General slocum east village walking tour

[George L. Lorton]

George On Beth Short(The Black Dahlia)-

I know a lot about her from high school. Of course they said she was a bad girl. Bad things don't happen to good girls. Or so they say. A bunch baloney.

Interesting info here Jim in that none of the police investigating the Dahlia murder could ever find a man who had slept with her or would admit it. Supposedly Miss. Short had a under developed V----a that would make s-x-al intercourse very painful.

Went to the site and I agree with you Jim. Don't look at the morgue shots if you have a weak stomach. The pictures though gruesome(horrible) do scream out one clue. Brutality and Hatred- who ever killed Beth Short hated her or what she represented to the killer or just women in general (which means there might be other victims out there).

 

[Jim Kalafus]

WHERE "THE UNSINKABLE MRS BROWN" SANK: Ungodly heat and humidity lays over Manhattan like a blanket. There is an air quality advisory out andf, far far worse, the Rolling Stones 1973 single "Heartbreaker" has been lodged in my head for two straight days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mEY7D2GIKQ
making it seem as though I have background music from a Caucasoid version of Shaft accompanying me wherever I go...

I opt to walk the six miles from East 73rd Street to Battery Park, despite the heat and the urge to strut oddly in time to music only I can hear, visiting Titanic and crime related sites as I go.

First stop is the Barbizon Hotel, at Lexington and East 63rd. This 1927 structure, originally meant to house respectable women both transient and long term, is where Mrs. Brown died in the early 1930s.

I have no idea in which room or suite Mrs. Brown lived, and I syuspect that the condo board has NOT included "Titanic Survivor Died Here" in their public relations kit, with instructions on how to locate the death room. I suspect that if her finances held, she probably had an upper floor corner room with view towards Central Park. Just a hunch.

Lexington Avenue is the point of demarkation between where you CAN afford to live in Manhattan, and where you probably cant. As such, it is a mix of elegance, like the Barbizon, functionality, like the 1950s brick-box apartment house across E 63rd, and former brownstones ( once residences of the not-rich-enough-to-afford-Park-Madison-or Fifth breed of well to do) now converted to mixed residential and commercial use.

Prosperity has come to Lex, and one can look downtown from E 63rd and see the seeds of doom in the progression of massive structures eradicating the funky low-rise quality of the street as they march thru the mid fifties ...

 

[Jim Kalafus]

One block north, and two and a half blocks to the east, is the sole survivor of the Astor mansion complex Caroline Astor deemed necessary to keep her weird offspring under her thumb. A combination of trees and badly parked trucks makes it impossible to photograph the rather staid Caroline Astor Williams mansion at #3 East 64th, which has been India House since 1952. It is a more restrained structure than the now-demolished mansion shared by Caroline Astor, John Jacob Astor, Ava Astor and, of course, Ava's lover who fathered her child, which stood at Fifth and E. 65th. THE Mrs. Astor's parlor from the mansion still exists, in Sarasota, Florida.

Most of the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue were demolished between the 'teens and the 1970s, in favor of apartment houses. Perhaps 150-200 survive on the cross streets between Fifth and Park, two blocks to the east, demonstrating just how many fortunes were acquired during the late 19th century.

My favorite of these was once the home of a man I admire, New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The World was a rather feisty, reform minded paper, and stylistically hovered in the undefined zone between tabloid and traditional. Its General Slocum coverage was the best of all the city newspapers, and much of the material I used early in this thread originated there.

Pulitzer's 1900 residence, at 11 East 73rd Street, survived the demolition boom which saw most of the large houses removed even from the side streets (confiscatory taxes) by conversion to luxury apartments in the 1930s. An effort was undertaken/is ongoing to restore as much of the original grandeur to the interiors as possible.

Trees and a badly placed truck make it impossible to photograph the mansion in full.

 

[Jim Kalafus]

I think that what I find appealing about the Pulitzer house is that it closely replicates the now-demolished 1856 AT Stewart department store, which once stood at Broadway between E 9th and E 10th. It pretty much does in stone what the old store did in cast-iron.

A walk a block down Fifth, and turn on to East 72nd street. East 72nd has a pristine but bland row of 1890s townhouses along its south side. Construction work was underway at the far end and I suspect that a non-landmarked survivor has bit the dust in favor of Luxury Condo Deluxe. On the north side of the street stands this group of three survivors. Most people assume that this is a single mansion, of assymetric design, but it is actually two houses built to function as a pleasant unit. The Oliver Gould mansion, on the left, and the Jessie Sloane mansion, on the right, date from 1898 and 1894 respectively. Construction work made it hard to photograph them well.

The 1936 apartment building on the right, at the corner of Madison Avenue, replaced the monster-of-a-residence built by Charles and Lewis Comfort Tiffany. It housed various members of the Tiffany clan, plus studios. It SHOULD have survived....

Funny thing about these houses is that, between them they share EVERY stylistic detail (except for the tower) of the detested Clarke mansion, which was so derided by critics and public alike that it single handedly drew the curtain down on tacky Newport style architecture in Manhattan:

On the one hand it grates on me that the innovative Tiffany house and studio (with valuable corner address) was jackhammered into oblivion and its fragments dumped far at sea, while the derivative architecture next door survived. But, on the other hand, the complex is now genuinely historic, and so I GUESS it can stay...

...but, still...

*sigh*

 

[Jim Kalafus]

Diagonally across Madison Avenue from the Tiffany site is this house, with an oddball history that makes me fond of it.

Briefly, Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo, old money, built this home in 1895. She occupied it, briefly, found it not to her liking, and moved back to the family manse. The residence stood, maintained but unoccupied, until it was converted for use as an antiques shop catering to a very exclusive clientele. Ralph Lauren did an excellent job restoring/converting it as his flagship outlet.

