Tag: Brooklyn

A Brooklyn intellectual landmark becomes a supermarket

Mentioned in our podcast this week was the precursor to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the three-story ‘centre of Brooklyn culture‘ known as the Brooklyn Athenaeum and Reading Room. Founded in 1848 and incorporated in 1852, the Athenaeum was a combination concert hall, store for intellectuals and library (in an era before public libraries), serving the gentlemen of the city of Brooklyn.

Not only BAM but the Brooklyn Public Library traces its lineage to this structure which sat at the northeast corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street. It was also the original home of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Perhaps the place was best known as a prime stop on the lecture circuit. Abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke to thousands here in October 1860 — “crowded to its utmost capacity” — encouraging the Southern states to secede from the Union, months before any of them did so.

By the 1890s, the more elevated arts had escaped to other venues, and the Athenaeum hosted various political functions. Economic reformer and former candidate for mayor of New York Henry George spoke to a crowd of a thousand here on October 25, 1897, four days before dying of a stress-induced stroke.

Events had wandered way off the original course by 1901, when police closed down the Athenaeum due to a planned meeting of East Coast anarchists.

The following year, the top floor was occupied for three decades by the New York Court of Special Sessions. It was unceremoniously torn down in 1942. At some point a modest structure was placed on the lot, and today is hosts a Key Food supermarket.


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ALSO FROM THE PODCAST: One of the very first films shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (in 1921) was the Swedish silent romance Synnøve Solbakken (“The Fairy of Solbakken”), screened decades before BAM’s stage collaborations with Sweden’s greatest filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman.

Looks like a spellbinding movie. Wish I knew Swedish!
 Top picture courtesy NYPL
Film photo courtesy Flickr/Truus, Bob & Jan too!

Categories
Podcasts

The Brooklyn Academy of Music: Enduring floods, fires and snobbery to become New York’s oldest home for the arts

PODCAST One of America’s oldest cultural institutions, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (or BAM) has an unusual history that spans over 150 years and two separate locations. We trace the story from the earliest roots of a Manhattan-Brooklyn rivalry and a discussion of high-class tastes to the greatest stars of the performing arts, including a couple tragic tales and a bizarre event involving the mother of modern dance.

Featuring horse tricks, French balls, a ‘flirtation’ post office, a bit of ski jumping.and a cavalcade of BAM’s greatest stars — Enrico Caruso, Merce Cunningham, Edwin Booth and his brother John Wilkes Booth!

ALSO: We uncover what may be the very first foreign films ever shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, many decades before the opening of their movie theaters.

The first Brooklyn Academy of Music, on Montague Street, nearby Brooklyn City Hall. Among the decades of great events here were Brooklyn’s Sanitary Fair, a speech by Booker T. Washington, an amusing lecture by Mark Twain and the final stage performance of Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. (source)

The building was destroyed by fire in 1903, and not everybody was sad to see it go. Here’s actual film footage of the flames atop the old Brooklyn building:

Compare this to New York’s own Academy of Music, at 14th Street and Irving Place. Although this venue brought the American debuts of many famous operas (including Carmen), festivities deteriorated once the Manhattan wealth moved up to the Metropolitan Opera House. This building was demolished in 1926. [source]

Edwin Booth, in his signature role as Hamlet, 1870. If some at the original Brooklyn Academy of Music had had their way, Booth would never have performed there! [LOC]

 

Isadora Duncan, who brought modern dance to BAM, and it never left. (source)



BAM in 1978: After a few decades of hardship, the venue, at its new home on Lafayette Avenue, rebounded in the 1960s, serving the artistic passions of the neighborhood and fostering a provocative relationship with the biggest names in avant garde performance. (Pic by Dinanda Nooney, NYPL)

The fascinating directions that BAM executive direction Harvey Lichtenstein took the venue opened its stage up to new and exciting performances. And, often, a raucous good time as well, as with this 1989 rain forest benefit, featuring Madonna and Sandra Bernhard. (Photo by Albert Ferreira, LIFE)

MORE PICTURES ON THE WAY LATER THIS WEEKEND

For more information on their schedule, visit the BAM website. They also have a great history blog BAM 150 Years where we obtained some of our information.

Categories
Newspapers and Newsies

Before ‘Newsies’: The Brooklyn Newsboys Strike of 1886

The grueling life of a Brooklyn newsboy, taken by Lewis Hine, 1910 (Library of Congress)

The new Disney-produced Broadway musical ‘Newsies‘ puts melody to the events surrounding the Newsboys Strike of 1899. For one week that summer, young newspaper sellers fought back against their employers’ unfair pricing schemes, turning their former street corners into places of mass protest. [You can hear all about in our 2010 podcast on The Newsboys Strike of 1899.]

But did the producers of the Broadway show realize they’re opening their new musical on the anniversary of another significant strike?

The organized disobedience of 1899 was only the grandest of New York’s newsboy strikes. Despite their youth and inexperience, newsies fought back on several occasions throughout the late 19th century. While the image of the street-smart, scrappy whelp was a stereotype often relayed by the newspapers themselves, in some cases, journalism’s youngest workforce used its hot-blooded pluck to great advantage.

