THE INFLATABLE TRAM TRIED TO TAKE OFF DURING HE CEREMONY AND JOIN THE CABINS MID AIR.
CUTTING THE 50TH BIRTHDAY CAKE WITH B.J. JONES.
THE MEETING OF THE TWO POLIVYS: LANCE POLIVY NEW RIOC COUNSEL & VERY DISTANT RELATIVE, (MAYBE) AND RIOC BOARD MEMBER HOWARD POLIVY
GET YOUR RIHS EXCLUSIVE TRAM 50 TEE SHIRT IN ADULT SIZES AT THE RIHS KIOSK $20-
CREDITS
SHARON CARSON
JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY THURSDAY, MAY 28TH TRAM PLAZA 3 P.M. ALL ARE WELCOME!!
The Midcentury Street Photographer
who
Documented New Yorkers
in all their raw,
Unfiltered Humanity
Lisette Model, born into an upper-class Jewish-Catholic family in Vienna in 1901, didn’t set out to be a photographer.
Ephemeral New York
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Issue # 1686
As a young woman she moved to Paris and studied music with Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Through Schoenberg, she was introduced to the emerging style of German Expressionism, in which painters used aggressive brushstrokes and exaggerated forms to highlight the psychological turmoil of modern life.
After abandoning a music career, Model thought she would become a darkroom technician—then realized taking photos was more to her liking. She borrowed a 35 millimeter camera from her sister and set out to document men and women lounging on the beach in Nice.
“The nascent photographer lifted the camera to her eye and captured them in a series of images that draw out the awkwardness of their well-fed, well-dressed bodies and the fascination of faces modeled by age, which appear almost grotesque, but also striking, even sculptural,” states Artsy.
After marrying Russian-born painter Evsa Model in 1937 and immigrating with him to New York one year later amid growing antisemitism in Europe, she committed herself to a career as a visual artist.
Model published photos in magazines like PM and Harper’s Bazaar, and she became part of the city’s postwar photography community. The couple’s first Gotham home was in the Master Apartments on Riverside Drive.
Drawing on the influence of German Expressionism, she pioneered a different kind of street photography, relying on tilted angles and close-ups to expose the raw, unposed, and unbeautiful sides of her subjects and reflect their inner emotions rather than the city outside.
One of Model’s earliest photos, taken in the 1940s for Harper’s Bazaar, brought her to Coney Island (second photo). “There she found a corpulent woman in a black bathing suit and with a beaming expression that radiated confidence and joyfulness,” states Artsy.
“Model captured this woman—who would become immortalized in her photographs as the Coney Island bather—standing in a high crouch and lying on her side with her head propped up on one arm.”
Jazz clubs and the Lower East Side became popular haunts for Model. There she found her subjects in unguarded moments, displaying their imperfect humanity against an unsentimental (and often close-cropped) stage or streetscape.
Unsparing portraits weren’t her only focus. Model seemed to be captivated by street life of New York City, its vitality and mystery. She produced a series of photos that reveal the city’s many layers in shadows and glass reflections.
“Then, as now, the storefront served as mirror and stage, showcasing a performative play of products and pedestrians,” wrote MOMA under a 1939 photo exhibited in the museum: “Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York.” (fourth photo)
Unsparing portraits weren’t her only focus. Model seemed to be captivated by street life of New York City, its vitality and mystery. She produced a series of photos that reveal the city’s many layers in shadows and glass reflections.
“Then, as now, the storefront served as mirror and stage, showcasing a performative play of products and pedestrians,” wrote MOMA under a 1939 photo exhibited in the museum: “Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York.” (fourth photo)
Model continued teaching and taking photos through the 1970s. In 1982, she died of heart failure. Intensely private, she seemed to give few formal interviews or publicly share thoughts about her craft.
She apparently did leave one simple piece of advice: “Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in” is a quote often attributed to her.
CREDITS
Ephemeral New York
[Top photo, “Little Man, Lower East Side,” National Gallery of Art; second photo, “Coney Island,” MOMA; third photo: “Lower East Side,” Sotheby’s; fourth photo: “Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York,” National Gallery of Art; fifth photo, “Lower East Side,” MOMA; sixth photo: “Window Reflections,” MOMA; seventh photo: “Sammy’s, New York,” Whitney Museum of Art]
JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY THURSDAY, MAY 28TH TRAM PLAZA 3 P.M. ALL ARE WELCOME!!
PROPOSALS FOR CONSIDERATION OF A
ROOSEVELT ISLAND MUSEUM
OF
TECHNOLOGY, ART & SCIENCE
FRIENDS OF ROOSEVELT ISLANDS STEAM PLANT
SEPTEMBER 17, 2013
While looking thru the RIHS files last week, I came upon a memo from RIOC memo entititled “Request for Expressions of Interest to attract reuse or redevelopment of the Steam Plant. The only response was that of the one attached from FRISP.
Anyone interested is welcome to see the entire file.
CREDITS
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY THURSDAY, MAY 28TH TRAM PLAZA 3 P.M. ALL ARE WELCOME!!
SEE 1976 INVITATION BELOW
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JOIN US ON THURSDAY, MAY 28TH AT 3 P.M. TO CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY PARTY
The invitation with the date stamped in, just in case.
The Program for the Opening Ceremony
A Boarding Pass for Opening Day
I has watched Welfare Island for many years since I was a student working at the Goldwater Hospital in 1967. When I heard the Tram was opening, I walked over from my home at 65th Street on the evening of March 17th, 1967 and took my first ride that day.
