➊THE CHELSEA HOTEL (222 West Twenty-third Street)—This is Chelsea’s most famous landmark (see photo on page 111), built in 1883 as co-operative apartments, becoming a hotel in 1905. Many of the famous robber barons stayed here, like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Also, the theater district was nearby in the late nineteenth century, so those involved in theater came here.
Later on, many famous writers stayed here, like Arthur Miller, Trotskyist James Farrell, Mark Twain, and O’Henry. In the 1960s, many figures in rock stayed here—the Allman Brothers, the Jefferson Airplane, and Pink Floyd, for instance. In the 1980s, noted punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols stabbed his girlfriend to death here; he died of a drug overdose before his trial started.
The radical history begins with Valerie Solanas, the founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), who was staying here at the time she shot artist Andy Warhol in June 1968. She had written the SCUM Manifesto the year before, which is now a feminist classic, even though much of it is tongue-in-cheek (Cost: $2 to men, $1 to women). She was angry at Warhol for not filming her script and for exploiting women in his films.
Ms. Solanas served three years in jail and was institutionalized, dying in 1988. Warhol said he didn’t take life seriously until after this attempt on his life. He died in 1987, at New York Hospital, in what was perhaps a botched operation.
In the 1940s, Gore Vidal and Jack Kerouac spent a night together here and there went another novel!
In recent years, the hotel has increased rents to long-term tenants, destroyed apartments through gut renovations, and forced tenants to leave. Problems started in 2007 when longtime manager Stanley Bard was replaced by corporate management. Joe Chetrit bought the Chelsea Hotel for $81 million in 2011 and began harassing tenants (In 1942 the hotel sold, along with a brownstone behind it, for just $220,000 by the Bank for Savings after a foreclosure action.) There has since been another ownership change and a deal with the tenants association will prevent any further evictions.
➋COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS (235 West Twenty-third Street)—Since the mid-1970s, this has been the national and local headquarters of the Communist Party, with the Unity Bookstore on the first floor. The late Gus Hall was General Secretary for over 30 years and a party member from 1927 until his death in 2000. When Daily Worker members protested his control and the need for new membership in the early 1990s, they were locked out of their offices and fired.
An offshoot of the Communist Party, The Committee of Correspondence formed and included long-time Communist Party member Angela Davis. The split is reminiscent of the infighting upon the inception of the Communist Party in America, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the Socialist Party endured splits and government raids. The Socialist Party was never the power that it had been in the 1910s, with one thousand municipal officers, including mayors in twentytwo cities, and more than nine hundred thousand votes for president for Eugene Debs in 1920 while he served a prison term for speaking out against WWI.
In 1927, the national headquarters of the Communist Party moved from Chicago to New York City, and in 1929, took the name Communist Party.
The Henry Winston Auditorium on the second floor of Communist Party Headquarters would also serve as a major meeting place for Concerned Friends of WBAI in 2001, which drew several hundred people to regular meetings to protest the firings of the most political producers at the radio station. WBAI is part of the Pacifica Foundation’s national network at 99.5 FM. Activists like Bob Lederer, Rosalie Hoffman, Pete Korakis, Donna Gould, Leslie Cagan, Ray LaForest, Paul Surovell, Denis Moynihan, Dan Coughlin, and Juan Gonzalez organized demonstrations, e-mail campaigns, and phone-ins to throw out the corporate hijackers who had taken over the station.
➌THE FLATIRON BUILDING (175 Fifth Avenue)—Erected in 1902, this architectural jewel housed the Socialist Labor Party’s headquarters in the 1910s. The Socialist Labor Party is the oldest radical political party still in operation in the United States, though it is definitely on life-support. It no longer publishes a newspaper but does have a website at www.slp.org. Almost all radical political parties originally spring from this group. Formed in 1876 in Philadelphia by German immigrants, it was originally called the Workingman’s Party.
It gained fame under the leadership, or dictatorship, of Daniel DeLeon, who edited the newspaper for almost twenty five years (1892–1914). DeLeon was dogmatic and authoritarian, and though his political program made sense, he had a hard time finding loyal adherents. Eventually, a Socialist Labor Party member named Morris Hillquit left with thousands of others to found the Socialist Party. Others got so disgusted with Mr. DeLeon that they started the Jewish Daily Forward in opposition to his party newspaper.
➍THE NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY BUILDING (51 Madison Avenue, across from Madison Square Park)—This headquarters went up in 1928, but more importantly sits on the site of the first two Madison Square Gardens.