With the growth of New York after the 1850s came a fierce competition among its many dozens of newspapers, leading to lamentable and unfair business practices aimed at those who actually sold their product. After all, selling newspapers was a grueling job with low financial reward. Adults looked elsewhere for higher paying work, so in the era before substantial child labor laws,  newspapers often employed younger New Yorkers, mostly boys. And children, cynical publishers believed, were a pliable workforce.

The independence the job required initially appeared to discourage any kind of organization, and newspapers felt they could systematically underpay their ‘freelance’ sellers, often pitting groups of newsboys against each other. A newspaper across the East River, in the pre-consolidation city of Brooklyn, made just such a mistake in March of 1886.

Above: Determined Brooklyn newsies hang around the Brooklyn Navy Yard (at Sands Street) looking for potential buyers. 1903 Picture courtesy Shorpy 

Brooklyn Takes Sides
The Brooklyn Times employed newsboys all throughout the city of Brooklyn, a fast expanding metropolis by the mid-1800s. Originally just the area we consider Brooklyn Heights and the Fulton Ferry, the burgeoning city grew to absorb many Long Island towns along the bay. In 1854, it also expanded to include the independent city of Williamsburgh (today’s neighborhood drops the -h) and Bushwick. These new additions were often referred to as the Eastern District.

However, the city of Brooklyn had a good deal more expansion ahead of it and would eventually swell to include many towns south and southeast of its original borders, an area referred to back then as the Western District, including areas like Bay Ridge, Red Hook, and many others. (This is a tad confusing today as many of these areas were later called South Brooklyn; the Eastern/Western distinction makes sense of you orient it with ‘true north’.)

In an effort to expand sales into the newer regions of Brooklyn, the Times made a unique deal to Western District newsboys. They would receive stacks of newspapers at a lower cost (one cent per paper) than those sold to Eastern District newsboys (one-and-a-fifth cent per paper). The Times publishers believed this would boost sales by encouraging the Western District newsies to “push sales vigorously in new directions.”

Above: Newsies gathered near the Brooklyn Bridge. Courtesy NYPL

Riot on South Eighth Street!
Oh, but when the Eastern District newsboys found this out the following day! On March 29th, according to a report by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a hundred newsboys, armed with sticks and stones, stormed the Times distribution offices at South Eighth Street and tried to prevent two wagons of newspapers from heading to the Western District. A whip-wielding wagon driver and arriving police officers thwarted the boys, but one of the trucks was later overturned at the area around today’s Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Many Williamsburg newsies refused to sell the Times, even defying orders of older, more compliant newsboys. Wagons filled with papers were continually attacked on their way south. Any regular newsboy caught selling the Times was set upon by other boys, often roving bands “backed by a number of roughs.” The Daily Eagle reports of some young newsies hiding newspapers in their jackets, selling them to customers in secret, for fear of reprisal.

The Brooklyn newsboy strike lasted for a couple days. Like the later newsboys strike of 1899, the key to success came from adult newspaper sellers at regular newsstands. Once a few of them joined the boycott, the Times agreed to lower their wholesale cost to just one cent per paper for newsboys in both areas of Brooklyn.

By April 1, 1886, newsies returned to their street corners, their hands stained with the ink of the Times and glowing with the satisfaction that their efforts might reward them with a little extra money that day.

SIDE NOTE: It’s probably a good guess to say that many of these young workers lived at the Brooklyn Newsboys Lodging House at 61 Poplar Street, which opened its doors in 1884, one year before the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Categories
Brooklyn History On The Waterfront Podcasts

Notes from the podcast (#133): Red Hook, Brooklyn

A haunting snapshot of the Atlantic Docks, circa 1870-80s (possibly as early as 1872) photo by George Bradford Brainerd (courtesy the Brooklyn Museum) 

Quite a few notes on the podcast this week! There were a lot of little details I found interesting that didn’t make the cut:

Before the Water Taxi: One of the more enlightening tales left on the cutting-room floor was that of the Hamilton Avenue Ferry, the 1846 Atlantic Docks ferry line that linked Red Hook with downtown Manhattan in much the same way the IKEA Water Taxi does today. As the ferry made “the shortest and most direct route from New York” to the newly constructed Green-Wood Cemetery, it also became the method by which many bodies were transported there.

Fiery renovation: A stalwart of the old community is Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church (built in 1896) right off of Coffey Park, the third incarnation after the congregation grew out of the first building (originally built in 1855) and fire destroyed the second. That fire, incidentally, was allegedly caused by combustible materials workers were using to renovate the structure.

Goodbye Vienna: A vestige of World War I hysteria exists within the name of Red Hook’s Lorraine Street. According to Brooklyn By Name, the street was once named Vienna Street but was deemed ‘offensive’ during the war and was changed to reflect the area of Alsace-Lorraine, which entered French possession after the war.

What’s My Name?: I mentioned a couple facts about the neighborhood of Carroll Gardens (once considered a part of Red Hook), although we hope to elaborate further one day on a show on South Brooklyn. The name Carroll Gardens, like that of its neighbors Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill, was a real-estate invention which the community quickly embraced. (Contrast this with modern failures of real-estate re-branding, like Chumbo, BelDel and LoDel.) You might be interested in reading Carroll Garden’s original 1973 historic designation.