FLOATING OVER SECOND AVENUE PAST THE KIOSK STILL ON SECOND AVENUE
ANNUAL RESCUE DRILLS
TAKE THE WINDOW OUT AND GET INTO THE RESCUE CABIN
WANT TO DO THIS CLIMB OUT THE WINDOW TO THE RESCUE CABIN?
ONLY ONCE THE RESCUE CABINS WERE USED IN APRIL OF 2006, WHEN THE CABINS WERE STUCK OVER THE RIVER. IT TOOK HOURS TO RESCUE ALL PASSEGERS SAFELY.,
EVERYONE HAD TO PARTICIPATE ON A SUNDAY MORNING
STAFF WAITING FOR THEIR TURN TO GET OUT THE FLOOR HATCH
DOWN YOU GO THRU THE FLOOR, WHEN THE CABIN WAS OVER LAND
2010 THE GREAT REBUILD FROM A SWISS TO FRENCH DESIGNED TRAM
DISMANTLING THE OLD HANGER ARMS
Input caption text here. Use the block’s Settings tab to change the caption position and set other styles.
RESUE CABINS TO THE DUMP AFER ONE USE.
PARKED AT THE BUS STOP, WAITING FOR 15 YEARS NOW TO FIND A NEW LIFE……
ONE TRIP ON GROUND LEVEL TO MOTORGATE
TRAM AT MOTORGATE STORAGE FOR 16 YEARS
THE NEW HANGER ARMS BEING INSTALLED DURING THE SUMMER OF 2010
ARMANDO CORDOVA, TRAM MANAGER CHECKING OUT NEW CABIN. ARMANDO OUR BEST FRIEND AND GREAT MANAGER IS RETIRED NOW AND SORELY MISSED… MY AMIGO!
CREDITS
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY
PHOTO OF THE DAY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Arnold Rothstein was of the most famous of America’s 20th century criminal masterminds, and for more than 20 years, the New York City native spent his summers in Saratoga Springs, gambling on the horses by day – and just plain gambling by night.
He first started coming to Saratoga on a regular basis in 1904, when he was 22 years old, and he largely gave up on Saratoga after 1925 – by then, he was able to make so much money bootlegging liquor that he no longer spent much time gambling at the Saratoga Race Course.
In his gambling, he never minded doing things to tweak the odds in his favor – and his most audacious tweak, the fixing of the 1919 Chicago White Sox-Cincinnati Reds World Series, was at least discussed at his famous and exclusive private club in Saratoga, The Brook.
Rothstein was variously known as “The Brain” or “The Big Bankroll” – he was said to have never made a mistake with numbers. He was always thinking a step ahead and was a ready source of cash, though always with repayment at high interest.
It was that reputation that led to his involvement in the White Sox’s 1919 Chicago World Series scandal, which would have the team forever after known as the “Black Sox,” though none of the involved players was ever convicted of a crime, and neither were any of the gamblers.
Rothstein denied involvement, though there’s no question that his name was being thrown around by nearly everyone.
The one person the scandal couldn’t have happened without, though, was Charlie Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, and builder of the legendary Comiskey Park, demolished in 1991.
The White Sox, with Shoeless Joe Jackson (1887-1951) as one of their leading hitters, were one of the great teams of all time, but Comiskey was known as a cheapskate who paid his players poorly, taking advantage of the “reserve clause,” a major league baseball policy that bound a player forever to the team that first signed him, unless he was traded.
During the 1919 season, when star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (1884-1969) reached 29 wins, Comiskey ordered the manager to bench him, to avoid having to pay a $10,000 bonus promised if he won 30 games.
Not surprisingly, many of the players hated him. With Cicotte among their leaders, they begin thinking about whether they could make a lot more money from gamblers by agreeing to lose the World Series to the Reds, even though the White Sox were the much better team.
The gamblers would be able to get a big payoff by betting on the long-shot Reds, secretly knowing that the Reds were going to win.
The White Sox were well-secured in first place in August, when the rich, the sports gamblers, and the mob were mixing in Saratoga Springs, even though the World Series was many weeks away.
At Rothstein’s club, The Brook, there would later be testimony that a Chicago gambler and wire service operator, Mont Tennes, was talking about having inside information that the World Series was going to be fixed.
Tennes told wealthy restaurateur and recreational gambler Charles Weeghman, who until recently had owned the Chicago Cubs, that he had heard the rumors from Rothstein himself, and from other gamblers including Nat Evans and Abe Attell.
Weeks later, it would be Attell – a former lightweight boxer turned professional gambler – who made actual contact with the White Sox players.
The players – eight to ten of them – wanted $10,000 each to throw the series. The fix was going to cost $100,000. Only one person in the underworld, Rothstein, had that kind of money, so it made sense that Attell turned to him.
One of the enduring questions is whether Attell turned to Rothstein for the money, or Rothstein was the fix’s mastermind who sent Attell to Chicago.
In any event, the players saw almost none of the promised payoffs. Cicotte was given $1,000 after the Cubs lost the first game, but few if any of the other promised payoffs came through.
Rumors about the series being fixed started almost immediately, and Rothstein was at the center of the rumors. In the end, the Reds won the World Series in eight games (the World Series was a nine-game series at that time.)
After the series was over Monte Tennes saw Weeghman in a Chicago barbershop, and reminded him of the conversation they’d had earlier in Saratoga Springs.
