FIRE WATCH TOWER IN MOUNT MORRIS PARK LAURA HUSSEY GOT IT!!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c)
JUDITH BERDY ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
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(and their family connection to Blackwell’s Island)
from Atlas Obscura
Apart from a few isolated incidents, they were rarely seen or heard until March 21, 1947, when the police were tipped off about a possible dead body in the house. They broke down the door and were confronted with piles of junk so large that it took them two hours to find Homer’s corpse dressed in an old bathrobe with his filthy gray hair reaching down to his shoulders. On March 30, false rumors circulated that Langley had boarded a bus for Atlantic City, but on April 8, nearly three weeks after the alarm was first raised, his decomposing body was found just ten feet from where his brother had perished. He had been crawling through a tunnel of newspapers when he had activated one of his own booby traps, which crushed him. His paralyzed brother starved to death several days later.
In total, 130 tons of junk was removed from the house, including baby carriages, rusted bicycles, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, plaster busts, rusty bed springs, 25,000 books, eight live cats, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, 14 pianos, and a selection of pickled human organs in jars.
The brothers were buried in Brooklyn and the same year, the house was torn down. By the 1960s, it was being used as a park, leaving future generations to dwell on the brothers’ strange and tragic lives.
Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Wakeman Collyer (October 3, 1885 – c. March 9, 1947), known as the Collyer brothers.
DR. HERMAN LIVINGSTON COLLYER
Dr. Collyer attended to patients on Blackwell’s Island. It is said that he rowed his canoe to the island daily.
A directory of the physicians who served at City Hospital.
Laura Hussey got it!! Rising nearly 70 feet, the shed houses 5,000 tons of salt and marks the historic location where the former canal enclosing Lower Manhattan met the Hudson River. The Salt Shed’s solid, crystalline form acts as a counterpoint to the diaphanous, scrim-like façade of the Manhattan 1/2/5 Garage, directly across Spring Street to the north.
ATLAS OBCURA R.I.H.S. ARCHIVES DATTNER ARCHITECTS NYC DEPT. OF SANITATION
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When we came here so many years ago, AVAC, the Island’s new, modern trash removal system was one of our Island’s major attractions. Wooshing away garbage underfoot, we didn’t need large trash rooms or to worry about vermin. Well, with AVAC blocked for us at any rate, my thoughts turn to trash in the City.
Always a problem, but at first nothing was done: New Amsterdamers chucked rubbish, filth, ashes, dead animals and such stuff into the streets. In 1657, the city banned citizens from tossing “tubs of odor and nastiness” into the streets but with little impact. Only in 1702 would semi-organized street cleaning begin. Citizens piled stuff in front of their homes each Friday to be collected by Saturday night scavengers. Rubbish-pickers took what they could and sold it to bone-boiling plants; the rest was left to hogs, and then to rot. Many folks gleaned among the refuse.
A tenement gleaner, New York City (1900-1937). Lewis Wickes Hines. NYPL
Only in 1881, the New York City created a Department of Street Cleaning in response to the public uproar over litter-lined streets and disorganized garbage collection. In 1929, it became the Department of Sanitation.
In the course of the next century and a half, the amount of city waste grew enormously (by early 21st century, nearly 50,000 tons of waste and recyclables were collected in New York City each day), and the character of trash changed as well (with autos, no more horse manure, urine or dead horses; now huge amounts of concrete and plastic). But the big issues remained the same: collecting it and then getting rid of it.
In its early days, the Department of Street Cleaning didn’t function at all. People were knee-deep in street muck, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and broken stuff. The problem was that people in charge of street cleaning were in the pockets of people like Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Other cities all over the world had figured out how to solve this waste problem decades earlier, but New York persisted in being infamously, disgustingly dirty.
In New York at the end of the 19th century, it was not uncommon for dead animals to lie on the streets for weeks
A tenement gleaner, New York City (1900-1937). Lewis Wickes Hines. NYPL
Only in 1881, the New York City created a Department of Street Cleaning in response to the public uproar over litter-lined streets and disorganized garbage collection. In 1929, it became the Department of Sanitation.
In the course of the next century and a half, the amount of city waste grew enormously (by early 21st century, nearly 50,000 tons of waste and recyclables were collected in New York City each day), and the character of trash changed as well (with autos, no more horse manure, urine or dead horses; now huge amounts of concrete and plastic). But the big issues remained the same: collecting it and then getting rid of it.
