Category Archives: New York City

A little Sunday reading

17 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in 23rd (106th) New York State National Guard Regiment, Fiorello La Guardia, Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Robert Moses

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The New York City Mayor’s Committee on Permanent War Memorial’s official rendering for the unrealized enduring monument.

Here is a little something to read over the remainder of one’s weekend: my piece at Roads to the Great War about the temporary Victory Arch built in Madison Square in the winter of 1919. This is the article I was alluding to last week when I posted the pictures of the return of the 27th Division. I have always found it interesting the way civic leaders built such ornate edifices knowing they would be used hard for a few short months or years and then torn down. Almost all of the facilities built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago for instance, were temporary assemblies built not of marble or granite but timber and plaster of Paris. The White City in all its majesty appeared poised to stand for centuries when in reality its wood and plaster would not have withstood more than one or two Chicago winters. At least we have the stories and photographs to remember them by.

Enjoy your Sunday.

(image/New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections)

 

Sunday morning coffee

24 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, New York City

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A young girl’s poem written in winter 1939 in anticipation of the coming spring and opening of the World’s Fair. The poem appeared in the 21 February 1939 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

I hope everyone’s weekend has been good. Yesterday afternoon I tried to see They Shall Not Grow Old at a theater in Brooklyn but alas it was sold out. The man at the counter told me today’s one showing would also likely fill up, so I bought a ticket for this afternoon’s showing. I’ve spent the morning continuing with this week’s lesson plans. Among other things I intend to focus much on the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Queens. Basically it was two fairs, one in 1939 focusing on an optimistic “world of tomorrow” and another in 1940 that played out after the German and Soviet invasion of Poland and onset of the Second World War. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle dedicated a great deal of space to the fair in the lead-up to its opening on 30 April 1939 when President Roosevelt gave the dedication address. That coverage included things like this poem we read above.

Unscaffolding the Trylon and Perisphere

23 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, New York City, Robert Moses

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A 1939 World’s Fair guide shows off the Trylon and Perisphere after the scaffolding came down, February 22, 1939

I don’t have much to add but wanted to share this photograph I discovered this morning while preparing for next week’s classes. Here we see a young woman standing before the Trylon and Perisphere after the remainder of their scaffolding was taken off on 22 February 1939. The World’s Fair coincided with the sesquicentennial of George Washington’s First Inaugural; President Roosevelt opened the Fair on 30 April, 150 years to the day after Washington took the oath of office in Lower Manhattan at Federal Hall. In winter 1939 Robert Moses’s crews were working long shifts to prepare the fair grounds in Queens in time to ensure the event opened on time come spring. Presumably they took the scaffolding off on Washington’s Birthday intentionally to promote the upcoming fair and emphasize the tie-in to the first president.

(image/Associated Press)

Sunday morning coffee

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Herbert Hoover, New York City

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Depression Era Hooverville in New York’s Central Park, circa early 1930s

Good morning, all. I have spent a good portion of the morning putting together this week’s presentations for our class on the life, times, and legacy of Robert Moses. I have learned a tremendous amount already this year. I thought I would share this incredible image I intend to show tomorrow in class. This is a so-called Hooverville in Central Park during the Great Depression. These squatter camps were ubiquitous across the United States and were so named in derisive “tribute” to President Herbert Hoover, who Americans unfairly blamed for the onset of the financial crisis.

I am often taken aback looking at old photographs of such cities as New York, London and Paris and seeing how dirty and chaotic they were not so very long ago. Yes, this was the era of the Great Depression and a Hooverville to boot; still, the early twentieth century cities were not the gleaming metroplises we know today. When I moved to New York City twenty-two years ago in 1997 the Bowery still had the last of its flop houses. Today those are gone and in their place are boutiques selling expensive retail goods.

(image/skyscrapercity.com)

The United War Work Campaign of November 1918

18 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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The YMCA was one of the seven organizations involved in The United War Work Campaign in November 1918.

