This week we are posting two pieces, one by Mike Wallace, the other by Jim O’Grady. Both pieces touch upon the groundswell of opinion surrounding the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the more general question of leadership among prominent public figures.

Another Ruckus, Another War

Mike Wallace, co-author of “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,” is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is working on the second volume of “Gotham,” which will cover the history of New York City from 1898 through World War II.

The controversy over the mosque brings to mind a New York story from the Second World War.

In 1942, not long after the internment camps had been set up, the War Relocation Authority (W.R.A.) announced plans to grant “leaves” to detained Nisei (Japanese born in the U.S.) if they passed a loyalty check and had the promise of a job in an area of the country where they were not banned and where the reaction to them would not be overly hostile.

In September 1943, a “New York Church Committee for Japanese Work” – headquartered at 150 Fifth Avenue – issued an appeal to the city’s Christian churches to support this W.R.A. program by arranging jobs, housing and church affiliations. The Federal Council of Churches created a similar entity, a “Committee on Resettlement of Japanese-Americans,” and other faith-based groups stepped forward.

In April 1944, the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the Church of the Brethren announced they would open New York City’s first W.R.A.-approved hostel for Japanese-American evacuees, in a three story building at 168 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights.

The prominent Brooklyn clergy and laymen supporting it were not surprised by the grumbling of some local property owners and tenants. But they and many others were startled by an unexpected eruption from Mayor La Guardia, who issued a feverish protest, saying it was unfair to “turn these people loose” and “force them on New York City.” The Japanese-Americans, he said, constituted a potential danger to the city’s military installations, war plants and shipping facilities.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, shocked, publicly rebuked the mayor -– a man who “has fought long and vigorously for racial equality and justice” -– for backing racial discrimination. Ickes explained these were entirely innocent U.S. citizens, who were entitled to all its rights and privileges. The response, he said, would “seem ominously out of tune in a nation that is fighting for the principles of democracy and freedom.”

The faculty of Columbia’s School of Social Work asked La Guardia to reconsider. The Citizen’s Union noted that “several hundred” Japanese had been living in New York during the war, whose “presence has been accepted without excitement in a liberal cosmopolitan city,” and said the evacuees should be allowed to relocate. The A.C.L.U. similarly protested the mayor’s position.

The New York Japanese American Hostel opened on May 10, 1944, housing an Arizona family of three – the father a gardener, the daughter a social worker, and the son about to be inducted into the army – without incident.

The W.R.A. cautiously pressed ahead, sending people from states – Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington – that refused to take them back. In the first two weeks, 497 of the 22,000 Japanese-Americans who had left the camps had moved to New York City, where most found jobs in personal service.

By the end of June New York City hotels had begun hiring them, for menial tasks, about 100 a month. Positions in gardening and agriculture began opening up, even positions for professionals like admen, draftsmen, engineers. By the end of the war, there were 35 people in the Clinton Street hostel, and perhaps 2,000 evacuees had been incorporated in the five boroughs, a Japanese newspaper was in the works, and the storm had blown over.

“Crocodile Catholics”: the Muslims of Nineteenth-Century New York

Jim O’Grady writes about history and religion and is an eight-time winner of The Moth’s storytelling slam. He is the author of two biographies: Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor.

At least New York’s Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, on wading into the controversy over a proposed Islamic Cultural Center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, got it wrong in the traditional way.

Deploying the M.O. that his predecessor Cardinal O’Connor used in bungling his response to a murderous fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Archbishop Dolan botched a chance to speak with moral clarity on Islam. And like Cardinal O’Connor, he did it by missing the main point of a debate in choosing the lesser of two virtues.

On Wednesday, Archbishop Dolan offered to mediate between those who support and oppose the center–a service that required him to set himself up as a neutral party by conveying to The New York Times that “while he had no strong feelings about the project, he might support finding a new location for the center.”

In the unlikely event that both sides would agree to such mediation, there are others who could act as honest broker. Governor Paterson, for one, keeps volunteering for the job.

What Archbishop Dolan could better do–what he’s uniquely qualified to do–is promote understanding and help tamp down an incendiary issue by telling the story of Irish Catholics in America. In particular, he could draw parallels between the hard road to acceptance traveled by his forebears and the path that American Muslims are now on.

Irish Catholics took a lot of bad raps during America’s nativist era, which lasted most of the 19th century. You know the list: drunkenness, idolatry and the singing of cheesy ballads. Nowadays, we may smile at such ethnic stereotyping. But the Irish were once seriously viewed as a pathological underclass bent on taking down the country. And they were flooding into New York. By 1835, over 30,000 “low Irishmen,” described by diarist George Templeton Strong as “the most obstinate and ignorant white men in the world,” arrived in the city each year.

Nativists loathed Irish Catholics for more than their immigrant crudeness. “The sudden spurt of Irish Catholic immigration seemed menacing too, in the light of Vatican support for various reactionary European governments,” reminds Gotham, the classic history of New York. “Some believed it signaled an attempt by monarchists and despots to establish a beachhead in New York City, as a step toward infiltrating and overthrowing the republic.”

This was no joke.

The Anglo-Protestant establishment accused Irish Catholics of the serious charge of Popery–loyalty to a religious authority at odds with the people and government of the United States. It is this same slur that has been updated by those who contend that American Muslims yearn to impose Sharia law on our soil, or that American Muslims are indistinguishable from any Muslim anywhere who takes that as a goal. In both cases, a majority brands a minority as not just incapable of assimilation but actively hostile to it. The real agenda of these aliens, says the nativist, is to destroy America.

If that’s your perception, of course you’ll be offended by a mosque built near Ground Zero. Or anywhere in the fifty states. Opposition to new mosques has sprung up from California to Staten Island at locations that are obviously outside the boundaries of the sacred ground created by 9/11, no matter how broadly you draw them.

Similarly, Old Saint Patrick’s Church on Mulberry Street in Manhattan was seen by nativists in the 1830s as a flagrant and ongoing insult or, worse, a theocratic bulwark against the hard-won independence of American politics. (This was the era in which cartoonist Thomas Nast depicted Roman Catholic bishops as an invading wave of crocodiles, their miters drawn as gaping jaws.)

Given that history, how moving it would be to see Archbishop Dolan standing in front of the scarred brick wall surrounding the Old St. Patrick’s graveyard that his predecessor, Bishop Hughes, built to repulse anti-Catholic mobs. How instructive to hear the sitting prelate recount the night in 1836 that a seething gang of nativists marched up the Bowery to level the church and start rooting out the seditious rot of Catholicism in New York. He could talk about how the church was saved when the nativists dispersed once they’d blinked and confirmed what their eyes were seeing: parishioners aiming rifles at them through holes poked in the wall.

More importantly, Archbishop Dolan could quote Hughes’ famous rejoinder to John Breckenridge at a debate during which the Protestant clergyman declared Catholicism an enemy of democracy because of the Church’s support for the Inquisition in Spain and tyranny in Italy and France. Hughes replied that it was wrong to tar American Catholics with the misdeeds of Catholics elsewhere, just as he did not hold Breckenridge responsible for “the scourge of Protestant persecution” that Hughes grew up under as a boy in Ireland.

Then the man from County Tryone got to the point: I am an American by choice, not by chance, he said. I know the value of that civil and religious liberty which our happy government secures for all.

Since I’m scripting Archbishop Dolan’s press conference, I would have him look into the cameras and say solemnly: “I’m confident that those principles espoused by Bishop Hughes are today held by an overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans. And that is why, when this cultural center and house of worship is built, I will travel downtown to pay my respects to my fellow Americans, Imam Faisel Rauf and Daisy Kahn.”

That would be leadership–a contribution to the controversy far more valuable than mediation.

Toward the end of his life, Cardinal O’Connor regretted criticizing The Satanic Verses without having read the book first. Maybe doing so would have given him time to see that what was needed was not to emphasize his sympathy for aggrieved Muslim sensitivities but to criticize a death threat by an organized religion.

That would’ve gotten to the heart of the matter. Archbishop Dolan can do the same if he will stand up and talk about Muslim Americans, and their mosques, in the troubled yet hopeful light of the Irish Catholic experience. Now is the time for it.

Jennifer Fronc is an assistant professor in the History department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  She received her PhD in 2005 from Columbia University, where she specialized in urban and social history.  She currently serves as a consultant for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and is a former Big Onion walking tour guide. Fronc’s book New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era was published in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press.

On September 28, 1912, George Francis O’Neill headed out to Marshall’s Hotel, a black-owned establishment that offered comfortable accommodations, delicious food, cold drinks, and hot jazz. Located in two neighboring brownstones in the heart of the Tenderloin district, Marshall’s Hotel featured live music and attracted throngs of fashionable New Yorkers—both black and white—every night of the week. Indeed, Marshall’s revolutionized social life for black New Yorkers, who began to abandon the older clubs downtown. According to James Weldon Johnson, by 1900 Marshall’s had become the center “of a fashionable sort of life that hitherto had not existed.” The “actors, the musicians, the composers, the writers, and the better-paid vaudevillians” congregated at Marshall’s; white actors and musicians also spent evenings there in the company of their black friends. Luminaries such as Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Florenz Ziegfeld, and W.E.B. DuBois all frequented the establishment¹. In short, Marshall’s Hotel was not a gin-soaked, rat-infested, honky-tonk, but an important gathering place for New York’s black cultural elite.

In response to a request from a social activist organization, the Committee of Fourteen, D. Slattery, Special Assistant to the Police Commissioner, confirmed Marshall’s reputation. He explained that Marshall’s Hotel, located at 127/29 West 53^rd Street, operated under an unexpired Liquor Tax Certificate held by James L. Marshall. In his judgment, Marshall’s was “conducted in such a manner, that so far it has been impossible to obtain evidence sufficient to substantiate a charge of keeping a disorderly house. Everything possible is being done to prevent cause for complaint at this location.”²

1. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 1930 (New York: DaCapo Press, 1991), 118-9; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 28-9. James Marshall even took out an advertisement for his establishment in the first issue of The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, New Edition, (New York: Owl Books, 1994), 411.
2. D. Slattery to Frederick Whitin, 28 September 1908, Box 1, Folder 7, Committee of Fourteen records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Hereafter referred to as C14.
3. William S. Bennet to Walter Hook (sic), 24 December 1910, Box 1, Folder 1, C14.
4. D. Slattery to Frederick Whitin, 28 September 1908, Box 1, Folder 7, C14.
5. George Francis O’Neill’s Report on Marshall’s Hotel, 28 September 1912, Box 28, Folder “Invest. Reports 1912,” Committee of Fourteen records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Hereafter referred to as C14.
6. O’Neill’s Report on Marshall’s, 28 September 1912, Box 28, Folder “Invest. Reports 1912,” C14.
7. O’Neill’s Report on Marshall’s, 28 September 1912, Box 28, Folder “Invest. Reports 1912,” C14.
8. Report on Foresters Hunters Hall, 781 Wycoff Ave., 9 January 1916, Box 30, Folder 9, C14.
9. Report on 76 Seventh Avenue, 5 April 1913, Box 28, C14.

Jerri Sherman had a highly successful career in the fashion business producing women’s clothing under her own label. She also served for three years on the Small Business Advisory Board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Upon retirement, she returned to academia, where she received her master’s degree at New York University’s Gallatin School of Interdisciplinary Studies. “The Classes vs. the Masses” is a small part of her extensive research on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sunday opening, and she plans a book on the subject.

It took New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), founded in 1870, a remarkable twenty-one years to convince its board of trustees to open the museum to the public on Sunday. In the post-Civil War years, during what was called the Gilded Age, America’s greatest city experienced momentous social, cultural, and economic change, which led to an increasingly unrestrained environment. New ideas from many sources jeopardized traditional values, and the business and political frenzy acted as a magnet for masses of immigrants who came to America and settled in New York, hoping for a new and better life. By the 1880s, the city was both reeling from the onslaught of violent labor unrest and financial depression and struggling to accommodate a million people, fully two-thirds of whom lived in 32,000 overcrowded tenement buildings. Native-born New Yorkers felt their way of life threatened by the influx of these newcomers and their “foreign” ways. With a worsening urban crisis, it became clear that many aspects of social behavior required change.

