Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Anyone who uses the 14th Street subway station – third largest in the city
according to my ancient statistics – is at some point struck by the nice little country
scene portrayed in glazed porcelain mosaic on the walls of the BMT line. Here is
the story, long version.

Around 1900 the chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, William
Barclay Parsons, gave the architect firm of George C. Heins and Christopher
Grant LaFarge a contract to design the subway stations. Two faience
porcelain firms – Grueby Faience of Boston and Rookwood of Cincinnati –
were chosen to prettify the tunnel oases with faience (glazed ceramic)
mosaics. This resulted in the long inlaid strips of vibrant earth-color
mosaics with contrasting moldings running alongside the top edges of subway
station walls, bits of Classic Greek design that have survived nearly a hundred
years, interlaid with panels spelling out the stations' names. Touches of unobtrusive beauty that we have taken for granted and only miss when they are replaced with bathroom tile and cartoon characters, as seen on some modern renovations.

There were also more ornate decorations – the majestic Grueby eagles embracing the simple “33” on the 33rd Street BMT (related to the original 71st Armory above the station, built in 1889 and burned down in 1906), and the beavers at Astor Place, symbolizing J.J. Astor’s original source of wealth, the beaver pelts of Hudson's Bay. The landmarked Astor Place station was extensively renovated in 1986, adding some new panels by Milton Glaser that complement the original design elements. The new cast iron entrance at Astor Place is a replica of the original Hecla Iron Works artifact.

Atlantic Terra Cotta, a provider of less expensive art, was an added starter, responsible for
the terra-cotta cartouches at Canal Street and other stations. At this point historic plaques were came into use at 14th Street and elsewhere, inspired by a new engineer, Squire J. Vickers, who joined Rapid Transit in 1906 and spent the next 32 years with the system (later State Public Service and then NY Board of Transportation).

The Union Square BMT scenics are faithful copies of the Lossing-Barritt
drawing in the Common Council Manual of 1865 .. They portray the union, or confluence, of Broadway
and Bowery Road, as it was in 1828. There are tall trees and three chimneys over the
roofs of the houses at the NW edge of an area that later expanded to be the Union
Park. The mark of Jay Van Eberen is included to the right of the date. Jay
was a Cornell schoolmate of Vickers, and did the bridge composition for the
walls of the 125th Street Station. Another cityscape, portraying the Metropolitan
Life Tower, for 23rd Street Station, was not used. You can see them at the
Whitney. Interestingly, in the recently completed renovation of the Union Square station six Grueby eagles clutching the 14th Street emblem were uncovered, and are exhibited in the station's IRT to BMT passageway; alas, three have lost their heads and only the pedestals are remaining.

The above-mentioned Manuals of the Corporation of City of New York, best known as Valentine’s Manuals, published starting in 1841 by the eponymous David T., clerk of the Common Council, and continued by various hands nearly annually into the 1920s, are wonderful sources of city lore and a collector’s delight, with their engravings and lithographs of old scenes.Benson J. Lossing (1813-91), a prolific writer and artist who produced many multi-volume histories, including one of NYC, was a contributor.

It should be noted that October 27, 1904, 100 years ago, is the date of the opening of the subway system. With streets clogged by traffic, an elevated railway system was put into effect in 1868, and a Rapid Transit Board started planning a subway system in 1894, following a referendum that approved the use of taxpayers’ funds to finance it. They took ten years to implement the first IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) line, and the entire system was active by 1908. The BRT (Brooklyn Rapid Transit), later BMT (Brooklyn- Manhattan Transit) started functioning in 1913, with both systems operating 123 miles of track and collecting a 5-cent fare. The systems were operated by private companies.

In 1925 Mayor John F. Hylan (who worked as a transit motorman while attending law school), disgusted with the company problems and bankruptcies, obtained approval for an IND (Independent Subway System) that added 51 miles of tracks between 1932 and 1940. When the IRT became bankrupt, it was bought by the city. A state- controlled New York City Transit Authority ran the subway and bus systems starting in 1953, when the fare grew to 15 cents (from 10 cents in 1948). In 1968 it became the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority). By 1977 ridership had deteriorated to inder 1,000 million, with panhandlers, fare-beaters, graffiti-ridden cars and serious deterioration in equipment intimidating the riders. Serious repairs and upgrades of equipment were installed. The lines grew to 255 miles, and the fare grew from 75 cents to $1.25 between 1981 and 1992. reaching $2 after the turn of the century. Happy Centennial, MTA, we are linked by your umbilical cords, er, lines, from birth to death!