The first Madison Square Garden was officially opened in 1879, on the remains of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York and Harlem Railroad’s freight shed, before the railroad moved to the present site at Grand Central Station. Master showman P. T. Barnum put on shows here, after paying $35,000 to remodel the freight yards and erect twenty-eight-foot walls.
The famous Flatiron Building. PHOTO BY MYRNA KAYTON
The second Madison Square Garden was completed in 1890 for the price of $3 million, replacing the earlier incarnation with a magnificent Stanford White design. Mr. White was one of the most famous architects, and womanizers, in New York City history. In 1906, he was killed on the roof of his creation by a jealous and deranged Pittsburgh capitalist named Harry K. Thaw.
The second Garden had a giant restaurant, a concert hall, eighty-foot-high ceilings, and an auditorium that held eight thousand people. It epitomized the Gay 90s era; the average woman attending the annual horse show wore $13,000 worth of jewelry. However, it cost $20,000 per month to maintain, and it finally went bankrupt in 1913, with the New York Life Insurance Company holding the $2.3 million mortgage. They subsequently decided to knock it down and erect its current headquarters building.
Before going bankrupt, there were two major events held at the second Madison Square Garden. In 1913, thirteen thousand silkworkers went on strike in Paterson, New Jersey, led by the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Margaret Sanger organized children’s marches to help publicize the strike and members of the anarchist Modern School took children into their homes so they wouldn’t be a financial burden to their striking parents.
Big Bill Haywood, one of the leaders of the IWW, complained at Mabel Dodge’s Salon (see Greenwich Village I Tour) on Fifth Avenue about the lack of sympathy for the strikers in the mainstream press (sound familiar?).
They walked to Haywood’s mistress’s house and Mabel Dodge came up with the idea of having the Greenwich Village bohemians produce a play about the strike at Madison Square Garden—it became The Paterson Pageant. John Reed was designated to direct the play, John Sloane to paint giant murals, and the strikers and strike leaders were to play themselves. The cost of the production kept rising and cuts had to be made in the number of scenes, but on June 7, 1913, fifteen hundred strikers made their way to the local train station to board a special thirteen-car train to Manhattan.
Carlo Tresca (see #7 below) led a contingent of eight hundred marchers from the train to the Garden, and at 7:30 PM, the large neon letters of the IWW beamed from the rooftop of the Garden. (The New York City Police Department would cut the electricity to those letters in just one hour.) Fifteen thousand workers attended the pageant, and Carlo Tresca and Big Bill Haywood made the same speeches they had made during the strike. However, ticket prices had to be drastically reduced, so the production lost a lot of money, negating an anticipated contribution to the strike fund.
Thousands of strikers who couldn’t get on the special train complained, and there were accusations of theft. However, everyone from Margaret Sanger to John Reed made loans, not expecting to get paid back, and everyone realized it was an honest financial disaster.
The strike collapsed in July 1913, as did the alliance between the Socialist Party and the IWW, and only one good thing came out of the loss. Margaret Sanger got so disgusted with the Socialist Party and the labor movement that she decided to devote herself to the birth-control movement (see #8 below).
The other important event at the second Garden was in 1920; the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, organized by Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey. The convention of people from all over the world lasted for thirty days, but opening night saw an overflow crowd of almost twenty-five thousand people.
Its Declaration of Rights listed twelve complaints and fifty-four demands in an attempt to unite Blacks from all over the world. For its remaining sessions, after the first night, the convention moved to Liberty Hall on West 138th Street (since demolished).
This represented the height of Marcus Garvey’s influence and he himself was plagued by both corruption in the movement and by U.S. Government attacks that resulted in his being jailed and deported from the country (see Harlem Tour for more information).
➎EMMA GOLDMAN’S MOTHER EARTH OFFICE (55 West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenues)—In 1911 Emma Goldman moved her magazine’s offices from her overcrowded apartment on East 13th Street to this building, which also had been part of the songwriter’s and music publisher’s row called Tin Pan Alley.
At approximately where East Twenty-fifth Street meets Madison Square Park is where Diane Keaton in Reds, playing John Reed’s future wife Louise Bryant, disembarks from a horse-drawn carriage upon arriving in New York City from Oregon on her way to Reed’s Greenwich Village apartment.
In April of 2006 tens of thousands massed on Broadway between 17th and 23rd Streets to protest the Iraq war. Led by United for Peace and Justice, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and the National Organization for Women, the march included Reverend Al Sharpton, Reverend Jesse Jackson, anti-war activist Cindy Crawford, and actress Susan Sarandon. The marchers stretched for over a mile long as they headed downtown to Foley Square just north of City Hall.
