Riot at Union Square
c. 1947 (depicting 1928 -1930)
Peter Hopkins (b. 1911)
Oil on canvas, 37 X 48
Signed lower right: Peter Hopkins
Gift of the artist, 66.82

 

Contrary to popular belief, Union Square was not named for its notoriety as a stronghold of New York's radical labor movement. Nevertheless, the area became associated with working-class causes as early as 1882 with the launch of what evolved into America's traditional Labor Day Parade: on September 5 of that year, twenty-five thousand marchers, gathered under a banner of the Knights of Labor, circled the square to demonstrate their support for an eight-hour work day and a ban on child labor. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, immigrants from the nearby blocks of the Lower East Side tended to assemble on the plaza at Union Square for open-air debates on issues vital to their economic livelihood. The square's reputation as a pro-labor locale was further solidified in the 1920s, when it became home to the Amalgamated Bank, the nation's first labor-owned bank; to headquarters of both the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the Communist Party (lodged one block south on East 12th Street) and its newspaper, the Daily Worker; and to various other progressive agencies and relief organizations, left-wing book shops, and bargain stores. Artists also drifted into the neighborhood in this period, sketching the proletariat crowds and the intriguing subculture of loiterers, soap-box prophets, and anarchist agitators.¹

A more explosive atmosphere infused Union Square as rallies by political dissidents, unemployed workers, and communist sympathizers increased in number and darkened in mood. These led to a series of clashes pitting the participants against New York's police force. In August 1927 angry crowds who had packed into Union Square to await news of the Sacco-Vanzetti execution were roughly dispersed by the police. On May 18, 1929, a demonstration against police brutality, led by the Communist Party, ended similarly when police charged the crowds to make arrests and injured several marchers. These confrontations erupted into uglier violence on March 6, 1930, when a mass protest at Union Square, calling for government action against unemployment, deteriorated into a melee after demonstrators -many of them jobless -resisted police efforts to prevent them from marching south to City Hall. The ensuing tumult resulted in one hundred injuries and thirteen arrests. This riot was the turning point in galvanizing public opinion against such acts of unnecessary police coercion, and city officials were subsequently pressured to guarantee the right to free assembly in Union Square.²

Peter Hopkins, a recent enrollee at the Art Students League when the March 6 demonstration occurred, witnessed the proceedings from a window overlooking Union Square. Seventeen years later he recalled the scene in Riot at Union Square, reworking some of the facts-of-record in order to create a more dramatic composition. The perspective captures the action at ground level looking south from 17th Street toward Union Square West (Broadway). The facade of the Park Pavilion, thrusting into the picture from the left, directs the viewer's eye to the unfolding drama at center, in which the onrushing police, menacing in their dark uniforms, deploy clubs, lunging horses, and the force of a water hose to quell the throng of demonstrators clad in buff-colored street wear. (A back-up battalion of firemen and street cleaners on hand to clear litter from the square were ordered to aim powerful streams of water into the crowd in an effort to stymie their movement.)³ A brunette in a sun dress, its vivid red color no doubt a reference to the "Red Rally's" ties to the Communist Party, holds her ground, mustering strength to strike her placard at an officer preparing to grab her. Reporters scribble notes on the sidelines.⁴ The buildings edging Union Square form a grand architectural enclosure for this urban spectacle.

The artist, raised in New York City, enjoyed an eclectic career, working as a writer, dishwasher, dog breeder, actor, teacher, portraitist, and theatrical scene painter. Hopkins' formal studies at the Art Students League were punctuated by a seventeen-year hiatus. Having briefly taken courses there under George Bridgman in 1928, he returned for four years of intermittent instruction following his service in the U.S. Army Air Corps Meteorological Service during World War II. Riot at Union Square, painted during this period of renewed association with the league, suggests the influence of his teacher, Reginald Marsh, whose studio happened to overlook Union Square. In 1950 this painting was one of eleven works by Hopkins featured in an award exhibition presented by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.⁵ Although he continued to paint and draw after 1950, Hopkins focused his later career on teaching and lecturing about art at New York City area colleges. A longtime resident of Greenwich Village, he has remained there since his retirement.

Notes:

  1  Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Raphael Soyer, and Georges Shreiber were among the artists attracted to the area during the 1920s and 1930s, where the top floors of Union Square's older housing stock and commercial buildings offered ideal studio light. The relationship between New York artists and Union Square during its heyday as a center of American labor unrest is explored by Stanley I. Grant, James M. Dennis, and Kathleen M. Daniels in essays accompanying the exhibition catalogue Between Heaven and Hell: Union Square in the 1930s (Wilkes-Barre, Penn: Sordoni Art Gallery, 1996), pp. 5 -40.

  2  The March 6 demonstration coincided with announcements of the highest level of unemployment ever charted by New York State's Industrial Commission since statistics began to be collected in 1914. The Third International had called the rally to draw public attention to what was termed International Unemployment Day. When the gathering failed to end by one in the afternoon, the deadline given to the organizers by Police Commissioner Grover Whalen, police were ordered to exercise force to break up the protest as the participants prepared to move to City Hall.

  3  Newspaper accounts of the preventive measures on call for the March 6 rally vary according to political persuasion. The New York Times reported the "readiness" of the fire department to assist police in maintaining "peaceful speechmaking" at the event. The following day, it noted that once fighting between police and protesters had extended into the center of Union Square, "firemen turned on hoses to clear the mass of paper and banners that littered the street." The Daily News of March 7, 1930, offered a more explosive article, reporting, "A hydrant was opened and firemen and street cleaners aided in turning streams of water toward the remaining thousands, many of whom were stymied and unable to progress in either direction, while motorcycle police, armed with unused machine guns and tear bombs, flanked the Square on all sides."

  4  A graphic record of the riot's violent termination was made by a commercial cameraman on the scene. His footage was censored by the New York City Police Department, but segments of it resurfaced in a contemporary film produced by the Film and Photo League, reporting on the country's unemployment crisis. The league, whose coverage of the Depression's upheavals provided an alternative to the edited newsreels of the film industry, showed their "unemployment special" in union halls, churches, and other places where the jobless gathered.

  5  The painting was exhibited originally under the title May Day, 1928, but Hopkins later retracted this title, citing the riot of March 6, 1930, as its more probable source of inspiration. The composition conflates details from several Union Square demonstrations, however, and since 1989 the artist has requested that the painting be known as Riot at Union Square, with no specific date attached to the title. His correspondence on this matter, which includes autobiographical notes, is housed in the Museum Archives.