When Did New York Become New York? The Apartment Building

I'm gonna try to do a series of posts about NY-in no particular order many of which will be illustrated with images I took. They are sort of meditations and not fully supported with links--however the general facts are mostly right.

Many, or most would say that New York was destined by history and geography to be a great city--but at various points decisions were made about how land was used; space was organised that affected every aspect of it's history.

Early New York was very much a port and manufacturing city--insanely dense, dirty, overcrowded yet filled with opportunity. In 1857, Central Park was laid out--in what was at the time a fairly remote northern stretch of land. Soon, the elaborate mansions and townhouses of America's richest families, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Whitney, Frick, Duke, lined Fifth and Park Avenues.

Just judging from the ones left, the area must have been very beautiful. Then in a period of often not much more than 20 years, the very wealthy folks who had spent so much cash and care on these homes decided--to tear them down, or in some cases donate them to create museums or schools. The motivation of course, was largely about making more money-not that they needed it. Most could have stayed and resisted the northern progress of the city upward as the subway lines were built-instead they saw the market for a new type of building--the elaborate, elegant building types that line Park and Fifth Ave today, offering a luxuriant but practical lifestyle to a larger group of the aspiring rich and upper class. Similar neighborhoods developed along the upper west side--creating the density to support great shopping streets--and the cosmopolitan, businesslike character we now associate with NY.

In the years afterward, when NY was physically assaulted and undermined by bad planners--this large group of New Yorkers-largely stayed in the city.

Historic Locomotive Works On North Side To Be Torn Down

If you want to know the price Pittsburgh is paying for not having a solid transit system and it's highway building binge in the 20th century, here's yet another clue.

Carnegie's historic railroad works were one of his first major business ventures and started building trains on the North Shore in 1865. The loss of this complex of buildings few noticed from the elevated expressway say's something deep and sick about our culture. Amazingly, few (or perhaps none) have talked about their historical value and even fewer the enormous potential value of this land to the city's tax base and the health of the entire North Side.

"Thousands of skilled workmen labored at the locomotive works over the decades; at full capacity the plant employed as many as 1,500. Some lived nearby in the Manchester neighborhood, which built up rapidly in the late 19th century with factories and housing, and attended St. Andrew Church, once located across from the locomotive works on Beaver Avenue.

Over the years, and with the construction of elevated Ohio River Boulevard next to the factory, the buildings lost all of their residential context. Today, they're surrounded by Duquesne Light equipment and a chain-link fence."

That's right-- before this so called "Boulevard" sliced through the area, this was a critical valuable link in a Neighborhood! A place Brian O'neil tries to describe in The Paris Of Appalachia.

"Check out the 1937 photo of old Beaver Avenue on the next page. See the vibrant street of shops in Manchester, and compare it to the desolate, soulless service road it has become today, a mere abutment to Route 65. The big road takes commuters in from the Northern suburbs to earn their bread and then hightail it home, just as the government planned a half century ago. Manchester lost it's commercial avenue, the lifeblood of any walkable community and has never recovered fully."

I would say he seriously understates things. Manchester today is pretty damn damaged. I just can't spell things out more clearly. Here we have an elevated expressway that has so eviscerated and divided Pittsburgh that most people don't even notice this slice of wonderfully located urban waterfront.

Someday, a wise and courageous city leader might say.

Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall.

Paula Poundstone @ Carnegie Music Hall Library In Homestead Tonight

Mostly, I'm doing this post about a comedian performing @ The Carnegie Library in Homestead because it's an excuse to mention the venue.

Any list of "must see" places in the Pittsburgh region would have to include a few of Carnegie's libraries in places like Braddock and Homestead. The term, "library", doesn't describe most of them well. These were really "community centers", and almost always included a gym, a library collection and reading room and a music hall or auditorium of some kind,usually built with the finest workmanship and design. Often they included showers for workers who didn't have them at home.

The Libraries demonstrate Carnegie's somewhat contradictory views towards his workers. As a boy who pulled himself up from poverty by his own bootstraps and lacked a lot of formal schooling, he valued self education and continuing learning. Likely, he felt most of his employees were not interested or destined to be more than "manual laborers", who needed to watched to keep them from drink and vice. But, at the same time, Carnegie felt there were some who would take to books and opportunity if it was offered and knew that his mills and the future of his company depended on finding, nurturing and promoting them.

The Libraries embody these values, combining a place for kids to exercise, be entertained, stay "off the streets" and away from "vice", and perhaps read if they were so inclined. I say, kids because very few of his workers would have had the free time or energy to enjoy the Library and might visit once or twice a year.

She is number 88 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest standups of all time,[citation needed] and number 7 on Maxim's list of "Worst Comedians of All Time".[4]

Here's a nice article about the Restoration of The Homestead Library Reading Room, with images that give some idea of it's beauty.


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Any discussion of the region's revival, (the Mon Valley is hardly there yet.) should give credit to the deluxe assets left here by folks like Carnegie.



