Harry Siegel: Jill Gill’s 70 years of painting a changing NYC

“They all disappear,” said Jill Gill when I visited her Upper West Side apartment the other week just before she escaped the city heat for some beach time on Long Island. “It’s extremely ephemeral.”

The 91-year-old artist was talking about Manhattan and its haphazard buildings, the ordinary ones that feel permanent right up until they’re not.

“I adored the ones that had names on the tops of them — probably the owners’ girlfriend or wife or grandmother or whatever — and sculptures of heads over doorways, probably by the Italian stone workers who were hired that also could have been relatives. Stories we’ll never know but they’re there.”

She was sitting in the living room of her classic six, an urban magpie’s nest of books, objets d’art and ephemera — a stained glass window salvaged from a building that was being demolished, colored seltzer bottles in a window, a dozen different Statue of Liberty tchotchkes on a tabletop — along with her own artwork hung and scattered all about.

It’s a gloriously overstuffed place, where picking up any item for a closer look unearths other treasures behind or beneath or beside it. 

We were meeting in person after I wrote about “Site Lines: Lost New York 1954-2022,” a gorgeous new collection of Gill’s paintings over the decades along with her insightful essays about each block’s lost buildings and what changed as those gave way to progress and, often, sky-scraping glass and steel.

The book is no screed but a celebration in pictures and words of what’s been lost in the course of change and sometimes progress.

“I think of New York as a master conjurer,” Gill writes in the book’s introduction. 

“The headline trick, played on locals and visitors alike, is the disappearing act: now you see it, now you don’t. A peculiar urban amnesia follows the conjurer’s performance: the inability to remember the buildings and businesses that previously existed on a razed or redeveloped block or lot. The ‘Lost New York’ paintings, completed over the course of 68 years, are my antidote to forgetting what has vanished.”

She goes on: “My sense of urban loss started when I was young. I am a Manhattan orphan. By the time I was thirteen, every building I had lived in, and the two public schools I had attended, had been torn down. Even Morningside Hospital, the place of my birth, is long gone. Perhaps that explains why, when I learned that a familiar block was destined for demolition, I would rush to its deathbed, camera in hand… to preserve, in watercolor and ink, the ordinary blocks that sprouted without benefit of planning boards and star architects.”

That began for Gill when the “sheer power and rough majesty” of the Third Ave. El was dismantled in the mid-1950s; soon “tenement sandwiches” on the Avenue would smush older walkups between new office towers.

“What interested me about ordinary buildings was just that lives were lived behind them, and they were like books you could open and learn stories. And the stories were being lost,” she told me. 

“It was like knowing a friend had a fatal illness… I would go with my camera and take many, many, many photos and close-ups in real detail: how the bricks were, there are all sorts of different brick patterns that are possible, lots of close ups and from different vantage points.”

Eventually, Gill would lay the photos out on her bed and start painting from them, “pretty much like scat singing: I fill in details as I see they’re needed to get the picture there.” 

“The book is my gift to New York and to anybody who loves it or is interested in it,” Gill said about having this part of her life’s work collected in a volume where her small sketches and big canvases all appear at about the same size. 

“Site Lines” is a book many people will open at random rather than read through, glimpsing at her work that’s detailed and colorful and instantly evocative even as it lacks literal perspective. 

“It’s saving so much of New York that otherwise would have been probably lost to history, because it was ordinary and it was un-landmarkable, unremarkable buildings and blocks,” Gill said. 

“I would hope that newcomers to the city would get a feel of what the city used to be and its pace and its variety. Now it is slick and commercial. And you don’t see the sky and you don’t get individual shops, you get malls all along the avenues. And that’s too bad. It’s very exciting when once in a while you just see a survivor and you want to cheer it.”

Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.