By Rob Garber for the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group
Welcome to another installment in the Rag’s Historical Photo Challenge. The image above was taken somewhere on the Upper West Side, sometime in the past. Can you figure out where, when, and what it shows? Look closely; this week’s challenge photo, like the others in the series, includes clues that will help you identify the scene, if you’re a dedicated UWS history sleuth. And even if you don’t recognize the picture—not to worry! Come back in two weeks and I’ll decode it, show you the clues that help identify it, and—best of all—tell you a story the image unlocks, because this column isn’t just a test of your neighborhood knowledge; it’s also a rolling celebration of the people, buildings and events that wove the tapestry of the Upper West Side.
Ready? If you think you know where and when the photo was taken and what it shows, post your answer as a comment on this column.
Solution to Historical Photo Challenge #35
Subject: Orestes Brownson bust
Location: Riverside Park near West 104th Street
Date: approximately 1920
Image Source: J.S. Saltus and W.E. Tisné. 1923. Statues of New York.
Clues: This one’s a walk in the park. Where else on the UWS will you find a rusticated stone wall this tall besides Riverside Park? But where, exactly? You could walk along the wall, looking for this exact pattern of stone and hoping it hasn’t changed in 100 years. So that’s what I did. To be sure, I had a good idea where to look. Between 104th and 105th, I found it—the same unique pattern of stones, but no evidence that there had once been a bronze bust on a sizable marble pedestal in front of it. Who was the Karl Marx lookalike, why was he here, and where did he go?
The rest of the story: The inscription on the pedestal read “BROWNSON 1803-1876 Publicist—Philosopher—Patriot. He Loved Country and Truth.” From the 1850s to 1870s, Orestes Augustus Brownson was a formidable American intellectual and a prodigious writer. Largely forgotten now, he was the subject of numerous book-length studies—a reviewer of the 1939 biography by a young Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called Brownson a “harsh and turbulent, uneducated, powerfully intellectual man.” Brownson’s complex political and spiritual journey took him from Transcendentalism, abolitionism and socialism to Catholicism, racial bigotry and what Schlesinger Jr. called “almost savage conservatism.” Brownson’s outspoken defense of Catholicism made him a prominent figure in the church and led the Catholic Club of New York to commission a bust of him, which was moved to Riverside Park in 1910 when its original home on Central Park South was demolished. In the 1930s the bust was vandalized and put into storage by the Parks Department. Fordham University, which had granted Brownson its first honorary degree, retrieved the bust in 1941 and today it is displayed at Fordham’s Bronx campus.
…and that’s the story behind the image in the last challenge. Now scroll back to the top of the column and take on your next one, Sherlockians! If you’ve missed any pictures in this series, you can find the complete set on my author page. All photos in the Upper West Side Historical Photo Challenges used with permission.
About the author: Rob Garber has lived on the Upper West Side since the late 20th century and is a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group. To learn more, visit their website at upperwestsidehistory.org.
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Where: the north end of Columbia’s Morningside campus, at West 120th Street and Broadway. The little round brick building with the dome is Columbia’s observatory, standing in “The Grove” — the park in McKim’s original campus plan, directly across from Teachers College. The big gabled building behind is Teachers College.
When: early 1900s. The Astronomy Department built a tiny observatory in the Grove in 1906-07, later called the Wilde Observatory; it stood until the Rutherfurd Observatory opened on Pupin’s roof in 1927. (An earlier one, the Bloomingdale Observatory of 1892, also sat near Broadway and 120th but was scrapped in 1900.)
What it shows: the observatory and its small annex on the lawn. The print itself is captioned “The Observatory, Columbia University, New York City.”