The story of New York’s oldest Titanic memorial, unveiled exactly one year after the disaster

The R.M.S. Titanic went to its watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean on the morning of April 15, 1912. Few cities felt the tragedy as deeply as New York City.

At the end of its maiden voyage, the luxurious ship was set to dock at the White Star Line’s Pier 59, near today’s Chelsea Piers. Instead, 706 dazed survivors picked up by the R.M.S. Carpathia disembarked a few blocks away at Pier 54—greeted by a crowd of thousands desperate for news about the iceberg that sank the ship and the whereabouts of family members.

St. Vincent’s Hospital tended to survivors; Lower Manhattan hotels put them up as guests. The Women’s Relief Committee, a newly formed group made up of prominent society ladies, raised thousands of dollars for stranded passengers, especially those in steerage.

Influential and lesser-known residents went down with the ship, including Macy’s owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, and John Jacob Astor IV (the son of Mrs. Astor, the society leader). Their absence was felt immediately in a city stunned with grief.

In response to so much tragedy, no time was wasted planning a monument to the lives lost—one that would function as not just a memorial but also as a guiding light for ships in New York Harbor.

“The Seaman’s Benefit Society has undertaken the task of collecting the funds for the erection of a permanent memorial to the men and women lost on the Titanic in the form of a lighthouse tower on the new Seaman’s Institute at the corner of Coenties Slip and South Street,” wrote the New York Times on April 23, 1912.

The lighthouse memorial, which would have a lantern gallery and a fixed green light viewable as far away as Sandy Hook, was to be topped by a time ball that dropped down a pole at noon, so seaman could set their chronometers (and Lower Manhattan dwellers could set their watches).

Though it honored everyone who went down with the ship, the memorial would be “in memory of the engineers who sent their stokers up while they went to certain death; the members of the heroic band who played while the water crept up to their instruments; and of the officers and crew who put duty above personal safety,” noted the Times.

“It will be given in memory of those in the steerage who perished without ever realizing their hopes of a new land, the America of endless possibilities.”

Putting the memorial on top of the new Seaman’s Institute was also a fitting choice. This organization, launched in 1834 as the Seaman’s Church Institute, helped take care of the thousands of sailors who came to New York City on the many vessels over the years that made shipping and trade a powerhouse of Gotham’s economy.

The cornerstone for the Institute’s new building went in the ground on the morning of the sinking of the Titanic. One year later, the completed building—featuring dormitory rooms, a bank, library, and chapel—hosted a dedication service for the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse perched on its roof.

The lighthouse, designed by Warren & Wetmore (the architects behind Grand Central Terminal) went into service that November, according to the South Street Seaport Museum.

For the next 55 years, as ship traffic decreased in New York Harbor and South Street’s fortunes turned, the Titanic memorial with its time ball stayed in service on the roof. In 1968, the Seaman’s Institute moved to a new headquarters on State Street. The top of the Titanic Memorial was given to the South Street Seaport Museum.

But it wasn’t until 1976 when the memorial lighthouse went up on a triangular corner at Pearl and Fulton Streets (now known as Titanic Memorial Park), held in place by a concrete podium. The time ball is also gone; it’s been replaced by an ornamental sphere.

Here it still stands, a memorial to a maritime disaster that hit the city hard and remains in the public imagination.

I’m not the only one who has noticed it could use some TLC. A group dedicated to restoring the monument has formed, according to a 2022 New York Times piece. But a costly restoration of a relic not many passersby notice remains uncertain.

[Second photo, NYPL, 1915; Third photo, MCNY, 88.1.1.2369; fourth photo, MCNY by Edmund Vincent Gillon; 2013.3.1.960]

A dynamic scene at a rooftop theater reveals changes in Gilded Age society

Going to the theater has always been a beloved New York City pastime. But theater became even more thrilling with the advent of open-air rooftop gardens—which hit the scene in the late 1880s with the opening of the rooftop theater at the Casino on Broadway and 39th Street.

