Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The Avengers Disassemble the MetLife Building


Fare thee well, you who we once called the Pan Am. We hardly knew thee. Image from Comic Book Movie

Warning: This story contains light spoilers.

Recent fantasy films and TV shows have found ways to alter New York City through the creation of alternate universes.  On Fox's Fringe, a parallel world features a New York where the World Trade Center wasn't destroyed, the Department of Defense is in a newly-bronzed Statue of Liberty, and Robert Moses never drove the Dodgers from Brooklyn. (The show also showed us what the skyline might look like with some Antonio Gaudi architecture.)

Comic book movies delight in showing super villains destroying the city -- this summer's 'The Dark Knight Rises' blows up bridges and ravages Federal Hall, while 'The Amazing Spider-man' will trash Midtown -- and sometimes they even re-write history itself.

In 'Captain America: The First Avenger', the title character, a resident of Red Hook, discovers underground government laboratories in downtown Brooklyn during World War II.  Elsewhere in this Marvel Comics timeline, Moses' World's Fair of 1939-40 was such a smashing success that Tony Stark (aka 'Iron Man') turns the site into a year-round glittering expo of technology!

The latest Marvel adventure 'The Avengers' takes a more proactive approach to revising the city landscape, as though the entire film was a surly New Yorker architecture critic.

Thanks to the Commissioners Plan of 1811, allowing for a grid striped with long uninterrupted canyons, grotesque alien beings from Asgard can fly down the avenues unabated, wrecking havoc through Manhattan -- Park Avenue in particular. Fortunately our heroes gather at Grand Central Terminal's traffic overpass, a critical location that they turn into a picturesque battleground. (Honorary Avenger Cornelius Vanderbilt, or at least his old statue from St. John's terminal, stands resolutely in the background, ready to employ his superpower of acquiring railroads.)

But one famous New York building is notably missing from these shenanigans. Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr., has constructed an energy-efficient new supertower for Stark Industries right on Park Avenue itself. To build this, he has clearly gotten permission from the city to methodically dismantle the MetLife Building (the former Pan Am Building).

The filmmakers have specifically chosen not to merely erase the MetLife Building, but to specifically display it being taken apart. The building is shown greatly reduced in height, decorated with cranes disassembling it like a tinker toy.

While other buildings enjoy the glamour of being reduced to rubble by gigantic mechanical space fish, the MetLife is ignobly taken apart to be replaced by an even taller, uglier structure. In fact, the dismantling looks a bit like this picture, an image of the Pan Am Building during construction in 1969:

(You can find a few more interesting construction pics here.)

The MetLife Building is easily one of the most disrespected structures in Manhattan and has been almost since the beginnings. Ada Louise Huxtable famously wrote: "A $100 million building cannot really be called cheap. But Pan Am is a colossal collection of minimums."

According to author Meredith Clausen, "The Pan Am Building and the reaction to it signaled the end of an era. Begun when the modernist aesthetic and the architectural star system ruled architectural theory and practice, the completed building became a symbol of modernism's fall from grace."

Its broad-shouldered silhouette calls a halt to Park Avenue in a dated style that hovers between two Beaux-Arts structures (Grand Central to its south, the Helmsley Building to its north). Yet people blame the building for somehow 'ruining' Park Avenue -- when the two other structures already blocked it -- and its sly octagonal shape today makes it one of New York's more interesting Brutalist-style examples.

Modernism happened, and if you use the same criteria that we might apply to other treasured New York structures, then the MetLife Building is a unique and exemplary building. But can you ever imagine a time when the MetLife Building might ever be landmarked?

This is what I was thinking while Thor and the Hulk were tearing into alien lifeforms.


But 'The Avengers' isn't entirely disrespectful of architecture. In fact, the Chrysler Building is practically fetishized as an ideal view from the newly built penthouse of the Stark Building.