In its early days, the Department of Street Cleaning didn’t function at all. People were knee-deep in street muck, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and broken stuff. The problem was that people in charge of street cleaning were in the pockets of people like Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Other cities all over the world had figured out how to solve this waste problem decades earlier, but New York persisted in being infamously, disgustingly dirty.
Tammany regained power in the next election and Waring lost his job. Still, even though in office for only three years, many of Waring’s innovations remained. After he left, nobody could use the old excuses that Tammany had used to dodge the issue of waste management – that the city was too crowded, with too many diverse kinds of people, and never mind that London and Paris and Philadelphia and Boston cleaned their streets. New York was different and it just couldn’t be done. Waring proved them wrong. Rates of preventable disease went down. Mortality rates went down. It also had a ripple effect across all different areas of the city.
Before and after photos of street corners in New York in 1893 and then in 1895 taken for Harper’s Weekly reveal the change that took place when the system finally began to work. New York Public Library
From this point on, New York had a method of trash collection. The issue of what to do with the trash that was collected remained, however.
New York’s main modes of disposal, into the eighteen-nineties, were rendering plants, hog feeding, fill operations, and ocean dumping. What little recycling there was came from private scow trimmers who loaded the garbage barges along the city’s shoreline. Rights for sifting through the trash were bid out to labor bosses who paid the city nearly $90,000 in 1894 for this privilege. They sorted out iron at $4.50 per ton, zinc at $1.75 per 100 pounds, paper at 25 to 40 cents per 100 pounds, along with commodities such as bones, fat, hemp twine, and old shoes.
Waring had novel ideas about what to do with what his White Wings collected. In 1895, he instituted a waste management plan that eliminated ocean dumping and mandated recycling. Household waste was separated into three categories: food waste, which was steamed and compressed to eventually produce grease (for soap products) and fertilizer; rubbish, from which paper and other marketable materials were salvaged; and ash, which along with the nonsalable rubbish was landfilled. Now, by keeping the sortable rubbish separate from the ashes and food waste, Waring hoped to capture the recycling value for his department’s budget.
The vast quantity of coal ashes became a significant source of landfill as the city’s islands expanded their shorelines. Rikers Island was enlarged from 80 acres to 400 acres. Recycled ash was also incorporated into cement cinder blocks. The wet garbage was sent to pig farmers in Secaucus, N.J., or to a composting plan in Jamaica Bay that extracted oil and made fertilizer. Meanwhile, his suggestion that rubbish should be incinerated rather than dumped at seas was much appreciated by the shoreline inhabitants of New Jersey and Long Island – though ocean dumping resumed during World War I and never really ended until the 1930s.
In 1919, Mayor John Hylan proposed that a fleet of incinerators be placed throughout the boroughs. When a judge ruled, in 1931, that New York City would need to end its ocean dumping—New Jersey had successfully sued the city over the trash blanketing its beaches—incineration became even more attractive. But incinerators were expensive to repair and maintain, and the pollution they produced was particularly unpopular. Moreover, increasing amounts of new materials – aluminum, plastics – made incineration more difficult. Burying the waste seemed a better idea. In the 1930s, Robert Moses launched an ambitious program to build both incinerators and landfills. At one point, there was a network of some 89 incinerators and landfills all over the city.
Inwood’s 215th Street Incinerator – January 29, 1937
After the 1960’s, no new waste disposal facilities were constructed in the city. Active incinerators numbered eleven in 1964, seven in 1972, three in 1990, and zero in 1994. Six landfills, filled to capacity, were closed between 1965 and 1991, leaving the City with only one remaining landfill — Fresh Kills on Staten Island, which after mounting protests by Staten Islanders, was finally closed in 2001 (though reopened on September 12, 2001 to receive the wreckage of the World Trade Center).
With the city’s last landfill closed, then mayor Rudy Giuliani’s solution was to increase the privatization and export of trash. By 1995, New York State was the largest exporter of waste in the country, sending it predominantly to Pennsylvania, as well as eleven other states. This is still the basic arrangement today.
