The fantastical 1886 plan to turn the Brooklyn Bridge towers into glass observatories

Changes came to the Brooklyn Bridge not long after this “eighth wonder of the world” linking the cities of New York and Brooklyn opened to enormous fanfare on May 24, 1883.

The toll to cross the bridge (one cent for pedestrians, a nickel for a horse and rider, and 10 cents for a horse and wagon, per history.com) ended in 1891. Eight years later, tracks were added to the bridge’s roadways so trolleys could carry people across the bridge in both directions.

But before that, in 1886, a high-profile New York welfare worker came up with a more fantastical idea: building an “ornamental palace of glass,” as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described it, on the top of each of the bridge’s two towers (sketch above).

These glass enclosures would serve as “grand observatories” for visitors who wanted to view the cities of Brooklyn and New York from “lofty heights,” the article continued.

How would people reach these glass enclosures? They would be whisked to the top of the towers and into the observatories by elevators, which would be enclosed in new steel framework to be added alongside each tower.

It might rank as the boldest, most unusual idea to alter the bridge ever put before city officials. But then Linda Gilbert (above), the woman who suggested it, was a bold and unusual New Yorker.

Born in Rochester in 1847, Gilbert (above in 1876) had been dubbed “the prisoner’s friend” because of her dedication to improving prisons and the lives of people residing in them. As a young woman, she used inherited family money to create penitentiary libraries, eventually building libraries at Sing Sing, the Tombs, the Ludlow Street Jail, and the New York House of Detention.

After her own funds dried up, she launched the Gilbert Library & Prisoners Aid Fund in 1876. Her need for more money to put toward her prison reform work appears to have been the reason behind her glass observatory idea.

“Gilbert proposed a modest fee for visitors, three-quarters of which would serve as direct revenue for the bridge, while the rest would fund Gilbert’s charitable and reformatory work,” wrote Richard Haw, author of Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: a Visual History.

“I am constantly hampered in my work for lack of funds,” Gilbert stated to Frank Leslie’s newspaper, bolstering her idea by adding that one of her cousins, Rufus H. Gilbert, was the inventor of the city’s first elevated railway.

She described the bridge towers as “not very ornamental.” Instead, she advocated for adding on top “two of the grandest points of elevation in the world” as long as she could be assured of getting a quarter of the receipts to put toward her prison reform work.

“The scheme will certainly attract general attention,” the Frank Leslie article concluded. In the end, of course, the glass observatories idea was DOA.

“The bridge’s trustees considered the proposal, but it went no further,” wrote Haw.

[Top image: NYPL Digital Collection; second image: Wikipedia; third image: The Life and Work of Linda Gilbert; fourth image: Currier & Ives, 1883, 1stdibs.com]

How fate and coincidence brought a firefighter statue honoring 9/11 to East 43rd Street

New York City is home to dozens of monuments marking the terrorist attacks and commemorating the thousands of lives lost on September 11, 2001.

Some are official, like the reflecting pools situated in the footprints of the Twin Towers. Others are less grand but equally powerful—street murals of American flags, an inconspicuous bronze plaque put up by a First Avenue hospital, and a Central Park memorial to children who lost parents on that terrible day.

Then there’s the statue of a firefighter on East 43rd Street, half a block from Bryant Park. Here, a nine-foot bronze figure of a fireman kneels on a granite base, one hand on his helmet and the other on his forehead in anguish, distress, and maybe prayer.

“The Kneeling Firefighter,” as it’s called, is not an exquisite piece of art, but it’s poignant and moving. It’s also something of a surprise to come across outside the headquarters of Emigrant Bank on an unglamorous stretch of Midtown that doesn’t seem a likely place for any kind of memorial.

What the statue does have, however, is an unusual backstory involving coincidence and perhaps fate.

The story of The Kneeling Firefighter begins in Missouri in 2000, when the Fire Fighters Association of Missouri commissioned the statue to honor those who have fallen in the line of duty.

Designed by Pittsburgh-based Matthews Bronze and cast in Parma, Italy, the statue was shipped back to the United States, landing at Kennedy Airport on September 9 and then bound for Missouri, according to fireengineering.com.