The development of rival doctrines also brought serious challenges to Christian religious conservatism. Sabbatarianism, one of Protestantism’s traditional moral crusades, found that it had lost touch with the labor movement, whose members chose in increasing numbers to avoid church attendance. The idea of a day exclusively for religious dedication was supplanted by the need for a secular day of rest. Thus the old boundary of the Sunday Sabbath needed to be broken.

Entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913

The Sunday Taboo

Against this backdrop, the idea for the Sunday opening of the Met began with only a few scattered voices suggesting it. As early as 1873, the New York Tribune stated its “regret” that the exhibitions could not be opened on Sundays; two years later, it declared that the museum should be opened to workers on Sunday and should charge fees to those who did not work during the week and could afford to pay. In 1879, public attention focused on the Met’s activities and policies with the opening of its permanent building, provided by the city, in Central Park. “Why were the art museums in Boston and Philadelphia open on Sunday and not the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?” inquired both the Evening Post and the Herald. In its Sunday issue, published two days before the formal opening of the new building on March 30, 1880, the Tribune made its opinion clear:

From the very beginning the museum has been an exclusive social toy, not a great instrument of popular education, and all its failure to secure a more generous endowment from the state, all the popular lukewarmness, and the restless demonstrations of opposition, have sprung from the conviction that this radical fault existed.

By the mid-1880s, the idea of a Sunday opening became a rallying point for most city and state officials, political groups, civic and reform-minded citizens, labor unions, prominent clergymen, and most of the New York press. Nevertheless, the museum’s founding board of trustees, and all successive museum boards, fought tenaciously against all efforts to bring it about—since the group of prominent, conservative, Protestant men who had founded the Met considered breaking the Sunday Sabbath a sin against God.

A Change in Journalism

During the Civil War, a hunger for information had spurred the creation of Sunday editions of the daily newspapers. Although soundly condemned by the Sabbatarians, these Sunday editions continued to thrive. By 1883, when Joseph Pulitzer bought the World, a money-losing daily, from the financier Jay Gould, what came to be called “New Journalism” began to flourish. This new approach, as promulgated by the World, targeted as its readers the newly arrived immigrants. To court them, the World employed new writers, ran spirited “human interest” news with an emphasis on gossip, scandal, and sensation, and developed a formula that became hugely popular: it would identify a social ill that resonated with its readership, and then create a “crusade” to correct it. once the World identified such a cause—and the Sunday opening of the Met became such a “crusade”—it never let up until the matter reached a resolution.

Within four months, the World’s circulation of 20,000 doubled. Pulitzer’s success caused other newspapers to alter their policies on circulation, price, news, and editorials in order to survive. Ultimately the World became the leading voice for liberal causes in America and influenced the character of the entire daily press.

By 1885, with Sunday afternoon concerts in Central Park successfully established and attended by thousands, the battle to force the Met to open on Sunday became a broad movement. When it became known in 1886 that for years friends of the director and the trustees had visited the museum on Sunday by presenting a special pass to an attendant guarding a side door, the uproar grew.

The Marquand Gallery, six years after the Met opened its doors on Sundays.

On May 19, 1891, the issue was finally addressed during a three-hour meeting of the Met’s board. At this boisterous gathering, described as a “series of cloudbursts,” a sharply divided board passed the following resolution: “Resolved, that…the museum be opened free to the public every Sunday from 1 P.M. till half an hour before sunset.” A gentleman representing the World attended the meeting with a check in hand to help offset the additional costs of opening on the extra day. Later the World’s headline proclaimed, “THE PEOPLE TRIUMPH.” The New York Times trumpeted, “VICTORY IS WON AT LAST.”

“A Working-Class Crowd”

The influence of the press in bringing about change to New York’s social structure was obvious. Politicians, reformers, unions, and religious leaders, who for years had acted separately, combined their efforts and used the platform the press offered to achieve their goal of bringing culture to New York’s working class on the one day they could enjoy it. Six-day-a-week work obligations left vast numbers of New Yorkers and their families in the majority Christian culture with only Sunday for leisure time, and they now responded enthusiastically to entering this remarkable institution of culture and education.

On Sunday, May 31, 1891, at 1 p.m. “on the dot,” the Met’s doors opened freely to the public. It was a gloriously sunny afternoon. By day’s end, 12,000 to 15,000 visitors had taken advantage of the opportunity to view the museum’s treasures, many visiting a museum for the first time.

This event was considered so significant that reports of it appeared in the domestic press in Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—and in la Crosse, Wisconsin, Keokuk, Iowa, and Seneca Falls, New York—and as far away as Italy. The New York newspapers reported that well-dressed young men and women arrived first, “the girls arrayed in stunning spring costumes and hats that looked like miniature flower gardens. Later a sprinkling of workingmen arrived looking a little uncomfortable in their Sunday best and shortly joined by their wives and families, they soon composed the majority of the afternoon crowd, definitely a working class crowd.” Addressing reporters as he left the museum, the Met’s director, General di Cesnola, expressed “amazement” at the intelligence of his Sunday visitors, having overheard some of their conversations as they moved around the galleries. However, the decidedly proper appearance of the crowd, he said, left him convinced that the poorer classes—the very people the newspapers had sought to reach in their advocacy of a Sunday opening—had not been sufficiently interested to come. But the curators disagreed with him, and the next day several editorials confirmed their opinions. One reporter observed that “those who had expected Essex Street Polish Jews and Thirty-Ninth Street and eleventh Avenue hod carriers, in ragged clothing and dilapidated hats, were agreeably disappointed,” and that those expectant individuals were surprised that “the wage earners of New York and all the workers in the lesser world, are able to wear decent clothes, put ribbons on their wives and comfort themselves with good taste and intelligence.”

More than a century later, in 2007 the Met’s Visitor’s Service Department reported an average Sunday attendance of between 16,000 and 18,000, with a peak of 40,000 visitors on one Sunday during the Christmas holidays. Whatever may be said about the individual motives of the Met’s founders, it is clear that they did the right thing.

Benjamin Feldman has lived and worked in New York City since 1969. His essays about New York and Yiddish culture have appeared on-line in The New Partisan Review, Ducts literary magazine, and in several earlier editions of The Gotham History Blotter. Much of his work can be read on his website, The New York Wanderer. His books include Butchery on Bond Street- Sexual Politics and The Burdell-Cunningham Case in Antebellum New York and Call Me Daddy - Babes and Bathos in Edward West Browning’s Jazz Age New York

Walk the moonscape of far East 38th Street today: the sidewalks are empty, devoid of life, though the streets hum and clog with traffic at rush hours as the entrances and exits to the Queens Midtown Tunnel spill forth. Those who emerge from the taxis and limos are well-scrubbed, their private baths drawn and terry robes donned. Toilettes in the neighborhood were not always this way. Where once, sidewalk games filled the air and factory whistles shrilled their shifts, not a trace remains of life as it was, circa 1900. Close your eyes and imagine the Gashouse District. It’s open to question if improvements have come.



The ultra high-rise Corinthian apartment house and an unused, sterile First Avenue garden frontage dominate its 38th Street block. 50 years back, the pavement roared with smoke-spewing buses headed in and out of the old East Side Airlines Terminal, bound for Idlewild.

The express truck warehouse at the northwest corner of First Avenue was long ago converted to office uses, and at # 325 a mauve-brick building houses the Philippine mission to the United Nations, its several street-side entrances hinting of a former use.

Few remnants exist in these northerly reaches of what was known for over a century as the Gashouse District. Con Ed’s Waterside generating station, torn down for Sheldon Solow’s latest and greatest development, stood among coal-gas storage tanks across the Avenue that decorated much of the East Side in the 20s and 30s, between the East River and First Avenue.



Tenements covered many of the small lots in the East 30s from 1890 onwards. Their residents found employment just yards from their vestibules: the Hupfels brewery and the Hoffman Cigar factory were two of the largest non-energy enterprises near # 325. As late as 1899, many lots in the immediate vicinity either vacant or the site of ramshackle wooden structures devoted to low-skill industrial or agricultural uses. Abbatoirs and packing houses filled the streets just north of 42nd Street from the early 1850s until the United Nations was constructed in 1952.

Take a sharp-pointed trowel and dig into the architraves over the identical doorways to # 325. Your efforts would yield a clue of the building’s former importance to its neighbors. These separate men’s and women’s entrances meant sanitary facilities, back in the day. Turn of the century photos from the Byron Studio tell the tale.

1899 Map of the Area, courtesy of The New York Public Library. For zoom-in capability click here.

Barefoot and filthy, a bareheaded boy in ill-fitting, unbelted knickers stares at the camera,in the second shot, standing on the sidewalk in front of # 325 on a late afternoon in 1904. His pals surround him, a lone, braided girl striding by. Perhaps they’re taunting him, the two youngsters in sailor frocks and nautical caps standing around him, somewhat better off. On the stoop of #325 a gaggle of boys roosts, sporting skimmers, pushing at the western entrance door to the building, their school day at nearby P.S. 49 finally over. In the distance, the iron superstructure of the 2nd Avenue elevated train,appears (demolished in 1942), along with a gas-lit street-lamp. All we see in the photo is long gone excepting #325, its history and origins obscured by the years, a rare remnant amongst today’s icy glitter.

Photo courtesy of the Byron Collection – Museum of the City of New York

Although the city government began assuming responsibility for the construction of desperately needed public bathhouses in poor neighborhoods at the turn of the 20th century, private philanthropy did not abandon the public bath movement.

Water closets in hallways and simple taps in the kitchens were the most that could be expected in many late 19th century tenements in New York. Bathing was only possible by filling tin bathtubs from the kitchen tap, a cumbersome procedure in crowded and busy flats. A once a week full body was custom and practice, and many went without for longer periods of time.

Photo courtesy of the New York City Housing Authority archives at LaGuardia Community College

Hollow-eyed faces and clothes hanging off gaunt frames cover the photo of the interior of the men’s waiting room at the Milbank Baths, also taken by the Byron Studio in 1904. At the right, men wait in line, bowlers askew and towels in hand, while to their left, younger men cover the benches waiting their turn. A NYPD cop in a “bobby” hat stands guard in the back of the room, his stern visage insuring order among the handle-bar mustachioed fellows in the hall, 30 years of age and under for the most part.

In June 1902, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson announced that she would donate a public bath, to be built on a 50 by 98-foot lot on East 38th Street (# 325) on behalf of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (the “AICP”). Anderson was heiress to one of the founders of the Borden Condensed Milk Company and was a leading New York philanthropist. During her lifetime she donated approximately $5 million to various institutions, with Barnard College as the chief beneficiary. The bathhouse which she donated, known as the Milbank Memorial Bath, opened in January 1904. A large and imposing facility, it cost $140,000 to build and could accommodate 3,000 bathers daily. The AICP also built The People’s Baths at 9 Centre Market Place, across the street from the new castle-like headquarters of the New York Police Department. In 1914, after a canvass of the neighborhood, the AICP established a wet-wash laundry at the Milbank bath.

Photo courtesy of the Byron Collection – The Museum of the City of New York

Mrs. Anderson (1850-1921) and her brother, Joseph Anderson, inherited an eight figure fortune, rumored to be as much as $32,000,000, in equal shares from their father. Jeremiah Milbank, whose success in his Front Street Grocery burgeoned into a fortune based on milk dsitribution and banking. Married at age 3thirty-seven to artist A.A. Anderson (whose studio was located in the roccoco Bryant Park Studio building that still stand on the south side of Bryant Park on the 6th Avenue corner), Mrs. Anderson donated a large share of her inheritance to charity. She and her husband lived on East 38th Street also, but at the fashionable 5th Avenue end. Their residence at 6 East 38th Street undoubtedly included more than enough plumbing to avoid even the servants needing to use their mistress’ charity facility near the East River docks. Her largesse also included deeding three and one-half acres of prime Morningside Heights land between Claremont Avenue and Broadway from 116th to 119th Streets to Barnard College for construction of the Milbank Quadrangle at the northern end of the campus as well as Milbank Hall thereon, in memory of her mother Elizabeth Lake Milbank. Millions more were given to Barnard and to Teachers College of Columbia University to fund science instruction for women and other academic purposes.

