Tag: new york city

Calendar: March 21

Year: Day to Day Men: March 21

Cool and Refreshed

The twenty-first of March in 1867 marks the birth date of Florenz Edward Ziegfeld Jr. who was an American Broadway impresario. 

Born in the Illinois city of Chicago, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was the son of Roselie de Hez, the Belgian grandniece to General Count Étienne Maurice Gérard, and German-born Florenz Ziegfeld, son of the mayor of Jever, the capital city of the Friesland district, Germany. The father founded Roosevelt University’s Chicago Academy of Music 1n 1867 and later opened the Trocadero nightclub to profit from the 1893 World’s Fair. 

During a trip to London in 1896, Florence Ziegfeld Jr. met the Polish-French singer Anna Held and brought her to the United States as his common-law wife. Held enjoyed several successes on Broadway including the 1901 “Little Duchess” and 1906 “A Parisian Model”. One of Broadway’s celebrated leading ladies, she became both a well-known and wealthy woman. It was Held who presented the idea of an American version of the Parisian Folies Bergère to Ziegfeld. 

Ziegfeld’s stage spectaculars, which became known as the Ziegfeld Follies, began with ‘Follies of 1907’ which opened in July of that year and continued annually until 1931. These productions with their elaborate costumes and sets featured beautiful women, the Ziegfeld Girls, chosen personally by Ziegfeld. The extravaganzas were choreographed to the works of such popular composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. The Follies featured many well-known theatrical performers including Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Bert Williams and Ann Pennington.

In 1927, the sixteen-hundred seat Ziegfeld Theater opened on the west side of  Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets. Designed by architects Joseph Urban and Thomas W. Lamb, the Art Deco theater’s auditorium was egg-shaped with the stage at the narrow end. A large medieval-styled mural by Lillian Gaertner, “The Joy of Life”, covered the walls and ceiling. To finance the construction cost of of 2.5 million dollars, Ziegfeld borrowed money from newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who took control of the theater after Ziegfeld’s death.

The Ziegfeld Theater’s opening production in February was Ziegfeld’s “Rio Rita” which ran for almost five hundred performances. The second production, “Show Boat” with stage sets by Urban and a score by Jerome Kern, was a success with a run of five hundred seventy-two performances. This musical continues to be revived on Broadway and has won multiple Tony Awards. In May of 1932 during the Depression, Ziegfeld staged a revival of “Show Boat” that ran for six months. In the same year, a production with the Follies’ theatrical stars entitled “The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air” was broadcast on CBS Radio.  

Anna Held divorced Florenz Ziegfeld in January of 1913. In April of 1914, he married stage and screen actress Billie Burke; they had one child, Patricia Burke Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld family lived at their New York estate in Hastings-on-Hudson and their residence in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1932 after spending a period in a New Mexico sanitarium, Florenz Ziegfeld traveled to Los Angeles, California. A few days later, he died in Hollywood from an existing lung infection, pleurisy, on the twenty-second of July in 1932.

Ziegfeld’s death left Billie Burke with substantial debts, one of the reasons that she steered her career toward film acting. She moved to Beverly Hills and returned to a successful career as an actress with such films as George Cukor’s “Dinner at Eight”, Norman Z. McLeod’s 1937 “Topper”, Victor Fleming’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz”, and William Keighley’s 1942 “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. In the late 1950s, failing memory led to Burke’s retirement from show business; she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five in May of 1970. Burke is interred beside Ziegfeld at Kensico Cemetery in Valhall, New York.

Calendar: February 26

Year: Day to Day Men: February 26

Moment of Rest

The twenty-sixth of February in 1870 marks the opening day of New York City’s Beach Pneumatic Transit, the first attempt to build an underground public transit system in the city. This system was a prototype developed by Alfred Ely Beach in 1869 to demonstrate a subway line running on air pressure.

At New York’s 1867 American Institute Exhibition, inventor and patent lawyer Alfred Ely Beach demonstrated a basic subway model in which air pressure pushed cars through a tubular tunnel. After a successful demonstration, Beach founded the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company in 1869 for the construction of a pneumatically powered subway line beneath Broadway, one of the main commercial arteries in New York City. He financed the full-scale test project himself in the amount of three hundred-fifty thousand dollars.

Alfred Beach, however had no political support for the project as William Magear Tweed, the political boss of Tammany Hall and third largest land owner in New York City, refused to give his approval. In order to start the project, Beach claimed he was building a postal tube system. This was a pneumatic system, already established in London and Paris, that quickly transported tubular cylinders containing small packages, mail, paperwork, and currency. Beach was granted an initial permit to install a pair of postal tubes beneath Broadway; it was later amended by Tweed to allow a single large tunnel in which a system of tubes would reside.

Construction on the Beach tunnel was completed in fifty-eight days. It extended for approximately three-hundred feet from the intersection of Warren Street and Broadway, directly across from City Hall,  and ended at Murray Street and Broadway. Built through the use of a tunneling shield, a temporary structure that shields workers from falling materials or cave-ins, the subway opened to the public on the twenty-sixth of February in 1870 and operated as a demonstration until 1873. 

The Beach Pneumatic Transit ran only a single car on its track from the Warren Street to Murray Street, the distance of one city block. Riders paid a fare of twenty-five cents for the experience, with proceeds given to the Union Home and School for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans. The Warren Street station was elaborately designed with frescoes on the walls lit by zirconia lamps; the interior held statues and a goldfish pond to view while passengers waited for the car.  The ride was controlled by a forty-four short-ton (39,915 kilogram) generator built by Roots Patent Force Rotary Blowers. The air pressure would propel the car forward and, by reversing the baffles on the blower system, the car would return to the original station. The public approved of the system with over four-hundred thousand rides in its operation.