Weeghman remembered; he would later testify that he just didn’t believe it was possible to fix the World Series.
Eventually, in 1920, there would be a Chicago grand jury investigation. Weeghman testified to what he heard in Saratoga; by then, three players, including Cicotte and Jackson, had made police confessions.
On the advice of his New York City lawyer, Rothstein went before the grand jury, and denied any knowledge of the fix. In the end, eight players were indicted, as were Attell and several other gamblers.
Rothstein wasn’t indicted. By the time the case went to trial, the player confessions and much of the other grand jury testimony had somehow disappeared from the district attorney’s files. The remaining evidence was unpersuasive, and everyone was acquitted.
If the series was fixed, no one was ever held legally responsible.
The Brook, out Church Street, near the corner with West, was the finest and best-known clubs in Saratoga Springs during its brief life. Rothstein knew that the gambling odds always favored the house, and believed running a house that appealed to richest visitors would be best for his business.
The food at The Brook was excellent, but there were no prices listed on the menu; his clientele was meant to be the sort who didn’t need to worry about such things.
Rothstein almost certainly was doing his best to manipulate horse races, including the 1921 Travers, which was won by a Rothstein-owned horse, Sporting Blood.
Arnold Rothstein was murdered in New York City in 1928 at age 46, but his Saratoga legacy lasted decades longer.
Editorial Notes on Upstate New York Crime Syndicates
Arnold Rothstein, Lanksy and his compatriot Bugsy Siegel (1906-1947) took part in pragmatic alliances with the dominate Italian crime syndicates operating in upstate New York.
In 1936, Luciano was convicted for his prostitution racket by the District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey and sentenced to 30-50 years in prison. Thanks to a deal made by Lansky, he was released after providing naval intelligence during the Second World War, and deported to Italy. His body was returned to the United States for burial.
Arnold Rothstein was also a mentor to Frank Costello (1891-1973), boss of Luciano’s crime syndicate . Costello spent several years in prison before retiring in 1957, following an assassination attempt ordered by Vito Genovese (1897-1969).
Rothstein is believed to have been killed over a poker debt in a game he thought was fixed, or possibly by Dutch Schultz in retaliation for the killing of his friend and associate Joey Noe by another Rothstein protege, Jack “Legs” Diamond (1897-1931).
Diamond was murdered in 1931 (probably by Schutlz’s orders) in Albany, NY on the evening of his acquittal in Troy, NY on kidnapping charges.
Dutch Schultz was killed at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey four years later, in 1935, after disobeying an order not to put a hit on Thomas Dewey.
JOIN US ON THURSDAY, MAY 28TH AT 3 P.M. TO CELEBRATE THE TRAM’S 50TH BIRTHDAY PARTY
The invitation with the date stamped in, just in case.
The Program for the Opening Ceremony
A Boarding Pass for Opening Day
I has watched Welfare Island for many years since I was a student working at the Goldwater Hospital in 1967. When I heard the Tram was opening, I walked over from my home at 65th Street on the evening of March 17th, 1967 and took my first ride that day.
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Archives of the Rooservelt Island Historical Society
Issue #1680
The invitation with the date stamped in, just in case.
The Program for the Opening Ceremony
A Boarding Pass for Opening Day
I has watched Welfare Island for many years since I was a student working at the Goldwater Hospital in 1967. When I heard the Tram was opening, I walked over from my home at 65th Street on the evening of March 17th, 1967 and took my first ride that day.
TRAM AT BUS STOP MARCH, 2010
TRAM AT MOTORGATE STORAGEFOR 16 YEARS
Finally, maybe a use?
CREDITS
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVES JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
A 1913 or so postcard showing the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge, looking east towards Brooklyn:
If that looks a bit more Parisian than you remember Chinatown as being, you’re not wrong. This is a fantasy in part, and some pleasantly-misguided design optimism in part. The colonnade is real, designed by Carrère and Hastings (the architects of the New York Public Library) and still there. Here’s an early photo of it, from the center of the bridge approach off Canal Street:
It’s a bit much.
If you look at the postcard, you can see that vehicular traffic got the grand arch in the center of the colonnade, while the streetcars wend behind the columns to the outer portion of the bridge deck. The bridge opened in 1909, streetcars started crossing it in 1912, and the BMT subway began crossing in 1913. The trains depicted on the right side, beyond the cube trees, are not accurate in their location or elevation: the subway dives underground as soon as it’s off the bridge.
The growth of vehicular traffic, and the eventual removal of streetcars form the bridge, meant that there were now cars on both faces of the colonnade, swerving around it as it interrupts the straight line from Canal Street to the bridge. The calm scene shown here did not last. Meanwhile the big open square that was created during the bridge construction by demolishing everything in the area bounded by Bayard Street, Canal Street, Forsythe Street, and the Bowery remained bereft of cube trees. 1916:
As far as I can tell from the 1924 aerial survey, there were some turn-around or storage tracks for the streetcars and not much else:
In 1975, Confucius Plaza, a complex including a high-rise apartment house, a public school, and shopping, opened in the south half of the square, and the rest was given over to traffic improvements:
It’s worth remembering that the bridge was constructed at the height of the City Beautiful movement in the US, and it was not completely insane to think that maybe a piece of Manhattan could be made to look like Paris. It didn’t work at the bridge plaza, and nearly all of the movement’s plans in NYC fell apart, but it’s hard to argue that wasteland and some storage tracks were better than a French garden landscape would have been.
