Esther Crain's Blog, page 39

When a public bathhouse opened on West 60th Street

By 1906, New York City had six free municipal-run public bathhouses operating throughout Manhattan. The seventh, at 232 West 60th Street—in a rough tenement enclave between 10th and 11th Avenues—formally opened its doors in June of that year.

A ceremony led by William H. Walker, superintendent of buildings, included a number of speeches. But “before the last orator had said his last word, a young army of West Side youth rushed for the plunges,” according to a New York Times article that covered opening day.

When the word was finally given to admit the 50 or so waiting boys, “there was a great rush, and in less than a minute the boys had undressed, donned their trunks, and were splashing about in the tank,” wrote the New-York Tribune.

Of course the kids wanted to get inside on that June afternoon. Behind the Beaux Arts-style limestone and brick exterior—featuring two terra cotta sea creatures with their tails entwined—was an upstairs bathhouse offering 80 showers (aka, “rain baths”) as well as something new and special: a ground-floor 35 by 60-foot “plunge,” or swimming pool.

Now, at the dawn of the Progressive Era, people residing on either side of West 60th Street—the mostly Irish Hell’s Kitchen to the south, and the now-defunct African-American San Juan Hill neighborhood to the north—had a place not just to cool down in hot weather, but to bathe all year round.

Even though the Tenement Act of 1901 mandated that all tenement apartment units have bathing facilities, many people occupying older tenements still lived without a bathtub. In the early 1900s around West 60th Street, “a majority of homes lacked indoor plumbing,” states NYC Parks.

The 60th Street public bath was one of 20 public bathhouses across four boroughs constructed in the early 20th century. This bathhouse-building on the part of Progressive reformers capped a series of initiatives dating back to the late 19th century that called for improved hygiene and sanitation: on city streets, in public buildings, and of people themselves.

“Government acceptance of its duty to provide for the cleanliness of citizens was what the reformers had been hoping for; they believed, as Jacob Riis wrote in his 1902 book Battle With the Slum, that soap and water were ‘moral agents of the first value in the slum,'” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2014 New York Times column.

The showers were not unpopular, but the pool may have been the main attraction. It could hold 250 people, featured a supply of continuously filtered water, and offered women-only swimming three days a week, per the New-York Tribune. (The sexes were rigidly separated, with distinct doors for males and females even at the main entrance, as the second image shows.)

While the place was packed in the summer, wintertime use wasn’t very high. “Robert E. Todd of the Bureau of Municipal Research found in 1907 that bathhouse patronage in the winter months fell to as little as 4 percent of capacity,” wrote Gray.

“The increased use of the baths in warm weather indicated to him that most people visited not for regular bathing, but to cool off,” he continued. “In Todd’s opinion, the need for personal cleanliness was felt more by reformers than by the poor and working class; adoption would be trickle-down.”

Within a matter of years, the 60th Street public bath, like others across the city, began to outlive their original purposes. More tenements were outfitted with bathtubs and showers, and the pool increasingly became a place for swim meets and competitions.

By the 1940s, its days as a public bathhouse were over. At some point one of the entrances was renovated into a window; the tenement next door fell to the wrecking ball.

In 2016, the bathhouse reopened as part of the Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center, which features not just swimming facilities but state-of-the-art fitness rooms and a new building addition.

Who was Gertrude Ederle? This West Side daughter of a butcher became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. Ederle was born in 1906—the same year the bathhouse that now bears her name opened its doors to kids like her.

[Third image: MCNY, 1925: X2010.11.6142; fifth image, 1939-1941: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The 1820s organization formed to improve the character of New York servants

Working as a domestic servant in 19th century New York City had plenty of challenges.

Sure, servants received room and board in addition to their wages, and they usually had at least Sunday afternoon off. But living in another family’s home was isolating and lonely—particularly if you didn’t speak English or weren’t accustomed to urban life.

The work could be physically difficult, too. Climbing up and down staircases carrying wood or coal for fireplaces, airing out heavy bed linens every morning, wringing wet laundry, and scrubbing pots and pans…day after day, this was true labor.

So it’s hardly surprising that the families who hired servants often had a hard time keeping them. In the late 19th century, the problem of finding and maintaining hard-working, loyal servants was summed up as “the servant question,” or more appropriately, “the servant girl question,” since most maids, cooks, and other servants were overwhelmingly young and female.

Wealthy Gilded Age wives often discussed the servant girl question among themselves. But employers in the early 19th century turned to another resource: a newly formed organization that tried to guide servants to have better character and morals, and to not change families so often.