Below: I’m not quite sure of the story behind this sunken squatters home, taken on Van Brunt Street from the year 1900 (courtesy the Brooklyn Museum) 

Brooklyn Museum: Brooklyn scenes; buildings


Further reading: For more information on the corruption of the  New York and Brooklyn waterfronts , I highly endorse Nathan Ward‘s ‘Dark Harbor’. It’s brilliantly lucid and immediate. In particular, he focuses some attention on the disappearance of Columbia Street longshoreman Pietro Panto and vividly describes a mob hit that took place in a building in Manhattan’s West Village, in a building next door to the treasured piano bar Marie’s Crisis. There are several books that feature chapters on Red Hook history, but a dedicated book on the subject is sorely needed. In the meantime, I recommend the short essay by Jerry Nachman that appears in “Brooklyn: A State of Mind,” about, of all things, an air conditioning crisis!

Maggie Blanck has an extraordinary web resource that begins as a genealogy of her family and elaborates into a history of Red Hook’s industrial giants. And for those of you who are fascinated by late-century street-gang history, the website Stone Greasers has an exhaustive list of gang names, many more unusual than anything you’d find in the movie The Warriors.

Red Hook as inspiration: Several sources, both on Brooklyn history and film history, discuss Red Hook’s impact on the work of both Arthur Miller and Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter of ‘On The Waterfront’.

 In 2009, a unique restaging of ‘On The Waterfront’ took place aboard the Waterfront Barge Museum in Red Hook, a production that then floated to Manhattan and Hoboken waterfronts for further performances, “all places whose dock wars echoed in Terry [Malloy’s] story,” according to Ward.

Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning film is embedded with influences from the entire New York waterfront struggle. For instance, Karl Malden‘s Father Barry is transparently inspired by Father Corridan, an activist waterfront priest from Manhattan’s west side. (Author J.T. Fisher focuses on Corridan’s contribution in his new book ‘On The Irish Waterfront’.) Of course no inspiration was greater than Malcolm Johnson‘s now classic series of articles for the New York Sun in the late 1940s, a series which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 — coincidentally the same year that Miller won for ‘Death of A Salesman’!

I suppose there is some controversy in some circles regarding whether Schulberg and Kazan ‘stole’ the idea of ‘Waterfront’ from Miller’s ‘The Hook’, but I’m not touching that. However you can read about it yourself in Stephen Schwartz’s argumentative 2005 article.

Thanks to commenter Rob Hill who calls to attention another fascinating literary Red Hook reference. In 1957, Harlon Ellison, one of America’s great science fiction and crime novelists, literally went undercover with a Red Hook street gang called The Barons to find inspiration for his book ‘Web of the City’ and, later, in the non-fictional account Memos From Purgatory. Ellison’s entire life would probably make a good subject for a podcast one day. Thanks Rob!

Further listening: This show shares many similar themes with our past shows on Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Corlears Hook and the Pirates of the East River. Hmm, and let’s just say, we’re probably coming back to the waterfront sooner than later this year….

Community vs Neighborhood: One listener Carolina from PortSide NY had some strong objections to my characterization of Red Hook, particularly my focus on the neighborhood’s crime and gang activity. I’m excerpting part of her letter, as it highlights a challenge that Tom and I often tackle with our podcast:

“Red Hook housed great poverty, but for decades was more mixed economically than your focus on gangland stories describes. Personally, I find what is most distinctive about Red Hook over the years is the capacity of this small place to hold AT THE SAME TIME a striking economic range in its residents and a striking range of land use from major industry to residences.“

That is an undoubtedly true statement, especially when you compare it to the fate of other dockside neighborhoods, like Corlears Hook and Water Street in Manhattan. I find there are two ways to accurately tell a story of a place like Red Hook — from an organic, street-level or ‘ground up’ perspective (what I call ‘a community history’) and from a macro-view, as a component of the larger forces of the city which contain it (or ‘a neighborhood history’).

As the creators of a New York City history podcast, we opt to recount neighborhood histories, as New Yorkers and those who love this city are familiar with the mechanisms of change that have influenced it. In this decision, we understand that the normalcy of a place can get sometimes overlooked. (After all, not every person in Five Points was a gang member or a prostitute either.)

However, the sad truth is, Red Hook was for many years nationally known as a blighted neighborhood, and it was important to inspect both how it got that way and how that condition demanded some very unique revitalization plans.  I hope I have shown how essential Red Hook was to New York, and continues to be.  We encourage you to wander around the waterfront on a sunny afternoon sometime and, in particular, check out places like the Waterfront Barge Museum.

Categories
Brooklyn History On The Waterfront Podcasts

Red Hook, Brooklyn: A rich seafaring history, organized crime and the isolation of a beleaguered neighborhood

PODCAST Red Hook, Brooklyn, the neighborhood called by the Dutch ‘Roode Hoek’ for its red soil, became a key port during the 19th century, a stopping point for vessels carry a vast array of raw goods from the interior of the United States along the Erie Canal.

In particular, two manmade harbors were among the greatest developments in Brooklyn history, stepping in when Manhattan’s own decaying wharves became too overcrowded.

With these basins came a mix of ethnicities to Brooklyn, and along with new styles of row houses came the usual assortment of vices — saloons and brothels along Hamilton Avenue. This fostered the development of crime along the docks, and Red Hook soon witnessed firsthand the opening salvos of 20th Century organized crime.

