Tag: Randalls Island

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Parks and Recreation Sports

New York City loves the Olympics — despite never hosting them

Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens receives a ticker-tape parade through lower Manhattan, September 3, 1936. (Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

OLYMPICS ROUNDUP Starting today Tokyo, the biggest city in the world, will host the Games of the XXXII Olympiad aka the Tokyo Olympics 2020 (in 2021). The Japanese city first hosted the games back in 1964.

New York City, the biggest city in the United States, has never hosted the Olympics Games.

The city did aim to host the 2012 Olympics in an ultimately unsuccessful bid back in 2005. Those games went to London. 

Alas.

A great many New Yorkers were quite happy to be without that international sporting event in the city. Personally, I would have loved to have seen New York become even more international for a few weeks, although I’m relieved that plans for that catastrophic Olympic Village in Queens were never realized.

Outside of that, the closest the city has ever gotten to the Olympics is a little under 300 miles — the distance from New York to Lake Placid, which hosted the 1980 Winter Olympics.

Those games featured the now-storied ‘Miracle on Ice‘ match between the USA and the USSR.

But did you know that the Russian team completely iced the US team just a few days earlier in an exhibition game played at Madison Square Garden? You can read more about that in my article ‘No Miracle on Ice’ from February 2010.

Although New York has never hosted the Games, when it comes to events before and after the Olympics, New York City’s all over them.

Randall’s Island

Randall’s Island has hosted several Olympic trials, including one of the most famous at all, the track and field events from 1936 which produced sports legend Jesse Owens.

You can hear all about it in one of our very early podcasts on the history of Randall’s Island and the 1936 Olympic Trials.

Astoria Pool

Around the same time, Robert Moses commissioned Astoria Pool with the explicit purpose of hosting Olympic swimming trials.

That 1936 event, featuring its dramatic diving platform, produced several American gold medalists. Two massive Olympic torches stood astride the pool as competitors fought for a spot on the Olympic team.

Olympics trials returned to Astoria Pool in 1952, and again in 1964, producing athletes that again nearly swept the diving events in the Tokyo games. 

Swimmer Don Schollander went on to win 4 golds that year, the most of any athlete in 1964 and the most medals won by an American athlete since Jesse Owens.

You can read more about Astoria Pool here — Nostalgia for Astoria Pool. 

The Counter Olympics

Of course, a great many New Yorkers were entirely unhappy with any participation in the 1936 Olympic Games, given that they were being held that year in Berlin, in the heart of Nazi Germany.

A concerted effort by politicians (including Fiorello LaGuardia), religious leaders and athletes to boycott the games was met with defeat, but in the summer of 1936, a group of Jewish athletes competed in a ‘counter-Olympics’.

For more information, check out our article Boycott the Olympic Games!

New York Welcomes Olympians

And finally, here are some pictures of two glorious receptions of American Olympians held in New York — after the 1908 games (in London) and the 1912 games (in Stockholm).

Photo showing an event in New York City related to the 4th Olympic Games, held in London, England, in 1908. Library of Congress
Photo showing an event in New York City outside City Hall, related to the 4th Olympic Games, held in London, England, in 1908. Library of Congress
Photo showing a parade in New York City related to the 5th Olympic Games, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1912. Library of Congress
Photo showing a parade in New York City related to the 5th Olympic Games, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1912. Library of Congress

And finally, here’s a swell photograph — no other adjective to describe it — of the U.S. Olympic team from 1908, posing with President Theodore Roosevelt at his home in Sagamore Hill, Long Island.

Categories
Neighborhoods Parks and Recreation

Nostalgia for Astoria Pool, an early Robert Moses project with a high diving, Olympic-sized history

Astoria Pool is the largest venue for swimmers in New York, outside of the Hudson and East Rivers and, of course, the ocean.

Its location in Astoria Park is certainly theatrical, parallel with the river and in sight of two spectacular bridges (the Robert F. Kennedy and the Hell Gate) that sail over to Randall’s Island.

