEWS IS PRNTED!
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
RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
In 1872 Austrian immigrant Joseph Keppler began work as an illustrator for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. He formed a friendship with the print shop foreman, Adolph Schwarzmann, and eventually the two conceived of a German-language humor magazine.
A month after Schwarzmann left to open his own printing business in August 1876, the pair formed a partnership and published their first edition of Puck. Schwarzmann provided the financial backing while Keppler came up with the editorial content and illustrations.
The magazine was an instant success and a year later an English version was simultaneously printed. While it supported the Democratic party, the publication was non-partisan in its satire. Political corruption, the latest fashion trends, labor unions, suffragists and “all forms of graft, extravagance and unjustice” were fair game for the editor’s sharp wit. Full-page cartoons printed in color (exceedingly unusual at the time) were most often drawn by Keppler.
As circulation grew Puck assembled a staff of talented comic writers and cartoonists. From its start Puck used the services of the J. Ottman Lithographic Company to produce the lithographs. With the growth of Puck, Ottman’s business burgeoned as well.
In March 1885 Ottman, Keppler and Schwarzmann joined together to purchase the property in the publishing district on the southwest corner of East Houston and Mulberry Streets where they would erect a building to house their two businesses. A year later the massive building was completed. Designed by Albert Wagner it was a great red-brick Romanesque Revival pile, the largest of the publishing house buildings.
Wagner visually separated the seven floors into three sections by filling equal-sized piers with variant-sized arches: single two-story arches on the first level, double two-story arches on the second, and triple three-story arches on the third level. Decorative cast iron masonry supports and window frames, corbelling of the cornice, and light-hearted sculptures of Puck (for which Keppler’s daughter reportedly posed), added the necessary material contrast.
Although construction took less than a year, it was not without problems. In September 1885 the foreman of the bricklayers, Patrick Cavanagh, was fired for drunkenness. A few days later when he had not yet returned home his wife found him in Gilligan’s saloon near the Police Headquarters, drinking with John Sweeney. Mrs. Cavanaugh, “after berating her besotted husband, struck with a bottle John W. Sweeney, who was helping him to spend his money,” reported The Times.
More serious was a strike in December 1885 “against the lumping system in the new Puck building.” Construction, however, continued and the building was opened in 1886, called by The New York Times “a very massive and handsome structure.”
The Puck Building in 1895 with the playful corner statue — “King’s Photographic View of New York” (author’s collection) On June 25, 1887 tenants included, in addition to Puck and the Ottman concern, G. P. Baldwin’s bookbindery; Robert Hornby’s electrotyping company; Stadecker & Emsheimer, hat frame manufacturers; H. Lindenmeyer, paper dealers; and on the first floor the hat store of Twest & Co. On that evening a fire originated in Baldwin’s offices and quickly spread. The large amount of inks, glues and paper in the building ignited into a major conflagration, not being fully extinguished until hours later, causing around $30,000 in damages.
The magazine continued to grow – circulation increasing from 80,000 in the early 1880s to 90,000 in the 1890s — and in 1890 the adjoining property was purchased. A seamless addition, also designed by Wagner was erected between 1892 and 1893. “King’s Handbook of New York City” deemed it “the largest building in the world devoted to the business of lithographing and publishing, having a floor area of nearly eight acres.”
A final alteration became necessary when the city decided to extend Lafayette Street, its route cutting through the western portion of the building. The new western façade was designed by Wagner, however he died in 1898 and Herman Wagner, a relative, and his partner Richard John finished the job. Interestingly, the smaller sculpture of Puck over the original west entrance was duplicated rather than moved.
Although Puck magazine did not survive the First World War, the Puck Building remained a constant presence throughout the 20th Century, relatively unchanged. The large gilded statue of Puck by sculptor Henry Baerer, on the northeast corner of Houston and Mulberry is a favorite among New Yorkers and a surprise to visitors.
In 2004 New York University acquired three floors (75,000 square feet) of the building for its Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the Department of Sociology. Large areas have been reserved as event venues on the ground and topmost floors.
In the televised sit-com Will and Grace, Grace’s design office was situated in the Puck Building.
When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Puck Building a landmark in 1983, it called it “one of the most imposing and impressive of the old publishing district buildings of the last century.”
On the wall of the REI shop in the Puck Building is a display of lithographic stones that were found when the building underwent restoration. Some are diplomas, stock certificates, advertisements and a variety of other items printed in the Puck Building.
From World’s Fair to World’s Fowl: The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Queens Zoo Celebrates the History of its Aviary
The Queens Zoo’s geodesic dome aviary was originally built for the 1964 World’s Fair.
Flushing, N.Y. – April 21, 2014 – A piece of the 1964 World’s Fair lives on at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Queens Zoo. The geodesic dome that houses the zoo’s aviary was an original structure on display during the historic exposition held in Flushing Meadows Corona Park 50 years ago this month.
The dome first served as the Winston Churchill Pavilion during the 1964 World’s Fair. At the close of the fair, the dome was dismantled and placed in storage for a few years. It wasn’t until 1968, when Robert Moses commissioned for a zoo to be built on the old fair grounds, that the dome would be rebuilt and repurposed, becoming the aviary it is today.
“Over the years, I can’t tell you how many people have related their memories of the ’64 World’s fair to me when they see the aviary,” said Scott Silver, Animal Curator and Director of the Queens Zoo. “Something about its iconic shape seems to trigger memories about the fair, and I have heard many wonderful stories about it as a result.”
The aviary is now home to many species of birds native to North and South America, including parrots, cattle egrets, pintail ducks, and more. In the warmer months, macaws, a species of parrot, join the other birds in the aviary. Some of the macaw species on exhibit in the aviary include blue and gold macaws, scarlet macaws, and hyacinth macaws – the world’s largest parrots.
The aviary has undergone several internal changes since the Queens Zoo came under the management of the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1992. Streams, elevated pools, and a waterfall have been added to better replicate a natural forest habitat. The winding walkway that ascends from the forest floor to the treetops at its apex has also been refurbished.
The geodesic dome was made famous by architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. It was hailed as one of the lightest, strongest, and most cost-effective structures ever conceived. Despite being one of the largest single-layer structures of its time, standing at 175-feet-wide, it took only about a week to erect.
