Tag Archives: New York

O is for Old

Author: Ria | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: Brooklyn, Historical museum, New York, Old Stone House, Revolutionary war

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: Ria | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: Library, Manhattan, New York, New York Public Library

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: Ria | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: Manhattan, Maritime Industry Museum, Museum, New York

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

L is for Little

Author: Ria | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: Little Island, Manhattan, New York, Parks

Located at Pier 55 in Hudson River Park @W 13th St, New York, NY 10014
Website: https://littleisland.org/

Little Island

Little Island is a new public park, jutting into the Hudson River, over what used to be piers 54 and 55. It is located within the larger Hudson River Park, which extends from Battery Park in the south to Pier 97 in the north.

The park is held up by 132 funnel shaped structures called Tulips. These tulips vary in height, anywhere between 15 and 62 feet above the water.

The park opened to the public on May 21 2021. It has an area of 2.4 acres and is built on multiple levels. There are two walkway bridges connecting the island park to the Hudson River walkway on the mainland. (The word ‘mainland’ is used kinda loosely here as Manhattan itself is an island!)

There are several wonderful seating areas and lookout points throughout the park. If you can imagine the whole park in the rough shape of a bowl, at the rims will be the lookout points, with a lawn, lots of seating with umbrellas for sun protection, and children’s performance area in the center which is called ‘the play ground’. You will find food vendors in this area as well.

You can walk up the various paths to get to the three overlooks with some of the best views in the city, of the neighborhood, downtown Manhattan and New Jersey.

To the southern end of the park is ‘the glade’ where small performances take place. Usually someone is reading to children sitting in close circles, with the parents a bit further on the benches. Various music, dance, poetry, and comedy shows take place here as well.

There is an amphitheater with facilities for professional performances in the park, called ‘the amph’. For these performances you will need advance tickets, which can be reserved online. If there is no performance taking place, this is a great place to stretch your legs and enjoy the view.

Only working dogs that assist patrons with disabilities are allowed in the park. Pets and emotional support animals are not allowed as it is not conducive to the wellbeing of the garden beds and lawns.

Looking at the up and down terrain of the park it is hard to imagine, but the whole of Little Island is ADA compliant.

The park is open to the public starting 6 am in the morning and closes at different hours, depending on the season, anywhere from 9 pm to 12 am.

There is a wide variety of trees and flowering plants growing all over the park. These are natives that thrive in the local conditions. These are maintained to suit the changing seasons.

During the 19th and 20th centuries the Hudson River waterfront was a busy port of entry. Between 1910 and 1935, Pier 54 operated the British Cunard-White Star line, serving as a point of departure and return for trans-Atlantic ocean liner voyages.

The pier then fell into disuse until the 1970s when it became the center of community activities in the area, especially for the city’s LGBTQ community. Starting in 1986, the annual Dance on the Pier event took place here for over 25 years.

In 2012, Pier 54 was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy which hit the New York City coastline. Instead of building it back up, the idea of an alternative use for it was envisioned.

Little Island was planned, designed and built under a private-public partnership. While $260 million came from private contributions, the rest of the cost was borne by the city and state of New York.

The best time to visit Little Island is early morning, just as soon as it is open. There is absolute peace and quiet and you have the whole place to yourself. And after you have done with Little Island, it just a short walk to the High Line, which will take you to the Hudson yards. So much to see, so much to do!

Tidbyte

In 1912, survivors from the Titanic disaster arrived to safety at Pier 54 where Little Island stands today, aboard the RMS Carpathia rescue liner.

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14 Apr 2023

K is for King

Author: Ria | Category: A to Z Challenge | Tags: King Manor Museum, Museum, New York, Queens

Located at 150-03 Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica NY 11432
Museum Website: https://www.kingmanor.org/

King Manor Museum

The King Manor Museum is the original country estate of Rufus King, a member of the Continental Congress, a framer and signer of the Constitution, one of the first senators from New York State, the ambassador to Great Britain under four presidents, and an outspoken opponent of slavery. It is a very well organized, gem of a museum.

King bought this house and property in 1805 and lived there with his wife Mary Alsop King, their five children, and hired help. After moving in full time, they enlarged the house and made renovations in 1810 and also expanded the property to 150 acres. A devoted scholar of agricultural science, Rufus focused on improving the land and experimenting with crops, turning it into a successful working farm.

King was a passionate advocate for the early anti-slavery movement in America and used his platforms as the first New York Senator and Ambassador to Great Britain to fight slavery in the United States.

After his death in 1827, Rufus’ eldest son John Alsop King bought the house and farm from his father’s estate. Like his father, John made his career in politics, serving in the New York State Assembly, U.S. Congress, and as Governor of New York from 1857 to 1859.

John carried on his father’s legacy of anti-slavery advocacy and fought for the arrest of men who kidnapped free Black New Yorkers and sold them into slavery.

After the demise of Cornelia King, granddaughter of Rufus King, the house and grounds were purchased by the Village of Jamaica to be used as a park, in 1897. The King Manor Association was formed in 1900 with the purpose of caring for the house and the museum collection. The Association still exists and runs King Manor to this date.

When the western half of Queens, including Jamaica, became part of the City of Greater New York, the house and the property were turned over to the New York City Parks Department which redesignated the land as Rufus King Park.

King Manor Museum is part of the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, and has been declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark and an NYC Landmark.

*The parlor, meant for immediate family, close friends, and long term guests*

Today King Manor Museum is the second longest-running historic house museum in New York City. The museum is a picturesque edifice that stands in the center of the square block of Rufus King Park. It is a treasure-trove of 18th century information and stories, and contains furniture, furnishings, books, and pictures that date back to that era.

*Room that was the master suite, now the exhibition room*

When I visited last in October 2022, the annual Fall Festival was taking place at the grounds of the museum, with dozens of vendors, and a pumpkin patch for the children.

The museum also on display some of the kitchen implements.

The museum provides an exhibition space, on the second-floor, for artisans to showcase their creative work in the community. The exhibits explore topics relevant to the social questions of the times. Each exhibition is on view for a few months at the museum.

There are several online exhibitions, with interactive elements, available at the museum website.

Kings Manor Museum holds a number of programs on a regular basis.

One of them is ‘Hands On History’, a family program series held each first and third Saturday of the month, from 1-4pm. You can find information about the workshops, school programs and special exhibitions at the museum on the Events Calendar.

*Extensive grounds around the King Manor Museum*

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13 Apr 2023