Money could not buy everything, though: In 1892, Elizabeth tried to impose her friend Dr. Francis Kinnicutt (Secretary of the Children’s Aid Society) as the director of a new medical pavilion at The Roosevelt Hospital, with his successor to be chosen by the “medical staff” of Columbia University, Roosevelt demurred, and the donation was aborted. The Milbank name is ensconced in the annals of New York philanthropy, physical reminders ever present in Morningside Heights and elsewhere in the metropolitan region. 105 years after its founding, funds originally provided by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson continue to support the operations of the Milbank Memorial Fund, which, according to its website “is an endowed operating foundation that works to improve health by helping decision makers in the public and private sectors acquire and use the best available evidence to inform policy for health care and population health.

What we take for granted today in New York for all but our poorest and usually homeless residents was once neither easy nor commonplace. The very basis of public health, a daily bath, and clean laundry facilities were made available to legions of Gashouse District residents by the Milbank largesse. It’s hard to believe when one stands on the sidewalk. #325’s stoops once teemed with needy visitors. Today they’re all but silent. Imagine those days.

Clint Johnson is a writer in Ashe County, North Carolina, specializing in the American Civil War.  He enjoys researching overlooked aspects of the war such as discovering an old newspaper article that described the dangers of the coal gasification process that had eluded the Confederates during their plot to attack New York.  He will be giving an illustrated lecture on his recently released book, It Was a Vast and Fiendish Plot: The Confederate Attack on New York City,  at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Libary at 455 5th Ave. on Monday, April 5 at 6:30 P.M. and a legal-based program for Books at the Bar at the New York Bar Association on Tuesday, June 8 at 42 West 44th St. at 6:30 p.m. Books will be sold after both presentaions. His website is www.clintjohnsonbooks.com.

The six Confederate officers who tried to burn down Manhattan on Friday night, November 25, 1864, were terrible terrorists.

They were not terrible in the sense that they were religious fanatics intent on killing 814,000 people. They were terrible in the sense that they were warm-hearted men who wished no one harm. They were terrible in the sense that they had no idea how to burn down the nation’s largest city.

An image of NYC looking south from St. Paul steeple. Everything to the south was to be destroyed in the attack.

They were not terrorists, just lousy spies and saboteurs.

None of the Confederates had ever visited New York before they arrived to burn it down. They did no scouting to find the most flammable targets. Just days before the attack, one of the Confederates was thrown out of his hotel for loudly proclaiming in his Alabama-born accent the merits of secession. None of the young men had any experience with incendiaries, yet they trusted a stranger to provide them 144 firebombs. When they took possession of the firebombs, they spent only a few minutes practicing with them – out in the open, in the daytime, in Central Park.

It was lucky for Manhattan these Confederates so thoroughly bungled their mission on November 25. Had these six young men from Kentucky, Virginia, and Louisiana been more professional, New York City would have been in ashes on November 26.

Even the planning for such a lofty goal as destroying The Emerald City (its nickname in 1864) was slipshod.

The Confederacy’s primary political goal in the summer of 1864 was creating a Northwest Confederacy from Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. While converting Illinois, the home state of President Abraham Lincoln, to the Confederate side sounds preposterous, The Confederacy was hopeful because the southern counties of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana had retained strong Southern sympathies and had not voted for Lincoln in 1860.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis believed a second war front behind Northern lines was possible when he received secret, coded letters claiming as many as 490,000 Copperheads, the nickname of anti-Lincoln Democrats, were waiting in those states for someone with military skills to form them into an army.

Jacob Thompson, the Confederate Secret Service commissioner in Toronto who ordered the attack.

Acting on those letters, Davis set up The Confederate Secret Service under the command of former U.S. Congressman Jacob Thompson in the spring of 1864 to operate out of Toronto, Canada. The Canadian government did not care what Confederate agents did within its borders as long as no Canadian laws were violated. Several Confederates, who had been good battlefield spies, slipped across the Canadian border and traveled to Chicago, site of the September Democratic Party presidential convention. For several months the Confederate agents waited in anticipation of that Copperhead army arising to free 17,000 Confederate prisoners kept in camps at Camp Douglas, south of Chicago and in Rock Island, Illinois.

In the Confederacy’s view of a perfect world, this new army of freed Confederate soldiers and disgruntled civilian Midwesterners would force President Lincoln to pull his armies out of the South and reposition them in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the Democratic convention would nominate a sue-for-peace presidential candidate. That candidate would defeat Lincoln once a casualty-weary nation realized that the Confederacy was no longer contracting, and had opened a new front in the North.

That idea fell apart when no army of Copperheads arose. The Confederate agents literally sat in their hotel rooms all through August and September waiting for that army that never materialized.

The whole idea of a Northwest Confederacy and a Confederate army made up of dissatisfied Midwesterners was ridiculous. Had 490,000 Northern civilians actually formed a secret Confederate army, such a force would have been five times the size of the Union Army of the Potomac, and eight times the size of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in 1864. It was a fantastic pipe dream that Davis believed.

Unable to create a Northwest Confederacy, free the Confederate prisoners, or influence the Democratic presidential choice, the Confederate Secret Service turned to another lofty goal – disrupting Lincoln’s reelection on November 8.

This new plan was just as bold; send agents back across the border to set fires on Election Day in Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston and New York City. The assumption was, like before, that the Union’s citizens would be so shocked and demoralized that the Confederacy could strike throughout the North in so many places simultaneously, that they would demand Lincoln – or Gen. George McClellan, his Democrat opponent for president – start peace negotiations.

It has been lost to history as to who ordered the attack on New York City. It may have been Thompson’s idea, or he may have followed an order from Jefferson Davis. What is known is that on October 15, 1864, an unusual editorial appeared in the Richmond Whig newspaper calling for Confederates to retaliate against Northern cities for the recent destruction of hundreds of farms in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The editorial called on agents in Canada to “burn one of the chief cities of the enemy, say Boston, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati, and let its fate hang over the others as a warning of what may be done to them, if the present system of war on the part of the enemy is continued.” Later in the editorial there was a cryptic line discussing what would happen if the Federals retaliated against a Southern city such as Charleston or Richmond: “New York is worth twenty Richmonds.”

Two, young, but battle-experienced Confederate officers were put in command of the New York City operation. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Martin, 24, and Lieutenant John W. Headley, 24, both veteran officers under famed Kentucky cavalry General John Hunt Morgan, had been specifically ordered from Virginia to Canada to undertake whatever operations Thompson conceived. They were joined by six other Confederate officers, all of whom had escaped from Union prison camps before making their way into Canada. All but one of those men, Lieutenant Robert Cobb Kennedy, the oldest at 29, had also ridden with Morgan.

Eight Confederate officers, about to embark on the most ambitious secret mission of the war, apparently underwent no spy craft training while in Toronto. Headley, who wrote a 1905 book about his exploits, made no mention in his text of practicing in the open spaces of Canada with Greek fire, the spontaneously combustible chemical compound selected as the weapon to burn the city. They were told a contact would give them the chemical firebombs once they arrived in Manhattan.

The eight conspirators arrived in Manhattan early in November only to discover that newspapers were speculating on potential attacks from Canada. The Union general in charge of the city issued orders to be wary of outsiders in the city.

Nonplussed, the Confederates – all eight of them- strolled to the offices of their main contact, James McMaster, editor of the staunchly anti-Lincoln newspaper Freeman’s Journal, one of the few true national newspapers of the day. McMaster’s role in the plot was to activate yet another secret army of 25,000 Lincoln-hating New Yorkers who would raise the First National Flag of the Confederacy over New York City Hall once the fires had disrupted the election. McMaster’s office was a stone’s throw away from police headquarters.

Four days before Election Day, more than 3,500 Union troops arrived in the city, acting on at least two specific, accurate tips originating in Canada that Confederates would try to disrupt the elections by setting fires around the city. The Confederates postponed their plans and did what all out-of-towners do while visiting New York. They acted like tourists, taking in plays and seeing the sights until the Federal troops left town.

A map showing the targeted fires with some modern day landmarks.

What the Confederates did not do was explore Manhattan to find the most flammable targets. Had they done so, they would have found distilleries for camphene (a kind of fuel oil) and turpentine, more than a dozen lumber yards, and the biggest prize, the Manhattan Gas Works, all closely packed together in what is now the Meat Packing and Arts Districts. While the Manhattan Gas Works had a good safety record in 1864, explosions and fires at other coal-to-gas distilleries were common big city news stories.

With no more motivation than they were bored after spending three weeks in the city, the Confederates struck on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Weather forecasts and reports were not kept in those days, but no newspaper mentions of high winds suggest it was a calm night, hardly the conditions patient saboteurs would have chosen if they wanted western winds to spread flames from building to building.

Their weapons were 144 small vials of Greek fire obtained from an unnamed chemist living just west of Washington Square. The Confederates practiced with the vials by throwing them on boards outside a rented cottage in Central Park. Once the glass vials broke and the still-secret chemical compound was exposed to oxygen, flames erupted, setting fire to the boards. That satisfied the Confederates that the chemist had not double-crossed them, even though he risked his own life and home in any resulting conflagration.

Targets were more than 20 business hotels, most of them along Broadway with the furthest north being at 26th Street. Most were clustered around City Hall. The Confederates started setting fires on top of piles of clothing and furniture in their rooms at 8:00 p.m., reasoning that almost everyone staying in the hotels would be out on the town and not in any danger of being asleep in their rooms during a fire.

All of the fires either fizzled out on their own, or were discovered by hotel staff. The Greek fire never flamed up as it should have because the Confederates left their hotel windows closed, thus robbing the flames of a steady supply of oxygen.

There was some panic along Broadway as word of the attack spread. Shouts of “Fire!” coming from the LaFarge hotel disrupted the performance of Julius Caesar at the adjacent Winter Garden Theatre. It was the first time the famed acting family of the Booth brothers, Junius, Edwin and John Wilkes had ever been on stage in the same play.

Martin and Headley narrowly avoided capture the next day when they saw police officers questioning a young woman whose father was a secondary contact in the city. The Confederates lay low in their Central Park cottage until that Saturday night when all six who had set the fires (two men lost their nerve and did not participate) stealthily boarded a north-bound train. They made their way into Canada and were safely back in Toronto by Sunday.

The New York City newspapers expressed the city’s outrage over the attack. The New York Herald headlined it A Vast and Fiendish Plot while the New York Times correctly called it A Rebel Plot. The New York World kept a sense of humor and New Yorker pride by dismissing speculation that thieves had set the fires by proclaiming: “Do you suppose New York thieves would have bungled the business so stupidly?”

Had the Confederates left their windows open and struck early in the morning when the city’s volunteer fire fighters would have been asleep, there might have been disastrous results. Three times before the Confederate attack, in 1776, 1835, and 1846, Manhattan had experienced devastating fires that had burned significant parts of the city. All those fires started from a single source. All had overwhelmed the city’s volunteer fire department.

A sure disaster would have occurred if the Confederates had set 144 separate fires, all on the west side of the city, on a windy night, at all those choice targets of highly flammable lumber yards and fuel distilleries.

What if the conspirators had studied the properties of coal gas, then gained access to the Manhattan Gas Works? With technical knowledge gained from study in Toronto, they could have sabotaged the Gas Works’ water tanks used to regulate gas pressure. Without those critical water tanks in place, the gas pressure flowing through hundreds of miles of underground pipes into every neighborhood of Manhattan would have increased to dangerous levels. The Confederates might have figured out how to ignite all that flowing gas at the source.