Though the aviary is the only structure on the Queens Zoo’s grounds that was used during the 1964 World’s Fair, the zoo is surrounded by several landmarks from the fair, including the Unisphere, observation towers, and the New York State Pavilion.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Sources
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
If you are waking up in Murray Hill today, you will be delighted to find whimsical creatures along the Park Avenue median between 34th and 38th Streets. Patrons of Park Avenue (POPA) invited French artist Idriss B to create a one-of-a-kind urban jungle as an inaugural installation.
Meet Manny the Mammoth! He is located on 38th Street.The polygonal shaped animal sculptures will inhabit Park Avenue between 34th and 38th Streets through February 23, 2023.
Born and raised outside Paris, France, Idriss B. has shown an interest in art since childhood. With decades worth of experience helping to create retail and window displays for luxury brands such as Dior, Moncler, Coach, & Michael Kors, Idriss B. launched his unique artistic collection of origami-polygonal shaped animal sculptures in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and now, New York City
Mojo2 the Gorilla
“One of the most beautiful places in the world is New York and it is the perfect place for me to exhibit my work. It is a hardworking city with a warm family environment, so it is very fitting for people to see and feel the strength of my pieces while bringing the fun to everybody, especially the kids,” said Idriss B.
Baloo the Bear
In bringing his artwork to New York City, Idriss B. has collaborated with POPA, which supports the care, maintenance and planting of the malls of Park Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood. The works are exhibited through NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program, which fosters the creation and installation of temporary public art in New York City.
Urus the Buffalo
“As Chairwoman of POPA, I’d like to thank Idriss B. for amplifying the beauty and culture of our iconic Park Avenue and installing the first ever art exhibit on the malls of our beloved Murray Hill,” said Victoria Spagnola.
“As CEO & Co-Founder of WindowsWear, I’ve always been impressed with Idriss B.’s work with major luxury brands worldwide, and as Co-Chairman of POPA, I’m thrilled to connect his work with New York City,” said Jon Harari.
Balo the Bear
We are happy to partner with Patrons of Park Avenue on their inaugural exhibition and welcome Idriss B.’s colorful, geometric sculptures to New York City through our Art in the Parks program,” said NYC Parks Senior Public Art Coordinator Elizabeth Masella.
Dundee the Crocodile
Idriss B.’s collection is made by molding his vision of contemporary art to create polygonal animal forms in different sizes, which can also be sold to collectors as limited edition pieces to provide as many opportunities for everyone to own their own unique piece of art.
Rexor The mission of The Murray Hill Neighborhood Association (“MHNA”) is to continue to make Murray Hill a highly desirable place to live, work and visit. MHNA does this through programs to preserve the neighborhood’s historic character, greening and beautification, liaising with local government officials about quality of life issues, providing information about the neighborhood to members, and social events.
Patrons of Park Avenue (“POPA”), a division of the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association, supports the care, maintenance and planting of the malls of Park Avenue in New York City. Funding for the seasonal planting and maintenance programs is provided by donations from building owners, co-op boards, condo buildings, private donations, grants, and the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association.
For over 50 years, NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program has brought contemporary public artworks to the city’s parks, making New York City one of the world’s largest open-air galleries. The agency has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art in parks throughout the five boroughs. Since 1967, NYC Parks has collaborated with arts organizations and artists to produce over 2,000 public artworks by 1,300 notable and emerging artists in over 200 parks.
While you’re there, walk a few blocks east to 34th Street and First Avenue to see ‘Spot’sitting in front of Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone.
GENERAL MOTORS FLINT ASSEMBLY PLANT NO ONE GOT THIS ONE!
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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Mott’s Apple Empire Began in Saratoga County in 1842
LYNDA BRYAN
You may have noticed that “Since 1842” appears on the label of all Mott’s apple products. That was the year Samuel Mott began selling apple cider and vinegar to his neighbors in Halfmoon, Saratoga County, NY. The Mott’s apple processing empire we know today grew from that humble beginning.
This fascinating story actually begins when Zebulon Mott moved his family after the American Revolution to a farm at what is now Market Road, and was then part of the Kayaderoasseras Patent. He and his wife Rebecca purchased the property in 1795. He had served in the Revolution and became a prominent man in Halfmoon’s early history. Zebulon was the Town Supervisor from 1801 to 1817, served in the New York State Legislature, was Deacon of the First Baptist Church that stood at the corner of Farm to Market and Pruyn Hill Roads and is buried in the Newtown Cemetery.
Zebulon’s brother Samuel, compiled and edited Mott’s Almanac. Zebulon’s son John Mott lived on the adjacent farm to the west of his parents Zebulon and Rebecca on the Kayaderoasseras Patent.
Samuel Roger Mott, John’s Son, was the last Mott to live on the farm in Halfmoon. Samuel spent many a day walking through the orchards with his grandfather Zebulon. There, he learned the tricks of the trade in processing the apples for cider and vinegar. Word got out and he started selling his product to his neighbors. The logo on every jar reads: SINCE 1842 and that was the year that Samuel, at 16 years old, began selling his product to his neighbors.
The cider was made by hitched horses that plodded in a circle, crushing apples between two large stones drums. This was a centuries old production process. As the demand grew so did the mill. The horses were replaced with a more modern method using waterpower and steam to operate the presses.
In 1868, at the age of 46, Samuel, his wife Ann Mary Coon, and 4 of their 5 children left Halfmoon and moved to Bouckville, in the Town of Madison, Madison County, NY, buying a 1/3 interest in a cider vinegar factory. On July 19th, 1870, Mott bought out his two partners Beach and Brown for $4,500. Samuel, like his grandfather Zebulon, served as town supervisor (for 17 years) and also as a member of the State Assembly.
Fourth generation John Coon Mott, Samuel and Ann Mary’s oldest son, and the last Mott to be born in Halfmoon, did not move with the family to Bouckville. He lived in the city of New York where he opened a cider mill of his own that was located where the Jacob Javits’s Convention Center is now, near Pier 76. Father and son merged their companies in 1879 forming the S.R. & J.C. Mott Company. In 1882 the mill in Bouckville was processing 14 carloads of apples converting them into 600 barrels of juice per day. A barrel contained 25 gallons, to give you an idea of their production. By that time there had expanded to distribution across the county and served international customers as well.