ISLAND IN BLOOM
CREDITS
OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Standing on the platform waiting for your train, did you ever think, “What do the NYC subway colors mean?” Is there a reason the colored bands of subway tiles that run along the platform wall are yellow at 23rd Street but green at 14th Street and red at Penn Station? These colored tiles are the remnants of a coded system from the Independent Subway, one of the three original subway systems that competed in the early days of New York City’s subterranean transit system. Today, we associate the colors of the subway – blue, red, orange, yellow, green, purple, grey, and brown – with their respective routes, but before the 1970s when a unified color coordination system was adopted, things were a little more complicated. New York Transit Museum curator Jodi Shapiro helps us break it down for you!
The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) was the first subway system to open in New York City in 1904. The first stop was the now-abandoned City Hall Station. The Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Cooperation came along in 1923 after acquiring the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT). The Independent Subway, the first city-owned system, opened in 1932. Each of these systems operated independently of each other until 1940 when the city took over operations of all lines. Before the systems were merged, each had their own wayfinding and identification systems.
The IRT used numbers to identify their lines, many of which have stayed the same to this day. The design of the stations by architects Heins and Lafarge under the direction of chief engineer William Barclay Parsons incorporated elaborate ornamentation including intricate terra-cotta mosaics. These mosaics, notes New York City Transit Museum curator Jodi Shapiro, may have been a piece of wayfinding in the IRT system. The unique mosaics at each stop related to the history or landmarks of the ground above. For example, at the Wall Street station, the mosaics depict the old wall erected at the northern border of Dutch New Amsterdam, at Columbus Circle, you see mosaics of ships Christopher Columbus sailed on. The BMT also used numbers to identify their routes, even going into double digits. Just as in the IRT Stations, the BMT stations boasts fanciful ornamentation.
The IND system identified its routes with letters and assigned colors to its stations to distinguish between local and express stops. The colors are signified in a band of tiles that run along the platform wall and provide the background for the station name. At every express stop, the color changes, rotating between five primary color families of red, yellow, green, blue and purple. These color shifts would signify to passengers where they could switch from an express to a local train. At express stations, the color is darker and the band of tiles is wider than at local stops. At local stops, the color is lighter.
There is no definitive answer as to why IND architect Squire J. Vickers chose the color-coordinated system he employed. New York Transit Museum curator Jodi Shapiro says it is one of the most common questions she gets asked. One popular theory is that the colors helped non-English speaking riders, or people who couldn’t read at all, navigate the system. “There isn’t anything that we were able to find that says definitively ‘This is the reason why we are doing that,” notes Shapiro, “It does make sense, and that’s part of the reason for the iconography used in the IRT stations and BMT stations.” Though there is no known document where Vickers explains himself yet, “It might be out there,” says Shapiro, “There may be some diaries of his that we don’t have where he runs down that logic. I hope we find it one day.”
Here’s how Vicker’s system worked. Let’s say you are in Queens riding west from Northern Boulevard which is purple. The next stop is 65th Street, another local stop, so it is also purple. Next, Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Ave., an express station. Here, a new color comes in, dark blue. The next five stations are all local, so they are a lighter shade of blue. At the next express stop, Forest Hills-71 Ave., the color changes green and all subsequent local stops are light green until the express stop at Union Turnpike-Kew Gardens. At Union Turnpike, the station colors change to yellow. You can see the assignment of station colors in the chart below, and compare them to the Pantone colors used in today’s station which can be found on the MTA website.
Squire Vickers’ subway color chart. Image courtesy of New York Transit Museum.
The IND stations have a minimalist aesthetic compared to the ornate IRT and BMT stations. Vickers had worked with architects Heins and Lafarge on IRT and BMT stations. The city-owned IND opened during the Great Depression, meaning the expensive ornamentation found in the stations of the former two systems just simply couldn’t be afforded. “City Hall was meant to be a showpiece,” notes Shapiro, but by the time of the IND, the system needed to be more utilitarian and cost-effective. The whole aesthetic was pared-down. The font used in IND stations is a machine-age san serif in heavy capitals, as opposed to the variety of fanciful fonts found in IRT and BMT stations.
There is no expensive terra-cotta, but instead visually clean tiles, that are also easy to physically clean. With artificial light, the minimal design helped make the stations appear bigger and brighter. “Maybe that played into the color choices also,” says Shapiro, Vickers likely chose “colors that would be discernible in artificial light and also not look dingy and have some kind of cheerful effect. There are yellows, greens, and blues, there are some reds. Yellow, green and blue are very natural colors: yellow like sunlight, green like grass, blue like water. I don’t think that’s an accident.” Another theory concerning color choice, maybe those colors are just what was available in large quantities from the manufacturer.
After the three subway systems merged in 1940, new stations were no longer designed according to the IND color system. It took decades for all of the color, letter, and number wayfinding systems to get organized into one cohesive network. “There was a huge amount of information being imparted to riders via signage and not only that, now you have to figure out how to manage all of these different routes,” Shapiro says of riding the subway after the merge. Perhaps most confusing were the route identification numbers and letters. You could get on a subway labeled 4, but depending on if it was an IRT or BMT 4, you’d either end up in the Bronx or Coney Island. Some riders relied on their knowledge of a hold-over from the elevated railroad systems, marker lights on the front of the subway car. Depending on the combination of white, red, yellow, or green lights, you could decipher where the train was headed.