Its antenna spire, which makes it New York's fourth largest building, is even utilized by Thor in the battle to save the Earth. William Van Alen, the building's architect, would have been quite amused. This very spire was hoisted to the top of the structure from within the building itself in October 1929, a surprise accessory that allowed the Chrysler to take the title of New York's tallest building from 40 Wall Street.

For more information on the controversies surrounding the MetLife Building, check out the 'illustrated' version of our podcast (Episode #61). Download it from iTunes or directly from here.


Pic above courtesy Bleeding Cool

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Who are Barnes and Price? And other notes from the podcast


Stuyvesant Street in 1856, an aberration to the city grid plan thanks in part to the presence of St. Mark's Church and its well-established churchyard. The small building in the foreground is where the St. Mark's Bookshop stands today. You can see the steeple of St. Mark's. Hmm, what what's the other 
church in the background? (Pic courtesy East Village Transitions)

Some notes on our podcast, Episode #139: St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery

THANK YOUS: For of all, we'd like to thank Rev. Winnie Varghese and Roger Jack Walters from St. Mark's Church for telling us some wonderful stories on a sunny Sunday afternoon as volunteers worked busily to repaint that 1838 iron fence. This is one landmark is really good hands!


THE MYSTERY OF BARNES AND PRICE: There was once a second cemetery one block north of St. Mark's that contained the bodies of less wealthy individuals in the community. In September 1864, their bodies were exhumed and moved to Evergreen Cemetery at the border of Brooklyn and Queens. The New York Times report on the exhumation mentions two individuals in particular: "The remains of two dramatic notables, BARNES and PRICE, of the Old Park Theatre, have been removed from this cemetery."

The Park Theatre (pictured at right) is considered New York's first great theater, sitting on Park Row in the days before there was a City Hall, a Printer's Row or anything else recognizable or familiar about that area today. The stage entertained British officers during the Revolutionary War, and in the early 19th century presented entertainment of the highest class.

The PRICE buried in the old St. Mark's Cemetery is most likely its former manager Stephen Price, who specialized in importing British stage stars for their American debuts. One of those was Julius Brutus Booth, who debuted Shakespeare's Richard III here in 1822. Booth's children Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth would enter the acting profession in the mid-19th century.

But who's the BARNES? Most likely it was English actor John Barnes who frequented the Park and died in 1841. However, his wife Mary, billed as Mrs. John Barnes, was in many ways a bigger star, the resident 'heavy-tragedy lady' who made here debut here in 1816. The two often appeared on stage together -- husband for the comedy, wife for the drama.

Mary Barnes outlived her husband by a quarter century, remarrying and becoming a successful theater manager in her own right. She died in the same year that her first husband's body was moved to Evergreen. An assessment of her career:  "In melodrama and pantomime her action was always graceful, spirited and correct." [source]

JAMES BOGARDUS: The portico of St. Marks is one of the last remaining examples of original cast-iron construction designed by Bogardus, but there are four other buildings in New York attributed to Bogardus that still exist: 254 Canal Street, 85 Leonard Street, 75 Murray Street and 63 Nassau Street. In TriBeCa today, you'll find Bogardus Garden, a lush, green-fitted traffic triangle. Bogardus is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery.


FURTHER LISTENING: Although Augustus Stuyvesant was the last living direct descendant, there are others named Stuyvesant that trace their lineage to Rutherford Stuyvesant. To find out why this doesn't quite count, listen in to my podcast on Rutherford's pet project The Stuyvesant apartment, New York's first of its kind. (Episode #131: The First Apartment Building).

We tell a ghost story about Peter Stuyvesant and St. Mark's Church In-The-Bowery in our most popular of our ghost story podcasts. (#91 Haunted Tales of New York)

And of course, for more information on Peter Stuyvesant himself, we devoted an entire podcast to the director-general back in 2007. (Episode 14# Peter Stuyvesant)

SLIP UPS: This weeks verbal slip-ups include me saying 'St. Mark's ON-the-Bowery' twice (it's referred to in many ways, but never that).