How did the history-rich, nautical neighborhood go from a booming center of employment to one of the worst neighborhoods in the United States by the 1990s? And can some surprising twists of fate from the last twenty years help Red Hook return to its glory days?

Featuring: Revolutionary War forts, shantytowns, Vaseline factories, famous gangsters, the gateway to Hell, and cheap Swedish furniture!

Photo above: Taken on Van Brunt street, 1/11/2012

The Atlantic Docks, illustration taken from Booth’s History of New York. (care of NYPL)

Modern living, circa 1939. The Red Hook Houses at their debut. Although the housing development cleared away a great many dilapidated homes — following a common model of urban redevelopment — the uninspired uniformity would put a dent in the neighborhood’s original character. (Courtesy LOC)

The Red Hook Play Center opened in 1936, the final of 11 swimming pools Robert Moses built during his early years as parks commissioner. Its Art Moderne style made it a beautiful if curious addition to the neighborhood.

The Erie Basin, a clutter of vessels and piers, is strangely beautiful from overhead in relation to the Manhattan skyline. (Pic courtesy Wired NY)

The crisis of organized crime and corruption within the longshoreman’s union along the Brooklyn waterfront was an inspiration for many writers, including Arthur Miller (below) in his unproduced screenplay ‘The Hook‘ — referring both to the neighborhood and the longshoreman’s “ever-present baling hook“. Later, Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg found similar inspiration for the Oscar winning film ‘On The Waterfront’, loosely basing events on situations that took place along the entire New York and Brooklyn waterfront. (The film was made in Hoboken, but there are of course famous shots of the Manhattan skyline.)

Categories
Brooklyn History

Holidays on Ice 1861: Skaters flock to Brooklyn’s icy ponds

Williamsburg(h)’s Union Pond, one of the finest destinations for ice skating in the city, 1863. It later became America’s first enclosed baseball field.

The nation was at war one hundred and fifty years ago, but that didn’t stop the austere celebrations in the ‘borough of churches’. But while thousands of Brooklyn residents attended church that morning in 1861, many participated in a more whimsical holiday celebration — wild and uncontrollable ice skating.

So famous was the city of Brooklyn’s famed ponds — which reliably froze each winter — that New Yorkers by the boatloads crammed into ferries across the East River to join in the icy merriment. On really cold days, of course, it was often the East River itself that froze solid. But in 1861, an unseasonable warmth kept the river disappointingly liquid, forcing thousands of skaters upon Brooklyn’s small ponds where the ice quickly melted.

For instance, Washington Pond (at right), at 5th Avenue and 6th Street — then considered Gowanus, today it’s Park Slope — was normally ideal for skating. Horse-drawn streetcars took crowds right from the Fulton Ferry to the door of the nearby old stone house, built in 1699 and famous for its role in the Revolutionary War. (It’s why the pond is named for Washington, after all.) But on Christmas 1861, “the ice was unpleasantly rough” there.

Skaters may have found more success at other Brooklyn skating destinations. The Capitoline Skating Lake, near the train station in the former independent village of Bedford, was known as the “principle pond of the Western District.” In Williamsburg, the versatile ‘world-renown‘ Union Pond drew thousands during the winter and thousands more in the summer — as the nation’s first enclosed baseball field. On this particular day, the newly opened pond in its ‘gay and brilliant appearance’ was crammed with skaters laughing and caroling, in various states of sobriety.

By the afternoon of Christmas 1861, most of the closest ponds were mushy and nearly dangerous. At a pond on Third Avenue, “a gentlemen with two ladies fell trough the ice and took their Christmas immersion without any material damage save a very decided shivering,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle.

Urban ice enthusiasts were forced to follow the advice of horsecars festooned with the signs ‘Good Skating in East Brooklyn’. I’m not sure exactly where crowds went that day, but a New York Times article from a three years later lists several ‘free ponds’ that might have been available for ice skating that day, including Seller’s Pond “in Bedford, near the Jamaica Pond Road”, “Dumbleton’s Pond on Myrtle Avenue” and the Suydam’s Pond, “on Atlantic-avenue near the Hunters-Ferry road.”.

All that skating and merriment drove many to more intoxicating holiday spirits, preferring their drinks ‘on the rocks’, or as the 1861 Eagle reports, “the boys will insist that ‘Christmas comes but once a year’ and with it comes a large measure of ‘good cheer’ and so they must get cheerful.” The most serious altercation came with one reveler, tiring of throwing rocks at boys, attempted to pistol whip a police officer.

The more respectable Brooklynites traipsed home at dawn, as the gaslights meet the fading light, casting the wet snow in a bright glare. Many reformed again for choirs of caroling, or else to distribute presents at charity ‘Christmas tree exercises’, where children lined up outside downtown theaters hoping for presents and a gander at the gorgeously trimmed tree, sparkling with candles.

Top pic courtesy NYPL. Second pic courtesy the Old Stone House.

The other Draft Riots: Brooklyn infernos, Queens bonfires

You probably know something about the Civil War draft riots that kept New York paralyzed during the week of July 13, 1863. But New York only meant Manhattan back then. What about the rest of the future boroughs?

The conscription act initiated draft lotteries throughout the area as, by 1863, the Union struggled to fill its quota of volunteers. Many thought the state of New York had contributed enough; hundreds were already dead after two years of bleak and depressing battle.