The Kneeling Firefighter was in customs at JFK on September 11—which became a horrific day of terror and mass casualties that paralyzed the city and put a stop to all air travel.

With hundreds of firefighters lost or missing at what remained of the World Trade Center, Matthews Bronze decided the statue, still detained in customs, should stay in New York City, and they would create another one for the Missouri group.

“It was fate that the 2,700-pound statue arrived in the United States on September 9 at Kennedy Airport,” a post on the Matthews Bronze website states.

“The statue, which was originally intended to be shipped by ocean freight to the United States for a mid-October delivery to the Missouri Firefighters Association, was air freighted to the United States at the direction of Matthews product manager to ensure the October delivery.”

An executive at the company “drove from Pittsburgh to the airport and put the statue on the back of a flatbed truck,” explained the New York Post on September 20, 2001. “Then he drove the statue to Midtown, where it was parked Tuesday in front of the Milford Plaza Hotel on Eighth Avenue at West 44th Street.” (Third photo, via Matthews Bronze)

The Kneeling Firefighter remained at this site, placed on a temporary granite foundation by the Milstein family, which owned the Milford Plaza. The Milford Plaza was a fitting site for the statue, as the hotel donated money for supplies as well as hundreds of rooms for search and rescue workers.

The statue went into storage at some point until 2011, when the Milstein family found its permanent home on East 43rd Street outside the Milstein-owned Emigrant Bank, according to fireengineering.com.

It’s hardly New York’s only firefighter memorial. Every September 11, the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive and 100th Street, built in 1913, attracts many mourners. City firehouses themselves also serve as makeshift memorials.

But The Kneeling Firefighter was actually in New York City as 9/11 unfolded—and it’s the first commemorative statue honoring the 343 members of the FDNY who perished while trying to save lives at the World Trade Center.

[Third photo: Matthews Bronze]

Two glimpses of life in Prohibition-era New York, one in sunlight and the other in shadows

Born in Austria, Samuel Brecher immigrated to New York City with his family in 1910. He studied at Cooper Union and then the National Academy of Design before establishing himself as a painter of rural coastal scenes and small towns—and later, of clowns.

But New York City is where Brecher spent the majority of his life (he died in 1980), working out of a studio on 23rd Street in Chelsea, according to 200 Main Art & Wine Gallery.

Based on two paintings that feature disconnected figures at different times of day and points on the streetscape, Brecher has something to say about the smallness and internal isolation of city life.

“The Speak Easy,” (above) from 1926-1930, depicts a tenement lane or alley in gritty earth tones. People appear small on opposite sides of the sidewalk, almost like they’re on a stage.

A backlit woman in a pink skirt has her hands at her hips. Is she the disgruntled wife of one of the men under the streetlamp, ordering him to home after a drunken night at an unseen speakeasy? Perhaps the speakeasy is the building behind her, and she, the proprietor, has kicked the men out.

Then again, she may not even be addressing the men at all; her expression seems angled away from them, possibly directed at another figure out of view. It’s hard to tell, but these people may be under elevated train tracks, their dramas made even smaller by the overarching bigness of the modern city.

The second painting, “West Eighth Street,” gives us low-rise West Eighth and Sixth Avenue in bright color. Again, Brecher depicts several disconnected figures, also from a vantage point that emphasizes their insignificance. (And could the rough brushstrokes underscore their rough, turbulent lives?)

Similar to the people in “The Speak Easy,” these New Yorkers seem isolated from one another, despite their physical closeness. Like all of us moving around the city, they’re likely caught up in the challenges of their relatively small yet meaningful lives—internal lives that strangers have no access to.

They’re together on the street, yet miles away from one another.

[The Speak Easy: 200 Main Art & Wine Gallery; West Eighth Street: New-York Historical Society]

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.

One of the first botanical gardens in America bloomed in 1810 where Rockefeller Center is today

Great cities are founded on great institutions, like banks, schools, and hospitals. New York City, the most populous city in the young United States as of 1790, checked all these boxes.