Mermaidens: Five sisters in bathing suits pose on steps of Astoria Pool, circa 1938. Courtesy the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives

For a public pool, its so big (330 feet long, with a supposed capacity of 3,000 people) that it might be more comfortable in a theme park.

Riding the Wave

The pool, the park, one of the bridges (the RFK, aka the Triborough) and the roads you probably used to get to thee places were all 1930s projects overseen by New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.

But the real fuel behind the creation of Astoria Pool was the Works Progress Administration, a federal agency that infused billions of dollars into local communities during the Great Depression.

The money came just as Moses (above, in a swimsuit, at Jones Beach) was ascending into his various governmental roles in city and state government. The result was some of his most earnest and arguably most effective projects.

Perhaps his legacy might not be as hotly debated today had he stopped with his greatest hits of the decade: the Triborough, the parkways and the many miles of parkland scattered throughout the city.

And of course the swimming pools, eleven in total, built during the 1930s.

Dipping A Toe Into Swimming Pools

They were of special note as a culmination of the modern public facility, using modern design and new technology to create places of recreation for regular New Yorkers.

The idea of municipal pools wasn’t new — Philadelphia had them as early as 1890s, and New York had plenty of public baths and even floating baths  — but standards of decency had changed by the 1920s.

Women could cavort with men, as could different social classes. (And occasionally people of different races, although many of Moses’ own pools were guilty of segregation.)

Astoria Pool, with its subdued Art Deco design, was the grand model for all the new pools in the other boroughs. And it was certainly the most popular, from the moment it opened in July 1936.

It became a daily destination during the summer for neighborhood children.

“In 1936, I was eight years old,” recalled New York Yankee superstar Whitey Ford. “You could stand by the pool on a hot summer day –along with a couple thousand neighborhood kids in the main pool and maybe another hundred in the diving pool — look up, and see quite a sight. On the right was Hell’s Gate Bridge….and on your left, was the brand new Triboro Bridge heading towards the horizon.”

But Moses wasn’t just concerned with public accommodation. He had different intentions for this pool, reflected in the semi-circle of bleachers and that spectacular diving platform stretching like a plant over a deeper half-moon pool.

The Astoria Pool was meant to create swimming superstars.

The Diving Board and the Butterflies

Two days after its opening, on July 4, 1936, Astoria Pool hosted the U.S. Olympic trials in swimming and diving. From these events, victors went straight over to the Games, hosted that year in Berlin.

And they weren’t the only athletes tested that month in a New York WPA project.

Across the water, at Randall’s Island, Olympic track-and-field trials were hosted at Downing Stadium, producing the man who would become the most famous Olympian of the ’36 games — Jesse Owens, winner of four golds. [For more information, check out the podcast on Randall’s Island and the 1936 Olympic trials.]

Two massive Olympic torches stood astride the pool as competitors fought for a spot on the Olympic team.

Events at the Astoria Pool in July 1936 produced several winners, including gold medal swimmers Jack Medica and Adolph Keifer and a slate of athletes that went on win ten of twelve medals in men’s and women’s platform and springboard diving.

(Interestingly, the other two medalists were Germans. And both their medals were bronze, yet another result that must have angered Adolf Hitler.)

Olympics trials returned to Astoria Pool in 1952, and again in 1964, producing athletes that again nearly swept the diving events in the Tokyo games.

Swimmer Don Schollander went on to win 4 golds that year, the most of any athlete in 1964 and the most medals won by an American athlete since Jesse Owens.

But, as it would turn out, the biggest swimming celebrities fostered from the Astoria Pool were neighborhood boys.

Aqua-Zanies

Imagine being a kid in Astoria, Queens, in the early 1940s, living next to a swimming pool that had helped produce the world’s greatest swimmers!

A group of local swimming enthusiasts looked at Astoria Pool’s extended diving platform and saw a opportunity to entertain, forming an athletic-comedy group called the Aqua-Zanies.