By the 1950s, riders had had enough. The transit authority was inundated with complaints about the confusing signage and jumbled routes. It didn’t help that there were also no official subway maps. Until the first official subway map produced by the transit authority came out in 1958, maps were produced by private companies who could skew the information to their own advantage, such as a hotel making its location most prominent.
The first step to clarify and declutter subway information was the release of the Official New York Subway Map and Guide in 1958. This map assigned one color – black, red, and green – to each of the former systems, the IND, IRT, and BMT. The routes were superimposed onto a simplified map of the five boroughs. While this was a good first step, it only clarified the system on paper. In the stations themselves, people were still scrambling to find their way.
The Chrystie Street Connection, which opened in two phases in 1967 and 1968, rerouted eleven existing lines and threw the system into further chaos. Shapiro told Untapped New York that at least one operator took his car on the wrong track! In 1967, the New York City Transit Authority hired Unimark to finally overhaul the subway’s wayfinding. Unimark is an international design firm that at the time was headed by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda. The company did its own research about graphical communication and studied other transit systems. They were also likely to influenced by the work of George Solomon, Stanley Goldstein, and Raleigh D’Adamo, three men who created maps, books, and studies suggesting ways to fix the subway. The Unimark system would need to be applied to not only the subway, but also New York City buses, the LIRR, and eventually the Metro-North.
Image via The Standards Manual/Pentagram
Vignelli and Noorda produced in 1970 what Shapiro refers to as “the Bible,”the Graphic Standards Manual. The manual is an exhaustive volume that instructs how every sign everywhere in the subway, bus, and train systems should look: inside a subway car, outside a subway car, inside a bus, outside a bus, hanging in a station, and on and on. The san serif font Vignelli and Noorda chose for signage provided “the easiest legibility from any angle whether the passenger is standing walking or riding.” They chose a rainbow of 22 different colors to assign to each subway line and gave the routes new names. While this was a major improvement, the system was still complicated and required a certain level of subway literacy to navigate. Vignelli and Noorda employed double letter names, such as the EE and GG, and colors were sometimes shared by different routes.
In 1979, instead of having a different color assigned to each separate route, colors were reassigned based on “trunk routes.” The trunk route is the portion of subway tracks that go through Manhattan. All trains that share a trunk route are the same color. For example, Lexington Ave’s 4,5,6 routes are all green, and Broadway’s N, Q, R, W routes are all yellow, regardless of their terminal destinations. G doesn’t go through Manhattan at all, and the 7 and L don’t share any trunk routes, they have their own colors. This is the color system we use today! However, it wasn’t until 1985 that all double letter routes were renamed.
Vignelli’s 1972 subway map, Map from the Metropolitan Transit Authority
While the colors are set now, the subway map is still evolving. New proposed designs were put on display in August 2020 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The simplified design was based on the beloved Vignelli map of the 1970s. In April 2025, a new map, or more ccurately a new diagram, was officially adopted. We spoke with map maker John Tauranac, who lead the design of the 1979 subway map, about his reaction to the new design.
Today, the mix of all three original subway lines along with changing architectural trends, new technology and works of art created for MTA’s Arts for Transit Program, make every subway station unique. “New York’s subway stations don’t look like subway stations anywhere else in the world, says Shapiro, “There is still some of the older stuff in there and its part of the charm of our system. If our system had been built all in one shot, by one group of people, it wouldn’t look as beautiful as it does. I think our system is beautiful, even though it is very idiosyncratic. There are so many cool things to look at.”
WHAT IS GOING ON HERE???
Protective wood is falling apart under the RI Bridge…DOT, time to wake up and see the damage
Sky high placement of Bus Stop signs. Are we an island of giants? Whose idea was it to place signs 10 feet in the air?
Two broken door windows at our deteriorating Post Office. The post office is in terrible conditon and neglected by the agency. Don’t blame the staff but complain upwards to negligent management.
CREDITS
UNTAPPED NEW YORK JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
At a nondescript building on Liberty Street, Tesla invented a ground breaking machine. But does anyone remember?
One of the most important inventions of the electrical age was invented at 89 Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, but there is no marker of this site’s significance. In the 1880s, Nikola Tesla’s first laboratory occupied the second floor of a four-story commercial building at the site. It was here that the great inventor built and patented the first alternating current motor, an innovation that would enable the construction of the modern electric grid.
With the original building now long gone, Zuccotti Park is the perfect place to mark this achievement. The park is directly across the street from One Liberty Plaza, and an invention of this magnitude deserves to be recognized in a prominent public place.
But why was Tesla’s invention so important? We all have some familiarity with the “War of the Currents,” i.e., the competition over which was better: alternating or direct current. Most people, however, do not know what Nikola Tesla accomplished to turn the tide in favor of alternating instead of direct current.
The Early Days of Electric Lighting In 1878, fresh from inventing the incandescent light bulb, Thomas Edison announced to the press that he would build the first commercial electric distribution system in New York City. Edison planned to use direct current because, among other reasons, it was the scientific consensus at the time that only direct current was feasible. The construction of an alternating current motor was deemed impossible.
While Edison initially built his system for lighting, all knew that electric motors would become even more important. Why build an electric system based on alternating current if it could not supply motors?
