NYC Day 56: In Which I Go To Hoboken In Search of The Ghost of Frank Sinatra

Click on images to view full sized

...

Today was one of those days that started out as one thing, and ended up as something else completely. I had the vague idea of indulging in a long ferry ride to ... where exactly? As it happens, I had not worked that bit out. Nevertheless, I made my way to Fulton Street with a rough plan to catch a ferry from the World Trade Center ferry berth, and see what was on offer. In the end I decided on a short ride to Hoboken South.

The last time I visited Hoboken was in 2010, and it is pleasing to see that New Jersey has found some money to smarten up areas along the Hudson River. A heap of new developments have sprung up over the intervening seven years, including multi-storey apartment complexes, along with extensive beautification measures that make walks or bike rides along well maintained paved pathways a real pleasure.

.... 

I was surprised to read via Wikipedia that "Hoboken was originally an island, surrounded by the Hudson River on the east and tidal lands at the foot of the New Jersey Palisades on the west." Though after some thought, I remembered that Coney Island, that most famous of New York City neighborhoods, was also once an island until what little stretch of water separated it from the mainland was filled in, paved over, and built upon.

I was even more surprised to read that despite being in New Jersey, "Hoboken is part of the New York metropolitan area." The Wiki articles goes on to say, "The city is a bedroom community of New York City, where most of its employed residents work." Indeed, "about 53 percent of the employed residents of Hoboken...work in one of the five boroughs of New York City, as opposed to about 15 percent within Hoboken."

But, wait! There's more. "The first officially recorded game of baseball took place in Hoboken in 1846 between the Knickerbocker Club, and New York Nine at Elysian Fields." A historical marker stands at the intersection of 11th and Washington Streets, the former site of Elysian Fields.

Ole Blue Eyes himself.

...

Hoboken likes to lay claim to one of America's most famous and popular singers and actors, the one, the only... Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra. I know this because they have named Frank Sinatra Park in his honor. Heck the city has even named Frank Sinatra Drive after him.

Sinatra was born December 12, 1915, in an upstairs tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey.

If I had thought ahead far enough, I could have walked to this address from the Hoboken South ferry berth to look for the house myself, but since I was not that organized, I have resorted to a Google Maps Street View of the address, and from what I can see, it seems to me that the tenement building that once stood here has long been pulled down and the site is now a car park for what appears to be a bar at number 417 called...wait for it... From Here To Eternity. Of course all Frank Sinatra aficionados will know this is the name of the 1953 film he starred in along with Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster.

A parking lot! It must be time to play Joni Mitchell's song, Big Yellow Taxi, with its very appropriate opening verse:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

A Google Maps Street View screen shot of the lot at 415 Monroe Street, Hoboken, NJ.

Oh well, at least someone had the bright idea of placing a star on the sidewalk to memorialize the location.

Frank Sinatra's blue star on the pavement at 415, Monroe Street [Image: ]
...

To be frank (sorry, that was an appallingly bad pun, I know), but apart from the Frank Sinatra Park and Drive, there really was not a lot to see in Hoboken for anyone wanting to walk in the man's footsteps. There was nothing for it therefore but to take a slow stroll along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, as far as 14th Street where another ferry berth was located. Along the way I stopped to enjoy the river views, and check out some of the local history.

Frank Sinatra Park
This park, near Pier A, is a great location to take in late afternoon or early evening views of the Manhattan skyline, especially when the rays of the sun begin to bathe buildings in a soft golden light. The park was built in 1998 and is shaped in a Roman amphitheater style with an area that faces the former site of the World Trade Center. The Hoboken Division of Cultural Affairs regularly produces events at the park which includes Thursday concerts, and 'Shakespeare Mondays' which are presented by the Hudson Shakespeare Company.

Above: the beautiful Pier A park, and below, the children's playground at Pier C.

 

Food trucks line Pier 13 at 13th Street, Hoboken. 

Sybil's Cave
Sybil's Cave, named for the ancient Greco-Roman prophetess, once "a cave with a natural spring, was opened in 1832 and visitors came to pay a penny for a glass of water from the cave which was said to have medicinal powers. In 1841, the cave became a legend, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Mystery of Marie Roget, about an event that took place there. The cave was closed in the late 1880s after the water was found to be contaminated, and it was shut in the 1930s and filled with concrete, before it was reopened in 2008." [Wikipedia...] However, the entrance to the cave is once again permanently barred by a heavy iron grill that completely encloses the opening, making it inaccessible to the public.

Above: The entrance to Sybil's Cave, and below, the cave marker. 

Like the Manhattan's waterfront, the Hoboken waterfront was once lined with numerous piers that serviced local and international shipping of all descriptions. During World War One, Hoboken became the major point of embarkation for more than three million soldiers, known as doughboys, who passed through the city.

Above and Below: The World War II Memorial.

  Not Forgotten, the 2002 Memorial to Hoboken's Vietnam War Veterans.
...