Had those six Confederates not been such terrible terrorists, New York City would have burned to the ground on November 25, 1864.

This article is adapted from A VAST AND FIENDSIH PLOT-The Confederate Attack on New York City by Clint Johnson (ISBN-10:0806531312, Citadel Press, New York City, March 2010)

James McGrath Morris spent five years working on Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (HarperCollins, February 2010), from which this essay is drawn.  His previous book, The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, was selected as a Washington Post Best Book of the Year for 2004 and was optioned as a film and released as an audio book. For more information on Morris or his book, visit www.jamesmcgrathmorris.com.

Sitting in the shadow of the New York Plaza Hotel, the nearly nude bronze sculpture of Pomona by Karl Bitter atop a six-level water fountain is a graceful work that at night, bathed in golden light, is a serene and peaceful oasis on the southern end of the Grand Army Place at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. To many New Yorker who think they know the man, the fact that Joseph Pulitzer made the bequest for this fountain that speaks of peace is strikingly ironic. Wasn’t he after all the worse purveyor of Yellow Journalism who used his perch of power to help rush America to war with Spain in 1898?

No.

That’s why the Pulitzer Fountain is a reminder that we are often too quick to judge. After spending five years working on his life I was, as many biographers are, astounded how often my subject is wrongly portrayed in our history books. In Pulitzer’s case one the biggest misunderstandings is his role in the Spanish-American war. Not that Wikipedia is the paragon of accuracy, but its description of his role is much like those our children read in their textbooks:

Typically accounts of the 1898 place equal blame on Pulitzer and his rival William Randolph Hearst Pulitzer and Hearst are often credited (or blamed) for drawing the nation into the Spanish-American War with sensationalist stories or outright lying . . .. Pulitzer, though lacking Hearst’s resources, kept the story on his front page.

The problem with this repeated portrayal is the personalization of the World newspaper that Pulitzer had built into America’s most widely circulated and politically powerful newspaper. True, he owned the entire operation and its politics, style, and vibrancy was a reflection of his personality. But, the fact ignored by most historians is that Pulitzer was not responsible for his paper’s day-to-day conduct during the war. Unlike the younger Hearst at the New York Journal, he did not have his hand on the helm.

In the fall of 1897, Pulitzer’s most cherished daughter Lucille died after a prolonged illness. Pulitzer, already depressed by a descent into blindness, retreated to Jekyll Island, a private retreat of the rich and powerful off the coast of Georgia. While there, the USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbor igniting the public’s passion and providing Heart’s Journal with powder keg it wanted to spark a war with Spain. He spared no expenses and rushed to beat the World in real and imagined scoops.

There was an atmosphere of desperation under the gold dome on top of the Pulitzer Building on Park Row, as the publisher remained secluded grieving over Lucille’s death. The staff, from the editors at the top to the reporters on the beat, consisted of men and women whose loyalty ran so deep they had chosen to cast their lot with Pulitzer rather than Hearst. They were willing to do anything for their absent general, and not out of loyalty alone. Everyone knew that Pulitzer was pouring his own money into the paper to make up for the losses induced by Hearst.

For those who remained at the World, losing to Hearst could mean the end to their careers. The staff struggled to match the Journal, but lacked the resources to compete effectively with Hearst. The epic battle did not pit Hearst against Pulitzer. Rather, it was Hearst against Pulitzer’s leaderless troops in a helter-skelter twenty four-hour-a-day competition. The World was losing its battle with Hearst, and losing badly.

The newspaper that had once set the news agenda for the city, and sometimes for the nation, was engaged in a futile game of catch-up. “It has been beaten on its own dunghill by the Journal, which has bigger type, bigger pictures, bigger war scares, and a bigger bluff,” Town Topics gleefully reported. “If Mr. Pulitzer had his eyesight he would not be content to play second fiddle to the Journal and allow Mr. Hearst to set the tone.”

By the time Pulitzer returned to New York, the battle was lost. From the command post of his house, Pulitzer tried to fix what ailed the World. He reorganized the staff, trying to put in charge editors with the courage to cease imitating Hearst. Confident that he had found a man would keep the staff in check, Pulitzer turned to the question of the day: should the United States go to war? There was no doubt that the Journal was champing at the bit for war. The Sun said war could not come soon enough. Almost every major metropolitan newspaper favored either war or the threat of one if Spain did not comply with American demands.

Pulitzer joined the chorus. But in doing so he supported the war only as a last resort. He did so not to contradict his support of international arbitration. Pulitzer believed that nations should solve their problems at a table rather than in a battlefield.. Three years earlier a similar crisis between the United States and another world power had arisen. How Pulitzer reacted to this event tells us far more about his character and beliefs than his minor role on the sidelines of the Spanish-American War.

In 1895, a discovery of gold intensified a quarrel between Venezuela and Great Britain about its border with British Guiana. The United States took Venezuela’s side, broke off diplomatic relations with England in late 1895, and demanded arbitration. The British, who ruled the seas, considered this an insult and refused. The rebuff drew an angry message from the president to Congress. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, Cleveland promised that if England dared to take any land the United States deemed as belonging to Venezuela, the United States would “resist by every means in its power.”

Congress rushed to the president’s side, and the saber rattling put the little-noticed dispute on the front pages. War on Every Lip was the Chicago Tribune’s headline. War Clouds proclaimed the Atlanta Constitution. The editorial pages clamored for a fight. “Any American citizen who hesitates to uphold the President of the United States is either an alien or a traitor,” said the Sun.

Theodore Roosevelt, then New York City’s Police Commissioner, was thrilled by the prospect of war. He was convinced that the entire nation, not just Manhattan, lacked virility. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer, not only in a time of peace, but on the field of battle,” he told one audience. He thought the time had come for the United States to flex its military muscle outside its borders, and he saw an opportunity in a crisis brewing in Venezuela.

Roosevelt, who had never seen a battlefield, wanted war. Pulitzer, who had, wanted nothing of it.

Pulitzer refused to let the World join in the clamor for war. He thought Cleveland had gone too far. Put the headline A Grave Blunder on the lead editorial, Pulitzer told one of his writers over the telephone from his rented house in Lakewood, New Jersey. Weighing each word carefully, he composed a four-paragraph assault on the president’s logic. Great Britain’s actions in Venezuela posed no danger to the United States, he said. “It is a grave blunder to put this government in its attitude of threatening war unless we mean it and are prepared for it and can hopefully appeal to the sympathizers of the civilized world in making it.”

Pulitzer expanded his efforts to douse the war fever. Over his signature, his staff sent telegrams to leading statesmen, clergymen, politicians, editors, leaders of Parliament, and the royal family in Great Britain, urging them to publicly express their opposition to war. Within days, the World published replies from the prince of Wales, William Gladstone, the bishop of London, the archbishop of Westminster, and dozens of other leaders. Each telegram professed England’s peaceful intentions and strove to lower the transatlantic rhetoric. “They earnestly trust and cannot but believe the present crisis will be arranged in a manner satisfactory to both countries,” read the message from the British throne. “No feelings here but peaceful and brotherly,” wired the bishop of Liverpool. “God Speed you in your patriotic endeavor,” added the bishop of Chester. The World’s issue for Christmas Day 1895 reproduced the telegrams from the prince of Wales and one from the duke of York under the headline Peace and Good Will. Soon, said another of Pulitzer’s editorials, the holly and mistletoe would be gone, as would the voices of children singing carols. “But we shall retain our hopes. The white doves, unseen, will be fluttering somewhere.”

In England, the telegrams sent by the prince and the duke generated considerable support and were on the front page of most newspapers, reported an excited Ballard Smith. The reaction in the United States was quite different. Roosevelt, who had already written a letter of congratulation to Cleveland for his belligerent threats, told Lodge that Americans were weakening in their resolve for war. “Personally, I rather hope the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.” He was furious at Pulitzer and Edwin Godkin at the New York Post, who had joined in urging restraint. “As for the editors of the Evening Post and World,” Roosevelt said, “it would give me great pleasure to have them put in prison the minute hostilities began.”

Roosevelt didn’t get his chance. Tempers cooled. The dispute between England and Venezuela moved to the back pages as the two nations agreed to arbitration, prompted in great part by Pulitzer’s actions.

Sadly, Pulitzer’s role as a peacemaker in 1895 has been forgotten. Rather the role of his troops as war makers in 1898 lives on. The fountain at 59th and Fifth sits in vigil, a reminder of this lesser know side of the man.

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of DuLong’s newly published book, My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson (Free Press, September 2009).  In her dual roles as freelance journalist and one of the world’s only female fireboat engineers, Dulong offers a porthole-view narrative of the river and its social tapestry as a microcosm of post-industrial America.  For more information on Dulong or her book, visit www.jessicadulong.com.  Copies of the book can be purchased there.

Seventy-two years later, nothing more than a pegboard forest of disintegrated pilings remains of Pier 42, where pilot John Harvey met his fate. Today is Memorial Day 2002, and we, the crew of retired New York City fireboat John J. Harvey, are preparing to pay homage to our boat’s namesake.

Pilot Bob Lenney, who steered this vessel for more than twenty years while the boat still served the FDNY Marine Division, noses her slender bow toward the stubby remnants of the covered pier—a grid of timbers, their rotting tips sticking out just a foot or so above the water’s surface. Chief engineer Tim Ivory swings a leg over the side, clutching a small bouquet of all-white flowers that he has duct-taped to the end of a broken broom handle. A crowd gathers on the bow as he leans out over the water, holding on with just one leg, to stab the jagged handle-end into the top of one of the crumbling piles.

I know all this only by way of hearsay and pictures. From where I stand belowdecks, my fingers curled around the smooth brass levers that power the propellers in response to Bob’s commands, I can’t watch it unfold. Because I, fireboat Harvey’s engineer, stand in the engine room the whole time we’re under way, this ceremony, like all the rest, is to me just another series of telegraph orders: Slow Ahead on the starboard side; Slow Astern on the port.

Between shifts of the levers, I steal glimpses of the harbor through the portholes—round windows just above the river’s rippled surface. Above decks, pilots use the Manhattan skyline for their points of reference, to know where they are or where they’re headed. Here, belowdecks, I use low-lying landmarks: the white tents where fast ferries load, the numinous blue lights in South Cove, the new concrete poured to straighten Pier 53 (which firefighters call the Tiltin’ Hilton) where, on February 11, 1930, FDNY Marine Division pilot John Harvey signaled his deck crew to drop lines and shot south at the helm of fireboat Thomas Willett on his final run.

Nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, as the fireboat named in his honor leaves the pegboard forest, I hold my own private memorial service, issuing a silent prayer. It’s something of a thank-you and something of a nod of acknowledgment: We remember. I whisper about the work we’ve put into preserving the boat over the past year. I tell him about rewiring shorted-out circuits. About our efforts to dis- and reassemble failing, rusty pump parts. About coating her steel surfaces with protective epoxy paints. All this, I explain, is done, in part, to pay homage to him—the man who lives on through this fireboat.

Photo by Sarah Lyon

As the boat pushes through the water, I stand at my post, sweating. Though I can’t hear the slosh of bilgewater over the growl of the engines, I can watch it through gaps in the diamond-plate floor. Like every steel vessel, this boat fights a constant, silent battle with the salt water that buoys her. The river seeps through little openings in her seventy-one-year-old skin. It trickles, etching burnt orange stains into the thick white paint that coats the riveted hull. Sometimes the boat rolls and sways and a splash of green overwhelms my porthole view. That’s when I remember that I’m underwater. Less than a half-inch of steel plate separates me from the river.

Only after we’ve pulled away can I make out, through a porthole, a small speck of white where the flowers stand tall in the May sunshine. As the speck disappears against the muted gray of the concrete bulkhead at the water’s edge, the significance of the ceremony fades into the everyday rhythms of the machinery

* * *

When I moved to New York City from San Francisco in 2000, I had never heard of a fireboat. Now I have found a home in the engine room of a boat born four decades before I was. During long stretches at the controls, when the drone of engines drowns out the mental clutter of my landside life, I wonder about the men stationed here before me. Did they feel left out of the action down here in the cellar? Did they chain-smoke, read, play cards to pass the time while they waited for the pilot’s next command? Career guys, most of them. Firefighters, with an engineering bent. Irish and Italian. Their uncles, fathers, and brothers—firefighters before them—had laid down the paving stones that marked their nepotistic path.