The ceramics info is mostly from subway preservationist Lee Stookey’s fine book, Subway Ceramics, 2nd edition in 1994, $16, copies available at the City Store in the Municipal Building, or directly from the author, now retired to Vermont (stookey@sover.net). Subway history is mainly thanks to Kenneth Jackson’s Encyclopedia of NYC.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis




Several buildings around Union Square have been recently honored by admission to the National Register of Historic Places, a designation administered by the US Department of Interior's National Park Service, whose local agent is the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation sand Historic Preservation, Bernadette Castro, Commissioner.


There are five buildings in the group, already distinguished by their designations as New York City landmarks, The new designation gives them, besides the honor, a palpable benefit of a tax deduction of 20 percent for repair work. It also gives me, in the 11-page government document, access to a treasure of architectural terms for parts of the buildings, which I will try to decipher and disseminate to my audience. Other people get grants for this kind of work, your kind thoughts will be ample reward for me.


Let's start with the most fun structure, the Moorish eleven-story Decker Building, later Union Building, at 33 Union Square West, between 16th and 17th Streets, easily recognized by an interesting layout of windows, three of them per floor, and a turret at the top. No floor is the same. The classic tripartite columnar skyscraper division is employed: the first two stories form a base, with the second floor windowing unified by a frame. Third is transitional, then come six stories forming a shaft of the column (the classical Greek column consisting of a base, a shaft and a capitol is easily discernible in lots of early NY skyscrapers), then a columnar loggia (a roofed open gallery overlooking the court, very appropriate in Tuscany, for instance), then a balcony, and finally, a tower.


What brought this Islamic/Venetian fantasy, this 1893 sliver in the middle of "shapeless and ill-looking lots .around which were reared a miserable lot of shanties," per Valentine's manual of 1957? Actually, at the time of the present building's construction there were modest three- and four-story structures surrounding a burgeoning park and residential area, with a major shopping area on the Ladies' Mile, just a block westward.


Well, this was a piano industry area - consider the Steinway building on 14th Street - and a bit of flash was expected to help the Decker piano people acquire the class that goes with fortune. In 1869 they hired Leopold Eidlitz, who was finishing St George's Church on Rutherford Place, to construct a jewel of a four-story showroom for their wares. In 1893 this was razed, to construct the present Moorish miracle.


The architect of record was Alfred Zucker, whose work we discussed in conjunction with the Madison Square Park Historic District. The actual doer was a notable architect and a man of some mystery, John H. Edelman, an anarchist who had come to the city after drifting back and forth between his native Cleveland, Chicago and Kearney, N.J. In Chicago he was a major influence in the growth of Louis H. Sullivan, the great pioneer of American architecture who sometimes worked for Edelman. Their interaction, with the aid of ideas from the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris formed what has been recognized as an outstanding style, best exemplified by the Decker Building. Edelman's presence at the birth of the present #33 has been recognized only since the 1960s by inquisitive historians, although the difference in styles between this and other imaginative Zucker buildings has been a long-time puzzlement.


Now to the interesting decorative elements. The center fifth-floor windows are framed by an Arabic horseshoe arch. The intrados (interior curve of the arch) has a contiguous band of similar small arches. An alfiz, rectangular molding framing a horseshoe arch, unites the fourth and the fifth floor window elements. Another horseshoe arch surmounts the 11th floor center windows. Cast-iron ogee arches (bell-shaped but pointed) frame the second-story windows. Terra-cotta ornaments, sunflowers, filigrees and arabesques abound. There was once a domed minaret atop the tower, which disappeared long ago. It was rumored that the owners had promised to restore it, but let's not hold our breaths.


To cap it all, this building's sixth floor after 1968 housed the Factory, Andy Warhol's studio and offices. It was renovated into condominiums in the 1990s.


More in weeks to come . Wally Dobelis thanks the NYS Office of Parks, Restoration and Historic Preservation, Anthony Robins, Christopher Gray, and Jack Taylor

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

There is a trip each registered voter of T&V Country must face every four years, that of taking the express Lexington Ave train from Union Square for one stop, to Brooklyn Bridge, where the juror rooms at the NYS Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street or 111 Centre Street and the US Court at 40 Centre Street are waiting, for a one-week (actually as little as three days) citizenly service of judging your fellow New Yorkers, accused of various transgressions. You must assume them to be innocent, and the accusers must present evidence to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Just like on Law & Order.