Hoboken also once supported a vibrant shipbuilding industry, a fact which made this former shipwright very nostalgic for his first major career decision. The image below is on the grounds of what little remains of that industry along this part of the Hudson River Walkway. 

Today, more than 45 years after I left the shipbuilding game, I still stop to watch boats and ships of all types pass on their way to and from foreign parts and ports. 

More Information
Frank Sinatra Official site... 
Frank Sinatra on Wikipedia...

====================================

Thursday 10, August | Expenses $72.15 ($92.20)

====================================

Any questions, comments or suggestions? How about complaints or compliments? Let me know via the comments box below.

NYC Day 55: In Which I Am Once Again Spoilt For Choice in The Big Apple

Dive Bomber and Tank (1940), by Jose Clemente Orozco

Click on images to view full size

...

I had eight events listed as potential activities for this day, and one of them was not a return to the Museum of Modern Art, but there I was, being drawn back to that venerable institution on 54th Street once again. This post features works from the Mexican Modernists room.

MEXICAN MODERNISM
After the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the new government of Mexico instituted a program to celebrate the nation's indigenous heritage and recent history. Artists were central to this initiative, designing and creating large-scale murals that often monumentalize their subjects, portraying both recognizable historical figures and common peasants and workers as symbols of strength in the face of adversity.

Through the support of the Museum of Modern Art's cofounder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco were invited to New York in 1931 and 1940, respectively, to make frescoes in work spaces provided by the Museum. Also in New York, in 1936, David Alfaro Siqueiros, interested in innovative materials and techniques, founded the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, whose membership included Jackson Pollock. Driving these artists, as Siqueiros explained, was the imperative to create "a fighting educative art for all."

Above: full painting, and below, a detail from Ethnography (1939), by David Alfaro Siqueiros 

DAVID ALFARO SIQUEIROS (1883-1949)
Of Los tres grandes (The Big Three) Mexican muralists, Siqueiros was the youngest and the most politically radical. His artistic career was repeatedly interrupted by his fervent political activity and frequent imprisonment. Siqueiros believed that revolutionary art called for revolutionary techniques and materials. Collective Suicide features several innovative techniques the artist explored as part of the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop he founded in New York in 1936. He airbrushed paint across the top third of the panel and used stencils to depict the army of invading seventeenth-century Spanish conquistadors on horseback (lower right) and Chichimec Indians leaping to their deaths to avoid subjugation (left). The swirling vortexes are pools of fast-drying commercial lacquer typically used on cars. A member of the workshop later recalled that they applied this paint "in thin glazes or built it up into thick gobs. We poured it, dripped it, splattered it,  and hurled it at the picture surface." Siqueiros's radical experiments proved influential for Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock, in particular, who was a member of the workshop.

Above: Full painting, and below, details of David Alfaro Siqueiros's, Collective Suicide (1936).

...

Above: Jose Clemente Orozco's, Zapatistas (1931) 

DIEGO RIVERA (1886-1957)
Dedicated to the slain revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919) and the campesinos, or peasant farm workers, who followed him, this fresco is a copy of a detail from a larger mural cycle Rivera made in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a few years earlier. It is one of eight "portable" frescoes Rivera produced expressly for his solo exhibition at MoMA in 1931. In a studio the Museum provided him above its galleries, he worked around the clock for a month to produce frescoes that, unlike traditional frescoes, were intended to be transportable. The works demonstrate Rivera's mastery of the medium and were a critical and popular success. During its five-week run, the exhibition broke Museum attendance records and led to important public commissions from the Ford and Rockefeller families.

Above: The full painting, Agrarian Leader Zapata (1931), and below, a detail from the work.

FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954)
Kahlo collected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican retablos -- small paintings on metal made as Catholic devotional objects -- and adopted the medium as her own. In this fantastical family tree, Kahlo depicted herself as a fetus in utero and as a child inside her childhood home. While Kahlo celebrated Mexican culture by evoking its traditions in her art and wearing elaborate traditional attire, this painting is as much a tribute to her European and Jewish heritage. On the right is her German-born Jewish father and his parents, symbolized by the sea, and on the left her Mexican mother and her parents, symbolized by the land and a faintly rendered map of Mexico that appears above her grandparents' heads. Kahlo made this painting shortly after Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws, forbidding interracial marriage. While the painting adopts the format of genealogical charts used by the Nazis to advocate racial purity, Kahlo uses it subversively to affirm her mixed origins.

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936, by Frida Kahlo

Fulang-Chang and I depicts Kahlo with one of her pet monkeys, interpreted by many as surrogates for the children she and Diego Rivera were unable to conceive. The painting was included in the first major exhibition of her work, held at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938. In the essay that accompanied the show, the Surrealist leader André Breton described Kahlo's work as "a ribbon around a bomb" and hailed her as a self-created Surrealist painter. Although she appreciated his enthusiasm for her work, Kahlo did not agree with his assessment: "They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." Kahlo later gave this painting to her close friend Mary Sklar, attaching a mirror to it so that, if Sklar chose, the two friends could be together.

