Author Archives: Ria

Q is for Queens

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Located at 73-50 Little Neck Parkway, Queens, NY 11004
Museum Website:  https://www.queensfarm.org/

Queens County Farm Museum

Queens County Farm Museum is a working farm, dating back to 1697 and occupies New York City’s largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland. The farm is one of the longest continuously farmed sites in New York State. The site includes historic farm buildings, a greenhouse complex, livestock, farm vehicles and implements, planting fields, an orchard, apiary, and a herb garden.

Queens County Farm Museum is a New York City Landmark, on the National Register of Historic Places and a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City.

The farm was privately owned by a Dutch family, the Adriances, from 1697 to 1808, after which year it was owned by a series of families. In 1926, the farm was sold to Creedmoor State Hospital. The hospital used it for occupational therapy, to stock its kitchen, and to grow ornamental plants for the rest of the hospital campus. 

In 1975, NYC Parks acquired the farm from the hospital for the purpose of starting a museum.

Queens County Farm Museum, also known as Queens Farm, provides an opportunity for urbanites to connect with agriculture and the natural environment.

The 47-acre farm has plenty of learning opportunities for people of any age, but especially for children. The farm is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and is operated by the Colonial Farmhouse Restoration Society of Bellerose, Inc.

The restored Adriance Farmhouse, the centerpiece of the farm complex, was first built as a three-room Dutch farmhouse in 1772. Certain dates each month, you can take tours of the historical farm house.

The Farmy Scavenger Hunt at Queens Farm, a free family program, is aimed at PreK to 5th grade children to help them discover and learn about plants, animals and the history of the farm.

At the Con Edison Reading Room, open year-round, visitors can relax with a book or magazine while visiting the farm. This was originally built as a summer kitchen and most recently was used for the farm’s tomato storage. You will find books related to cooking, gardening, the environment, health and wellness, animals, farming, science and NYC history at the reading room.

If you are interested in taking part in the Apple Blossom Carnival, now is the time! It is being held April 22-23 and 28-30, 2023. 

You can check out all the museum programs on the Events and Programs page of the museum website.

The Farm Store at Queens Farm is a wonderful place to find unique items for the home and garden including Queens Farm products, locally-made gifts, and educational toys and books.

Farm-fresh eggs from the variety of heritage-breed hens raised at the farm, raw, local wildflower honey, an assortment of herbal teas like lemongrass, nettles, lemon verbena, raspberry leaf, tulsi etc produced from plants grown at Queens Farm, yarn from the farm’s alpacas and cotswold sheep, some naturally-dyed using dye plants grown on the farm… these are some of the goodies available for sale at the Farm Store.

The Farm Store also sells a range of seasonal plants from spring through fall. 

Animal feeding, sheep shearing, pumpkin patches, tractor pulled hayrides a maize maze… lots of seasonal things (some are ticketed) are happening at the Queens Farm. Be sure to check out their happenings page for the year.

The Annual Queens County Fair, a traditional agricultural fair with competitions in produce, arts and crafts, takes place at the farm. This year it is scheduled for the September 8 to 10, with pie eating and corn husking contests, hayrides, carnival rides, and games. Tickets for this event can be purchased online.

Queens Farm also offers educational programs for students and adults, the details of which are on the museum website.

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20 Apr 2023

P is for Park

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Located at Brooklyn, New York City, main entrance at Grand Army Plaza
Park Website:  https://www.prospectpark.org/

Prospect Park

Prospect Park is an urban park in Brooklyn, New York City. The 585-acre park is one of the nation’s premier public parks. In 2017, Prospect Park celebrated its 150th anniversary.

The park has a long history. In the 18th century, Brooklyn was one of six villages located at the western end of Long Island. By the second half of the 19th century, Brooklyn had grown to be the third most populous city in the country, after only New York and Philadelphia. The erstwhile farming community had quickly turned into a commuter suburb with row homes and street grids.

The growth of urban concepts coincided with this growth. Following the setting up of Central Park in Manhattan, by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux starting 1858, a movement grew in Brooklyn for a landscaped park of its own. 