Note that waste collection had become divided between public and private organizations. The public system handles waste from residences and government buildings as well as some non-profits. This “public waste,” which accounts for about a quarter of the city’s total, is collected by New York’s Department of Sanitation, which has become the largest waste management agency in the world with a yearly budget greater than the annual budget of some countries. The other three-quarters of New York’s garbage is generated by commercial businesses, mostly debris from construction projects. Collection of this “private waste” does not come out of the city’s budget. Instead, business must pay one of the City’s licensed waste haulers to take it away.
There’s more to the story of course – recycling would take another essay at least and the story of exporting our waste is scarcely over. But for now, it’s time to take out the garbage. Thanks for your time.
Note, I gleaned extensively from Robin Nagle (Picking Up) and Martin Melosi (Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City) from several of the sources below.
The bell was cast from coins donated by delegates of 60 Nations at the 13th General Conference of the United Nations Associations held in Paris in 1951, and from individual contributions of various kinds of metal. It is housed in a typically Japanese structure like a shinto shrine, made of cypress wood.
At the presentation of the bell, Mr. Renzo Sawada, Japanese observer to the United Nations stated that the bell: embodies the aspiration for peace not only of the Japanese but of the peoples of the entire world. Thus it symbolizes the universality of the United Nations.Location (Building): Exterior Ground Donor Country: Japan Artist or Maker: The Tada Factory Exterior Ground Floor: Rose Garden Dimensions: Height: 39 in.; Diameter: 24 in. Donation Date: June 8, 1954
Jay Jacobson and 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 Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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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What cements Riverside Drive as one of Manhattan’s most beautiful streets is its architecture. The avenue is a winding line of elegant 1920s and 1930s apartment houses, with some surviving rowhouses and a few stand-alone mansions that reflect the beaux-arts design trend of the Gilded Age—lots of limestone, light brick, and marble.
But every so often, the Upper West Side portion of Riverside has a surprise. Case in point is the 15-foot, 22-ton bronze statue that has stood outside 332 Riverside Drive, between 105th and 106th Streets, since 1955, according to Japan Culture NYC. The statue is of Shinran Shonin, a Buddhist monk in Japan who founded a sect of Buddhism called Jodo-Shinshu in the 13th century. The monk is depicted in missionary robes, his face mostly obscured by his hat. (Originally he carried a cane, presumed stolen in the early 1980s, per Japan Culture NYC.)
Photo: Atlas Obscura Riverside Drive has always been an avenue of grand statues. But how did the statue of a Japanese monk end up here?
The story begins in Japan in 1937, when a businessman in the metal industry commissioned his factories to make six identical bronze statues of Shinran Shonin, according to fascinating research by Sam Neubauer at I Love the Upper West Side. “The statues were spread across Japan, with one standing on top of a hill overlooking Hiroshima,” Neubauer wrote.
Once war broke out, the Japanese military turned three of the statues into scrap metal for ammunition. “A similar attempt was made in Hiroshima but after significant protests over the importance of the statue, the government allowed Shinran Shonin to remain on his hilltop,” stated Neubauer
Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th Street, about 1903
“It was from the hilltop that, on August 6, 1945, the statue witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb exploded over the city,” he continued. “Although the epicenter of the blast was just 1.5 miles away, the statue somehow survived.” An estimated 80,000 people perished in immediate aftermath of the atomic blast.
In 1955, after the New York Buddhist Church moved to Riverside Drive from its original home in a brownstone on 94th Street, the church’s minister and the businessman who commissioned the statue decided to bring it to New York.
The rooftop pool at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. The pool is long gone but it most have been fabulous! John Gattuso and M. Frank both got it right!
Sources
Ephemeral New York
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
Text by Judith Berdy
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I was looking for an administration building on the NYC Municipal Archives digital collection website. These are some of the images classified under “administration”
TO ENLARGE THESE IMAGES TO SEE THE DETAILS GO TO: NYC.GOV/RECORDS GO TO HISTORICAL RECORDS GO TO COLLECTIONS GO TO DIGITAL COLLECTIONS IN SEARCH TYPE IN “ADMINISTRATION”
Rendering, aerial view of landplane base administration building proposed for North Beach Airport.
Site plan, proposed Municipal Airport #2, North Beach, Queens, prepared by WPA engineers. Date: 1935-1939
United States. National Recovery Administration. Consumers’ Division Subject: New York Public Library Subject: Parades Date: September 13, 1933
United States. National Recovery Administration. Consumers’ Division Subject: Parades Date: September 19, 1933
Copy of rendering, City Island-Hart Island Administration Building. Small one-story building.
