National Air Mail Week Starts Today!

Get ready! Transcontinental mailing has changed over the years, but in 1938, it was just 20 years old, and May 15th marked the start of Air Mail Week. [I'm going to spell it 'Airmail' from here on out. Over the years the two words gave birth to the current compound word, sort of like to-day versus today, or good-bye / goodbye, though I don't think airmail ever had a hyphen . . .]

ANYWAY, the  The week-long festivities from May 15-21 were planned to help bring air transport companies out of an economic slump, caused in large part by the Great Depression. The goal was to get everyone to send and/or receive at least one piece of transcontinental mail.

Here are some New Yorkers doing just that, in the Farley General Post Office, during Airmail Week. I love the a-frame sign in front of the teller windows. It reminds me science projects, or history presentations on countries or civilizations of the world that you'd do in fifth grade. Mine was on the Phoenecians.

The Farley building's namesake James A. Farley, was appointed 53rd Postmaster General, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. He served from 1933 until 1940. He was instrumental in the 1934 addition of the post office's western annex.

 

To promote and celebrate Airmail Week, the USPS issued a new 6 cent stamp, with a patriotic color scheme and (of course) an eagle. A fierce-looking red one.

Not to be confused with this fierce eagle

 

National Airmail Week is no longer celebrated with such fervor, but in 2008, to commemorate 90 years of flying in the U.S. Postal system, three pilots in vintage planes retraced the same inaugural route used on May 15, 1918. They successfully completed the journey, chronicled  here by Air & Space magazine.

Public Art Transforms a Struggling City Park

This post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

Over the past year, Bryant Park has been the location of a few notable public art exhibits: Paul Ramirez Jonas' Key to the City, Kate Gilmore's Walk the Walk, and most recently, "Battle of the Brush." It's a long-standing tradition that many present-day park visitors may not be aware of. In 1980, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, Public Art Fund, and the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation collaborated to create an Artist-in-Residence program. The Artist-in-Residence program was one of several things park management did to infuse Bryant Park, then suffering from criminal activity and lack of use, with positive activity. The resulting spectacle increased pedestrian traffic and human presence in the park, and discouraged negative activity, such as drug use and vandalism.

Artists assembled their pieces on-site, where visitors were able to watch, ask questions, and in some cases, lend a hand with the installations. Exploring the theme of metamorphosis, visual conceptual artist Mel Chin, constructed his piece "MYRRHA P.I.A. (Post Industrial Age)" in the park, during the summer and fall of 1984.

Chin used  nineteenth century fabrication techniques to create a three-dimensional figurative sculpture of a female set on a wood pedestal, and placed in the center of the lawn.

The statue's two outer "skin" layers made of perforated steel, encased a skeleton made of polystyrene.

The piece was 30 feet tall, 6 feet deep, and 16 feet wide. "MYRRHA P.I.A." was completed, and unveiled on January 17,1985. It stood in the park until May 30 of that same year. 

In addition to Industrial Age fabrication techniques, Chin drew from  a nineteenth century engraving by French illustrator Gustav Doré. Chin's Myrrha is heavily based on Doré's engraving of Dante's portrayal of Myrrha in Divine Comedy. In Greek mythology, Myrrha disguised herself as someone else, tricked her father into an incestuous affair, as punishment was transformed into a tree, and, still as a tree, bore a son, Adonis. Doré's engraving shows Virgil leading Dante on a tour of the underworld, through the Eighth circle of hell, where Myrrha and other "falsifiers of others' persons" reside. For more on Dante, visit Danteworlds, an "integrated multimedia journey" through Dante's Divine Comedy.

Mel Chin continues to work and exhibit internationally.To see more of his work, click here, here, and here.

To learn more about Public Art projects in and around the city, visit the Public Art Fund, MAS NYC, and Creative Time. For more information of current public art exhibitions in New York City parks, click here.