Here's Patti Smith @ The Homestead Library

Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town

I had a long list of books related to the region's history and culture, I wanted to get around to reading. One of them that, I'm so glad I got around to was a book called Homestead: Tragedy of an American Steel Town written in 1992. It was written by a the former labour and workplace corespondent of the NY Times during the tragic and tumultuous years between 1979 and 1986 which saw the death and near death of much of industrial America. The writer's deep association with the industry and committed work talking to people in the town over many years really pays off.

The first few chapters and the last are in some sense, not that interesting to me---The massive pain of catastrophic job loss in all it's devastation are laid out in painful detail. Several other chapter's paint a vivid picture of the incredibly tough and insanely dangerous life in one of the world's largest steel mills-- a place where the author estimates more than 1000 workers lost their lives in the the works more than 100 year history.

The middle of the book holds a somewhat more dry but clear and concise history of both the massive Homestead works and the company of which it was a central part-- U.S. Steel as well as the birth of the American labour movement.

While, Pittsburgh had been a central part of the American iron, glass and industrial history almost from it's birth, the scale of the massive industrial complexes in the Mon Valley that kicked off with Carnegie's Edgar Thomson works in Braddock in 1873 were unprecedented. Carnegie copied the new Bessemer process used by a few new English mills, to build a company marked by an almost brutally competitive nature, quick to innovate in new technologies, aggressive in sales and driven to be the lowest cost producer. Soon other mills followed, opened by both Carnegie and a host small host of other operators. The business was very tough on everyone and required massive amounts of upfront investments in fixed capital. Miscalculations in projected demand or disruptive new innovations can and did bankrupt many, but the potential profits were huge. Workers in a Carnegie Mill and most competitors worked 12 hour shifts, six or seven days a week. Not surprisingly, both the managers, investors and workers dreamed of an easier way.

Carnegie bought the new Homestead mill across the river from Braddock from it's financially strapped competitor and and in a few years new mills were built by Carnegie in nearby towns on the Mon as many of the smaller competing mills were bought out and consolidated into companies controlled by JP Morgan. The stage was set for a tragedy that few saw coming. Carnegie was ready to retire from the brutally competitive industry he had worked so hard to dominate through pricing and relentless innovation and Morgan who never could take the strain. " Although he was regarded as the archetype of the American capitalist, Morgan was in many ways not a capitalist.... but as as Joseph Frazier Wall wrote: " He did not really believe in the free enterprise system.. Like most ardent socialists, he hated the waste, duplication and clutter of unrestricted competition". It was for this reason that he had been so intoxicated by Schwab's portrayal of a combined, efficient steel industry."

Morgan made Carnegie an offer of a massive payment in gold for Carnegie's mills to create a company controlling 65% of the existing industry and once and for all stop the unpredictable, competitive free for and replace it with a stable comfortable and reliable business that would run almost as a perpetual machine. The deal was done and most of the rest of the book deals with the results. The combined company seemed indestructible and the only central issue seemed to be one of dividing the profits among the owners and also increasingly with the workers. Problem solved-- capitalism was just too much work!

"By 1936, the stagnation at U.S. Steel was such that Fortune magazine "recalled that the Corporation's policy had once been summarized as 'No inventions: no innovations'" (p. 132) and Charles M. Schwab reported that "the chairman of US Steel admitted to him that the Corporation, in fact, had missed every 'new thing' in steel" (p. 132). Under Carnegie's reign, Pittsburgh-based steel facilities had competed successfully against growing location-based advantages of other regions by relying on innovation, efficiency, and superior management. U.S. Steel under Gary did participate in the geographic dispersion of American steel-making but its "Pittsburgh Plus" pricing (an artificial attempt to exercise industry price discipline by linking prices across America to steel prices in Pittsburgh plus freight from Pittsburgh) led to a hobbling of the corporation's growth into new markets and eventually shrank the region in which Pittsburgh-area steel was competitive. Even in its infancy, U.S. Steel was an illustration of inertia and captivation by sunk-cost investments."

A further quote from an industry expert was even more honest about the results.

"Actually the operation of basic processes has not changed significantly in either theory or fundamental design of equipment in the past 75 years. While automobiles were being made better and cheaper with ever newer processes.... tonnage steel as distinguished from the specialty or the alloy steels grew neither cheaper or better"
Charles Ramsayer 1935

Much of the rest of the book deals with the struggles of workers to attain a larger and larger share of company output. In fact-- it sort of looks as if distribution of profits was the primary thing people thought about more and more as the years went on. The post WWII period ushered in what seemed like a golden age, culminating in what were increasingly cosy relations between workers and management. There was more than enough money to go around, seemingly little prospect of competition from abroad and no need to sweat. The company spent big-- but rarely, if ever took the lead and often built new plants and expansions with equipment that was obsolete from the start.

Anyway, great book, well worth reading. I hope to get back with more thoughts about it.