Waiting Flight

It's kind of an urban sketcher cliché to draw airplanes on the tarmac while waiting for your flight, but here it is. At LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY. 

Bartel-Pritchard Columns, Take 2

These two columns stand at the Western entrance to Prospect Park at Bartel-Pritchard Square in Brooklyn, NY. They are made of granite, with bronze tripods of bowls on top. Inspired by the 400 B.C. Acanthus Column of Delphi, the columns were one of the last designs of Stanford White, cast just before his infamous murder in 1906. The columns were dedicated in 1911. 

Bartel-Pritchard Square is actually a circle. Now a traffic circle, or roundabout as some call it, it was once a major trolley interchange. It was named for two local World War I war heroes, Emil Bartel and William Pritchard, who were killed in action in France in 1918.

I don't often revisit past subjects, but lately I have done so a few times.. Here's a drawing I did of this same site almost 10 and a half years ago! Back then, it was all in pencil, with no color.

Fuller Building - 57th Street

 

The Fuller Building is a 40-story building at the corner of Madison Ave. and 57th St. It was built in 1929 by the Fuller Construction Company, an early developer of steel-skeleton skyscrapers. It is actually the second "Fuller Building;" the first is better known as the Flatiron Building. At the time of this building's construction, the area was the center of the New York art world, and so the lower twelve floors were designed with very high ceilings specifically for art galleries.

Above the main entrance is a limestone sculpture of two idealized construction workers towering over the cityscape they've built. It is the work of Elie Nadelman. Born in Warsaw in 1882, Nadelman was classically trained in Munich. He immigrated to America at the onset of World War I, settling in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he remained until his death. He married a wealthy heiress named Viola Flannery in 1920. He became fascinated with American folk art, incorporating it into his own work, and the couple began to collect American and European folk art, eventually accumulating a collection so large that they founded the Nadelman Museum of Folk and Peasant Art.

Nadelman, ca 1915, with bronze "Man In The Open Air"

Elie and Viola Nadelman, ca. 1921

Unfortunately, after some initial years of success as an artist, his career went into decline, and after Viola's fortune was lost during the Great Depression, they were forced to sell their folk art collection to survive. In 1935, many of his artworks were destroyed by workmen remodeling his studio, and the remaining work was packed away and left to disintegrate. Nadelman fell further into isolation and depression, refusing to exhibit his work, and committed suicide in 1946. 

After his death, a huge trove of work was discovered. He'd spent his years of seclusion making hundreds of small plaster figurines of little girls. He received a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, and another at the Whitney Museum in 2003, and some of his work remains in the collections of the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and a few other collections. The bulk of his folk art collection is owned by the New York Historical Society, which toured the collection a few years ago.

Initial Pencil Sketch:

Ink Drawing:

First color stages:

References:

On the Fuller Building:

Ephemeral New York: Fuller Building-57th-street

The City Review

On Elie Nadelman:

Artnet.com : Elie Nadelman Biography

National Gallery of Art

Incollect.com: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman

New York Historical Society:The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman

2020-2021

Recently finished filling this sketchbook. The first drawing was done just days before New York City was locked down because of the Coronavirus Pandemic, and the last was done as it was starting to abate. During that year, there as the uprising over the murder of George Floyd - that's what that one drawing of Frederick Douglas you can glimpse pertains to - and that officer was found guilty a few days after I completed the book. There's also all my "Save Our Stages" drawings in there that were featured on USK Talks. Man, that was a hell of a year.

Gowanus Canal

 A tugboat moored in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY.

A local resident once complained to the Brooklyn Common Council that the raw sewage flowing into the Gowanus Canal had "injured the health of his wife" and "killed his father-in-law." A local alderman agreed with the complainant and said, "I wouldn't take this land as a present." The year was 1861, and it would only get worse.

The area was originally a series of tidal inlets. The Dutch colonized the area in 1636 and named the waterway "Gowanes Creek" after Gouwane, sachem of the local Lenape tribe. The Dutch began to harvest large oysters from the creeks, which became the first notable export to Europe from the area, and established a tobacco plantation.