In 1900, the S.R. & J.C. Mott Company merged with the W.B. Duffy Cider Company of Rochester, NY, creating Duffy-Mott and was incorporated in New York in 1914. The newly formed company introduced many products that we are familiar with today and sold the company to Cadbury Schwepps in 1982.
Charles Stewart Mott, John’s son, studied the fermentation process in France and Germany. He began work in the family business, but at the turn of the century, he became the Superintendent of his uncle Frederick’s business, the Weston-Mott Wheel Works. They produced metal wheels for bicycles, carriages and rickshaw’s and later axles. They were offered a proposal to build a plant in Flint, Michigan and produce wheels for “Horseless Carriages.” Uncle Frederick, not wanting to move, turned the business over to his nephew Charles.
The success of the Wheel Works caught the eye of a new up and coming company. In 1913, Charles sold the business in exchange for stock in that new business – General Motors. For many decades he would remain the single largest individual shareholder in the firm, and accumulate wealth in excess of $800 million. He sat on the Board of Directors for 60 years until his death in 1973. It was Autos, not Apples that made him one of America’s first billionaires.
In 1926 he created the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation with a $320,000 endowment, explaining his reason in an often-quoted comment: “What I Am worth is what I do for other people.” The foundation celebrated its 95th anniversary this year. It now has more than $3 billion in assets and offices in three countries. His subsequent gifts of cash and stock made his foundation one of the largest in the country, and he donated more than $130 million dollars to organizations in his lifetime.
Photo: a horse-powered apple press.
Lynda Bryan, a life-long resident of the Town of Halfmoon, has also served as Town Clerk since 2010, and is Town Historian and President of the Halfmoon Historical Society.
Nine decades ago, Charles Stewart Mott established the Foundation that bears his name in response to his deep concern about the welfare of Flint, Michigan, and an abiding affection for his adopted community. Initially, the Foundation served as a vehicle for fulfilling the Mott family’s charitable interests. It began to evolve in 1935, when Mr. Mott teamed with local educator Frank Manley to create community schools in Flint. Their innovative approach to using schools to meet neighborhood needs would become a national model. That project also served as a platform for the Foundation to expand international grantmaking and become a global force for positive change in the areas of education, civil society and the environment.
Four members of the Mott family have directed Foundation operations over the past 90 years: C.S. Mott; his son C.S. Harding Mott; William S. White, Harding Mott’s son-in-law; and Ridgway H. White, great-grandson of C.S. Mott. The Foundation that Mr. Mott launched in 1926 with a $320,000 endowment now has more than $3 billion in assets, offices in three countries, and a legacy of working with local organizations to strengthen communities around the world. The Foundation has given away more than it is currently worth, awarding grants totaling more than $3.2 billion to organizations in 62 countries.
Our Founder Charles Stewart Mott (1875–1973) was an engineer, entrepreneur, public servant and philanthropist who dedicated much of his life, and wealth, to helping others. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he worked for his family’s Mott Beverage Co. after earning an engineering degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology. After his father died, he took control of the family’s wire-wheel company — located in Utica, New York — and made it profitable by manufacturing axles. He was invited in 1906 to move his Weston-Mott Company to Flint, Michigan, to produce wire wheels and axles for the emerging automobile industry. When W.C. “Billy” Durant organized the General Motors Corporation (GM) in Flint, in 1908, Mr. Mott sold 49 percent of his company to GM in exchange for stock. In 1913, he exchanged the remaining 51 percent of Weston-Mott stock for GM stock and became a company director. He served on GM’s board of directors from 1913 to 1973, a period in which the company became the world’s largest automaker.
Like other large cities, New York was devastated by fires in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1776, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, a great fire swept through the city, destroying 493 buildings. Two more great fires, in 1835 and 1845, together destroyed approximately 1000 buildings and killed 50 people, including a number of firefighters. Fire safety improved in the late 19th and early 20th century, but firefighting remained a dangerous task. Following the 1907 drowning death of Deputy Fire Chief Charles W. Kruger in a flooded Canal Street basement, Bishop Henry C. Potter proposed a memorial to firefighters who had died while performing their duties.[2]
Potter established a committee to build a monument, and was its first chairman, being succeeded by Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment granted $40,000 to the project on July 17, 1911, and an additional $50,500 was raised through a popular subscription.[1]
Although originally planned for Union Square, the memorial eventually ended up being built on the fashionable Riverside Drive, alongside which ran Frederick Law Olmsted‘s English-style rustic Riverside Park. The monument was designed by architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle and its sculptures are by Attilio Piccirilli. The site consists of a grand staircase leading up from the west, a balustraded plaza, and the Knoxville marble monument. Above the fountain, which extends from the box-like structure of the monument, is a large bas-relief scene of a horse drawn engine rushing to a fire. The monument is flanked to the north and south with groups of sculptures representing “Duty” and “Sacrifice”.[1]
ANDY SPARBERG AND JAY JACOBSON KNEW TODAY’S PHOTO!!!
SOURCES
NYC ALMANAC
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869-1933) was a leader in the art of photographic portraiture in turn-of-the-century New York. She operated – for ten years beginning in 1897 – arguably the most fashionable portrait studio on Fifth Avenue, while at the same time contributing work to numerous publications and the period’s most important photography exhibitions. As a testament to her renown, she served as a spokesperson for the Eastman Kodak Company and was regularly profiled in newspapers and magazines. Yet the memory of her achievement as a photographer has largely vanished.
Born in London, Ben-Yusuf settled in New York in 1895. There she took up photography, first as a hobby and then two years later as a profession. Rather than falling back on traditional portrait conventions – painted backdrops and contrived poses – she sought inspiration from the leading artists andpictorial photographers of the period. Despite her young age and her recent arrival in America, she attracted to her studio many of the era’s most prominent artistic, literary, theatrical, and political figures. Seen together, these individuals represent a remarkable cross-section of a place that was rapidly becoming America’s first modern city. Yet, like many professional women, she encountered personal and economic difficulties that ultimately compelled her to abandon photography. Although she later pursued with equal ambition a career in the fashion trade, it is her photographic work – and the men and women she portrayed – that we aim to recover in this exhibition.
