North Brother Island lies in the East River, between The Bronx and Queens, just west of Rikers Island and directly under the flight path of departing jets from LaGuardia. It was once the site of Riverside Hospital, a tuberculosis facility later converted to GI housing after WWII. Previously, it was home to the infamous “Typhoid” Mary Mallon during her years of quarantine. Throughout the 1950s, the city operated a drug rehab center for adolescents there, but the hospital closed in 1963, and North Brother was abandoned. Nature slowly reclaimed the island.

Today North Brother Island is a protected heron habitat, owned by the Department of Parks and Recreation. Access to the island is extremely limited due to the sensitivity of the bird-breeding habitat.

In the past, a number of colonial water bird species nested on North Brother Island, including Black-crowned Night Herons, Glossy Ibis, and Great Egrets. Over the last several years, however, the bird population on North Brother Island has declined.

To keep track of colonial water bird populations in the city, the New York City Audubon Society conducts a yearly survey of seventeen islands within New York Harbor, including North Brother Island. This May, The City Concealed joined Dr. Susan Elbin and research associate Liz Craig on their survey to find out whether the herons are back on North Brother Island or nesting elsewhere.

For more about the history of North Brother Island, check out Opacity’s overview (which features some really nice historic images). Also see northbrotherislan.blogspot.com, Forgotten-NY, and bridgeandtunnelclub.

And for a behind-the-scenes glimpse of our experience shooting on the rugged island, read this post.

– Daniel Ross, Producer

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without much help from Dr. Susan Elbin, Elizabeth Craig, New York City Audubon, the David Rumsey Map Collection, and the The New York Public Library. Thank you to all.

Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was New York City’s primary landfill from 1948 to 2001. Thousands of tons of daily garbage composed the largest man-made structure on Earth.

In 2001 the landfill was finally closed, with a brief reopening to accommodate the World Trade Center wreckage.

Since then it’s been the site of Freshkills Park, a 30-year project to cover and slowly open parts of the former landfill.

While the trash of New York City ships to other states, the park’s decomposing refuse mounds generate methane gas that National Grid sells back to the island’s inhabitants.

Putting this piece together, I often found myself trying to describe the United Palace Theater to people who had never seen it. “It’s sort of Neo-Classical Cambodian, with influences of Hindu, Mayan, and Moorish architecture. Gilded and covered in red velvet.” I sounded ridiculous, but my description isn’t that far off the mark.

The United Palace is a fantasy, an architect’s dream of excess, embellishment, and more and more gold paint: a Greek goddess presides over a hall lined with meditating Buddhas, Indian ascetics share the wall with fat Renaissance cherubs. Nothing really makes sense here, but it all comes together completely, courtesy of Thomas W. Lamb.

Lamb was the preeminent theater architect for the first half of the 20th century. And while I’m no expert on his work, in researching this story I was fascinated by the way his buildings developed over time. In the 1910s when theaters were devoted to vaudeville and in need of legitimacy, Lamb designed buildings that were respectable Greek temples. In the first part of 1920s, art deco predominates. But I think it’s in the second half of the 1920s that Lamb comes into his own. Hollywood is entering its Golden Age and is proving to the world that any dream can be manufactured for the screen. Lamb’s challenge is to design theaters grand enough to contain those dreams, and he needs to borrow from every conceivable architectural style in order to do so. Historians call it the “Movie Palace Era,” and really these are palaces that Lamb is designing, buildings dedicated to the glamor of Hollywood and the prosperity of America right before the Great Depression.

But the United Palace was the last of Lamb’s movie palaces. Once the Depression set in, Neo-Classical Cambodian theaters were no longer practical. Part of me wonders what Lamb would have come up with had he been able to continue designing theaters unencumbered by the harsh economic reality of the 1930s. But maybe its the brevity of the Movie Palace Era that makes buildings like the United Palace so special.

Still, going uptown to shoot this piece, I learned that the United Palace is not an artifact from some other time. It’s very much a living, breathing community center that evolves as Washington Heights evolves. Go there. Take the A train to 175th street. You’ll see a past and a present coming together in a way that happens less and less in today’s New York City.

– Josh Cohen, Producer

The Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville are the discovered remnants of a free African-American enclave of urban trasdespeople and property owners.  The community provided safety for fugitive slaves and those later fleeing the Civil War draft riots of lower Manhattan.  By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, Weeksville was a thriving area with its own doctors, teachers, publishers, and social services.

