Esther Crain's Blog, page 87

Knitting for soldiers in an upper Manhattan park

When Ashcan painter George Luks completed this painting of a group of women knitting in Highbridge Park on the Manhattan side of the Harlem River, he gave it the one-word title “Knitting.”

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But it was 1918, and amid the war effort, “critics naturally assumed that the scarves and gloves were being made for soldiers,” notes terraamericanart.org. Hence the amended title, “Knitting for the Soldiers.”

It’s an unusual piece of art from Luks, who tended to focus on the gritty realism of the city’s poorer pockets. A move from Greenwich Village to Upper Manhattan, however, changed his focus.

“While taking advantage of the expressive possibilities of paint, Luks suggested details of costume and gesture with a sharp reporter’s eye: the women’s garments are simple, yet fashionable enough to mark them as comfortably middle-class. Varying in age from young to elderly, they work in silent camaraderie,” states terraamericanart.org.

A remnant of the Drama Book Shop from 1962

Like so many other New York City specialty bookstores, the Drama Book Shop has a long history of moving around.

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First established in 1916 inside the West 42nd Street offices of the New York Drama League, according to a 2017 New York Times article, the shop then moved to 47th Street, and by the late 1950s it occupied a brownstone and then a commercial building on West 52nd Street.

[image error]That’s where this relic of one of the 52nd Street stores comes in.

Thumbing through an old catalog of plays, I noticed the front cover had this Drama Book Shop decal across it—displaying not just one of the best store logos ever but also an old 2-letter postal code (used in the days before 5-number ZIP codes) and a two-letter phone exchange, JU for Judson.

(There’s nothing like coming across bits and pieces of the city’s literary glory days while browsing old books, right?)

The catalog, from the Samuel French company, dates back to 1962; twenty years later, the store hopscotched over to Seventh Avenue and 48th Street, then to 250 West 40th Street in 2001.

Forced from the 40th Street location earlier this year, the Drama Book Shop was bought by Lin-Manuel Miranda and three others Hamilton collaborators. An updated New York Times piece from last month says the new store will open on West 39th Street next spring.

Portraits of family bliss in 19th century New York

We’re in the season of holiday cards, particularly family photo cards. You might have a pile of them right now—family members, especially kids, appearing joyful in the warm embrace of domestic life.

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Well-heeled New York families in the 19th century couldn’t curate their Instagram account to find the right picture representing family tranquility. And while photography studios abounded in the city after the Civil War, photo portraits were posed and formal.

So how did families convey their domestic and material comforts? By commissioning a painted portrait, as the family of Robert Gordon did above, in the parlor of his home at 7 West 33rd Street in 1866.

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“The Contest for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in Their New York Dining-Room,” was painted by Seymour Joseph Guy. Guy, a British painter, went on to do many more family portraits, called “conversation pieces” because of the narrative elements that help tell the story of the family.

In this case, Mrs. Gordon is clearly the center of domestic life in the household, sending her children off to school after breakfast (likely made by a cook) in a sumptuous Renaissance Revival dining room.

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In the second portrait, the narrative elements hint at the larger world outside the domestic sphere. “Christmas-Time, the Blodgett Family,” painted by Eastman Johnson in 1864, shows a wealthy family’s restrained Christmas decor (see the wreath and tree in the background) in the parlor of their home at 27 West 25th Street.

“Depicted during the Civil War, at a time of urban upheaval, the serene interior decorated for Christmas, embodies ‘the best sentiment of home,’ as a critic observed in 1865,” states the description of the painting at Metmuseum.org, the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Only the toy of a caricatured black male dancer held by the young boy hints at pressing issues of racial strife and emancipation.”

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The third painting takes us to the New York of 1880, where a wife and mother posed with her four lovely children in a luxurious dressing gown.

The woman in the portrait is Cornelia Ward Hall, wife of businessman John H. Hall; the stunning portrait is by Italian painter Michele Gordigiani. I’m not sure where the Hall family home was, but the parlor decor reflects the fashionable Asian-inspired aesthetic of the era.

Eastman Johnson was also the artist behind the fourth family portrait, depicting three generations of the Hatch family in their home at 49 Park Avenue in 1870-1871. Alfrederick Smith Hatch was a Wall Street broker in the firm of Fisk and Hatch, which helped finance railroads. (He’s the man seated on the right at a desk.)

Considering that Hatch is posing not only with his immediate family but with his own parent and his wife’s mother, this family portrait gives us a man who wasn’t just abundant in terms of his finances, but also abundant in family members. (I count 11 kids in that parlor!)

