B-311_184+EAST+BROADWAY

BLOCK 311





AIA GUIDE (p. 91) "SEWARD PARK: A bit of green . . . seems less rare today than it did today before urban renewal, when tenements were cleared and towers were placed on lawns. The park was named for Lincoln's secretary of state, William H. Seward (1801 - 1873)."
 * BLOCK || 311 ||
 * LOT || 1 ||
 * ADDRESS || 184 EAST BROADWAY, 57 ESSEX STREET ||
 * NB || NOT FOUND, BUILT 1939 (AIA GUIDE) ||
 * USE || RECREATION BUILDING, OPEN SPACE ||
 * ORIGINAL USE || RECREATION BUILDING (RESTROOMS) ||
 * CURRENT USE || RECREATION BUILDING (RESTROOMS) ||
 * NUMBER OF STORIES || 1 ||
 * FAÇADE MATERIALS || BRICK, LIMESTONE, ULTRAMARINE BLUE TERRA-COTTA FRIEZE ||
 * FOUNDATION MATERIAL || CONCRETE ||
 * STYLE || "Greek temple updated in the style of the Paris Exposition of 1937" (AIA Guide, p. 91) ||
 * FIREPROOF || ? ||
 * NUMBER OF UNITS || 1 ||
 * ELEVATOR || x ||
 * NUMBER OF ELEVATORS || x ||
 * DATE OF INSTALLATION || x ||
 * PARKING GARAGE || x ||
 * DESCRIPTION || x ||
 * DATE OF INSTALLATION || x ||
 * NUMBER OF PARKING SPACES || x ||
 * LOT SIZE || 380 ' x 420', (PARK IS 3 ACRES) ||
 * BUILDING SIZE || 5608 sq. ft. ||
 * BUILDING HEIGHT || ? ||
 * RELATIONSHIP TO LOT LINE || ? ||
 * ARCHITECT NAME + ADDRESS || ? ||
 * BUILDER NAME + ADDRESS || ? ||
 * OWNER/DEVELOPER NAME + ADDRESS || NEW YORK CITY PARKS AND RECREATION ||

Over one hundred years ago, settlement workers Lillian D. Wald and Charles B. Stover founded the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL) to promote organized games in public playgrounds as an alternative to play in city streets. Between 1898 and 1902 ORL opened nine privately sponsored playgrounds on municipal parkland. Soon after the City of New York assumed operations of ORL playgrounds in 1902, the facility at Seward Park became the first permanent, municipally built playground in the United States. It opened on October 17, 1903, in the north corner of the park. With its cinder surfacing, fences, recreation pavilion, and play and gymnastic equipment, the facility became a model for playground programming and design. The city had acquired the land for Seward Park by condemnation in 1897. Due to lack of funds, the site remained largely unimproved until the intervention of the ORL. In addition to the playground, the 1903 plan featured a large running track with an open play area in the center and a children’s farm garden in the southeast corner. Curving paths and a north-south mall divided the park into recreational areas. The limestone and terra cotta Seward Park Pavilion was equipped with marble baths, a gymnasium, and meeting rooms. Rocking chairs were placed on the broad porch for the use of mothers tending their small children. Seward Park underwent a major transformation in the 1930s and 1940s. First, a sliver of land on the east side of the site was surrendered to the city and reassigned to the Manhattan Borough President for street purposes. The Schiff Fountain (1895), designed by architect Arnold W. Brunner, was moved from nearby Rutgers Park to Seward Park in 1936. It was the gift of Jacob H. Schiff, a banker and philanthropist, to the people of the Lower East Side. Seward Park’s pavilion was demolished in the same year, and a new recreation building was erected in 1941. New facilities focused on active play: a basketball court, playgrounds, horseshoe-pitching and shuffleboard courts, and a large paved area adaptable for roller skating, paddle tennis, and ice skating.

