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The Doherty monument in First Calvary is one beautiful bit of carving, in my opinion.

Art school faculty, turtlenecked and smoking french cigarettes, would probably describe the thing as “Sophia, goddess of wisdom – in the form of a christian angel, sitting within a Roman structure, crowned by a cross – representing an agglutination of civilized democratic-christian progress advancing since the time of the Greeks and the Roman Republic which ultimately and inevitably (and logically) manifested as The United States. The angel casts her eye skyward, vigilant, with sword in hand. A pacific and expectant expression suggests the nearness of the second coming and resurrection of the dead.”

Such imperious and hyperbolic thinking was very much in vogue in the years between 1900 and the first World War.

More after the jump…

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Eugene Doherty and his wife Mary J. Doherty are buried here. Their headstones have bas reliefs of palm fronds draped across them. The little flags are planted at the graves of military veterans in New York Cemeteries on national holidays to honor their service, but I found no evidence of Doherty serving in the military. That probably just means I didn’t know where to look.

Mr. Doherty, it seems, was a man of means and of no small reknown. He was a leading member of the Irish community on both sides of the Newtown Creek, and stood shoulder to shoulder with Battle-Ax Gleason in the eyes of his countrymen as one of their leading members.

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A manufacturer of rubber, Doherty specialized in the sort of material demanded by “turn of the 20th century” Dentists for the manufacture of dentures. His heavily advertised (see sample at bottom) Samson Rubber was a standard component used for the manufacture of false teeth. The factory, incorporated as Eugene Doherty Rubber Works, Inc., was located at 110 and 112 Kent Avenue over in Williamsburg. 110 is the brick building adjoining East River State Park for you Brooklyn folks and/or visitors to Smorgasburg.

Rubber, from Wikipedia:

The major commercial source of natural rubber latex is the Para rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), a member of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. This is largely because it responds to wounding by producing more latex.

Other plants containing latex include Gutta-Percha (Palaquium gutta), rubber fig (Ficus elastica), Panama rubber tree (Castilla elastica), spurges (Euphorbia spp.), lettuce, common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), Russian dandelion (Taraxacum kok-saghyz), Scorzonera (tau-saghyz), and Guayule (Parthenium argentatum). Although these have not been major sources of rubber, Germany attempted to use some of these during World War II when it was cut off from rubber supplies. These attempts were later supplanted by the development of synthetic rubbers. To distinguish the tree-obtained version of natural rubber from the synthetic version, the term gum rubber is sometimes used.

A neat image of the the Doherty Rubber Works building late in its heyday (1920) can be found at trainweb.org, and they have a great description of the whole scene at the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal here. I warn you though, you’re going to learn about the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal if you click that link! There’s also a partial photo of the Doherty factory as well.

Also, in a completely unrelated coincidence, North Brooklyn Community Group NAG is located at 110 Kent in modernity.

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Eugene Doherty died in 1906, his wife Mary in 1914. Luckily for Mary, the denture business was a lucrative one, and her years of mourning were spent in material comfort. At her death, she bequeathed the staggering sum of $621,148 to her heirs. $621,148 in 1914, mind you, and federal income tax had just become a reality in 1913. That’s at least $10,000,000 in modern coin.

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Life sized, if you’re a five-foot-tall woman, the statue itself is disarmingly realistic in execution and its eyes in particular seem to follow one about. Its weathered existence in the corrosive atmospheric miasmas extant about the nearby Newtown Creek for a century, only losing a thumb to the elements. Xanthian skill representative of true artistry went into the shaping of this stone, but I haven’t been able to find the name of the sculptor in any public record and that’s a real shame.

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Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.


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