Which “East River Park” is in this 1902 painting?

When William Glackens painted “East River Park” in 1902—contrasting the serenity of a city green space with the noisy industrial riverfront—the park that currently stretches along the riverfront called East River Park had yet to be created.

So what East River park did he depict here? Perhaps Corlears Hook Park, at the bend where Manhattan tucks under itself between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges?

This was certainly a smoggy, ship-choked channel at the turn of the last century. The city purchased land here in the 1880s for the creation of a park, completed in 1905.

Neighboring East River Park didn’t exist until the 1930s, and according to the Brooklyn Museum, which owns the painting, a label on it indicates that the Brooklyn waterfront is depicted.

Or maybe his “East River Park” (closeup of the women and girl above) was farther upriver in Yorkville at today’s Carl Schurz Park—with a view of the factories and ship traffic of Hell Gate and Queens?

“The southern portion of the park was set aside by the City as East River Park in 1876,” according to NYC Parks. “The former Gracie estate was added in 1891 and a new landscape design by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons was completed in 1902.”

An apartment house evokes “memories of Paris”

When the Dorilton opened in 1902, the 12-story Beaux-Arts building at Broadway and 71st Street was one of many grand apartment houses designed to take advantage of all the new Upper West Side residents the coming subway system would bring.

With its curvy mansard roof and enormous arched entryway, it caught the eye of architectural critics, who generally loathed its florid, ostentatious details.

“[The Dorilton] was criticized as an ‘architectural aberration’ because of its grandiose scale and overly lavish ornament,” states Gwendolyn Wright’s Building the Dream.

But that didn’t stop people from moving in. Consider the amenities: filtered water, free electricity, separate servant and passenger elevators, soundproof walls and windows, and long-distance telephone service and refrigerators in every apartment.

There was even a charger for the electric automobiles hitting the streets at the time.

If flamboyant ornamentation is your thing, then the Dorilton is a dream. The iron gates at the limestone entryway look like they belong in a European palace.

And don’t forget the sculptures on the Broadway side, “two greater than life size female figures whose handsome draped clothing enhances the motion expressed in their bodies,” wrote the Landmarks Preservation Committee.

The Dorilton wasn’t one of the few luxury buildings on Upper Broadway for much longer. But as the neighborhood declined after World War II, so did the Dorilton, with pieces of the cornices and other details falling off.

After it was landmarked in 1974—with the Landmarks Preservation Committee report describing it as evoking “memories of Paris”—the Dorilton rebounded, undergoing a renovation to return it to its glory.

Today, this “aberration,” as it was called, has some of the most sought-after co-op apartments in the city. And its pull-out-all-the-stops ornamental beauty stops pedestrians in their tracks.

[Top photo: Architectural Review; third, NYPL; fourth: Wikipedia]

Taking in the view from East River Park in 1902

William Glackens contrasts the calm quiet of a lower Manhattan park with the smoke-choked industrial Brooklyn waterfront across the river in his 1902 painting “East River Park.”

Is this the same East River Park that exists today south of East 12th Street? According to the NYC Parks Department, the current park was conceived by Robert Moses in the 1930s.

The painting is part of the collection at the Brooklyn Museum. “William Glackens found ample subject matter in the parks of New York and the city dwellers who frequented them,” the museum website explains.

“Here he depicted the natural features of the East River Park, and the pastimes of its inhabitants, in sharp contrast to the bustling industrial setting of Brooklyn’s waterfront visible across the water. For the many immigrants living in small, cramped quarters, the urban parks of Brooklyn and Manhattan served as a refuge from the poor conditions and overcrowding of tenement life.”

Brigham Young’s grandson kills a midtown woman

On September 19, 1902, the body of a young woman turned up in a canal in Jersey City. Police identified the corpse as that of Anna Pulitzer, a married prostitute who lived on Broadway and West 46th Street.

Police fanned out to solve the crime. A crucial break came within days: A coachman recalled driving Pulitzer and an unknown young man to an apartment on West 58th Street.

That apartment turned out to be the home of John Willard Young, the businessman son of Mormon leader Brigham Young (below).

Willard Young was out of the country, but his son, William Hooper Young, 32, had been staying there. Hooper Young, once a Mormon missionary, was now a drifter and morphine addict.

Cops traced Hooper Young to a Connecticut park. Drunk and disheveled, he admitted that Pulitzer died after he picked her up in a coach and took her to his father’s apartment.

But he blamed her actual murder, via chloral poisoning (aka, knockout drops), on a man he’d just met in Central Park.

He had a hard time convincing anyone he was innocent. Police never located the other man. Pulitzer’s bloody clothes, jewelry, and letters addressed to Hooper Young were found in a trunk he had shipped to Chicago.

In 1903, Brigham Young’s grandson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got life without parole at Sing Sing, escaping the electric chair because the judge thought he was medically insane.

No motive was ever definitively uncovered, but it may have been robbery, or perhaps it stemmed from a romantic relationship the two had, which some suggested may have started when Hooper Young did his missionary work years earlier on the East Coast.

When Manhattan had a French neighborhood

Or “French colony,” as this New York Times headline announces from a 1902 article. Mostly it was centered in Manhattan’s West 20s and 30s.

“The French colony is almost as old as the settlement which has grown into the present city of New York, French Huguenots having been among the early settlers of Manhattan,” reported the Times.

“But the French colony has long since lost its Huguenot character and is now largely Catholic, maintaining the Churches of St. Vincent de Paul in West 23rd Street and of Jean Baptiste in East 76th Street.”

St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1857, still offers mass in French.

Among the other institutions anchoring the district were the Cercle Francaise de l’Harmonie, on West 26th Street, a social hub.

A battalion of the Guards of Lafayette, with headquarters on West 25th Street, “keeps alive national traditions among young Frenchmen in New York.”

As for young French women, they had the  Jeanne d’Arc Home, described as a home for “friendless French girls.” They still rent rooms to women today.

The French Benevolent Society, French Hospital, an orphanage, and several professional groups representing French chefs, waiters, and musicians also made their home in the neighborhood—now Chelsea, which has long since lost any international flavor.