The magical “blue hour” in rainy 1940 New York

It’s the blue hour in “Rainy Day, New York,” a 1940 painting by Leon Dolice—a Vienna-born artist who came to Manhattan in the 1920s.

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The sun has sunk below the horizon, and sidewalks and buildings are cast in a blueish glow, illuminated by streetlamps, car headlights, and the reflection of rain-slicked streets.

I’m not sure where Dolice painted this moody, magical scene. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s the feel of the city at twilight he’s captured here—an enchanting, slightly eerie few moments whether in the middle of Times Square or on a lonely side street.

Beauty and humanity in a Third Avenue El film

In 1955—before the shutdown of the Third Avenue El between Chatham Square and East 149th Street in the Bronx—a filmmaker named Carson Davidson took his camera up to a lonely platform and into one of the mostly empty trains.

With just weeks to go before the train and this main portion of the elevated would be trucked to the scrapyard, Davidson and a group of actors shot a haunting Impressionist short film.

The El may have been destined for the wrecking ball, yet Davidson’s film brings it alive—the iron spine of a city snaking between the tenements of Lower and Upper Manhattan and then over the Third Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.

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The voiceless characters feel familiar, but they’re not cliches. A man sleeps, a couple plays cards. A stumblebum gets on near the Bowery and tries to wring one last drop out of a bottle of liquor. A little girl excitedly takes a seat.

Out the train windows we see the geometrical shadows of the railings on platforms. The camera turns to the train itself, a metal machine screeching and lurching high above sidewalks while a harpsichord plays as a soundtrack.

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During the ride Davidson captures a street cleaner, faded ads, puddles on paving stones, the Chrysler Building, laundry lines, the Harlem River, and a tugboat belching smoke as a swing bridge aligns itself so the train can keep going.

The Third Avenue El threads the characters’ stories, as does a coin caught in the floor of the train car. Each character tries and fails to grab it.

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Finally at night, a young couple boards. Amid glimpses of a Horn and Hardart Automat sign and a movie marquee, the male half of  the couple picks up and pockets the coin.

A director and artist I know had this to add about Davidson’s Oscar-nominated short:

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“Although the filmmaker is fascinated with mechanics and shapes, it is always softened by humanity, the sympathetic characters. It’s literally a day in the life of the El which ends, after all those geometrically composed images, romantically with the lovers getting the coin.”

A relic of a downtown “apartment for rent” sign

In a city that practically requires renters to fork over thousands of dollars to a real estate broker just to sign an apartment lease, you don’t see too many “apartment for rent” signs nailed to building entrances.

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But “to let” or “to rent” signs used to be a lot more common—like this one, which Ephemeral reader Ellen G. shared with me this week.

The sign was for sale on eBay, and the description says it’s from the 1930s.

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It’s certainly pre-1960s, as it has the wonderful old two-letter telephone exchange that was replaced by digits in the 1960s. Drydock is the name of a small street in the East Village near Avenue D and 10th Street, a leftover of what was once the Drydock District. (Oddly, Drydock isn’t anywhere near One Spring Street, which is at Bowery.)

This isn’t the only Zacarro real estate relic. I’m not sure if it’s still visible, but a faded ad for P. Zaccaro’s real estate business used to be up on the side of a building on Delancey Street (above).

Who was P. Zaccaro? He was the father-in-law of former New York City congresswoman and vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.

[Thank you Ellen G. for sharing this sign!]

The ghost chimney on an East Midtown building

Phantom buildings abound in New York, especially in the contemporary city, with so many structures that were once neighborhood fixtures getting the heave ho in an era of rampant renovation and reconstruction.

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This ghost walkup on East 52nd Street and Third Avenue was probably a 19th century tenement home to several families—perhaps all sharing one slender chimney, its outline very creepily five years after the building was torn down and replaced by a Hilton Garden Inn.

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If you look at it long enough, you might actually start envisioning puffs of smoke coming out the top.

Six unified mansions still gracing Madison Avenue

In 1882, when Henry Villard commissioned a complex of six Italian Renaissance-inspired mansions on Madison Avenue between 50th and 51st Street, the railroad magnate and newspaper publisher was one of the most prominent financiers in the nation.

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By 1884, his financial empire was in tatters, and he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

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So begins the unusual story of what became known as the Villard Houses—a collection of six harmonious brownstone mansions designed by the then-new firm of McKim, Mead & White.

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Though intended for six separate households, the mansions were to appear as one building (above, 1882), and the ambitious but restrained design was based on the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome.