The Armistice of November 11, 1918 coincided with the start of The United War Work Campaign, a national initiative to raise a staggering $170,500,000 in 1918 dollars to aid the American Expeditionary Forces. The project began back in the summer and was, to put it mildly, a massive undertaking; in addition to raising that extraordinary sum, organizers hoped to marshal one million Victory Boys between the ages of 12 and 20 to feed, entertain, and provide educational instruction to doughboys. The United War Work Campaign was the effort of seven agencies: the YMCA, the YWCA, the National Catholic War Council of the Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare Board, Salvation Army, American Library Association, and the War Camp Community Community Service. Clearly the intent was to involve as many constituencies as possible across religious and other lines. The chairman of the initiative in New York City was none other than John D. Rockefeller  Jr., who spoke at various functions around the city in early October drumming up interest. Another prominent New Yorker involved in the campaign was Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke at the Manhattan Opera House on November 1 for that same purpose. Colonel Roosevelt implored his audience that while the kaiser was on his heels there was still much work to be done in winning the war.

As mentioned above the campaign began on November 11 just as news of the Armistice was coming in. For much of the the next week while the celebrated Americans still went out and participated in charity gold tournaments, bake sales, benefit concerts, and so many others things besides. When it became obvious that the funding goal would be a bit short come the November 18 deadline organizers pushed the date back, first to the 20th and then to the 25th. This had the desired results. In those two weeks just after the German surrender Americans donated $203,179,038 to the campaign.

(poster/Library of Congress, designed by Neysa McMein)

 

On the cusp of the Armistice

10 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in Great War centennial, Incorporating New York (book project), New York City

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I hope everyone’s autumn has been good. These first ten days of November have been busy, thus the lack of posts here.

Readers may recall when I posted just after Memorial Day that I sent a proposal to an academic press regarding “Incorporating New York,” my book project about Civil War Era New City. I heard back earlier this week from the editor asking for the full manuscript. I sent it in this past Thursday. We shall see what happens. I have also been putting the final touches on a talk and interview I will be doing tomorrow for Armistice Day at All Souls Church in Manhattan. It all came about quickly when I got asked to do it a few weeks back. There is a nice bit of serendipity in the thing because All Souls plays a significant role in my history of Civil War Era New York. As Kramer would say, my worlds are colliding. The concert begins at 5:00 pm with my talk and interview an hour before that.

Seward Park, Canal and Essex Streets, November 10, 1918

The image we see above was taken in Seward Park on the Lower East Side 100 years ago today. It is the dedication of the J.W.B. Canteen Hut sponsored by the Jewish Welfare Board. Attorney, reformer, and American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the Wilson Administration Abram L. Elkus oversaw the proceedings. Present also was banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff. Organizers knew that the war was about to end, though they certainly were not aware that it would be the following day. Schiff told the crowd we see here “Now that the war is ending happily for everybody . . . war work organizations will for many months need our support more than ever, our soldiers and sailors will demand more attention when the grim business of battle is over and the guns have ceased. When the boys come back we want them to feel that we did what we could for them.”

The J.W.B. Canteen did its part; in just the next two months alone the site served over 8000 meals to returning servicemen. The Seward Park canteen continued its work for much of 1919 as men continued coming from Europe en route home.

(image/Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Center for Jewish History)

Pennsylvania Station, 1910-1963

28 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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They began tearing down the original New York Pennsylvania Station fifty-five years ago today. It was a mammoth undertaking that would go on for three years into 1966. When built in 1910 everyone assumed it would stand on the west side of Manhattan for the ages, and yet it lasted just barely more than half a century. In some ways it lasted less than half a century: a major renovation in 1958 had already obliterated much of Charles McKim’s original design. Penn Station’s destruction was a tragedy from which we have never fully recovered and yet its demolition made sense in a way. First of all it was private property, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to tie Manhattan to the continental United States. Before Penn Station opened in 1910 passengers traveling eastward by rail had to disembark in New Jersey and ferry across the Hudson River. It was a perilous undertaking; the ferry boats zigzagged their way between other ferries, around tug boats, and dangerously close to the huge ocean liners that came into New York Harbor daily.

The first act in the demolition of the original New York Pennsylvania Station on October 28, 1963 was the removal this eagle. It was one of twenty-two granite eagles that adorned the structure.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, like all the major railroad companies, was hugely powerful and profitable. It would have been difficult to imagine when the station opened just a decade into the twentieth century that it and most other railroads would be rendered obsolete by the 1960s. By this time however, the highway were largely built. Trucks and automobiles, not locomotives, now moved people and products. For longer travel, why spend five days on a train when an airplane could get you there in five hours? Like Kodak after the invention of digital photography, the railroad company’s demise happened swiftly.