When summonsed, you can get the first deferment of up to six months by phone, and two more by appearing in person, with documentation. The law is reasonable, but a forever excuse is hard to come by, none of the great men or women of our times are exempt. On the last previous occasion, five years ago, while serving at the Civil Court, 60 Centre, I saw the jury-room judge excuse William Bratton, the former Commissioner of Police, who had received an emergency call. This upset the juror sitting in the box next to me no end. He turned out to be Joseph Lelyweld, then the executive editor of the New York Times, who diligently served through several jury calls and "voir dires," the screening processes. We were both challenged (eliminated) once, but at the next call I left him patiently sitting in the jury box, while I was excused, because of potential of prejudice against the medication on trial. Eventually I was mustered out, on the fourth day.

This time, at the Criminal Court, 111 Centre, my jury room mates included a Vassar junior, who played computer poker while waiting (Internet connections cost $9 a day), and turned out to be a professional weekend dealer in a downtown club. His favorite game was Omaha hold-'em, a variant of Texas hold-'em, the world championship game. Hi-lo advantages and the techniques of card counter teams were dissected at our table at length. The other participants were a nutritionist and two advertising people, a woman who builds individualized restaurant lists for major downtown hotels, and a man who spoke authoritatively on billboards as the most effective medium (you get captive audiences who cannot tune you out, don't you know) and the relative dangers of flashing advertising sign boards at street crossings (we have some, on 14th Street). Jury duty can be quite instructive.

Lunch hors for jurors in waiting are generous, leaving room for explorations in Chinatown. From 111, crossing Centre Street and walking east on the Bernard Kerik passage (between two jails, honoring the Commissioner of Correction), you get to Baxter Street. There's Jaya Malaysian, at #80, has lemon grass satay, beef or chicken, curry, noodle, , clam and tilapa dishes, and frogs with pepper as a house specialty. Or you can duck into Forloni's, at #93, the esteemed Italian restaurant, where suit-clad lawyers and judges eat. Thai Son, authentic Vietnamese cuisine at #89, offers green mussels , fried frogs' legs in special French butter or lemon grass sauce, chicken with curry, and caramel fish or pork with coconut milk.

The latter can be also bought from street stands, the hard skin peeled, the meat shaped and wrapped in plastic, fresh from Thailand, $1.50. On Canal Street, a block North, lichee nuts are $10 for 4 lbs. There, at Sun Say Kai restaurant (220 Canal, no English menu) barbequed pork is $5 /lb, and ducks weigh in at $13 each. Next door, pungent odors of fish of unknown varieties assail your senses, giving rise to doubts about the sanitary aspects of the laid-out wares, although the stone crabs crawling around on their platters, $2 apiece, seem to attest to their freshness. At Kam Man Products (200 Canal) are aisles of packaged foods, nuts, noodles and more. The artfulness of the Chinese craftsmen extends to all sphered - downstairs they have beautiful Japanese lantern night-lights, square black frames with mullions, Bamboo leaves and script painted on the parchment-covered sides - duplicated in China!

For those jurors who opt for some more Occidental fare, Little Italy is only two blocks away. One crosses Canal and walks on Mott Street to Grand, where pasta abounds, or continues to Broome and Mulberry, the home of Umberto's Clam House, of linguini and clam sauce fame ($17) and some interesting history from the Gallo family wars. Or continues back on Mulberry, where our Sal Anthony's other venue, S.P.Q.R., will greet you with a prix fixed lunch at $13.50 and Dean Martin singing That's Amore. You don't even have to offer your Irving Place credentials.

Now you want to know about the cases. I had one jury call, and was excused , after three days. Discussing the wasteful methodology with the jury clerk, one finds out that the call-in systems used in some boroughs and on Long Island were tried in Manhattan, and turned out to be counterproductive - Manhattanites just use the calls to generate excuses, making the filling of the jury box impossible. As is, allegedly 1000 summonses are needed to bring in 200 jurors. A helpful method is to bring in five-day jurors on Mondays and Wednesdays. The new arrivals will be called first on Wednesday, to fill courtroom requests. If that group is large enough to fill the expected demand, Monday people will be discharged then and there, after three days. The courtroom administration knows that if a Monday juror is not on a jury by Wednesday, he/she will use excuses to avoid being chosen even for an average case of five days that will drag into next week. Screening them out is costs al lot of courtroom time. A fair court system is an expensive privilege, and we will not have it any other way.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

The local Community Board is one of the two activities on the ground-floor level of participatory government that allow the citizen to get involved, hands-on, and let his or her opinion count Membership in the local political club of one’s choice is the other ground-floor level activity of active, participatory, continuous and institutionalized democracy, as distinguished from grass-roots movements and protests, which are spontaneous, issue-oriented and mostly of limited duration.