The Victory of Vegetables

This post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

By 1917, the war efforts centered around World War I were creating significant strains on domestic food production. Food prices increased 200%, and people were hoarding what limited staples they could acquire.

In March 1917, the National War Garden Commission was founded by Charles Lathrop Pack. The Commission embarked on a massive advertising campaign, encouraging citizens to get more involved in food production, and utilize public spaces, fire escapes, and rooftops to grow their own produce. Most of the posters employed the use of clever slogans, while trying to serve as morale boosters during a devastating time in history. In some ways, advertising hasn't changed much.

 Pretty ladies in pretty dresses are often used to sell all types of things, even gardening and patriotism.

Uncle Sam works too.

My favorite, screaming (banshee) produce.


Library of Congress Digital Collection

In New York City, on February 21, 1917, just a month before the National War Garden Commission was formed, 150 housewives storrmed city hall, demanding the local government to get involved in the food crisis. The Mayor at the time, John P. Mitchel, responded by creating a food committee to regulate prices and educate the public on urban gardening practices. The War Garden Committee of Manhattan was a branch of the Department of Parks and Recreation, and overseen by Park Commissioner William F. Grell.

Bryant Park was home to one of New York's largest demonstration gardens. It opened on April 13, 1918, 93 years ago today, and was located on the north side of the park, about where the ping-pong tables and Reading Room are now, and near the Eagle Hut.

Library of Congress Digital Collection

This garden, along with a similar demonstration garden in Union Square, increased Manhattan's gardening activities by 70 percent.

Library of Congress Digital Collection

Here, people could be more involved in local gardening efforts, receive instruction on how and what to plant, and interact with like-minded neighbors. This small garden house was used as a depot for instructional literature, and as a sort of visitor's center in the park.

Thankfully, the practice of urban gardening is still alive and well in NYC, with several farmer's markets in all five boroughs, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs all over. Click here to search for a CSA by zip code. Or, if you want to plant your own, GrowNYC has several open source publications on starting and maintaining your own urban garden.

Primary source. Hard to find in print, easy to find in Google Books:
The War Garden Victorious, Charles Lathrom Pack, 1919

A Hut Worth a Hoot in Bryant Park

This post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

New York City parks are home to many World War I memorials and monuments, including the plaque dedicated to former NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchell on the front terrace of the NYPL, near Bryant Park. The park itself was the location of the first New York City Y.M.C.A. Eagle Hut. First built in London, the huts were constructed to provide a home away from home to soldiers and military personnel. This image, courtesy of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library (WWPL) flickr page, is identified as signage for the Eagle Hut in London. Click on the photo for more information, and to check out their vast digital photo archive.

The Bryant Park Eagle Hut was based on the London Eagle Hut, which opened on September 3, 1917. Similar in structure and services provided, the Bryant Park Eagle Hut was dedicated and opened in 1918, and stood in the northwest section of the park, about where Heiskell Plaza is now.

The Hut, still under construction, in 1917

The Hut, after it's completion, ca. 1918

The Y.M.C.A was first founded in London in 1844 by George Williams, a department store worker, formerly a farmer, who sought to create a safe place for the large number of young rural men moving to the city in search of work. London during the Industrial Revolution was pretty bleak -- living and working conditions were horrible, children worked long hours in factories, and labor rights hadn't been considered or established yet. Poet William Blake openly criticized the Industrial Revolution's effects on children, workers, and society as a whole, remarking on the collective departure from nature, and misery of city-dwellers living and working in oppressive conditions. Blake's first stanza, from his poem, "London" published in Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794:

I wander thro' each chartere'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe

Read the whole thing here, and see one of the early published copies of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience here.

The Y.M.C.A's goal was to provide the men with resources, Bible study, and a sense of community in their new environment. The United States Y.M.C.A was founded on December 12, 1851 by retired sea Captain Thomas Valentine Sullivan to provide the same types of services to sailors and merchants in Boston.