The Lower East Side neighborhood around Seward Park continued to evolve. In the late 1950s a triangular swath of land to the east and north of the park was condemned and redeveloped by the city. Most of the intersecting streets were closed, and the Seward Park houses were built where crowded tenements once stood. The 1999 renovation of Seward Park has revived several features from the 1903 plan. There is a new center oval with a large spray shower and marble mosaic map of the neighborhood. The various quotations by historic local residents were provided by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Other revivals of the park’s original appearance include fencing modeled after the historic fences, as well as period lighting and site furniture. The new design also considers the legacy of park namesake William Henry Seward (1801-1872), an American statesman. As senator from New York (1849-1861), Seward was an outspoken critic of slavery. As Secretary of State under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, he arranged the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. This famous bargain, once denounced as “Seward’s folly,” inspired playground equipment such as the seal spray shower and Mount McKinley play unit. Standing proudly in park’s tot lot is a bronze statue of the husky named Togo. A contemporary of Balto (whose statue is located in Central Park), Togo played a heroic role in the 1925 dash to bring an antidiptheria serum to Nome, Alaska. In 2001 the park benefited from a $1.56 million reconstruction funded by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani with Council Members Kathryn E. Freed and Margarita López. The reconstruction added a new playground, spray showers, fencing, plantings, benches, pavement, a historic fence, and a mosaic. [|www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M082/]

___ Volume XXXI · Autumn 1978 · Number 1 -- GLYNDON G. VAN DEUSEN
 * The Life and Career of William Henry Seward 1801-1872**

William Henry Seward was born in Florida, New York, on May 16, 1801. He came of English stock, with possibly some infusion of Welsh and Irish blood; his family had migrated to America in the early eighteenth century. Harry Seward, as he liked to be called in his younger days, was one of five children of Samuel Sweezy Seward, a prosperous, domineering doctor and businessman, and Mary Jennings Seward. He was five feet, six inches in height, red-haired, blue-eyed, and slight of build, bright, charming, and stubborn, with a taste for adventure. At the age of 15 his health was delicate, but he had a studious bent, and therefore, his father entered him in Union College, Schenectady, New York. The young Union student liked to dress well. His taste in clothes caused grumbling at home as the tailor bills came from Schenectady; his father finally refused to pay them. In January 1819, Harry left college and struck out for the South with a classmate. In Georgia he took a job teaching school. He found life in Georgia pleasant, though he developed a lasting dislike for slavery. Despite family pleas, he did not return home for six months. When he did return he re-entered Union and graduated in 1820, a junior Phi Beta Kappa. Young Seward studied law in various law offices, becoming a full-fledged lawyer in 1822. The following year he became a partner in the law office of Judge Elijah Miller in Auburn, New York, and on October 20, 1824, married Frances Adeline Miller, the judge's younger daughter. Frances Adeline was 19 years old at the time of the marriage. She was a beautiful brunette, strong-minded and intelligent, with high standards of morality, and a conventional Christian faith. The life which Harry looked forward to was vastly different from that which Fanny, as he called her, preferred. He was eminently social, made friends with everybody, and had a calling for public life. Fanny, on the other hand, shrank from society, much preferring a quiet family life with a few close friends. Though Seward was a competent lawyer, he soon found that his chief interest was in politics. At first a young Federalist, he had a brief Van Burenite period, then became a National Republican as he settled down in Auburn. This last choice was logical. Auburn was in spirit largely National Republican, and Henry's father-in-law was an ardent follower of John Quincy Adams. In the middle 1820s a new political party, the Anti-Masonic party, made its bow. It had its origin in the 1826 abduction of William Morgan, a member of the powerful and secret order of Masonry. Morgan, who had threatened to expose the secrets of the first three degrees of Masonry, was seized in Canandaigua, New York, by a group of men, presumably Masons, who rushed him to the Niagara Frontier. There all trace of him vanished forever, but it soon became apparent that prominent Masons were hindering the investigation of his disappearance. Bitter attacks on the Masonic Order appeared in the press, and denunciations of Masonry as an enemy of democracy spread throughout the eastern part of the United States. Out of this emerged the Anti-Masonic party, a political organization that grew with great rapidity in that part of the country during the latter 1820s. One of the most outspoken of the newspapermen who aided and abetted the Anti-Masonic excitement was a Rochester journalist named Thurlow Weed, a supporter of John Quincy Adams and an astute and able politician. He and Seward had become acquainted in Rochester, and as their acquaintance ripened they became political partners; Weed as a newspaper editor, Seward