New York City and the nation were fortunate Pennsylvania Station opened when it did. It proved hugely important to the Allied war effort, moving men and materiel across the country. Interpreted a certain way it can be seen as a triumvirate of public works projects done in time for the war: Pennsylvania Station in 1910, Grand Central in 1913, and the Panama Canal in 1914 just as the Guns of August began going off. On one day in June 1918 alone over 4,000 men were inducted into the U.S. Army and shipped off from Pennsylvania Station to training camps in various locales. Just a few weeks after his tragic plane accident John Purroy Mitchel’s remains were brought back from Louisiana on a train that pulled into Pennsylvania Station. Theodore Roosevelt, his health rapidly declining in that same summer of 1918, traveled to and from Pennsylvania Station on various trips out West to advocate for the American war effort. I could go on but one gets the idea.

This eagle is one of four from the original New York Penn Station that was moved to Philadelphia’s Market Street Bridge after the destruction of the iconic Manhattan train station. Philadelphia Penn Station is in the background.

Fourteen of the twenty-two eagles that once adorned New York Pennsylvania Station are still known to exist. A few remain in New York and others got sent elsewhere. Four of them decorate the Market Street Bridge in Philadelphia, which is where I took the photo one sees directly above a few summers ago.

(top image/New York Times)

 

 

The 1902 Rochambeau Delegation

13 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in Antietam, General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Henry Cabot Lodge, Horace Porter, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Washington, D.C., William McKinley

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One of the most famous moments in American diplomatic history was the Viviani-Joffre Mission to the United States in April-May 1917. This was when the French politician René Viviani and Field Marshal Joseph Joffre, among others, came to America to discuss military and diplomatic details after the United States declared war on Germany that spring. Viviani, Joffre and officials from other Allied governments toured the entire United States for several weeks to meet the American people, many of whom, especially in the South and Midwest, were suspicious of European leaders’ intentions. Fifteen years earlier there was a lesser known diplomatic mission: the 1902 Rochambeau Delegation.

The British Museum acquired this painting of General Joseph Brugère in 1902, the same year this French military leader led a goodwill tour to the United States solidifying Franco-American relations. Many of the individuals involved would go on tour serve in the Great War.

The event was so-called because the central moment of the mission was the May 24, 1902 dedication in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Park of a memorial to Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, the French military leader who had fought with George Washington during the American Revolution. The early 1900s were an interesting moment in diplomatic relations. The United States had recently won the Spanish-American War and was becoming a true world power; the brutal Philippine Insurrection, the final phase in the Spanish-American War, ended on June 2, 1902. One month earlier, on May 6, General Joseph Brugère boarded Vice Admiral Ernest François Fournier’s Gaulois in Toulon and sailed for Washington. One of the driving forces of this mission was Horace Porter, the United States ambassador to France.

Porter had served under Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War and went on to serve in various capacities over the next several decades. He was the driving force to fund and build Grant’s Tomb, which finally came to fruition on April 27, 1897 when William McKinley dedicated his predecessor’s final resting place. Several weeks after that dedication Porter was off to Paris, where he would be President McKinley’s representative to France. Civil War veterans were still very much running American life; the president himself had been in the Battle of Antietam; his Secretary of State, John Hay, had been one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries; and right then in 1902 Secretary of War Elihu Root was putting Ambassador Porter in for the Congressional Medial of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Brugère, Fournier and a sizable contingent visited George Washington’s resting place at Mount Vernon on the afternoon of May 22 and were hosted that evening by Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. The big event came two days later when Ambassador Porter, President Roosevelt, General Brugère, Vice Admiral Fournier, scores of dignitaries, and thousands of others turned out at Lafayette Square Park for the Rochambeau statue dedication. Henry Cabot Lodge was the featured speaker. It was all a huge success.