The Houses help fill a  historical gap between slavery and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  The Weeksville staff clearly promote the idea of a successful African-American project that can be remembered with pride.

The discussion of Weeksville’s place within an always changing, mostly African-American neighborhood might  forget the fact that it is, for everyone, a fascinating piece of American history with an equally amazing story of that history’s rediscovery.

–bijan rezvani, producer

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Danielle Officer at Weeksville, Pamela Green, Kadrena Cunningham, Marcia Goldman, the David Rumsey Map Collection, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Christian Virant and Zhang Jian of The Buddha Machine.

Students of New York’s literary history ought to be familiar with our latest location, the Fulton Ferry Hotel, at 92 and 93 South Street on Schermerhorn Row. Joseph Mitchell, author and chronicler of the five boroughs’ extraordinary ordinary citizens, immortalized the building in his 1952 New Yorker story, “The Cave,” later titled, “Up in the Old Hotel.”

If you haven’t read the story I won’t spoil it for you. All you need to know is that Joseph Mitchell, a habitué and student of the Fulton Fish Market, was eating at Sloppy Louie’s restaurant on the ground floor of the old hotel, when Louis Marino, the owner, mentioned the abandoned floors of the building. The ever-curious Mitchell offered to venture upstairs with Marino to see what was there.

Fast forward to the 1980s, thirty years after Mitchell’s and Marino’s visit. The South Street Seaport Museum by then occupied Schermerhorn Row. One day, the museum bookstore manager, Jack Putnam, discovered a doorway that lead to the forgotten floors of the old Fulton Ferry Hotel. There, Mr. Putnam found the spaces in much the same condition they were in when Mitchell and Marino explored them all those years ago.

Now Jack Putnam is the South Street Seaport Museum’s historian. Occasionally he leads tours of the upper floors of the old hotel, but visitors are rare. The artifacts that remain – century-old wallpaper, delicate plaster, and rickety wooden planks – are too fragile to allow frequent foot traffic.

A few weeks ago, on a bitter January day, Mr. Putnam invited us on a tour of the old hotel, which the South Street Seaport Museum allowed us to film.

As a fan of Joseph Mitchell’s work, the visit was made especially moving when Mr. Putnam recounted how he invited the aging writer back to the old hotel for a final visit, shortly before Mitchell passed away.

View a gallery of odds and ends Joseph Mitchell collected from the Fulton Fish Market

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–Daniel Ross, Producer

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without much help from Jack Putnam, Christine Modica, the South Street Seaport Museum, Nora Sanborn, Shane Kelly, the David Rumsey Map Collection, and the Library of Congress. Hat tip to Saul Austerlitz of The New York Times, whose lovely July 2008 piece about the old hotel introduced me to Jack Putnam. And of course, thank you, Joseph Mitchell, for preserving in your writing a New York that has become, as Rem Koolhaas once wrote, “a city replaced by another city.”

Brooklyn Navy Yard is one of NYC’s largest pieces of intact — though decaying — history. Sprawling over nearly 300 acres, it has both current industrial tenants, and plans are in the works for adaptive reuse projects for some of the buildings. It’s living history, dotted by pockets of contemporary industry.

For this video, we looked for someone who could tell us about the Yard from the perspective of an employee during it’s heyday (or one of them, at least), and came upon Rubena Ross. An employee of the Yard around the time of the second World War, Mrs. Ross toiled in the flag loft for years, earning a comfortable salary that allowed her to purchase not one but two brownstones in Prospect Heights. By pure coincidence, one of those homes, which she had recently sold, is the subject of the 2009 season of PBS’ This Old House.

Of the many beautiful buildings you’ll see in this piece, my favorite had to be the Laboratory Building. A massive structure, it has a top floor containing an amazing greenhouse-like space with a vaulted glass ceiling. Only recently, in Nov. 2008, did the Navy Yard start opening up the medical campus and other parts of the yard to public tours (brochure pdf) — they’re highly recommended.

-Tom Vigliotta, Producer

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without much help from Daniella Romano, Sara Fitzpatrick, and Andrew Kimball of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Janet and Rubena Ross, Ian Ference, Monark, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the David Rumsey Map Collection, and the National Archives. Thanks to Steve Hindy, president and co-founder of the Brooklyn Brewery, for originally sending me in the direction of the Yard.