High Pressure Fire Service Pumping Station, Coney Island. Public Works Administration Docket. Date: September 1937
WPA workers demolishing shacks of Hoover City, erected on Red Hook dump land. Date: 1930-1939
Betsy Head Memorial Playground Bathhouse. WPA bathhouse. Two large pools, many young people. Date: 1940-1949
A full view of the modern pool, with community bath house in rear, concrete walk for observers in foreground and buildings of neighborhood in background Book for Which Intended: New York City Guide Date: August, 1936
Rendering, proposed new administration building. Department of Marine & Aviation: Pier A (Blistered) Date: November 20, 1942
WPA Description: Two chimps embracing keeper; one is on leash. Keeper also carries feeding pan. Onlookers seated against administration building Book for Which Intended: New York City Guide Date: July 1937
Armored Cars installed by Comptroller Berry during this administration now protect the City’s Millions in Cash Payrolls. Subject: Department of Finance Subject: Workers Description: Workers wait to receive pay from armored car under the Brooklyn Bridge. Date: 1920-1930
Airports–LaGuardia Airport Description: Rendering, seaplane base administration building, seen from Bowery Bay. Date: 1935-1939
Description: 655- Acre “Terminal City” Development will replace this small cinder block Administration Building. Which was the only Passenger Terminal Facility at New York International Airport when the Port Authority Assumed Responsibility for its Development and Space in 1947 Date: 1956
MOVIE THEATRE AT FRESH MEADOWS DEVELOPMENT NINA LUBLIN, REPORTS
Subject:Todays Pix is that of the Fresh Meadows, Queens Movie Theatre by the 188th Street & Horace Harding Blvd along side the Robert Moses-built LIE……at the Fresh Meadows Shopping Center, home of one of the first Bloomingdales branches… Where I spent lots of times w. family & friends & it was next door to the Horn & Hardhart Automat!! And near the Fresh Meadows apartments—
All built in the post WW2 era.:
LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA BROWN, ED LITCHER AND GLORIA HERMAN KNOW THEIR THEATRES
THE FIRST BLOOMINGDALES BRANCH.
SOURCES
NYC MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
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Text by Judith Berdy Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
The City purchased a farm for the Parental School in an area of Queens called Flushing Hill. The farm’s previous owner was Kane & Wright, a “manure dealers” firm. In an interesting coincidence, the company’s partner Robert J. Wright had been New York City’s first Department of Correction commissioner in the 1890s.
The new school opened in 1909 with a main administration building, three dormitories referred to as cottages, and a power plant. They were designed in a Mission Revival style by C.B.J. Snyder, Superintendent of School Buildings. In the 1920s, more cottages were added that followed Snyder’s original plan. The school buildings were designated by letters.
Students received classroom instruction but also performed farm work, learned trades, and engaged in military drills.
The owl remains to this day over the door.
However, by the 1930s there was a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality.
In 1934, the new mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, received letters alleging mistreatment of students at the Parental School. Although the school denied the allegations and a Board of Education report cleared the school, a Grand Jury found evidence of widespread problems and recommended the school be completely reformed or closed.
Among the Grand Jury’s findings: some staff engaged in “entirely unwarranted use of corporal punishment;” the “regular school work is pathetic;” and the boys were served “badly prepared food” with “an almost complete lack of appreciation of the food requirements of growing boys.”
Soon after, the Parental School closed.
The following year, 1935, the New York City Children’s Hospital moved to the Parental School campus from Randall’s Island, where its building was demolished to make way for the Triborough Bridge. The hospital, which served so-called “mental defectives,” closed in 1936 and its patients were sent to state institutions.
With the Parental School campus available and in the face of heavy lobbying by Queens officials, the City agreed to establish a new public college on part of the site where the Parental School buildings were located (new schools were built on other portions of the property).
Colwin Hall
Delaney Hall
Queens College opened in 1937. While it continues to use several of the original Parental School buildings, over time some others were demolished to make way for new buildings.
One of the lost buildings, originally designated “A” was renamed Walt Whitman Hall in 1939. Coincidentally, 100 years earlier, in 1839, its namesake, then only 20 years old, taught for several months at Jamaica Academy, a local one-room school house.
