Postcard Thursday: Walking Tour in Central Park on September 10

Join us for Walk in the Park -- Central Park, that is....

On Sunday, September 10, at 10:00 AM, join us a walking tour of the northernmost -- and often least-visited -- section of Central Park.

Some potential highlights (though the itinerary is still in flux):

• The block house from the War of 1812 (above)
• The Harlem Meer
• The memorial the "Father of Greater NYC"
• The loch
• The Conservatory

The tour will cost $20 per person for early-bird subscribers who sign up between now and Tuesday, September 5.

PLEASE NOTE: This tour involved many stairs and a certain amount of uphill climbing and uneven terrain. While not exactly a strenuous hike, this isn't the best outing for those who aren't as nimble as they used to be.

To register send an email to walknyc@gmail.com

1. Your name
2. Number of people in party
3. A cell number where we can reach the day of the tour in case of emergency

The meeting place will be emailed to you within 24 hours of your reservation.

Best wishes,
Michelle and James Nevius
www.walknyc.com | authors of "Inside the Apple" and "Footprints in New York"

Postcard Thursday: Washington Square and Jane Jacobs

Today's postcard is an aerial view of Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue. The postcard was sent in August 1928, but the image must be from a few years earlier. Notice that No. 1 Fifth Avenue, erected in 1927 (and pictured below), is missing.

One Fifth Avenue

Also notice that an asphalt road goes through the Washington Arch and continues through to the south side of the square. This was the road the Robert Moses wanted to expand in the 1950s to make the Village more car friendly and to connect uptown traffic to the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which was on the drawing board at the same time.

Robert Moses's plans for a highway through Washington Square

The road through Washington Square was blocked by Shirley Hayes and Jane Jacobs, whose 100th birthday was yesterday. As part of the birthday celebrations, James wrote a history of the rise and fall of LOMEX for Curbed.com.

You can read the piece at: http://www.curbed.com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex

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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

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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

Happy 50th Birthday to the Delacorte Theater

James Earl Jones in the inaugural production of
Merchant of Venice at the Delacorte Theater;
courtesy of the New York Public Library

On June 19, 1962, the Delacorte Theater held its first public performance--The Merchant of Venice with George C. Scott and James Earl Jones--and Shakespeare in the Park as we know it was born. (The actual first performance had been the night before; it was a benefit preview for donors and city officials.)

In 1954, Joseph Papp was granted a charter from New York State to create what was then called the "Shakespeare Workshop." In 1956, the workshop -- now dubbed the Shakespearean Workshop Theater -- began performances. These early shows were at a variety of venues, including an amphitheater on the Lower East Side on Grand Street, outdoors in Central Park near Turtle Pond (close by the current site of the Delacorte) and at Wollman Rink before Robert Moses finally agreed to Papp's request that the company be given a permanent home in the park. First, however, Papp had to sue Moses, who insisted that the Shakespearean Workshop charge admission -- at least a dollar or two -- to offset the extra costs that would be involved in hosting the plays in the park. The courts sided with Papp's desire to keep his performances free, and soon work on the Delacorte began.

Delays in the design and construction of the theater led the initial season to be pushed back from 1961 to 1962, and for the city to need an additional $150,000 in funds to complete the project. Philanthropist and publisher George Delacorte (of Dell Books), a major supporter of Papp's efforts and of the park, stepped in with the cash and the theater was named in his honor.

Playbill has a slideshow you can peruse of past productions at the theater -- or go check it out in person. This summer features a delightful As You Like It (on through June 30) followed by Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods from July 23 to August 25. Information on tickets (including "virtual tickets") can be found at the Public Theater's website.





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For more on Robert Moses, Joseph Papp, and theater in New York check out
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City







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Should Tavern on the Green Be a "Casual" Restaurant?

As reported recently by DNAinfo, the Parks Department is on the verge of soliciting proposals for a new concessionaire to run the storied restaurant in the Central Park, Tavern on the Green (after an aborted attempt two years ago to install new management).

However, a number of attendees at the recent Community Board 8 meeting objected to the park's idea that the new Tavern be a "high quality casual restaurant." The problematic word in the Parks Department's presentation was "casual," which has led some to think that the new Tavern might not be fancy enough. (Or, as Gothamist succinctly put it: "NYers Worry an Olive Garden-Type Restaurant Will Open at Tavern on the Green.")

But how fancy should Tavern on the Green actually be? When the restaurant was created by Robert Moses in 1934, he promised that it would be a place where "the general public can get what it wants."

Through the early 1930s, the upscale restaurant in the park was called the Casino (where Rumsey Playfield now stands), which Moses wanted to tear down. As we write in Inside the Apple:

Moses had two primary objections to the Casino: one was that it that it catered to the city’s wealthy residents at the expense of the majority of park users. (In an era when a cup of coffee at a Horn and Hardart Automat cost a nickel, the Casino charged 40 cents.) Secondly—and perhaps more importantly—the Casino had been a favorite haunt of disgraced Mayor Jimmy Walker.... To remove the Casino, Moses needed to find an alternate spot for an eatery. And, since public sentiment opposed building anything new in the park, Moses instead came up with a clever plan to convert the 1870 sheepfold at 65th Street (constructed by Jacob Wrey Mould) into a “popular-priced” restaurant.

Scores of workers from the Civil Works Administration began converting the old sheepfold into the restaurant in February 1934. (In true Moses fashion, the conversion was well underway before the city announced what it was doing.) As the New York Times reported, the new Tavern on the Green promised "reasonably priced table d'hote luncheon and dinner and a la carte service within reach of the average purse. There will be no cover charge. A sandwich and a glass of beer will be served at a reasonable price if a more elaborate meal is not wanted."

