Creating a book on the streetscapes of New York is equal parts labor and love, especially since the urban fabric is mended as soon as it frays and frays as soon as it is mended. I have updated the commentary numerous times, but the rapid pace of change in the city means that some information will be outdated almost as soon as the book is published.
I am indebted to the countless individuals and publications I have consulted while researching my Lost New York streetscapes. All errors are my own.
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Portions of John Freeman Gill’s essay “How My Mother Saved New York” originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, in the New York Times
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gill, Jill, artist, author. | Gill, John Freeman, writer of supplementary textual content.
Title: Site lines : lost New York, 1954–2022 / paintings and commentary by Jill Gill ; essays by John Freeman Gill, Marc Hacker.
Description: First edition. | Novato, CA : Oro Editions, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references. Summary: “Jill Gill’s spirited watercolors and accompanying perceptive captions document New York City as it has changed over more than half a century. Covers Midtown Manhattan (with its southern, eastern, and western sections), the Upper West Side, and the Upper East Side” — Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023016527 | ISBN 9781957183695 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Gill, Jill—Themes, motives. Buildings in art. | Lost architecture. | Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)— In art. | New York (N.Y.)—In art.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023016527 Printed in China
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INTRODUCTION
I think of New York as a master conjurer. The headline trick, played on locals and visitors alike, is the disappearing act: now you see it, now you don’t. A peculiar urban amnesia follows the conjurer’s performance: the inability to remember the buildings and businesses that previously existed on a razed or redeveloped block or lot. The Lost New York paintings, completed over the course of 68 years, are my antidote to forgetting what has vanished.
My sense of urban loss started when I was young. I am a Manhattan orphan. By the time I was thirteen, every building I had lived in, and the two public schools I had attended, had been torn down. Even Morningside Hospital, my place of birth, is long gone. Perhaps that explains why, whenever I learned that a familiar block was destined for demolition, I would rush to its deathbed, camera in hand. A painting of that block might be years in the future, but the buildings were safe in my photographs.
Preservationists aim to save worthy buildings and neighborhoods by means of landmarking. My intention, however, was to preserve, in watercolor and ink, the ordinary blocks that sprouted without benefit of planning boards and star architects. Although I have depicted a few Manhattan icons—Tiffany’s, St. Bart’s—it was the haphazard buildings that touched me; they were the patches on the fabric of my personal city.
The text accompanying each streetscape is a combination of research and observation. I am a magpie of information, collecting articles and avidly reading about New York history. I’ve attended lectures on New York, seen movies starring New York, gone on walking tours in New York, read poetry about New York, and followed blogs reporting on New York. The more I learned, the more I realized how much there still was to learn. I have woven as much evocative information as I could into the text; even more remains in my file cabinets.
My memories of the scenes in the paintings feature in the commentary. Memory, no matter how seemingly accurate, is a funhouse mirror that distorts perception. Looking anew at streets I’d taken for granted made me aware of the many changes over the years: different types of lampposts and mailboxes; two-way avenues; yellow and green buses; timely sidewalk graffiti. Some memories are so strong that they extend into the present. I cannot, today, hear an approaching fire engine without expecting to see a spotted Dalmatian, and two handsome firemen, perched steadfastly at the rear of the truck.
In most cases, I have included a few notes on the buildings that fill the sites today. “New” is not necessarily “bad.” While many of the new buildings are architecturally undistinguished, others are novel and memorable. Philip Johnson’s Lipstick Building is as extraordinary as the block that preceded it was ordinary (see plate 37).
Third Avenue at 29th (see plate 20)
Buildings that play bit parts in one scene often occupy center stage in the next. The doomed five-story building on Madison Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets nudges a gray brick shoulder into the scene of the next block north (see plates 57 and 59). Likewise, some of the city’s great skyscrapers appear and reappear in the background, noble and reassuring symbols of stability in an ever-changing city.
The streetscapes arrange themselves in seven Manhattan neighborhoods; the site for each painting is identified on the chapter map. Adding a square to the map is sad work, for each scene represents a city block lost. It is like a reverse jigsaw puzzle, where to complete the puzzle is to lose.
