Historic Richmond Town's Kruser-Finley House Gutted by Fire

This summer, we snapped the above photo during a visit to Historic Richmond Town, Staten Island's remarkable collection of colonial and early American architecture. That's the Kruser-Finley house, which was built around 1790 and is one of only four houses in Richmond Town built in the eighteenth century. The house, originally located in nearby Egbertville, was built as one room. Two additions were made in the nineteenth century, and it probably served as a house/shop/workshop for various craftspeople, including a cooper (barrel-maker).

Alas, on Wednesday around 4:30pm, the house caught fire. Though the blaze was extinguished in an hour, most the house was lost: the interior was gutted and roof is now completely gone. Though the investigation is still on-going, it has been deemed "suspicious."

courtesy of MARC A. HERMANN/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

If you've never had the chance to visit, Historic Richmond Town is well worth the trip. Located in the middle of Staten Island, it was the county seat of Richmond County before Staten Island was annexed into New York City. More than 25 significant historic buildings -- some relocated to the site, others original to the town -- are scattered around the property. Though you can walk the streets on your own, the only way to really see the buildings up close is on a tour, which will generally take you inside three or four historic houses.

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Otis's First Elevator

The view from the top of the Latting Observatory. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Yesterday, our friends at Curbed highlighted a mostly forgotten chapter in New York's history -- the Crystal Palace Exhibition in Reservoir Square (today's Bryant Park) and the accompanying Latting Observatory, which was the tallest building in New York when it was constructed.

However, there was one chapter of the story they left out -- the debut of the commercial elevator. The man behind the elevator was Elisha Graves Otis, an engineer and inventor who was also, evidently, quite the showman.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

The idea of the elevator was not new; since antiquity, hoists and pulleys had moved cargo. But ropes frayed and pulleys malfunctioned, which meant that there had never been a viable passenger elevator. Without elevators, commercial buildings were limited to six or seven stories, and rents diminished the farther one had to climb from the street. Otis’s invention was a mechanism to automatically stop an elevator in the event of a fall. And to show the world how much he trusted it, he used himself as the test subject.

One block north of the Crystal Palace grounds stood the Latting Observatory, with a steam-powered elevator which could take visitors up two levels. They would then, however, have to climb stairs to the top of the observatory as no one trusted an elevator to take them higher. For his demonstration Otis got inside the elevator cab, which was suspended from the top of the observatory, and called down to his assistant who—with a dramatic flourish—severed the elevator cable. The cab lurched, dropped an inch, and then shook to a halt, held in place by Otis’ new brake.

The story has, over the past 160 years, developed the mystique of legend. In Gotham, Mike Wallace and Edwin Burroughs write that when Otis's platform "reached the highest level, an assistant presented the inventor with a dagger on a velvet cushion" that he used to cut the rope. In the new book Cities are Good For You, Leo Hollis tells a version where Otis is hoisted aloft with "several barrels and heavy boxes, until [he is]... 30 feet above the heads of the throng. After a dramatic pause an assistance cut the hoists with an axe and the crowds gasped as they anticipated seeing the engineer crash to the floor."

Whether it was a dagger or an axe, it was dramatic, and hundreds of people left the observatory that day having witnessed the future. In 1857, Otis installed his patented safety break in the Haughwout china store on Broadway, and it quickly became a tourist attraction. (The store would also become famous in 1861, when Mary Todd Lincoln came to buy a new set of White House china. But that's a story for our next book, Footprints in New York.....)

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Summer Streets: The Old Fourth Avenue

Tomorrow, August 17, is the last day of this year's iteration of Summer Streets, the program where numerous city agencies ban together to turn a Manhattan avenue into a pedestrian thoroughfare. This year, the city is closing down Park Avenue from East 72nd Street all the way down to Fourteenth Street, and then Lafayette Street south to Foley Square and the Brooklyn Bridge.

One highlight of this year's program is rare access to the Park Avenue tunnel south of Grand Central Terminal, where artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has installed an art piece using lights and loudspeakers that are triggered by the voices of passersby.