Then there was that troublesome little exemption clause. Those chosen in the ‘wheel of misfortune’ could either find a substitute or pay a $300 commutation fee. According to the Inflation Calculator, that’s about $5,250.00 today. Look at your bank account. Could you afford to pay that?

People revolted violently when the drafts were held in New York on July 13. There were also seismic reactions in the surrounding counties as well, chain reactions of the anger quelling in New York. In the surrounding regions, local law enforcement were often better prepared to handle disruptions amongst their less concentrated populations. Even still, the horror of New York’s draft riots did spread.

The homes of many black residents on Staten Island were torched. According to historian Richard Bayles, “From its proximity to New York City this county could not help but feel every pulsation of popular emotion that disturbed the bosom of the city.” Mobs attacked black shopowners in Factoryville, surrounded a black church in Stapleton and threatened parishioners inside, and burned down a railroad station owned by Republican and Union supporter Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Residents from the village of Astoria and the farmlands of Sunnyside and Ravenswood could see New York burning across the water. But Queens County caught the loathsome riot fever when the draft commenced in nearby Jamaica, on July 14. Riled crowds gathered at dusk and nearly torched the village but for the intervention of a few Democratic community leaders.

The draft office in Jamaica was eventually destroyed and number of buildings filled with government property were vandalized. Rioters stormed one building and stole piles of garments intended for the battlefield. According to an 1882 history of Queens County, it was an apparel Armageddon, the rioters “taking out some boxes of clothing which they broke open, piled in heaps and set on fire. The largest pile, which they derisively called ‘Mount Vesuvius’ was about ten feet high.”

In Westchester County, towns along the Bronx River reacted similarly to their own draft lotteries, with rioters in Morrisania and West Farms destroying telegraph offices and yanking railroad ties from the ground. However, other local towns, like Yonkers, were successfully insulated from violence, due to better living conditions and the entreaties of an especially popular local leader, the Rev. Edward Lynch. A mass gathering on July 15th in the village of Tremont eventually snuffed out violence in the region.

Although it was one of the country’s largest metropolises, the independent city of Brooklyn never saw the intensity of violence that New York did. Indeed, some black New Yorkers escaping violence in the city fled to the countryside in Kings County, to places like Weeksville. However the county did see a good share of bloodshed and destruction, particularly in the Eastern District (the areas of Williamsburg and Greenpoint).

The Brooklyn Eagle, solidly Democratic and in quiet support of the anti-draft agitators, had this to say in a July 16th article, “We could fill columns of the Eagle with exciting stories of anti-negro demonstrations, threatened outbreaks, etc.. So far no disturbance has occurred in Brooklyn which two or three policemen could not surprise [sic]. There has been nothing like any attempt to get up a mob, or create a riot.”

This is preposterous, but even through the Eagle’s glossy lens, it’s apparent that violence never fomented to the degree that it did in New York. This, of course, would be of cold comfort to the dozens of black Brooklynites who did have to flee their homes and businesses that week.

The most dramatic scene in Brooklyn took place before midnight on Wednesday, July 13, with the destruction of two large grain elevators in the Atlantic Basin, in Red Hook. (Pictured at top.)

The Eagle’s reasoning for the blaze demonstrates the reasonless chaos that typified violence in the latter days of the riots. It had nothing to do with racism or with drafts, but rather â€œ[t]he fire was the work of incendiaries, supposed to be grain shovellers who recently had some trouble about a raise on wages, and who have always looked with feelings of animosity on these elevators because they dispensed with a large amount of manual labor.”

The burning elevators, facing into the East River, made a grim bookend to the burning structures across the water in New York. Luckily, within 24 hours, the riots would be calmed throughout the region.

Categories
Podcasts Wartime New York

Fernando Wood, the scoundrel mayor during the Civil War: Will New York and Brooklyn secede from the Union?

 

His Honor, one of the most ambitious, most duplicitous leaders of New York in its history — as photographed by no less than Matthew Brady.

PODCAST The first part of our Bowery Boys Go To War! trilogy of podcasts set during the years of the American Civil War.

Fernando Wood, New York’s mayor at the dawning of the war, was the South’s best friend. The rascally politician, famous during his first term for inciting a police riot, drummed up pro-slavery support amongst his Irish and German constituents and even suggested New York secede from the Union itself! But once the war began and public support for the conflict swelled, the nefarious Fernando tried to have it both ways, both leading the Union cry and undermining it.

Click here for notes, corrections and other details on this podcast.

Wood’s ornate mansion at Broadway and 77th Street, called Woodlawn, bought with his newly acquired wealth obtained from the results of a suddenly successful shipping business and advantageous political fortune. (NYPL)

U.S. Representative Wood, near the end of his life, taken sometime in the 1870s.

Categories
Brooklyn History

Let There Be Light: Brooklyn illuminates Manhattan with a spotlight that ‘will burn your skin at three hundred feet’


That Gotham glow: The powerful Sperry searchlight drapes the dark city in light. The Woolworth Building is lit up like a candle.

A thin, bright streak of light brushes across the sky and dances off the clouds above. With few buildings over fifteen stories and the city’s electrical lights at a fraction of the intensity that they are today, the white piercing beam would have awakened the night sky, the most powerful illumination in the sky with the exception of the moon.