HOW MY MOTHER SAVED NEW YORK
John Freeman Gill
New York is neither an old city nor a new city: it is both, with gusto. Though 400 years old, it is striving, impatient, and unsentimental, reinventing and redeveloping itself at every turn. The only constant here is change, so we native New Yorkers learn early that loving our hometown is not enough to keep it from hurting us. We learn that no cherished bookstore or theater or diner can be trusted not to disappear overnight.
But my mother, Jill Gill, has never been willing to let the wrecking ball have the last word. For the past seven decades, as entire blocks have been razed by New York’s elbow-jostling relationship with time, she has relentlessly kept one step ahead of the demolition crews, preserving her favorite, now vanished street scenes in rambunctious, off-kilter watercolor and ink.
Throughout my childhood, the demolished landmarks of old New York were alive and well on the walls of our home: the 57th Street automat served up cheesecake in the kitchen; the windows of Bonwit Teller displayed haute couture dresses in Mom’s bedroom; subway trains hurtled along the Third Avenue el in our front hall. Life in our townhouse—a twelve-foot-wide Queen Anne on East 89th—was one mad, eternal rush hour.
From the beginning, my mother’s passion for rescuing fragments of the streetscape was at odds with the behavior then expected of a young mother. Rather than sit in the playground, bored to tears, she wheeled her first-born, Tracy, along Second and Third Avenues, photographing cranes as they ripped down row after row of 19th-century tenements. Sometimes she preserved the buildings in paintings; other times she acquired architectural ornaments from the workmen, ousting Tracy from her stroller to make room for a snarling gargoyle keystone or a terra-cotta spandrel. Before long, the chassis of my sister’s stroller collapsed under the weight of its historical responsibility.
As the city remade itself again and again, my mother’s paintings spoke of the aspect of urban flux that many longtime New Yorkers feel most viscerally: the loss of buildings as memory markers, as touchstones of personal and common history.
The crumbling and destruction of the city at large were paralleled by the disintegration of our own household. In 1972, when I was six and my sisters ten and twelve, our father moved out. In 1979, the house was sold. Short of cash to pay her divorce lawyer, my mother bartered scenes of lost Manhattan in exchange for legal services. But enough works remained to overcrowd our new, much smaller living quarters on Riverside Drive.
There my mother worked like a woman possessed, often painting through mealtimes to depict the soon-to-be-razed West Side buildings that were taking on meaning for her. With a cluster of overlapping snapshots as reference, she worked on her bed, the painting-in-progress flat on her quilt beside two corpulent cats, whose wayward paws periodically stretched forth to disrupt Broadway traffic or obscure the gaudy Mediterranean facade of Mamma Leone’s restaurant.
When I graduated from college, my mother lost no time in gutting my bedroom to turn it into an art studio. On my first visit back, I was unsettled by her decision to rebuild so quickly on the site of my adolescence. But as I scanned the rollicking neighborhood scenes that now covered the walls, I noticed anew how transporting her art was. Something about her idiosyncratic perspective beckoned me right onto the streets of a city that no longer existed, allowing me once again to scarf down hot dogs at the 87th Street Papaya King, to run up the Gimbels East escalator in the wrong direction, to go on a midnight double date to The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the old New Yorker Theater on 88th and Broadway.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, what was taking shape in my former bedroom was the book you now hold in your hands. This volume is my mother’s life’s work, her personal chronicle of several of the many vibrant lost New Yorks, buried in the public consciousness, that lie beneath our current city like the nine cities of Troy built atop one another across the centuries.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a number of these New Yorks simultaneously, moving nimbly from one to the other through my mother’s paintings. That is the open-hearted promise of her art: if you let Jill Gill be your guide, if you follow her down the avenues and side streets of these ghost metropolises, her watercolors will launch you on your own journey of memory and discovery.
Come. Hop in a Checker cab. Lose yourself in lost New York.
John Freeman Gill writes the Streetscapes column for the New York Times, unearthing the hidden biographies of historic New York City buildings and their occupants. A Brooklyn resident and former reporter for the Times City section, he is the author of The Gargoyle Hunters, a novel set in 1970s Manhattan. His writing has been anthologized in two New York Times books.
THE CITY IN PERSPECTIVE
Marc Hacker
Jill Gill is an artist, a friend, and a lover of New York City. Born and raised in Manhattan, she has a passion for architecture and artifacts that knows no bounds. Her home and studio mimic the congestion and exuberance of the city, just as if she had subsumed the rhythm of its daily reality. She delights in great theater; relishes good food; craves a wonderful book. Jill adores travel, perhaps holding the return even more dear than the journey. Above all, she has a passion for making the art that captures her experience of life in the city, a cartography that betrays an endless curiosity.
