Recently we wrote about The New York Parental School and its architect C.B.J. Snyder. Here is much more on the man who designed glorious school buildings.
Think of someone who had an enormous positive impact on the City, who was a City employee, a prolific builder who never got rich and whose name is scarcely known today. I give you Charles B. J. Synder.
Who was he? A builder of schools. At the turn of the 20th century, he designed and supervised the construction of 400 public schools in New York. Not only many schools, but attractive, safe and healthy schools. In his 1902 book “The Battle With the Slum,” the social reformer Jacob Riis wrote of Snyder: “Mr. Snyder builds New York’s schools, and he does that which no other architect before his time ever did or tried; he ‘builds them beautiful.’ In him New York has one of those rare men who open windows for the soul of their time. Literally, he found barracks where he is leaving palaces to the people.” A public school that “opens the windows of the soul” – not bad. So, what’s the story here?
Public funds for education became available after 1795, and in Manhattan a Free School Society was formed to disperse the state money. Later, a parallel Catholic parochial school system was constructed. A compulsory attendance law for the primary grades was enacted in 1874 but the city school system was soon overloaded by new immigration. Universal school attendance was never realized.
For many children, life was tough. In the winter of 1892, Riis visited eleven of the city’s sixteen riverside dumps to investigate the enforcement of two public health laws: one required that old rags be washed before resale, and the other forbade rag pickers from living in the dumps. He learned that neither law was enforced. Riis saw women and children working and living in the dumps. He wrote: “I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump, literally.”
For those who went to school, New York’s public schools were widely viewed as wretched. A Harper’s article (“New York Common Schools”) published in the winter of 1894-95 quoted Dr Rice, New York City Commissioner of Education: “The typical New York public school is a hard, unsympathetic, mechanical-drudgery school – a school in which the light of science has not entered.” The article describes how the schools “crowd little children into ill-ventilated rooms, and keep them for hours at work by the light of flaring gas…”
School construction? Horrible. Christopher Gray writes that “From 1884 to 1891, the architect for the Board of Education had been George Debevoise, whose work was described by the Real Estate Record and Guide in 1893 as ’a civic disgrace — warehouses have greater artistic value.’ Debevoise resigned suddenly amid suggestions that he had schemed with contractors to substitute cheaper materials in school projects — although criminal charges were never filed.”
In 1898, William H. Maxwell was appointed superintendent of the newly consolidated New York City school system. An Irish immigrant himself, Maxwell was a visionary advocate of improving education for the immigrant children then flooding into New York’s schools. Maxwell first fought and defeated the old corrupt system that permitted political bosses to hire teachers. He then sought better-trained, professional teachers and selected them based on their qualifications.
The flood of new New Yorkers intensified. In 1909, the U.S. Immigration Commission reported that over 70% of New York City students were children of immigrants. Between 1900 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, New York schools experienced a 60% increase in enrollment. Most of these new students were Russian Jews and Italians, either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. Moreover, the cultural backgrounds and languages of these “new” immigrants were quite different from those of the English, Germans, and Irish who had dominated immigration to America before 1900.
Overcrowding plagued New York schools. Many schools held double sessions. A single classroom with one teacher often held 60 and occasionally up to 150 children. In the primary grades, pupils frequently sat three to a seat. Many immigrant children had only three hours of instruction a day. During some years, as many as 30,000 new students, mostly immigrants, were simply turned away.
But a new light was dawning. In 1891, with the firing of Debevoise, the Board of Education had turned to Charlies Snyder, a slight man, born in Stillwater, north of Albany, a descendant of Dutch settlers in Saratoga Springs. He was 31 years old, an architect and mechanical engineer, had studied at Cooper Union and worked with the obscure New York architect William E. Bishop. Gray says that it’s not clear how he got the job, “but it must have had something to do with the banker Robert Maclay, who served as head of the school board’s building committee — Snyder gave his son Robert, born about 1894, the middle name Maclay.” Snyder would serve as Superintendent of School Buildings until 1923.