as a candidate for office. In 1830 the Anti-Masons of the state's seventh district elected Seward to the New York State Senate. There he worked closely with Weed, who founded and edited the //Albany Evening// //Journal//, and became the guiding spirit of the New York State Anti-Masonic party. The leaders of that party sought to make it national in scope, a movement of which the two young men heartily approved. Seward participated actively in fostering this national movement. He was a delegate to a national Anti-Masonic convention in Philadelphia, and in 1831 made a political journey to New England, where he met and talked with John Quincy Adams about the political future. In the New York State Senate Seward spoke and acted for reform legislation, emphasizing the need for a sound paper currency and the usefulness of the United States Bank. The Anti-Masonic party became more and more closely aligned with the National Republicans, whose principal leaders were John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. This party was shattered by the Democratic party's victory in 1828, when President Adams had gone down to an overwhelming defeat at the hands of Andrew Jackson and the Democrats. National Republicanism was now a waning force, and Anti-Masonry had too narrow a base to become a powerful rival, state or national, to the triumphant Democrats. Seward's political future seemed dark, but he continued to make a name for himself as a supporter of internal improvements and prison reform, and as a critic of the Democratic leadership. In 1833, Seward went to Europe on a sightseeing journey, and his letters to Weed, published in the //Albany Evening Journal//, bore witness to his insatiable and sometimes naive curiosity. When his coach lumbered up a long hill, Seward would get out and walk, so that he could see as much as possible at close hand. On his return home he plunged again into politics, taking a leading part in the organization of the Whig party. In New York State, this was a combination of National Republicans and Anti-Masons that arose out of opposition to Jackson, and distrust of Van Buren and the reigning Democratic regency. The New York Whigs made Seward their candidate for governor in 1834, but his Democratic opponent, William L. Marcy, won a decisive victory. For several years after this setback Seward gave politics a minor role, devoting himself to legal work and to family affairs. The law bored Seward. Nevertheless, his legal practice was large and successful, and it furthered his reputation as a coming man. His popularity was also augmented by settling the Holland Land Company's tangled financial affairs in Western New York. Nevertheless, his achievements had their darker side. His busy life gave him little time for tending to domestic affairs. When in Auburn he spent his days and most of his evenings in his law office. His work for the Holland Land Company kept him for months at a time in Westfield, New York, over 100 miles from home. The care of his two young sons, Augustus and Frederick, was left to a wife whose sense of neglect drove her into a state of hypochondria that was only temporarily relieved by a three-month carriage journey with her husband into Virginia, Washington, and Maryland. Seward's interest in politics remained as keen as ever, and Whig prospects began to brighten with the panic and depression that began during Van Buren's administration. Seward and Weed saw the signs of the times, and Seward began speaking throughout the state, stressing the need for internal improvements and for reform in education. He also had a hand in framing New York State's Free Banking Act of 1838, a Whig measure. With Weed's clever support, he received the Whig nomination for governor in 1838, despite the opposition of powerful Whig rivals, and was elected to the highest office in the state by some 10,000 votes over the Democratic candidate, Marcy. The campaign was organized and run by Weed, who was also largely responsible for the new governor's major office appointments. The opportunities afforded by his gubernatorial career marked Seward as a shrewd politician with liberal and progressive inclinations. He championed educational improvements, prison reform, the construction of railroads and canals. But he was handicapped in his ambition for achievement by powerful Whig conservatives and jealous rivals for political leadership in the state. Consequently, his stand on issues that had dangerous political implications was sometimes equivocal. But controversies over slavery, in which he became involved with Southern governors, brought him into national prominence as a leader in the growing antislavery movement. Interstate bickerings and charges of extravagance in his plans for internal improvements lessened Seward's popularity, and in his campaign for reelection in 1840 he won by only 5,000 votes. He did not seriously consider running for a third term, since during the next two years controversies between liberal and conservative New York Whigs increased in violence, and he was also financially hard pressed. Seward was by nature extravagant, and his debts weighed heavily upon him. Only Weed's advice and services, together with those of a wealthy New York lawyer and banker, Richard M. Blatchford, saved him from financial disaster, and once again he devoted himself perforce to his law practice. Life had its problems for Frances and Henry. She hated being the governor's wife, and after the years at Albany were over she complained that his legal work kept him altogether too much away from home. Frederick