James S.T. Stranahan, a business and civic leader with real estate interests in Brooklyn argued for a park not only as a public nicety, but also as a way to lure wealthy residents to the town. In 1865, Calvert Vaux sketched Prospect Park’s present layout at Stranahan’s request. This induced the Brooklyn commissioners to authorize the full purchase of the land for Prospect Park.

A comprehensive plan for the development of Prospect Park was submitted by the Olmsted and Vaux team in 1866, envisioning a tranquil, rural landscape where people could recuperate from the incessant pace of city life. They designed an elaborate infrastructure for Prospect Park, and construction began on July 1, 1866, under their supervision.

The principal features of the design included the Long Meadow, a heavily wooded area they called the Ravine and a 60-acre lake, meandering carriage drives, high elevation scenic lookouts, woodland waterfalls and springs, and a rich forest. 

Original Park structures included rustic shelters and arbors, and sandstone bridges and arches. A Concert Grove House and Pavilion were built adjacent to the Lake so Park visitors could enjoy music in a pastoral setting, and there was a Wellhouse near Lookout Hill, and a Dairy complete with milking cows. 

The public was welcomed to the park for the first time on October 19, 1867, long before the Park was complete. Construction continued for another seven years. In the year 1868, 2 million people came to enjoy what would come to be known as ‘Brooklyn’s Jewel’.

Over the years, the park was improved by activities like the creation of the Prospect Park Zoo in 1935, new playgrounds around the Park’s perimeter, the extensive renovation of the Park drives in the 1950s, and the construction of the Bandshell. 

The park has undergone many ups and downs in its lifetime. By 1979, the number of the visitors had dwindled to just 2 million a year, the lowest in the Park’s history. In 1980 was started long term restoration efforts to bring back the glory of the park.

The 146-acre section in the center of the park, known as the Ravine, is also Brooklyn’s only forest. The Ravine’s stream and steep gorge is a recreation of the Adirondack Mountains, created by the original design team of Olmsted and Vaux. The Ravine has a variety of trees growing there from black oak to hickory to tulip trees.

Prospect Park originally included several arched bridges to provide grade-separated crossings for pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Today the main surviving arches are the Endale Arch, East Wood Arch, Meadowport Arch, and Cleft Ridge Span.

The Music Pagoda, used for concerts until it burned down in 1968, was rebuilt on the site in 1971.

The Camperdown Elm is a species of elm trees with drooping branches usually called ‘weeping elm’. The Camperdown Elm in Prospect Park, nicknamed ‘the crowning curio’ of the park was planted in 1872. It still survives in the park, though it was almost dead once.

The Prospect Park Boathouse is set in the most idyllic scene, with its beauty reflected in the waters. When the Parks Department proposed demolishing the boathouse in 1964, the local preservation group Friends of Prospect Park built public awareness over the park’s disappearing historical structures. The public pressure became so strong that the park commissioner halted plans for demolition.

In 1987, a group of private citizens working with the Parks Commissioner founded a new nonprofit organization to work with the City in leading Prospect Park’s transformation called the Prospect Park Alliance. More than a decade of intensive restoration efforts followed with focus on restoring the Ravine, a radical redesign of the skating rink and the lakeside, and restoration of the historic Baier Music Island.

The LeFrak Center, a year-round skating and recreational facility, was opened In 2013, in the final phase of the restoration and redesign of the Lakeside section.

A restoration project, focusing on an 8-acre section of the Vale, is being planned to start in 2024. The Vale is a 26-acre portion of Prospect Park in its northeast corner. The plan is to restore two landscape features in this area: the historic Children’s pool and the former Rose Garden.

The Grand Army Plaza, which was constructed along with the park during the late 1860s, is the park’s main entrance, though there are 17 other entrances to the park.

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19 Apr 2023

O is for Old

Author: | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: , , , ,

Located at 336 Third Street, Brooklyn, New York
Museum Website:  https://theoldstonehouse.org/

The Old Stone House

The Old Stone House, located within the Washington Park in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, is a historical home, originally a Dutch stone farmhouse and now a museum, dedicated to increasing public awareness of icons of American History.

The original house, known as the Vechte-Cortelyou House, was built by Claes Vechte, in 1699, beside Gowanus Creek. Its two-foot thick wall of fieldstone and brick and its heavily shuttered windows were meant to protect the family. At the time, this area was part of the village of Gowanus in the old Town of Breukelen. The Vechte family farmed the lands around the house.