[image error]The architects built four mansions in a U-shape around a central courtyard fronting Madison Avenue, with the remaining two mansions facing 51st Street, explained Christopher Gray in The New York Times in 2003.

“The courtyard matched a grassy square at the back of St. Patrick’s [Cathedral], and the whole became a sort of urban piazza, with parts not open but at least visible to the public,” wrote Gray.

[image error]“Why would Villard build six houses as an enclave for like-minded people rather than just one home? The Real Estate Record and Guide observed in 1881 that his goal was probably to ”secure privacy and get rid of tramps, and to live in a quiet and secluded way.”’

And though Madison Avenue in the 1880s wasn’t exactly secluded, it was sparsely settled—not nearly as posh as neighboring Fifth Avenue, with its Vanderbilts and Astors.

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Even though Villard was broke, he managed to spend a few months living in one of the mansions. His was a corner house with beautiful interiors and ornamental touches by John La Farge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

[image error]Once he was forced to leave (and he was forced, as an angry mob of investors gathered outside his mansion’s front door), Villard’s business associates bought up the six mansions and moved their families in.

Through the turn of the century, these families largely remained in the beautiful yet outdated Villard Houses.

While apartment living became fashionable by the 1920s and the rich gave up their single family homes, the residents of the Villard Houses lived Gilded Age-style, a team of servants in tow.

[image error]“All six houses continued to be used as residences until after World War II, when the changing character of Madison Avenue led to their conversion into offices,” wrote Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel in The Landmarks of New York, Fifth Edition.

The Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Random House were among the new tenants, but by the late 1970s, the entire complex was threatened with demolition.

Then, Harry Helmsley bought the air rights and demolished two of the mansions to build the Helmsley Palace Hotel.

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Today, the Lotte Palace Hotel occupies the site, and many of the rooms of the mansions have preserved details and artwork.

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Skip the holiday festivities on Fifth Avenue and really celebrate the season by going back in time with a tour of the lobby and public rooms of this Gilded Age masterpiece.

(Photos by Ephemeral New York except third photo: MCNY, 90.44.1.127; fifth photo: MCNY, 2013.3.2.721)

Inside a New York Depression-era “relief station”

Saul Kovner was a Russia-born artist best known for his poetic glimpses of 1930s New York, from East Side tenement backyards to kids playing in a snow-blanketed Tompkins Square Park.

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But one painter Kovner completed in 1939 tells a story about what it was like to be poor in Depression-era New York.

“Relief Station” depicts a group of mostly strangers sitting on wood benches in a drab facility, facing forward as if they’re waiting for their names to be called.

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Where is this group? In a place New York new longer has, a relief station—where jobless people with no money to buy food or pay rent sought what was known as “home relief.”

Relief stations weren’t new. But with nearly one third of the city out of work at the height of the Depression and a government more willing to distribute relief to people in need, dozens of home relief bureau stations popped up across the city.

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Kovner’s painting was part of a series on relief stations; another two are below. The second image comes from painter Louis Ribak, who captured an emotional scene a woman pleading her case to an official behind a desk, and a crowd waiting their turn.

Newspapers also published glimpses of what it was like in a relief station, with readers reporting distressing scenes of people pleading their cases or being treated rudely by an administrator.

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Relief stations also became targets for activists—who petitioned (or rioted, depending on the report) for more help for New Yorkers to pay their bills. On at least one occasion, a South Williamsburg relief station was stormed by a hundred people who demanded that relief be given out a lot more quickly.

While we still have home relief—just under a different name—these portraits remind us of what the term used to mean, and how relief stations were part of the fabric of the 1930s city.

A moment in McSorley’s by an Impressionist artist

McSorley’s Old Ale House, on East Seventh Street since 1854 (or thereabouts), has long been a magnet for artists.

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Perhaps the most famous was John Sloan—who painted various scenes of both dark moods and high spirits inside this former working-class Irish saloon in today’s East Village from 1912 to 1928.

But in 1916, another celebrated New York painter with a style very different from Sloan’s visited McSorley’s.

Childe Hassam had already made his name as an Impressionist painter in the 1890s. Hassam focused on what he described as “humanity in motion,” painting iridescent glimpses of city life centered along the stretch of Fifth Avenue outside his 17th Street studio between Union and Madison Squares.

Instead of a lush scene of light and air, Hassam’s “McSorley’s Bar” gives us a rich interior glimpse of the saloon with a well-dressed man holding a bottle (or about to grab one) at a wood bar—curiously alone and not necessarily in motion.