For the next three decades, Snyder presided over the greatest expansion of elementary, middle, and high schools in the five boroughs in the nation’s history. It was not uncommon for him to open more schools in a single year than existed in most other American cities. His buildings were big enough to hold the waves of immigrants flooding into the city, to have indoor play areas for the kids and auditoriums for the community, and light and air, the values of an age made real in brick, mortar and steel. “He found barracks, where he is leaving palaces to the people.”
Snyder’s schools are widely praised for their quality, longevity, and beauty. He worked in many styles – Beaux Arts, Flemish Renaissance, Italian palazzo, Collegiate Gothic and Renaissance Revival – but all embodied his commitment to health and safety issues, improving fire protection, ventilation, lighting, and classroom size. All schools were to be built of fireproof materials, capable of being emptied within three minutes. Snyder’s schools included auditoriums with projection rooms and organs, space for public art, laboratories, vocational training facilities, gymnasiums, swimming pools and roof playgrounds. The buildings were designed also to accommodate new after-school activities like recreation classes and evening lectures. Light was key. He pushed an “H” design, with enclosed outdoor play areas. In these buildings, 60% the exteriors were made up of windows, double what had been the standard; many of these were 10 feet high.
1910 Eastern District Brooklyn High School P.S. 64 sitting dormant in 2013, courtesy of GVSHP
1897 Public School 165 The first school to make use of Snyder’s H-plan Snyder’s Morris High School in the Bronx, shot by Jacob Riis in 1903. (MCNY).
Today, thirteen of his schools and five of his additions have been landmarked. Two-hundred and eighty of the buildings remain standing and 235 of these are still public schools (the rest have been converted to everything from condos to health facilities, artist housing, halfway homes and shelters). Some have been divided up into three or four schools; some are the subject of fierce legal battles as they crumble in place.
Today’s problem is clear. Half the city’s 1,100 main school buildings are already more than 50 years old, and nearly 40% were built before 1930. Many lack gymnasiums, air-conditioning and cannot accommodate computers and other modern technology. Many great neo-Gothic and Renaissance-style schools were built from 1891 to 1923 during Charles B. J. Snyder’s tenure as Superintendent of School Buildings. ”Some of these schools are almost like a church, quite elegant, handsome, massive and distinctive buildings that are likely to lead to lofty thoughts,” said Timothy D. Lynch, who has worked with both the construction authority and preservationists in rehabilitating old schools. ”Do you need 30 landmarked Snyder schools? Probably not. Is one better than the other? Probably not.”
These schools are expensive to rehabilitate — sometimes it costs as much as a new school. The City Comptroller estimates that it would take more than $9 billion to modernize 455 of the schools built before 1950. Preservationists and residents say they should not be destroyed. In many instances, they are the last architectural jewels in their neighborhoods. And over the decades, they have remained productive, providing classrooms for generations and acting as town halls.
Interesting how the work of this little known man – schoolhouses! – continues to roil our City, not because the buildings are so poorly built and unhealthy but because they added so much value to our communities.
From Jay Jacobson:Used at PS 87. Carried only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Our mother filled our lunchboxes with whatever was in the refrigerator and was on the cusp of spoiling. My brother hated four out of five lunches each week. He told mother that he wanted only PBJ because they were easier to trade with other kids. He never traded. Ate the PBJ from third grade through 8th grade. Probably had a few of the lunchboxes. They would last only year or two. Then the latches broke.
Alexis Villefane, Laura Hussey and Gloria Herman remember the 1950’s school-lunch box
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
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THE PODCAST THAT EXPLORES BIG QUESTIONS THROUGH INTIMATE STORIES OUTDOORS
It’s hard to keep a resolution for even a few months, but visual artist Nick Golbiewski has kept his for nearly seven years.
The resolution involves daily drawings, outdoors. We spoke with Nick about how this project came about and about connecting with nature in even the most urban of environments.
PHOTO COURTESY NICK GOLEBIEWSKI
OUT THERE: What made you start the Nick’s Lunchbox Service Art Project?
