"East Side Stories" at the Metropolitan Playhouse

As you know, we're big fans of the Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village, where we've spoken a couple of times in conjunction with main stage productions. In addition to the revivals that are the mainstay of the Metropolitan's season, each year they also produce an East Village theater festival, showcasing short new works about the East Village and the Lower East Side.

A few nights ago, we were able to see "Pioneers," one of four nights in this year's festival, and it was great. Michael Bettencourt's "The Origins of Zoos" pits birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger against Bronx Zoo founder Madison Grant in a Lower East Side coffee house. "The Invention of the Living Room," by Andrew R. Heinze imagines the birth of Levittown in a Lower East Side tenement. "Occupy Avenue A" (Josh Gulotta) brings the conversation into the present, and "Delicacy" (Toni Schlesinger) moves it into the world of Dreams -- and the Second Avenue Deli. If the other three nights are as good as this one, you're in for a treat no matter which night you go.

Tickets and more information at: http://www.metropolitanplayhouse.org/EVTF2013.

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Find out more about the Lower East Side and East Village in
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Reminder: West Chelsea Walking Tour on Sunday

Today, Tuesday, April 23, is the last day to sign up at the $15 price. 

All reservations from tomorrow onward are $20 per person

Join us Sunday, April 28, at 2:00pm, for an excursion through historic West Chelsea. Our walk encompasses everything from early 19th-century houses to industrial buildings and factories (including the birthplace of the Oreo). We'll see the General Theological Seminary, built on the apple orchard of Clement Clarke Moore, who was not only the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas('Twas the Night Before Christmas), but also a major real estate developer in early New York. We'll also talk about the High Line, which is either a triumph of urban renewal or the last nail in the coffin of the real Lower West Side. (The tour ends near the High Line for those who want to stroll it afterwards.)

To reserve:
Email info@insidetheapple.net with your

* Name
* Number of people in your party
* A cell phone where we can reach you before the tour in case of any changes

The meeting place for the tour will be emailed to you as your confirmation. (We try to get confirmations out in about 24 hours.) Reservations will be taken on a first-come, first served basis and in order for everyone to see and hear, we are going to cap the number of people who can attend, so do reserve as soon as you can.

You can pay by cash only at the start of the tour.

If you cannot make this date and time, the tour is, of course, available for private bookings. Email us and we'll set something up for you & your group.

Copies of Inside the Apple will be available for sale and signing.

Hope to see you there!

The Randel Farm Maps

One of the previously unsung heroes of nineteenth century New York--whose praises are actually being sung a bit more often these days--is John Randel, Jr. As chief surveyor of the 1811 Commissioners' Plan that established the Manhattan street grid, Randel perhaps had a greater effect on our day-to-day life in the city than any of his contemporaries. For the first time, Randel has been the subject of a major biography, The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor, which has just recently been published.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

With the population rapidly increasing and without any plan for regulating property sales and population growth, it seemed very possible that the city would simply collapse underneath its own weight, with too many people crammed into the area of the city below Chambers Street but not enough food, water, or sanitation to go around. The grid plan was overseen by a commission headed by Gouverneur Morris, the eminent politician who’d written the preamble to the Constitution. The survey itself was carried out by John Randel, Jr.; he and his team walked out every block of the city from Houston Street to 155th Street in Harlem, charting over 2,000 city blocks in all. It was enough room, as was noted at the time, “for a greater population than is collected at any spot this side of China.”

Though Randel finished his first survey in 1810, he then produced an even more important work--a detailed atlas of the island of Manhattan, showing both the existing farms and the new, superimposed grid. This atlas, known as the Randel Farm Maps, now resides in the office of the Manhattan Borough President.

In conjunction with the exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of the Manhattan, 1811-2011 at the Museum of the City of New York in 2011, the entire atlas was digitized and the maps "stitched" together so that anyone with a computer and some time to kill can examine Randel's marvelous work in detail. The maps are online at http://www.mcny.org/sidebars/randel-farm-maps-online.html and it really is a great way to time travel back to the early nineteenth century. Most recently, we've been consulting the maps in preparation for our new West Chelsea Walking Tour, which you can participate in on Sunday, April 28.

