|
|
| Re: Historic Subway Tiles With Nothing To Do With Racism Or Even Confederacy to be Removed (1447209) | |||
 |
|||
| Home > SubChat | |||
|
[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ] |
|
||
|
Re: Historic Subway Tiles With Nothing To Do With Racism Or Even Confederacy to be Removed |
|
|
Posted by Michael549 on Mon Aug 21 02:03:30 2017, in response to Re: Historic Subway Tiles With Nothing To Do With Racism Or Even Confederacy to be Removed, posted by Michael549 on Mon Aug 21 01:58:15 2017. According to the NY Post - it is Civil War historian Dr. David Jackowe who claims the tiles honor the late New York Times head Adolph S. Ochs, a Southerner. He also believes Ochs was buried with a Confederate flag.-------- Below is a NY Times article from 2015: https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/06/29/1917-stars-and-bars-on-subway-walls/?mcubz=0 Looking Back 1917 | A Rebel Flag on Subway Walls? David W. Dunlap June 29, 2015 2:18 pm June 29, 2015 2:18 pm Photo Credit Share Tweet Save More David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 40 years. The hunt for Confederate symbolism led last week to the doorstep of The New York Times. “Tiny Confederate flags are right under the noses of millions of straphangers passing through the Times Square station every day,” The New York Post declared on Friday. “The tile mosaics honor the late New York Times head Adolph S. Ochs, a Southerner with ‘strong ties to the Confederacy,’ said Civil War historian Dr. David Jackowe.” Subway riders were quoted by The Post as calling for the immediate eradication of the X-shaped decorative tilework, installed in and around the 40th Street mezzanine in 1917. There are numerous facts in The Post account. Mr. Ochs, who was the publisher of The Chattanooga Times before coming to New York in 1896, was proud of his ties to the South. His mother, Bertha Levy, had immigrated to Natchez, Miss., from Bavaria. Later, in Nashville, she married Julius Ochs, who was also from Bavaria. The Post noted, accurately, that Bertha was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, though it failed to add that Julius served the Union cause as soldier and provisioner. (And misspelled her maiden name as Levi.) “She had embraced a contemptuous antebellum view of blacks, and for the rest of her life was dogmatically conservative, even reactionary,” Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones wrote in “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times” (1999). “Julius, on the other hand, recoiled at the sight of slave auctions in Mississippi and Louisiana.” “Declaring slavery a ‘villainous relic of barbarism,’ he became as determined to abolish the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ as Bertha was to preserve it,” Ms. Tifft and Mr. Jones wrote. After Mr. Ochs died in 1935, the Daughters of the Confederacy sent a tribute described by The Times as “a pillow the top of which bore a flowered likeness of the Stars and Bars of the Southern Confederacy.” Perhaps that is what The Post meant when it said Mr. Ochs was “buried with a Confederate flag.” So can we conclude that a band of predominantly blue X’s — edged in white against a field of red — was meant by the subway’s chief architect, Squire J. Vickers, as a symbolic tribute to the Ochs family? After all, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, which built the first subway, had accommodated The Times 13 years earlier by naming its 42nd Street station “Times Square.” The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is not convinced. “The banding design was based on geometric forms with multicolored palettes, and the various designs are seen in stations that opened at this time,” said Sandra Bloodworth, the director of the authority’s Arts and Design unit. “While pictorial images that referenced what was above were often used in the designs, there is no evidence that the geometric patterns, and colors used, indicated anything beyond ornamentation.” Nearly 200 commuters were seen passing through the mezzanine in a five-minute period on Friday evening. They looked untroubled by the decorative environment. No one among them recoiled at the sight of The Post’s “tiny Confederate flags.” In fact, no one seemed to notice. |
|
|
|