As one heads south down Broadway to Emma Goldman’s massage parlor, you are viewing the Ladies’ Mile, a fashionable shopping district of the late nineteenth century. These giant stores were the beginning of the modern departmentstore era and represent the large accumulation of capital as more and more products were sold by fewer and fewer companies. 900 and 903 Broadway at 20th Street are two Stanford White-designed buildings from the 1880s. Lord and Taylor used to be located in the beautiful white building (1869) on the southwest corner of Broadway and 20th Street. W. and J. Sloan’s rug and carpet store inhabited 881 Broadway in the 19th century, which was built in 1881.
➏EMMA GOLDMAN AND THE CORNER OF BROADWAY AND SEVENTEENTH STREET—This was the location of Emma Goldman’s massage parlor in 1905, though an exact address is difficult to determine. She described her office as being on the top floor, having much air and sunlight and a view of the East River. With so many tall office buildings going up in subsequent years, such a river view is long gone.
Emma Goldman spent many years working in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side and complained that the sweatshops of Czarist Russia, where she was born, were easier to work in than American sweatshops—you got breaks in Russia and the supervisor in Russia didn’t watch you like a hawk. In fact, Emma would be fired from one American sweatshop for coming to the aid of a co-worker who had fainted.
Emma also had some successful businesses that enabled her to spend more time on political organizing (something we all need more of). It wasn’t always that way, however. In the 1890s she started a dressmaking cooperative that failed in New Haven, Connecticut, and then set up a photography studio in Worcester, Massachusetts with Alexander Berkman, her nearly lifelong comrade, which also failed.
Her success started with an ice-cream parlor in Massachusetts, which she was forced to close in order to work on the Homestead, Pennsylvania strike of 1892. She later worked as a nurse, and then went into body massages in 1903. Emma’s body massages required too much time, so her manicurist suggested she do only facial and scalp massages, which wouldn’t require so many hours. Emma thought it dubious that women would flock to the notorious “Red Emma” for massages, but the manicurist recommended clients and her friend Bolton Hall lent her $300 to get started. She took an office on one of these street corners, and soon had women clients from all types of professions, whom she served as a masseuse and quasi-therapist. Most of these professional women, according to Emma, were financially independent, but emotionally dependent on men and marriage.
Her clients liked her, and Emma began to get so successful that she thought of hiring a secretary, but she was obviously repulsed by a worker-management relationship. The dilemma was solved when the landlord, after discovering she was the famous “Red Emma,” failed to renew the lease. She closed up shop and started the magazine Mother Earth.
➐CARLO TRESCA AND THE CORNER OF FIFTH AVENUE AND FIFTEENTH STREET (Northwest Corner)— This was where anarchist Carlo Tresca was gunned down by a Mafia hitman on January 11, 1943. Carlo was involved in many fights during his lifetime, including the Industrial Workers of the World’s Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, the fight to prevent the execution of fellow anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, the fight against both fascists and Stalinists in Spain in the 1930s, and against an established newspaper publisher in America, Generoso Pope, who tried to cover up his previous support of Benito Mussolini.
On the night of January 11, 1943, Carlo was at the office of his newspaper, Il Martello (The Hammer), at 96 Fifth Avenue (the southwest corner, though the building isn’t there anymore) leaving at 9:30 PM with his friend Giuseppe Calabi. They walked to the northwest corner, when future Mafia boss Carmine Galente emerged from the shadows and shot Carlo.
The police arrived and Carlo was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Thousands of supporters joined his funeral procession, with fifteen cars filled with flowers, and ten cars filled with reporters. Among those speaking at the funeral at Fresh Pond Cemetery in Queens were David Dubinsky, Norman Thomas, and Max Eastman.
Tresca’s great political work inspired much opposition and there are many theories concerning who wanted Tresca dead. The official investigation didn’t go far; investigators feared connection to prominent people. Galente served a year in jail, confessed to the crime, but claimed later that he didn’t do it.
In 1979, Galente was gunned down at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. In what became a famous and controversial frontpage Newsday photograph, he lay dead with a cigar in his mouth in a pool of blood, similar to Tresca’s position of death.
➑MARGARET SANGER’S BIRTH CONTROL CLINIC (104 Fifth Avenue, 20th Floor)—This 1911 building housed the first doctor-directed birth control clinic in the United States in the late 1910s. Originally set up to answer letters to the editor of her magazine The Birth Control Review, she eventually hired a doctor and catered to women desperate for birth control.
The first birth control clinic in the U.S. was set up by Margaret Sanger in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916, but it was illegal for a doctor to prescribe birth control, and hence no doctors would get involved. But a loophole in the law during her 1918 trial allowed her to hire a doctor, Dr. Hannah Stone, who created a contraceptive jelly, and kept medical records on thousands of women regarding abortions, miscarriages, and sexual behavior.
