Inside the Apple: City Hall Park

Showing posts with label City Hall Park. Show all posts

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Postcard Thursday: Ode to Greater New York

One of the many gems in the digital collections of the New York Public Library is this piece of sheet music for an ode to be "sung by a chorus of 2,000 voices in the City Hall Plaza, New Year's Eve" in 1897.

That night was the last that New York City's territory consisted of Manhattan and a slim portion of the Bronx. The next morning, January 1, 1898, the city would officially consolidate into the five boroughs, with Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, and the rest of the Bronx coming into the fold.

The song begins, "Hail thee city, born to-day! / Commercial monarch by the sea," which underlines immediately the reason why the city was expanding. As New York was beginning to see its commercial status erode to cities like Chicago (then second most populous in the country), the unification of Brooklyn and Manhattan was seen as a good way to ensure the city's enduring mercantile prowess. The song's final line -- "When sister cities wed with thee / Joined in power and history" -- is a nod to Brooklyn, which Manhattan saw as having a parallel history and a natural extension of New York's territory.

Brooklynites didn't see it that way. As we write in Footprints in New York:

On December 31, 1897, an electric trolley car wended its way across the span of the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time. Employees of the trolley company made last-minute adjustments to the electric cabling and then, a few minutes before midnight, the Columbia and the Amphion—two “sumptuous” trolley cars (in the words of the New York Times)—ferried a delegation of Brooklyn dignitaries to Manhattan to celebrate New Year’s Eve. When the trolleys took them home again at the end of the party, their city was gone. At the stroke of midnight, Brooklyn had ceased to exist as an independent entity. It was now just one of five boroughs.

On the Manhattan side, a celebration thrown by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal was hampered by rain that turned to snow by midnight; still, an estimated 100,000 people came out to cheer the beginning of the new city.

In Brooklyn, things were much more somber. Mayor Frederick Wurster welcomed Seth Low and other former mayors for an “observance” at Brooklyn City Hall. Though the reception was held for pro-consolidation advocates, it can’t have been a cheery occasion. The official poem written for the festivities ends its first stanza with “You, with me, must die.”

Just a few years after five-borough consolidation, New Year's Eve celebrations moved from City Hall Plaza up to the newly minted Times Square. You can read all about the Times Tower and the annual ball drop in one of our most popular blog posts here.

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Thursday, May 12, 2016

Postcard Thursday: The Woolworth Tower

Today's postcard comes from 1919, just six years after the completion of the Woolworth Building. As the front of this unusual card notes it was "the tallest and most beautiful office building in the world."

As we write in Inside the Apple:

Frank W. Woolworth, the inventor of the dime store in 1878 and the most revolutionary retailer in America since A.T. Stewart, had become rich off a simple notion: low prices and high volume. Not only was everything at Woolworth’s priced at either five or ten cents, all the merchandise was on display. In an era when store clerks normally had to fetch items from the back, the ability to browse store shelves gave buyers greater power over their selections. And, as Woolworth soon realized, it made them purchase more. In 1910, he added the lunch counter to a store in Manhattan—another tool to keep shoppers in the store longer and by 1911, when the Woolworth Corporation was founded, Frank Woolworth was worth millions.

That same year, the company hired Cass Gilbert to build its new corporate headquarters on Broadway. Gilbert, who had just six years earlier finished his Beaux Arts masterpiece, the U.S. Custom House, gracefully transitioned into high-rise construction. He was one of the first New York architects to embrace the idea that tall buildings should actually look tall, and used a variety of techniques to draw the viewer’s eye from the decorated street-level entrances to the soaring tower. The window bays are separated by vertical piers that rise, almost uninterrupted, from the base to the spire. The building is faced in terra cotta that lightens toward the top of the building, emphasizing its height....

Gilbert’s use of neo-Gothic tracery (sometimes referred to as “wedding cake” Gothic) gives the building a medieval feel and, indeed, led Brooklyn minister S. Parkes Cadman to dub it “the Cathedral of Commerce” at its opening gala. Cadman was not only making a commentary on its architectural style but on the fact that in the battle between God and Mammon, Mammon appeared to be winning....

In the end, Woolworth paid about $13.5 million to build the tower out of his own deep pockets.... He was one of the first to realize the sheer publicity value of building a noteworthy skyscraper, from using its image in advertising to having postcards sent around the world showing off his creation. As with all skyscrapers claiming the title of tallest in the world, the Woolworth tower had an observation deck that drew in over a quarter million people a year until it was displaced by the Chrysler Building in 1930....(Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the government closed the observatory atop the Woolworth Building for fear that the vantage it gave of New York harbor was too strategically important. Later in the war, the copper cladding on the Woolworth’s roof was removed and melted down for the war effort; today, the building is painted green instead.)

Today, the tower of the Woolworth Building is in the final stages of being converted into condos; the observation deck is part of the $110-million penthouse, but it's unclear if it will be accessible.

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REMINDER!