That same year, 1878, Nikola Tesla was in an electric engineering class in Graz, Austria. His professor explained the scientific consensus that an alternating current motor was a physical impossibility. Tesla responded by declaring that he would build such a motor. Even though the professor ridiculed him in front of the class, Tesla never gave up on his goal.
Tesla in New York City On June 6, 1884, Nikola Tesla walked off a boat in New York City with a letter of introduction to work for Edison. He had previously worked for an Edison affiliated company in Paris. Edison, now known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” was world famous, and his electric company had successfully started up the world’s first commercial electric distribution grid on September 4, 1882, in lower Manhattan.
Tesla, eleven years younger than Edison, was just getting started. In his autobiography, My Inventions, Tesla writes that he impressed Edison from the start and that, because being Serbian was unusual at that time in New York City, Edison referred to him as “my Parisian.” While Edison’s letters from that time make no reference to Tesla, there is one document showing that Tesla was a highly paid Edison employee. While Edison must have recognized Tesla’s talent, Tesla admits in his autobiography that he chickened out and never asked to collaborate with him on developing an alternating current motor.
After a dispute over pay, Tesla left Edison to strike out on his own. He failed miserably. He fell in with Wall Street swindlers who left him penniless. In desperation for money to survive, Tesla became a ditch digger for the Western Union company. There he convinced the foreman of his crew that he was an electric genius. The foreman took him to see two Western Union executives, Alfred Brown and Charles Peck, who decided to finance him.
Tesla’s First Laboratory on Liberty Street Brown and Peck rented a room for Tesla on the second floor of 89 Liberty Street. They chose that building because there was a printing press on the first floor and at night Tesla would be able to use the steam that ran the printing press to work on his inventions.
While at 89 Liberty Street, Tesla first had to convince Brown and Peck that they should finance his project to develop an alternating current motor. They were skeptical of alternating current and were more interested in their own scheme to use differential ocean temperatures to create steam to run electric generators. It is notable that even then there were investors dreaming of a way to make electricity from renewable sources.
Tesla convinced them by copying a Christopher Columbus legend. According to this legend, Columbus overcame his critics in the Spanish court by challenging them to balance an egg on one end. After they were unable to do so, Columbus made the egg stand upright by lightly cracking it on one end. Tesla said he did a form of this by copper plating an egg and then making it both stand on its edge and spin on top of a table by placing a primitive form of his alternating current motor under the table.
Peck and Brown were duly impressed and agreed to allow Tesla to work on this project. Tesla both perfected his model and developed his patents for this motor while working at 89 Liberty Street. He also wrote six other patents on how to operate an alternating current electric system.
In 2018, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers declared this motor was “the most significant invention of the electrical age.” But Tesla was pure inventor and no businessperson. Peck, however, convinced Tesla to give a lecture and demonstration about his motor at Columbia University on May 16, 1888. That is how George Westinghouse learned of the invention.
Westinghouse was interested in developing an alternating current electric system to compete with Edison’s system but knew he needed a working alternating current motor to develop such a system.
Westinghouse’s chief technical personnel visited Tesla’s office at 89 Liberty Street several times during June and July 1888. They became convinced that Tesla had developed a working alternating current motor even though one Westinghouse employee told Westinghouse that he could not understand Tesla’s explanation of how it worked. Westinghouse bought the patent rights in July 1888 and hired Tesla to work for him. The rest is history.
Westinghouse won the “war of the currents” because an alternating current transmission system is more efficient than direct current, and there was now a working alternating current motor.
89 Liberty Street Today
The Singer Company demolished the lab building at 89 Liberty Street to make way for its famous skyscraper, the tallest building in the world from 1908 to 1909. The U.S. Steel Corporation in turn destroyed the Singer Building in the late 1960s to build its headquarters, which is now One Liberty Plaza.
Zuccotti Park, a privately-owned-public-space (POPS) located on the opposite side of Liberty Street was created in 1968. Most famous for serving as the base of the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the park offers a bustling public space where a marker to Tesla’s achievements could easily be discovered by passersby, steps away from the forgotten site where his breakthrough invention was made.
Recognizing Tesla’s Contributions
There is a Nikola Tesla way at 40th Street and 6th Avenue, near where he lived out his last years at the New Yorker Hotel (at 34th Street and 8th Avenue). He also spent much of his time in Bryant Park with the pigeons there. But that sign does not commemorate the most world changing invention of one of the world’s greatest scientific geniuses.
A plaque in Zuccotti Park would commemorate the early days of Tesla’s classic immigrant story, the days when he was a striver who solved the Rubik’s Cube of how to build an alternating current electric system—a feat that the greatest minds of the time said was impossible—and proved that he could compete with Edison’s direct current system.
WHAT IS GOING ON HERE???
Protective wood is falling apart under the RI Bridge…DOT, time to wake up and see the damage
Sky high placement of Bus Stop signs. Are we an island of giants? Whose idea was it to place signs 10 feet in the air?
Two broken door windows at our deteriorating Post Office. The post office is in terrible condition and neglected by the agency. Don’t blame the staff but complain upwards to negligent management.
CREDITS
UNTAPPED NEW YORK JUDITH BERDY
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Poet Emma Lazarus was active from the mid-1860s until her death in 1887. She descended from a well-established Sephardic family in Manhattan. Her presence coincided with the arrival of waves of Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe. Their customs, Yiddish language, and political activism were distinct from the assimilated Sephardic community.
Emma created two contrasting sonnets on immigration, both dated 1883. Set against the socio-political background of their time of publication, these poems highlight some of the historical and continuous controversies surrounding the issue.