A few days later the Brugère/Fournier contingent would be fêted across New York City. Among other things they got a look at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, dined with mayor Seth Low, and received a tour of Columbia University from college president Nicholas Murray Butler. Columbia is conveniently located next to Grant’s Tomb and on May 28 Ambassador Porter took Brugère, Fournier and the rest of the French delegates to the mausoleum that he had done so much to build. At the time the general public could not walk down to the sarcophagi as one can today. As leader of the Grant Monument Association however Porter was naturally able to take the Rochambeau delegates down the marble steps, where they all stood in hushed stillness for ten minutes. (At the time it was still only Ulysses; Julia passed away seven months later in December 1902.) After the visit, the delegation walked north of the tomb to the Claremont Inn, where several dozen people had a sumptuous meal.

(image/The British Museum)

 

 

A World War One era Steinway

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in New York City

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Now here is something you don’t see everyday, let alone in a thrift store: a 1917/1918 Steinway & Sons grand piano. I saw this in the city yesterday on 23rd Street. I was a little confused at the 1917/1918 designation. I would have thought it fairly easy to trace the provenance of such a thing; as I understand it Steinways come with serial numbers and other identifying information to track their provenance. Or, maybe due to the war they were producing models on something other than an annual basis? Whatever the reasons, one can’t blame the people in the thrift store for not knowing.

This century-old 1917/1918 Model M Steinway & Son piano is currently in a thrift store on Manhattan’s 23rd Street.

Whenever I see something like this, I wonder how it got there. Was it in someone’s New York City apartment for decades until said person either passed on or moved in to a smaller place? Did the family donate the thing to a thrift store during a house cleaning? What famous pianist might have played it along the way over the past century? There is no way to know. That is the wonderful mystery of such things.

I have passed the Steinway crypt in Green-Wood Cemetery dozens of times over the years. A Wikipedia search informs us that the company was founded by Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg in New York City in 1853. Steinweg had emigrated from Lower Saxony and come to the United States with his sons after the failed revolutions of 1848. It was a wise move; the family avoided much of the tumult of the next 75 years. Steinway the Elder died in 1871 in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War. By the time of the Great War the Steinways were part of the fabric of New York City life and it does not seem they suffered from the anti-German sentiments so common during the Great War. Steinweg himself had anglicized the family name when first coming to the New Country. Perhaps the less overtly Germanic “Steinway” saved the family such grief.

Steinway pianos then and now were made in Queens. During the war the city was building a Steinway tunnel to connect Queens to Manhattan via a new subway line. Frederick Loeser & Co., a Brooklyn-based department store, was one place to buy a Steinway, among dozens of other piano makes and models. Loeser newspaper ads from 1917 and 1918, the period in which the Model M we see above was manufactured, list the original price of a Steinway grand piano at around $1000, just over $18,600 in today’s currency. Loeser’s however was selling them at a steep discount. It would be interesting to know if such discounts were customary or due to the war.

 

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Mitchel Square

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Great War centennial, John Purroy Mitchel, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Quentin Roosevelt

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Yesterday I put the final touches on my upcoming talk this Sunday at Camp Doughboy on Governors Island about John Purroy Mitchel. Later I did a dry run for a friend in my department to work out the kinks. A dress rehearsal always helps with these things in turns of timing, avoiding ambiguity, and just making certain that are sufficiently clear. I am as ready as I am going to be.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney sculpted this doughboy statue in Upper Manhattan in 1923 and later founded the Whitney Museum of Art. Quentin Roosevelt was engaged to her daughter when killed in an airfight in France in July 1918.

In part of the talk I discuss the ways the JP Mitchel is remembered in New York City. Mitchel Square at 168th and Broadway is just one memorial to the Boy Mayor. There too is this beautiful statue that we see above, which was not sculpted expressly for Mitchel himself but for the men on Washington Heights who fought in the war. I happened to be in northern Manhattan a few weeks ago on my way to somewhere else when I stumbled upon it. Yesterday after my walk through my friend and I were discussing Mitchel and breaking down some of the details of his life and times. Color me ignorant but I did not know that the statue in Mitchel Square was designed by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Gertrude was the mother of Flora Payne Whitney, Quentin Roosevelt’s fiancée. Of course Quentin himself died in a military plane incident above France just two weeks after Mitchel was killed in Louisiana two weeks earlier.

Check out the schedule for Camp Doughboy 2018 here.