Called the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants, this wonderfully named organization officially formed in New York City in 1826. The Society took its inspiration from a similar group in London, known as “The Society for Improving the Character and Usefulness of Domestic Servants,” according to the group’s first annual report.

The name of the London group better sums up much of what the New York chapter was all about. “No one can be ignorant, at least no house-keeper needs to be told, that we are very dependent upon our Domestic Servants for a large share of our daily comforts,” the report began.

“Indeed, it may be safely asserted, that if all the other arrangements and connexions of a family are as happy as fall generally to the lot of humanity, bad Servants are alone sufficient, if not to destroy, at least to mar, much of the calm happiness of domestic life.”

The report called out the tendency of servants to have a “love of incessant change,” in other words, moving on to another servant job or different type of work. “This restlessness of mind, and love of change, is especially true of the young and unwary female servant,” the report stated.

By changing employment, they “become impatient of control, or of advice, negligent of their duty, and, after wandering from place to place, deteriorating at every change, they not infrequently end their days in the miserable haunts of vice.”

The group advised employers how to manage their servants, and they also acted as an employment agency, matching qualified servants to households that needed them. This appears to be a crucial part of the group’s mission, as the “rapid growth of our city” has made it difficult to find enough people willing to do servant work.

[Fourth floor maids’ room at the Merchant House Museum]

They also awarded bonus money to faithful servants—from $3 to $10, depending on how long the servant stayed with their employer. (After one year of faithful service, servants were awarded a bible.)

For such a mission-oriented group, the Society didn’t last very long. By 1830, the organization dissolved, according to Leslie Harris’ In the Shadow of Slavery—noting that the group’s founding in 1826 coincided with the end of slavery in New York in 1827 as well as the first great wave of Irish immigrants, who typically took positions in domestic service.

What took the place of the Society when it came to guide servants and their employers? No one specific organization, it seems. No wonder servant issues escalated throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[Top image: MCNY, 1847: 56.300.1320; second image: Google; third image: MCNY, 1890: 45.335.21]

A vision of a colonial-era country mansion inside an East Side apartment lobby

Imagine the Upper East Side along the East River from the 1700s until roughly the Civil War.

In a time of booming population and rapid development, this stretch of Gotham remained sparsely populated, dotted with grand old estate houses surrounded by woods, streams, and mostly unspoiled countryside.

The Astors, Rikers, and Gracies are among the Old New York families who built unpretentious, comfortable wood-frame estate houses here, with characteristic wide porches to better enjoy the river breezes and beautiful views.

Almost all of these estates homes have disappeared, the pretty houses and spacious grounds subsumed by the march of urbanization through the end of the 19th century.

But one 1960s apartment building has found a way to memorialize the country life that existed on its footprint a century earlier.

The building is the Pavilion (below), a white-brick, luxury rental with a fountain in front of its circular driveway. It’s exactly the kind of postwar apartment house you wouldn’t expect to have a floor-to-ceiling lobby mural marking a long-gone era in Manhattan history.

Yet there it is behind the front desk: the image of an 18th or 19th century estate house overlooking a gentle East River, a sailboat on the water, pavilion on the grounds, and trees swaying in the breeze.

The artist behind the mural isn’t named, and a simple plaque states “nearby country mansion and pavilion, circa 1850.”

It’s a wonderful old-school vision inside a modern apartment house. But whose mansion was it?

The Pavilion is at 500 East 77th Street, between York Avenue and Cherokee Place. The nearest estate house in pre-Civil War Manhattan was the Riker Mansion, once “at the foot of 75th Street East River,” per the caption on the above illustration, from 1866.

The mural, then, likely honors the Riker mansion. But the porches are dissimilar, and the Riker mansion appears to have a third floor of dormer windows in the 1866 illustration.

Perhaps the artist took liberties with the image of the mansion, combining features from other illustrations—and from Gracie Mansion on 88th Street and East End Avenue, the only one of these country houses to still exist (above)—to create a composite representation of a type of house and way of life that is lost to the ages.

[Top image: NYPL; fourth image: NYPL]

Waiting for Thanksgiving dinner at a Bronx orphanage

Thanksgiving in early 20th century New York City wasn’t just celebrated in private homes and expensive hotel restaurants. Institutions of all kinds across Gotham also honored the holiday with their own commemorative dinners.

Hospitals, facilities for the poor, sick, and aged, and even city prisons served up a special Thanksgiving meal—usually along with speeches by important guests and often religious sermons.

