I'm not going to say I nearly fell over (I was already seated) when I read Alexander Garvin's obituary two days ago in the NYT by Paul Goldberger and it was revealed as background that Alexander grew up in Manhattan, went to Riverdale Country School, then Yale, and that his father Jacques, and the family's wealth, stemmed from the ownership of "the Claridge Food Corporation, a canned goods producer."
I pretty much defy any reader to tell me they remember Claridge Foods and their location on Murray Street. I passed the factory on my way to school every day through the fourth grade until my father sent me to a Greek school in Beechhurst.
When the weather was warm the doors were open and behind the screens you could see the Black men, smoking, with shovels churning through huge barrels of what was believed to be meat. There was no particular odor, but a wet, hot steaminess blew onto the sidewalk.
My walk to school was unaccompanied. There was only one street to across, Barclay Avenue, a street with so little traffic there was no need for a crossing guard or a STOP sign. There was a YIELD sign at the intersection with Murray Street.
Barclay at that point, running east, bordered the school grounds. There were no homes on it at that point, only small industrial outfits.
P.S. 22 was literally around the corner from the house. We were sent home for lunch. I cannot recall a time that I ever ate lunch in the school building. It was heated by coal and has long been replaced by something that itself is no longer new.
There were two entrances to P.S. 22, one marked BOYS, the other GIRLS. I have a picture of the school, a solid, red brick fortress typical of NYC elementary schools at the time.
By the time I was going there all classes were co-ed. It had been only a few years before I got there that the building housed K-8th grade. The junior high, middle school grades hadn't yet been introduced.
The Claridge factory could be seen from our backyard, with a large smokestack that at one time belched black smoke on my mother's laundry drying on the line.
At some point the buildings housed Star Catering, which I believe made meals for the airlines. There was an Arnold bread commissary there at some point. The Claridge building on the east side of Murray has been repurposed as something claiming to be "Real Estate Management." The west side building is gone and is an empty lot. For now.
Only once in my life did I ever see a can of goods from Claridge on a supermarket shelf at King Kullen up the street from our house. My father said Claridge made Army rations during the war. This is corroborated by a 1946 story in the NYT in a News of Food section that tells us:
Tinned Corned Beef Hash Is Adaptable to Many Uses by Those Who Cook in Haste
The Claridge Food Company of Flushing, which had hardly started to turn out canned goods for the general trade when the war came along and it had to divert its output to the Army, is back now in civilian production.
Yes Virginia, people used to eat hash, not smoke it. The article is a real foody story about the things you can do with Claridge's hash at 22¢ a pound.
I wonder if the Garvin family somehow played down where their money was made from, somewhat like when Niles Crane on Frazier learned that his unseen wife's family fortune was derived from restaurant/bar bathroom urinal cakes used in the men's rooms nationwide. After all, an image of meat being worked on with shovels might not be a photo in a silver frame on the family's piano.
As for Alexander Garvin's achievements, they had nothing to be with canned meat. In a series of municipal planning commission postings, he had a hand in shaping what NYC looked like, especially after 9/11.
Mr. Garvin was the first student at Yale to come away with a dual degree in architecture and urban planning. He taught at Yale for 55 years.
If anyone remembers the imbroglio of opinions and proposals that flooded in when suddenly 16 acres in lower Manhattan had no buildings on it, they will remember that at times it seemed nothing was ever going to get built.
I was working on the 29th floor of Tower One that day, got down safely to the street after about a 35 minute staircase descent, when I met three other women from my floor who were walking north on West Broadway.
One of the women, Beth, had a husband who worked in the Puck building on Houston Street. He was an architect for Swanke Haydn Connell. When we reached the office and were accommodated by the stunned and somewhat frantic staff, I sat in a chair in the conference room and said to no one in particular, "boy are they going to fight over this one." By then, both towers had crumbled.
The obituary tells how Mr. Garvin worked his way through the thicket of conflicting, self-centered interests and was able to help make what we see today as the result of the planning efforts.
Credit is given to Mr. Garvin for restoring Greenwich Street as a through street through the site, rather than being blocked by the original building placements.
Mr. Garvin was also Mayor Bloomberg's point man on trying to get the Olympics in NYC for 2012. That of course didn't work. No mention is made if Mr. Garvin was behind Bloomberg's desire for a West Side football stadium to be built over the Hudson Yard tracks.
The idea of the Jets and Giants playing on the West Side might have seemed like a terrific idea, but the logistics of crowd and parking killed the plan. My thought on that was that a tailgate meeting of the Budweiser and grilled bratwurst set with the white wine and shrimp set from the U.S. Open crowd might create some sparks. Talk about a divided city.
I wonder if Alexander Garvin's father Jacques ever took him as a lad to see how the hash was made in Flushing.
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