Everett Shinn 1876-1953
Born Woodstown, New Jersey
Everett Shinn drew inspiration from the extraordinary energy and tensions of New York. In his paintings and pastels, the streets, city parks, and theaters of the bulging metropolis teem with activity. In these works the literal movement of people serves as a metaphor for the larger transformations occurring there. Ben-Yusuf’s portrait of Shinn pictures the artist in his mid-twenties, during the period when he was first emerging as an important figure in the art world. Having begun his career as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia, Shinn thrived in his new home. While he enjoyed a lengthy career, he is perhaps best remembered as one of “The Eight,” a group of artists who in 1908 united to stage an exhibition meant to protest the conservative policies of the National Academy of Design.
Platinum print, c. 1901 ARTnews Collection
The New Woman
Ben-Yusuf was the epitome of the “New Woman” – a class of predominantly younger women who at the century’s end sought to challenge prevailing gender norms. It was not simply her bohemian appearance; what differentiated Ben-Yusuf from the majority of women during this period was her desire for an independent life within the public arena. As a single woman who needed to earn an income, she embraced portrait photography as a career. This work opened up a host of opportunities – to write, to travel, to meet new people. Yet the growing
independence of women also elicited criticism at times and led figures like Ben-Yusuf to scrutinize their own sense of identity. The photographs in this first section are less representative of the commercial portraiture that sustained her financially. Instead, they speak to her artistic ambitions and her experiences as a “New Woman.”
Roosevelt Men
No other figure towered over American life at the turn-of-the-century as Theodore Roosevelt did. Even before he assumed the presidency following William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt was widely regarded as a national hero. Once in the White House, he proved exceptionally energetic, fighting to break up corporate trusts, leading the effort to build the Panama Canal, and pushing efforts to conserve America’s natural resources. Each of the figures in this section was a fervent supporter of Roosevelt. In addition to sharing his political vision, they also admired the public persona he projected, in particular his belief
in the so-called “strenuous life” and his assertion of American strength – a belief characterized by his favorite proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Ben-Yusuf photographed Roosevelt during his tenure as governor, and many other figures whose careers intersected with America’s twenty-sixth president.
Daniel Chester French 1850-1931
Born Exeter, New Hampshire
Daniel Chester French’s career as a sculptor coincided with an unprecedented rise in the construction of public buildings and civic spaces in America. A demand for public art accompanied this boom, and French built a prestigious career fulfilling this need. His popularity stemmed in part from the fact that much of his work was a throwback to a familiar nineteenth-century decorative aesthetic. Yet, French can also be seen as a transitional figure between the beaux arts movement and modern sculpture’s increasing realism. Whereas he preferred idealized allegorical figures early in his career, his later work – most especially his moving statue of Abraham Lincoln for Washington’s Lincoln Memorial – gestures toward an emergent modernism. Taken alone, French’s Lincoln would secure his reputation as a great sculptor, but taken as the capstone of his prolific career, it illuminates French’s larger influence in shaping public space at the dawn of the new century.
Platinum print, 1901 ARTnews Collection
Portrait of Miss S. Ben-Yusuf reveals neither the name of this young woman, nor the character she assumes, although her unusual outfit suggests that she possibly enacts the role of a character from a work of art, literature, or theater. Her provocative costume signals her association with New York’s bohemian set. Wearing a low-cut lace dress and a high-collared cloak, she stands apart for her choice in fashion. During this period there arose a small, yet increasingly visible set that preferred “artistic dress.” Equating restrictive clothing with limits on one’s freedom, these women embraced dress reform as one part of their larger campaign for equality. Self-consciously flamboyant, the outfit that Miss S. wears is in part an outgrowth of the changes in the world of women’s fashion and is symptomatic of the enhanced freedoms – professional, political, and sexual – that many women sought during this period.Platinum print, c. 1899 National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution
Augustin Daly 1838-1899Born Plymouth, North Carolina Having produced his first play when he was only seventeen, Daly spent his entire adult life in the world of the theater. While others preceded him in establishing New York as a venue for reputable drama, Daly was influential not only in elevating standards for theatrical production, but also in reshaping important elements associated with it. His innovative work as a director – in rethinking methods of acting and in reimagining stage scenery and lighting – helped make American theater modern. Daly’s commitment to more naturalistic performances amidst realistic settings represented a sea change in American drama. While Daly recruited theatrical stars to appear from time to time, he relied most often on his own stock company. Figures like John Drew and Ada Rehan became household names under his direction. Ben-Yusuf admired Daly, describing him in a later essay as “one of the most interesting men I have known.”Platinum print, 1898 Portrait Photograph Series, Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library
Elbert Hubbard 1856-1915
Born Bloomington, Illinois
Elbert Hubbard purchased the struggling Roycroft Printing Shop in East Aurora, New York, in 1895 and built it into one of the centers of the arts and crafts movement in America. Modeling his enterprise after William Morris’s Kelmscott Press in England, he attracted craftsmen by paying them well and leaving them alone to pursue their ideas. Workers were never admonished for wasting money. The Fra, as Hubbard was called by his followers, saw wasting time as the greater sin. Under his direction, the Roycroft Press became a leader in the publication of small designer books and specialty magazines. Hubbard was also an influential author, and his essays about art and labor made him a national celebrity. Ben-Yusuf photographed him in New York at the outset of a lecture tour being orchestrated by James Burton Pond.
Platinum print, c. 1900 Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
THE ALFRED STEIGLITZ CONNECTION
From the NPR : 1898-1900
On October 21, ZBY writes Alfred Stieglitz regarding his invitation to reproduce an example of her portraiture in Camera Notes. About her photography, she explains that she is “very much in earnest about it all.” Stieglitz publishes her work in Camera Notes the following April, and again in July.
The New York Daily Tribune publishes on November 7 an article about ZBY and mentions that her studio opened “only six months ago.” The article describes the elaborate decorations that adorn the space, as well as her work creating advertising posters. Leslie’s Weekly publishes a separate profile about her on December 30.
1901
ZBY exhibits four photographs from May 2 through November 9 in a display juried by Alfred Stieglitz at the Glasgow International Exhibition in Scotland.
ZBY photographs former President Grover Cleveland during a fishing excursion on Hop Brook, near Tyringham, Massachusetts.
ZBY publishes “Celebrities Under the Camera” in the June 1 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. In this essay ZBY describes many of her encounters with subjects she has photographed.