Fulang-Chang and I (1937, assembled after 1939)

====================================

Wednesday 9, August | Expenses $27.05 ($34.30)

====================================

Note: All biographical and interpretive information in this post is sourced from the Mexican Modernism room at the Museum of Modern Art.

Any questions, comments or suggestions? How about complaints or compliments? Let me know via the comments box below.

NYC Day 54: In Which I Go in Search of Pre-Revolutionary America

Three views of the Morris-Jumel Mansion
Click images to view full sized

...

It may surprise you, dear reader, that in amongst the soaring skyscrapers that dot the New York City skyline, there are to be found numerous buildings and homes that reach back to before the American Revolution. I know that may seem preposterous; that a city as dynamic and as ever changing as New York City, somehow retains vestiges of it's revolutionary past.

One of those buildings is the Morris-Jumel Mansion, located on an acre or two of land in upper Manhattan, overlooking the East River (at 65 Jumel Terrace). I mention the acreage specifically because the former estate on which the mansion now stands once stretched across Manhattan from the Hudson River to the East River, and from approximately 168th Street down to 158th.

The Mansion today is part of the Jumel Terrace Historic District, a small historic district in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

It consists of 50 residential rowhouses built between 1890 and 1902, and one apartment building constructed in 1909, as the heirs of Eliza Jumel sold off the land of the former Roger Morris estate. The buildings are primarily wood or brick rowhouses in the Queen Anne, Romanesque and Neo-Renaissance styles. {Wikipedia...] 

An information sheet at the Mansion provides additional information:

The Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's only remaining Colonial residence, is unique in its combination of architectural and historical significance. Built as a summer "villa" in 1765 by the British Colonel Roger Morris and his American wife Mary Philipse, it originally commanded extensive views in all directions: of New York harbor and Staten Island to the south; of the Hudson and Harlem rivers to the west and east; and of Westchester county to the north.

Colonel Morris was the son of the famous architect Roger Morris, a fact which may explain the extremely innovative features of the Mansion such as the gigantic portico, unprecedented in American architecture, and the rear wing which was the first octagon built in the Colonies.

Above: Interior of the octagonal Drawing Room, and below items within the room,

 A painting of Aaron Burr, by George Hans Eric Maunsbach

Empire Sofa, c.1825

Painting of Eliza Jumel by an unknown artist.

...

The house's situation and large size made it ideal as military headquarters during the Revolution, and it was occupied successively by Washington, General Sir Henry Clinton, and the Hessian General Baron Von Knyphausen. As the Morrises were loyal to Britain during the Revolution, their property was seized and sold after its conclusion. In 1790 Washington returned for a cabinet dinner at which he entertained Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Colonel Knox, among others.

The later history of the house centers on the Jumels, Stephen Jumel was a wealthy French emigre who married, in 1804, his beautiful and brilliant mistress, Eliza Bowen. They bought the Mansion in 1810. In 1815 they sailed to France, and offered Napoleon safe passage to New York after Waterloo. although he eventually declined the offer, they did acquire from his family many important Napoleonic relics - some of which can be seen in the blue bedroom on the second floor. Stephen died in 1832 and Eliza married the ex-Vice-President, Aaron Burr in the front parlor a year later. On her death in 1865 she was considers one of the wealthiest women in America.

Above and Below: The kitchen situated in the basement.

...

It should be said that today the Mansion is in dire need of an extensive (and no doubt expensive) upgrade of its exterior facade. The staff member I was taking to described a complicated arrangement with a government heritage department which divides responsibility for the buildings maintenance thus: the non-profit group managing the site is only able to renovate and fix the interior of the building, while the government agency is responsible for the exterior. This has led to a situation in which the interior is progressively being upgraded, while the exterior of the building appears run down, and in desperate need of maintenance, including and a fresh paint job.

I don't know how many of the fittings and items of furniture currently on display in the Morris-Jumel Mansion are original to the building, but as a 'work in progress', it was sobering to walk in the footsteps of George Washington, and some of the other leaders of the American Revolution for an hour or so, and to try and imagine the scenes playing out inside the Mansion more than 200 years ago..

Above and Below: A series of photos representing Washington's War Room.

...

A special bonus for visitors who make the trip uptown to see the Morris-Jumel Mansion is the chance to walk along one of the most unique streets in the whole of New York City; and that is the incredible time warp that is Sylvan Terrace.

...

Sylvan Terrace, located where West 161st Street would normally be, was originally the carriage drive of the Morris estate. In 1882-83 twenty wooden houses, designed by Gilbert R. Robinson Jr., were constructed on the drive. Initially rented out to laborers and working class civil servants, the houses were restored in 1979-81. They are now some of the few remaining framed house in in Manhattan. {Wikipedia...]

...

===================================

Tuesday 8, August | Expenses $86.80 ($110.25)

===================================

Any questions, comments or suggestions? How about complaints or compliments? Let me know via the comments box below.