A few years ago a local historian determined that the site of Jamaica Academy was the present day location of the Queens College Student Union building. Queens College has placed a plaque nearby honoring Whitman’s connection to the site.
FROM A READER
Lucerne, Switzerland? For me, a trip to Manhattan is like taking my life in my hands, even though Mitch and I have gotten the booster (of Pfizer), thanks to you! I thank you inwardly every time I mention to anyone that we’ve gotten the booster.
What a service you do for Roosevelt Islanders with your daily history newsletters. It’s an amazing contribution to the mental well-being of the readership, especially during the time of Covid.
NYPD headquarters on Lafayette Street Laura Hussey, Clara Bella, Gloria Herman, Hara Reiser and Arlene Bessesoff 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
New York City Municipal Archives Untapped New York
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WOMEN AND CRIME IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
Badgers and sneak thieves, dishonest servants and disorderly houses, Fagins, shoplifters, con artists and grifters. Who were these pretty girls and hard women?
Sadie Schoen, the “Pretty Girl” from Austria caught conning a shopkeeper, made headlines with her “clever swindle.” Maggie Moore, with her sad, weathered face, standing only 5 feet, and weighing 107 pounds, was a 35 year-old Irish woman arrested for malicious mischief in 1910. Lena Keller, a tough, plain-looking woman from Germany, faced a homicide charge. But look at her occupation—midwife—did she provide an illegal abortion as many midwives did? Slim, blue-eyed, wig-wearing Esther Gensberg, 17, was arrested for keeping a disorderly house. This was not a violation of cleanliness, but the formal name of the offense for running a brothel. Tattooed Lillie Bates, 23, was arrested in 1909 as a badger, part of an old con to lure men into a compromising position and then blackmail them.
Life was never easy for women in New York and the way they were treated by the law and the press varied according to their social class. Was it poverty or hysteria? Was she an “idle housewife” or a “hard-working stenographer”? Was it “kleptomania” or “grand larceny”?
BERTILLON CARDS
The New York City Police Department opened their first “Rogues Gallery” in 1858, with photographs of recidivist criminals taken by a portrait studio. However, the story of police photography really begins with Alphonse Bertillon in Paris, France around 1880. Bertillon did not invent police photography, but he gave it rules and scientific methodology. From a family of scientists (his father was a famous statistician), Bertillon had a job as a police clerk that required him to describe prisoners and file photographs. He quickly realized the assignment was pointless as there was no consistency to the descriptions or how the photographs were produced. His invention was to use scientific calipers to take 10 precise measurements of various bones in the human body (and record other features such as eye color, scars, etc.) reasoning that no two people would have the same set of dimensions.
For the photographs Bertillon specified the front portrait and profile pictures that became the standard “mug shot.” He wrote specific instructions on how these photographs should be made, including poses, lighting, and distance from the prisoner. In 1897, the NYPD built a studio, trained police officers as photographers, and adopted the Bertillon method. With development of fingerprinting for criminal identification in 1920, the “Bertillon” measurements were phased out. But the dual photographs and descriptive information remained.
BROOKLYN STAND-UPS
The 3,000 Bertillon cards in the NYC Municipal Archives were once part of a vast Rogues Gallery, which by 1920 contained over 50,000 criminals. In 2011, the Archives accessioned the NYPD Photo Unit’s records dating from 1897 to 1975. The collection contained some of the original Bertillon glass-plate negatives from 1897, crime-scene photographs from 1915 to 1975, and the Brooklyn Stand-Up series.
The stand-up mug shot was implemented by the NYPD in 1918. The stand-up was directed for recidivist criminals or those accused of a major crime. When known collaborators were arrested they were photographed in a group stand-up.
And the prize for the most thrilling cable car ride goes to this one.
Why? That’ll be because passengers can stand on the roof.
Behold the ‘CabriO’ cable car, which swoops up to the 6,069ft summit of Mount Stanserhorn in Switzerland. Nina Lublin and Alexis Villafane guessed it and did not volunteer to test i!
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) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
This exhibit was curated by Quinn Berkman and Michael Lorenzini of the NYC Municipal Archives for Photoville 2016 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
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Recently libraries, archives, and museums around the globe featured some of their favorite maps and map-related records using #ArchivesYouAreHere.
