Ghosts

Pioneering photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine visited Gowanus a century back, as part of a landmark project documenting the ills of child labor.

Lewis Hine, February 1912  (Library of Congress)

8 P.M. Farrell family, 151 Eleventh St., Brooklyn. (See schedule.) They had temporarily discontinued the brush making, but sent to a neighbor for materials and posed for me, just as they had been doing it. The little five year old on the right is very deft. Her eyes seemed to be troubling her. Boy on left is a neighbor who makes them too. The father complained of the little money there is in the work. 







151 can be seen above, at center, with a corrugated silver facade.  Did the Farrell apartment have a front window? Did the children stand by it and gaze down onto the street? 151, a frame house, was built at some point in the 1880s.  The much smaller 147, two doors down, is older, dating back at least to the seventies.  It's the oldest wooden house on the north side of the block, though across the street there's a row of attached frame rowhouses that are also pre-1880.  In poor condition, fire-damaged, and apparently in contract, 147 looks likely to be gone shortly.

Lewis Hine, February, 1912 (Library of Congress)

Brush-making late at night. Photo taken at 9:00 P.M., and they work later. Girls are 12 and 14 years old and go to school working in the morning before school and at night after studying is finished. Mother said, "It is better for children to learn something useful to do." The three average one dozen brushes a day. (30 cents.) One of the girls said she would rather work then [i.e., than?] study. Shultz family, 476 Third Ave., Brooklyn. 

Most of the older maps of this area indicate 476 as a brick building right on the north-west corner of Third and 10th. Today the F & G trains rumble over the spot where the Shultzes toiled at their brush-work.

Links

2011

De Blasio Moves to Bring Safe Injection Sites to New York City (Daily News)
If the plan proceeds, sites would open as a one-year pilot program in up to four locations — Gowanus in Brooklyn, Midtown West and Washington Heights in Manhattan, and Longwood in the Bronx. There are currently needle exchanges at each proposed site. The injection facilities would be run by the nonprofit Research for a Safer New York, and would not get city money.

Cash Cash or Lights Out (Walkers in the City)
In her book, she (Viv Albertine) talks a lot about her mother, who was born in 1919, and about the ladies of her mother’s age and the limitations they had to live with even as smart people who wanted to live life to the brim. She wrote about how after her mother divorced her father, just not having to do all his laundry and cook for him felt like tremendous luxuries to her. And how, when Viv was a kid, her mother would take her and her sister to the seaside for a whole day and let them do everything they wanted with all the money she’d saved for it, and then tell them that they’d had so much fun that they’d actually managed to cram a whole two-week vacation into that day, and she was so convincing that they believed her. Reading that, I thought, yes, that way of thinking is really the secret, isn’t it.

Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 (NY Times)
Like the starlight that travels millions of years before we see it, the four little boys stand in their underpants at Coney Island on an August day in 1978, and it is only now, in a found photograph, that we behold them.  The ocean has not quite left their hair. Four decades later, they are still flexing their muscles, still just about 10-going-on-11.
... Until now, none of these images have ever been displayed or published. A selection of them are here and in a special print section. More will be on view from May 3 through June 14 at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, 830 Fifth Avenue, near 64th Street.

Can Cities Make Us Better Citizens? (New Yorker)
Sennett likes “grim.” He also likes “difficulty,” “complexity,” and “friction.” His critique of the effect of digital devices on the city, apart from the fact that they are “individualizing machines,” is that apps like Google Maps make the city too user-friendly, too “friction-free.” If you think that the role of a designer, whether of software or of city streets, is to make those things easier to use, Sennett would disagree. He sees “encounters with resistance” as crucial to learning any craft, even the craft of dwelling. Getting lost is how we learn.

100 Years Ago: France in the Final Year of World War I (The Atlantic)
The American photographer Lewis Hine is perhaps most famous for his compelling images of child labor across the United States in the early 20th century. In 1918, Hine was hired by the American Red Cross to document their work in Europe, as they provided aid to wounded soldiers and refugees affected by World War I. The photographs were also intended to drum up support for the Red Cross, and appeal to an American audience back home who had grown weary of the war, even as it crawled toward a close. Hine traveled across France, photographing refugee families, orphaned children, wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, the nurses and volunteers who cared for them all, the ruined buildings they fled, and the temporary homes they filled.

This Film Series Undercuts the Macho Mythology of Seventies Moviemaking in America (Village Voice)
Men like Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader are constantly credited with defining a generation of rebellious auteurs who broke free of the studio system to revitalize cinema in Seventies America. But BAM (the programmer is Jesse Trussell) is countering this narrative, bringing into focus the era’s sidelined female trailblazers through 42 of their titles. Their work stands against the brand of macho bravado in which such New Hollywood classics as Easy Rider reveled — and is all the more subversive for it. It’s fascinating, too, to discover their influence on much-beloved scenes of the future, whether it’s the fake-orgasms banter of 1977’s First Love, predating the iconic comic fodder of When Harry Met Sally, or the struggling artist–meets–awkward moments shtick that Girlfriends nailed way before the likes of Girls and Frances Ha.

Olivia Laing: 'There's no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature' (Guardian)
I can’t remember now how Jarman entered our world. A late-night TV screening of Edward II? Kitty was immediately obsessed. She’d watch and rewatch his films in her room, his most unlikely and fervent fan, bewitched in particular by the scene of Gaveston and Edward dancing together in their prison, two boys in pyjamas moving to the sound of Annie Lennox singing “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”.
It was the books that did it for me. Returning to Modern Nature recently I was astounded to see how thoroughly my adult life was founded in its pages. It was here I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely).