By the mid-19th century, the City of Brooklyn (not yet incorporated into the City of New York) had become the third-largest city in the U.S. The Gowanus Creek became a repository for sewage run-off for other parts of Brooklyn, and the Industrial Revolution lead to the surrounding lands becoming home to a variety of industries, including stone and coal yards, cement works, slaughterhouses, tanneries, flour mills, machine shops, sulfur producers, and chemical plants, and became an important hub for maritime shipping.

The local government decided to transform the natural creeks into a straighter, deeper canal to accommodate commercial shipping needs. In 1869, the 1.8 mile (2.9 km) canal was completed, and the surrounding marshes filled in to provide increased land usage. Initial designs incorporated systems that would flush the entire waterway daily, but were deemed too expensive. Instead, the cheapest option was built, with no through-flow of water. As a result, the water became deoxygenated, unable to support life, and the continual dumping of coal, pesticides, chemical waste, and other industrial byproducts, as well as the continual flow of raw sewage into the canal, created a toxic sludge of "black mayonnaise" that settled to the bottom, at least 10' (3 m) deep. Plumes of coal tar penetrated up to 150' (46m) underground. It took on a reddish-purple color and emitted a terrible smell, and was contaminated with typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea. Ships would sail into the canal with the sole purpose of using the toxic waters to cleanse their hulls of barnacles.

Industry around the canal declined drastically during the 1960s with the advent of containerization and the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Verrazano Bridge, which promoted trucking over maritime shipping. But the century's worth of pollution and waste remained, and millions of gallons of raw sewage continued to flow into the canal.

As far back as 1890, efforts were made to address the situation, as the canal became the most polluted waterway in America. Time after time, these efforts failed, even after it was listed as a Superfund National Priority site by the EPA. Dredging continues to this day - I think this tug is part of the effort - but it seems impossible to fully remediate. It's somewhat better - it's no longer purple, but has a definite green sheen, and there's no life to be found, except for weird microscopic bacteria that have been discovered. A local organization, The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, leads canoe trips in the canal and advocates for environmental reform. A "sponge park" has been built, which is designed to filter some of the waste water that overflows into the canal. Meanwhile, real estate developers are trying to build big residential complexes around the canal. The hope is that people will pay premium prices to live in luxury waterfront condos, even if that water is completely toxic.

History at Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club

Brooklyn Eagle: The Gowanus Canal Will Never Be Clean

Gowanus Expressway Viaduct

Structural supports beneath the Gowanus Expressway. This section of elevated highway, built in the 1950s, cuts through, or rather over, Sunset Park and Gowanus Canal. I'm not sure how high it is, but the nearby Smith-9th St. elevated train station rises to 87.5 feet (26.7 m). That's about six stories tall! The height allowed for tall-mast ships on the Gowanus Canal. It's been a long time since any tall-mast ships went on the Gowanus Canal, but these two towering spans remain.

It was, of course, one of the pet projects of Robert Moses, who looooved to build highways cutting right through cities. More than 200 buildings were condemned to make way for it. In 1959, Lewis Mumford wrote in the New Yorker:

"At the very moment . . .  that we have torn down our elevated railways, because of their spoilage of urban space, our highway engineers are using vast sums of public money to restore the same nuisance in an even noisier and more insistent form. But what is Brooklyn to the highway engineer - except a place to go through rapidly, at whatever necessary sacrifice of peace and amenity by its inhabitants?"

The irony is that this whole highway is now known for constant gridlock, at all times of day and night. No one thinks of it as a way to get through Brooklyn rapidly.

It's also been deteriorating for decades from the constant traffic and harsh weather. There are various plans to renovate it, or replace it with a new span, or tear it down and dig a tunnel along its route. But each plan would cost billions of dollars, and necessitate taking a central traffic artery out of commission for years. In 1973, a dump truck fell through the elevated West Side Highway to the streets below. It'll probably take something similar to spur any action on the Gowanus Viaduct.

The initial pencil sketch . . .

Finished ink drawing, done with Pigma Micron pens . . .

Initial background color wash . . . 

University Club Skybridge

Another aspect of the University Club building on 54th Street, which I previously drew here. I'm not 100% certain, but I think that the section to the left was a later addition, connected by that skybridge at top. Maybe?

I forgot to take a picture of the initial pencil drawing. Here's the ink stage.

The initial lay-in of color.