What New York was missing, however, was a botanical garden—a sweeping green space filled with native and imported plants that could be “one of the genteelest and most beautiful of public improvements,” advocated Samuel Latham Mitchell, a professor of botany at Columbia College, then on Lower Broadway.

Besides elevating New York as a metropolis, a botanical garden could be used for teaching and agricultural experiments, Mitchell argued. Though Mitchell proposed the idea in 1794, it was another Columbia botany professor and physician, David Hosack, who made it reality.

Hosack was a pivotal character in some headline-grabbing events in post-colonial New York City. Born in Manhattan in 1769, he was apprenticing at New York Hospital on Broadway and Pearl Street in 1788 when the “Doctors Riot” broke out: a violent mob, enraged by rumors of physicians stealing bodies from graves for medical experimentation, stormed the building.

After finishing his medical training, he opened a practice in the city and became the personal physician of the Hamilton family. In 1804, it was Hosack (below, in an 1826 portrait by Rembrandt Peale) who tried to save Alexander Hamilton after Hamilton was mortally wounded in his duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.

But back to the botanical garden: Hosack became the leading proponent at the dawn of the 19th century. He sough funds to build it from Columbia and the state legislature, but both turned him down.

“Finally, in 1801, Hosack resolved to take the matter into his own hands, personally financing the purchase of twenty acres of land in the countryside to the north of the city, between what is now 47th and 51st Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues,” states the National Gallery of Art.

He named the land, which he paid about $5,000 for, Elgin Garden, after his father’s birthplace in Scotland. (Below, Elgin Garden is marked on an 1897 redrawing of the 1807 version of the Commissioners’ map of the city street grid.)

At the time, this area was part of the bucolic countryside of Manhattan, located a good 3-4 miles from the main city. Today, of course, this is smack in the middle of the concrete and steel of Art Deco Rockefeller Center.

Elgin described the land as “variegated and extensive, and the soil itself of that diversified nature, as to be particularly well adapted to the cultivation of a great variety of vegetable productions,” according to the National Gallery of Art.

After purchasing the property from the city in 1801, Hosack got to work: he asked friends in Europe and the West Indies to send him plants. He built greenhouses and hothouses; he hired gardeners to help with the labor of planting so many specimens.

By 1806, Elgin Garden had 2,000 plants, including a ring of elms, sugar maples, oaks, poplars, and locust trees. The rest of the garden was completed within a few years—one of the first botanical gardens in America.

“Walks on either side of the garden led to compartments of plants laid out according to their scientific order, and beyond them lay a nursery of fruit trees, a pond…and native plants, such as rhododendron, magnolias, and willows, which favored the moist ground adjacent to the pond,” stated the National Gallery. Rocky outcroppings were planted with pine, juniper, yew, and hemlock.”

You would think such loveliness would be maintained and preserved for decades, especially in a city that had yet to build its great public park. But by 1811, Hosack could no longer handle the financial burden.

“Operation of the garden proved too costly for Hosack, who sold the land to New York State,” wrote the New York Daily News in 1982. The state allowed Columbia to use the land for study, but the school let it go into disrepair.

“On a visit in August 1813, Hosack, who continued to collect seeds and plant materials for the garden, was distressed to find that the greenhouse plants had not been set outdoors during the summer, that many of them were missing, that the shrubbery in front of the greenhouse was choked with sunflowers, and that vegetation had overtaken the walks,” wrote the National Gallery of Art.

Columbia bought the garden outright in 1814, according to the Daily News, under an agreement with the state that the school would move its facilities there from Lower Manhattan. Instead, Columbia allowed it to deteriorate.

By the middle of the 19th century, the urban city had arrived on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, making the land on the former garden was quite valuable. Columbia made money leasing it for residential development, but in the 1920s, “many of the 298 row houses in this once stylish neighborhood had deteriorated into an unseemly collection of boarding houses, nightclubs, and speakeasies on the northern boundary of New York’ s theater district,” wrote the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The wrecking ball arrived in the early 1930s to make way for Rockefeller Center. Hosack himself passed away almost a century earlier; he had a stroke at age 66 after exhausting himself during the Great Fire of 1835, when a quarter of the city burned to the ground.