It was March of 1919, and the device creating this expressionistic Gotham nightscape was the Sperry Searchlight.

Since the first arc lights installed along Broadway in 1880, New Yorkers had grown accustomed to electric light. In fact, Times Square and the stretches of Broadway had become New York’s entertainment capital because of it. But searchlights were still a bit of a novelty, devices more associated with wartime. Innovations in electrical light changed how wars were even fought; combatants in World War I aimed spots to the skies to search for enemy zeppelins and scoured the grounds below for encroaching forces.

New Yorkers would have been used to seeing searchlights atop the city’s newest, tallest buildings. The first New Year’s celebration at One Times Square used a searchlight to blanket stunned crowds below. Both the Flatiron Building and the Metropolitan Life Tower in Madison Square were equipped with searchlights during elections. They were an effective way to present information. For the 1908 presidential election, the New York Herald announced that a searchlight atop the Met Life building would swing north if William Howard Taft won and south if the victory went to William Jennings Bryan. That night, the beam turned north.

But the Sperry Searchlight was different. The powerful device, created in the mid 1910s, was described by a science journal of the day in 1917 as ‘the world’s most powerful searchlight’ and as bright as ‘the fiercest sunlight’. “The heat of its focused beam is so intense that it will set paper afire at a distance of two hundred and fifty feet …. It will burn your skin at three hundred feet.’

This intense searchlight was the product of Brooklyn innovator Elmer Ambrose Sperry, whose greatest invention, the gyrocompass, was quickly adopted by the United States Navy and almost immediately changed sea travel forever.

From the Sperry Gyroscope Company — the ten-floor building still stands at 40 Flatbush Avenue Ext. by the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge — the inventor and his team created a host of new items, many for the military. (Did you know that the Sperry Company created the first airplane autopilot?)

In 1919, one version of his new and improved searchlight made a test run, presumably atop the roof of the Sperry building. If you look at where the building is on a map, you can almost trace the beam from the roof along the line of its projection.

Over the Brooklyn Bridge, bouncing off the first line of buildings along the east of Manhattan, and illuminating three of New York’s tallest and best known buildings of the day — the Singer Building (center left), the Park Row building (center right), and the majestic Woolworth Building (the tallest beacon-like structure, center right).

Images like this one weren’t just documents of technological success. (Although good night photography itself was a pretty nifty trick, even in 1919.) They helped build the mythology of the city, which in 1919 was about to go down the rabbit hole of Art Deco and inspire new architects to populate the skyline with more ambitious and futuristic towers.

The original Farmville; or putting the ‘green’ in Greenpoint

Frozen farm: The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm waits out the weather for a better day. (Courtesy Scott Nyerges)

NAME THAT NEIGHBORHOOD Some New York neighborhoods are simply named for their location on a map (East Village, Midtown). Others are given prefabricated designations (SoHo, DUMBO). But a few retain names that link them intimately with their pasts. Other entries in this series can be found here.

NEIGHBORHOOD: Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Last month I took in a terrific exhibition of photography by my old friend Scott Nyerges, documenting a year in the life of the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The farm (all 6,000 square feet of it) sits atop an old warehouse near the mouth of Newtown Creek as it spills into the East River.

Typical farming may not lend itself to photographic opportunity, but add a view from a few stories up, and you get something rather surreal. The rooftop farm, one of several sprouting up on top of New York buildings, offers local restaurants and budding farmers an opportunity to use organically grown produce and even grow their own food.

But the Eagle Street farm actually brings Greenpoint back to its roots. Literally. And nods to the origin of its name.

I’ve always associated Greenpoint with industry, its shores dominated by dockyards and its rows of streets, running in alphabetical order from north to south, defined by factories and warehouses. Its rich Polish community traces its development to immigrants who moved here to work in those very places.

But the original settlers to the area had a very good reason to call it Greenpoint. This was once a vigorous and fertile farming community, with ideal soil conditions and access to a waterway that could get farmers to the thriving markets of New York.

There was even an actual point of green, so to speak, a slender neck of land covered in grass that jutted into the East River at this location. (One source says the point was actually planted with green wheat.) Those travelling along the river in the early days called it as they saw it — Green Point. I’m not sure what happened to this long-gone natural feature, but eventually it lent its name to the entire neighborhood.

Also gone is a third body of water, filled in long ago, that helped define (and segregate) the region — Bushwick Creek (sometimes known as Norman Kill), which ran south, and separated it from the town of Williamsburgh to the south. For some idea of where this creek might have sat, simply erase everything between the Bushwick inlet and McCarren Park and replace it with a marsh.

The region became part of the Dutch town of Boswijck (Bushwick) in 1638 and would not become distinguished by its current name for almost 200 years. During the time, the area was noted for large farms, many in the early days worked by slave labor. One of the first farmers was the Nordic implant Dirck Volckertsen whose nickname, Dirck de Noorman, gave the creek its alternate name. By the age of the Revolutionary War, farmers with familiar names like Meserole, Calyer and Provoost all set up stakes here.

During these years, Greenpoint earned its nickname as the ‘garden spot’ of the region; but with the growth of New York, Brooklyn and Williamsburg in the early 19th century came the industrialization of the shores. The old farms were replaced with factories. Its name became a bit of a farce as oil refineries and shipyards soon defined the area. Bushwick Creek was filled in by the early 20th century.