NICK GOLEBIEWSKI: It started on New Year’s Day as a sort of New Year’s resolution: “I’m going to make a drawing every day.” So that’s one aspect of it, this desire to make something every single day. And also at that time in my studio I was working on these large, intricate paintings of city scenes in New York City that would take me three or four months to finish. So there were these long-term projects and also I can finish something in one minute if I need to, and it’s done for the day. That was the genesis of the project.
OT: How has this project made you appreciate nature more, especially in urban settings?
NG: My rules for the project are it has to be made on site and then photographed that day and then posted, eventually, that day. Looking through New York City and going through the seasons, it’s a call to find the magnolia blossoms blooming in the spring and chasing those. Looking back over the years, I can see this magnolia bloomed two weeks earlier than last year; it’s like these sparks of beauty. And also a way of connecting to the outside even if you’re in New York City. I live in Greenwich Village, and there’s lots of buildings but also little gardens around all the trees and the little square of dirt that’s cut out of the sidewalk. And I’m right next to the Hudson River. It’s great being able to be out there and stare at the water in the Hudson River and make a drawing of it for ten minutes.There’s always finding something happening and appreciating what’s there.
OT: Is there any one drawing in particular that has a fun story behind it?
NG: There’s a fun one just a few days ago where we were walking along the creek in Highbanks Park and my kids started talking to some other kids, at distance, because we’ve been starved socially.When drawings bring up conversations with people, I think that’s when I feel the most successful or interesting. As an artist I’m always really psyched when one day I’ll make a drawing of the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum and they’ll retweet that drawing. It makes me feel like, “Wow people are listening”.
PHOTO COURTESY NICK GOLEBIEWSKI
OT: Have you ever had to do one in just absolutely terrible weather?
NG: Yes! I remember this crazy snowstorm, walking out to the Hudson River. You could hardly even see the horizon of New Jersey. I think my drawing was one line across a paper: okay here’s the separation between sky and earth. Even that line stopped working halfway through with the pen and all the snow falling on it. That’s one of the most weather adverse ones, but since then I’ve learned that pencil works a lot better in the rain or snow.
OT: What are some tips you have for people who want to draw and paint on the go?
NG: Just make it very portable and small scale. I always carry a small sketchbook with me and recently a couple of pencils and a small sharpener. That’s all you need. I’ve added in watercolor lately and so that means a small watercolor set and an old, single-serving yogurt cup I’ve been reusing for a year now that I just fill up with a little water from a water bottle. And for me, the other thing is a phone to take a picture of it on site afterwards. For example, I would draw and paint the left half of the bridge at Highbanks Park in Columbus and then let the photograph show the right half so that the different sides could talk to each other.
OT: I really like those tips. You can start with the basics.
NG: Yeah I’ve been leading a couple Zoom drawing workshops this pandemic, and usually I start with doing a blind contour drawing in these workshops. It’s a sketch where you’re just looking at an object, and you put your mark making tool down to the paper, and you’re not allowed to look down at your paper nor pick up the pencil. It’s one continuous line, so if you’re drawing somebody’s face it will end up having this beautiful line quality where you are really looking at someone’s glasses and their nose but when you look down at the paper afterwards it’s like this face slanting across the page. Usually you get somebody to laugh once they look at that, but it also loosens up the drawing technique. Draw every day. It kind of works, you get better.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
photo courtesy of Nick Golebiewski
MORE LUNCHBOX IMAGES
Photo print of Washington Square Park, the daily drawing from Nick’s 8-year-long daily drawing project.
A fine art photo print from my “Nick’s Lunchbox Series” daily drawing project of the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. On the boardwalk, I made a drawing, painted with watercolor, and photographed the sketchbook in front of the real ferris wheel.
1,000 drawings! Wow, this is the one thousandth consecutive daily drawing in my #NicksLunchboxService project, and I chose a place that’s really important to me—the chapel at Greenwood Cemetery, built in 1911 and designed by architecture firm Warren and Wetmore, who also did Grand Central.