* * * *

Find out more about John Randel, Jr., and the 1811 grid in
our book:

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

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West Chelsea Walking Tour: Sunday, April 28, at 2:00 pm

Walking Tour West Chelsea

Reservations made on or before Tuesday, April 23: $15 per person

Reservations made on Wednesday, April 24 or later: $20 per person

To reserve email info@insidetheapple.net

Join us Sunday, April 28, at 2:00pm, for an excursion through historic West Chelsea. Our walk encompasses everything from early 19th-century houses to industrial buildings and factories (including the birthplace of the Oreo). We'll see the General Theological Seminary, built on the apple orchard of Clement Clarke Moore, who was not only the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas('Twas the Night Before Christmas), but also a major real estate developer in early New York. We'll also talk about the High Line, which is either a triumph of urban renewal or the last nail in the coffin of the real Lower West Side. (The tour ends near the High Line for those who want to stroll it afterwards.)

To reserve:
Email info@insidetheapple.net with your

* Name

* Number of people in your party
* A cell phone where we can reach you before the tour in case of any changes

The meeting place for the tour will be emailed to you as your confirmation. (We try to get confirmations out in about 24 hours.) Reservations will be taken on a first-come, first served basis and in order for everyone to see and hear, we are going to cap the number of people who can attend, so do reserve as soon as you can.

You can pay by cash only at the start of the tour.

If you cannot make this date and time, the tour is, of course, available for private bookings. Email us and we'll set something up for you & your group.

Copies of Inside the Apple will be available for sale and signing.

Hope to see you there!

Why Not Use the "L"?

Reginald Marsh, Why Not Use the “L”?, 1930. Egg tempera on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase  31.293  © 2010 Estate of Reginald Marsh / Art Students League, New York / Artists Rights Society, New York

A few nights ago, we were walking through the Whitney Museum's recently re-installed top floor, "American Legends: From Calder to O'Keeffe," when Reginald Marsh's 1930 painting "Why Not Use the 'L'?" caught our eye. If you've read Inside the Apple, you know that we're fans of Marsh's work in the US Custom House on Bowling Green.

In this work, Marsh captures a slice of the city that's now gone: riders on the elevated train. The train depicted appears to be the Third Avenue "L" (or, sometimes, "El"), but transportation aficionados should chime in if we are wrong about that. As in many of Marsh's paintings, there is a gauzy quality to the canvas, though a few things are in sharp focus. Above the sleeping man's head is a sign that gives the painting its title: "The subway is fast, certainly. But the open-air elevated gets you there quickly, too! And with more comfort. Why not use the 'L'?" Below the man's feet is a newspaper, the headline of which trumpets, "Did Sex Urge Explain Judge Crater's Disappearance?"

Judge Joseph Force Crater disappeared on August 6, 1930. Having had dinner with his mistress and a friend on Forty-fifth Street, he hailed a taxi, never to be seen again. At first, he wasn't even reported missing--the courts were in recess and he had been frequently commuting back and forth to his summer house in Maine. But when he didn't show up for work on August 25, the police were called in; the disappearance went public in early September and consumed the New York headlines for weeks. Had he been murdered? Kidnapped? Run off to a tropical island with a woman? It remains one of the great unsolved cases in New York history and anchors Marsh's painting in a very specific moment in time.

A few years after this canvas was painted, the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts hired Marsh to complete sixteen murals in the rotunda of the Custom House. As we write in Inside the Apple:

"[His] murals depict the dominance of American shipping; the eight larger panels show the stages of a steamship's entrance into New York harbor, from its approach to the Narrows to its discharge of passengers and cargo. In one panel, the ship pauses to take on the press so that they can interview an arriving celebrity--Greta Garbo.... Just before work was to begin in September 1937, Marsh received world that Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. maritime commissioner, objected to the fact two prominent ships in the panorama were foreign vessels--the Queen Mary and the Normandie. Kennedy wrote that Marsh should instead depict 'the new passenger liner that we will probably commence building.'"