It wasn’t just the cool breezes that appealed to New Yorkers. “Only at the turn of the century did amusements of this sort become acceptable places for respectable women,” explains the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has this painting, by William Glackens, in its collection.

“Hammerstein’s Roof Garden,” from 1901, depicts theater magnate Oscar Hammerstein’s semi-outdoor Palace Roof Garden at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. While men and women sit side by side at tables configured to encourage socializing, performers entertain the well-heeled crowd.

As an Ashcan artist, Glackens wasn’t just interested in capturing a lively scene. “The arena into which they gaze is lit by a filigreed tangle of electric lights, a recent invention that had made nighttime theater possible,” states the Whitney.

“In this painting, Glackens portrays not simply a night at the theater, but the changing mores of post-Victorian society and the impact of new technology on everyday life.”

It’s always 1910 at this East Houston Street knish shop

Before Yonah Schimmel moved into an actual brick and mortar store on East Houston Street, he sold his knishes, reportedly made by his wife, from a pushcart.

“When Schimmel, a rabbi, left his native Romania for New York late in the 19th century, he had visions of becoming a teacher,” wrote Bill Morris in the New York Daily News in 2004.

But instead of joining the ranks of educators, Schimmel became part of the vast brigade of the city’s peddlers and vendors. He then opened a knish shop on East Houston with his cousin, states Sam Roberts in a 2010 New York Times article. The knishery relocated to its current site in 1910.

Schimmel left the knish business early on, wrote Roberts. He likely missed what was dubbed in 1916 the “knish war,” which involved a knish baker on nearby Rivington Street slashing his knish price from five to three cents, among other tactics, to undercut a rival knishery across the street.

Who knew the knish business was so cutthroat?

Now there are no rival knish bakeries; Yonah Schimmel’s is the only one left on the Lower East Side. (Yonah Schimmel has even outlasted Mrs. Stahl’s knishes in Brighton Beach, which closed in 2005.)

Schimmel’s namesake knishery continues to turn out doughy pillows of potato and kasha that go from the oven to an ancient display case. The store signage remains charmingly frozen in time.

Images of the shop reveal how little has changed, despite the transformation of so much of East Houston Street—once a Jewish immigrant main drag that became a trendy nightlife destination in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In the second photo, from about 1940, there’s a vertical knish sign—how wonderful if it managed to survive and is in storage somewhere! But otherwise, the little shop’s windows and doorway, save for a ramp, appear the same.

Thirty-three years later, Hedy Pagremanski painted a robust view of Yonah Schimmel’s (third image) looking eerily as it does today.

Pagremanski depicts the current signage above the store (with it’s curious misspelling of Schimmel), a crowd of neighborhood folks, and signs of life in some of the tenement windows, like flower boxes and curtains. Instead of another tenement on the right, there’s just an empty lot—hardly an uncommon sight on the Lower East Side of the 1970s.

The last image shows the current Yonah Schimmel’s. Flanked by a featureless hotel on the right and a reflective glass box on the left (RIP Sunshine Cinema), the knishery comes off as a relic of a very different Manhattan. Which it is—and the city is better for it.

[Second image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; third image: MCNY, 79.50]

The boy in red lobbing snowballs on a desolate tenement street

By 1905, nine playgrounds had been built in Lower Manhattan—products of a social movement started in the late 19th century that called for safe, supervised places for city boys and girls to play.

But nine playgrounds couldn’t possibly serve all the tenement-district kids who dwelled in downtown neighborhoods at the time. For most of them, the streets remained their playgrounds.

And snowbanks surrounding a block of rundown red brick storefronts made the perfect launching spot for a snowball fight.

George Luks painted “Children Throwing Snowballs” in 1905. The thick brushstrokes suggest action, almost chaos. Is it kids vs. kids, with two adults watching from a shop awning…or a group of kids lobbing snowballs at the adults, a shopkeeper in a smock and female customer dressed in black?