During the Battle of Brooklyn, in August 1776, the sturdy house and its strategic position made it the focus of the most dramatic event of the day. The house was held by an estimated 2000 British and hired Hessian soldiers, who turned it into an artillery position. From the house, they fired on the Americans, who had suffered disastrous losses and were fleeing for their lives to the safety of American forts across the Gowans Creek. Against this stronghold, some 400 of the Maryland Brigade threw themselves in six attacks, regained the house twice, but, ultimately, were repulsed. Nevertheless, it was their valor, witnessed by General Washington and his troops, that hardened the resolve of the American Army.

This was the first major engagement of the Continental Army after the Declaration of Independence, and the largest battle of the entire war. The Old Stone House was established as a memorial to the Battle of Long Island due to the efforts of members of the First Battle Revival Alliance named in honor of that first battle of the newly formed country against Great Britain, the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn.

To honor the memory of the Maryland Continentals, the flag of Maryland flies from the house.

The building has an interesting history of being buried once and then being resurrected. Nicholas Vechte, grandson of Claes, was still living at the Old Stone House during the Revolutionary War. The house passed through to various descendants of Vechte and Jacques Cortelyou who bought it from Vechte. After 1852, the home was used as a clubhouse for a skating club in the winter and a baseball club in the summer. The Old Stone House became the first clubhouse of the Brooklyn team of the National Base Ball league, later known as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

When street grading raised the level of Fourth and Fifth Avenues, only the second story of the house was above ground level. In 1897 the exposed part of the house was razed in a public demonstration of military technology and then buried. The land that the house was on was purchased by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in 1923 and excavated the house in 1930. Reconstruction of the building was completed in 1934 using the original stones. However, the new house was turned 90 degrees and placed a few feet further west and sixteen feet higher than the original farmhouse. The house underwent restoration in the 1970s and the 1990s.

The Old Stone House Historic Interpretive Center is operated by the Old Stone House of Brooklyn (OSH), a not-for-profit corporation, under license from the Parks Department. 

There are several small gardens around the house, concentrating on community activities, including a tool lending library.

An actual book lending/ recycling library is also present on the premises.

The lower floor of the house contains exhibits on the battle with detailed information, as well as the family stories of the Vechtes including a detailed family tree. 

OSH offers a full program of school visits on subjects related to the history of the house and the battle and an extensive schedules of concerts, readings, lectures and other events. Each year, 7,000 students visit the Old Stone House to learn about the Battle of Brooklyn and colonial life.

It is also used for a variety of events including a summer camp, Piper Theatre, and one-off events such as a sing-a-long to the musical Hamilton.

The hall on the upper floor is used for art and craft exhibitions. When I visited last in October 2022, a textile craft exhibition named ‘Belonging’ was on display, showing creations by three artists – Kimberly Bush, Stephanie Eche and Traci Johnson, curated by Grace R. Freedman of Why Not Art. 

The show featured rich and varied textures in the textile work on view like knots, tufted rugs, felted wool, and subtle stitches shown in a mix of natural and bombastic colors. 

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18 Apr 2023

N is for New York

Author: | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: , , ,

Main location: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building Tours
Library Website:  https://www.nypl.org/ 

New York Public Library

To many people, the landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman building, with its famous lions facing Fifth Avenue, symbolizes The New York Public Library. But the Library is actually a vast network of libraries, organized into two distinct parts, The Research Libraries and The Branch Libraries.

The New York Public Library is the country’s second biggest public library system (second only to the Library of Congress) and the world’s third biggest (coming in behind the British Library). When it was completed in 1911, New York Public Library was the largest marble structure in the country. At that time it contained 1 million books and more than 50,000 people visited on the first day. The library spans two full city blocks. 

The New York Public Library originated from the consolidation of the early libraries Astor Library, Lenox Library and the New York Free Circulating Library. 

Every part of the building is richly decorated. Astor Hall, where you first enter, and the McGrow Rotunda on the third floor are prime examples of this. The building itself is placed on an elevated platform so it can stand out even when there are many other buildings nearby. Along the top of the building are situated sculptures of allegorical characters representing the fields that the library will cover… History, Romance, Poetry, Religion, Drama and Philosophy. 