Marsh ignored Kennedy. Supposedly the word "Normandie" is smudged on the bow of that vessel, but it is still perfectly legible. The old Custom House is now the Museum of the American Indian and is open to the public free of charge so that you can check out Marsh's work yourself. The Whitney Museum is pay-what-you-wish on Friday nights. There are other Marsh works in the "American Legends" installation, as well as, of course, some of the finest works of American art in any New York collection.

* * * *

Find out more about Reginald Marsh in
our book:

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

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Last Chance: Designing Tomorrow and Currier and Ives at the Museum of the City of New York

If you are looking for something New York-centric to do this Easter weekend, you could take a tour with us -- we still have a few time slots open. But if that's not on your agenda, how about a couple of show at the Museum of the City of New York?

Courtesy of http://designingtomorrow1939.tumblr.com/

Designing Tomorrow examines the six World's Fairs held in America in the 1930s, with a particular focus on the 1939-40 fair at Flushing Meadows in New York. Through artifacts, newsreel footage, and advertisements, this show deftly illustrates the hope for the future that these fairs predicted even in the midst of the Great Depression. The show is open only through Sunday, March 31, so it's now or never.

courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Also on at the museum is Currier & Ives and Other Winter Tales, which draws on the museum's excellent collection of Currier & Ives prints, many of them familiar New York scenes. This show was supposed to close on March 17, but has been extended through the weekend. (Or not -- we just saw it and know it was still up and Time Out has it listed as ending 3/31. But when we called the museum staff, they told us it was no longer up, even though we'd just been there and seen it.)

The Museum of the City of New York is located at 1220 Fifth Avenue and is always pay what you wish.

* * * *

Find out more our tours at
www.walknyc.com
or buy the book here:

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

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St Peter's Church, Chelsea

courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This year marks the 175th anniversary of the opening of St. Peter's Church in Chelsea, which was designed (in part) and financed (in large part) by Clement Clarke Moore, author of A Visit to St. Nicholas (aka 'Twas the Night Before Christmas).

Moore owned a massive amount of property in the area in the early nineteenth century. As we write in Inside the Apple:

Moore was descended from distinguished New York families: his large family estate, Chelsea, which gave rise to the modern-day neighborhood, had originally been owned by his grandfather, Major Thomas Clarke, a veteran of the French and Indian War. Moore’s father, Bishop Benjamin Moore, was the head of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and twice president of Columbia College. 

In 1817, soon after Bishop Moore’s death, the Episcopal Church convened in New York to establish the General Theological Seminary. Jacob Sherred, a member of the Trinity Church vestry, donated $70,000 and Clement Clarke Moore agreed to donate 66 lots from his Chelsea estate to house the school. (The seminary met elsewhere until construction could begin in the 1820s.) Moore, already the author of a well-regarded Hebrew lexicon, was also hired to serve on its faculty, teaching Biblical languages until 1850.

At first, residents of Chelsea attended church services at the seminary. However, as the population in the area began to grow--in part because Moore was making a killing selling property on the newly created Manhattan street grid--it was decided that a proper parish church should be erected.

In February 1831, a handsome Greek Revival chapel was built on land leased to the parish by Moore. Walking by this building today--which serves as the rectory--you'd be hard pressed to realize it once had an ecclesiastical function. Indeed, it had always been built with the idea that it was simply the first building in a complex that would eventually contain a much larger Greek Revival church. However, when construction on the new church began, tastes had changed and the Gothic Revival--formerly shunned in America for being too Catholic--was beginning to take hold. In conjunction with James W. Smith, Moore designed the restrained Gothic church. The new church opened in February 1838, two years before Richard Upjohn's magnificent Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue (which is considered by some to be the oldest true Gothic Revival house of worship in New York).

When you visit St. Peter's on West 20th Street, there appears to be a third church on the property as well. It sits just east of the main church, and is today used by the Atlantic Theater Company as their main stage. While this building had a Victorian Gothic refit in 1871 that made it look like a chapel, it always served as the parish hall.