The boy in the red coat is in the center of the image, and our eyes are drawn to his warrior stance. At this moment, the boy might be imagining that he isn’t on a gritty snowbank but on top of a parapet. He’s a knight defending his kingdom, or a soldier leading his backup troops to victory—not just another poor city kid making mischief on a winter afternoon.

This elegant object in a historic East Side synagogue had a lowly but crucial function

There’s incredible beauty inside the Museum at Eldridge Street, the stunningly restored synagogue originally opened in 1887.

The physical building—with its stained glass windows and Moorish style—is an astounding remnant of a long-dispersed Eastern European Jewish community that packed into the narrow streets of the Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th century.

But it’s the artifacts inside that help tell the story of this historic sanctuary, from the brilliant brass chandeliers (originally gas-lit, then electrified) to the worn pine floorboards, where congregants would pray and leave “their physical imprint on the space,” per the Museum website.

And on display on a platform is a blue and white ceramic bowl (top photo). Its lowly yet important purpose? To collect spit from worshippers who would otherwise “expectorate” on the synagogue floor.

Seeing a spittoon in a house of worship might seem a little strange. But a century or so ago, these “cuspidors” were common everywhere men gathered: restaurants, clubs, hotels, railroad cars, banks, and bars (below photo shows the spittoons at J.J. Corbett’s Salon at Sixth Avenue and 33rd Street).

“Nineteenth-century America had a spitting problem,” explains the website for the Tenement Museum. “Public spitting . . . was a deeply engrained aspect of male culture. The use of chewing tobacco was nearly universal among the working class, while pipe tobacco and cigars became a status symbol for wealthier Americans.”

The male worshippers at the Eldridge Street Synagogue had picked up the spitting habit. According to a 2012 post on the Museum’s Facebook page, “the congregation at Eldridge Street would order [spittoons] at the start of the Jewish New Year. They were a way of keeping decorum. Spitting in a receptacle versus on the floor.”

Traditionally, a spittoon was placed on the floor. Exactly where it would have been in the Eldridge Street Synagogue is unclear. The main sanctuary was closed in the 1940s due to the dwindling congregation, then reopened to the public after the 20-year restoration was completed in 2007.

Thanks to turn-of-the-century laws outlawing public spitting (New York passed its first one in 1896), the practice has died down. Spittoons that once graced the floors of many city buildings and houses of worship are now more likely to be artifacts in museum collections like the one on Eldridge Street.

[Second image: Rhododendrites/Wikipedia; third image: MCNY 93.1.1.2206]

A painter captures the rich street life of a busy day in Lower Manhattan in 1951

On a busy day in 1951, a hot dog vendor found himself captive to a hawker of cheap jewelry who set up shop across from his rickety food cart decorated with American flags.

Horses still worked the side streets of the city. Stray dogs waited for food scraps to fall to the pavement. TV antennas sprout from tenements; litter collects in the gutter. Corner stores exhibit life and activity.

And a New York artist named Philip Reisman was there, apparently, to capture these and other rich snippets of visual poetry in a painting he titled simply “Busy Day,” painted in 1951.

Born in Poland in 1904, Reisman and his family fled pograms for the safety (and poverty) of New York City. His father discouraged him from studying art, but he took classes at the Arts Student League and found critical recognition and success through the 20th century for his paintings and etchings.

“His early paintings were candid, crowded scenes of the life he saw around him on the Lower East Side of New York: butchers, carters, peddlers, and homeless men in the Bowery,” states the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

What I wish I knew is the street the painting captures. The slight bend in the sidewalk makes me think of Doyers Street in Chinatown, or another cowpath-turned-road somewhere in Lower Manhattan.

A painter depicts the moody early 20th century East River as a “landscape of industry”

For centuries, New York City made its fortunes from its riverfronts. But it’s been a long time since the waterways of Gotham were dominated by industrial use. In contemporary Manhattan, rivers are for pristine parks, not derricks, tugboats, and ship traffic.