Monday, May 7, 2012

UK Magazine: 'Out In The City' Madonna


The new issue of 'Out In The City' magazine – with #Madonna on the cover – is out now in London! 

Click HERE to view it online
Click HERE to download the pdf

#Madonna #LoveSpent #MDNA Tour


Floating about are some weird recordings.  Make what you will of them.  I love it all!

'Mad Men' notes: The delirious world of Off-Off-Broadway


Radical thoughts, limited spaces: a performance at the Caffe Cino. Photo by Ben Martin (from an excellent website by Robert Patrick about this important off-off-Broadway site)

 WARNING The article contains a couple spoilers about last night's 'Mad Men' on AMC. If you're a fan of the show, come back once you're watched the episode. But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don't watch the show at all. You can find other articles in this series here.

 Megan might be Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's hottest new pitchwoman, but deep in her heart of delicate French extraction, she wants to be an actress. And in last night's show, she steals away to an audition of an unnamed off-off-Broadway production. She didn't get the part, but the experience leads her to make a jarring decision.

This wasn't merely a plot contrivance, but rather another use of New York geography to delineate character. Don Draper was busy at Danny's Hideaway, a Midtown East restaurant along famed 'Steak Row' shimmering with late 50s -- and, by 1966, ever fading -- glamour. Megan's off-off-Broadway audition could only be one place, and that was downtown below 14th Street, in the thriving epicenter of New York counter culture.

Aspiring performers have made New York their destination for fame since the late 19th century with the birth of the Broadway theater circuit. By the 1950s, playwrights and producers who challenged the preconceptions of standard, mainstream theater found homes for their work off Broadway both literally and metaphysically. The art of theater could now be explored for smaller crowds and with smaller budgets.

But even off-Broadway was not immune to financial realities. By the end of the decade, the popularity of off-Broadway created a parallel industry, "a smaller-scale version of Broadway itself." [source] If you were to look back at the greatest off-Broadway hits of this era (plays by Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, musicals like Threepenny Opera) you'd notice that most of them have had subsequent Broadway debuts. Indeed, off-Broadway continues to be a sort of a minor league tryout for future Broadway shows.

By the 1960s, unconventional creative voices were emerging that seemed positively alien even in that world. What do you call the alternative to something that was itself the alternative? Although Village Voice critic Jerry Tallmer is credited with coining the phrase 'off-off-Broadway', the phrase might have sprung up naturally the first time audiences came in contact with the early works of this field -- modest, broken-down, difficult and experimental shows eager to discard every theatrical trapping that had built up for the past four hundred years.

The first 'true' off-off-Broadway performance, according to Tallmer's fellow Voice critic Michael Smith, was a surreal revival of Ubu Roi, performed at a Bleecker Street coffeehouse in 1960. Theatrical experimentation complimented the Village music scene nicely, as even the smallest venues could now host a production. Only in this new creative world could a cramped, smoke-filled coffeehouse like Caffe Cino, at 31 Cornelia Street, become center stage for a new theatrical revolution.

If the art was nontraditional, so too were the venues. Two churches became important homes for alternative theater in the early 1960s and they remain so to this day. Judson Memorial Church, off Washington Square, may seem austere with its elegant Italianate bell tower, turned its meeting room into an off-off-Broadway stage in 1961. And, of course, St. Marks-in-the-Bowery, took a page from its own 1920s radical bohemian past to become home to the Poetry Project and Theater Genesis (performing sometimes sexually explicit plays in the churches parish hall). Above: A poster for Theater Genesis



But just as many pivotal and provocative voices of off-off-Broadway were developing further east, in an area of the Lower East Side heavily influenced by Greenwich Village counterculture idealism and referred to by the mid-60s as the East Village. The chief among these, Ellen Stewart's mold-breaking La Mama Experimental Theatre, opened in 1961 and rejected most theatrical instincts, featuring only new plays in a stripped-down, almost barren theatrical space. Pictured above: Ellen Stewart in 1970. Picture courtesy TCG

By 1966, off-off-Broadway became a banquet of experimental ideas, spaces for gay, feminist and African-American playwrights and performers. In effect, the opposite of a certain ad agency, where creative flowering is hindered by the whims of client preference and the banality of subject.

