The Oil Can The Award Winning Newsletter of the Cooperstown Rotary Club Vol. 87, No. 15— October 20, 2009 He designed our village library building... Ernest Flagg, architect extraordinary veryone here, Iʹm certain, has walked down Main Street in Cooperstown, and admired the beautiful Village Li‐ brary Building, which also houses the Cooperstown Art E Association and the Village Offices. But have you ever wondered who designed it? Somehow, I never did until very re‐ cently, when I learned that its architect was named Ernest Flagg. What I found surprised me. Ernest Flagg was not just a gifted ar‐ chitect, who designed important American buildings. He was also a social reformer, who helped improve the lives of New York Cityʹs urban poor. He was a city planner, who influenced todayʹs New York City skyline. And he designed what was at the time the tallest building in the world. So what was he doing in a small vil‐ lage in upstate New York? Ernest Flagg was born in Brooklyn in 1857, the son of an Episco‐ pal clergyman who had become an itinerant portrait painter, as well as a speculative land developer. The family was not without its connections. One of Ernestʹs aunts had married Cornelius Van‐ derbilt; his sister Louise married Charles Scribner, the publisher. In 1872, at the age of fifteen, Ernest left school to become an office boy on Wall Street, and two years later ‐‐ with his older brother Jared ‐‐ he opened a small business selling salt codfish at New Yorkʹs Fulton Fish Market. For a time he lived in some of the filthy, ill‐lit, badly ventilated tenements of the Lower West Side. But after a few years, in 1881, the fish business failed. Ernest then joined with his father and brother Jared in promoting what was then a new idea in New York City real estate ‐‐ the cooperative apartment house. He gained practical experience in both the planning and construction of city buildings. Then, in 1888, his rich uncle Cornelius Vanderbilt, ʺtold me that I ought to become an architect and that if I would go to Paris and enter the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts, he would pay the cost.ʺ Ernest Flagg was 31 years old, but he accepted the offer gladly. The Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, was the leading school of architecture at the time, and many aspiring American architects were going to France to study there for at least a short time. Flagg spent three years in France; two of them studying for the Ecoleʹs difficult entrance exams, and one year at the school itself. Like most other Americans he did not remain long enough to earn a degree. But he came home in 1891 filled with the new ideas being taught by the Ecole. ʺEvery true architect,ʺ Flagg later wrote, ʺmust have two natures, the practical and the artistic.ʺ The right combi‐ nation of these, or what he called the ʺparti,ʺ or ʺchoiceʺ is ʺthe logical solution of the problem from his dual stand‐ point as constructor and artist. The ability to grasp the right parti is a gift of nature.... It is the characteristic of genius in architecture.ʺ The good architect, Ernest Flagg believed, has at his disposal the entire repertory of historical styles, and should draw upon it freely as artistry and the situation demand, but he is not an archaeologist, and must use this history in combination with the open presentation of evolving materials and methods of construction. This combination is often apparent in the buildings, large and small, that Flagg designed over his long life. Cont. on p. 2 The Oil Can October 20, 2009 Page two Ernest Flagg (Continued from page 1) Today’s Program October 20 n his return to America in 1891, “A Bad Day for the Yankees” Ernest Flagg plunged into several Gabe Schechter decades of frenetic work. His first important commission was to design Forthcoming Programs O the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, October 27 which remains one of our capitalʹs most impor‐ The Otsego Land Trust tant buildings. Flaggʹs name was suggested for Executive Director Peter Hujik the project by a sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward, whom we know here as the creator of the November 3 Indian Hunter statue in Lakefront Park ‐‐ which is General Election Day a copy of the original erected in New Yorkʹs Cen‐ Polls Open 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. tral Park in 1864. Over the next years Ernest Flagg designed public buildings, mansions, commercial November 3 buildings, churches, and even tombs. They include Saint Lukeʹs Hospital on New Election Day Pancake Feast York Cityʹs Morningside Heights, the United States Naval Academy buildings in Cooperstown Veterans Club Annapolis, the Scribner bookstore building on Fifth Avenue, and a number of luxurious mansions in New York City and elsewhere. November 10 But other aspects of Ernest Flaggʹs life and work were, I think, even more impor‐ WW II Veterans Honor Flight tant ‐‐ and form a part of the history of our Library Building. Greg Furlong In 1894 Ernest Flagg published an article in Scribnerʹs Magazine called ʺThe New York Tenement‐House Evil and its Cure.