Archive for July 2010
Project Firebox 8
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This maladjusted servant of the City of Greater New York enjoys a tumultuous existence on 48th Avenue in Long Island City, not far from that tendril of cuprous cupidity known as Dutch Kills- a tributary waterway to the Newtown Creek. Your humble narrator has witnessed this firebox’s abuse filled duties for quite some time. It seems to be a regular target for trucks, and I’ve seen it reinserted into its assigned place several times. How do you not notice a big red box?
Bandits Roost, 2010
– photo by Jacob Riis (or one of his associates) found in the public domain at wikipedia, of Bandits Roost- 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, 1888
This is one of those iconic images from the dawn of the photographic era, the sort upon which entire scholastic careers and political memes are based. It purports to show a group of street toughs at the Mulberry Bend, which Riis described as the very heart of the manifest evil that was Five Points. The part of the Lower East Side described in the 1980’s as “Alphabet City” was similarly described as hell on earth by politicians and journalists, but it was actually an ok place- which makes me wonder…
For the purposes of this post though, it is one of those truly rare historical captures that lists a street address, so I headed down to Mulberry and Bayard Streets to see if I could find the spot… however… Riis and his allies in the municipality oversaw the obliteration of Five Points and its wonders, and there is no 59 1/2 Mulberry street in modernity (entire streets were demapped, or had their names changed- the actual Mulberry Bend is now Columbus Park), so I was forced to get a little “batman” on this one…
from nycgovparks.org
Columbus Park was named in 1911 after Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), the Italian explorer credited with discovering America, or at least with awakening Europe to the opportunities there. Bounded by Baxter (formerly Orange), Worth (formerly Anthony), Bayard, and Mulberry Streets, the site has alternatively been named Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park, and Paradise Park. Columbus Park is situated in the heart of one of the oldest residential areas in Manhattan, adjacent to the infamous “Five Points” and “The Bend”.
Until 1808 the site for the park was a swampy area near the Collect Pond (now Foley Square) and hosted a set of tanneries. In 1808 the pond was filled and became Pearl Street. When the filling began to sink, a foul odor emerged which depressed the living conditions of that neighborhood. As a consequence, the area became host to one of the world’s most notorious tenements, known for its wretched living conditions and rampant crime, earning such names as “murderer’s alley” and “den of thieves.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The east side of Mulberry Street still exists, and as evidenced above- this is 62 Mulberry- a modern day parking lot.
also from nycgovparks.org
Mulberry Bend Park was planned in the 1880’s by Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Vaux saw this park as an opportunity to bring new life and order into the depressed neighborhood. Riis remarked of Vaux’s newly designed park that it is “little less than a revolution” to see the slum housing replaced by trees and grass and flowers, and its dark hovels infused with light and sunshine and air. The park opened in the summer of 1897, with bench-lined curved walkways and an expansive, open grassy area.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just next door- this is 60 Mulberry-
from focpny.org
We have a growing “RAT” problem at Columbus Park and the surrounding neighborhood. The Health Dept. has been doing “RAT” Indexing (research) and hear is what they are saying…
“Columbus Park after years remains a challenging situation………..
- There is an extraordinary amount of food trash left in baskets each day and night;
- abundance of litter within the park that does not get collected on a regular basis;
- many restaurants along Mulberry Street place out their trash each night and the rats have easy access;
- and the park is located over very old subterranean lines of sewer, and even old streams. These subsurface areas no doubt serve as partial replenishes for rat control achieved at surface level. Many of the restaurants on Mulberry have failed for having rats on their premises; and thus there is likely a back and forth swapping of the rats from Columbus Park to Mulberry Street basements.
- Baiting alone will NOT get this done. In fact, long term, it exacerbates it.
- There also appears to be a hawk which is using the park for easy pickings of the rats; and so the Parks Dept will need to weigh in on “the risk to the hawk” if any large scale baiting is done. They will need to make the call.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just next door- this is 58 Mulberry- so, spinning on my heels at that point equidistant between 58 and 60 Mulberry…
Coincidentally, 58 Mulberry has a back house, according to the NYCDOB, and is an “old law” tenement. Check out this nytimes.com article from 1881 which describes Mayor Grace’s tour of the block and includes a description of #56 Mulberry as “a tenement house of the worst class”. And also- this one which discusses the mortality rate on this block in 1884.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is 56 Mulberry today, but I’m uncertain as to whether this is the original structure which Grace visited.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This entrance to Columbus Park must be 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, Bandits Roost.
from wikipedia
Old Law Tenements are tenements built in New York City after the Tenement House Act of 1879 and before the so-called “New Law” of 1901.