In the September issue of Metropolitan Magazine, ZBY publishes “The New Photography – What It Has Done and Is Doing for Modern Portraiture.” She discusses her commitment to “a middle way,” between the radicalism of certain fine art photographers and the prosaism of most commercial photographers.
ZBY is profiled as one of the “foremost women photographers in America” in the November issue of Ladies Home Journal.
At the Fourth Philadelphia Photographic Salon, held from November 18 through December 14 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, ZBY exhibits ten photographs. Alfred Stieglitz leads a boycott of this salon when he loses the authority to develop the exhibition to his liking.
Beginning on November 23, ZBY publishes the first of six illustrated articles for the Saturday Evening Post on the topic, “Advanced Photography for Amateurs.”
1902
Stieglitz organizes “American Pictorial Photography” at New York’s National Arts Club. The exhibition runs from March 5 through March 22. Considered the inaugural exhibition of the “Photo-Secession,” it includes the work of thirty-two photographers whom Stieglitz felt aspired to a higher purpose. ZBY does not participate.
The June 27 issue of the New York Times includes ZBY in a list of debtors. She owes $119 to Henrietta Prades, and is ordered by a local judge to make payment.
ZBY exhibits two photographs at the Tenth Photographic Salon of the Linked Ring in London between September 19 and November 1.
1903
Stieglitz publishes the first issue of his new journal Camera Work in January.
ZBY travels by steamship to Japan, arriving in Yokohama in April. She tours Kobe and Nagasaki before continuing on to Hong Kong for a brief sojourn. Returning to Japan, she rents a house for the summer in Kyoto, with the stated purpose of living “in native fashion.” She travels to Tokyo and Nikko during her stay, and returns to New York in the fall.
1904
ZBY publishes the first of four illustrated articles, “Japan Through My Camera,” in the April 23 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
Sadakichi Hartmann mentions ZBY’s contributions to the newly formed Salon Club of America in the July issue of the American Amateur Photographer. Sponsored by the Salon Club of America, the First American Photographic Salon opens in New York in December. ZBY is listed in the catalogue as a member, though she does not submit any work.
1905
On January 12 the New York Times includes ZBY again in a list of debtors.
ZBY’s essay, “A Kyoto Memory,” is published in the February issue of the Booklovers Magazine. That same month, Leslie’s Monthly Magazine publishes ZBY’s illustrated article, “Women of Japan.”
In September Anna Ben-Yusuf begins teaching at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is an instructor of millinery in the Department of Domestic Arts.
Beginning October 14 American Art News publishes a weekly profile of an American artist with an accompanying portrait by ZBY. This arrangement lasts seven weeks.
ZBY delivers on November 23 an illustrated lecture, “Japanese Homes,” at Pratt’s Assembly Hall.
Alfred Stieglitz’s inaugural exhibition at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue opens on November 24. One hundred photographs by thirty-nine photographers are featured. ZBY does not participate.
1906
ZBY publishes twenty architectural photographs to accompany Katharine Budd’s article, “Japanese Houses,” in the January issue of the Architectural Record. The February issue features ZBY’s article on Japanese architecture, “The Period of Daikan.”
In March ZBY serves as a member of the national preliminary jury for the Second American Photographic Salon held at the Art Institute of Chicago. However, she does not contribute work.
Photo Era publishes in September three photographs by ZBY from her visit to the Mediterranean island of Capri. The accompanying article suggests that she “passed considerable time there not long ago, exploring its mountains, rocks, and grottoes.”
In October ZBY exhibits one portrait at the Third Annual Exhibition of Photographs at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
Hotel Shelton Designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon, who would be involved in the design of the Empire State Building a few years later, the Hotel Shelton was an immediate sensation. In 1925, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, moved into the hotel and lived there for twelve years.Oct 28, 2020
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:
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
The steerage passengers immortalized in a 1907 landmark photo
February 14, 2022
In June 1907, photographer Alfred Stieglitz left New York for Europe with his wife and six-year-old daughter. His “small family,” as he wrote years later, had first-class accommodations on the liner Kaiser Wilhelm II and were headed toward Bremen, Germany.
But Stieglitz felt stifled by the atmosphere in first class. “One couldn’t escape the nouveaux riches,” he explained in his account, reproduced in the 2012 book, The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz.
After three days he took a walk “as far forward on the deck as I could.” Looking down, he found a scene that left him spellbound: men, women, and children on the lower deck in steerage. These third-class passengers were biding their time by hanging laundry and playing on a staircase. Meanwhile, a man in a round straw hat watched the group amid the iron railings and machinery of the ship.
Stieglitz ran to get his camera. The resulting picture, “The Steerage,” wasn’t published until 1911. “I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life,” he said, per the Library of Congress (LOC) via Wikipedia.
Alfred Stieglitz – The Terminal – 2015.218 – Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg
Alfred Stieglitz Winter Fifth Avenue 1892.jpg
Snapshot – In the New York Central Yards MET DP281374.jpg
The Swimming Lesson MET DP277997.jpg
Old and New New York MET DP257104.jpg
The City across the River MET DP372411.jpg
Photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918.
Georgia O’Keeffe MET DT227433.jpg
Georgia O’Keeffe — Hand and Breasts MET DP232920.jpg
Kitty Stieglitz, Central Park, New York MET DP343197.jpg
Biography from the NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Few individuals have exerted as strong an influence on 20th-century American art and culture as the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864 during the Civil War, Stieglitz lived until 1946. He began to photograph while a student in Berlin in the 1880s and studied with the renowned photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel. On his return to the United States in 1890, he began to advocate that photography should be treated as an art. He wrote many articles arguing his cause, edited the periodicals Camera Notes (1897–1902) and Camera Work (1903–1917), and in 1902 formed the Photo-Secession, an organization of photographers committed to establishing the artistic merit of photography.
Stieglitz photographed New York for more than 25 years, portraying its streets, parks, and newly emerging skyscrapers; its horse-drawn carriages, trolleys, trains, and ferry boats; as well as some of its people. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, he also focused his camera on the landscape around his summer home in Lake George, New York. In 1918 Stieglitz became consumed with photographing his future wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. For many years he had wanted to make an extended photographic portrait—he called it a composite portrait—in which he would study one person over a long period. Over the next 19 years he made more than 330 finished portraits of her. Beginning in 1922 and continuing throughout the 1920s, he also became preoccupied with another subject, clouds, making more than 300 finished studies of them.