For this installment of The City Concealed, I ventured to the southern tip of Staten Island, near the ruins of the old Raritan Bay clamming industry. There, a lifelong Staten Islander, Doug Schwartz, has been creating rock sculptures on the beaches of Mount Loretto State Park for over a decade.

I first heard about Doug and his work via Forgotten NY in the fall of 2007. One Saturday I decided to take a trip out there to see it for myself. After a two-hour journey — by subway, ferry, Staten Island Railway, and bus — I reached the site. The scale of Doug’s sculptures blew me away. They extended nearly a half-mile down the beach, and where they were most dense, thousands of rocks were stacked in intricate towers and mounds, like the ruins of an ancient temple.

Doug’s rock project had made brief blips in local newspapers (when Doug first began, The Staten Island Advance published an article about his rocks titled, ”Sophomoric Prank or Cult Activity?”) and The New York Times, but I wanted to sit down with Doug to pick his brain about his decade-long devotion to piling rocks on a lonely beach, and then film him doing it. Tracking him down wasn’t hard. It turned out Doug isn’t a stranger to media attention. In fact, every February, he’s in the news: he’s the zookeeper at the Staten Island Zoo responsible for Staten Island Chuck, the famous groundhog. I phoned him at the zoo and we arranged to meet.

A couple of weeks later, early one Saturday morning, Doug and I made a trip to his beach. Instead of explaining to me why he toils week in and week out, year after year, Doug simply asked me to help him build a sculpture. It was a foggy morning, and the ships out on Raritan Bay occasionally sounded their horns. The waves broke gently against the rocks, and the gulls called from their perches in the cliffs above the shore. An hour passed, and eventually the stack of rocks we had erected took shape. Doug wedged a handful of broken branches into it, and the sculpture began to resemble a tentacled scarecrow (similar to the sculpture you see Doug create in the video above). Right then I realized exactly why Doug has been doing this so long. I was on a deserted beach, breathing salty air, nearly a mile away from paved roads, and still within city limits. Despite the heavy lifting and the early hours, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more relaxed anywhere in New York City.

–Daniel Ross, Producer

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Green-Wood Cemetery is best known as the final resting place of famous New Yorkers like Boss Tweed, the Steinway family, and Leonard Bernstein, but it’s also a treasure trove of hidden sculpture and architecture.

Established in 1838, Green-Wood Cemetery became a destination for American and European tourists. Every year, thousands flocked to the cemetery to enjoy its lush gardens, rolling hills, and stately tombs. Unfortunately, during New York City’s financial woes of the late sixties and early seventies, the cemetery restricted public access and lost its reputation as an urban oasis of art and nature.

Over the last decade, however, the cemetery has made efforts to invite the public back inside, hosting concerts, film screenings, and tours. Still, access to the most fascinating sites — inside the tombs and catacombs — remains extremely limited. That’s why we called Jeff Richman, Green-Wood Cemetery’s historian, who wields the massive, dungeon-like key ring that unlocks the granite portals behind which lie the dead.

We’d like to thank everyone who helped make this video possible, including Jeff Richman, Green-Wood Cemetery, David Rumsey Map Collection, and Christian Virant and Zhang Jian of The Buddha Machine.

Green-Wood Cemetery

Until the early part of the 1800s, all cemeteries in the western world were ordered, compact churchyard burial grounds. But a movement came about in the early 19th century — the creation of the ‘rural cemetery’. These were to be grounds for contemplation, literally: rambling, park-like, pastoral, social environments meant as much for recreation by the living as much as interment of the dead. The first rural cemetery in the U.S., inspired by Pere Lachaise in Paris, was Mount Auburn, 4 miles from Boston, built by 1830. Laurel Hill, a smaller cemetery in Philadelphia, followed in 1836.

Though conceived by Henry E. Pierrepont, Major Douglass lobbied for the funding for Brooklyn’s Green-Wood plans by declaring that a city of over 300,000 should have a lovely pastoral cemetery. They then purchased the land with Douglass laying out the grounds. It was to be Douglass’ most successful project, and certainly the only one he worked on fully, from inception to completion.

Douglass later designed other, smaller cemeteries based on the same design concept in the U.S. and Canada. And famously, Green-Wood was the inspiration for the rambling, pastoral Central Park with its famous ring road. But his impact in the New York City region extended far beyond the Cemetery, as he had participated in a large number of civic projects throughout the area before he’d started working on Green-Wood.

