#batterypark

This 1930 scene in our Winthrop Family Home Movie Collection has always fascinated us. It was shot somewhere in #NYC and is part of a reel shot from a car driving all over the city.  What we really love on the reel is the few seconds of this bagel seller. The babushka, the wicker pram, the bagels stacked on sticks. It’s just got a poignant beauty to it.  But where was it filmed?  Since today is an #ArchivesHashtagDay, with the theme #ArchivesYouAreHere, we thought we’d answer that question at last, after getting help from colleagues in New York.

The home movie in question can be watched here: https://bmac.libs.uga.edu/pawtucket2/index.php/Detail/objects/39245  This scene shows up at 36:58 for just a few seconds.  So we see the men in the image driving around lower Manhattan, we see the Manhattan Bridge, and the area now known as DUMBO.

The location clues are: water, tugboats, a sign on the building that says something Steamboat Company and Coney Island and something, I passed the scene along to consulting archivist and friend, Susan Woodland, longtime resident of New York, who once worked very close to this area.  She recognized the building on the left as the old fire station on the pier at the corner of Battery Park, and says the building is still there. She adds, “The boats from Ellis Island would have left people off around there, and office workers from Wall Street would have been having lunch in the park, or perhaps grabbing a bagel before work? I wish there were much, much more footage of the bagel seller.” Me, too!

With this more pinpointed information, I found some older images of that pier online. This one shows someone else selling food from a cart, and the buildings are more elaborately decorated.

The Museum of the City of New York has even more photos: https://collections.mcny.org/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=24UP1GROJE17V&SMLS=1&RW=1536&RH=722

This one from The New York Landmarks Conservancy gives a wonderful bird’s-eye view of the area:

An employee there confirmed that the building on the middle of this photo is the Iron Steamboat Company with service to Coney Island and Rockaway. It is “...today’s Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Park, and consists of landfill taken from the World Trade Center site when Port Authority constructed the first building in the 1970s. The current waterfront does not reflect the configuration of the waterfront in the 1930s.  This area was also significantly reconfigured with the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.”  She also very helpfully referred me to a book that gives some history of that boat service, Around Manhattan Island and Other Tales of Maritime NY Illustrated Edition by Brian J. Cudahay. It’s available online and I was able to read it full text thanks to the UGA Libraries.

The Mystic Seaport Museum has photographs documenting fire damage to the Iron Steamboat Company building in the 1920s, and its demolition in the 1960s.

You can see the area as it looks now, thanks to Google Maps:  https://goo.gl/maps/GcpVczbXzez1gLDA9  The pier building has been renovated into a restaurant, bar, and shops. The Gotham To Go website has terrific photos of the Pier A from all around and, even better, from above, and briefly tells its history: https://gothamtogo.com/a-look-back-at-the-renovation-of-historic-pier-a-in-battery-park-city/

It’s pretty glitzy now, but we still love the 1930 view, preserved on film in our archives. We are there!