Jonas Lie’s “Morning on the River” puts the gritty, smoky East River of old back into view. Lie was a Norwegian immigrant known for his Impressionist paintings of harbors and coastlines in the early 20th century.

In this 1912 depiction of the riverfront—a place bustling with energy but no human faces in view—Lie “captures the new American landscape of industry and technology,” states Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, which owns the painting.

“Jonas Lie’s dramatic portrayal juxtaposes the powerful bulk of the bridge with the brilliant morning light reflecting off the icy East River in a drama of humankind versus nature,” states the University of Rochester in a separate document that goes into greater detail. “The modern cityscape has replaced the untamed wilderness as a symbol of America’s progress.”

It’s a captivating, moody painting, and my eye is drawn to the orange glow in the center, perhaps a furnace burning coal or wood for industrial use or to keep the working men warm.

Where tenement dwellers slept during brutal summer heat waves

At the turn of the last century, two out of every three New Yorkers lived in a tenement. Day-to-day life inside most of these overcrowded, shoddily constructed buildings meant navigating dark hallways, communal bathrooms, trash-strewn backyards, and airless rooms.

But perhaps the worst of all was trying to sleep inside a tenement in the summer, when a heat wave could turn interior rooms lacking ventilation into ovens reaching 120 degrees.

Getting a good night’s rest indoors was virtually impossible during scorching days in July and August. New Yorkers with money and means fled the city, while the poor and working class stayed behind.

During the day, city officials gave away blocks of ice; public baths extended their usual hours. But after dark, options were limited. The only recourse many tenement dwellers had was to leave their stifling flats and find another place to bed down—sometimes with tragic results.

One sleep solution was to take a blanket and pillow to the tenement roof. Under the stars six stories in the air, it was possible to catch a breeze cool enough to help you nod off. The danger, unfortunately, was rolling off the roof to the pavement below.

Newspaper headlines every summer told tragic stories. “Rolled Off Roof and Was Killed” read one article from the July 1, 1901 edition of The New York Times. “John Terrell, living at 23 Duane Street, fell from the roof of the four-story building at 104 Park Row yesterday and was instantly killed. Terrell went on the roof on account of the heat, fell asleep, and rolled to his death.”

Dragging a mattress through an open window to the fire escape was another option. But again, sleepers risked falling off. “Eleven-year-old Dennis Brophy, of 57 Kent Avenue, is in a dying condition at Eastern District Hospital as a result of falling 30 feet from a fire escape to the ground,” wrote Brooklyn’s Standard Union on July 11, 1912. “”His mother placed him on the landing last night to get some air.”

A safer place to sleep would be a park. Though it was illegal to sleep in a public space at night, the law was eventually lifted at all city parks during heat emergencies to help sleep-deprived New Yorkers survive. (Below, Battery Park around 1910)

On August 12, 1922, six thousand people slept in Central Park, with the largest crowds beside the East Drive close to 86th Street—perhaps residents temporarily fleeing the tenement districts of Yorkville.

“There were hundreds of babies sleeping in their carriages, while the parents lay on the grass nearby, many of them with newspapers under them and with coats or shawls for pillows,” the New York Times reported. Extra police were on hand all night to protect the sleepers.

The sands of Coney Island were also crowded after sundown with New Yorkers seeking cool air and a bit of peace, as this photo above shows. On July 3, 1911, five thousand people slept on the beach at Coney, guarded by 25 extra cops to make sure “no thieves could rob the sleepers,” the Times wrote.

Where else could a tenement dweller cool off enough to catch some shuteye? One of the many piers that lined the East and Hudson Rivers.

This group of city residents at an unidentified East Side pier are trying to hold out. The two small kids on the right with blankets beneath them, however, have already drifted off to dreamland.

[Top image: NYPL; second image: New York Times; third image: Bettmann/CORBIS; fourth image: Bain Collection/LOC; fifth image: Getty Images; sixth image: Bain Collection/LOC]

The blazing colors and old-school design of two Manhattan store signs

It’s a special thrill to come across a vintage New York City store sign that’s never caught your eye before. The design, the typeface, the colors—it all hits you at once, making you feel like you’ve found a magical spot in Gotham where mom-and-pop shops aren’t the exception and time stands still.