ʺ Ernest had lived in lower West Side November 17 tenement buildings when he was selling codfish at Fulton Fish Market years be‐ Springbrook Update fore, and he never forgot the experience. Patricia Kennedy The long rectangular blocks that cover most of Manhattan had been laid out in standardized lots 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep. On them New Yorkers built November 24 their town houses side by side, with gardens at the back. By the mid‐19th century, New Member Profile—Angie Ehrway however, wealthier New Yorkers had moved uptown, and their original homes had been chopped up into tenement apartments, often paired with so‐called rear December 1 tenements at the back of the lot, with windows only in those few rooms at the Cooperstown Rotary Foundation front or rear. Ellen Tillapaugh-Kuch In 1879 the Board of Health made what Flagg called ʺfeeble efforts at reform,ʺ and launched the creation of so‐called dumbbell houses, ninety feet long, which December 8 were built in great numbers throughout the City. Each floor was divided into two Christmas Outreach Gathering or four ʺrailroad styleʺ apartments of three to seven rooms, reached by un‐lit inte‐ December 15 rior stairways, and with narrow halls on each floor with communal toilets and CCS Kindergarten Angels washing tubs. They were called ʺdumbbell housesʺ because a four by forty foot air well was placed between each pair of buildings. This created, in Flaggʹs words, House Committee Schedule ʺwells or shafts of stagnant air at the sides, acting as conductors of noise, odors, (Meeting Set-up & Breakdown) and disease from one apartment to another. The bedrooms of one family have [ \ their windows directly opposite, and four feet distant from, the windows of the Carl Good — October 6 house adjoining. Each family has generally a cooking‐stove in one of the rooms Will Green — October 13 which open on to this same slit or well.... Very little imagination is required to Tom Heitz — October 20 picture to oneʹs self the wretched condition of people forced to live under such Jim Howarth — October 27 circumstances, and the great dangers arising therefrom to the health and morals John Irvin — November 3 of the community. By far the greater number of the inhabitants of this city live Jim Kevlin — November 10 in such homes. From sixteen to twenty families to a single lot.ʺ Tom Lieber — November 17 Continued on The Oil Can Insert…. John Ramsey — November 24 The Oil Can Insert Page One October 20, 2009 Earnest Flagg, Architect Extraordinary (continued) his, Flagg continued, was as uneconomical as it was terrible: ʺGreat sums of money are yearly squan‐ dered upon making the structures unfit to live in. Then other great sums are contributed by charitable people to relieve the distress which these horrible structures engender. Hospitals are kept full, chil‐ dren die, misery, disease and crime flourish, because the people are huddled together without light Tand air.... All this is accomplished at a vastly increased expense over what the same rentable space, well lighted, might be obtained for.ʺ Instead, Ernest Flagg designed a new kind of building, built around an open court on a 100 foot square lot, and two years later Elizabeth Scriven Clark gave him the opportunity to build it. The Alfred Corning Clark Buildings on West 69th Street opened in 1898. Many of you will recall the name of Jacob Riis, whose writing and photography around the turn of the 20th cen‐ tury did more than anything else to awaken America to the plight of our urban poor. In 1899, he visited the com‐ pleted project, and wrote ‐‐ in an Atlantic Monthly article on ʺThe Tenement: Curing its Blightʺ, as follows: ʺThe Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, as they were called in recognition of the support of this public‐spirited woman, have been occupied a year. When I went through them, the other day, I found all but five of the 373 apartments they contain occupied, and a very large waiting list of applicants for whom there was no room.... The plan of the buildings, for which Ernest Flagg, a young and energetic architect, with a very practical interest in the welfare of the Other Half, has the credit, seems to me to realize the ideal of making houses under a common roof. The tenants appeared to take the same view of it. They were a notably contented lot...