One activity I participated in today was to go on a Walking tour ( to cover Union Square, Gramercy area, Flatiron District and North Madison) which was just great but I had to leave halfway through and get home...
Found this through Meetup.com-- check listing
with NYC Walks: Explore Architecture, Art, History and Sculpture
Tour leader's name was John, who was extremely well informed-- I used to live in the Union Square-Gramercy area for quite a while and was surprised what I had never known.
Besides his mic- amplified talk, John also had a large scrapbook full of material for us to look at..
Just two of the things I learned-- the Roosevelt birthplace (Teddy) near Gramercy Park is more than a renovation, it is an actual reconstruction the building which had been torn down before- under the guidance of a woman architect named Theodota Pope, who had had a terrible time becoming a woman architect in a man's world and only succeeded because of help from people like Stanford White, etc ( plus the fact that she was enormously talented)
Gee, even today, how many female architects can you name? I never thought of that ..
Ms. Pope was one of the few lucky people to survive the sinking of the Lusitania by German U- Boats.
The anti-German hysteria that was whipped up by the time the U.S. got into World War Two was such that the big Germania insurance building on Park Avenue South was renamed "Guardian insurance"-- John showed us cartoons from the time urging people to destroy dachshunds as part of the anti-German fervor... there were other changes too, reminiscent of calling French fries "Freedom Fries" when a lot of Americans were mad at the French for not backing us on Iraq.
Let me see if I can find any pictures off the net for this...I know I have a photo of the Roosevelt birthplace, ( of which as I said, I had no idea was a reproduction and not the original building).
Yes, here it is
Next, let me check the internet for pix of Germania/Guardian insurance, which is now called something else altogether again
Weird, I cannot even find a picture of it when it was Guardian Insurance, just the modern version (below)
And there was much, much more, including the site of what had been the Princeton Club where a shooting inspired the Sullivan act to control handguns in NYC ( Sullivan himself was quite a character, a ward heeler from the Lower East Side and part of the Tammany organization whose old building we also saw off of Union Square). ( He had his own reasons for wanting the law, but I am not going to get into that here).
Well, what can I say but tell you to check up Meetup.com and look at their walking tours for some area...
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