The 1879 law required that every inhabitable room have a window opening to plain air, a requirement that was met by including air shafts between adjacent buildings. Old Law Tenements are commonly called “dumbbell tenements” after the shape of the building footprint: the air shaft gives each tenement the narrow-waisted shape of a dumbbell, wide facing the street and backyard, narrowed in between to create the air corridor. They were built in great numbers to accommodate waves of immigrating Europeans from troubled nations. The side streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side are lined with dumbbell structures.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I ask myself, how would Riis have described this 21st century gathering of amiable asiatic card players at 59 1/2 Mulberry Street?
from wikisource.org, “How the other half lives, by Jacob Riis”
Abuse is the normal condition of “the Bend,” murder its everyday crop, with the tenants not always the criminals. In this block between Bayard, Park, Mulberry, and Baxter Streets, “the Bend” proper, the late Tenement House Commission counted 155 deaths of children in a specimen year (1882). Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was 68.28, while for the whole city the proportion was only 46.20. The infant mortality in any city or place as compared with the whole number of deaths is justly considered a good barometer of its general sanitary condition. Here, in this tenement, No. 59 1/2, next to Bandits’ Roost, fourteen persons died that year, and eleven of them were children; in No. 61 eleven, and eight of them not yet five years old. According to the records in the Bureau of Vital Statistics only thirty-nine people lived in No. 59 1/2 in the year 1888, nine of them little children. There were five baby funerals in that house the same year. Out of the alley itself, No. 59, nine dead were carried in 1888, five in baby coffins.
Mulberry Streets
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Note: The series of posts you’re about to see, over the next few days, are offered as a notebook- sort of a work in progress. When I get something wrong, please let me know, as this is a learning experience for your humble narrator.
The “Bloody Sixth” provides a certain context, in my mind, for why the vast numbers of people left Manhattan for points east and populated Brooklyn, Long Island City, and Newtown. In many ways, we live in the wreckage of their utopia… here in the Newtown Pentacle.
This is an image of a Mulberry Street Tenement from the
Harper’s Weekly of September 13, 1873, from the Library of Congress:
A familiar illustration, it’s linked to by many people, and is provided for context- although it is difficult to read the actual text- even in the larger version attained by clicking the image. It describes a visit to a Mulberry Street Tenement and it’s “back house” in the upper drawing, and an inspection of a fruit market set up along the sidewalk in the lower.
This is a short post, but likely interesting to long time readers and antiquarians…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Exiting from St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, I noticed a surprising relict of the ancient sixth ward. The bloody sixth, as it was called by sensationalist and muckraker alike, was famous for the smaller structures that landlords would erect in their back yards in order to maximize their real estate. So called “back houses” were once a common sight, but were the worst places to live- as they shared their living space with the outhouses and privy drains of the larger structure and the enormous population housed therein and most were in perpetual shadow.
from nytimes.com
The worst thing in New-York from a sanitary point of view is the rear tenement. It kills more people than war or famine in proportion to its opportunities. It is a sure lurking place for dirt, disease, and death.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For some reason, the progressives of the 19th century were horrified by open air markets set up along the sidewalk. On modern day Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, one can observe similar merchant activity to that described by Jacob Riis and others- little shops set up in hallways and along the sidewalk, any hole in the wall- by an insular people loathe to let go of their customs and language.
Other Riis terminologies like “Tramp Burrows”, “Jewtown”, and “Heathen Temples” trample upon modern political corrrectness, however, and will most likely be trimmed from future discourse.
Moving about the sixth ward in 2010, one might happen across a Chinese grocer offering alien vegetables of unknown specie, who barely hides her umbrage when the Gwai Lo tourists ask “What’s that?”. Many sidewalk vendors were noticed to have displayed signs that say “photos $2”.
from wikipedia
Gwai Lo (鬼佬) literally means “ghost man” (the word “ghost” refers to the paler complexions of stereotypical Caucasians). The term is sometimes translated into English as foreign devil. The term arose when the first group of Europeans appeared in China as they were associated with barbarians . For several thousand years, Chinese people had the image of its borders continuously breached by “uncivilized tribes” given to mayhem and destruction. The term was popularised during the Opium Wars in response to the Unequal Treaties. In Southern parts of China, the term gwai lo was used. In Northern parts of China, the term (Western) ocean ghost ((西)洋鬼子 (Xi) Yangguizi) was used, Europe being West of China.