Friday, May 4, 2012

In Memory of Keith Haring

Madonna wearing Haring jacket 1984.

Happy 54th Birthday Keith Haring!  May 4, 1958.  Year of The Dog.

Madonna in her influential 1991 film, Truth or Dare, discussing her friend Keith Haring and giving a Holiday performance.

Beastie Boys MCA Adam Yauch Dead at 47

Forever Legend.  Seen here final night of The Virgin Tour 1985.


RIP Adam Yauch from The Beastie Boys. Died of cancer.


Outside Radio City Music Hall as opening act for The Virgin Tour .

The secrets of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, and uncovering the East Village footprint of Peter Stuyvesant



FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION Until May 21st, you can vote every day in the Partners In Preservation initiative, which will award grant money to certain New York cultural and historical sites among 40 nominees. Having trouble deciding which site to support? I'll be featuring on a few select sites here on the blog, providing you with a window into their history and hopefully giving you many reasons to visit these places, long after this competition is done. Read about other candidates here.


PODCAST The church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery is one of Manhattan's most interesting and mysterious links to early New York history. This East Village church was built in 1799 atop the location of the original chapel of Peter Stuyvesant, New Amsterdam's peg-legged director-general. His descendants -- with the help of Alexander Hamilton and the architect of New York City Hall -- built this new chapel with the intention of serving the local farming community of Bowery Village.

But in many ways, the more thrilling tales occur among the honeycomb of burial vaults underneath the church, the final resting place of vice presidents, mayors, and even Peter himself.

St. Mark's reflected the changes that swept through Greenwich Village during the 20th century, with experimental and sometimes scandalous church activities, from hypnotism, modern dance and even a trippy foray into psychedelic Christian rock.

ALSO: Find out why you can never EVER go down into the vault of Peter Stuyvesant. And why is the church IN the Bowery, not ON the Bowery?

To get this week's episode, simply download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, subscribe to our RSS feed or get it straight from our satellite site.


Or listen to it here:
The Bowery Boys: St. Mark's In-The-Bowery

NOTE ABOUT THE NAME: The modern name of this historic structure is technically St. Mark's Church In-The-Bowery. However most 18th-19th century sources drop the 'church' from the middle of the name. The hearty bust of Peter Stuyvesant in the courtyard calls it 'Saint-Mark's-in-the-Bowerie'.

Hyphens are liberally or reservedly applied based on the source. As we decided to spend a great deal of time talking about the old farm and the early years, we settled on 'St. Mark's in-the-Bowery'. But I even twisted myself around during recording and said 'on-the-Bowery' accidentally at least twice, so sorry for the confusion!

I'll post some more notes on the show next week, some thank-yous, further information and some further sources to check out for more information.
------------------------------------------------------------

Below: The residents of New Amsterdam beseech Peter Stuyvesant to surrender to the coming British forces in 1664. He is clearly not pleased. The official surrender actually took place at Stuyvesant's farm house, two miles outside of town along the bouweij or Bowery road. Listen here for the real pronunciation of bouwerij.


The caption reads 'The Residence of N.W. Stuyvesant' which formerly stood in 8th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenue', one property on the land estate of the Stuyvesants during the 18th century. (NYPL) I've seen this same illustration differently labeled, dated 1800 and called simply 'the Bowery House'.

 St. Marks in 1865, rendered in an early stereoptic photograph. The church itself looks pretty much as it does today. But the surrounding churchyard would be radically transformed. (NYPL)


A real estate map, imprinted with the grid plan over the Stuyvesant property. You can see Stuyvesant Street at the bottom. The collected properties were also known as 'Petersfield' after a manor home of one of the Stuyvesant descendants. (NYPL)


The interpretive dancers of Dr William Norman Guthrie,  the Scottish clergyman who oversaw many radical changes to the standard St. Mark's services.