Maps, atlases, pocket maps, maritime charts and other cartographic materials contain a wealth of information about places in New York State.
Here are some tips on how to find them:
Understanding what kinds of maps are available for the time period you’re interested in is a good place to start. Review the NYG&B Society’s Historical New York Maps webpage which provides an overview of the kinds of maps available and includes links to numerous map collections. Be sure to see if your county was once part of another county at the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.
One important resource for New York State maps, particularly urban and well settled places, are the late-19th century and early-20th century Sanborn Fire Protection Maps. More than 2,500 of these detailed maps are available online at the New York Public Library.
A significant collection of maps from the same period but covering more rural places can be found at the USGS Historical Map Viewer.
The David Rumsey Map Collection includes more than 150,000 maps, more the 100,000 of them available for free online. The collection has a focus on rare maps of North and South America from about 1550 through the present.
The National Archives cartographic and architectural holdings in College Park, Maryland features more than 15 million maps, charts, aerial photographs, architectural drawings, patents, and ship plans. One of the oldest items in the Cartographic holdings is the Polus Antarcticus atlas page. Published in the 1630s by Henricus Hondius, a Dutch cartographer and engraver, the map is one of the first to depict the South Pole area.
Map Searching Tips
Start by identifying the year and place you are interested in and target your research there. Search using several name variations and spellings; be sure you’re using the name a place was called at the time. If you are looking for a name or phrase, put those terms in quotations for the search, example “New York.” Search results typically bring back all formats of records. Use filters where available to narrow your results and/or limit your search to items available online. If you have a questions about using a catalog, reach out to the reference staff listed in the contact section of the website.
SOME RESEARCH MATERIALS AVAILABLE AT THE RIHS. YOU ARE WELCOME TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT TO SEE OUR COLLECTION.
This map of the island is in the collection of the New York Public Library.
Though not a map, this image of Blackwell’s Island gives a view of the island and structures from Harper’s Weekly.
Subway and bus maps are a great source of information and the expansion of the transit system.
This is probably one of the most valuable treasures in the RIHS collection. Rev. Oliver Chapin collected dozens of artifacts when he moved here in 1965. This survey contains maps, architectural plans, topographic surveys of the island in 1969-1970, before construction of our community began.
As many pieces of our collection, it was rescued from the abandoned buildings on the island before they were demolished.
A survey of Goldwater Hospital and the area surrounding the structure. RIHS Collection
Isador Strauss, founder of Macy’s with his brother Nathan. JOYCE GOLD, LAURA HUSSEY AND GLORIA HERMAN KNEW THE ANSWER.
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
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
| Tags: Art Students League, Ernest Lawson Ashcan Painter, Ernest Lawson Harlem River, Ernest Lawson High Bridge, Ernest Lawson Painter, Ernest Lawson Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan paintings | Categories: art, Upper Manhattan | URL: https://wp.me/pec9m-9ru
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This dry goods emporium was the first to offer set prices for each item (in other words, no haggling), a money-back guarantee, and a store Santa starting with the 1862 holiday season.
But the retailer that eventually operated 11 shops across 14th Street in the Ladies Mile shopping district before decamping for Herald Square in 1902 can also claim another first.
Macy’s was the first store, or perhaps the first business in New York at all, to employ a female executive.
Having an astute woman leading a company that largely marketed itself to women may have been the secret that helped make Macy’s the retail giant it still is today.
Born in 1841, Margaret Getchell (above) was a former schoolteacher from Nantucket who moved to New York City at the age of 20. She applied for an entry-level job as a Macy’s clerk.
[Some accounts have it that Getchell was a distant relation of Rowland H. Macy, the store founder; but it’s unclear if this was actually true.]
“[Getchell] was an incredibly hard-working employee and, aside from her quick calculations as a cashier, she would often stay late at night to help with the company bookkeeping,” states The Folding Chair, a women’s history website. “Macy decided to promote her to the store’s bookkeeper.”
Soon, Getchell wasn’t just keeping track of the books and training new “cash girls,” as the shopgirls were called. She was recommending trends to Macy that he should capitalize on.
She married another Macy’s employee, and the two lived above one of the stores, according to Macy’s for Sale.
As consumerism exploded in the Gilded Age, Macy’s became one of New York’s leading new department stores.