1.6.22 Lunchtime drawing: Pearl River Mart on Broadway, picking up a porcelain planter for a plant cutting I have in the studio, and when I first moved to NYC virtually every present I gave came from this place (at their old location.)
1.7.21 Lunchtime drawing: Snow! Magical snow! A watercolor sketch of the Washington Square Arch in the snow. I especially like how the paint starts freezing on the paper and the crystals cause the pigment to shift in spots. Also, this is my ninth year of making this drawing-a-day project. What do you want to see more of?
2022
1.22 Drawing: Welcome to the new year, “Skate at your own risk” is good advice for 2022. Rockefeller Center ice time with the Christmas tree and Prometheus in gold.
BANK OF THE UNITED STATES FACADE AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM AMERICAN WING LAURA HUSSEY AND ARLENE BESSENOFF GOT IT!!
OOPS OTHER CORRECT RESPONSES THIS WEEK CAME FROM ARON EISENPREISS AND ANDY SPARBERG. WE TRY TO KEEP UP BUT SOMETIMES OR “AI” FAILS US!!!
SOURCES
OUT THERE PODCAST #NicksLunchsServiceproject (C)
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Prior to the American Revolution, there were virtually no banks in the United States. However, Alexander Hamilton, who was George Washington’s key advisor on financial matters, was familiar with the central banks of England and the Netherlands which had been key factors in the growth of the economy of those countries.
Unlike some agrarian Virginian politicians such as Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton believed that banking and credit was the key to the nation’s future. In 1781 he encouraged Robert Morris, the recently appointed Superintendent of Finance for the Continental government, to form the Bank of North America in Philadelphia. For a time up, until the British surrender of New York, this was the only Bank in the colonies.
The Bank of New York
After the British surrender of New York City on Evacuation Day on November 25th, 1783, Hamilton returned to the city of New York. There, in 1784, he convinced the New York State Legislature to charter the Bank of New York, the only bank in the city until the Manhattan Company was chartered in 1799. Hamilton’s Bank of New York was instrumental in assisting New York merchants, whose city had been ravaged by the British during the Revolution, to rebuild the city’s economy. Banking in those days was in many ways a highly partisan endeavor however, and the Bank of New York was affiliated with Hamilton’s Federalist party, so that it behooved merchants seeking financing to support the Federalists.
The post-Revolution government was committed to enforcing New York State land forfeiture laws, which allowed the seizure of land from those who had sided with the British, a sizable portion of the residents of the city of New York. This policy violated the terms of the Treaty of Paris which had ended the Revolution which provided that the pre-war rights of British supporters would be respected. As a result, a number of Loyalist landowners sought out New York lawyers such as Hamilton to argue claims to their land which had been forfeited to the new State of New York.
Hamilton became an ardent advocate of the U.S. Constitution, which would provide what he considered a more rational federal system leading to an economically and militarily stronger United States. One provision of the new Constitution was the clause that said “No State shall impair the obligation of contract,” which was used to guarantee Loyalist rights to their prewar lands. The fight to ratify the U.S. Constitution in New York was thus very bitter, and was strenuously opposed by Anti-Federalists.
The fact that the Bank of New York had a monopoly position over banking in the city was undoubtedly significant factor in the Federalists’ ratification victory. However, in the next decade, there would be increasing bitterness in the city among many veterans of the revolution who felt that the pre-war aristocracy was reasserting itself in contravention of what they believed had been hard won rights.
Ultimately this feeling would be reflected in the rise of the Tammany Society and the creation by Aaron Burr of the Bank of Manhattan in 1799 as a rival to Hamilton’s Bank of New York.
The Bank of Manhattan
As the city of New York’s economy began to improve in the 1790s, many veterans of the Revolution felt they were left out of the prosperity and began to congregate in a civic organizations, especially the Tammany Society. Over time, these disaffected veterans and their supporters denounced the ruling Federalists and the increasingly autocratic administration of John Adams. Particularly galling was the administration’s Alien and Sedition Act (1798), which stifled free speech.