Recife & New Amsterdam
During the seventeenth century, the scattering of Jewish communities reached a global dimension. When in 1630 the Dutch West India Company (WIC) took the Brazilian coastal state of Pernambuco from the Portuguese, Sephardic (Iberian) refugees living in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Dutch Republic were encouraged and supported by the WIC to settle there.
New Christians (“conversos”) who had returned to Judaism joined them. Many settled in the capital Recife. Enjoying freedom of worship and civil equality, they established a synagogue there in 1636/7, the first one in the New World.
The community’s economic activity in Recife was significant. As the region’s humid tropical climate made the cultivation of sugarcane profitable, Jewish merchants developed the sugar industry. They owned the slave-based plantations and ran trading networks between Recife and Amsterdam. Their activities fostered a period of prosperity.
When in 1654 the Portuguese retook the colony, Jewish settlers scattered. Some returned to Europe, whilst others moved within the Americas, forming Jewish communities in the Caribbean that helped launch the sugar trade in Barbados.
In early September that year, twenty-three Jewish refugees fleeing Recife, landed in New Amsterdam on board the French barque Sainte Catherine (later referred to as the “Jewish Mayflower”). Upon arrival, the ship’s captain Jacques de la Motthe sued his passengers for the cost of the journey, leaving them destitute.
Although governor Peter Stuyvesant resisted their reception, fearing that the New Netherland colony would be torn apart by the presence of multiple religious groups, he was vetoed by the directors of the WIC in Amsterdam who ruled that these Portuguese Jews “shall have permission to sail and trade in New Netherland and to live and remain there provided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the Company, or the community.”
The first permanent Jewish congregation to settle in New Amsterdam, its members founded “Shearith Israel” in 1654.
Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849, in the city of New York into a wealthy family. Her father was a sugar merchant who descended from the early Portuguese Jews in New Amsterdam. Her ancestors had cemented assimilation of the Sephardic tradition into the city’s socio-religious life, giving the dynasty considerable status in metropolitan circles.
Growing up in the city, Emma received a “classic” European education by private tutors. Her father backed the publication, at the age of seventeen, of her Poems and Translations (1866). Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated her work and became the young poet’s mentor.
Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, her work appeared in various magazines reaching a mixed audience, but social and political circumstances were deteriorating. Acts of antisemitism, even directed towards assimilated Jews, were on the increase.
In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was murdered in St Petersburg. Ashkenazi Jews, already compelled to live in a restricted region (the “Pale of Settlement”), were held responsible. Their persecution by the Romanov government started a process of mass movement to America.
Elite Sephardic families in New York tried to stay clear of indigent Yiddish-speaking immigrants, but Emma was determined to offer help. She taught English at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association; volunteered for the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society on Ward’s Island; and joined Henry Leipziger’s Hebrew Technical Institute to provide vocational training to young immigrants.
During these years, she created the “Songs of a Semite” (1882), in which she rallied uncommitted American Jews. She also became a contributor to American Hebrew newspaper. After publishing her “Songs,” the paper’s editor invited her to write a column called “An Epistle to the Hebrews.”
In fifteen letters (1882/3), she challenged New York Jews to acknowledge their privileged social status and support refugees from Eastern Europe. At the same time, she warned about Jewish vulnerability, even in the United States. She knew antisemitism to be a “very light sleeper” (a phrase attributed to Irish politician Conor Cruise O’Brien), lying just beneath the surface and ready to spring up at any time.
More than a decade before Theodor Herzl made the Zionist case in Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896), she spoke of Jewish “repatriation” in Palestine. Deeply concerned about developments, she transformed from a poetical observer into a committed activist, trying to unify her Sephardic community with that of Ashkenazi refugees.
Your Huddled Masses
In June 1865, Édouard de Laboulaye invited some liberal friends for dinner at his home in Paris. A Professor of Law at the Collège de France, he was the author of a three-volume Histoire des États Unis (History of the United States) and translator of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.
The party celebrated the end of American slavery with the imminent ratification of the 13th Amendment. In his word of welcome, the host proposed that the French people should present America with a monument to honor the values of liberty and abolition. There was no mention of immigration or refuge.
Political upheaval delayed the project, but work started in Paris with the construction of the Statue of Liberty’s torch-bearing arm which, in May 1876, was on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition. The parts were then moved to Madison Square Park, before returning to Paris.
Between 1882 and 1884, the statue was assembled in a foundry at Rue de Chazelles where Parisians were astonished to see a colossal female figure appearing above buildings surrounding the workshop. American participants in the project agreed to finance its pedestal.
Emma Lazarus must have been impressed by seeing the exhibit in Manhattan. In 1883 she composed her poem “The New Colossus,” hoping to raise funds for the pedestal.
In this sonnet, she contrasted the bronze “brazen giant of Greek fame” on the island of Rhodes (one of the Seven Wonders of Antiquity) with the Statue of Liberty, defining her as the “Mother of Exiles.”
The ancient male Colossus intended to overwhelm and intimidate; Emma’s Lady evoked hope and anticipation. She redefined a statue that stemmed from the spirit of liberal French Republicanism as one that stood for a humanitarian mission: to welcome the poor immigrant.
The poem was included in the “Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition” at Manhattan’s National Academy of Design. Emma lent her voice to stress the Statue’s role as a symbol of compassion. It called for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” in reference to destitute refugees.