An excerpt from the Mind Garage's 'Electric Liturgy', which was performed at St. Mark's Church in 1969



Visit St. Mark's website for a virtual tour of the St. Mark's church yard.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

#Madonna #VanityFair Photos

Smoke a Peter Stuyvesant! New Amsterdam leader becomes a cigarette, the "international passport to smoking pleasure"

Oh, that Peter Stuyvesant. He was all about luxury, high class athletic sport and international travel. The Concorde! Monte Carlo! Caviar!

Less than three centuries after the iconic Dutch director-general of New Amsterdam died at his palatial farm in today's East Village, his name was employed to sell a brand of stylish, premium cigarette, still enjoyed today by smokers in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other counties, most being places Peter Stuyvesant had no idea existed.

The cigarette was developed by a German company in the 1950s and soon became associated with an international sensibility due to its 'American blend' of various tobaccos from different countries. "The smell of the large far world: Peter Stuyvesant" went the slogan in 1958. It was test marketed in New York in 1957. Stuyvesant was not the only Dutch historical figure to make his cigarette debut that year; Rembrandt cigarettes also hit the streets of New York that year.

"Stuyvesant people having fun!" went the jingle, accompanied by rigorous activity that might prove challenging for those enjoying one too many of their advertised product:




By the 1980s, the Peter Stuyvesant cigarette was advertised as a high adventure, Donald Trump-like symbol of masculinity and wealth, trying to closely align with upper class leisure. In London, during the 1980s, the cigarette company even sponsored the Peter Stuyvesant Pops in London. In 2003, the cigarette was even bought by a British company, which would have disturbed the actual Peter Stuyvesant to no end.

The company even experimented with Peter Stuyvesant travel agencies in some places, clever ways to advertise their cigarettes in places with strict advertising laws.

The cigarette embodied the American ideal, a distillation of glamour, capitalism and excess, 'further testimony to the adoption by European of American dreams', according to author Alexander Stephan.  "Feel the Big Apple beat!" went this promotion in 1985. "It's fun! It's fabulous! It's fast!"




Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, the neighborhood which bore the Stuyvesant name (Bedford-Stuyvesant) was hardly tasting the fruits of prosperity advertised in Stuyvesant commercials half a world away. And it was hardly Polos and champagne in the East Village, the neighborhood which developed from Stuyvesant's old farm to become the gritty backdrop for 1980s art and punk music.

Not that Stuyvesant cigarette executives turned their backs to the promotional opportunities provided by the fight for freedom and human rights. In 1989, employees in 'Come Together' shirts distributed Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes to East Berliners on their way to the vote in the election that would unite the former Soviet sector with West Berlin.

Here's an older ad for you German speakers!




Tomorrow, the Bowery Boys will return to the world of Peter Stuyvesant in our newest podcast.

 Image at top courtesy Museum Victoria

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

#Madonna #W.E. Released Today on iTunes


W.E. is beyond fabulous on every level.

#Madonna Rehearsal Pics on The #MDNA Tour Stage

First Day Production Rehearsals.

Camera Ready: The Alice Austen House, a rustic reminder of an uncommon artist and a cottage shrine to a life in pictures




FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION Until May 21st, you can vote every day in the Partners In Preservation initiative, which will award grant money to certain New York cultural and historical sites among 40 nominees. Having trouble deciding which site to support? I'll be featuring on a few select sites here on the blog, providing you with a window into their history and hopefully giving you many reasons to visit these places, long after this competition is done. 


Historic Site: The Alice Austen House
On the banks of Staten Island's eastern shore sits a worn but elegant cottage, where once lived a woman of modern artistic gifts that just a few decades earlier would have been considered magical.