The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm brings urban agriculture back to the neighborhood after almost 150 years. Too bad it’s the dead of winter here in New York and currently snowing, because a lovely stroll through some tended fields, high in the skyline, sounds like a really good idea right now.

You can see more of Scott’s rooftop photography at his website. The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm reopens in April.

I found the best little ‘old time’ map of Greenpoint history which pinpoints the exact area of this original ‘green point’. But you’re going to want to click into this to see the details (Map courtesy Greenpt):

Ulmer Park: A toasty footnote in Brooklyn beer history

We’re putting together the first new podcast of the year right now, involving a major traumatic event in south Brooklyn history. As I’m getting that together, enjoy this blog posting from summer 2009 about one of southern Brooklyn’s long forgotten pleasure destinations, Ulmer Park. You can find the original article here.

Over a 100 years ago, there was once a time you could get your beer, music and mayhem at a Brooklyn ‘pleasure park’ just a few stops short of Coney Island — near today’s Bensonhurst neighborhood.

Ulmer Park was the lark of William Ulmer, one of Brooklyn’s most successful brewers in an age where much of the nation’s finest beer was coming from the future borough. The German-born son of a wine merchant who learned the trade from his uncle, Ulmer opened his eponymous brewery in the 1870s at Belvedere Street and soon came upon the idea of opening a park as a way of selling more beer. (Not a bad idea. Jacob Ruppert would have similar designs in mind when he bought the New York Yankees in 1915).

The park would open in 1893 in Gravesend Bay along the southern shore of Brooklyn — back when there was an actual shore — between Coney Island farther south and the more conservative Bath Beach resort community to its west. Ulmer Park seemed to have more in common with Bath Beach — clean, family friendly (keep Dad happy so he keeps drinking!) with a beer garden, carousels and swings, rifle ranges, a dance pavilion and of course plenty of beachfront property.

The park seemed to be particular popular with Germans — Ulmer after all was German, and this was a beer garden — and particularly the annual ‘Saengerfest’ festival. A Times article even claims that 100,000 gathered at Ulmer Park for the end of one such festival.

Below: an illustration of Ulmer Park. Note the grand pier which stuck out into into the bay

We can get a good idea of Ulmer’s intentions for the park by looking at his failure at obtaining a “liquor tax certificate” (or license) in a report from 1900. “A picnic ground, or open air pleasure resort, of about two acres” between Harway Avenue and the shore, the park had a bowling alley, a pier with canopied bar at the end, two or three other beer pavilions scattered throughout the property and a hotel.

Ultimately, neither the resort at Bath Beach nor amusements at Ulmer Park could compete with Coney Island which was about to enter its golden age in the early 1900s; apparently, it was grit and decadence people wanted in their summertime Brooklyn getaways. Ulmer closed in 1899.

Below: All aboard the train to Coney Island, Ulmer Park and Bath Beach Above pic courtesy NYPL

The land remained a public space hosting baseball, cricket and track and field events. Eventually it was wiped away and redeveloped. It remains in name only, at the Ulmer Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the name of the neighborhood bus depot.

You can find more information about the area surrounding Ulmer Park over at Forgotten New York.

So, do we call it St. Patrick’s Old Basilica now?

New York’s original St. Patrick’s Cathedral located in Little Italy — or NoLIta, if you must– just got a serious upgrade yesterday, when the Pope deemed the old, revered Catholic church an officially sanctioned basilica.

A Catholic basilica is a church with ‘certain privileges’, an elite designation where various religious rituals can take place. This is Manhattan’s first basilica, although Brooklyn has two churches that have reached this distinction.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Sunset Park, which gathered its first small congregation in 1893, became the first on November 1, 1969. I don’t know the specific reason why it became New York’s first, but grandeur certainly helps, and Our Lady’s got it, a massive, Romanesque stone behemoth set back and towering above the intersection at 5th Avenue and 60th Street.

The Cathedral of St. James, designated the city’s second basilica in May 1982, is minuscule and modest in comparison, tucked back from the bustle of Flatbush Avenue. Its austerity lies in its history: it’s the first Catholic Church on Long Island, its cornerstone laid in 1822, just as the population of the young city of Brooklyn was exploding.

But the 1820s were not a welcoming era for Catholics in the United States, and a young Catholic Church in Manhattan, dedicated in 1818 for St. Patrick, bore the brunt of New York anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment in its early years. Although its ornate, showier successor opened in 1879, St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral has weathered on. Its distinction as a basilica just underscores its value as one of New York’s most important historical structures still standing.

For more information, check out one of our early podcasts on the history of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. [You can download it directly from here.]

The website of Our Lady of Perpetual Help has a further, very heartfelt explanation of the importance of the basilica designation.

And thanks to our Facebook fan Jarrett Brown for inspiring this post!

Pic courtesy the NYPL digital gallery

New York and Brooklyn’s first ferry — for a handful of wampum and the toot of a horn


ABOVE: A detail from an illustration of the northern points of the New Amsterdam colony, 1640.

The year 1642 saw the very first regular ferry service in New York Harbor, between the two small villages of Breuckelen and New Amsterdam. The populations of both areas numbered less than 1,000 at most, combined, and most were employed by the Dutch West India Company. New Amsterdam, under Peter Kieft, had a modicum of defenses (notably Fort Amsterdam) but that famous wall demarcating its northern border would only come many years later, as would Peter Stuyvesant.