There were no paving stones for me. My father is a car mechanic in Massachusetts. I’m here only by blissful accident, having stumbled aboard in February 2001—a naive young upstart with a university degree. A bubble-salaried dot-commer.  A striving, big-city editor. A woman.

Photo by Richard Andrian

When I look at the black-and-white photographs of old-time crews—ranks of short-haired men, some young, shirtless, and grinning; others defiant; a few older ones, impassive, their stern expressions suggesting what a handful the younger ones can be—I want to know them. But I’m not sure the feeling would be mutual. These men probably never imagined that someone like me would be running their boat, their engines. All my compulsive investigations began as an attempt to bridge that gap.

The distance between us is what first fueled my fascination with the fireboat’s history—a fascination that escalated to obsession, then swelled to encompass the history of the Hudson River, whose industries helped forge the nation. I’ve since fallen in love with workboats, with engineering, with the Hudson.

As American society continues to become more virtual, less hands-on, I’m a salmon swimming upstream. I have come to view the transformation of our country through a Hudson River lens. More and more, my days are defined by physical work—shifting levers, turning wrenches, welding steel. As I work and research, a picture begins to form of the history of American industry mapped through personal landmarks. As the United States faces economic upheaval that challenges us to rethink who we want to be as a nation, I have discovered that it pays to take stock of who we have been: a country of innovators and doers, of people who make things, of workers who toil, sweat, and labor with their hands.

***

Buoyed by history, I consider how the past informs the present. The Hudson is known as the river that flows two ways, its waters a brackish mix of seawater from tides pushing upstream and fresh mountain runoff pushing down. I know what it’s like to feel pulled in two directions at once. I oscillate between worlds: white- and bluecollar, virtual and physical, human and machine, preservation and obsolescence, land and water. My days on the Hudson transport me through the past to the present, granting me uncommon access to the lasting lessons of history that somehow, as they likely have through time immeasurable, feel more important today than ever before.

David Freeland is a writer who specializes in music hisory and popular culture.  He is the author of Ladies of Soul.  This is an excerpt from the introduction of his new book Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure (New York University Press, 2009).

Manhattanites have often seemed remorseful at having ignored their physical history, having treated it so callously. At the same time they have sought to accept change as an inescapable element of life in the metropolis. In Downtown: My Manhattan (2004), Pete Hamill writes poignantly of this experience:

The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same . . . Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself.¹

But we never make total peace with the destruction of architecture. As evidenced by the popularity of Web sites such as forgotten-ny.com and vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com, our anxiety has grown in recent years, as more and more of the city we know has been replaced with new construction. The elegiac posts on these sites indicate that the process of coming to terms with architectural loss occurs in stages: first shock that something beautiful could have been destroyed; then resignation; and, finally, determination to appreciate the treasures that remain. If, as Hamill suggests, we approach loss with a fatalistic perspective, it is because we understand the irreversibility of destruction. Once a building is gone, it is gone forever. The demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station in the 1960s is still recalled with sadness by many who are old enough to remember it, while others bemoan the loss of the Metropolitan Opera House on 39th and Broadway, which was torn down in 1967, after the new Lincoln Center had replaced it some twenty-five blocks to the north. Other losses abound: Luchow’s, the famous German restaurant on East 14th Street; the Helen Hayes, Morosco, and Bijou theaters in Times Square (destroyed to build what is generally regarded as one of the city’s least attractive buildings, the hulking Marriott Marquis), and so many of the townhouses and railroad flats that once typified the East Side, to name a few.

The former Baby Grand, 319 West 125th Street, 2008 (photograph by Steph Goralnick)

Still, every so often the past comes back to haunt us, letting us know that it is not to be taken lightly, that it has something to say. In Manhattan there are many striking examples of buildings and neighborhoods where, through adjacent demolitions or the weathering effects of time, layers are stripped away to reveal history. In 1998, when the remnants of the 1918 Central Theater on the southwestern corner of Broadway and 47^th Street were torn down to build the W Hotel, the side of a building from the 1860s was exposed, revealing a large painted sign for carriages—a glimpse into the days when Times Square was a center of the horse trade. Of course, once the skyscraper hotel was completed, the old sign again disappeared from view. Another discovery came at a Radio Shack on West 125th Street, near Eighth Avenue. One day the cement below the doorway chipped, uncovering part of a sign for the Baby Grand, a popular Harlem nightclub that lasted from 1947 all the way to 1989. Suddenly a place that had seemed clearly within New York’s past (legendary for performers such as comedian Nipsey Russell and singer Little Jimmy Scott, who often worked there) was pulled into the very real present. At such moments the city offers its own greatest history lesson.

Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville searches for these “windows”—odd openings where we can view the past, if only for an instant—and then uses them as an entry into a history of place. One reason I have chosen to spotlight buildings of entertainment and leisure (as opposed to those devoted strictly to government or business) is because these are the places that most often disappear after their economic usefulness runs out, casualties of an American popular culture that is always moving to the next trend. For example, of the half-dozen theaters that helped make Union Square the city’s leading entertainment district of the 1870s, not one has survived into the present day (a fact that can be compared to the significant number of 19th-century churches, stores, and bank buildings remaining throughout the city). Thus the discovery of an extant cultural site provides the rare chance to experience a fragment of history within itsoriginal environment. It offers the sense of context and scale often lacking in even the most detailed museum installations.

More important, as a starting point for many of the narratives dominating this book, places associated with entertainment culture possess dramatic and sometimes turbulent histories. In his well-researched book, Nightclub City, Burton W. Peretti explores how New York’s social history can be viewed as one long struggle between city establishment and the larger populace. Sites of recreation and entertainment frequently have become grounds for this ongoing battle, one that has played itself out through the machinations of civic authority versus the inhabitants’ opposing will to fight back, to claim ownership upon a space that for them holds meaning. In some instances (such as those related to the experiences of African Americans in Manhattan) the end result of these battles has been an actual population shift, one which reflects the human drive for physical and emotional security—a place to call home. But even in these situations, New Yorkers have managed to take an active role in the creation of their own spaces. Although the history of a building can be instantly wiped away, through fire or demolition (thus underscoring the role chance plays in shaping the city’s architectural patterns), the human processes informing that history are anything but random.

1. Hamill, p. 19

In 2008 NYC artist Susan C. Dessel spent a week working on the restoration of the historic Hunt’s Bay Cemetery in Kingston, Jamaica. This introduction to sepulchral material led Dessel to the Chatham Sq. Cemetery, NYC’s oldest extant cemetery. While both sites contain graves that date to the mid 1600s, in 1851 a NYC law was passed banning burials below 86th Street.

still lives, currently on view at the Abrons Arts Center Henry Street Settlement and supported by a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s (LMCC) Manhattan Community Arts Fund, gives voice to the women buried in Chatham Sq. and its sister cemeteries on W. 11th and W. 21st Streets. Dessel, a member of L.I.C. Artists, Inc., creates work that reflects on death as social commentary – e.g., the artist’s installation OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale, selected among the 2006 Top Ten works by a number of art blogs yet censored in 2008 by the Long Beach Island Foundation as “‘offensive” – and as the gift of memory.

A visit to the Chatham Sq., W. 11th and W. 21st Streets cemeteries (belonging to Congregation Shearith Israel, a.k.a. The Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue) resulted in an understanding that little information could be gleaned from the headstones due to ravage resulting from New York City’s climate and environmental conditions over 3 ½ centuries. Additionally, the early Jewish community reflected the local Christian custom of unadorned headstones and brief text, unlike the headstones in Hunt’s Bay which resembled those found in Europe rich with informative iconography and text.

Conceptual and artistic decisions were made as research was conducted. The work would give voice to the women and girls buried in the three cemeteries by naming them as during their lives they were most often referred to as wife of or daughter of.

A number of Wills of early New York Jews mention slaves among various men’s belongings that were to be passed on to others at their deaths. Reading this elicited a strong emotional reaction and a determination that this information could not be ignored. The art work had to also honor the female slaves — 10 of the 30 referred to in the Wills were mentioned by name – without taking the fact out of its historical context or having it overwhelm the installation.

Young women were concerned about the condition of their teeth which began to deteriorate at age 18. The first mass produced toothbrushes were made in the Wisdom factory (England, 1780), which still exits. Many men of the Jewish community were merchants who traveled back and forth from Nieuw Amsterdam/New York to Europe. An archived letter that mentioned sending a toothbrush back to a daughter highlighted what a special gift this was at the time

The research coalesced in a decision to create an object for each woman and girl that would resemble the article that she had used to clean her teeth.

I made tooth rags dipped in salt for the Jewish women who died before the mass production of toothbrushes

Detail Tooth rag. S.C.Dessel’s still lives. (Photo © Susan C. Dessel)

in 1780 (i.e. between 1654 and 1779). The material used was heirloom linen from a nightgown that had belonged to my great-grandmother who was raised and married on the lower east.

Detail Chew Sticks (Photo © Susan C. Dessel)

African chew sticks, used even today in Africa and the U.S., represent each slave woman and girl with inscriptions of their names when known. Placement in the installation would be along-side the piece representing their “owner”.

I carved cow bone and used horsehair for bristles (the same materials used for the first mass-produced toothbrushes) to create toothbrush-like forms for the Jewish women who died after 1779 through the mid 1800s.

The use of multiples of each object also references the commonality of some aspects of the women’s lives while the differences among the pieces symbolize their individuality. The combined total of 270 hanging objects is coincidentally a multiple of CHAI (the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which spell “chai” or “life” equal the number 18, which is considered to be very lucky) which delighted me as I often use multiples of CHAI in my work.

Detail Toothbrushes (Photo © Robert Puglisi)

In addition to the installation, through american samplers, series 3 (chicken chronicles), a suite of 14 works on paper, the still lives exhibit addresses serious issues of inclusion and exclusion these immigrant Jewish women faced (and many immigrants still face today) keeping traditions, rituals, family and home together.

Food was chosen as the central visual image for the drawings as the kitchen was women’s domain. Because of dietary restrictions, Jews were forbidden to eat plentiful local food such as lobsters and instead killed and prepared chickens following the laws of kashrut (kosher slaughtering). Even as wealth accumulated, women were still responsible for maintaining strictly Kosher homes by closely monitoring any household help in the kitchen.

S.C.Dessel american samplers, series 3 (the chicken chronicles, no. 14). (Photo © Robert Puglisi)

The drawings depict the various stages of raising, slaughtering, preparing and eating chickens as kashrut required. The use of birds is reminiscent of art created by and for the observant Jewish community throughout history where representations of the human form were not allowed. Societal and cultural pushes and pulls that confounded this first Jewish community and continue to mark the maturing of immigrant communities are glimpsed through visual references in the drawings.

Three texts that were particularly helpful:
. Leo Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews (1704-1799), 1967.
. David De Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone Early Jewish Settlers 1682-1831. 1952.
. Hasia R. Diner, Her Works Praise Her, 2002.

Joseph Ditta is a native New Yorker whose Italian immigrant ancestors moved in 1922 from Manhattan to Gravesend, Brooklyn, the historic neighborhood where he has resided since birth and which he chronicles in his book, Gravesend, Brooklyn, a title in Arcadia Publishing’s “Then & Now” series that was released on July 20, 2009. Frequent visits to the Gravesend Cemetery (New York’s oldest burial ground, established about 1650) piqued his desire to learn about the area’s original inhabitants, whose surnames grace many Brooklyn street signs. A two-time graduate of the Conservatory of Music of Brooklyn College, Ditta later obtained a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute, and despite plans to find work as a music librarian, he was serendipitously hired by the New-York Historical Society in 1998, where he happily assists researchers in unraveling their own local history puzzles. He is currently documenting the ties of family and community among 133 individuals whose names appear on a quilt pieced by the Sewing Circle of the Gravesend Reformed Dutch Church in 1879.