Orphanages also celebrated Thanksgiving. This photo (above) shows more than 100 young residents sitting at long, linen-draped tables inside the girls’ dining room at the Roman Catholic Orphan Society in the Bronx. The orphanage was built in 1902, relocated from an older building on Fifth Avenue in Midtown.

A boys’ dining room operated in a building next door. Together, both the girls’ and boys’ buildings could house up to 1,600 residents at a time, according to nycago.org.

These uniform-clad, unsmiling girls look like they’re on their best behavior. I wish we knew exactly what their Thanksgiving menu offered…and what their adult lives were like.

You won’t find this handsome orphanage (above, in 1914) in the Bronx anymore. By the 1920s, thanks to a sizable reduction in the number or orphan residents, both buildings were abandoned and sold. The Bronx VA Hospital took its place.

[Photos: New-York Historical Society]

An immigrant printmaker and painter gives color and light to Depression-era New York City

Max Arthur Cohn was a prolific 20th century artist of many mediums. But whether a silkscreen print, oil painting, mural, or lithograph, Cohn’s work imbues nuanced scenes of midcentury New York City with bursts of color and Ashcan-inspired realism.

(“Rainy Day/Victor Food Shop,” date unknown, seriograph)

His early years echo those of so many early 20th century immigrants. Born in London in 1903 to Russian parents, Cohn and his family settled in America two years later, moving to Cleveland and then Kingston, New York. At 17, he landed his first art-related job in New York City: making commercial silkscreens.

(“New York Street Scene,” 1935, oil)

Silkscreening seemed to become Cohn’s creative focus. At the Art Students League—where he studied under John Sloan—he’s thought to have made his first artistic screenprint, according to the Annex Galleries. In 1940, he founded the National Serigraph Society (a serigraph is another word for a silkscreen print) and exhibited his prints in New York galleries.

Cohn, who spent much of his long life residing in Gotham, is also credited with teaching a young Andy Warhol the silkscreening process in the 1960s, according to Sotheby’s.

(“Washington Square,” 1928, oil)

During the Depression, Cohn found employment at the Works Progress Administration. The small stipend the WPA paid to artists must have been welcome support during these lean years of national financial uncertainty.

“In 1934, as part of the New Deal, he was selected as one of the artists for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and from 1936-1939 the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Easel Project,” states arts agency fineleaf.net.

(“Hooverville Depression Scene,” 1938, oil)

The work featured in this post don’t reflect Cohn’s later artistic style, which became more abstract. Instead, they reveal an artist with a sensitivity to New York City’s rhythms and moods from the 1920s to 1940s.

I’ve read a fair amount about Cohn, and what strikes me most is that he doesn’t seem to belong to any one school. Art historians have described him as a pointillist, modernist, and American scene artist. I see the influence of the post-Impressionists and the Ashcan School, sometimes with a Hopper-esque quality as well.

(“New York City Subway,” 1940s, oil)

There’s no need to categorize him. However you’d describe his style, Cohn—who died in 1998 at age 95—gives us a long-gone midcentury Manhattan of oil drums, el trains, and corner gas stations bathed in magical color.

[First, second, and third images: Invaluable; fourth image: Milwaukee Museum Mile; fifth image: 1stDibs]

When Longacre Square became Times Square

I’m not sure what year this postcard dates to, but the image offers a few clues. For starters, that’s the then-new New York Times building in the center of the image. The opening of the Times headquarters in 1904 triggered the name change from Longacre Square to Times Square.

On the right there’s another notable building, with porthole windows across a mansard roof. This was the Hotel Astor, constructed in 1905 and at the time one of the most luxurious hotels in the city. What you can’t see is its fabulous roof garden—a dreamy place to go in a city largely without air conditioning.

Times Square in 1905 isn’t quite the crossroads of the world just yet. But with a major newspaper anchoring the square, plus a plethora of hotels, and theaters already occupying this junction, it’s well on its way.

[Postcard: MCNY; X2011.34.878]

Stop and admire the Chelsea Hotel’s beautiful iron balconies

There’s a lot to love about the Chelsea Hotel: the Queen Anne (or Victorian Gothic?) style, its backstory as a failed early cooperative apartment house, the enchanting main staircase and lobby fireplace, and its cultural relevance as a home for artists, writers, and free thinkers throughout the 20th century.

But there’s one feature I can’t get past: the magnificent floral-ornamented iron balconies gracing the circa-1883 building—seven rows of delicate leaves and flowers spread across the hotel’s red brick facade.

The floral motifs bring the beauty and softness of the natural world to the harsh brick and mortar cityscape of West 23rd Street.