Also of interest, this is a digitally retouched and colored image found in the Public Domain over at Wikimedia Commons, representing Mulberry Street in 1900:
My belief – if the signage displayed in the above photo is accurate and 88 Mulberry Street means the same thing now as it did 110 years ago- is that this is the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets, looking uptown from below Canal Street with Five Points behind the camera. Obviously, the photographer had someone watching his back.
from wikipedia
The street was named after the mulberry trees that once lined Mulberry Bend, the slight bend in Mulberry Street. “Mulberry Bend is a narrow bend in Mulberry Street, a tortuous ravine of tall tenement-houses… so full of people that the throngs going and coming spread off the sidewalk nearly to the middle of the street… The crowds are in the street because much of the sidewalk and all of the gutter is taken up with vendors’ stands”.” For the urban reformer Jacob Riis, Mulberry Bend epitomized the worst of the city’s slums.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My 2010 shot looks downtown toward Five Points from the far end of the scene above, at Mulberry and Grand Streets in modern Little Italy’s “main street” restaurant row, and at the infamous “Mulberry Bend”.
from wikipedia
Much of the neighborhood has been absorbed and engulfed by Chinatown, as immigrants from China moved to the area. What was once Little Italy has essentially shrunk into a single street which serves as a tourist area and maintains few Italian residents. The northern reaches of Little Italy, near Houston Street, ceased to be recognizably Italian, and eventually became the neighborhood known today as NoLIta, an abbreviation for North of Little Italy. Today, the section of Mulberry Street between Broome and Canal Streets, is all that is left of the old Italian neighborhood. The street is lined with some two-dozen Italian restaurants popular with tourists, and seemingly very few locals. Unlike Chinatown, which continues to expand in all directions with newer Chinese immigrants, little remains of the original Little Italy.
The house of Dagger John
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When you first enter the place, your pupils are narrowed, as the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself stares down upon you. This is hallowed ground, one of the places where the modern nation cast off its caul. You are in Manhattan, but the builders of this place called the island New York, and this is their Cathedral.
In 1815 New York City was Manhattan only, and it only extended from the Battery to fourteenth street, by 1865 paved and graded roads went as far as Forty Second Street.
On June, 8th, 1809- the cornerstone of this building was laid down, and it was dedicated on April 14, 1815.
from wikipedia
In the 19th century, the city was transformed by immigration and development. A visionary development proposal, the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, expanded the city street grid to encompass all of Manhattan, and the 1819 opening of the Erie Canal connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the North American interior. Local politics fell under the domination of Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish immigrants. Public-minded members of the old merchant aristocracy lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which became the first landscaped park in an American city in 1857. A significant free-black population also existed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Slaves had been held in New York through 1827, but during the 1830s New York became a center of interracial abolitionist activism in the North. New York’s black population was over 16,000 in 1840. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, and by 1860, one in four New Yorkers – over 200,000 – had been born in Ireland.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The king of France himself commissioned stained glass windows to adorn this structure, but those artifacts ended up at Fordham university, which is just as well because they would have been consumed in the 1866 fire that gutted the place.
Hellfire, however, was no impediment to Dagger John’s flock which feared it not.
During the 1830’s and 40’s, large tracts of Manhattan building stock were converted from domestic to industrial usage, and the flood of arriving immigrants- largely from Catholic Germany and Ireland, and overwhelmingly single young men, crowded into certain neighborhoods walking distance from the new factories.
This building was designed by Joseph Francois Mangin, and beneath the place is a labyrinth of mortuary vaults.
from nyc.gov
In the 17th century, the Dutch City Hall was in the old City Tavern on Pearl Street. A new City Hall was built in 1700 at Wall and Nassau Streets. It was renamed Federal Hall when New York became the first capital of the United States. The 1833-1842 Federal Hall National Memorial is now on this site. The Common Council talked about a new City hall as early as 1776 but the Revolutionary War intervened. A site was chosen, the old Common at the northern limits of the City, now City Hall Park.
In 1802, a competition was held for the new City Hall and twenty-six proposals were submitted. First prize of $350 was awarded to John McComb, Jr. and Joseph Francois Mangin. John McComb’s father repaired the old City Hall in 1784. John McComb, Jr. was a New Yorker while Joseph Mangin was trained in his native France. McComb designed the landmark Hamilton Grange on Convent Avenue, Castel Clinton in Battery Park and the James Watson House on State Street. Joseph Mangin was City Surveyor in 1795 and published an official City map with Casimir Goerck in 1803.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When anti catholic “nativist” mobs from the nearby “Lower East Side” river fronts approached the place in 1842, they found that Dagger John had great walls erected about his church after similar riots in 1835, and that those walls and the surrounding streets were manned by the hated Irish.
By the late 1840’s, the word tenement had become a familiar term to refer to the crowded warrens in New York, and an official City census by the Council on Hygiene reported some 500,000 people living in just over 15,000 buildings.
