Postcard Thursday: Poe's Lost Home

There's a story in the newly revamped Gothamist/WNYC today about the efforts to have Walt Whitman's sole remaining New York City home landmarked.

(You can read it at http://gothamist.com/2018/07/26/walt_whitman_brooklyn_home.php)

This brings to mind the similar efforts to save Edgar Allan Poe's only Manhattan home, a townhouse at 85 Amity Street (today's West 3rd Street) in Greenwich Village. Today that same block houses the Poe Study Center, but that building isn't Poe's original home.

As we write in Footprints in New York:

The Poes lived nine places in the city, seven of them in just a two-year period.... Having published “The Raven” in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845, Poe set to work at 85 Amity Street revising the poem for The Raven and Other Poems, published that November. He also began his series “Literati of New York City” while residing at 85 Amity, and may have written the bulk of “The Cask of Amontillado” at the boardinghouse too.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century this was the only Poe home in Manhattan still standing. With that in mind, it’s logical to assume it would have merited at least some consideration by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. But in 2000, the commission declined to even hold a hearing. On one hand, this seemed ironic—back in 1969, when creating the Greenwich Village Historic District, the commissioners cited Poe as one of the literary figures whose residence made the neighborhood historically important. Yet, at that time, they had not extended the landmark district’s boundaries the one block necessary to include the Poe house. Three decades later, the commission was not going to raise NYU’s considerably powerful ire by revisiting that decision. Not everyone agreed that the house was worth saving. Kenneth Silverman, a Poe scholar employed by NYU, pointed out that the building had been so significantly altered since 1845 that Poe wouldn’t even recognize it as his own home. He had a point: The stoop had been removed, and the lower floors turned into commercial space. Arched window frames replaced the Greek Revival originals; an incongruous tiled awning jutted out between the second and third stories. 

85 Amity Street (left) and the Poe Study Center (right); courtesy of the New York Preservation Archive Project

What’s more maddening than the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision—or, more accurately, their abdication from making a decision—is what NYU did next. In an eleventh-hour move to placate the community, they agreed to rebuild the facade of Poe’s house as part of the new building, install the home’s staircase inside, and provide a room for Poe readings and events. No one was ecstatic about this, but it was better than nothing. 

Instead, what people got was worse than nothing. The scaffolding came down...in October 2003 to reveal an ersatz Poe home. Nothing had been preserved; nothing had been rebuilt. It wasn’t even in the right spot. 

“Unfortunately, there was not enough of the original bricks to use on the full facade,” an NYU associate dean told the New York Times. “What we did instead was save a portion of them, and put a panel inside the room of the original bricks.”

If what happened to Poe house happens to Walt Whitman's Brooklyn home, we may find in the future that the original structure has been torn down and some simulacrum put in its place to note the historic importance of the spot. Is this sort of commemoration useful or necessary? That's a deeper question that preservationists and historians have been grappling with for centuries.

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Want to hear more about NYC history?

Inside the Apple has recently been released for the first time as an audio book!

Visit Amazon or Audible to download today

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

In case you’ve missed this news, today marks the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire—one of the deadliest industrial fires in American history and a turning point for worker’s safety and unionization in America.

The factory was predominantly staffed with young women who lived in Little Italy and the Lower East Side, and when we are giving walking tours of those neighborhoods, our clients are sometimes surprised to discover that the factory was in Greenwich Village. So much of that neighborhood—including the Asch Building, where the fire occurred—is now dominated by NYU that it is easy to forget that the stretch of the Village on both sides of Broadway was once a vital part of New York’s garment industry.

In Inside the Apple we dedicate an entry to the fire. We note:

Long before the fire broke out, the factory was infamous for its poor labor practices. In 1909, New York’s largest job action, known as the “Uprising of the 20,000” began when workers walked off the job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For months, the majority of the city’s shirtwaist factories were crippled by the strike, but the factory owners refused to budge. Though the International Ladies Garment Workers Union brokered a settlement in 1910 that stopped short of forcing the recognition of their union, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, refused to agree to it. The factory’s workers went back to work having gained few concessions.