Getchell, sadly, didn’t live to see the store make its historic leap to Herald Square at the beginning of the 20th century.
Two years after her husband died of tuberculosis in 1878, Getchell succumbed to heart failure and inflammation of the ovary.
Her business motto, however, still applies to retail today: “Be everywhere, do everything, and never fail to astonish the customer.”
Henry Phillips Photo SAILMAKERS SHOP ON CITY ISLAND Jay Jacobson 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
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
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On September 12, 1871, the New York Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction (which managed the institutions on Blackwell’s Island) submitted a report to Mayor A. Okley Hall that described the “practice-cruise of the school-ship Mercury from her anchorage at Hart’s Island to Sierra Leone during the winter of 1870-71”.
It turns out that a bunch of dead-end New York boys did crew a large sailing ship across the Atlantic on an oceanographic mission. Read on for another incredible New York story.
It all begins on Hart Island.
Hart Island is an 85-acre island east of City Island. During the Civil War, it was used as a military facility and a Confederate prisoner of war camp; in 1868, it was sold to New York City to be a municipal prison and a potter’s field. Soon after, the State authorized the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction to establish an industrial school on Hart’s island for “incorrigible” boys.
The Commissioners discuss the founding of the industrial school in their report: “With the increase of the population of the city there had been a greatly increased number of boys committed to the care of the Commissioners by the magistrates for slight misdemeanors and vagrancy. Others, and in large numbers had been committed by their parents as incorrigible, or because of evil associates, who were leading them to ruin.”
These boys were sent to the Industrial School on Hart’s Island, but their numbers increased so rapidly that the Commissioners “were embarrassed as to the disposition which should be made of them.” Without a long probationship, they couldn’t be recommended as apprentices “because of their reckless and wayward character” nor could they be discharged fearing “they would return to the vagrant life or fall in with the former associates”. So, “under these circumstances, it was deemed expedient to establish a nautical school…providing for them a sure and honest means of livelihood suited to their adventurous spirit.”
This wasn’t the first time this had been attempted. Other cities – Baltimore, Boston, New Bedford among them – had created similar projects several years earlier. Indeed, in New York, two other groups sought to start maritime training programs: the Chamber of Commerce wanted an “honest boys’ ship” under its control or at least a share in the management of the project, and Randall Island’s House of Refuge wanted its own school ship for its delinquent residents. But the
But the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction owned the big guns – several Commissioners had long maritime experience and several others were top Tammany chiefs. So, in 1869, the New York Senate authorized the establishment of a nautical training ship by the Commission, in connection with its newly established industrial school, but failed to provide funds to make this happen. Then, apparently behind the leadership of State Senator William M. (Boss) Tweed, the ball began moving and a former Havre line packet, the clipper ship Mercury was acquired in the summer of 1869. Later that summer, 35 Hart Island “naval pupils in neat and attractive uniforms” visited Tweed’s Greenwich estate.
Hopes were high about the new program: “The industrial school gives great promise of success, and your Committee trusts that it will develop into some positive system whereby the 20,000 or 30,000 children in our City growing up with only the education of the street, may be rescued from idleness and immorality and reared to honest pursuits.”
Mercury embarked on an initial trial run on September 10 for a four-day sail throughout Long Island Sound. A subsequent New York Times report indicated that “everything connected with the trip worked charmingly, and . . . the boys entered into the spirit of the occasion with a gusto that seemed quite promising.” Several other training trips took place over the next few months as the boys shook down into a working crew.
In November 1869, Harper’s Weekly investigated this new development. “It is quite recently that practical philanthropists directed their attention to the homeless boys of large cities.’’ Refuges were established but boys escaped, back to the life they had left. Then a good idea “first appeared in Boston for training neglected boys for seamen.” In a typical Harper’s fashion, the new Hart’s Island nautical school program is fulsomely praised.
None of this was easy. The navy ship Albany rammed Mercury as it lay at anchor off the Battery in November 1869 and Mercury’s first executive officer was fired after he ran the ship aground south of Cape Henry, Virginia in April 1870. The young sailors posed their own problems. Of the first group of around 250, 39 were discharged after a few months for various reasons and 18 deserted. In addition to the boys and the ship’s officers, 22 adult petty officers and seamen were on board, as well, all on salary, to form the police for the ship and to provide a corps of practical instructors in seamanship, as well as to perform the more arduous duties on shipboard.