RESERVATIONS ARE NOW OPEN

for our 3rd Annual Alexander Hamilton Memorial Day Weekend Walk

Read all about it and reserve at

http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2016/05/3rd-annual-alexander-hamilton-memorial.html

****

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Postcard Thursday: Civic Virtue

Back in 2011, we wrote a blog post pondering the fate of Frederick MacMonnies's sculpture "Civic Virtue," which is the subject of today's postcard. For once, the story has a happy ending.

Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) is best remembered today for his statue of Nathan Hale that still stands in City Hall Park,* but at the end of his own lifetime, he was better known for the controversy surrounding "Civic Virtue," which essentially ruined his public career.

The statue’s story begins in 1894 with the death of Angelina Crane, an eccentric, rich widow who lived in the Hotel Brunswick on Madison Square. In her will, Mrs. Crane left $5 to her daughter (who had treated her in “a most undutiful and unnatural manner”), a few thousand dollars to a handful of charities, and the bulk of the money—upward of $50,000—to the City of New York to erect a drinking fountain in her honor.

After a round of lawsuits, in which Mrs. Crane’s daughter was unable to prove that her mother was insane, the city began the process of creating a statue to fulfill Mrs. Crane’s bequest. In 1909, Mayor George “Max” McClellan hand-picked MacMonnies to create the sculpture. (MacMonnies had recently completed a statue of the mayor’s father, Civil War General George B. McClellan, in Washington, DC.) It took MacMonnies five years to create the preliminary designs, which were for a massive work, 57-feet tall, which depicted Virtue (a large male figure) vanquishing Vice (a supine female). The Parks Commissioner and the city’s Art Commission hemmed and hawed over the piece: it was too big; it didn’t take advantage of its proposed location in City Hall Park; it was too architectural for MacMonnies to execute properly. The city told MacMonnies to go back to the drawing board and convinced him to allow architect Thomas Hastings to help him with the new plan. Somewhere along the way, the idea that this be a "drinking fountain" (as stipulated in Angelina Crane's bequest) seems to have been dropped.

In 1919, MacMonnies’s revised (and much smaller) "Civic Virtue" was approved and the finished work was unveiled in 1922. In the new work, MacMonnies continued to represent Virtue as a club-wielding man, while Vice was now depicted as two female women being trampled beneath Virtue’s feet. New Yorkers were immediately up in arms. Virtue was instantly nicknamed “The Rough Guy” in the press and women complained that MacMonnies was unfairly vilifying their sex. The statue stirred up so much public debate that the city held a public hearing on its propriety. At the hearing, Elizabeth King Black of the National Women’s Party declared: “Men have their feet on women's necks, and the sooner women realize it the better!” Popular Mechanics reported the reactions of passersby: "It ain't art to have a guy stepping on a girl's neck that way"; "Huh, those women represent vice—the man doesn't. That's why the women are kicking about it."

MacMonnies didn't help himself by wading into the fray. "God Almighty made men strong and women beautiful," he told the New York Times. "The female form is used to suggest grace and beauty, being combined with the form of the sea-monster to to suggest treachery and guile....when we wish to symbolize something tempting we use the woman's form." MacMonnies also chided people for misreading the statue, pointing out that Virtue's feet stood on two rocks—not on the two women—and that if women didn't understand their own anatomy that wasn't really his fault.

Despite the bad press and poor public reception, there were no immediate plans to do anything about MacMonnies's work. However, by the early 1930s, the city’s newly elected mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and his Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, had began to publicly discuss moving the piece. In 1941, the statue was removed from its original basin (which was destroyed) and relocated to a spot near Queens Borough Hall.

In 2012, a secret (or, maybe, not-so-secret) plan was hatched to move the deteriorating statue from Queens to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where it arrived at the end of that year. The statue can now be seen at the intersection of Jasmine and Garland Avenues in Section C of the cemetery.

* The Nathan Hale statue was put in the park to commemorate the spot where he supposedly regretted having but one life to give for his country. Historians now agree that Hale was hanged elsewhere.

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Read our full chapter on Edgar Allan Poe in NYC in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,

you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Temperature's Rising....

As temperatures rise and cooling centers open around the city today, it’s good to remember how wonderful air conditioners are. Our predecessors have weathered some terrible heat waves in New York.

The hottest June day on record is in some dispute, but June 29, 1934, June 27, 1966, and June 25, 1952, are each contenders, with the mercury perhaps reaching 101 degrees. The New York Times reported in 1934 that the official temperature reached 97 degrees (101 in Central Park, which was not then the official reading) and that temperatures soared to 137 degrees in the full sun in the park. To gain relief from the scorching heat, children frolicked in city fountains (including Civic Virtue, then still in front of City Hall), and perhaps as many as 8,000 people brought blankets to Coney Island to sleep at the beach.

Back in the 19th century, stifling heat waves were less frequent—but certainly more deadly. On September 7, 1881, the temperature reached 101 degrees and the Times wrote: “Sept. 7, 1881, will long be remembered, not merely as the hottest day of the year, but as one of the hottest of the century.” The streets of the city were deserted except for those forced out in the heat, which unfortunately included the city’s many horses, some of whom died of heat stroke as they worked. The only crowds to be found were those “crowded all day long around the bulletin boards giving the news from the bedside of President Garfield.” (Garfield had been shot July 2nd and clung to life until September 19, when he finally succumbed to the assassin’s bullet.)

By far the worst heat wave to strike the city came in August 1896, when over 1,300 people died in the city, many of them stifled to death in tenement apartments that since 1879 were supposed to allow access to light and air, but many of which did not. As Edward Kohn points out in Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, the heat wave was a test for Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt and an important moment in cementing his progressive credentials. Unlike in 1934, no one flocked to the beach during this heat wave: there was a ban on the public sleeping in public parks, and so many people crammed on to the roofs of their tenements, hoping to escape the brutal, stagnant temperatures. Among Roosevelt’s attempts to mitigate the disaster included hosing down the streets and handing out free ice. Alas, much of Roosevelt’s good work came too late: the city only began to address the heat wave in a coordinated way on its tenth—and last—day.

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Read more about Teddy Roosevelt--NYC's only homegrown president--in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The Fate of Frederick MacMonnies's "Civic Virtue"

Yesterday, the Daily News—in a column titled “The Eyesore Next Door”—examined Frederick MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue, which is slowly disintegrating in Kew Gardens, Queens. Though the article mentions that the work once graced City Hall Park in Manhattan, it didn’t delve into the fascinating details of this work by one of New York’s great Beaux-Arts sculptors.

Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) is best remembered today for his statue of Nathan Hale that still stands in City Hall Park,* but at the end of his own lifetime, he was better known for the controversy surrounding Civic Virtue, which essentially ruined his public career.

The statue’s story begins in 1894 with the death of Angelina Crane, an eccentric, rich widow who lived in the Hotel Brunswick on Madison Square. In her will, Mrs. Crane left $5 to her daughter (who had treated her in “a most undutiful and unnatural manner”), a few thousand dollars to a handful of charities, and the bulk of the money—upward of $50,000—to the City of New York to erect a drinking fountain in her honor.

After a round of lawsuits, in which Mrs. Crane’s daughter was unable to prove that her mother was insane, the city began the process of creating a statue to fulfill Mrs. Crane’s bequest. In 1909, Mayor George “Max” McClellan hand-picked MacMonnies to create the sculpture. (MacMonnies had recently completed a statue of the mayor’s father, Civil War General George B. McClellan, in Washington, DC.) It took MacMonnies five years to create the preliminary designs, which were for a massive work, 57-feet tall, which depicted Virtue (a large male figure) vanquishing Vice (a supine female). The Parks Commissioner and the city’s Art Commission hemmed and hawed over the piece: it was too big; it didn’t take advantage of its proposed location in City Hall Park; it was too architectural for MacMonnies to execute properly. The city told MacMonnies to go back to the drawing board and convinced him to allow architect Thomas Hastings to help him with the new plan. Somewhere along the way, the idea that this be a "drinking fountain" (as stipulated in Angelina Crane's bequest) seems to have been dropped.

In 1919, MacMonnies’s revised (and much smaller) Civic Virtue was approved and the finished work was unveiled in 1922. In the new work, MacMonnies continued to represent Virtue as a club-wielding man, while Vice was now depicted as two female women being trampled beneath Virtue’s feet. New Yorkers were immediately up in arms. Virtue was instantly nicknamed “The Rough Guy” in the press and women complained that MacMonnies was unfairly vilifying their sex. The statue stirred up so much public debate that the city held a public hearing on its propriety. At the hearing, Elizabeth King Black of the National Women’s Party declared: “Men have their feet on women's necks, and the sooner women realize it the better!” Popular Mechanics reported the reactions of passersby: "It ain't art to have a guy stepping on a girl's neck that way"; "Huh, those women represent vice--the man doesn't. That's why the women are kicking about it."

MacMonnies didn't help himself by wading into the fray. "God Almighty made men strong and women beautiful," he told the New York Times. "The female form is used to suggest grace and beauty, being combined with the form of the sea-monster to to suggest treachery and guile....when we wish to symbolize something tempting we use the woman's form." MacMonnies also chided people for misreading the statue, pointing out that Virtue's feet stood on two rocks--not on the two women--and that if women didn't understand their own anatomy that wasn't really his fault.

Despite the bad press and poor public reception, there were no immediate plans to do anything about MacMonnies's work. However, by the early 1930s, the city’s newly elected mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and his Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, had began to publically discuss moving the piece. In 1941, the statue was removed from its original basin (which was destroyed) and relocated to a spot near Queens Borough Hall, where it stands to this day. Though MacMonnies defended the work throughout his life, it was his last major public commission in New York and signaled the beginning of the end of his career.

For good pictures of Civic Virtue as it looks today, visit www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com. And if you are interested in the fate of the statue, there's a Facebook group, "Restore Civic Virtue."

* The Nathan Hale statue was put in the park to commemorate the spot
where he supposedly regretted having but one life to give for his country.
Historians now agree that Hale was hanged elsewhere.