Today, a plaque commemorating Elgin Garden exists in this skyscraper mini-city, memorializing David Hosack as a “man of science,” “citizen of the world,” and the developer of a botanical garden “for the knowledge of plants.”

[Top image: From the Archives of The New York Botanical Garden, via Wikipedia; second image: NYPL; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: Drawing of Elgin by Reinagle, frontispiece of Hosack’s Hortus Elginensis catalogue, via Wikipedia; sixth image: Tabea Hosier, Elgin Botanical Gardens, 1936, National Gallery of Art]

Sun-struck and recovering in the hospital in 19th century New York

Today, we call it heatstroke, hyperthermia, or heat exhaustion. But in the sweltering summertime of 19th century New York City, having a dangerously high body temperature was described as being “sun-struck” or suffering from “heat prostration.”

As this 1892 illustration of men recovering from the condition at the (long defunct) Centre Street Hospital shows, heat prostration was serious. Newspapers regularly listed the names and addresses of New Yorkers who were stricken during heat waves, or the “heated term,” as summer was called.

It looks like treatment involved wrapping a patient’s head with what I imagine to be an ice-packed or ice water towel. The man on the left is pouring something in a glass—ideally water for one of these dehydrated patients.

[Image: NYPL]

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]

This Lower Broadway boot scraper may have been used by a US President

When St. Paul’s Chapel opened at Broadway and Vesey Street in 1766, it was conceived as a “chapel-of-ease” for New Yorkers who lived on the outskirts of the city (at the time, roughly Chambers Street) and weren’t keen on traversing the unpaved streets to Trinity Church, the city’s Anglican house of worship.

A decade later, however, Trinity Church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1776. St. Paul’s had been saved by a bucket brigade, so it became the main church until Trinity was rebuilt in 1790.

Among the elite, well-heeled worshippers at St. Paul’s was George Washington.

The first American president prayed at St. Paul’s following his inauguration at Federal Hall on April 30, 1789—and he continued to attend services there for the brief period when the Presidential residence was in Lower Manhattan and New York was the nation’s short-lived capital city.

The very pew where President Washington prayed has been preserved inside the chapel as a historical site. But what about another historical artifact Washington may have used when he arrived to attend services: the iron boot scraper just outside the front entrance?

Readers of this site know all about boot scrapers. These always functional, sometimes fanciful metal devices were located by the main door of any fine residence or building. Visitors would use them to scrape off the dirt and debris from their shoes before entering a home, business, school, or church.

They seem odd today, but boot scrapers were necessities in muddy, garbage-strewn, manure-filled Gotham through the 19th century.

Of course, it’s impossible to know if President Washington actually used this boot scraper (or the one on the southern side of the entrance). In his diary he includes several mentions of going to St. Paul’s “in the forenoon,” but he didn’t record anything about scraping his boots there.

Still, it’s certainly possible he ran his heels across the blade. Boot scrapers were made of iron, so durable that many of them still exist today, especially outside residences. And the boot scrapers at St. Paul’s are in as good a shape as the black iron fence around Bowling Green Park, which dates back to the 1770s.

St. Paul’s Chapel (above, in 1812) underwent a restoration in 2016, which included landscaping, steeple repair, and repainting. But the church website chronicling the restorative measures doesn’t mention anything about replacing the boot scrapers.

President Washington departed New York City for good in August 1790. The boot scrapers outside St. Paul’s Chapel remain. And even if they came after Washington’s era, these relics are still delightful reminders of a vastly different (and filthier) post-colonial city.

[Third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

The 1872 plan to get around Manhattan via elevated pneumatic tubes

In the 19th century, not unlike today, New York City had a mass transit problem.

As the city’s population boomed and the urbanization of Manhattan continued northward, it was clear that the horse-pulled omnibuses and horse-drawn streetcars—which carried thousands of people to their destinations every day and contributed to enormous, epic traffic jams—were not going to cut it.