On the day of the fire, a Saturday, only about half of the factory’s 500 employees had come to work. Just as the afternoon shift was ending, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. Typical of garment centers of the day, the factory floor was a virtual tinderbox, with clothes, scraps of cloth, and unswept trimmings everywhere. When the fire started, the majority of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape,* but those on the ninth floor had been locked in. This was done, some speculated, to cut down on unauthorized breaks, though it is also likely that it kept union organizers off the factory floor. Soon the elevators stopped working, which meant that the only remaining exit was the fire escape. Tragically, the fire escape had been poorly installed and maintained, and when too many young women began to climb down, it collapsed beneath their weight, sending them plunging to their death. The rest of the women on the ninth floor were then faced with jumping out of windows or waiting to burn to death. Many chose the former, raining down on the assembled crowd from above. The fire department did arrive, but as their ladders reached no higher than the sixth floor, it did little to save the women. In the end, 146 women died, most of them at the scene—some were only thirteen years old.

* Blanck and Harris, the owners, were able to get up to the roof and escape from there.

A number of events are commemorating the fire and its aftermath:

·         Today at 10:00 a.m., a parade will begin at the south end of Union Square Park and wend its way to the site of the Asch Building (today called the Brown Building), where there will be speeches by the mayor and others. Marchers in the parade will carry 146 shirtwaists on poles, one to commemorate each woman who died.

·         If you are interested in where these young women lived, the Bowery Boys put together a post that maps out all of their homes, some of them in outer boroughs. Many of those places will have the names of victims inscribed in chalk on the sidewalk courtesy of Ruth Sergel and a group of volunteers; see www.streetpictures.org for more information.

·         Today at 7:00 p.m. in the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, join artists, storytellers, and others for “100 Years After: The Triangle Fire Remembered and Rethought.”

·         PBS aired a documentary on the fire earlier this month on American Experience; it is available to stream online at http://video.pbs.org/video/1817898383/.

·         HBO’s documentary, Triangle: Remembering the Fire is being shown on CNN this Saturday, March 26, at 11:00PM (EST), so that anyone with basic cable can see it.

·         NYU’s Grey Art gallery has an exhibition through July 9 entitled Art, Memory, Place, that commemorates the fire and its victims.

·         The New York Times has provided a number of interesting articles and blog entries in the past few days, including a look at how the fire shaped the lives of such public servants as Frances Perkins and an article about how the fire was one of the first big tragedies captured by photojournalists.

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Read more about the Triangle fire in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Today, March 25, marks the 98th anniversary of the tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that claimed the lives of 148 young women and ushered in an era of renewed efforts to unionize New York's garment industry and protect the lives of its workers.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

On the day of the fire, a Saturday, only about half of the factory’s 500 employees had come to work. Just as the afternoon shift was ending, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. Typical of garment centers of the day, the factory floor was a virtual tinderbox, with clothes, scraps of cloth, and unswept trimmings everywhere. When the fire started, the majority of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape, but those on the ninth floor had been locked in. This was done, some speculated, to cut down on unauthorized breaks, though it is also likely that it kept union organizers off the factory floor. Soon the elevators stopped working, which meant that the only remaining exit was the fire escape. Tragically, the fire escape had been poorly installed and maintained, and when too many young women began to climb down, it collapsed beneath their weight, sending them plunging to their death. The rest of the women on the ninth floor were then faced with jumping out of windows or waiting to burn to death. Many chose the former, raining down on the assembled crowd from above. The fire department did arrive, but as their ladders reached no higher than the sixth floor, it did little to save the women. In the end, 148 women died, most of them at the scene. Almost entirely immigrants from Little Italy and the Lower East Side, some were only thirteen years old.

Though the fire forced the Triangle's owners to abandon the factory, the building still stands at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. Then known as the Asch Building, it was renovated and reopened the next year. However, a New York Times article from 1913 noted that the building's tenants hadn't learned many lessons from the fire -- "they were, in fact, heaping its floors with scraps of clothing and flimsy material... and permitting smokers to stand near these heaps--(revealing) once more the singular carelessness of humanity."

The building was purchased by NYU in 1929 and renamed the Brown Building; today, it houses university classrooms.

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Much more about the Triangle fire and other Greenwich Village people, events, and landmarks can be found in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, which is now officially out! You can buy it from online retailers, check out whether it is carried in-store at your local Barnes & Noble or Borders, or look for it at your neighborhood independent retailer.

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