There are over 52 million items in the collections of The New York Public Library today, the manuscript archives and over 18 million books making up the core of the collections. 

Millions of items in other formats, ranging from 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets to CD-ROMs, are also part of the collections. Films, maps, photographs, prints, magazines, government documents, menus, newspapers, sound recordings, and other artifacts of human communication are all gathered and preserved.

The library stacks under the main library are seven layers deep and built with steel and cast iron. Books are requested and delivered from these stacks using a mini rail system going up and down.

To hold more material on-site, a storage center that can hold 4 million items was built below Bryant Park. 

The first thing you notice as you approach the library are the majestic lions in front of it… Patience and Fortitude, named so by Mayor La Guardia to exemplify the city’s characteristics during the depression era. (I have always thought that the names should have been Patience and Perseverance. Better rhyming!). 🙂  The lion’s head is the logo of the library and lions’ heads can be seen throughout the building, suggesting the power and stability of the institution, and the idea that the lion is the protector of the building.

A blog post cannot even touch upon the vastness of the material in the library. Just to touch upon them…

Manuscripts

Personal papers, literary manuscripts, original correspondence, company records – all are the raw material of the historian. The Research Libraries hold some of the most important of such manuscript collections in the world.

Photography Collection

Contains more than 200,000 images from the mid-19th century to the present, including the 72,000 items of Stereoscopic Views.

Videos

There are a half-million audiovisual items in the collections of the library. The many special video collections include oral histories of civil rights leaders and live dance and theatrical performances.

Map Division

This is the largest public library collection of its kind in the United States, with more than 420,000 maps and 20,000 books and atlases dating from the 16th century to the present. Shown here is an 18th-century map of Ireland.

Magazines

Original comic books, including many examples of Classics Illustrated, form one of the Library’s caches of ephemeral material for research on 20th-century popular culture. Other materials in magazine format – general interest and scholarly periodicals, for example – are collected extensively throughout the Library.

Government Documents

Collection includes official gazettes and other publications issued by the United States, New York State, and international bodies like the United Nations.

Vital Records

Millstein Division for local history provides people interested in genealogical research access to New York city’s vital records – birth, death, and marriage certificates; census materials, ships’ passenger lists, city directories etc. 

Braille Books

The New York Public Library holds more than 11,000 braille books. Every day the library delivers thousands of braille books for home use throughout New York City and Long Island.

Cuneiform tablets. The Library’s collection of approximately 700 cuneiform tablets from the third millennium B.C., which are among the earliest written records, are housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division. Cuneiform tablets were written by scribes, usually on soft clay that was then either baked in an oven or left to dry in the sun.

Music Manuscripts

The Music Division holds thousands of composers’ manuscripts from the 18th through the 20th centuries.

Audiocassettes

Outstanding collections of audiocassettes and CDs include nearly 35,000 recordings as well as talking books and magazines. 

Film

Some 8,500 circulating 16mm films are held in the media center.

LPs

The Archives has a vast collection of opera and classical music in the LP format and excellent LP holdings in American pop music, jazz, musical theatre, and European and Wester hemisphere folk music.

CD-ROMs

The CD-ROM, with its space-saving capabilities, is today a familiar format in the Library’s electronic reference collections. The English Poetry Full-Text Database on CD-ROM includes over 165,000 poems drawn from 4,500 printed sources. American Business Disc CD-ROM lists over ten million U.S. businesses.

Research Libraries

The Research Libraries include four centers:

  • Center for the Humanities located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building
  • Science, Industry and Business Library on Madison Avenue
  • The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts located at Lincoln Center
  • Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem

Branch Libraries

The Branch Libraries include 85 neighborhood libraries (including five central service locations) located throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. These local libraries provide circulating and reference collections to users of all ages; more than 11 million items are available for borrowing by cardholders, including books, magazines, videotapes, pictures, audio recordings, and other items. The Branch Libraries also provide specialized services for children, young adults, for people with disabilities, for the elderly and new immigrants, for job seekers and inmates, in fact anyone in need.