Garbed in matching stripped ensembles, the teenagers performed wacky acrobatic stunts from off the platform — darting, twirling and sometimes bellyflopping into the water below.

They soon became ‘America’ leading water comedians‘, performing throughout New York and even going on an international tour in the early 1950s. Several Aqua-Zanies went onto more legitimate swimming careers.

And certainly these effortless performance have inspired hundreds of others to leap from the Astoria diving platform with equal attempts at gravity-defying levity.

Although the swimming pool has remained a important part of the community even to this day, that diving platform, weathering decades of elemental abuse, was shut down in the 1970s and has become something of a beloved ruin.

In June 2006 it was officially designated a New York City landmark. And the pool is open for swimming again. Let your aqua-zany dreams soar!

Thanks to the Parks Department for use of the images above. (Diving platform photo courtesy NYC Dept of Records)

Is that any way to treat an Olympian?

Has an internationally famous monument ever had to endure such grave indignities as the Discus Thrower of Randall’s Island? Scandal!

Nothing proclaims the revitalization of Randall’s Island more than this distinctive, classically inspired statue by Greek sculptor Kostas Dimitriadis. The Discus Thrower is the most graphic symbol of the changing island and a hallmark of its sports past. However, almost since its creation, Dimitria’s work has been constantly on the move and was even, at some point, ravaged and dismembered.

Dimitria created this award-winning discobolus for the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Two years later, businessman Ery Kehaya donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as “an expression of gratitude from Greeks living in New York to the city that has given them opportunity.” The bronze was displayed behind the Museum, not in it, for ten years.

Finally, when the new stadium was opened on Randall’s Island in 1936, the Discus Thrower was installed in front of it, a natural fixture for a place soon to burst with Olympic superstars.

But respect for this Olympic icon faded in the 1960s. Badly rusted, the poor guy was riddled with graffitti, his discus was stolen, and part of his arm was broken off. Eventually, in 1970, the entire statue was placed into storage.

Almost thirty years passed before the island was in good enough shape, thanks to the Randalls Island Sports Foundation, to welcome the Discus Thrower back. But not before some delicate restoration to replace the missing limb. The statue was rededicated on July 21, 1999, in a ceremony that featured an actual discus thrower, and a pretty legendary one at that — Queens native Al Oerter, who won Olympic gold in the event in four consecutive games, a feat yet to be surpassed in any sport.

Later Mayor Bloomberg, who had worked with Oerter during the failed 2012 Olympic bid, turned the now-gleaming statue into a tribute when the athlete died in 2007. “From now on, when New Yorkers pass the iconic discus thrower statue on Randall’s Island, they should remember the life and contributions of Al.”

The Discus Thrower has a brother replica in Athens, Greece. He hasn’t moved from the entrance of Athens’ Panathinaiko Stadium since 1927.

Categories
Podcasts Sports

PODCAST: Randall’s Island and the 1936 Olympic trials

PODCAST The smaller islands of the East River reveal fascinating secrets of the city’s past, and Randall’s and Ward’s Islands are no exceptions.

Found out how these former potter’s fields are related to the most important Olympics-related event New York City has ever seen. The cast includes a swashbuckling British engineer, Jesse Owens, Tony Bennett, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses, and Pearl Jam!

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The Olympic trials at Downing Stadium not only made Jesse Owens (seen below in the 100 meter) into an athletic superstar, but the black and Jewish American athletes who qualified that day became an embarassment to the Olympic host city, Berlin, and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

jesse-owens

From a stock picture in the 40s, when Randall’s and Ward’s were still seperate entity and the Little Hell Gate was still a existing body of water.
1948-randalls-and-wards

Engineer and interogator John Montressor, who owned Randall’s Island during British occupation.
montresor

From a British print — the treacherous Hell Gate pass, as seen from ‘Great Barn Island’ (later to be known as Ward’s Island)

hell-gate-great-barn

 

Two hospitals on Wards Island, 1880

Museum of the City of New York
Museum of the City of New York

A picture of the Infant’s Hospital on Randall’s Island, 1935

infant-randals

The Triborough Bridge as seen from Astoria swimming pool, circa the bridge’s date of birth — 1936

1936-Triborough-Astoria-Pool

From on old tactile sign on the island, indicating the placement of Downing Stadium.

