East River Waterfront
1932
Maurice Kish (b. 1898)
Oil on canvas, 44 X 36
Signed lower left: Maurice Kish
Gift of the artist, 72.41

 

The Trinity Coal Company at the foot of East 70th Street provided the setting for this somber February view. As barges and tugboats ply the East River's strong tides and choppy waters, the Trinity plant and other nearby smokestacks discharge their begriming vapors into New York's overcast skies.

From this dockside vantage point are seen the strong arch of the Hell Gate railway bridge and the delicate turrets of the Triborough Bridge where it spans Randalls Island. The East River, though crucial to the city's flow of commercial maritime vessels, posed a major obstruction to interborough transportation, requiring construction of many costly bridges and tunnels to connect Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn. From the mid-nineteenth century until 1956, the Welfare Island ferry operated from a slip just to the north of this site at the base of East 78th Street, providing access to the island's municipal welfare institutions. Welfare Island itself (formerly called Blackwell's island and now known as Roosevelt Island) can be seen across the river. The visible municipal buildings may have been part of Metropolitan Hospital, one of New York's largest hospitals of that period, which provided free medical services to the city's needy.¹ The massive apartment buildings of Roosevelt Island now replace most of the earlier structures.

Trinity was one of many coal yards located along Manhattan's shoreline until the demand for coal was reduced by the World War II -era development of a process for extracting oil from coal and the emergence of diesel-fueled ships' engines. Today, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive (East Side Highway) covers the East River shoreline, and buildings in the New York Hospital complex now occupy the point where East 70th Street meets the river.

Maurice Kish was born in Russia and came to the United States in his teens. For a long time he lived in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. He was a student at the National Academy of Design and Cooper Union and later was a member of the allied Artists of America and the Brooklyn Society of Artists. He exhibited extensively in the New York area during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. For further discussion of his career, see plate 89.

Notes:

  1  The WPA Guide to New York City (1939; reprint, New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 423.