The balconies “lend an atmosphere of charm to this high brick facade,” as the 1966 report designating the Chelsea a historic landmark put it.

What I didn’t realize after so many years of admiring the balconies is that they were made by Cornell Ironworks—whose name I’d often seen on manhole covers and cast iron buildings across Manhattan.

The company’s roots go back to 1828. But in the late 19th century, Cornell became “one of the largest manufacturing operations in New York City, employing 1,200 at its peak,” noted a historical timeline from dasma.com. “In the 1880s, the firm provide[d] circular stairs and ironwork for the Brooklyn Bridge and the iron base and stairways for the Statue of Liberty.”

Cornell also supplied the cast iron for many of the great department stores of Gilded Age New York City, from the A.T. Stewart store on 10th Street and Broadway to the Arnold, Constable Dry Goods establishment on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street, according to Walter Grutchfield.

The Chelsea Hotel has undergone lots of big changes over the past decade or so. Recently I took a walk through the new, spiffed up lobby and public rooms. While many of the art and architectural distinctions of the interior remain, the space lacks the intentional shabbiness and artistic colony feel of the pre-renovation hotel.

But you don’t need to go inside the Chelsea Hotel to enjoy its magic. Just stand outside on 23rd Street and look at the iron balconies—works of art created by a storied city manufacturer for a hotel clientele that appreciated artistic magic.

How an authentic Swedish cottage from 1875 ended up in Central Park

One of the wonderful things about Central Park is the enormous variety of buildings spread out among its 843 acres of pastures, hills, and woodlands.

On the northwestern end of the park, the remains of a stone fort dating to 1814 harken back to a sparsely settled Manhattan. At the southeastern end is a former arsenal-turned-office space completed in 1851. On the western side near 79th Street is a circa-1872 miniature castle with the best views in the city.

But there’s one structure almost as old as Central Park itself that’s always been a curiosity: the Swedish Cottage, near Belvedere Castle and the Shakespeare Garden on the park’s west side.

Almost all of the structures in Central Park either predate the park or were built specifically for it. So how did an authentic Swedish log cabin, one with gothic-style arched windows and a steep peaked roof, end up in New York’s premier city green space?

Its journey begins in Sweden in 1875.

“Designed by architect Magnus Isæus to serve as the Swedish Pavilion for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the building was constructed in Sweden of oiled pine and cedar, then dismantled, packed in crates, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it was erected by Swedish craftsman on the Exposition grounds,” wrote Cynthia S. Brenwall and Martin Filler in 2019’s The Central Park: Original Designs for the New York’s Greatest Treasure.

Rather than a cottage, the building was actually a Swedish schoolhouse. It was a hit at the Exhibition—an event described as the first World’s Fair ever to be held in America.

“Furnished with desks and chalkboards and staffed by Swedish teachers, the pavilion was a popular attraction that served as an example of Scandinavian building design to the American public,” stated Brenwall and Filler.

Visitors to the Exhibition enjoyed this one-room Swedish schoolhouse. That included one very distinguished visitor: Frederick Law Olmsted, a co-designer of Central Park. Apparently he was so captured by it, he paid $1500 to buy it and have it shipped to Central Park, where it was reassembled in its current location in 1877, according to New York City, by Robert Kahn. (Above image: the cottage in 1880)

Finding a use for the Swedish Cottage, as it was now called, took some time. Over the years it served as a park restroom, a nature center, and civil defense headquarters during World War II, noted Kahn.

Since 1947, it’s been the home of the Marionette Theater, with a permanent theater built inside the cottage in 1973, per centralpark.com. Though the cottage has undergone renovation over the years, this authentic pine and cedar cabin that charmed Olmsted has since entertained thousands of city kids and their families.

[Third photo: MCNY, 1880; X2010.11.1559]

A glorious birds-eye view of early 1900s Brooklyn at night

Sometimes a simple penny postcard really can blow you away. Behold this turn-of-the-century nocturne downtown in the county of Kings, with office windows glowing with amber light and trolley cars making their way.

The one building I can make out with clarity is Brooklyn Borough Hall at the far left, with the clock and domed tower. Completed in 1848, it was formerly called City Hall.

[MCNY; 2004.36.3]

A glorious birds-eye view of 1930s Brooklyn at night

Sometimes a simple penny postcard really can blow you away. Behold this 1930 nocturne downtown in the county of Kings, with office windows glowing with amber light and trolley cars making their way.

The one building I can make out with clarity is Brooklyn Borough Hall at the far left, with the clock and domed tower. Completed in 1848, it was formerly called City Hall.

[MCNY; 2004.36.3]