Similarly, the Eagle Huts in London, Bryant Park, and gradually other locations, including a "Victory Hut" erected in New York City's Battery Park in 1919, provided out-of-town servicemen with a broad range of services and activities, including free circulating libraries, meals, movies, socials, and events; and convenience services like mending, check-cashing, post and parcel services, and discounted sight-seeing trips. Duties were mostly carried out by female volunteers, and headed by committees of the same.

The huts also served as gathering places (much like parks do) for relaxation or just hanging out, as seen here in this photo of the inside of the Bryant Park Eagle Hut, taken June 12, 1918.

Photo: Shorpy's. Click on the link for a high-res view

At some point, the Bryant Park Eagle Hut proved so popular, that two additional wings were added. You can sort of see them in the lower left corner of the picture below, taken around 1920.

It was most likely torn down to make way for construction of the Flushing line subway, which began in 1922 and lasted through most of the decade.

Additional Sources:

Harper's Pictorial Library of the World War, volume 7

Service with Fighting Men, by William Howard Taft

The Farley Post Office Building

The Farley General Post Office Building is located on the "superblock" between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, and 31st and 33rd Streets, within the 34th Street district in Manhattan.

It's massive, old, and almost looks out of place among the surrounding office buildings. A relic from a different time, its closest neighbor is Madison Square Garden. The Farley building was conceived and constructed to replace the 1878 General Post Office, located downtown on Park Row and Broadway.

Construction of the Pennsylvania Terminal Building, as it was called then, came on the heels of the completion of McKim, Mead & White's monumental Pennsylvania Station. In the photo below, taken in 1913, Penn Station sits in the foreground, with the Penn Terminal building just behind it, to the west, and, for a good measure of bizarre, a lone guy on the roof of the building in the lower right corner. He was probably counting Penn Terminal's colonnade of 20 Corinthian columns, designed to complement the facade of Penn Station. Both buildings were designed and built by McKim, Mead &White, Beaux-Arts kings in the early 1900s.

Photo: MCNY

Penn Station was completed in 1910, and that same year, ground was broken for the Penn Terminal building. Penn Terminal was finished in 1913, and opened for business in September, 1914. In this postcard, most likely issued shortly after the new post office opened, it's rendered quite majestically. The artist took some liberties with the gold-embellished columns, but it really was (and is) an impressive building.

Image: Pisark's Cards

In 1914, Ira Schnapp, who at the time was designing stamps for the Postal Department, was hired as a stone carver by the US Post Office Department to design, and hand-carve the famous quote on the building's front facade:

NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS

The quote comes from Herodotus' Histories 8.98, and refers to Angarum, the royal riding post in the Persian Empire. Schnapp had previous experience carving, having completed the front facade of the New York Public Library in 1911 when he was just 19 years old.

Around 1918, Penn Terminal was renamed General Post Office Building, and here it is in 1920.

Photo: NYPL Digital

In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed James A. Farley as the 53rd Postmaster General. Under Farley's leadership, a western annex was added onto the existing building in 1934, and The General Post Office building was extended all the way to Ninth Avenue, giving it superblock status. Farley served until 1940, successfully managing the postal service during the Great Depression, and greatly improving trans-continental mailing services.The next two photos are from the Smithsonian's flikr page, which is definitely worth a visit.

In this photo, taken on June 15, 1936, postmen exit the building to deliver the first round of  WWI "bonus army" checks. In 1932, WWI veterans demonstrated in Washington DC, demanding faster payment for their Service Certificate Payment. Click through the photo for more information.

Below, postmen storm the Eighth Avenue steps to deliver holiday packages in 1952, fourteen years before the building was designated a New York City landmark in 1966, and ten years before demolition began on its neighbor Penn Station in 1962 to make way for Madison Square Garden.

Smithsonian flikr

You can still see a good bit of Farley history in the Farley Museum, located in the north pavilion, as well as the building itself. I was fortunate enough to get a brief work-related tour of part of the building. Here are a few photos.