 

[Jim Kalafus]

MERCHANT MARINE MEMORIAL: EFFECTIVE, EERIE, OR BOTH?

Picking up the thread almost two weeks later...

The running theme in the storyline I was going to develop was that I was unsure, during the 13 mile walk I took, if what I was feeling was the effects of 90F heat and air-quality-advisory breathing, or the onset of the flu. As it turned out, all of the above... followed by the fun of learning whether it was the flu or THE flu.

ANYWAY, skipping the various Titanic/Lusitania related sites, which can be revisited later, I'll skip to where this ended... the memorial to the several thousand members of the merchant marine lost in service during WW2.

By the time I arrived at Battery Park, it was close to sunset. The sky had turned that shade of neutral it does on humid NYC days which makes it impossible to take good photos... the whiteish sky always looks like an underexposure, but isn't.

The northwest corner of battery Park is, perhaps, the most sobering waterfront promenade anywhere, ever. The Holocaust Museum, the globe from the World Trade Center plaza, and the Merchant Marine memorial stand in close proximity to one another, turning the uptown end of the park into something thought provoking yet decidedly at odds with the good cheer unfolding a few yards further down the esplanade...

The statue was modeled from a photo, taken by Germans, showing Merchant Mariners stuggling to save themselves after their ship had been torpedoed. A scene which played out hundreds of times less than ten miles from this site during the grim year of 1942....

The effect of Marisol Escobar's memorial is hard to explain. The drowning man is at the mercy of the tides... at low tide the statue grouping has a small amount of optimism to it, since the fellow's upper body is out of the water and he seems to be seconds away from (temporary... these men were left adrift to die) salvation. At mid-tide, waves break over his head and river water flows out of his mouth; a decidedly creepy but realistic touch. At high tide, of course, the mood of the work is relentlessly grim... which is the whole point...

As I look at the statue, it has a vaguely unsettling effect on me, beyond the obvious, which I have trouble placing. Then it occurs to me. the figures are in the wrong place. They should be on the harbor wall, facing out, from where the viewer can interact with them, so to speak. As placed, the viewer does not have their perspective. The viewer has the perspective of the people who not only abandoned these men at sea to die but who also took closeup souvenir snapshots. One has the perspective of Nazis.

I find myself wondering if this was intentional, or just a case of placing the work where it could be better viewed...

I amble northeast, past the World Trade Center Globe, feeling fluish and a bit odd, post-memorial-viewing. The Globe does not serve to alleviate my mood. In its former site, this statue served as a great focal point to meet friends who worked in the towers. So, it has a lot of summer-day memories attached to it; some pleasant (Jazz players on the Plaza) and some rather silly (synchronized unicyclists come to mind); and in its new locale, smashed and reassembled, it brings a lot of memories to the forefront that I'd rather not deal with at the present....

 

[Jim Kalafus]

IMM/US LINES BUILDING The building with the verdigris along the roof, visible behind and to the left of the shattered orb, is the former United States Line Building, which prior to that had been the IMM Building, at #1 Broadway.

The structure dates to 1883, and is the same building visible in April 1912 "Crowds Jam Bowling Green Waiting For News Of the Titanic" photos. In 1921/22 the original facade was removed, during a late "White City" make-over, and replaced with the present rather bland face. However, the end result won an award when new for best reconstruction of an existing structure....

The Third Class Entrance, oddly the most elegant and least "striving to be pretty" of the three, was stripped of its identity. Tim and I stumbled upon it in January, 2006, at a point where the renovation work was being done and some, but not all, of the letters which spelled out Third Class had been removed.

The Cunard building, just around the corner, is swathed in scaffolding. Which means one of two things: facade restoration or facade removal.

The IMM building, just as an aside, is only the second structure to stand on this site. The English Colonial era Kennedy mansion, which predated the revolution by at least a generation, stood here intact thru a war, two great fires, and several commercial booms which saw virtually all of its equally old neighbors cleared. Its antiquity drew much comment, but it was finally cleared around 1880 for the present structure.

The oldest man-made structure in downtown Manhattan, (arguably... the foundation fragment from the 1641 Staadt Huys is now visible at Coenties Slip) stands across the street from the IMM building, at Bowling Green.

The fence which surrounds the park is British Colonial. The finials atop the post were once crowns, and were knocked off in a fit of revolutionary fervor when the equestrian statue of George III that once stood within the park was toppled and hacked to pieces...

HOWEVER, and this is a BIG however, the fence survives not because it was viewed as a historic object but because no one bothered to get rid of it. Examining vintage photos, one can see that the fence was forever being uprooted and moved around as needed. A year or two after the Titanic disaster, the entire thing was removed and dumped. A few years after THAT, someone got to thinkin' about how short sighted the disposal; of the fence was, and much... but not all... of it was recovered from the dump site and put back.

So, it's historic but then, again, it isn't. The portion shown above was THERE in 1775, but not on this site. The chain of history, so to speak, was arguably broken the first time the fence was moved for the sake of convenience, and definitely broken during the 5 years it was in a dump (or "storage area") somewhere. It's a reconstruction, using original material...

 

[Hildur Panula-Heinonen]

Thank you very much for posting the General Slocum pics ad information. You made my day! Very great! I have a great interest in the General Slocum and the Eastland and i appreciate the information you have place on here very much.

 

[Jim Kalafus]

You are welcome. If you are ever in New York during the months I am in residence, I will be glad to show you the General Slocum sites.

 

[Hildur Panula-Heinonen]

Thank you! I will have to hold you up to that offer someday!

 

[Amy Met]

Thank you so much for the powerful and painful information and accounts of the General Slocum!