Actually, the oldest part of the complex is the fence. According to the AIA Guide to New York City, this wrought iron gem comes from the second version of Trinity Church, Wall Street. There have been three Trinity Churches on Wall Street; the first burned down during the Revolution; the second was surrounded by this fence. When the second Trinity was felled in the late 1830s to make way for the current incarnation of the parish, the fence was moved to Chelsea.

* * * *

Find out more about Chelsea and Clement Clarke Moore in
our book:

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

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125 Years Ago: The Blizzard of 1888

Are you sick of winter yet?

Today marks the 125th anniversary of the famous Blizzard of 1888, which struck the east coast on March 11, moving northward rapidly. Snow began to fall in earnest in New York on March 12 and by the time it was over--three days later--over 40 inches of snow had been dumped on the city.

"A policeman rubbing snow on the frozen ears of a passer-by during the storm." (Courtesy of the NYPL.)

 

By the end of the first day, the city had been brought to a standstill and the city’s miles of telegraph and telephone wires lay in downed heaps along the sides of the roads. (Though New York had already toyed with idea of burying these wires underground, it was the 1888 blizzard that finally forced the city to act, freeing the city of above-ground wires to this day.) Because of snow drifts across the tracks, rail service was suspended in and out of the city for over a week and staples such as bread and coal were quickly in short supply. In some places (such as the Gravesend section of Brooklyn), snow drifts were as high as 52 feet.

Senator Roscoe Conkling

By far the most famous victim of the storm was New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. An important post-Civil War Republican, Conkling was part of the Stalwart branch of the party that hoped to draft Ulysses S. Grant into running for a third term. When that didn’t happen, Conkling supported Rutherford B. Hayes and was instrumental in creating the commission that ultimately handed Hayes the presidency in 1877. (The controversy of the 1876 Hayes/Tilden election will be the subject of a future post.)

Conkling’s best-known protégé was Chester A. Arthur, who benefited from Conkling’s patronage when he was New York’s Commissioner of Customs, but as president instituted civil service reforms that enraged his former mentor.

Federal Hall National Memorial  on Wall Street (then the U.S. subtreasury) in the blizzard.

On the first day of the blizzard, Conking was at his law office at 10 Wall Street. Despite the severity of the storm—which made catching a horse-drawn cab impossible—Conkling decided to walk from his office to his club on Madison Square, even though it was 6:00 PM and already dark. He made it up Broadway as far as Union Square where he (as he later put it): “got to the middle of the park and was up to my arms in a drift…. For nearly twenty minutes I was stuck there and I came as near giving right up and sinking down there to die as a man can and not do it.”

But somehow Conkling freed himself and continued up Broadway to Madison Square, where the people at the New York Club could “scarcely believe” he had walked from Wall Street.

However, while Conkling was quick to credit his three-hour walk to his strong constitution, all was not well. He soon developed an ear infection, which in turn became mastoiditis, and by April doctors were draining pus from his skull. He died on April 18, 1888, about a month after the blizzard.

Conkling is memorialized in a statue in Madison Square Park. (Apparently the city fathers balked at commemorating Conkling in Union Square amidst George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.)

[The bulk of this post originally appeared on our blog on March 2, 2009.]

* * * *

Want to know more about NYC history? Check out

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Happy Birthday, Pan Am Building

It only came across the Inside the Apple newswire late last night that yesterday was, in fact, the fiftieth birthday of the Pan Am Building (or, if you must, the Met Life Building) that stands atop Grand Central Terminal. Significant for a plethora of reasons--not least of which is that it is the only building by the Bauhaus’s Walter Gropius in the city--it has long been the building that New Yorkers love to hate. Or simply hate.