Alice Austen was a photographer of sublime ability, in an era when the artistic potential of photography was still being assessed. She's the sort of historical figure whose life could easily be overlooked. In fact, it was, for almost half a century. Her existence at times seems sequestered, in a habitat of old wealth, her universe principally residing in a borough that itself sometimes gets unfairly disregarded. In some ways, it's the Alice Austen House, in Rosebank, Staten Island. that keeps her legacy in the conversation -- as a revolutionary artist, an enigmatic social eccentric and a famous New Yorker.

Portions of this curious house -- named Clear Comfort, but readily known today as the Alice Austen House, after its most famous resident -- can be traced to a modest one-room structure built in the 1690s, when Staten Island (or, as the British preferred to call it, Richmond County) had only about 1,000 residents, mostly Dutch farmers.  From the windows of the original farmhouse, the residents might have seen the British, using Richmond as a base, attacking Washington's forces on the opposite shore in Brooklyn in August 1776.


Above: Alice's photo of her home, 1895

By the early 19th century, the house shared the northeastern shore with a smattering of ferry docks, including one owned by an ambitious young periauger operator named Cornelius Vanderbilt.  As New York grew to become a busy port city and a capital of wealth, some prominent residents flocked to the Staten Island shore for respite. Moguls, businessmen, socialites, even Vice Presidents (Daniel D. Tompkins) built lavish homes a short carriage ride away.

That this shoreside Dutch farmhouse survived to even this point in history-- hogging a view of the Narrrows that any mansion builder might envy -- is extraordinary. As a later history of Staten Island dramatically put it, "[I]t is a relief to the more conservatively inclined to find in Greater New York a house that still defied the sword of the destroying angel....One of these, which for centuries has defied destruction, is the Austen homestead."

In 1844, a lower Manhattan dry goods merchant John Haggerty Austen purchased the old Dutch house, dilapidated but still desirable due to its view of a harbor clogged with ships. Austen greatly expanded the property into a Gothic revival summer cottage worthy of an old European fairytale. Soon, several members of the Austen clan lived here year-round. And in 1866 they were joined by Austen's unmarried daughter and her small infant Alice.

The pair had been abandoned by Alice's father, a situation one might normally consider dire in the mid-19th century. However the Austen family doted upon the child, and their wealth provided a cushion for the girl to pursue her ever bolder ambitions in comfort.

Above: Alice Austen in a self portrait on the porch of Clear Comfort, 1892 [source]

The first camera came to Clear Comfort in 1876, the present of Alice's uncle, Oswald Muller, a Danish sea captain who demonstrated the bulky, wooden device in the Austen garden. Alice became immediately fascinated, and, although it was certainly unladylike in the Victorian era for a young woman to hunch in front of a large wooden tripod, her talents soon became evident. Another uncle, a chemistry professor, guided her through the development process, and an upstairs closet was eventually transformed into her own personal darkroom. In this dank, inconspicuous room, Austen patiently developed some of the most beautiful pictures of old New York ever taken.

Above: Lounging in the woods, 1893


A THOUSAND WORDS
Alice Austen was not a professional photographer. She did not get paid to document the world or to hover over developing chemicals. She took pictures because she loved it.

The photographic process before the 1890s -- before the introduction of camera film -- was a complex and frustrating production. The pursuit of leisure photography, capturing casual, outdoor scenes using a portable camera, was a relatively recent phenomenon. And a camera was only 'portable' in the sense it could be used outside a studio. A wooden-box camera with a tripod and a satchel of delicate lens and exposed plates would have been difficult to transport.

Below: The Staten Island Cricket Club in St. George, in 1893, employing the sort of subject framing that would typify art deco photography a couple decades later.



Alice's first images were taken at home, on the grounds of Clear Comfort.  From here she developed the poise, the skill and the guts to take the camera on the road -- around Staten Island, along rocky mountainous areas and winding trails. And eventually, to Manhattan itself. What a sight it would have been to behold young Alice Austen on her bike, weaving through the streets of Manhattan with her equipment strapped to the back.