All the Library’s locations are linked with each other, and with the outside world, through telecommunications networks. The entire Branch Libraries catalog and the online catalog of The Research Libraries can be reached from any location within The New York Public Library system, from other libraries around the world, and from home computers via the Internet.

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17 Apr 2023

M is for Maritime

Author: | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: , , ,

Located at 6 Pennyfield Ave, Bronx, NY 10465, within the SUNY Maritime College campus
Museum Website:  https://www.sunymaritime.edu/aboutpublic-programs/maritime-industry-museum

Maritime Industry Museum

Among my list for this A to Z Blogging Challenge, this will be the least known. Surprisingly, not even many native New Yorkers (Is there a word ‘New York Citian’?) are aware of this museum. 

The Maritime Industry Museum is a treasure trove of information about the seafaring industry, its origin and development in the western world, with specific reference to New York. The stated mission of the Maritime Industry Museum is “to collect, restore, preserve and interpret artifacts, photographs, art and writings celebrating all facets of the Maritime Industry ashore and afloat”.

The museum is located in historic Fort Schuyler, within the campus of the SUNY (State University of New York) Maritime College. Its location right below the Throgs Neck Bridge offers a unique view of the bridge and Manhattan further ahead.

The museum was established in 1986 as a true labor of love. It was an idea of Captain Jeffrey W. Monroe, then Associate Professor of Marine Transportation at SUNY Maritime College to provide a location to display the rich heritage of the maritime industry for the general public, in addition to a resource for the college’s cadets.

With the help and contributions from the college’s staff, alumni and student body the museum was filled with photographs and paintings of ships, and its passageways flooded with showcases displaying nautical artifacts from the seven seas.

Since then, steamship lines, related companies in the maritime industry, and private collectors have donated hundreds of artifacts to supplement the museum’s collection. Today, the Maritime Industry Museum has over 2,000 items on display, and thousands of other items in its archives, which will be preserved for future generations.

This is a hidden gem of a museum is a testament to the importance of shipping and the seafaring way of life to the modern global society.

The first European to settle in the lands that Fort Schuyler stands today was John Throgmorton, who obtained a license to settle on the peninsula which now bears his name on October 2, 1642, according to recorded history. The place gets its name, Throgg’s Neck, from this original inhabitant. Four sides of the fort’s irregular pentagon-shaped edifice face Long Island Sound and its juncture with the East River.

With the idea of constructing a fort to protect New York from attack by sea, a tract of 52 acres of land was purchased by the Federal Government in 1826. In December 1845, the fort was completed. It is named after for the Continental Army General Philip Schuyler, who commanded the Northern Army.

In 1932, military operations at the fort were ended and in 1934, it became the home of the New York State Merchant Marine Academy.

In cooperation with the Eastern Dive Boat Association, the Maritime Industry Museum at Fort Schuyler has artifacts from many local shipwrecks of different time periods, like from the Cunard liner Oregon.

The museum has many unique artifacts ranging from the Clipper Ship era to the present. 

The extensive collection of ship models, some up to 6 feet in length, is a major part of the museum. Some of the valuable large scale models include those of the liners S.S. Bremen, S.S. Reliance, S.S. Hansa ,S.S. Argentina Maru, and S.S. Saturnia.

The library has maritime industry books, periodicals, documents, papers, prints, photographs, and old steamship company records.

There are so many artifacts related to the history on New York and its seafaring environment. The museum is an excellent reminder that maritime trade is how and why New York City has grown into the international center of industry that it has.

The Maritime College has active classrooms inside the museum.

The Maritime Industry Museum is spread over two floors, with many galleries which are full with charts, historical documents, advertising posters from bygone times, paintings, ship parts, and shipping related instruments and tools.

In addition to browsing the artifacts and maps relevant to maritime trade from the earliest Atlantic fishermen to mid-20th-century supertankers, Fort Schuyler itself is an interesting place to visit.

The winding stone steps, of the spiral staircase going up the fort’s towers, are a real charm. 

Even the forgotten ship disasters like General Slocum, Morro Castle, Andrea Doria, etc. are not forgotten here.

Outside the museum, the grounds offer great views all around.

This museum is quite enjoyable, and one learns a lot in the process, even if you don’t have any knowledge of, or interest in ships and shipbuilding. There is so much history living in its galleries!

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15 Apr 2023