Her words soon faded away. When the Statue of Liberty was dedicated, the poem did not figure. More than fifteen years after her death in November 1887, composer Georgina Schuyler commissioned a plaque with the text of the sonnet inside the pedestal as a tribute to her late friend.
During the 1930s, an era of quotas and immigration hysteria, the sonnet gained new relevance. In 1949 Irving Berlin, who himself had arrived as a five-year old with his Russian-Jewish family at Ellis Island in 1893, set it to music in “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” as part of the Broadway musical Miss Liberty.
A Two-Faced Year
Within days of writing “The New Colossus,” Emma penned a parallel poem entitled “1492.” This sonnet reflected on her Sephardic heritage, linking the expulsion of Iberian Jews in 1492 to that of the mass of new arrivals settling on American soil. History books tend to remember the year for Christopher Columbus’s transatlantic voyage, rather than for the tragic fate of Spanish Jews.
Until the late fifteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula had been a center of Jewish life. On March 31, 1492, the “Catholic Monarchs” Isabella and Ferdinand II signed an edict ordering all Jews living in Castile and Aragon to convert or leave. New Christians suspected of holding on to their faith were persecuted by the Inquisition.
An exodus followed. Small groups of Jews settled in port cities such as Livorno, Antwerp, or Amsterdam, but most of them moved to Portugal. In 1497 King Manuel I decreed, under Spanish pressure, that all Jews had to convert to Christianity or leave Portugal.
In “1492,” Emma Lazarus explored the “two-faced” nature of that year, contrasting the face of the Inquisition’s “zealous hate” with the “smiling” welcome of the “virgin world.” She personified the year as a “Mother of Change and Fate” for Jews, a turning point from persecution to freedom.
With Europe closed to them at “every gate,” the New World opened “doors of sunset” in a dark age of persecution. The tone of the poem is more upbeat than that of “The New Colossus,” as if the poet is challenging her community to rise to the task.
The poem may be a celebration of refuge and sanctuary, but political developments were moving in an opposite direction. In May 1882, President Chester Arthur had signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to restrict immigration and the only one to single out a specific nation, fueling racial discrimination.
At the Statue of Liberty’s dedication on October 28, 1886, politicians on that rainy day showed little concern with welcoming any huddled masses.
Headlines were stark. The recent Haymarket bombing in Chicago had killed eleven people. The culprit was never identified, but eight men were convicted for conspiracy – six of them newcomers. For many, immigration meant terror.
America for the Americans
A gate marks passage, but also limitation or denial of access. As a metaphor, it is often used to advocate or justify immigration policies, framing a nation as a bounded space with borders (gates), controlling entrance and exit. When Emma Lazarus applied the metaphor, her Jewish background was relevant.
In Judaism, the imagery of gates is embedded in religious tracts and liturgical practices. Traditionally, the city gate was a place where traders met and from where news was circulated. In ancient Israel, elders and judges sat at the city gates to hear legal cases and administer justice.
On a spiritual level, the gate was central in the relationship between man and God. The final service of Yom Kippur (Ne’ilah) symbolizes the “closing of the gates of Heaven,” regarded as the penitent’s last chance at redemption. The gate was the threshold between the known and unknown, between past and future.
The gate entered the nativists’ rhetoric too. In the July 1892 issue of The Atlantic Monthly its editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich published a long poem entitled “Unguarded Gates.” Structured in three parts, the narrative moves from the country’s former unspoiled landscape to demographic invasions, ending in a plea for preclusion.
The poem’s first line is a leitmotiv: “Wide open and unguarded stand our gates!” Overrun by a “wild motley throng” of incomers, socio-cultural identity is at peril:
“In street and alley what strange tongues are loud, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!”
The concluding section of the poem raises a question that reads as a polemical response to the image of Lady Liberty painted by Emma Lazarus: “O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well / To leave the gates unguarded?”
Aldrich merged his anti-immigration stance with the notion of Anglo-American superiority. Many contemporaries shared this view.
Writing to a friend in 1892, the author said that he drafted the poem in anger after being subjected to a robbery. He abhorred an America that would be the “cesspool of Europe,” concluding with the xenophobic statement “I believe in America for the Americans.”
Reflecting nativist fears and prejudices, Aldrich voiced a tendency of intolerance towards racial and social diversity. Attacking the “open gate” reality, he called for exclusionary measures.
The poem became part of the political debate. Two years after its publication, the Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston by Harvard graduates, a nativist organization that campaigned for strict laws to curb the influx of “inferior” southern and Eastern Europeans.
To them, the symbolism behind Lady Liberty’s statue was contentious. She was wrong embracing the world’s poor and huddled masses. In their vision, the chains at her feet should be interpreted as deportation tools in defense of the nation’s broken identity and fractured self.
CREDITS
Illustrations, from above: “Come Unto Me Ye Opprest!,” a nativist, anti-Italian and anti-Anarchist cartoon by James “J.P.” Alley published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, July 5, 1919; Jewish owned sugar mills and slave labor in Dutch Brazil; The First Mill Street Synagogue in the City of New York, 1730; Portrait of Emma Lazarus, ca. 1872; The Statue of Liberty’s hand and torch on view in Madison Square. (Museo Bartholdi Colmar); The original 1883 manuscript of “The New Colossus”; and an anti-immigration cartoon featuring the Statue of Liberty by F. Victor Gillam, 1890 (from the cover of Judge magazine).
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