did well at Union and then joined the editorial staff of the //Albany// //Evening Journal//, but their eldest son, Augustus, was a problem. To his mother's horror, he decided upon a military career. She begged his father to get Augustus out of the army, but he refused to take any such action, and Augustus remained a constant worry to her. The lives of Frances and Henry were drifting apart, but two events of this period renewed the ties that bound them together. Their last child, Frances Adeline, was born December 9, 1844. She was sprightly and affectionate, a bond of union in the family. Two years later came an event of a very different nature. In 1846, two Negroes, Henry Wyatt and William Freeman, were brought to trial in Auburn, accused of murder. Seward acted as lawyer for both men. His eloquent appeal for blacks as men entitled to the educational and political privileges of whites brought him wide attention as an opponent of slavery, and the ardent sympathy and support of his wife. His legal practice, increased by the eloquent defense of Wyatt and Freeman, was further enhanced by a number of suits in patent law cases. One of these took him to New Orleans. He returned home by way of a trip across the Deep South, where he visited friends that he had made as a young schoolteacher in Georgia. During this period of legal activity, Seward never lost his interest in politics. He supported Clay for President in 1844 and Zachary Taylor in 1848. He also remained a firm and increasingly vocal opponent of slavery, but urged that freedom for slaves should go hand in hand with compensation for the economic loss that freedom would entail for the slaveholders. He had no enthusiasm for the Mexican War, fearing that its outcome would increase slave territory and thus the political power of the slaveholders. He would counter this by the enactment of the Wilmot Proviso, which would prohibit slavery in any land acquired from Mexico, by giving free male Negroes suffrage, and by extending the same privilege to the foreigners who were flocking to America. These ideas appeared in some of his speeches. Both he and Weed sensed the growing strength and political power of the antislavery movement, but they both felt that caution must be their watchword, for already their political objective was the White House. The Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor for President in 1848 with Millard Fillmore, a New Yorker but no friend of Seward, for Vice President. Under Weed's astute guidance, a Whig majority in the New York State legislature elected Seward to the United States Senate, where he took his seat immediately after Taylor's inauguration in March 1849. Seward used all his charm and hospitality to make friends among the Senators of both North and South. He also established such influence over Taylor that, to Fillmore's disgust, he obtained virtually complete control over federal patronage in New York State. Tension between North and South over slavery rose steadily in 1849, and when the Senate assembled for the session that began in December, war between the two sections seemed imminent. Clay's compromise, introduced early in February, brought months of debate. It was an attempt to calm the passions of both North and South by granting something to both sides. Under terms of the compromise, California, where the sentiment for freedom was predominant, would be organized as a state without reference to slavery. The remaining territories conquered from Mexico would be organized without restriction as to slavery. Slaves should not be brought into the District of Columbia for sale, but there should be a more rigorous fugitive slave law, and there should be no interference in the slave trade between slaveholding states. Clay defended the compromise as essential for the maintenance of the Union, at the same time declaring that there was no such right as secession. Webster spoke in support of this proposal. Seward spoke on March 11 in opposition to the compromise. His speech had been weeks in preparation, and he and Weed had agreed on its main themes-the grandeur of the nation's destiny as a nation, the certainty of slavery's destruction, the impossibility of dissolving the Union. The compromise was unnecessary because slavery was a transient institution. Compromise was also unnecessary as a means of preserving a Union where natural and economic factors made a permanent cleavage between North and South impossible. Seward's speech was able and eloquent, but in it he made a statement that, misconstrued, was to be used with considerable effect against him. The Constitution, he said, devoted the public domain to noble purposes, but there was "a higher law than the Constitution" that devoted the public domain to the same high ends. This statement, as Greeley said, reinforced a constitutional obligation by the sanction of divine law, but Seward's opponents declared that he had overridden the Constitution, and presumed to legislate as the steward of God Almighty. Despite the criticisms of Seward's opponents, the speech was in great demand. It made him one of the leaders of the antislavery forces. Taylor died July 9, 1850, and with Fillmore in the White House Seward's influence in national political affairs decreased. Clay's compromise became law in September, the Whig party divided on slavery, and in 1852 the Democratic candidate for President, Franklin Pierce, won an overwhelming victory over Whig Winfield Scott. The Whig party now began fragmenting. It went to pieces after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska