Photo Thursday: Hans Haacke and the East Village

Installation view of America Is Hard to See (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 1— September 27, 2015): Hans Haacke, Shapolsky, et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1 1971, 1971, (2007.148a-gg). Photography by Ronald Amstutz.

In 1971, conceptual artist Hans Haacke produced one of his most enduring works, Shapolsky, et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1 1971, a visual critique of Manhattan slumlord Harry Shapolsky.

This summer, James decided to track down the buildings Haacke had photographed to see how the East Village (the main area on which he focused) had changed in the past four decades. The result is "The Artist and the Slumlord: A Photographer's 1970s Quest to Unmask an NYC Real Estate Family," an essay for Curbed's national site that compares buildings in the neighborhood then and now.

538-40 East 11th Street today. Photo by Will Femia.

 Read the full story at http://curbed.com/archives/2015/09/02/hans-haacke-photography-slumlord.php

We'd love to know your thoughts! Comment on the story itself or here on the blog.

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

Available from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

General Slocum Disaster: June 15, 1904

One hundred and seven years ago, New York suffered the greatest tragedy in its history (up to that time), the sinking of the ship General Slocum in the East River.

We wrote about the ship in Inside the Apple and on our blog two years ago: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/06/general-slocum-disaster.html

RIP Tony Rosenthal

EV Grieve just alerted us to the fact that sculptor Tony Rosenthal passed away last week at the age of 94.

Rosenthal is best known as the artist behind the rotating Astor Place Cube (officially, The Alamo -- so called because his wife thought it was a good name for an impenatrable object).

There are many other places in the city to view Rosenthal's public art, including:

• 5 in 1, a tribute to the five boroughs of New York City, in One Police Plaza behind the Municipal Building;
• Rondo at the New York Public Library's branch at 127 East 58th Street;
• Hammarskjold at FIT (27th Street and Seventh Avenue);
• SteelPark at 401 East 80th Street.

Also, according to the artist's website, a temporary exhibition is currently on view in the Ralph Lauren flagship store at 72nd Street and Madison.

Another interesting note: the Astor Place Alamo -- which was originally installed temporarily as part of a citywide "Sculpture in Environment" show -- is not one of a kind. Examples of Rosenthal's cube sculptures can be found in private and public collections, including Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park in Hamilton, Ohio, and at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor (where the piece is called Endover).

You can also read Tony Rosenthal's obituary in the New York Times.

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The General Slocum disaster

Today (June 15, 2009) marks the 105th anniversary of the sinking of the General Slocum, a steamship that had been hired by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kleindeutschland ("Little Germany") to take its parishioners on their annual Sunday School picnic.

(Though it was a Sunday School outing, it did not take place on a Sunday, as is sometimes erroneously reported; June 15th was a Wednesday.)

As we write in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City:

The...boat carried families from just about every block of the area surrounding Tompkins Square Park, the heart of the German neighborhood. The boat left from the pier at East Third Street around 9:30 in the morning and trouble developed almost immediately. A spark, probably from a stove, set the stern on fire; as the ship steamed up the East River, observers on either bank could see smoke and flames billowing from the vessel. Captain William Van Shaick could have headed for Manhattan, the Bronx, or Queens. Instead, he decided to make for North Brother Island, which lies in the East River near the entrance to the Long Island Sound. Captain Van Schaick, who survived the tragedy, later said that he’d hoped in doing this to keep the fire from spreading, but in fact he was piloting into a steady wind and the blaze quickly got out of control, enveloping the ship’s three decks, which then collapsed. Van Schaick may have also picked North Brother Island because of the hospital there (where Typhoid Mary would later spend the last two decades of her life). However, by the time the ship ran aground, the hospital staff could do little to help: most of the passengers had already drowned or burned to death.

Compounding the tragedy was the ship’s utter disregard for safety standards. Life preservers that were shoddily constructed in the first place had not been replaced in years. Mothers, hoping to save their children, bundled them into life preservers and threw them over the side only to watch them drown as the defective floatation devices became instantly water-logged and sank. The ship’s lifeboats could not be detached from the vessel and the crew had no instruction on how to handle a fire. Indeed, one of the only things Captain Van Schaik was ever punished for was lack of safety preparedness. (The jury refused to find him guilty of manslaughter.)

The official death toll stands at 1,021 though many--including Ed O'Donnell in Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum--calculate that the loss of life was even higher.

A small monument, which looks like a Greek funeral stele, stands in Tompkins Square Park to commemorate the children who lost their lives that day. But that is Kleindeutschland's only real marker to the event that changed that neighborhood--and New York--forever.

The event does make a few appearances in popular culture; perhaps most famously, it is mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses, which takes place entirely over the course of the next day, June 16, 1904. The sinking of the General Slocum is recreated in the film Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell (the latter who would go on to star in the Thin Man films) and it even inspired an unfinished classical piece by American composer Charles Ives.

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Much more about the General Slocum tragedy and New York's German community in the East Village can be found in Inside the Apple, including a walking tour of important German-American sites.

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February 27, 1860: Lincoln at Cooper Union

A lot of our posts recently seem to have focused on the East Village and we return there again today to celebrate the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s “Right Makes Might” speech at Cooper Union.

Lincoln had been invited to address the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, but the parish—led by noted abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher*—realized that the crowd would be too large for their Orange Street home and the speech was rebooked for the Great Hall at the Cooper Union. The Great Hall had opened only two years earlier and was one of the largest public gathering spots in the city.

In the speech, which historian Harold Holzer persuasively argues made Lincoln president, the “noted political exhorter and prairie orator” (as the New York Times called him the next day) forcefully laid out his case for barring the spread of slavery into the territories. Afterwards, the New York Tribune wrote: “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”

It was a busy day for Lincoln. In addition to the speech, he had his photograph taken by Mathew Brady. Both the speech and the photograph were distributed across the country, significantly raising Lincoln’s profile. According to McSorley’s lore, Peter Cooper brought Lincoln around for beer after the speech. This is unlikely. Instead, Lincoln went to the Athenaeum Club with some members of the Young Men's Central Republican Union for dinner.

The complete text of Lincoln’s speech can be read at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm.

* We’ll visit the Plymouth Church in a future post.

For more about Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union, and the city during the Civil War, be sure to pick up a copy of our book Inside the Apple.

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Happy Birthday, McSorley's

I was sitting in mcsorley's. outside it was New York and beautifully snowing.

Inside snug and evil.

—ee cummings

Photo by DoctorWho on flickr.

McSorley’s, the venerable old Irish saloon on East 7th Street, gets a little older today as it turns 155.

Over the years there has been great debate as to whether McSorley’s should hold the title of New York’s oldest bar. Historian Richard McDermott has tenaciously searched out insurance maps and municipal tax registers that push the date of McSorley’s forward to 1862. The bar, in answer, points to a photograph from February 17, 1904, of founder John McSorley celebrating the tavern’s 50th birthday. But more important than the actual date is the fact that McSorley’s is a living testament to its own past. The bar still only serves one thing—its own ale—and has on the walls an eclectic assortment of memorabilia from the famous John Wilkes Booth wanted poster to newspaper headlines detailing the bar’s losing battle in 1970 to keep women out. (The bar’s former motto, “Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies,” was replaced with “Be Good or Be Gone.”)

If you are in the East Village, head over for a round. If you are somewhere else raise a glass—or, to be historically accurate, two half-pint glasses—to John McSorley and his tavern.

For more about the saloon, one good place to start is Joseph Mitchell’s classic, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.

We also have a chapter on McSorley’s—as well as entries on other venerable drinking establishments—in Inside the Apple.

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Prohibition Repealed! (75 Years Ago)

Today (December 5, 2008) marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition.

The 18th amendment was never popular in New York City, but it surprised even the wettest foes of Prohibition that the city voted in May 1933 by an overwhelming ratio of 44 to 1 in favor of repeal. When Utah became the 36th State to ratify repeal in November of that year, Congress ordered the law to expire at 2:00 p.m. on December 5. (Just to foil morning drinkers, we suppose.)

So, if you are so inclinded, go out a raise a glass today. The city's best-known speakeasy, Chumley's on Bedford Street, is still undergoing renovations from its well-publicized chimney collapse. But perhaps pay a visit to McSorley's Old Ale House in the East Village. Not only is it the city's oldest pub (having opened in 1854 -- or, if you believe the nay-sayers, as late as 1862), it did not close down during Prohibition. They simply moved the brewing operations to the basement and continued to serve their regular brew, calling it "near beer" (wink, wink).

McSorley's only serves its own brew--in light and dark varieties--so don't go in looking for a scotch on the rocks. For years its motto was "Good beer, raw onions, and no ladies." However, since 1970, it has allowed women to patronize the establishment and its new motto is "Be good or be gone."

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Much more about the "noble experiment," Chumley's, McSorley's, and other city bars can be found, as always, in Inside the Apple.

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