By 1799 a new political party, the Democratic-Republicans, (ancestors of today’s Democratic Party) was coalescing around Aaron Burr, a prominent lawyer and politician. They challenged the Federalists for control of the city government and the state legislature, although the Federalist Bank of New York’s monopoly on banking was a significant impediment to their efforts.
Burr promoted a civic project to fresh bring water into Manhattan by convincing the State Legislature to incorporate the Manhattan Company for this purpose. The charter for the company however, also permitted their excess funds to be invested in banking. In fact, the corporation made fairly minimal efforts on their water plan (although a hexagonal cistern remains the logo of JP Morgan Chase, its corporate descendant). As a bank however, it was successful in breaking the Bank of New York’s monopoly. Among the directors of the new Bank of Manhattan were Aaron Burr, 72-year-old Horatio Gates and other members of the Tammany Society.
Horatio Gates was a former British officer who had been the Patriot commander at the Battles of Saratoga and had afterward clashed with Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s young aide, and later Washington himself, whom he was alleged to be scheming to replace. Gates’ reputation significantly declined after his disastrous defeat at the Battle if Camden in South Carolina in 1780, and, unlike Adams and Washington, he had played no role in the formation of the new government after the Revolution.
Gates was active in the Society of Cincinnati, another organization devoted to perpetuating the liberties secured in the Revolution, and in veterans affairs more generally. In 1790, he moved from his home in Virginia to the city of New York, where he became friends with Aaron Burr and was convinced to run, as a kind of celebrity candidate, with former Governor George Clinton, in the 1800 election on the Democratic-Republican ticket. Gates and the other Democratic-Republicans won a stunning upset victory, which helped elect Thomas Jefferson over John Adams. (See Hamilton, Gates and the New York City Elections of 1800).
Gustave Myers in his history of Tammany Hall (1902) states that without the formation of the Bank of Manhattan and the Tammany Society, the Democratic-Republicans would have been wholly ineffective. By providing a vehicle through which merchants not allied with the Federalists could obtain financing, the Bank of Manhattan broke the stranglehold on the city’s merchant community, and subsequently chartered banks continued to expand the availability of credit. Ultimately, the largest faction of the Democratic-Republicans, the Democratic Party, would become the predominant political power in the city of New York for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The opening of banking to a broader base of merchants and the proliferation of bank charters subsequently granted by the New York State Legislature would lead to one of the most entrepreneurial periods in New York’s history. Although undoubtedly there were some speculative excesses, in the 25 years after 1800 election, the State of New York would become a national center for some of the most daring technological projects in the nation’s history (notably the Erie Canal, completed in 1825) which would lead the city to commercial dominance by the mid-19th century.
Postscript
One would think that JPMorgan Chase would be proud of its origins in the fight of Aaron Burr and Horatio Gates to oppose the monopoly of the Bank of New York and open banking more broadly. However, in the early 2000s Chase Bank ran an advertisement in Crains New York with a picture of Hamilton, boldly proclaiming that he and a group of far-sighted businessmen had founded the bank in the 1790s.
What happened Judge Crater? On August 6, 1930, New York Supreme Court judge Joseph Force Crater vanished on the streets of Manhattan near Times Square. The dapper 41-year-old’s disappearance launched a massive investigation that captivated the nation, earning Crater the title of “the missingest man in New York.”’ Joyce Gold, a NYC Tour Guide 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 ALMANACK BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON
This is a series of of articles on the history of Wall Street in the city of New York. You can read the entire series here.
Illustrations: Colonial two shilling currency from the Province of New York (1775); the Walton House on Pearl Street, home of the Bank of New York from 1784 to 1787, by artist Abraham Hosier; the Manhattan Company Building at 40 Wall Street, erected in 1929–1930 and now known as the Trump Building; and the tricolor cockade used by the Democratic-Republicans and in the French Revolution.
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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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