Monumenta slavica

More than fifteen years ago I posted a brief note about the Balkan folk-song "Mečkin Kamen" (The Bear's Rock) and its commemoration of the 1903 Illinden uprising in what is now North Macedonia. I included an image of the spomenik (monument) at Kruševo, which memorializes the same events. Today I discovered that an American biologist named Donald Niebyl has spent several years compiling a lavishly-illustrated database of similar monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia.

Unlike the Illinden spomenik (which he includes), most of these memorials (one example is shown above) commemorate the anti-fascist struggle in the Balkans during World War II. Constructed largely between 1960 and 1990, these oddly-shaped Brutalist structures are now often in disrepair. Sometimes atrocious in isolation, they can be uncannily evocative when viewed in their surroundings.

A related book, Spomenik Monument Database, is available from FUEL Publishing.

Spring list

I've been too busy of late to write anything substantial but not, happily, too busy to read. These three books have very little in common other than the fact that they were published either this year or last, and that I liked them enough to buy a copy. I've reached a point where adding to my library isn't always advisable, if only in terms of shelf space, and so I've been trying to rely on the public library system for run-of-the-mill reading matter (electronic books not being to my taste). These books are exceptions.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is a beautifully written book about training a goshawk named Mabel, about coping with grief, and also about the writer T. H. White, who is best known for his Arthurian fiction but who also composed an account of his own ill-fated attempt to raise a similar hawk. Macdonald's book has been a surprise bestseller both in her native UK, where it was released last year by Jonathan Cape, and now in the US, where it is published by Grove Press, and it has won several awards. For once, all the attention is amply justified; Macdonald is a fine writer, able to deftly capture both her hawk's flights around the English countryside and her own emotional turmoil. Inevitably, there is a movie deal, but although H is for Hawk might make a fine film, nothing, I suspect, can substitute for the pleasures and integrity of Macdonald's prose.

Terhi Ekebom's Logbook, on the other hand, has almost no prose at all. It's a tiny illustrated chapbook published in Latvia (though what text there is is in English). Grief is also the subject here, although the details are as mysterious as the atmosphere. Two women — it's hard to say if they are adolescents or adults — inhabit a house in the middle of the sea where they tend to a bedridden male figure who is menaced by an expanding darkness. Their only temporary defense against its spread are the light-releasing spheres of a marine plant that float up to the surface. Logbook is available from kuš! komiksi for $6 including postage worldwide.

Finally, for some time I've been following Tom Miller's excellent blog Daytonian in Manhattan, which is dedicated to the architecture and histories of Manhattan buildings and monuments, but I've had to admit to some frustration because there was simply too much of interest there to comfortably digest online. Fortunately, a selection of entries has been published in a reader-friendly and nicely illustrated compact format by Universe (Rizzoli) in the US and Pimpernel Press in the UK. Though the book includes a few internationally renowned buildings (the Flatiron Building, St. Patrick's Cathedral), most of the structures it covers, like the Village's Pepperpot Inn and the melancholy General Slocum Memorial Fountain, are easily overlooked, and Miller's enthusiastic dedication to their stories is admirable. Let's hope there will be sequels to come.

The Lost Tower

This postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge and the adjacent waterfront, published by the Rotograph Co., was postmarked in 1905. Offering a view of the bridge at a time before automobile traffic had begun to transform the city, and of the rough-and-tumble district that, considerably scrubbed-up, is now anchored by the South Street Seaport, it's interesting for a number of reasons, but there's one particular detail that leaps out, and that's the curious structure on the far right that appears to be some sort of obelisk or monument, and which hardly seems to belong in the picture at all.

A bit of research soon revealed that the tower was not a ceremonial structure or an observatory for turn-of-the-century sightseers but, in fact, an industrial building constructed to serve a very specific purpose. It was one of two cast-iron "shot towers" designed by the 19th-century architect James Bogardus for use in the manufacture of lead shot. From a vat near the summit of the building, molten metal would be poured through a sieve; as the droplets fell from the heights they would be shaped by surface tension into tiny spheres, which would then harden when they fell into a tank of water at the bottom. This particular tower, which stood at 82 Beekman Street and rose some 215 feet high, was built for Tatham & Brothers around 1856; its construction followed by a year or so that of a similar but shorter structure which Bogardus had built further uptown for the McCullough Shot and Lead Co.

A pioneer of cast-iron construction, which relied on prefabricated elements that could be strikingly ornate, James Bogardus designed a number of important commercial buildings in Manhattan and elsewhere, but only a handful are still standing, including buildings at 75 Murray Street, 63 Nassau Street, and 254 Canal Street. A plaque at City Hall memorializes the McCullough Tower, and in TriBeCa a street sign officially designates James Bogardus Triangle.

The New York Times reported, in 1892, that the formerly dull red Tatham Tower had recently been repainted a yellow so vivid that "you can hardly see anything else as you look off toward the river." The color shown in the Rotograph postcard is not reliable, as it has been layered onto an image taken from a black-and-white original. Over the years the building suffered at least two serious fires, which were reported in the Times on February 8, 1895 and June 28, 1899. The image below depicts the earlier incident, which resulted in one death. Both shot towers were demolished in 1907.


The definitive volume on James Bogardus is Cast-Iron America: The Significance of James Bogardus, by Margot and Carol Gayle.

The Akin Hall Library (c.1907)

This Rotograph postcard of what is now known as the Akin Free Library, located in Pawling, New York, was probably taken during the final stages of its construction, which was completed in 1908. The "undivided back" format of the reverse became obsolete after March 1, 1907, when new postal regulations permitted a message to be included on the same side as the address.

The Library was founded by a local Quaker businessman, Albert J. Akin. At the time, the Quaker Hill neighborhood in which it was located was dominated by a large resort, the Mizzentop Hotel, which Akin had also founded. During the Depression the hotel was shuttered, and apart from the library, a nearby church, and an old Quaker meeting house the hill is now strictly residential. The business district of Pawling is several miles away at the base of the hill, strung along the rail line.

The library, which is run by a private association, remains in operation during limited hours. In addition to its modest book holdings, which circulate to members, it houses a small natural history museum in the basement as well as historical exhibits in the upper storey. The relatively open terrain seen around the building in this view is now more heavily wooded.

The Equitable Monument

Aloft amidst the vapors
Of an early morning dew
Over old Manhattan Island
Comes the sunlight's golden hue.

Around me mammoth buildings.
Lift their peaks up to the sky
Far below the sea gulls
Seeking food, they swiftly fly.

Beneath me busy millions
Driven on by Destiny
Ride upon the wheels of Progress
To the call of Industry.

And upon this noble structure
Whereon whose heights I stand
Tolls three thousand odd mechanics
Skillful both of brain and hand.

From the day they sunk the caisons
To the day they laid the roof
They have built it forty stories
Cold, heat, fool, and fire proof.

And each one a Union member
Being paid the wage he sought
Have made it one of many
Of the monuments they've wrought.

M. P. Kearin
December 1914

The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators, 1915