Alfred Beach had problems in getting official permission to expand the system. In 1873, he succeeded in getting permission to expand the system to Central Park, a distance of five miles. However; both public and financial support had waned, mainly from a stock market crash that became known as the Panic of 1873. With the project shut down, the tunnel entrance was sealed and the station reclaimed for other uses. Although the Beach Pneumatic Transit only existed for three years, the project inspired the New York pneumatic tube postal system that Beach had previously, albeit falsely, suggested to William Tweed. Opening in October of 1897, the pneumatic postal system operated continuously in New York City until 1953, except for a suspension of service during World War I to conserve funding for the war effort.

Gio Black Peter

The Artwork of Gio Black Peter

Gio Black Peter is a Guatemalan born, New York City based actor, musical performance and visual artist perhaps best known for his featured roles in the movies “Eban and Charley”, directed in 2000 by James Bolton, and “Otto or Up with Dead People”, directed in 2008 by Bruce LaBruce. His musical and performance art is part of the New York underground and is often in collaboration with the multi-media team SUPERM.

As a visual artist, Gio Black Peter (Giovanni Paolo Andrade Guevara) is known for his figurative and sexually themed paintings.

James Maher

James Maher, “Fire Escapes, Chinatown”

James Maher is a professional photographer based in New York, whose primary passion is documenting the personalities and stories of the city.

“My inspiration in photography has always come from the people of New York. When I began with photography, I would walk the streets of 5th Avenue for fun and people watch. I didn’t even know that it was called street photography. From there, I grew a portraiture and event business, began to photograph and learn more about the incredible architecture of New York, and just went exploring as much as I possibly could. I studied the history of New York whenever I could and became a certified tour and workshop guide.” – James Maher

Ryan McGinness

Ryan McGinness, “Signs”, 2014, Fifty Vinyl on Aluminum Signs/ Dispalyed in Manhattan from July 28- August 30, 2014

Signs, a public art project by artist and designer Ryan McGinness, featured funky street signs fabricated and installed by the New York City Department of Transportation all around downtown NYC.

The project included fifty signs installed and displayed around the Manhattan area until the end of August in 2014. The signs were installed on traffic light posts and lamp posts along the route of the city’s Summer Streets program, a weekly event where about seven miles of NYC’s streets were closed off to allow people to freely and safely run, walk, bike and play.

The fifty signs were made of vinyl on aluminum and were manufactured and published by the DOT itself. The signs featured various contemporary designs in black, red, and white. The artist identified each sign as a number and he also included whimsical descriptions for each of the design on his website.

City Hall Subway Station

Abandoned City Hall Subway Station, New York City

If you ride the Number 6 train to the end of the line and get off at the Brooklyn Bridge stop, you’re missing out on something incredible. As the train loops around to go back uptown, it passes through the abandoned and beautifully preserved City Hall Station from 1904.

The station, with a maximum use by only 600 people a day, was closed by the City of New York Because the loop created an unsafe gap at the platform. In 1995 the city vowed to restore the site and turn it into a part of the transit museum, but those plans were scrapped years later.

The station is still not open to the public, but there’s a trick you can use to see it for yourself. Until recently the MTA would force passengers to get off before the train made the loop, but now passengers are allowed to stay on. So the next time you reach the end of the line, stay on the train as it rolls through the City Hall Station.

Victo Ngai

Illustrations by Victo Ngai

Victo is a New York based illustrator form Hong Kong. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design majoring in illustration. Her work has been described as being highly detailed and precise, referencing comic book drawings, classic children’s book illustrations, the work of Japanese painters, and more. Victor Ngai has also taught athe the School of Visual Art in New York, the illustration Academy and other workshops and conferences.

 

Lucea Spinelli

Lucea Spinelli, “Photosgraphe”, Light and Motion Photos

NYC-based photographer Lucea Spinelli has a special appreciation for light and motion in her series of moving images titled Phōtosgraphé. She utilizes chairs, swing sets, and park benches as backdrops and props for luminous forms that seem to bounce effortlessly through the frame. In some pieces the light mimics the pathway of ghostly human figures while in others it sparkles like fireflies or expands like a rainbow.

“Photography is the process of drawing with light, as it’s etymology implies: a compound of the greek words φωτός (phōtos) “light” and γραφή (graphé) “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”. Like a human eye, the camera receives impressions of light reflected off the world around us. When making long exposures, the film (or sensor) becomes a canvas for as long as the shutter is open, permitting light to act like paint on a brush.

In this way, by distilling the course of movement over time into one single image photography, in addition to it’s potential to mirror reality, also has an ability to suspend reality.” – Lucea Spinelli

Vito Tomasello

Vito Tomasello, Untitled, 1940s, Pastel Drawing, 22 x 30 Incehs, Private Collection

A lifetime NYC resident and gay artist, Vito Tomasello is best known for his male nude drawings and paintings, as well as documenting the Ballet Trocadero dancers of the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s he was asssociated with the avantgarde in New York City. Works by his hand hang in the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York

The Temple of Dendur

The Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

The Temple of Dendur) is an Egyptian temple that was built by the Roman governor of Egypt, Petronius, around 15 BC and dedicated to Isis, Osiris, as well as two deified sons of a local Nubian chieftain, Pediese (“he whom Isis has given”) and Pihor (“he who belongs to Horus”). The temple was commissioned by Emperor Augustus of Rome.

The temple was dismantled and removed from its original location south of the town of Aswan) in 1963. This was accomplished as part of a wider UNESCO project, in order to save significant sites from being submerged by Lake Nasser, following construction of the Aswan High Dam. In recognition of the American assistance in saving various other monuments threatened by the dam’s construction, Egypt presented the temple and its gate as a gift to the United States of America.