Enter the Gilbert Elevated Railway (above and below, in proposed illustrations). Introduced in 1872 amid a flurry of other ideas for elevated transit, this railroad would run high above the surface of the city on elegant, decorative wrought-iron archways, ferrying passengers in cars powered by compressed air.

Basically, it would be an elevated railroad shuttling uptown and downtown through pneumatic tubes.

The man behind the much-talked-about idea was Rufus H. Gilbert, a former doctor in the Union Army who was troubled by the high rates of sickness in tenement districts.

“Gilbert’s answer to the cholera, typhus, and diphtheria rampaging among the downtrodden classes was, elliptically, rapid transit,” wrote Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin in an article for The Gotham Center for New York City History.

“He reasoned that fast and cheap public conveyances would allow the poor to flee their teeming, disease-infested neighborhoods, and live in the hinterlands, where they could enjoy clean air and water, and plentiful sunshine,” continued Lubell and Goldin.

The idea of mass transit via pneumatic tube sounds a little crazy, especially if you think of pneumatic tubes as an old-fashioned system banks and department stores used to carry cash and receipts through a vacuum-powered network.

But it had precedent. Two years earlier, a pneumatic-tube underground subway opened for business. Running just one block from Warren to Murray Streets under Broadway, the city’s first subway, built by inventor Alfred Ely Beach, attracted curious riders—but not the funding (or political clout) needed to extend the line any farther. Beach’s subway closed in 1873.

Gilbert (above) may have borrowed the pneumatic tube idea, but he also put a lot of thought into how his railroad would run. He proposed putting his stations roughly one mile apart and providing pneumatic elevators for passengers to ascend to each station, according to Lubell and Goldin, who authored the 2016 book Never Built New York.

“He also planned a telegraph triggered by the passing cars, which would automatically signal arrivals and departures from all points along the line,” they wrote.

Though Gilbert got the go-ahead from the city to start constructing his pneumatic railway along Sixth Avenue, his plans had the misfortune of colliding with the Panic of 1873—a terrible depression that left him without investors. With no capital, he was forced to abandon his idea.

Gilbert persisted over the next few years, modifying his elevated railroad so it would be powered by steam engines, not compressed air. In 1875 he received a charter to begin building. Three years later, the first leg of the Gilbert Elevated opened from Rector Street to Central Park. (Above, the debut of the railroad as it approached Jefferson Market Courthouse.)

By 1880, almost all of New York’s avenues had steam-powered elevated trains roaring and belching overhead. Traffic congestion was relieved—but a decade later, plans for a faster, less obtrusive, and more efficient underground subway would be in the works.

What became of Gilbert? Sadly, after his elevated railroad opened, he was ousted from his own company, which was renamed the Metropolitan Elevated Company. Gilbert threatened to sue his former colleagues, charging that they defrauded him. Ultimately he died in his home on West 73rd Street in 1885.

[Top illustration: Alamy; second illustration: Library of Congress; third illustration: NYPL; fourth illustration: Library of Congress; fifth illustration: Library of Congress]

What it was like commuting by sleigh in snowy 1860s Manhattan

The idea of getting around the city by horse-drawn sleigh might sound like a lot of fun to contemporary, snow-starved New Yorkers.

But as this detailed illustration from 1865 shows, sitting in an open-air omnibus as three teams of horses round a tight side street covered in snow was probably rather miserable.

What a rich scene the illustration offers, though. While two drivers direct three teams of horses to pull the streetcar to its destination, groups of boys are having a jolly time on sleds. A dog joins in the excitement, chasing the horses.

Ads for a tailor and a seller of shirts appear on the storefronts in the background. And when was the last time you came across a shop selling only wine and tea?

This omnibus appears to carry commuters to and from the Fulton Ferry, which allowed people to cross the East River in an era before bridges. I’m not quite sure how the omnibus got from the ferry on the East River to Broadway, Greenwich Avenue, Amity Street (the former name for Third Street), and Seventh Avenue.

More sleighing and sled scenes from old New York can be accessed here.