Stieglitz witnessed some of the most profound changes this country has ever experienced: two world wars, the Great Depression, and the growth of America from a rural, agricultural nation to an industrialized and cultural superpower. But, more significantly, he also helped to effect some of these transformations. Through his New York galleries—the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, which he directed from 1905 to 1917; The Intimate Gallery, 1925–1929; and An American Place, 1929–1946—he introduced modern European art to this country, organizing the first exhibitions in America of work by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Paul Cézanne, among others. In addition, he was one of the first to champion and support American modernist artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth.
Photography was always of central importance to Stieglitz: not only was it the medium he employed to express himself, but, more fundamentally, it was the touchstone he used to evaluate all art. Just as it is apparent today that computers and digital technology will dominate not only our lives but also our thinking in this century, so too did Stieglitz realize, long before many of his contemporaries, that photography would be a major cultural force in the 20th century. Fascinated with what he called “the idea of photography,” Stieglitz foresaw that it would revolutionize all aspects of the way we learn and communicate and that it would profoundly alter all of the arts.
Stieglitz’s own photographs were central to his understanding of the medium: they were the instruments he used to plumb both its expressive potential and its relationship to the other arts. When he began to photograph in the early 1880s, the medium was barely 40 years old. Complicated and cumbersome and employed primarily by professionals, photography was seen by most as an objective tool and utilized for its descriptive and recording capabilities. By the time ill health forced Stieglitz to stop photographing in 1937, photography and the public’s perception of it had changed dramatically, thanks in large part to his efforts. Through the publications he edited, including Camera Notes, Camera Work, and 291; through the exhibitions he organized; and through his own lucid and insightful photographs, Stieglitz had conclusively demonstrated the expressive power of the medium.
CAPE CANAVERAL , FLORIDA GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, HARA REISER, & LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Long ago, in the early 1950s, my mom loaded me and my sister into our stick shift, non-airconditioned Chevy and headed south on pre-Interstate highways from Pittsburgh to Miami Beach. I handled our AAA Triptic maps and she drove, 4 or 5 days. We spent summers in the ‘50s there, visiting her family, watching Miami Beach grow and change. Now with friends fleeing south to warmer climes, I thought it would be fun to think again about Florida.
Of course, some history. Florida was contested by the Spanish, French and British from earliest colonial times. West Florida (the Panhandle) was a distinct region (important because it bordered on the Mississippi); the east and west coasts of the peninsula developed separately, and the south was an impossible, disease-ridden swamp. And, also, Key West (important because it overlooked Caribbean trade routes).
Florida was ceded by Spain to the US in 1819 and became a territory in 1821, sparsely settled by Seminole Native Americans, escaped African American slaves (many lived with the Seminoles), Spaniards and folks from older Southern plantation regions. With territorial status, the pieces were merged into a single entity with a new capital city in Tallahassee, chosen because it lay halfway between the St. Augustine and Pensacola, the old governmental centers.
The US fought 3 bloody wars with Seminoles – who were finally forcibly removed from the territory (think Andrew Jackson). Florida became our twenty-seventh state in 1845; by 1850 the population had grown to some 87,000 (New York City’s population in 1850 was 590,000), including about 39,000 African American slaves and 1,000 free Blacks. Before the Civil War, Florida was becoming another southern cotton state.
After the War, Florida took a different route. Jacksonville and Pensacola flourished because of the demand for lumber and forest products in the nation’s growing economy. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, large-scale commercial agriculture, especially cattle, grew in importance. Industries such as cigar manufacturing took root in the immigrant communities of the state.
And tourism: By the late 1880s, Naples and Marco Island were viewed as winter resorts for wealthy Northerners and sportsmen. Steamboat tours on Florida’s winding rivers were a popular attraction for these visitors. Travelers praised Florida’s climate and its reported ability to ease various ailments. Florida was even said to be an aphrodisiac, for “heat stimulates powerfully the faculty of reproduction,” as Daniel Garrison Brinton, medical doctor turned anthropologist, wrote in an 1869 guidebook.
Travelers could make their way to Florida by steamboat and the great private yachts of the age, built for blue sea travel, could have made the trip. But the number of visitors arriving this way could not have been very great. Rail transformed Florida from a backward agricultural state with poor transportation connections to the North and Midwest. By 1900, the foundation of the state’s growth had laid down with the construction of railroad systems along both coasts. Henry Morrison Flagler and Henry Plant are the two figures most associated with Florida railroads.
Henry Morrison Flagler was one of John D. Rockefeller’s partners in creating Standard Oil. Flagler came to St. Augustine in 1883 on his honeymoon and found the city lacking in luxurious accommodations that would attract wealthy families. He realized that paradise could be marketed and sold, and he launched a new career. In 1885 Flagler started developing the area around the old city of St. Augustine, building a grand hotel, the Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1888. (The hotel is now Flagler College.)
But even the grandest hotels would be empty unless guests could get there. Flagler realized that the key to developing Florida was transportation. In the next two decades, he bought smaller railroads, put them all on the same standard gauge track, and opened Florida to wider tourism. Flagler also built schools, a hospital and churches in St. Augustine, “transforming St. Augustine from a seedy southern Saratoga into a glamorous winter Newport.”
By 1912, Flagler’s trains traveled the length of the state to Key West, constructing a string of luxury hotels from St. Augustine to Miami.
In 1893, he selected a small, sandy island called Palm City and built a huge hotel called “The Breakers” to promote his railroad growth. Even before the railroad reached Palm Beach, affluent Northerners were already planning their winter mansions. Flagler built his new wife a massive marble winter mansion called Whitehall and Palm Beach soon became the winter watering hole of America’s industrial elite.
On the West Coast, a Connecticut businessman, Henry Bradley Plant, started another railroad boom when he obtained a charter for a South Florida Railroad on the St. Johns River to Tampa Bay. Plant’s railroad turned Tampa into a deep-water center for freighters and steamers from Cuba and South America. The rail line opened the region to citrus and vegetable growers – a vast improvement over the twenty days to reach Northern markets by boat.