Across the water, Breuckelen was nothing more than a cluster of basic structures along the shore, near the area where the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge sits today. Its long stretch of flat shore in full view of the harbor and a high bluff (later Brooklyn Heights) made it a choice spot for adventurous Dutch settlers who made it their home in 1636. In contrast, other areas of Long Island were settled by other nationalities under Dutch authority, e.g. the English settlements of Gravesend (modern Gravesend and Coney Island).

Just north of New Amsterdam resided a man who would be the first to link the two tiny settlements. Cornelius Dircksen was a farmer and inn owner with prime real estate, even in 1640, along the eastern stretch of Mannahatta at Peck Slip, just north of the city.

In the early 1630s, Dircksen’s ferry was an irregular service, a way to earn extra income. Perhaps he considered it a special accomodation for guests of his inn. And who was staying at his inn, at this time? Mostly newcomers to New Amsterdam, or Dutch West India fur traders passing through.

As legend has it, if one of his guests or a passerby wanted conveyance across the river, they needed only to take a horn hanging from a tree and blow it. Cornelius would drop what he was doing to arrange the voyage, even if he was tending to his own fields. (I imagine the money must have been good.) His small boat would take passengers from the foot of his farm to a small landing on the other side — not surprising in the area that would later develop the Fulton Ferry in the 19th century.

In 1642, Cornelius decided to jump into the ferry occupation full time. Dircksen was, according to old histories, “the earliest ferryman of whom records speak and was, probably, the first person who regularly followed that calling.”

In a modest skiff, Cornelius (or his assistants) would take passengers across the harbor for shells: “the small price of three stuivers in wampum, meaning nine purple beads or eighteen white beads.” Wampum would be the colony’s most versatile form of currency, usable in both the Dutch settlements and with the Lenape themselves. The ride, often choppy and unpredictable, would sometimes take a full hour.

Cornelius owned the land on both sides but later sold the Breuckelen landing in 1643 to Willem Jansen — who then opened a competing tavern there himself.

Joy Fong and memories of Chinese food past

I have this thing for kitschy Chinese restaurant design, so this picture from 1971 made my day. Joy Fong Chow Mein was located on Avenue J and Coney Island Avenue in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn nearby Di Fara’s Pizza and the old Midwood movie theater (which closed in the early 80s). Joy Fong is also long gone, including this massive sign.

Writer Pete Cherches has a wonderful recollection of the restaurant and eating Chinese food in Brooklyn in the 1960s. He says of Joy Fong: “a now-defunct place that retains an almost holy status in the memories of Brooklyn Jews of a certain age. I wouldn’t be surprised if people visit the site of the former restaurant and wail against the wall.”

Photo courtesy Flickr/Bridgeport Mike

Bensonhurst’s Sbarro: a non-New Yorker’s New York pizza

The Sbarro family in their original salumeria in Bensonhurst

In my Friday roundup of famous New York-style pizzerias, I left out the one pizza company that could technically be called the most recognizable New York pie — at least to those who live outside the city.

Sbarros Pizza is a fixture of shopping malls and roadside traffic stops across the nation. In fact, “across 30 countries” according to the website. In many of these countries, Sbarros is most likely introducing the actual concept of pizza, much less its modified ‘New York style’ offering.

I was surprised to learn that Sbarros actually got its start in Brooklyn, 50 years ago, and in a fashion similar to Lombardi’s Pizzeria.

It too was started up by a Neapolitan named Gennaro — the highly alliterative Gennaro Sbarro, to be exact — with his wife Carmela and their three sons. Like Gennaro Lombardi, the Sbarros didn’t start off selling pizza either. Their original salumeria (delicatessen) in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was located at 1701 65th Street and 17th Avenue, opening in 1959 and serving the usual Italian-style deli fare, eventually incorporating pasta and pizza onto the menu — and sit-down service along with it.

The similarities stop there. The Sbarros had a mind to expand, keeping a tight reign on their operation as they opened 14 additional New York locations well into the 1970s, with all the food made at the original Bensonhurst location. Carmela even continued to personally make the cheesecake.

It could have stopped there, but keep in mind that the 1970s was the age of the shopping mall, and the lure of the food court greatly appealed to the Sbarros. Their first experimental pizza outlet was at the King’s Plaza mall in Marine Park. It was here that Sbarros became a counter fast-food restaurant, shedding its salumeria image for a bright, uniform place with a set menu of popular Italian standards.

Needless to say, it was a successful experiment. Incorporating the family business in 1977 and opening the brand up for potential franchises, the Sbarro sons took their restaurant chain national by the 1980s after their father’s death, and rolled it out to international locales by the 1990s.

The original Bensonhurst Sbarros was closed a few years ago, and it’s difficult to find the inherent Brooklyn-ness in a standard-issue Sbarros restaurant today. But if you look carefully, you might find some dusty, fake-looking meats hanging in the window, harkening back to its early Bensonhurst roots.

It’s definitely the closest you’re ever going to find New York-style pizza in, say, Salt Lake City or even Kazahkstan.

(Picture courtesy PMQ Pizza magazine)