Jill’s work creates a visual language that expresses the everyday existence of the city along with its condition of perpetual change. The paintings are a personal map of her long residency. Using the city as a vessel for memory, Gill focuses on the average block and avenue, mostly eschewing the more totemic structures and monuments that define New York in the popular imagination. She thus avoids the nostalgia attached to lamenting what was lost, instead celebrating the essence of urban life in a constantly changing environment. The something lost/ something gained game the city plays provides rich fodder for the inquisitive mind.
A voracious reader of the city, Gill scans the streets for patterns, textures, colors, configurations, signs of habitation. In recording the messy vitality of New York, her work both documents and criticizes; as the city’s engine of transformation purrs away over the course of almost seventy years, the paintings reveal a jolting change in building scale and appearance. It is important to recognize that we are losing not only buildings but our relationship to buildings, the sense that we can relate to their scale and the stories they have to tell of the businesses operated and lives lived therein.
Jill has an innate sense of multiple perspective, almost in defiance of the single-point stance of photography. Her technique allows for multiple points of view, in the fashion of analytical cubism, and creates the immediacy of frontal perspective rather than the remoteness of diminishing perspective. Gill’s graphic language brings us closer to the real experience of the city: a dynamic collage of impressions.
The linework in the paintings is unsteady, even erratic, just as fleeting as the moments she registers. It also embodies an idea of instability, a spirit of perpetual transition, with friction between past and future, between love of the familiar, the existing, and excitement over what will come. The agitated line creates a noise on paper, much like endless horns and sirens puncturing the day.
The scenes Gill paints are textured, intricate, and decorated, inviting our eyes to travel across them as landscapes of pattern, color, and feel. A flat, two-dimensional quality cleverly encapsulates the city as an envelope of day-to-day being. Many of the paintings read as incomplete, mimicking the shapeshifting of New York City. This idea is reinforced by other rendering techniques: borders that fade into white, suggesting an arbitrary boundary of time; blocks of color that overlap the line, creating a dreamlike condition where buildings jostle for attention like paparazzi angling to get the best view.
The erasure of lots small and large robs the city of a storyline recorded in the articulated surfaces of rowhouses and compact industrial structures. Glass, which reflects the city in vast swaths of flat surfaces, is superseding masonry. Like an unchecked virus, glass boxes have colonized the city block by block, collapsing its contours and topography into monotonous outlooks that impoverish the eye. What emerges from Gill’s paintings, however, is a city that knits together buildings from different times into a more accurate image of the heterogeneity of city life. When we can no longer “see” who we are, except in literal reflections, something is lost.
Welcome to Jill Gill’s Site Lines, in which something is gained.
Marc Hacker was born and raised in London and moved to the United States to study architecture at Princeton University. He has worked with many of the world’s leading designers—in architecture, interiors, fashion, and applied arts—and collaborated on numerous books. A longtime resident of New York City, Hacker now lives in the Berkshires.
PLATE 2
Untitled Watercolor and ink, 9 x 11¾ inches, painted in 1955
PLATE 3
Untitled [Northeast Up Second Avenue, 23rd to 59th Streets]
Watercolor, ink, gouache, and colored pencil, 13½ x 14 3/8 inches, painted in 1955
PLATE 8
Avenue at 24th Street, October 1963
Second
Watercolor, black ink, and sepia ink, 15 x 20 inches, painted in 1964
PLATE 9
Twenty-Fifth Street at Second Avenue, 5-63
Watercolor, black ink, and sepia ink, 15 x 20 inches, painted in 1963
21ST STREET TO 34TH STREET
What is known today as Third Avenue is actually a continuation of the Bowery, a former Indian trail that, during the Dutch rule of New Amsterdam, was known as the “bouwerij” (“farm”), or the road to the country estate of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. The name Bowery changes to Third Avenue at Cooper Square and East 4th Street.
I painted the about-to-change neighborhood just after the elevated train had been torn down. Third Avenue was lined with hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop shops, junk shops, pawn shops, liquor stores, hardware stores, and laundries. Today’s broad open thoroughfare, in contrast, consists of impersonal high-rises bullying the low relics of former times.