Charles Chusseau-Flaviens, Photographer (Spitalfields Life)
Photographer Charles Chusseau-Flaviens came to London from Paris and took these pictures, reproduced courtesy of George Eastman House, before the First World War – mostly likely in 1911. This date is suggested by his photograph of the proclamation of the coronation of George V which took place in that year. Very little is known of Chusseau-Flaviens except he founded one of the world’s first picture agencies, located at 46 Rue Bayen,  and he operated through the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century. Although their origin is an enigma, Chusseau-Flaviens’ photographs of London and especially of Petticoat Lane constitute a rare and surprisingly intimate vision of a lost world.

New Order

2015

488 Third Avenue is back. It was listed for $2,900,000 last summer, and was taken off the market at the end of the year. Now Corcoran is handling the sale, and it's priced at $2,450,000. Last year it was described as being built in 1901, but now it apparently it's lost an additional thirty years. In fact, 488 was built prior to 1880. A NY Times article from 1879 mentions the arrest of its owner, one Mary Everett (along with several male guests), for keeping a "disorderly house." Lewis Hine was round this way a century ago, visiting homes and documenting the conditions of working children. He didn't visit 488 as far as we know, but he would have walked right by it.

Today Gowanus is "often referred to as 'G Slope' " (who knew?) & 488 is all stainless steel appliances, marble countertops, deep soaking tubs & custom cabinets.  The oven even has an extendable spigot!  And there's more:

The bricked backyard area features room for yoga, a grill, a table for al fresco dining, or even an urban herb garden. This 3,000 sq. ft. townhome was built in 1931 and is around the corner from the F and G 4th Ave. stop and a few blocks away from the 9th St. R stop with Fairway, Ikea, and Lowe's nearby ... With the recent condo projects across the street and around the corner, savvy buyers can get this three family property for the same price as a penthouse in one of the newer developments AND make money to pay for a mortgage making this townhome a must see for anyone looking to call a prime property in Brooklyn home!

488 was sold to Third Contractors 488 LLC in 2013 for $279,000, and it was sold again two years later for $900,000, to Park Slope 488 LLC.

2015

Earlier:
70's Third
A Makeover (of Sorts)

Chronicling America

It's the smallest houses that draw my attention. 147 11th went on the market in May of last year, for $2,250,000, and with a switch in realtor, it slid down in price to $899,000.  An In Contract sign was up outside the house for months, and was still there a few days ago. An online realty site lists the fire-damaged property as having sold earlier this month for $999,000, though there's no ACRIS record on file as yet.  The building has had a Full Vacate in place for over a year, though I've noticed lights on inside.  Passing by the house today, I saw a new sign. Looks like it's ready for a flip.

Lewis Hine was just up the block from 147 in 1912, visiting a family of brush makers at 151, but what forgotten moments in the history of 147 are on record?  In 1888, 19 year-old resident Joseph Besosa wins a full scholarship to Cornell , & a few years later, a W.Kane at the same address is recruiting for a children's baseball team. In 1905, a Miss May Cray appears, in a Chronicling America ad, endorsing Peruna, a 18% grain alcohol tonic.

Miss May Cray, 147 11th Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., writes:
For more than five years I suffered from rheumatic pain in my joints, and in damp or stormy weather I was obliged to stay indoors. 
Medicine seemed to be of no use until I started using Peruna. I took twelve bottles in all, although it is six months ago since I stopped. 
I have had no return of my old complaint, in spite of the fact that I have been out in all kinds of weather during the severe winter.

And what a delight, there's Miss Cray herself, surrounded by her fair companions.  Watch her for a second, before she fades quietly back from view.

The Barge Canal

The New York State Barge Canal was built as an improvement to the Erie, Champlain, Ontario, Cayuga and Seneca canals. Authorized in 1903, it was completed in 1918.  By the 1980s commercial shipping on the canal had declined, the result of the increased use of pipeline, rail, and bulk truck-carrying facilities. Today the group of canals is known as the New York State Canal System, and is used mostly for recreational boating.  It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2017.

There's a local connection here. The Gowanus Bay Terminal, of which the giant Grain Elevator Terminal, still standing today, was a part, was built to serve the needs of the State Barge Canal system by reviving grain & other freight traffic lost to the railroad system.  It was completed in 1922, and almost immediately proved to be a costly failure.

Library of Congress - date & photographer unknown


Pioneering photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine recorded the living conditions of immigrant laborers working on the Barge Canal.  The photographs below (NYPL Digital Collections) were taken in 1910 and 1912.

In the Heart of Prime

147 in better days

Every so often I check back in on the fate of 147 11th Street, the little pitched-roof frame house, set below street level and almost at the end of its days.  It sold last fall for just under a million, after a long time on the market, and after the sale it was promptly put back up for sale.  No takers, and it's still listed.  The building is fire-damaged, with a full vacate in place due to structural instability. There's also an SWO for work done without a permit.  The demolition plans were on record late last year, but no new building applications have been filed. 147, its buckling roof a bed of weeds, is irredeemable by this point, I'd imagine.

Construction plans or not, a future (manufacturing) building's up for rent at 147.  It all sounds a little over-optimistic.

Brand new construction to commence Summer 2016.
Will build to suit. 
Up to 7,500 square feet available.
5,000 Square foot building with a 2,500 square foot legal basement with 9' ceilings and separate entrance

Located in the heart of prime of Gowanus bordering Park Slope. 
Across the street from Ennis Playground

As I mentioned in an earlier post,  Lewis Hine walked the block a century ago, as he documented cases of child workers. and a Miss May Cray, a resident of 147, featured in a 1905 Chronicling America ad. for Peruna 18% grain alcohol tonic.  She's pictured right here. 

These houses, and their histories are disappearing fast.