Postcard Thursday: The Year at Curbed

The Elevated Railway near Morningside Park

'Tis the season for year-end wrap-ups and "Best of 2018" lists.

James is pleased to have been awarded two slots in Curbed New York's list of  the "Thirteen Best Longreads of 2018" for his history of Co-op City in the Bronx and his look back at the 150th anniversary of the first elevated railway to be erected in the city.

If you aren't already a reader of Curbed NY, it is a great resource for journalism on architecture, urbanism, transportation, and more. The other stories in the "best of" list include Karrie Jacobs's trek to La Guardia airport on foot, Nathan Kensinger's photo essays about Canal Street and Long Island City, and a first-hand look at "glamping" on Governors Island.

Check out the entire list at https://ny.curbed.com/2018/12/19/18146998/best-longreads-new-york-city-history-architecture-2018.

James had a number of other pieces published by Curbed NY this year, including

• Long Island City's Forgotten History
• How Wall Street became Wall Street
• When Trinity Ruled Lower Manhattan
• A Walking Tour of 1909 New York
• A "Futuristic Vision for Harlem"

Thank you for your support this year. We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season!

Michelle and James Nevius

If you are looking for a great gifts this holiday season, Inside the Apple and Footprints in New York look great on anyone's shelves!

 

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

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Jackson Heights

This week, James had a story published by Curbed on the history and development of Jackson Heights, Queens. The neighborhood is modeled on the "Garden City" ideal first put forward by English thinker Ebenezer Howard.

Read the story at http://ny.curbed.com/2017/4/19/15328342/jackson-heights-queens-history.

* * * *

Read more about NYC history in

 

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

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday; PS 13 in Queens and Antonin Scalia

courtesy of the Supreme Court / New York Magazine

This class picture from May 1947 shows students at PS 13 in Queens. The boy whose face is circled in red is Antonin Scalia, who passed away this past weekend just a month shy of his 80th birthday. Scalia would, of course, grow up to be a conservative member of the Supreme Court and his death in an election year has caused great speculation as to what President Obama and the Senate will now do.

James moonlights as a political commentator at The Guardian, where he comments on the intersection of history and politics. Yesterday, he compared the current situation to two instances in the 19th century when justices had died during election years. You can read the story at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/17/republicans-block-supreme-court-nominations-history-backfires.

* * * *

Read more about NYC history in

 

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

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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.

* * * *

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.

Postcard Thursday: 1939 World's Fair

At some point, we will examine the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 in greater depth. Today, let's just enjoy this picture of the Electrical Products Building, which housed, among other things, the exhibits from Remington who introduced the electric ("dry") shaver at the fair that year.

courtesy of http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/

The building was designed by Walker & Gillette, whose work in New York City includes the Fuller Building on 57th Street and the Jacob Riis Houses, a public housing project on the East River that we talk about in Footprints in New York.

Speaking of which....

Explore more NYC history 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.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.

Born Today: Judy Holliday

Word came down yesterday that the Broadway revival of Born Yesterday is closing next week. The play's Tony-nominated star, Nina Arianda, has been earning great reviews—and favorable comparisons to Judy Holliday, who originated the role in 1946. That spurred us to read about Holliday and, lo and behold, it turns out today would have been her 90th birthday.

Holliday was born on June 21, 1921, in Sunnyside, Queens. Her birth name was Judith Tuvim—Tuvim is a variant of the Yiddish word for holiday. She attended Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side (a couple of years ahead of Lauren Bacall) and got her first job in show business working the switchboard at Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater.

Holliday’s first Broadway role was Alice in Kiss Them For Me in 1945. But her big break came in Born Yesterday—and it almost didn’t happen. The role of Billie Dawn had been written by Garson Kanin for his friend Jean Arthur. Arthur, however, was reluctant to take the part and during out-of-town tryouts in New Haven and Boston, Kanin was constantly rewriting the play to accommodate her needs—and to answer the critics, who were lukewarm, both in their response to Arthur and to the play.

When Arthur sat out a string of performances in Boston due to "ill health," Kanin began looking around for a replacement and found Holliday, who’d been recommended on the strength of her role in Kiss Them For Me. Kanin hired her to replace Arthur—but on the condition that she could learn the part in four days for the opening in Philadelphia. She did and it made her a star.

Holliday played Billie Dawn for 1,200 performances on Broadway and then reprised the role in the 1950 film version, winning both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. The 1950s were rocky for Holliday: she was investigated for alleged Communism, and though cleared by the Senate committee, she found less work. In 1956, she returned to Broadway, winning a Tony for her role in Comden and Green’s Bells are Ringing.

Starting in 1953, Holliday lived at the venerable Dakota Apartments on Central Park West. She died on June 7, 1965, of breast cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Read more about "The Great White Way" in

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

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.
Or, to subscribe via email, follow this link.

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.

* * *

Read more about City Hall Park
(and take a self-guided walking tour of the area) in

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

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Or, to subscribe via email, follow this link.
Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.

Area Code Blues

Norman Mailer called it "Probably the worst news to hit Brooklyn since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles." No, he wasn't back from the dead to pronounce judgment on the new Nets arena -- he was talking about the 718 area code, which was introduced 25 years ago.

When area codes were first established in 1947, all of New York was given 212. Due to its large population, the city was assigned the area code that was considered easiest to dial on a rotary telephone. However, by the early 1980s, it was becoming clear to Public Service Commission that New York's continued growth would soon create the need for a new area code. (Not only was the population rising, fax machines were becoming affordable for the first time and the country's first 1G cell phone network had just been established.)

The commission decided to allow Manhattan and the Bronx to retain the 212 area code, assigning 718 to Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Public reaction was swift and furious. Businesses complained about the costs of reprinting stationery and letterhead; residents kvetched about being pushed further into the realm of the "outer boroughs." As Brooklyn College's president, Robert Hess, remarked to the New York Times: "It's a giant step backwards. For 80-odd years we've been striving to make New York a single city out of the five boroughs. To solve a problem in New York where there are not enough lines by essentially evicting the outer boroughs is really an affront."

Today, of course, 718 seems old fashioned. In 1992, the Bronx (and the Marble Hill section of Manhattan) joined the other boroughs by switching to 718; that was the same year that the 917 area code was added to Manhattan. (Fun fact: originally, 917 was used more for beepers and pagers than for cell phones.) Area codes 646 and 347 were added in 1999 to further lighten to load, but there still aren’t enough numbers -- area code 929 will be introduced in early 2011 to provide more service in the outer boroughs.

* * *

Read more about New York's role in the creation of the telephone
in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.
Or, to subscribe via email, follow this link.
Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.