To order a copy of Gravesend, Brooklyn click here or here.

FIGURE 1. An 1879 view of the Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend (right, built 1833) and adjacent lecture room (left, built 1850s). West side of Gravesend (now McDonald) Avenue between Village Road North and Gravesend Neck Road, Brooklyn, New York.

This stable scene belies the surprising physical mobility of Gravesend’s building stock at the turn of the 20th century. Some structures, in the paths of long-planned streets, were moved to conform to new grid patterns once roads were opened and graded. Other buildings that outlived their original functions but were still sound structurally were put to adaptive reuse at new sites. A case in point, the frame chapel to the left in Figure 1 had two addresses after it was removed from Gravesend (now McDonald) Avenue in 1893. Its moves and subsequent religious uses also illustrate the ecumenical ease enjoyed in Gravesend, the 1645 patent to which granted the founders “free liberty of Conscience…without molestation or disturbance from any magistrate or…ecclesiastical minister that may pretend jurisdiction over them, with liberty likewise for…their associates, heirs, etc.”¹

The basement of the 1833 building of the Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend proved an unsuitable place for holding consistorial meetings and teaching Sunday school: it was “dark, gloomy…and so damp as to be inimical to health.”² But it was not until the 1850s that funds and land were secured for a separate lecture room.³ Carpenter John Bergen, Jr. erected “a neat and comfortable house, about 25 x 45 feet” on a site just south of the church, at the northwest corner of Gravesend Avenue and Gravesend Neck Road. ⁴ Then, “[i]n 1879 a gallery was made across one end, and fitted up for an infant-class-room, [it had] sliding-doors so arranged that the upper and lower rooms [could] be thrown into one, during the opening and closing exercises of the Sabbath-school.”⁵ A slightly later photograph taken from the identical spot as Figure 1 shows the lecture room at some point lost its projecting, pediment-crowned portico with supporting Tuscan columns (see Figure 2).

FIGURE 2. Private mailing card, printed 1898-1901, showing the 1833 Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend and adjacent 1850s lecture room prior to their removal from Gravesend (McDonald) Avenue in 1893. Compare altered lecture room with Figure 1 and note railroad crossing sign at the corner of Gravesend Neck Road.

The opening in 1875 of the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad down Gravesend Avenue signaled the impending end of the Reformed Dutch Church’s presence at the central crossroads of town, where it had met, in one building or another, since 1667.⁶ Noisy, puffing steam trains passed and stopped directly in front of the sanctuary every two to three minutes, shattering the Sabbath stillness on each trip to Coney Island and back.⁷ By the early 1890s, with parishioners threatened by ever increasing traffic, the site was abandoned for one less traveled.⁸ The grounds had become valuable for other purposes and were bought by the Town of Gravesend with the stipulation that the buildings be removed by 16 June 1893.⁹ The church was demolished (its pews carted home by members who owned their use by ancestral purchase)¹⁰ , but the lecture room was moved to a spot near East 1st Street to shelter services while the new sanctuary was under construction¹¹ (see Figure 3).

FIGURE 3. Map charting locations of the lecture room of the Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend.

The Reformed (Dutch) Church in America was no longer the principal Christian denomination in Gravesend by the end of the 19th century. Roman Catholics established the parishes of St. Mark in 1861, Guardian Angel in 1880, St. Mary Mother of Jesus in 1889, and Ss. Simon and Jude in 1897.¹² Homecrest Presbyterian Church was organized in 1900.¹³ St. John’s, a Protestant Episcopal congregation in Greenfield, just north of town, was incorporated in 1859.¹⁴ The Ocean Parkway Methodist Episcopal (later Ridley Memorial) Church, also in Greenfield, was organized in 1865.¹⁵ Earlier Methodist churches were established at Sheepshead Bay in 1841 and Unionville (near today’s Bath Beach section) in 1844.¹⁶ And the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, on the road to Gravesend Bay, was erected in 1869.¹⁷

FIGURE 4. Gravesend Methodist Episcopal Church (formerly lecture room of the Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend). No. 14 Gravesend Neck Road, southeast corner of Van Sicklen Street, Brooklyn, New York. Postcard, published by F. Johnson, ca. 1910.

A group of Gravesend Methodists who found the trip to Sheepshead Bay or Unionville inconvenient organized their own church in the center of town in 1899.¹⁸ Until they petitioned the Brooklyn Church Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to buy a building plot, they worshipped in the house at 27 Gravesend Neck Road, and in a tent adjacent, on the land previously occupied by the lecture room of the Reformed Dutch Church.¹⁹ Coincidentally or not, the lecture room, superfluous now that the new Reformed Church had “several Sunday School rooms around a central assembly space,” was sold to the Methodists for a token sum of one dollar.²⁰ Cost of the move and necessary construction was defrayed by donation, with a generous sum coming from former Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney.²¹ Once again, the then nearly fifty-year-old but still sturdy building was rolled along Gravesend Neck Road, this time to a spot just east of Van Sicklen Street, where it was put atop a high foundation²² (see Figure 4). Ironically, this structure, built to avoid holding Sunday school in a damp church basement, now gained a basement classroom.²³

The new Gravesend Methodist Episcopal Church at 14 Neck Road was dedicated on 16 September 1900.²⁴ It was hoped the surrounding area, in transition from farmland to urban neighborhood, would provide a steady crop of members for the fledgling church.²⁵ As it happened, most arrivals to Gravesend in the early decades of the 20th century were southern Italian immigrants who left the crowded tenements of Manhattan in search of newly-built, affordable homes. Though ostensibly Catholic, many sought Church benediction only for baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Regular, organized worship was typically ignored for a personal blend of Christian and Pagan rites.²⁶ If the Roman Catholic Church could not hold these largely independent Christians, what chance did the Methodists stand?

The Gravesend Methodist Episcopal Church never grew as anticipated. At its largest the membership topped 185.²⁷ This coincided with the appointment of the congregation’s first settled clergyman, the Reverend Rufus Stanley Putney (1843-1920), who served between 1907 and 1910.²⁸ But the numbers fluctuated and dipped, and services were discontinued in 1914, by when some members had joined the Ocean Parkway Methodist Episcopal Church.²⁹

And yet the building at 14 Gravesend Neck Road endured. Sometime before 1925 it came to house the local Boy Scouts. Curiously, the Scouts figured in a vision experienced that year by Rose Greco, the wife of a Pentecostal minister: her husband, Giuseppe, “was to seek a building in…Gravesend” in which to start a church. He would know it by the troop meeting in session there. Reverend Greco found and managed to rent and later buy 14 Neck Road, and despite its distance from Coney Island named it the Coney Island Pentecostal Church.³⁰

Where the Gravesend Methodist Episcopal Church never drew members enough to survive, the Coney Island Pentecostal Church attracted the masses with visible evidence of miraculous healings: abandoned crutches adorned the sanctuary, testimonials to the restorative power of the Holy Spirit. The Italian language, too, was an important hook: Oggi e il giorno della Grazia—Today is the day of Grace—was Reverend Greco’s constant exhortation.³¹

FIGURE 5. First Korean Church of Brooklyn (formerly Coney Island Pentecostal Church). Southeast corner of Gravesend Neck Road and Van Sicklen Street. Photo by Joseph Ditta, 2008.

The Church quickly outgrew its small home. In 1937 it contracted architect R. T. Schaeffer to design a larger building to replace the old frame chapel and fill the entire corner lot³² (see Figure 5). For the next forty years the Coney Island Pentecostal Church worshipped in Schaeffer’s ashlar sanctuary until it, too, proved too small for the ever expanding congregation.

A far larger home became available in 1979, when the venerable Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend, its membership nearly extinct, federated with the Advent Lutheran Church at 1209 Avenue P to form the interdenominational Advent-Gravesend Church.³³ The Coney Island Pentecostal Church bought the vacant building and grounds at Neck Road and East 1st Street for $325,000, and on moving to its new home renamed itself Trinity Tabernacle of Gravesend.³⁴ Its former sanctuary at 14 Gravesend Neck Road has housed the First Korean Church of Brooklyn since the 1980s.³⁵

Reformed Dutch to Methodist Episcopal to Italian Pentecostal to Korean Christian: in their wildest dreams of religious freedom the founders of Gravesend could never have imagined such a dizzying procession.