What comes through from her photography is a zest for life rarely documented in images of the era. Due to the conventions of the photographic process, subjects had to stand still or risk being rendered a ghostly blur. Equally important, people rarely knew how to pose. But in the world of Alice Austen, frivolity overrides stiffness. Austen documented her social circle with a provocative candidness, allowing her subjects to goof around, create visual gags, even cross dress.

My favorite of all her images finds Alice herself posing awkwardly with a group of men at a mock tea party. What are they doing? This picture presages a billion future Facebook photographs of people acting in a nonsensical fashion.



On the streets of New York, Austen found composure and beauty in common situations. More stunningly, she found it among lower class subjects -- bike messengers and street urchins, rag pickers and fishmongers. Most likely, she knew 'proper' New Yorkers would never have posed so spontaneously for her. Perhaps her choices were informed by contemporary New York photographers of the day, people like Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, who chose the same subjects but for more social reformist purposes.

In 1896, Alice stopped a messenger boy on the street to create a masterpiece of composition and form. She would do the same with policemen, postmen, even street sweepers. (NYPL)



Her travels took her around New England and even to Europe, but she always returned home to Clear Comfort, and her house and the Narrows framed beautifully in front would remain her most popular subjects.

ALICE AND GERTRUDE
Alice Austen is also an important figure in gay and lesbian history, although she might have recoiled from the word 'lesbian', a term which seemed to apply more to the debauched female bohemians of Greenwich Village than an old-money doyenne living in a seaside cottage. In 1899, she met Brooklyn school teacher and dance instructor Gertrude Tate and began a companionship that culminated in 1917 when Gertrude, over objections from her family, moved into Clear Comfort with Alice.

Yes, another female power couple named Alice and Gertrude. Although unlike the Parisian bon vivants of the day, the true relationship led by Austen and Tate continues to remain closed to the world. They were companions for the rest of their lives, even through the troubling trials that would soon befall the residents of Clear Comfort

She had survived this many years quite comfortably on the interest from her grandfather's wealth. But the Great Depression wiped out most of the family finances. Austen resorted to opening her front yard as a tea room, and when that failed, she mortgaged the house and sold off most of her possessions. Fortunately in 1945 she confided her glass plate negatives to Loring McMillan at the Staten Island Historical Society -- although she expected to get them back! (McMillan would later be instrumental in the creation of Historic Richmond Town as a repository of some of the borough's oldest, most famous structures.)


Above: For a Life Magazine article in 1951, Austen was reunited with her tattered old home.

Alice Austen has the rare distinction of being rescued herself by a historical preservation society.  Even as situations became so dire for her in 1950 that she moved into the Staten Island Farm Colony, a pauper's retreat in Sea View, the Staten Island Historical Society began work with a publisher to publish her photos, most seeing light for the first time in decades. From the proceeds she was able to spend her final years in a private nursing home, the subject of magazine articles and belated tributes. She died in on June 2, 1952.

Gertrude outlived her by ten years. Her request to be buried next to Alice was not honored by her family.

PRESERVING THE IMAGE
Alice Austen's home was rescued by the community in the 1960s, designated a New York City landmark in 1971 and exhaustively renovated in the 1980s. Today it's one of Staten Island's most unusual treasures, close to industry and a heavily developed residential area, but serene as though kept under glass.

The house is as reverent to the craft of photography as it was when Alice was alive. On the blustery afternoon I spent at the Alice Austen House, the rooms were buzzing with children arriving for a workship on how to make and use pinhole cameras. Replicas of her equipment are featured in exhibits fashioned from Alice's old drawing room.

While the home is in remarkable shape for a building over three centuries old, standing on the shores of the Narrows provides a special challenge for preservation, and the grant it has placed with the Partners In Preservation program would help weatherproof the structure, with additional repairs to the chimney and roof.

The Alice Austen House is digitizing many of her 3,500 existing photographs, available on their newly launched website. You can also go there for information on how to visit.

Below: Alice in a self-portrait with her dog Punch, 1893 [source]


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