Plant’s railroad quickly attracted the Key West cigar industry and Northern manufacturers to Tampa, as well as investors who started trolley lines and electric companies. Nothing was as spectacular as Henry Plant’s largest hotel, the Tampa Bay Hotel. At one hundred dollars per day, Plant hoped to attract the Northern rich to his empire. (The hotel is now part of the University of Tampa.)
With railroads now stretching the length of the state, the Everglades being drained and then World War I, which cut off richer Americans from traditional European beach resorts, Florida boomed. Developers pushed Florida real estate – Carl Fisher who backed Miami Beach development, purchased a huge billboard in Times Square proclaiming “It’s June In Miami”. Brokers and dealers speculated wildly, selling underwater properties to clueless northerners. In 1925, some 7,000 people seeking a new life and perhaps a new fortune entered Florida each day. In Massachusetts alone, owners of more than 100,000 bank accounts used their savings to invest in Florida land. Deposits in Florida banks increased 400 percent in three years.
In the increasing frenzy of Florida real estate speculation in the 1920s, lots were bought and sold for double their prices in a matter of weeks. Then options on lots were traded, and options on options were sold. Fabulous stories abounded, like the one of a cabby who took a couple the thirteen hundred miles from Manhattan to Palm Beach and, with his fare and tip, invested in real estate and made a million dollars. Check out the Marx Brothers’ film “The Coconuts” for a hilarious but all too accurate picture of the boom.
Even in January 1925, investors began to read negative press about Florida investments. Forbes magazine warned that Florida land prices were based solely upon the expectation of finding a customer, not upon any reality of land value. The Internal Revenue Service began to scrutinize the Florida real estate boom as a giant scam. Speculators intent on flipping properties at huge profits found new buyers increasingly scarce. And then bust.
Before the bust, one day’s Miami Daily News ran to 504 pages and weighed as much as a healthy baby; just two years later, in 1927, a single edition of another Florida daily carried 41 pages of tax delinquency notices. In time, nearly 90 % of Florida’s municipalities defaulted on their bonds. Overleveraged banks collapsed. Empty lots stretched across mile after mile of unbuildable land. The developer Walter P. Fuller offered the not-quite-last word in a memoir published three decades later: “We just ran out of suckers.” Florida’s property bubble burst did not set off the Great Depression, but the Depression rolled over and exacerbated Florida’s situation.
World War II was a powerful accelerator in Florida’s recovery with military bases sprouting in all directions. After the war, many who had been stationed in Florida returned to live there. Florida remained a winter resort largely for the well-off until the earthquake change produced by air conditioning and economy non-stop flights. Summer tourism boomed. Middle class New Yorkers could pay in advance with one check for transportation, accommodation and meals (the “American Plan, two meals a day), and Florida – particularly the billowing Miami Beach – stole the clientele from the upstate borscht belt resorts in the Catskills. Retirement communities and long-term care facilities expanded across the state and, finally, new forms of destination resorts drew in floods of tourists. And my mother and me.
The story of Miami Beach, dear to me (and to my dermatologist) is worth a story of its own. In any case, keep warm. Spring is coming
MODEL OF FLUSHING MEADOW PARK FROM THE\PANORAMA OF NEW YORK CITY AT QUEENS MUSEUM, .ED LITCHER GOT IT RIGHT!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
A tough, feisty photographer who began freelancing for the Associated Press in 1935, Wolcott hasonly recently received the attention she deserves. Most of her fairly short career was spent working under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, following the Stryker formula for “documenting” working-class life across the country during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her New England pictures are eloquent examples of that formula, merging old and new New Englands into an (almost) comfortable relationship with each other. Her own inclination, after studies at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Vienna (she heard Hitler speak in Berlin), was to be more of a social activist, an inclination that occasionally surfaces in her “off duty” pictures. In 1941, with husband Lee Wolcott, she moved to a farm in Virginia. For the next three decades she raised a family, taught school, and traveled with her husband, who joined the Foreign Service after a farming accident. In 1975, she returned to photography, this time specializing in color. She and her husband settled in San Francisco in 1978.
Marion Post Wolcott, Miner’s wife on porch of their home, an abandoned company store. Pursglove, West Virginia, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.15
Marion Post Wolcott, Dancing during the Cotton Carnival. Memphis, Tennessee, May 1940, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.43
Marion Post Wolcott, The Piney Hotel, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.35
Marion Post Wolcott, White man on wagon, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.30
Marion Post Wolcott, Gathering of black men, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.26 Title
Marion Post Wolcott, Work horses on a Farm Security Administration project. Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, 1941, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.53
Marion Post Wolcott, Hanging bands of tobacco in barn to dry, Russell Spear’s farm. Near Lexington, Kentucky, 1940, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.21
Marion Post Wolcott, Workers and truck, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.8
Marion Post Wolcott, Coney Island Lunch, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.34
GREYHOUND BUS TERMINAL ON 38TH STREET NEXT TO OLD PENN STATION GUY LUDWIG, ANDY SPARBERG, GLORIA HERMAN, GLORIA HERMAN AND CLARA BELLA GOT IT RIGHT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Sources
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Macy’s Bldg. & Herald Square, New York City, 1907.
Irving Underhill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Irving Underhill (1872–1960) was one of the most notable commercial photographers in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. He produced work that was featured in postcards and numerous publications while he was still alive, and that continues to be exhibited and receive recognition long after his death.
Wall Street, New York City
Glossy color postcard of Wall Street, New York, New York. Back is divided. Published by The American Art Publishing Co., New York City, #R-34320. It reads “Wall Street Canyon, the financial heart of America, is occupied entirely by banks, trust companies and financial interests. The Stock Exchange on left, the U. S. Sub-Treasury and Bankers Trust Building 39 stories high on right.”
Underhill took a particular interest in capturing the cityscape, landmarks, tall buildings, and nautical scenes. In 1911 Woolworth hired Underhill – whose studio directly fronted the building site – to document the construction of the Woolworth Building at regularly timed intervals. The photographs were then mailed to store managers throughout the country and abroad, with the recommendation that they be distributed and published as “widely as possible.”[6][7] Another self-published work that was a promotional piece in collaboration with the Hudson River Day Line was entitled The Hudson River: photo-gravures.[8]
He was enlisted in the Prohibition with photographs from a Federal Prohibition Laboratory that accompanied a 1926 New York Times article, showing shelves and shelves of liquor.[9]
Irving Underhill was particularly adept at showing the juxtaposition of old pedestrian-scaled buildings and newer skyscrapers that seemed to dominate the older city. Such was the case with one photo of the Trinity Church Spire, shown against the new fifty-story 1 Wall Street at Broadway and Wall, which in 1931 was said to be the most costly plot of real estate in the entire world.[10] Underhill also photographed the rise of the Empire State Building.