Publicity from Ms. Sanger’s court battles and fights with the censors enabled her to outgrow this office, and move to a building at 46 West Fifteenth Street. She fought for most of her long life for the increased distribution of birth control, but before becoming America’s birth control pioneer, she was active in the Socialist Party and major strikes in the northeast, and is believed to have first learned about birth control from Emma Goldman, who used to smuggle early diaphragms (called pessaries) to the U.S. from Europe in the 1890s.
Ms. Sanger married the head of 3-in-1 Oil, Noah Slee, and in the 1920s pessaries were smuggled to the U.S. in 3-in-1 oil drums via Europe and Canada. Slee eventually bought his wife a new building at 17 West Sixteenth Street. Planned Parenthood, the current well-known birth control clinic, was formed due to Ms. Sanger’s work; her grandson, Alexander Sanger, now heads the local New York City office. The corner of Mott and Bleecker Streets, where the New York City office is located, has been designated Margaret Sanger Square.
For some extra buildings of the Ladies’ Mile, walk one block west to Sixth Avenue. On the west side of Sixth Avenue (#621) between 18th and 19th street is the B. Altman Building, erected in 1876, and across Sixth Avenue from B. Altman is the Siegel-Cooper and Company Building of 1896. The Hugh O’Neill Dry Goods Store, with the name still visible if you look up, was at 655-671 Sixth Avenue between 20th and 21st Street. The former Adams and Company Dry Goods’ address was 675 Sixth Avenue (note the “ADG” initials). It was erected in 1900 and used to house a Barnes and Noble Superstore. With the vicious claws of the N.Y.C. real estate industry, we are very lucky to have these buildings still standing.
➒THE NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY (formerly called The New School for Social Research) (66 West Twelfth Street)—The New School was founded in 1918 by dissident professors from Columbia University, furious over their firings for counseling students to resist the World War I draft and oppose U.S. entry into the war. This was a time of repression against the left, with little or no free speech rights for those opposing the war.
For instance, during this era the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World were nearly shut down by the government, and radical publications like Appeal to Reason and The Masses (see Greenwich Village III Tour) lost their mailing “privileges,” and were forced out of business.
Eugene Debs, the head of the Socialist Party, was jailed for making a speech against the war in Ohio, and fellow Socialist Party member Rose Pastor Stokes faced ten years in jail for an anti-war letter to the editor of a Kansas newspaper.
Professors Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson were so incensed over Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler’s firing of two professors that they resigned and began planning the New School with several associate editors of The New Republic, which at that time was politically to the left of The Nation.
Classes began at six brownstone mansions on West Twenty-third Street, thanks to the commitment of Dorothy Straight (an heir to the Whitney fortune) of $10,000 per year for ten years. Major principles of the school included faculty control, no endowment, and no real estate ownership. These principles soon gave way, and this building officially opened in 1931.
In the early 1930s, Mexican muralist Jose Orozco painted five murals in the building, including a controversial one of Lenin, Stalin, and Gandhi, still preserved in Room 712. In the 1950s, during the era of McCarthyism, the board of trustees ordered a curtain placed over Lenin and Stalin after it was found that it couldn’t be erased without tearing down the walls it was painted on. The Mexican government has since paid to preserve it, and it is a true sight to see along three of the walls of the classroom.
Other highlights of the New School include W. E. B. DuBois teaching the first college-level Black Studies class in the country. In 1933, the University in Exile Program welcomed Jewish and/or Socialist professors and researchers fleeing from Nazi Germany; many ended up doing important research on fascism.
The school has since become more of an establishment institution, but nonetheless offers many great classes.
➓116 UNIVERSITY PLACE (at Thirteenth Street)—This building was rented out by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. Previously, the Socialist Party (SP) rented two floors in the building. The Industrial Workers of the World had an office here as well on the second floor.
The SWP was supportive of Malcolm X, and they still publish and have the rights to many of his speeches. They sponsored several forums with Malcolm X over the years, including one here in 1964 about eight months before he was assassinated. He was a surprise guest who had returned from his second trip to Africa just a few days before. He answered false charges made against him that he inspired a gang called the “Blood Brothers,” which was killing white people. Malcolm talked about the brave fight of the brothers in Algeria who were attacking the French colonizers, police brutality in New York City (some issues never change), Cuba, and China.
At this time, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, organized the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and was preparing to work with Martin Luther King, Jr., which was the FBI’s biggest nightmare. (See the Harlem Tour for more sites from Malcolm X’s life.)