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Downing Stadium, the later years.

downing

The spectacular new Icahn Stadium at night

2006-09-Icahn-Stadium_SloanLED

Another angle, with downtown Manhattan at top.

randallsisland

A current map of Randall’s and Ward’s.

current-map

Boycott the Olympic Games!


It’s been awhile since America faced the potential of an Olympic Games boycott. The debate about Beijing is still being waged in the press. America withdrew from the Moscow Olympics in 1980. And in 1936, there was an equally emphatic cry to boycott the Olympics in Berlin, Germany — and New York City led the protest.


This seems logical, as New York was America’s center for Jewish culture; many Jewish athletes (most notably, world record hurdler Milton Green) would eventually sit out these Olympics anyway, in protest to Hitler’s purging of his Olympic team of Jewish athletes. Hitler had relented in his original dictate to ban all Jewish athletes from all countries, but who could blame any athlete from wishing to avoid such an event fraught with toxic politics?

But in fact it was prominent New York Catholic politicians that headed the effort to convince the New York Olympic committee to pull out of games. Leading the charge was former New York state supreme court justice Jeremiah Titus Mahoney, who also just happened to be the president of Amateur Athletic Union. Mahoney had run for mayor of New York in 1934 but lost to Fiorello LaGuardia.

So imagine the impact of a rally on Dec 3, 1935, where both Mahoney and Laguardia took to the stage, urging Americans to support a boycott of the Berlin Olympics. The rally was held at the former Mecca Temple for Shriners on W. 55th Street.(Today, its the New York City Center concert hall.) Pictured above: announcements of the Mecca rally

According to Jeremy Schaap, a host of political leaders urged on a boycott and read letters from supportive state governors and Senators. But it a speech from the diminutive but charismatic LaGuardia, himself of Jewish descent, that moved the crowd. “Athletic contests imply good sportsmanship and fair play, two qualities which are unknown to the Hitler regime.”

But boycotters faced two insurmountable roadblocks. The first was Avery Brundage, president of the United States Olympic Committee, who was firmly in Hitler’s pocket after a carefully orchestrated wine-and-dine tour through the country convinced him of above-board German intentions that would “promise … the greatest sports festival ever staged anywhere.” Brundage also happened to be the former president of the Amateur Athletic Union, pitting him directly with Mahoney.

The other was endemic of America itself. Many wondered how America could boycott the games out of political protest, when African-Americans were hardly being treated any better in our own country. Jesse Owens originally signed on to the notion of a boycott, but the general concensus was that a diverse American team could undermine Hitler’s racial policies by showing him up at his very doorstep.

So it was no surprise that at a Dec. 8 meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union, held at the Hotel Commodore on Lexington and 42nd Street, Brundage was able to convince the voting body of the organization to vote to stay in the games.

Despite the bad blood with city leaders, New York City hosted the Olympic trials the next year in July on Randalls Island at the former Downing Stadium. (Downing was ripped down in 2004 and replaced with Icahn Stadium.) New Yorkers got to witness firsthand the now-legendary prowess of Jesse Owens who then went on to snatch four gold metals from Hitler’s games.


But while Owens was busy showing up the Nazis, a ‘protest’ Olympics were being held at Downing that same summer. The World Labor Athletic Carnival or ‘Counter-Olympics’ featured over 400 American athletes in a display more of solidarity than actual competition. Although it was organized by the Jewish Labor Committee, its no surprise to find as co-chairs of the ‘counter-Olympics’ the two former rivals who had desperately tried to boycott the games in the first place — Mahoney and LaGuardia.

As for the former Hotel Commodore (pictured at left), now the Grand Hyatt , it holds another place in sports history; it was here on June 6, 1946, that the precursor the the National Basketball Association was formed.