1. Jerrold Seymann, Colonial Charters, Patents and Grants to the Communities Comprising the City of New York ([New York]: The Board of Statutory Consolidation of the City of New York, 1939), 495.
2. William H. Stillwell, History of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Gravesend, Kings County, N.Y. (Gravesend: Printed for the Consistory, 1892) [hereinafter Stillwell], 29-30.
3. Ibid, and Rev. A. P. Stockwell, A.M., “History of the Town of Gravesend” in The Civil, Political, Professional and Ecclesiastical History and Commercial and Industrial Record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, N.Y. from 1683 to 1884, edited by Henry R. Stiles (New York: Munsell, 1884) [hereinafter Stockwell), 181-182.
4. Frederick W. Beers, Atlas of Long Island (New York: Beers, Comstock and Cline, 1873), plate 32; Stillwell, 29-30; Stockwell, 181-182. Stockwell and Stillwell disagree on the year the lecture room was built. According to Stockwell it was completed in 1854, but Stillwell claims funds for its construction were just being raised in 1856.
5. Stockwell, 181-182.
6. Brian J. Cudahy, How We Got to Coney Island: The Development of Mass Transportation in Brooklyn and Kings County (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 73; Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of Church Archives of New York City: Reformed Church in America (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1939), 32.
7. “Gravesend Gossip. The Reformed Church to Move After Two Centuries,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday 13 November 1892, p. 16.
8. The 300th Anniversary of the Gravesend Reformed Church, 1655-1955 (New York: Brooklyn Eagle Press, [1955]), 25.
9. Ibid, 26-27.
10. Gertrude Ryder Bennett, Living in a Landmark (Francestown, New Hampshire: Marshall Jones Company, 1980), 25-26; and Turning Back the Clock in Gravesend: Background of the Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead (Francestown, New Hampshire: Marshall Jones Company, 1982), 32-33.
11. The 300th Anniversary of the Gravesend Reformed Church, 1655-1955 (New York: Brooklyn Eagle Press, [1955]), 30; Atlas of the 29th, 30th, 31st and 32d Wards (formerly Towns of Flatbush, New Utrecht, Gravesend & Flatlands, Kings Co., New York), Borough of Brooklyn, City of New York (New York: E. Robinson & Co., 1898), plate 23, shows a frame “stable” of approximate size and oblong shape as the lecture room behind the church, directly in the projected path of East 1st Street between Gravesend Neck Road and Avenue U.
12. Rev. John K. Sharp, comp., Priests and Parishes of the Diocese of Brooklyn, 1820 to 1944 (New York: Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, 1944), 188, 194, 203.
13. Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 123.
14. Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: Protestant Episcopal Church, Diocese of Long Island (Vol. 2), Brooklyn and Queens (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 30.
15. Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: The Methodist Church (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 117.
16. Ibid, 101-102.
17. Frederick W. Beers, Atlas of Long Island (New York: Beers, Comstock and Cline, 1873), plate 31; Teunis G. Bergen, “History of the Town of New Utrecht” in The Civil, Political, Professional and Ecclesiastical History and Commercial and Industrial Record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, N.Y. from 1683 to 1884, edited by Henry R. Stiles (New York: Munsell, 1884), 265.
18. “New Gravesend Church,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Saturday 15 September 1900, p. 9.
19. “Brooklyn Church Society,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Wednesday 27 September 1899, p. 9; Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: The Methodist Church (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 134; “Methodist Ministers Meet,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Monday 1 May 1899, p. 16 and “Church Extension Work,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Friday 27 April 1900, p. 16. No. 27 Gravesend Neck Road still stands and is known variously as the Van Sicklen, Hicks-Platt, or Lady Moody House.
20. Lionel R. Lindsay, Gravesend Kid: A Brooklyn Boyhood (Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse, 2004), 44. Lindsay’s father, the Rev. Linden M. Lindsay, served as minister of the Reformed Dutch Church of Gravesend, 1944-1954; The 300th Anniversary of the Gravesend Reformed Church, 1655-1955 (New York: Brooklyn Eagle Press, [1955]), 30-31.
21. “New Gravesend Church,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Saturday 15 September 1900, p. 9.
22. The 300th Anniversary of the Gravesend Reformed Church, 1655-1955 (New York: Brooklyn Eagle Press, [1955]), 30-31; Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: The Methodist Church (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 134.
23. “New Gravesend Church,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Saturday 15 September 1900, p. 9.
24. “New Church Dedicated,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Monday 17 September 1900, p. 8.
25. “Church Extension Work,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Friday 27 April 1900, p. 16.
26. On the southern Italian belief system, see Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian American (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974), chapter seven, “Religion, Magic, and the Church.”
27. Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac, 1908 (Brooklyn, New York: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1908), 341.
28. Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: The Methodist Church (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 134, gives Putney’s dates of service as 1907-09; Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac, 1908-10, shows Putney’s service as 1908-10; Death record for Rufus Stanley Putney, State of Connecticut, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Town of Westport, 1920, certificate no. 110. Putney is quite possibly the minister photographed with the women and children in Figure 3. Pastors who served the church: 1900—W. Shrigley (acting); 1901—Rowland Hill; 1902—vacant; 1903—Rowland Hill (supplied); 1904—S.W. Eaton; 1905-07—G.A. Bronson; 1908-10—Rufus Stanley Putney; 1911—E.W. Shrigley; 1912-13—G.M. Powell (data culled from Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac, 1900-1913).
29. Historical Records Survey, Works Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New York City: The Methodist Church (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 117, 134. Records from the dissolved Gravesend Methodist Episcopal Church (marriages, baptisms, and members, 1899-1914) are now held by the archives of the United Methodist City Society, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 1922, New York, NY 10115; http://www.umcitysociety.org/.
30. Rev. Elie DeVito, “Featured Church: Trinity Tabernacle, Brooklyn, NY,” Vista 2001: A Publication of the General Council of the Christian Church of North America (vol. 2, no. 1), 5. In 1929 it bore the inscription “Assemblea Christiana Radunatu Di Jesu” (Christian Assembly of Jesus); see Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s – 1970s, from the Collections of the New York Public Library (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1981), microfiche nos. 0235-A5, A6, and A7, all available online at NYPL Digital Gallery, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm, digital ID no. 705841F. An inscription on the congregation’s next building (see note 34) reads “Coney Island Christian Church.”
31. DeVito, 20.
32. The New York Times, Thursday 22 April 1937, p. 43, “Building Plans Filed / Brooklyn / Gravesend Neck Road, 2-12, s e cor of Van Sicklin [sic] St, extension of 1-story brick and frame church; Coney Island Pentecostal Church, premises, owner; R. T. Schaeffer, architect; cost, $5,000.” Elie DeVito’s account in Vista 2001, 20, also implies the new building was an extension of the old chapel: “In 1937, construction began around the original frame….[T]he old boy scout building [was] transformed into a beautiful church….” If the former lecture room of the Reformed Dutch Church exists as part of the stone church currently standing at 14 Neck Road, all external, visible traces of it have vanished.
33. 8 January 1979. See “Advent Gravesend Church History,” http://www.advent-gravesend.org/pages/history.html, accessed Tuesday 8 August 2006.
34. DeVito, 20.
35. See http://www.fkcb.org/, accessed Tuesday 8 August 2006.

Amy Johnson is a graduate of Columbia University (2009 B.A. Anthropology). She is currently on a Fulbright Scholarship in Nepal. Her research of the lumber industry on Manhattan island in the early Dutch period was conducted as part of an internship at Sawkill Lumber Co., a NYC based company that reclaims antique lumber from dismantled buildings (www.sawkil.com).

It is hard to imagine Manhattan Island without skyscrapers, traffic, and nearly two million people living upon it. It is equally as difficult to believe that this great metropolis was previously covered in forests, with vast streams crisscrossing the hilly granite terrain. Prior to the establishment of a permanent Dutch settlement on the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape, Manhattan was such a place. And just a little south of modern East 74th street, where Manhattan Island touches the East River, a creek named the Saw-kill once flowed.

Elizz Greatorex drew this sketch of Arch Brook (originally the Saw Kill) on the eastern side of Manhattan in 1869, approximately where E. 75th St. meets FDR Drive today. (source: Mannahatta, 2009).

Saw-kill

Surging into the East River between two rocky points, the Saw-kill was the island’s “largest hydrological network (by length),” a 13,710-meter long stream that began in the northern reaches of today’s Central Park (Sanderson and Brown 2007: 11; Koeppel 2000: 10). The land contained by the arms of the Saw-kill was “delightfully situated,” overlooking “a bay of considerable size” (132). In the coming years, the Dutch would utilize watercourses, like the Saw-kill, to access and process the forest’s major product: timber.

Though the date of its assemblage is unknown, it is possible that the Dutch colony of New Netherland established one of Manhattan’s earliest sawmills upon the Saw-kill. The Manatus Map of 1639, the first landmark map of the island known to the Dutch as Manhates (being the most common translation, and thus the Dutch may have confused the two) references the Saw-kill, yet highlights the creek as the “the quarter of the blacks, the company’s slaves,” rather than the site of a mill. This evidence suggests that by 1639 logging efforts surrounding Saw-kill may have declined, while the name Saw-kill remained in use. Undoubtedly the Lenape called the creek by their own name. The mill at Saw-kill represented only a part of the network of mills established on Eastern and Southern Manhates in the late 17th century.

Manhattan Ecology

Indeed, the abundance of trees on Manhattan had caught the attention of many of Manhattan’s first European visitors. When the Dutch carrack the Halve Moon, captained by Henry Hudson, ventured into the Lower Bay on 2 September 1609, officer Robert Juet described the country, “as pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them” (Burrows and Wallace 1999: 14). Henry Hudson echoed Juet’s statements, remarking as he exited the Narrows, “the land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon and it also abounds in trees of every description” (1999: 14).

According to Sanderson and Brown (2007). Hudson’s “trees of every description” most likely included American Chestnut, White Oak, Tulip Tree, Red Maple, American Beech and softwoods such as White Pine, Spruce and Fir. In their extensive analysis of pre-colonial Manhattan ecology, the authors account for the subtle differences in forest type and composition across the island, from the “the more xeric chestnut-oak forest type” of hill tops and sandy soils to the “mesic oak-tulip forest” of the hill side slopes and “deeper soils” (564). Along riparian habitats, “hemlock–northern hardwood forest” was probably a dominant feature with “red maple hardwood swamps” or “shrub swamps” occupying lower lying depressions (564). One can speculate that the forest lining the banks of the Saw-kill would have taken this character. Combined, these trees contributed to the mosaic “of the vast broadleaf deciduous forests that cloaked the Northeast” and have today largely disappeared from Manhattan¹. At the time of the arrival of the Nieu Nederlandt in 1624, however, the expansive woods and waist-high meadows offered a “terrestrial Canaan,” a welcome respite for the weary traveler (Burrows and Wallace 1999: 3).

Manhates was not a landscape empty of people. Over fifty Native American habitation sites, camps, and towns have been documented to exist within what would become the five boroughs of New York City. The majority of the island’s inhabitants, roughly 15,000 people, belonged to the Lenni-Lenape, a collective of various bands speaking the Munsee dialect of the Delaware language. Their presence, alongside climactic processes, shaped the ecological world of Manhattan creating the island’s extensive forest cover and grasslands. Archaeological evidence and ecological modeling techniques have determined that these bountiful habitats were the result of a succession of fires initiated by native peoples of the area “to clear the underbrush to ease travel and to increase levels of game” (Sanderson and Brown 2007: 20).

From the earliest days of the colony, the Dutch praised the dense groves of the island, unaware of their indebtedness to their Lenape neighbors, and speculated about the marketability of Manhates’ timber in the Netherlands. Yet, to the dismay of the Dutch, the ecology of Manhates proved to be an impediment both for enhancing settlement and establishing a timber trade on the island. Settlers such as the Revered Jonas Michaelus, in August 1628, declared his fervent belief that Manhates, not the Northern Dutch settlement of Fort Orange, should be established as the stronghold and center of New Netherland. He conceded, however, that realizing the island’s potential would be difficult due to the multitude of thick shrubs and trees, which made the clearing of land for settlement and cultivation exceedingly strenuous. But if Manhates was to become the center of Dutch New Netherland, it was imperative that the forests be cleared, allowing for the building of homes and other structures for the necessary growth of population and a competitive advantage for the Dutch timber trade.

Timber

To accomplish this, the Dutch needed to establish a number of mills in areas both accessible to the thick forests and to the newly planned fort of New Amsterdam, established in 1626. Several early constructed mills noted on the Manatus Map, such as the Saw-kill, were located in the tree filled landscape of Eastern Manhattan, which served as a primary base for initial logging efforts on Manhates.

The Dutch, however, had to carefully consider the Native American inhabitants of Manhates before any permanent settlement could be established or felling of trees could occur. The Dutch mentality behind their relationship with the Native Americans of Manhates, according to historical accounts, appears to have revolved largely around trade. From the available historic records, it can be assumed that trade on Colonial Manhattan occurred in both directions, sometimes with the Native Americans inhabiting Manhates or surrounding lands initiating the exchange. Anonymous “Native Peoples” are recorded in December 1626 as giving the Dutch settlers permission to cut logs on the island. Remarkably, historical accounts document this agreement as occurring one month after Peter Minuit’s supposed purchase of Manhates from the alleged “wild men” on 5 November 1626. Thus, it appears that the Native Peoples of Manhates did exert influence within the Dutch colony in the 17th century. To supply large, sturdy masts for the Dutch Navy and merchant ships, such as the West India Company, as well as materials for building homes, the extensive Oak, Pine and nut grove forests of Manhates were steadily cleared by Dutch settlers and the slaves of the West India Company.

Slave Quarters at Saw-kill and Slavery in Dutch Manhattan

Slavery was a contested practice in 17th century Netherlands. While it is possible slavery always existed at some intensity on Manhates the first instance of slaves on the island is recorded as approximately 1625 or 1626 when the Company imported eleven men, “among them Paulo d’Angola, Simon Congo, Anthrony Portuguese, and John Francisco” followed in 1628 by three women from Angola to Manhates (1999: 31). An overseer, named Jacob Stoffelsen, was officially hired in 1635 to care for the “negroes belonging to the Company” (1999: 32). Furthermore, the slave population would most certainly have included Native Americans, in addition to “captured Spanish or Portuguese sailors,” creating a diverse slave community that mirrored the hodgepodge of nationalities living as freemen alongside them (1999: 32). Slaves, while retaining the right to own property, marry, bear arms, attend religious services, observe holidays, and remaining subject to the same legal procedures and laws as other New Netherland colonists were nonetheless hardly treated equally (1999: 32). Men typically were employed for arduous tasks, most often performing repairs to New Amsterdam and cutting wood (1999: 32).

The slaves of the West India Company were quartered as early as 1626 at the mouth of the Saw-kill, their lodgings bordered by the smaller northern creek and the Wiechquaesgecks Trail. Historians believe the slaves living at Saw-kill were the primary workers of the mill (Stokes 1998: vol. 6, 132). After cutting down trees in the forests, the slaves would use the mill to help saw logs, which would then be placed in the Saw-kill. These logs would float downstream and be transported by ship to the settlement of New Amsterdam or across the Atlantic to the Netherlands. As of 1639, however, the Manatus Map still referred to the Saw-kill as the “the quarter of the blacks, the company’s slaves.” It is undoubted that the labor of slaves at the Saw-kill and other locations across Manhates led to the development of New Amsterdam.