Steam-generated elevated railways came to Manhattan in the 1870s. New York’s Rapid Transit Elevated system afforded an escape from downtown slum tenements to less crowded and more affordable housing uptown; in the other direction, it led to jobs in the financial district. Els appeared on Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues. Their sheer power and rough majesty captured the imagination of author Henry James, among others. In his 1886 novel The Bostonians, James describes the “fantastic skeleton of the [Second Avenue] Elevated Railway, overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws of an antideluvian monster.”
Swiss-born draftsman John Harte designed the Third Avenue El stations to reflect his native country, hence the resemblance to mountain chalets. Red-gabled metal roofs were bordered in green, downward-facing cresting, and each roof end was topped with small, slatted chimney turrets wearing flat caps. Steep metal stairs between swirly ornamental ironwork led up from the street through worn wooden doors. Inside, pot-bellied stoves were bathed in a vivid rainbow cast by blue, red, and orange-yellow stained-glass windows decorated with ornate Victorian floral and geometric vinelike patterns. The El’s battered beauty struck deep.
The society traveling above the everyday world included those who were called, back then, bums or winos. Small drab groups congregated in sodden camaraderie on the tan woven-wicker seats near the doors at each end of the coaches. On May 12, 1955, the Third Avenue El’s final day, Ray Winship, my boss at Fortune magazine’s promotion department, invited me for a farewell picnic on the railway. We dined on fried chicken, artichoke hearts, potato salad, and, in the spirit of our fellow riders, white wine, ours in stemmed plastic glasses.
Park Avenue South
Watercolor and ink, 20 x 15 inches, painted in 1963
PLATE 21
Subway Kiosks at Twenty-Eighth and Park Avenue South until May 1964 Demolition
Watercolor and ink, 20 x 30 inches, painted in 1964
PLATE 22
PLATE 36
Third Avenue at Fifty-First Street, Looking Northeast, in 1972
Watercolor and ink, 30 x 20 inches, painted in 1981
The stark contrast between old and new along the east side of Third Avenue suggested, to me, a “tenement sandwich.” The ragtag walk-ups between 52nd and 54th Streets are the filling; the 1960s office towers surrounding them are the bread.
The southern slice (right) is 845 Third Avenue, a block-long office building between 51st and 52nd Streets. Designed by Emery Roth & Sons, the 21-story International Style structure was built in 1963. The American and British flags in front indicate two of the tenants: the U.S. Passport Office (since relocated) and the British Consulate General.
The northern slice is another full-block building, 909 Third Avenue of 1968, between 54th and 55th Streets. Max O. Urbahn Associates and Emery Roth & Sons (again) designed the brutalist tower. The FDR Station
Post Office occupies its podium base. The AIA Guide to New York writes: “The tower’s deeply coffered, cast concrete walls seem a honeycomb for the killer bees of Manhattan businesses.” One block to the north stands the (tall for the time) 47-story 919 Third Avenue, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. P.J. Clarke’s survives on the 55th Street corner.
And what of the tenements in between? The 52nd–53rd Street block would become the site for 875 Third Avenue. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the structure around the “holdout” tenements on the southeast corner. The 53rd–54th Street block would be demolished for 885 Third Avenue, Philip Johnson’s Lipstick Building. The bus in front of the tenements bears my snarky message “Stay Home.”
PLATE 62
Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Sixth Street, Looking Northeast, July 1979
Watercolor and ink, 30 x 40 inches, painted in 1980
PLATE 63
Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Sixth Street, East Side, North Corner, May, 1979
Watercolor and ink, 20 x 30 inches, painted in 1979
PLATE 64
Fifty-Seventh Street, North Side, between Park and Lexington Avenues in 1971
Watercolor and ink, 40 x 30 inches, painted in 1978
65
West Side of Lexington Avenue between 57th and 58th Streets
Watercolor and ink, 30 x 40 inches, painted in 1980
PLATE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lifelong New Yorker Jill Gill has been painting the watercolor streetscapes of her Lost New York series since the mid-1950s. Her body of work also includes woodcuts, silkscreen prints, townhouse portraits, and collages. Gill is the author and illustrator of the children’s book Tiger & Leopard (English edition)/Tigre & Léopard (French edition). She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan amid her collection of collections.