The Pan Am tower came into being in the mid 1950s. As America’s transportation needs shifted from railroads to automobiles and airplanes, the owners of Grand Central Terminal and the surrounding Terminal City needed to find ways to increase revenue. After rejecting plans for a skyscraper that would have required demolishing the station, developer Erwin Wolfson proposed a three million-square-foot tower to stand between the terminal and the railroad’s headquarters, the 1929 New York Central Building. In 1958, Emery Roth & Sons submitted designs for a slender tower for that spot in keeping with their other Park Avenue skyscrapers, such as the Uris and Colgate-Palmolive buildings. Wolfson, fearing this new tower lacked architectural panache, brought in Gropius and Pietro Belluschi to enliven the 49-story building.* Gropius and Belluschi changed the building's massing, created its unusual octagonal shape, and, most noticeably, shifted its axis so that it stood completely blocking views up or down Park Avenue.

When the building opened on March 7, 1963, it had more interior square footage than any office building in the world. Twenty-five percent of those offices were leased to the building’s name tenant, Pan American airlines, which also installed a helicopter landing pad on the roof. This allowed commuters to land at any of the area’s major airports and be whisked to the heart of Manhattan. Due to construction delays and lack of public support, the helipad did not open until 1965 and then was only used for three years. After nearly a decade, it reopened in 1977; on May 17 of that year, the landing gear on a helicopter failed just after it had touched down on the roof of the building. The resulting accident killed five people and closed the helipad for good.

The building was derided from its opening. Then New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously called it, "gigantically second-rate." In 1987, New York magazine conducted a poll of New York City leaders to discover what was the worst building in the city. Pan Am topped the list. In 1991, the airline--which was already on life support and occupied only a fraction of its original office space--left the building, and the skyscraper's owners, the Metropolitan Life Insurance company, replaced the iconic Pan Am logo with their own. Though that logo remains, Met Life sold the building in 2005 for a record $1.72 billion to a consortium headed by Tishman Speyer, but which also includes the New York City Employees' Retirement System and the Teachers' Retirement System.

So, if you are in midtown today, instead of raising your fist at the shadows cast on Park Avenue, raise a glass instead to this monument to modernity. 

* Pan Am stands 808 feet tall -- approximately 59 stories -- but the bottom ten stories don't exist in order for it to float over Terminal City.

* * * *

Read more about Grand Central and midtown skyscrapers in

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Charles Scribner's Sons at 597 Fifth Avenue

photo by epicharmus on flickr

A century ago, the architect Ernest Flagg was at the top of his game. Just five years earlier, in 1908, he'd completed the tallest building in the world, the lavish (and, sadly, now demolished) Singer Building in Lower Manhattan. Today, Flagg's name isn't remembered as well as some of his contemporaries like Stanford White and Cass Gilbert, but many of his buildings remain. In 1913, he completed what is one of his finest achievements, the Charles Scribner's Sons bookstore and offices at 597 Fifth Avenue.

The publishing company started life in 1846 as Baker & Scribner. When founder Charles Scribner took over the firm, he renamed it the Charles Scribner Company; later, when management moved to his sons, they changed the name again to reflect their new ownership. Though they published books from the start, the company was best known early on for its magazines, including St. Nicholas Magazine, The Century Magazine, and Scribner's.

photo courtesy of Princeton University library

In 1893, the firm hired the then-unknown Flagg to design a corporate headquarters for them on lower Fifth Avenue at 21st Street. (This squat Beaux-Arts building from the beginning of Flagg's career, still stands.) Less than two decades later, the publishers rehired Flagg--now an architectural star--to create a soaring space in midtown to house not only the company's headquarters but also their corporate-owned bookstore on the retail level. This move reflected not only Scribner's growing fortunes, but also the rapid development of Fifth Avenue above 42nd Street as a prime shopping district.

Flagg's soaring Beaux-Arts exterior was matched by the retail space's opulent interior, including a Carrara-marble staircase, gorgeous iron railings and balustrades,and--of course--row upon row of books.

In 1984, what was then known as the Scribner Book Companies was purchased by Macmillan, which in turn was folded into Simon & Schuster in 1994. The bookstore closed in 1988; the retail space currently houses a Sephora. Because the interior has been landmarked, much of the original fixtures remain inside and it is well worth checking out, if only to imagine what shopping for books must have been like a century ago.

photo by bjmccray on flickr

* * * *

Read more about Beaux-Arts New York 

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

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