Detailed ceilings in the front foyer

Postal delivery bike on display

Carrier pigeon service, and pigeon capsules(!) in the museum 

  Filigree staircase

 Steel girders in the loading dock (probably original)

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To read a more in-depth post about the history of the building, check out   Daytonian in Manhattan, and for a more thorough look at the inside of the building as it is now, before it turns into the new Moynihan Station,  check out  Scouting NY.

World's Tower Building: A 40th Street Gothic High-Rise in the Middle of Midtown Art Deco-land

A version of this post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

Recently, there was shift of offices here at work. I went from sitting in an open area, sort of a combo - cubicle/bullpen setting, to a room with four walls, a door, and two windows that actually open (rare for a midtown office building).  Being able to somewhat control light and temperature levels and tell when it's dark outside is very nice. Like many working archivists, most of my former jobs took place in dreary basement-level rooms with poor air circulation (great when you are sorting through 30 year-old Thermofaxes layered in dust, or rotting photographs reeking of developing fixer solution) and no natural light. Now, I look out the window and see this building.

Photo: A. Kumer

Photo: A. Kumer

The World's Tower, at 110 West 40th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, has 30 above-ground levels, and a glazed terra cotta facade. When this Neo-Gothic building was completed in 1913, it was the tallest of its kind, on an extremely narrow, 50 foot-wide footprint, and made a striking impression in mid-town Manhattan.


Photo: MCNY

The architecture firm, Buchman & Fox, was commissioned by budding real estate magnate Edward W. Browning. According to New York Times Streetscapes columnist Christopher Gray, Browning was eccentric, throughout his life, steadily acquiring adoptive daughters (and marrying one), as well as skinny mid-block high-rises. You can also see part of the Empire (Eltinge) theater in the bottom right, with Billie Burke (later to play Glinda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz) on the marquee.


Photo: BPC Collection

Behold, midtown, more or less as we know it now. The above photograph, taken in 1935, and looking south-west from above and across Bryant Park, shows numerous high-rise buildings surrounding the Tower. The Union Dime Savings Bank building is in the lower right of the above photograph, and Bryant Park is just west, outside the bottom frame of the photograph.

**Note: The eccentric Browning link may not work w/o a NYT login. It's worth it though, so maybe get one and read the article anyway. Sorry!

Tunnels Under Bryant Park, Part 2

This post also appears on the Bryant park blog.

During its long tenure as a public park -- 165 years, if you go all the way back to 1846, when the City ordered construction of a public park, then called Reservoir Square, next to the Croton Reservoir -- Bryant Park has seen a lot of construction. 

In addition to the erection of a temporary structure now and then, usually for a public event or activity, such as the Crystal Palace in 1853, and Federal Hall in 1932, and more recently, the Citi Pond at Bryant Park, there have also been two large-scale reconstructive efforts: one in 1934 under the guidance of Robert Moses, which transformed the park from a Victorian to a French Classical design, and another in 1988, headed by Bryant Park Corporation, which in addition to giving the park a much needed facelift, included the installation of  NYPL stacks under the lawn. 


Photo: NYC Transit Museum

 


























The photo above, taken in 1924, shows a pedestrian view of 42nd street, on the north side of the park, during construction of the Flushing Line, now, the 7 train. Service began from Grand Central Terminal to Vernon-Jackson in Queens, on June 13, 1915. Over the next 13 years, the line extended to Flushing, Queens, and to Times Square. You can read more about it here, and of course, check out the more specific up-to-date 7 train line information here.


Running along 42nd Street, building the line turned much of the park into a construction site for about five years. 

Photo: BPC Photo Collection



Years later, while writing about the 1934 renovation of the park in the December 1, 1934 issue of the New Yorker, Lewis Mumford would recall " . . .those long dreary years, when it looked as if someone had struck oil there." Construction crews arrived in the park on June 2, 1922, and didn't leave until July 5, 1927.