That’s the feeling I had after happening upon these two time machine signs a while back, one on the Lower East Side and the other on the opposite end of Manhattan in East Harlem.

On Essex Street is the signage for fourth generation-run M. Schames & Son Paints. I don’t know how old the sign is, but M. Schames got its start in 1927, according to the company Facebook page. The business appears to have moved to 90 Delancey Street.

The sign for Casa Latina, on East 116th Street, is another portal to the New York of the 1950s or 1960s, when Italian Harlem transformed into Spanish Harlem and salsa music came into its own.

Family owned and operated for over 50 years, the shop sells Latin music, instruments, and collectibles, per their Facebook page. Actually, make that sold. According to nycgo.com, Casa Latina is no longer in business. At least the wonderful sign is still there.

The 1820s organization formed to improve the character of New York servants

Working as a domestic servant in 19th century New York City had plenty of challenges.

Sure, servants received room and board in addition to their wages, and they usually had at least Sunday afternoon off. But living in another family’s home was isolating and lonely—particularly if you didn’t speak English or weren’t accustomed to urban life.

The work could be physically difficult, too. Climbing up and down staircases carrying wood or coal for fireplaces, airing out heavy bed linens every morning, wringing wet laundry, and scrubbing pots and pans…day after day, this was true labor.

So it’s hardly surprising that the families who hired servants often had a hard time keeping them. In the late 19th century, the problem of finding and maintaining hard-working, loyal servants was summed up as “the servant question,” or more appropriately, “the servant girl question,” since most maids, cooks, and other servants were overwhelmingly young and female.

Wealthy Gilded Age wives often discussed the servant girl question among themselves. But employers in the early 19th century turned to another resource: a newly formed organization that tried to guide servants to have better character and morals, and to not change families so often.

Called the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants, this wonderfully named organization officially formed in New York City in 1826. The Society took its inspiration from a similar group in London, known as “The Society for Improving the Character and Usefulness of Domestic Servants,” according to the group’s first annual report.

The name of the London group better sums up much of what the New York chapter was all about. “No one can be ignorant, at least no house-keeper needs to be told, that we are very dependent upon our Domestic Servants for a large share of our daily comforts,” the report began.

“Indeed, it may be safely asserted, that if all the other arrangements and connexions of a family are as happy as fall generally to the lot of humanity, bad Servants are alone sufficient, if not to destroy, at least to mar, much of the calm happiness of domestic life.”

The report called out the tendency of servants to have a “love of incessant change,” in other words, moving on to another servant job or different type of work. “This restlessness of mind, and love of change, is especially true of the young and unwary female servant,” the report stated.

By changing employment, they “become impatient of control, or of advice, negligent of their duty, and, after wandering from place to place, deteriorating at every change, they not infrequently end their days in the miserable haunts of vice.”

The group advised employers how to manage their servants, and they also acted as an employment agency, matching qualified servants to households that needed them. This appears to be a crucial part of the group’s mission, as the “rapid growth of our city” has made it difficult to find enough people willing to do servant work.

[Fourth floor maids’ room at the Merchant House Museum]

They also awarded bonus money to faithful servants—from $3 to $10, depending on how long the servant stayed with their employer. (After one year of faithful service, servants were awarded a bible.)

For such a mission-oriented group, the Society didn’t last very long. By 1830, the organization dissolved, according to Leslie Harris’ In the Shadow of Slavery—noting that the group’s founding in 1826 coincided with the end of slavery in New York in 1827 as well as the first great wave of Irish immigrants, who typically took positions in domestic service.

What took the place of the Society when it came to guide servants and their employers? No one specific organization, it seems. No wonder servant issues escalated throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[Top image: MCNY, 1847: 56.300.1320; second image: Google; third image: MCNY, 1890: 45.335.21]