In an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Architectural League of New York, in 1931, an article in The New York Times entitled “From Roofs to Towers and Slats”, prominently featured a photograph Irving Underhill.[11] This photograph showed the skyline below City Hall Park at the beginning of the century, to symbolize the passing of an era before tall buildings began to dominate the cityscape.
In 1982, a book entitled New York, photographs, 1850-1950 featured some of Underhill’s work, particular his photo of Columbus Circle between 58th and 60th Streets.[12]
A photo of the Woolworth Building in 1913 made shortly after construction was completed was highlighted in a 1993 New York Times article. Charles Hagen compared this photo with an etching from John Marin about the same time, and wrote “Irving Underhill’s photo, made the same year, offers a more sober depiction of the building’s Gothic forms than Marin’s giddy impression, but records it with a mixture of down-to-earth factuality and pride.”[13]
Irving Underhill’s work was displayed along with Berenice Abbott‘s in 1993 exhibition by the Museum of the City of New York entitled “New York Saved: 30 Years of Landmarks Preservation.” The exhibition displayed Underhill’s photo of the exterior of Grand Central Terminal in 1919.[14] Still later, a photograph showing the West Street Building and the Singer Tower from the Hudson River, taken by Underhill ca. 1908, was included in a book on Cass Gilbert.[1]
The work of Irving Underhill continues to resonate today. A colored postcard of Columbus Circle from 1925, was used in a 2005 New York Times article.[15] His picture of the Manhattan Bridge from a New York Times article in 1909, was highlighted in a 2009 article talking about the same bridge and how it has struggled to earn recognition and respect. Underhill’s photo shows the beginning of decking being hung tenuously from the thick and heavy cables overhead.[16]
Digitization efforts have brought Underhill’s work into the public spotlight once again. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery, includes 249 Items under the name “Underhill, Irving” in their digital collection available via their website. Likewise, the Museum of the City of New York has 142 results of digitized images available to view in their online collection. The Brooklyn Museum now has 119 Underhill images in their online digital collection.
Title: Hydro-aeroplane – Wright model at Battery, N.Y. Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.
Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress Public domain
Hydro-aeroplane – Wright model at Battery, N.Y. LCCN2002718324.ti 1912
New York City- Century Opera House, Central Park west & 62nd St. LCCN2003678134.jpg Title: New York City: Century Opera House, Central Park west & 62nd St. Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.
Title: Arsenal Central Park Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.Date1914
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHSThanks 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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
As the 1920s roared on in New York City, Irving Chanin was busy building. The developer was responsible for several Garment Center buildings, as well as the famous Roxy Theatre, the Majestic Apartments and the Century Apartments on Central Park West, and the Royale and Majestic Theatres.
His signature building would rise at 122 E. 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue, The Chanin Building. Chanin commissioned architects Sloan & Robertson to design his 56-story tower. It would be the first major Art Deco office building in the city and, according to The City Review, “the finest expression of Art Deco in the city.”
Mayor James Walker was on hand for the dedication of the building in January 1929. It heralded the beginning of an age of iconic Art Deco buildings in Manhattan: Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building would all rise in a matter of years.
Although the bulk of the structure, complying with the city’s demand for set-backs, has been declared somewhat unexciting; the crown of the building with its buttresses and piers has been called the finest in the city. What no one complains of, however, is the exuberant Art Deco decoration.
In “New York 1930, Architecture And Urbanism Between the Two World Wars,” authors Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins write “Above shop fronts sheathed in bronze and black Belgian marble, a bronze frieze narrated the story of evolution, beginning with the lower marine forms and then bursting forth with fish and birds. This formed a plinth for a two-story colonnade of massive Norman piers whose squashed cushion capitals were carved with writhing sea monsters. The fourth story was sheathed in terra-cotta panels rendered with a bold overall pattern of abstract floral patterns”
The frieze depicting evolution stopped at geese; the designers no doubt feeling that including man in the process, only four years after the Scopes Trial, might be too controversial.
Chanin used his own architectural department head, Jacques I. Delamarre and Rene Chambellan, an architectural sculptor, to decorate the interiors. Fantastic Art Deco grills, elevator doors, mailboxes and sculptures greeted the visitor. Two bronze-painted plaster reliefs by Chambellan represent Achievement and Success. The means to gain these are represented in six matching reliefs: three are physical, Effort, Activity and Endurance; and three are mental, Enlightenment, Vision, and Courage.
On the 54th Floor was an roof top observatory and on the 50th and 51st floor was a 200-seat theatre decorated in silver and black for the tenants’ sole use. Later the space was converted to offices.
Chanin installed his own offices on the 52nd floor, lavishing it with Art Deco ornamentation, including bronze gates. Below ground the Baltimore Ohio Railroad Company leased space for ticket offices, waiting rooms and a bus terminal – complete with an immense turntable to turn the busses around.
The Chanin Building was perhaps solely responsible for making 42nd Street the premier commercial address of the time. The imposing structure became the subject of one of Hugh Ferriss’s architectural paintings.
Throughout the 20th Century to the present it remains a striking presence in midtown — an Art Deco masterpiece.
ANDY SPARBERG, LAURA HUSSEY AND MITCHELL ELINSON KNOW THEIR TRAIN STATIONS!
SOURCES
DAYTONIAN IN MANHATTAN
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
The Puck Building in 1895 with the playful corner statue — “King’s Photographic View of New York” (author’s collection) On June 25, 1887 tenants included, in addition to Puck and the Ottman concern, G. P. Baldwin’s bookbindery; Robert Hornby’s electrotyping company; Stadecker & Emsheimer, hat frame manufacturers; H. Lindenmeyer, paper dealers; and on the first floor the hat store of Twest & Co. On that evening a fire originated in Baldwin’s offices and quickly spread. The large amount of inks, glues and paper in the building ignited into a major conflagration, not being fully extinguished until hours later, causing around $30,000 in damages.