Douglass’ New York City Area Engineering and Surveying Projects

The Croton Aqueduct, NY
Chief Engineer, 1833-36
Major Douglass was hired as the original engineer for this massive-scale civic improvement project. Since the 1820s, proposals had been batted around to provide New York City with a reliable, clean source of drinking water (and put out frequent fires). Douglass was brought on board and planned the entire route for the project, from the Dam of the Croton River all the way down to the High Bridge crossing the Harlem River into Manhattan. Douglass also planned the original design for the masonry and iron aqueduct, but partway through the project was removed by the Aqueduct’s backers, due to the fact they thought he was moving too slowly.

He was replaced by John B. Jervis, the engineer of the Erie Canal, who designed the remaining aqueduct arches that dot the Westchester area, and supervised the construction of the actual aqueduct. Jervis had the unenviable position of taking over an already highly politically-charged project and seeing it to completion–an entire book has been written basically about the politics and history in the construction of the Croton Aqueduct.

Brooklyn Retaining Wall and Proposed Canal, NY
Surveyor/Engineer, 1830s/40s
Douglass surveyed Brooklyn’s water flows during the 1830s (image below), and proposed a canal similar to Gowanus, though longer and straighter. He also planned and engineered the Brooklyn Heights Retaining Wall, possibly in conjunction with the financial might of Henry E. Pierrepont, with whom he collaborated on Green-Wood Cemetery. The retaining wall later became the Brooklyn Promenade.

Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad
Planner/Surveyor, 1832-34
Major Douglass laid out the route for the first railroad on Long Island, the B&J, which ran between (naturally) Brooklyn and Jamaica.

Morris Canal, NJ
Chief Engineer of the Inclined Planes, 1829-32

The Morris Canal is considered one of the most prominent engineering marvels of the 1800s, traversing New Jersey from the Hudson to The Delaware River. Douglass’ innovation for canal architecture at the time was the creation of a number of inclined planes which made the route possible, which pulled barges up hills that would have been otherwise unnavigable. They used the power of the water flowing through mills in order to provide the power to move the barges.

The impact of the Canal? It connected New York City and the cities of the East Coast with the coal industry in Pennsylvania and the iron industry deeper into New Jersey, spurring development in the 1800s. The Morris Canal has a cumulative rise and fall of 1,674 feet, the largest vertical change of any canal built, in 23 inclined planes and 23 locks. It lost its usefulness as other methods of transport became available, and the Canal was dismantled in the 1920s.

Other Biography
For all of Major Douglass’ projects, only a few are mentioned here. A good biography of Douglass his works, and other anecdotes is found in Van Nostrand’s Eclectic Engineering Magazine.
A collection of Douglass’ papers is at the U. of Michigan; the collection and a biography are outlined here.

to the right: Major Douglass’ monument in Green-Wood Cemetery

You might catch a glimpse of Newtown Creek by traveling over one of its many bridges. But that glimpse doesn’t give you the scope of the creek’s importance to New York City’s development, or exactly why it has become a zone of contention in the NYC landscape.

The Creek is most-known for the well-publicized oil spill, to which it lends its name, that sits under a swath of Greenpoint, its neighbor to the south.

The creek runs a full 3.5 miles, bisecting Brooklyn and Queens. Most people barely know it exists. So what happens there, how did it become so overlooked, and was it always this way?

What we found was both beautiful and grotesque, heartening and depressing.

We contacted Captain John Doswell of the Working Harbor Committee, and he arranged for us to rent a boat and set us up with a Newtown Creek expert, Bernard Ente of the Newtown Creek Alliance, who was interviewed for the video. (John and Bernard give tours of the waterways around New York called the Hidden Harbor Tours.)

On a lovely August day, we set off from the east side of Manhattan, across the East River into the depths of a virtually-invisible part of New York City. Basil Saggos of Riverkeeper told Reuters:

“a boat trip up the creek is a journey into the heart of darkness, with the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline as a reminder of its real world locale.”

We’d like to thank everyone who helped out with making of this video, our maiden voyage, if you will. Mat Lynch first of all for the idea, and Carter Craft and the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance for helping with the boat, Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, David Rumsey Map Collection, Monark, and all of those above.