In 1866, a conflagration consumed the place, and it was rebuilt in 1868.
from wikipedia
Anti-Catholic animus in the United States reached a peak in the nineteenth century when the Protestant population became alarmed by the influx of Catholic immigrants. Some American Protestants, having an increased interest in prophecies regarding the end of time, claimed that the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. The resulting “nativist” movement, which achieved prominence in the 1840s, was whipped into a frenzy of anti-Catholicism that led to mob violence, the burning of Catholic property, and the killing of Catholics. This violence was fed by claims that Catholics were destroying the culture of the United States. The nativist movement found expression in a national political movement called the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which (unsuccessfully) ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in 1856.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
They thrust rifles through and over the walls, brandished pistols and brickbats, and in the end- the Irish Squad of Dagger John called the Hibernians battled the riot away from this place. Honored even today for their courage, these Hibernians showed the so called “English” that in America, things would be different for their people.
The political map of the time was drawn around this district, whose death rate was six times that of the rest of the city, and where the principal form of garbage collection were a population of roaming hogs.
Incidentally, this is where the baptism scene from the Godfather film was filmed.
from aoh.com
Anti-Catholic bigotry, cloaked in the guise of American patriotism, emerged in a nativist prejudice against immigrants –– especially the Irish, who began arriving in large numbers. A period of extreme intolerance was launched in the early 1800s that began with social segregation, resulted in discrimination in hiring, and reached its climax in the formation of nativist gangs such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, the True Blue Americans and others bent on violence against the Irish Catholic immigrant population. These gangs would coalesce in 1854 into the American Party or ‘Know Nothings’.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When you’ve been inside for a minute or two, your eyes adjust to its permanent twilight interior, and reflect on what it must have been like in the 1870’s and 80’s to enter this space after having experienced the surrounding neighborhood, described by Charles Dickens as “leprous houses where dogs would howl to lie”.
The “ward”, which translates into a modern political term roughly as “district”, was once the worst slum on earth according to contemporaries- who actually did factor Calcutta, Shanghai, and London (from personal experience, mind you) into their opinion.
This is the Bloody Sixth Ward, just north of the “Mulberry Bend” and “Five Points”.
from urbanography.com
The district was known as the Sixth Ward bounded, south, by Reade Street; west, by West Street; north by Canal Street; east by Broadway. The Five Points so named in the 1830’s from the convergence of the intersection of five streets: Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth St.), Cross (now Park), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water Street (no longer exists). This neighborhood was built over the Collect Pond and its adjacent swampland north of City Hall and the Courthouse, between Broadway and the Bowery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lords and ladies of the Newtown Pentacle, welcome to the progenitor and founder of Calvary Cemetery, the stage of Dagger John Hughes and the birthplace of modern New York. This is St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, we’re in Manhattan for a change, and we’ve come here to figure out where the other half lived.
from oldcathedral.org
Her sidewalls rise to a height of 75 feet, and the inner vault is 85 feet high. The church is over 120 feet long and 80 feet wide. Near the west wall stands the huge marble altar surrounded by an ornately carved, gold leaf reredos.
At the opposite end of the church in the choir loft is a historic organ, an Erben 3-41, in its original condition. The organ was built by Henry Erben in 1852, and is one of less than a dozen such great instruments surviving in New York City. The organ is still used in liturgies today.
Project Firebox 7
Firebox (actual number) 182 – photo by Mitch Waxman
Just down the block from the Grand Avenue Bridge, on the Brooklyn side, one may marvel at this survivor of an earlier time. Oddly, it’s also just up the block from a firehouse which should negate its necessity. The sticker affixed is meant to boost the fortunes of a candidate for high office in the Teamsters union, James P. Hoffa.
Of course, this is Hoffa the younger, as the storied elder Hoffa has been missing from our national dialogue for some time.
from wikipedia
He is the only son of Jimmy Hoffa, who was also a president of the Teamsters, and his wife Josephine (née Poszywak). He is the brother of Judge Barbara Ann Crancer. Hoffa has a wife, Virginia, and two sons, David and Geoffrey.
Born in Detroit, Michigan on May 19, 1941, Hoffa established himself as a leader as early as his high school years while attending Cooley High School. There, he became a member of the National Honor Society, and an all-city and all-state football player.
Hoffa often accompanied his father to Teamster meetings and events, and became a Teamster on his 18th birthday. Hoffa holds a degree in economics from Michigan State University (1963) and a law degree (LL.B) from the University of Michigan Law School (1966). Hoffa was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship to work in the Michigan State Senate as an aide to senate and house members doing constituent relations and research. Hoffa is a member of Alpha Tau Omega.
A member of the Teamsters since his 18th birthday (1959), Hoffa was an attorney for the Teamsters from 1968 to 1993.
The Newtown Pentacle 