The Park Avenue tunnel is a vestige of the street's earlier incarnation as a railroad right of way. For most of the nineteenth century, the entire avenue was known as Fourth Avenue. As we write in Inside the Apple:

In 1831, the New York and Harlem Railroad had established its at-grade tracks along a mostly uninhabited stretch of Fourth Avenue. The first New York and Harlem trains were horse drawn along the entire length of the line; however, this soon gave way to steam locomotion, which drew complaints from people living and working along the more densely populated stretch of Fourth Avenue near the train’s depot on 27th Street. In 1854, the city passed an ordinance banning steam travel south of 42nd Street, which forced the railroad to unhook its steam locomotives at 42nd Street, and, one by one, haul passenger cars by horse to the depot farther downtown. These horse-drawn cars were shunted into a covered viaduct from 42nd to 32nd Streets, which not only solved an elevation problem, but also kept the horses and the trains out of sight. When the area atop this covered viaduct was planted, it came to be known as “Park Avenue.”

For a long time, Fourth Avenue north of 42nd Street was an open railroad cut, but it was finally paved over after the electrification of New York's train system and the name Park Avenue extended north. Now, the only vestige of Fourth Avenue is a small sliver that extends south of Fourteenth Street to Astor Place, where it then becomes Lafayette Street.

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Edith Wharton's View of New York

This weekend marks the seventy-sixth anniversary of the death of Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862-August 11, 1937). Though she spent much of her adult life living outside the city, Wharton was born and raised in New York and returned to it again and again in her novels and short stories.

We've been doing a lot of Wharton reading in preparation for our next book, Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers, which is due out next April (save the date!) from Lyons Press. Though most people are familiar with Wharton's great New York novels, such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence (which made her the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature), many of Wharton's stories also concern life in the city, including her very first published tale, "Mrs. Manstey's View," which came out in July 1891.

The story concerns a widow, Mrs. Manstey, who lives in a third floor room of a boarding house. Her husband has been dead for seventeen years, and her daughter has married and moved to California "so many years [ago]...that they had ceased to feel any need of each other's society." Mrs. Manstey is cordial to her fellow boarders, but keeps most people at a safe remove. She is, in Wharton's words, "lonely if not alone."

What Mrs. Manstey has to keep her company is the view out the back of her building and into the yards of neighboring buildings. It reads almost as if it could have been written today:

[She] looked out first upon the yard of her own dwelling, of which, however, she could get but a restricted glimpse. Still, her gaze took in the topmost boughs of the ailanthus below her window, and she knew how early each year the clump of dicentra strung its bending stalk with hearts of pink. 

But of greater interest were the yards beyond. Being for the most part attached to boarding-houses they were in a state of chronic untidiness and fluttering, on certain days of the week, with miscellaneous garments and frayed table-cloths. In spite of this Mrs. Manstey found much to admire in the long vista which she commanded. Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clotheslines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others, the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder; the broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer annoyed her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of the prospect before her. 

In the very next enclosure did not a magnolia open its hard white flowers against the watery blue of April? And was there not, a little way down the line, a fence foamed over every May be lilac waves of wistaria? Farther still, a horse-chestnut lifted its candelabra of buff and pink blossoms above broad fans of foliage; while in the opposite yard June was sweet with the breath of a neglected syringa, which persisted in growing in spite of the countless obstacles opposed to its welfare.

How many New Yorkers have stared out their windows and marveled at the views--hidden to passersby on the street--of a secret world behind the buildings?

The whole story is worth a read--it's quite short--and we're looking forward to sharing more of Edith Wharton's view of the city when Footprints in New York comes out in the spring.

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Happy Birthday, John Sloan

Today marks the 142nd anniversary of the birth of John Sloan, the great Ashcan school painter, who created vivid scenes of life in New York City. Sloan was born in 1871 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and after spending a number of years in Philadelphia, he moved to New York in 1904, settling in Greenwich Village. That same year he participated in a group show of "The Eight" at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, an exhibition that thrust him into the limelight and drew critical attention to the Ashcan school's realist art.

Sloan, like his friend George Bellows, painted life as it unfolded around him. Below are just some of his wonderful New York City scenes.

Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912, courtesy of the Addison Museum of Art.

Sloan exhibited this painting in the famous 1913 Armory Show.

Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Picture Shop Window, 1907, courtesy of the Newark Museum

The Lafayette, 1927, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Lafayette was a cafe in a hotel on University and Ninth Street where Sloan liked to hang out. Now gone, it was one of the last great literary and artistic meeting places in the Village.

Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, 1906, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

McSorley's Bar, courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Art.

See our earlier blog post about McSorley's Bar here.

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