This column will try an experiment in covering the hearings and agendas of our local Community Boards 5 and 6, using the minutes of the monthly full-board meetings (available only a after the next monthly meeting has approved them) and the announcements of future committee meeting topics. This is an area totally neglected by the daily newspapers, for various reasons (to be discussed at a later date) and is particularly suited for coverage by neighborhood media.

There are 59 such boards in NYC, with a maximum of 50 members each, appointed by the Borough President, 50% of them following recommendations of City Council members .The citizen can either apply for membership, granted on basis of political, environmental activity or other qualifications, or request the designation and attend committee meetings as a “public member,” or just attend the meetings of one’s choice and testify on the items under consideration. The summary below will give you the flavor of the activities Future articles will have more details and some historic stuff of the CB phenomenon..

Today let’s look in on CB5, which had its monthly get-together on April 4, attended by practically all of its 43 members, plus representatives of Borough President C. Virginia Fields State Senator Liz Krueger Assembly member Richard Gottfried and City Councilmember Christina Quinn. The first part of a full board meeting gives members of the public an opportunity to make statements on local subjects. The bulk of the meeting involves reports from thew various sanding committees that have had their own hearings during the month. The bulk of CB work is done on the committee level. Committee recommendations and resolutions are normally approved by the whole board, practically unanimously, and the resolutions refuiring further action by various city government organizations are passed through.

CB 5 in this 3 ¼ hour meeting dealt with a variety of topics. The Public Session saw a dozen community members speak against a Department of City Planning ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Process) proposal to change the zoning of 5 ½ bocks of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District (17th to 22nd Streets, 5th to 6th Aves) from M1 (Manufacturing) to C6 (Commercial), to accommodate “ as of right” residential development. Later in the meeting the Land Use and Zoning Committees, jointly, did not approve the city planners’ resolution, unless rezoned area includes specific provisions for affordable housing, requires sufficient off-street parking and excludes new bars and night clubs. The full CB agreed with the committees, as it did in all recommendations detailed below. .

The same committees also asked the NYC Department of Buildings to reverse a ruling that allows 49% of space in transient hotels to be used for long-term occupancy

A major function of both CB5 and 6 is granting permits for street fairs, block parties and park use Any number of religious, ethnic and fraternal, as well as commercial functions like to use the above activities for their commemorative, fund raising and advertising activities. If all were permitted, the streets in Manhattan would have no room for weekend traffic, and we would be overrun by vendors. The criteria for denials by the CB committee members center on lack of tolerance for minorities, gender discrimination, lack of cleanup after the festivities, and event organizers’ non-attendance at committee hearings, where the groups are supposed to present their cases. Thus, Consents and Variances Committee and Parks Committee denied various requests from Chelsea Chamber of Commerce and some Catholic, Indian and Pakistani groups for fairs involving street closings and Union Square and Madison Square park use, in one case urging the group to see an alternate venue.. An Oxygen Media concert, a wine tasting sponsored by The New Yorker and a Chiclets promotion in both parks bit the dust, while a Marina Maher commercial women’s health event and a Carvel Ice Cream feast were approved. .The customary New York is a Book Country on Oct 3 passed with flying colors, as did a Berkeley College block party.

Request for modifications to landmarked buildings are reviewed by the Landmarks Committee, which approved proposed changes to 42-48 East 20th Street and denied the legitimization of illegal changes in another, on West 18 Street.

Sidewalk cafes are another major item. The 12 CCKO tables at 25 Union Square West and another for Zana Inc at 30 East 30th were approved. Proposed curbside telephone booths, new and improved, were investigated, and 12 of 20 denied.

Madison Square Park has a food kiosk, which had requested a beer and wine license. It was recommended by the joint Public Safety and, Quality of Life and Parks committees and approved by a split vote.

The next full board meeting is scheduled for June 10, 6:30 PM, at F.I.T., Building A, 8th Floor, 227West 27th Street. After the meeting approves the may meeting minutes, they will become available to this column for summarizing.