Though it took some time for Tavern to figure out its pricing, the restaurant soon settled on a price-fixed dinner of $1.50--not the cheapest meal in town in 1934, but well within reach of many middle-class New Yorkers. The question now is whether or not the new Tavern on the Green will return to Moses's populist roots or be more like the glitzy tourist attraction of the 1970s and 80s presided over by the late Warner LeRoy. Stay tuned.....

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Read more about New York's Robert Moses and Tavern on the Green in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

Robert Moses

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death, at age 93, of Robert Moses, probably the person with the single greatest influence on the shape of New York in the 20th century.

As we write in Inside the Apple, “There is perhaps no figure in New York City’s history more likely to set off a heated debate than Robert Moses. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about the ‘Power Broker’ (as Robert Caro called him), and he is vilified and praised in equal measure—often in the same breath.”

A short blog entry is not enough to do Moses justice, but consider some of the projects that he had a hand in during his tenure:

• ·         Astoria Park
• ·         1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs
• ·         Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
• ·         BQE
• ·         Central Park Zoo
• ·         Co-op City
• ·         Cross Bronx Expressway
• ·         East River Park
• ·         Jones Beach State Park
• ·         Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
• ·         New York Coliseum
• ·         Ocean Parkway
• ·         The Robert F. Kennedy (aka Triborough) Bridge
• ·         Shea Stadium
• ·         Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village

The list is endless and these are just a fraction of the projects that came about under his stewardship. At one point, Moses simultaneously held twelve different state and city offices, from being in charge of slum clearance to running the highways to overseeing the parks.

Of course, not every project was welcomed and many never came to fruition, such as his idea to run a Lower Manhattan Expressway across the Lower East Side and SoHo. As we note in Inside the Apple:

By the late 1960s, Robert Moses’ influence in New York was on the wane. His last big project in the city had been the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and he had retired from most of his official positions. What ended up as his last great fight was the battle of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (sometimes called LOMEX), a road that had first been proposed in 1929 and did not ultimately go down in defeat until 1969.

The purpose of the expressway was to relieve downtown traffic and connect the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges to the Holland Tunnel. By the 1940s, Moses was proposing an eight-lane elevated highway roughly following the paths of Broome and Delancey Streets across the island. To Moses and other urban planners, the area that LOMEX would traverse—not yet called “SoHo,” a moniker that would come into use in the late 1960s—was the definition of urban blight.

Had the expressway been built, a number of wonderful cast-iron structures would have been lost—indeed, the city was well on its way to tearing down SoHo in its entirety. Luckily, Jane Jacobs and the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway convinced the city’s Board of Estimate not to move forward and SoHo was saved.

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Read much more about Robert Moses's influence in

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

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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.

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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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Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.

Remembering Opening Day at the Guggenheim

In all the brouhaha surrounding the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum's plan to place a food kiosk outside the museum (a request unanimously denied by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, despite Frank Lloyd Wright's love of hot dogs), there's been little or no mention of the fact that today is the Guggenheim's 51st birthday. The museum opened on October 21, 1959, to mixed reviews. From the conception to completion the project took 16 years, but alas, Wright--who died six months before its completion--never got to enjoy the finished space.

Planning czar Robert Moses--Wright's second cousin by marriage--did not always see eye-to-eye with the famed architect. (In his opening remarks he said, "We need not debate how much of cousin Frank was genius and how much was, let us say, showmanship." In another context, he referred to his cousin as the man "regarded in Russia as our greatest builder.") But Moses made sure the Guggenheim got built. When the Department of Buildings was dragging its feet on giving the museum the proper approvals, Moses called the commissioner and told him: "I will have a building permit on my desk at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow or there will be a new building commissioner."
Many of Wright's colleagues praised the new museum. Philip Johnson called it "Mr. Wright's greatest building. New York's greatest building." Edward Durell Stone, who had worked on the Museum of Modern Art and would go on to build Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle, noted "I personally think it's a wonderful museum.... Why can't people relax and enjoy a fantastic structure instead of continually carping and criticizing."

And carp and criticize they did. The New York Mirror compared it to a "ball of mud" and an "imitation beehive that does not fit in any New York environment." Others drew comparisons to a Jello mold or a washing machine. The biggest complaint was that it would be a terrible space to show art (a critique that still plagues certain shows at the museum.)
If you are on the Upper East Side today, swing by and admire Wright's greatest New York creation and wish it a happy birthday.

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Read more about Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim Museum in

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

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Tavern on the Green to Get New Management

New York's Department of Parks has announced that next year Dean J. Poll, who currently holds the license to operate the Boathouse in Central Park, will also take over the management of Tavern on the Green.

Among the changes Poll will implement is a thinning of the landscaping at the rear of the building to open up the vistas toward Sheep Meadow. What many people don't realize is that throughout most of the park's life, Sheep Meadow's official name was "the Green." Thus, when the restaurant first opened in 1934, it made sense that it was Tavern on the Green. (Perhaps techinally in should have been Tavern near the Green, since it is cut off from its namesake by the wide swath of the ring road.)

The Green came to be nicknamed Sheep Meadow because from 1864 to 1934 it housed a flock of pedigree Southdown and Dorset sheep. The removal of the sheep in 1934 is a story we tell in Inside the Apple. There are many plausible reasons why the sheep may have left, but certainly the main one is that the Parks Department (in the person of Robert Moses) had its eye on their sheepfold, an elaborate 1870 structure designed by Jacob Wrey Mould. As soon as the sheep were out, their barn was tranformed into Tavern on the Green.

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