Indeed, problems with the wayward boys continued through the life of the program. On August 25, 1870, a facility employee acting as a boatswain took 25 Mercury boys on a rowing session. At a pre-arranged time and with a pre-arranged signal, the boys knocked the boatswain overboard and rowed to shore where all but two of the boys fled. Ten of the boys were promptly recaptured. Thirteen remained at large several days later. Such “escapes” do not appear to have been uncommon. A few years later, on June 2, 1873, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that “Fifteen boys ran away last night from the school ship Mercury, lying at Hart’s Island and are in hiding on Long Island.” Boys will be boys.
What about the industrial school on Hart Island? Apparently, nothing much ever came of it. It never functioned effectively as a trade school as originally intended. Only the nautical school actually began operations.
The school ship did not limit its training activities to short jaunts in Long Island Sound. In the fall of 1870, the Commissioners decided to winter the ship in a milder climate, giving the boys a better opportunity to improve in seamanship and navigation. and scientific survey techniques. This led to a much grander project. It would cross the Atlantic in winter, to the coast of Africa and there begin a scientific oceanographic study. Equipped for a four mouths’ cruise, Mercury sailed on December 20 with a full complement of officers, twelve men, and two hundred and fifty-nine boys, and arrived at Sierra Leone on February 14. It soon commenced the deep-sea soundings across the ocean.
The results seem to have had real scientific value. Water temperature readings confirmed a theory that a cold current from the poles underlies the surface-waters of the tropical seas. The tables and charts of the daily measurements carrying out the United States Coast Survey instructions were included in the report. Those readings, plus the sea water and ocean bed specimens, were turned over to NYU Professor Henry Draper. Draper’s conclusions and commentary became part of the Commissioners’ report – which Draper published soon after as a book.
Draper’s report and book
The voyage was viewed as Mercury’s finest hour and was a publicity coup for the nautical program. This wasn’t the last of Mercury’s ocean trips. An annual spring cruise to the West Indies became a key element of its program. An April 5, 1873 article in the New York Times gushed over the return of the Mercury from one of these spring voyages: “It is almost impossible to enumerate all that has been accomplished by this cruise… for it may be safely said that when the ship left New York it had on board many young scapegraces, who in time have grown to be vagabonds and outcasts; but in place of these the ship brings home a crew that will make good seamen, who have made a Winter passage of the Atlantic, and aided in navigating the ship a distance of nearly 15,000 miles. In doing this they have provided themselves with a self-supporting occupation, and are in a position to make themselves respectable members of society.”
Its achievements notwithstanding, the “Panic of 1873” and depression that followed sank Mercury as well as rivalry with other city agencies. By 1874, New York City was feeling the financial pinch. An analysis of the expense of running the nautical school showed high costs but a relatively low number of program graduates who actually entered the Navy or the Merchant Marine. In fact, by then the Board of Education had acquired its own training ship, the St. Mary: The Times headlined “A Chance for Public School Boys to Learn a Profession.” The Times now stated “We have serious doubts, also, whether the School-ship Mercury is a desirable branch now that the Executive has its own school ship, to be supported at public expense. The expense might be better employed in making Hart’s Island School a real ‘industrial school,’ which should teach trades and help to pay the costs of the institution.”
St. Mary’s, NYC Board of Education’s own school-ship circa 1874 – 1907
But it was not just the cost, but the downfall of Boss Tweed and the rise of reformers opened the way for the Chamber of Commerce to get the legislative mandate for the school ship it wanted: one run by the NYC Board of Education with Chamber in-put; a good boys’ boat, not a bad boys’ brig.
With the loss of funding, the Department of Charities and Correction’s Board of Commissioners decided to close the nautical school, to take steps so that “the school ship Mercury be laid up in ordinary,” to transfer boys involved in the nautical school “to the care of the Warden on Hart’s Island,” and to dispense with the services of the officers and seamen of the Mercury involved with training the boys.
It’s all here. Ships and incorrigible boys; money, influence and Boss Tweed; spring trips to the Carribbean; competition among city agencies. Thank you for reading.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 2, 1873 New York Times, December 9, 1874 New York Times, Dec. 28, 1874
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 FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