Mills

In the late 17th century, the Saw-kill remained an important mill as evidenced by the construction of two roads connecting the mill both to New Amsterdam and New Harlem. Saw-kill’s prominence existed at this time in spite of the presence of two other mills on the Eastern portion of Manhates and the further construction of three expensive mills by the West India Company after the arrival of permanent settlers to Manhates in 1626. On the eastern portion of the island, the Dutch exploited the hydropower of existing creeks by constructing mills at Turtle Bay (between present day East 45th- 48th Streets) and Montagne’s Kill, later called Harlem Mill Creek (East 108th Street). The Saw-kill was situated between these two mills. The Dutch erected perhaps their first sawmill on Noten Island, their name for today’s Governor’s Island which during the Dutch Colonial Period was covered in nut trees. The mill upon Nut Island was later taken apart for iron in 1648. This network of saw mills, some powered by water, others by wind, were the foundation for the construction of New Amsterdam, the building of permanent homes for Dutch colonists, and the advancement of the Dutch Naval and commercial vessels during the 17th century. The Saw-kill, while quoted as, “the well known Saw-kill, which played an important part in the early days of Manhattan,” however, eventually became lost to time.

The Saw-kill’s later life

By 1677, that the property was referred to by a surveyor as, “ye run of water formerly called ye saw mill creeke,” indicating that the sawmill, from which the stream received its name, had long been out of operation (133). Subsequent owners of the land replaced the sawmill with a leather mill and, eventually, the Saw-kill wad redirected into a culvert, “arched over, and its trickling little stream was called Arch Brook” (133). Prior to this occurrence, however, the Saw-kill Bridge, built in was known popularly as “The Kissing Bridge,” first mentioned as such in 1806 (Stokes 1998, vol 4: 340). Its position four miles north of town, the surrounding picturesque landscape, and, above all, its seclusion, made the Saw-kill Bridge a favorite among Kissing Bridges in 18th century Manhattan. This distinction remained throughout the 19th century.

Although even Arch Brook has since disappeared, the waters of the Saw-kill are still present in Central Park. At the time of Central Park’s development in the mid-19th century, planners utilized the Saw-kill’s source waters, located approximately underneath the American Museum of Natural History, to create the 22-acre Lake enjoyed by New Yorkers today (2006: 87). Until the early 20th century a portion of the Saw-kill continued to flow into Ladies Pond. This small ice skating pond, consisting of two bays connected by the Saw-kill, was reserved for women’s private use to allow women to avoid the gaze of their male counterparts while changing their shoes. As standards changed, Ladies Pond fell out of use and in 1930 the Pond was filled in to serve as a pedestrian path (2000: 60). Thus the last active watercourse of the Saw-kill disappeared.

While it is no longer possible to witness Manhattan’s largest stream rush into the East River or meander through forested hills, the Saw-kill remains a prominent part of the Manhattan landscape. By remembering the Saw-kill and its place in the history of Manhattan this great stream can begin a new course through the island, bringing into relief the connectedness of past and present.

Works Cited

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
1999 Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. (New York: Oxford University Press).

E.W. Sanderson and M. Brown
2007 “Mannahatta: An Ecological First Look at the Manhattan Landscape Prior to Henry Hudson.” Northeastern Naturalist 14(4): 545-570.

Jennifer C. Spiegler and Paul M. Gaykowski
2006 The Bridges of Central Park. (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing).

I.N.P. Stokes
1998 [1967] The iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 : compiled from original
sources and illustrated by photo-intaglio reproductions of important maps, plans, views, and documents in public and private collections, 6 v. (Union, N.J.: Martino Fine Books).

1. Approximately 77% of Manhattan was covered in forest at the time of Hudson’s arrival (Sanderson and Brown 2007: 11

Janet Braun Reinitz, a painter and community muralist, and Jane Weissman, a writer and public relations specialist, are longtime members of Artmakers Inc., an artist-run, politically oriented community mural organization that works in collaboration with neighborhood groups to create high quality public art addressing residents’ lives and concerns. They are also the co-authors of ”Community, Consensus, and the Protest Mural” (Public Art Review, Fall 2005).  Braun-Reinitz, president of Artmakers, is co-author with Rochelle Shicoff of The Mural Book: A Practical Guide for Educators. Weissman, a participating artist and project director of several Artmakers murals, is the curator of the traveling exhibition Images of the African Diaspora in New York City Community Murals, developed to coincide with the publication of On the Wall.

This essay is an excerpt from On the Wall published by University Press of Mississippi, 2009

Murals are the people’s blackboard.
– Pablo Neruda

I know that mural. I live near it. . . . I remember when the mural was painted. It’s really a part of our neighborhood. . . . I see that mural every day from the elevated train on my way to work. . . . Our mural has been there for years. Now it’s faded and the paint is peeling. It’s very sad. . . . Last week, when I walked by my favorite mural, the wall had been whitewashed.

Such comments inevitably figure in any conversation about community murals. People who live, work, or pass by murals note, remember, and accurately describe them. Community murals–collaborations among artists, neighborhood groups, and mural organizations–have energized New York City’s visual landscape since 1968, the four decades covered in this cultural history. A singular art form, these large-scale and site-specific works reflect the social, cultural, and political climate of their times and the neighborhoods in which they are located. Community murals beautify, educate, protest, celebrate, affirm, organize, and motivate residents to action. They are a window into the unwritten history of a neighborhood, providing a depth of understanding equal or perhaps greater than that provided by “official” records.

Nancy Sullivan, Not For Sale, 1985, from Artmakers Inc.'s La Lucha Mural Park, Lower East Side, Manhattan, photo (c) Camille Perrottet.

Over the past forty years, local organizations have enthusiastically adopted outdoor community murals, sponsoring more than five hundred of them throughout the city’s five boroughs. The ideal collaboration involves every phase of the mural-making process, from germination to dedication, with artists and representatives of neighborhood groups embracing their roles to the fullest. This interaction depends on the mutual respect of everyone involved and distinguishes community murals from commissioned and artist-initiated murals and most memorial walls.

Every year, community murals disappear–and with them their histories. As time passes, murals inevitably fade–sun, wind, rain and snow their enemies. Buildings develop cracks, and water seepage causes paint to peel, requiring walls to be resurfaced. Buildings are demolished. New construction obscures murals on walls facing vacant lots and community gardens. Many of New York City’s early murals–and, indeed, many later ones as well–are known today only through contemporary documentation. While most community murals have been documented in some form, their images and the stories behind them have never before been gathered together in one place. On the Wall offers readers the opportunity to explore the variety and richness of these remarkable works of art and to meet the artists, arts organizations, and communities that collaborate to create the murals.

Community murals are hardly unique to New York City. It is generally accepted that the contemporary national community mural movement began in Chicago–an article in Ebony magazine brought widespread attention to the 1967 Wall of Respect–but artists were also painting murals in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In New York City, community murals first appeared in 1968 in East Harlem, in the South Bronx, and on the Lower East Side. Playing a significant role in the history of the national community mural movement, New York City is responsible for a number of firsts. New York artists developed the projected silhouette mural technique, creating a style that characterized the city’s earliest walls. In 1976, these artists also organized the 1st National Murals Conference, a gathering of more than 150 mural professionals. And spray artists in the Bronx first collaborated with neighborhood groups to create community murals using aerosol paint.

Many factors influence the creation of community murals: practical considerations, the political climate of the time, the intentions of the various participants, and a willingness to work toward consensus. Among the practical considerations, the current availability of walls and the ability to contract for expensive scaffolds determine mural location, size, and orientation (vertical or horizontal). Social and political considerations give murals their themes and content as well as their evocative titles: Arise From Oppression (Multi-Ethnic Mural) (1972), Urban Rebirth (1975), Pride and Joy* (1982), Push Crack Back (1986), West Harlem Wishes (1993), Erase the Hate* (1996), Nuestro Barrio (1998), and When Women Pursue Justice* (2005). (An asterisk after a mural title indicates that the mural existed in whole or in part as of January 2008.)

(c) Artmakers Inc., When Women Pursue Justice, 2005, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, photo (c) Jane Weissman.

Community murals reflect the mood and hopes of local residents. They call attention to neighborhood concerns and, chronicling cooperative efforts to address problems, convey the pride of communal accomplishment. They express cultural identification and group solidarity, commemorate historical events, speak to ethnic and racial pride, and honor local and national heroes.

Throughout New York’s mural history, several themes continually recur–most notably, the lack of decent and affordable housing. This problem is directly affected and often exacerbated by the city’s fluctuating financial health, economic policies, and local politics. Murals today still present critical views of gentrification, homelessness, slum landlords, and the failure of local government to address these issues adequately. Community murals continually bring attention to the need for social justice, better education and health care, and improved community-police relations. From the 1970s to the present, murals have offered images of residents demonstrating, raised fists, and picket signs that define and demand solutions to pressing problems. The “community” is also shown actively intervening to rectify prevalent adverse conditions.

For many of those involved, the act of painting a community mural is itself a political act. What propels a neighborhood group to put forward its message to the larger community? And who determines how that message will be conveyed, what the mural will look like? National and international events dominating newspaper headlines rarely find their way into community murals unless the sponsoring organization exists specifically to address such issues (e.g., war, arms proliferation, women’s rights). Artists working with neighborhood groups quickly learn that their members usually hold differing and often polarizing views. National and international concerns become subjects of community murals only when issues have local ramifications on, for example, housing, health care, or the environment and when members agree on a course of action. Essential to the development and success of community murals is consensus on mural themes and content.

Heriverto "Eddie" Alicea, Building the Community, 1980, Harlem, Manhattan, (c) CITYarts, Inc., photo (c) Heriverto "Eddie" Alicea.

In his afterword to Toward a People’s Art (1998), Timothy W. Drescher writes, “In their democratic aspects, community murals may be an ideal microcosm of the larger society, one in which the result is an expression of mutual respect and commonality.” Artists, neighborhood groups, local residents, and sponsors (i.e., mural, arts, or community-based organizations), make up that “larger society.” Each should be present in the development of community murals, equal participants in public meetings and forums where mural themes and designs are determined and/or reviewed. These constituencies inevitably bring distinct interests and goals to the project. Political perspectives often diverge, but sufficient overlap is required to arrive at community consensus.

Neighborhood groups naturally concentrate on pressing local concerns, identifying immediate or long-term goals. Artists, especially those with backgrounds in political activism, see murals as a way to bring attention to the wrongs around them and may filter these goals through a more global perspective. Sponsoring organizations such as local or economic development corporations, which often fund murals, consider their participation in community murals as positive civic engagement and, with notable exceptions, are generally less involved in determining a mural’s theme. The opinions of neighbors who live near a mural can never be underestimated, and ideally they too join in the consensus, sharing the belief that a mural will be an effective vehicle for community improvement.

Joe Matunis, Ashes to Ashes, 2000, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (c) Los Muralistas de El Puente, photo (c) Joe Matunis.

Neighborhood groups often initiate the idea of a community mural, but they must do more than express such a desire. Guided by their partnering artists, they also articulate whether the mural will address social and political issues or celebrate a neighborhood, its history, and its residents. While a mural organization usually but not always selects the artist, it is the community group that identifies themes, suggests or specifies imagery, reviews the design, and in some cases has final approval of the completed drawings. The group also provides labor and assistance to the muralist in a variety of ways that may range from erecting the scaffold to scraping peeling paint. And almost always, members of the community celebrate the mural’s completion with a dedication ceremony and festivities. It is this interaction among artists, sponsors, and neighborhood residents that makes New York’s community murals eloquent expressions of the city’s enduring, block-by-block sense of identity and anchors them in the life of the neighborhood for years to come.

For a muralist, the magic starts with the wall, which can exert a powerful attraction. For most people, a wall encloses, protects, confines, defends, circumscribes, safeguards, and restricts. To a muralist, however, a wall is a potential painting surface that presents limitless possibilities. Each wall has its own personality, and every artist must take its measure before determining if it is suitable for a mural. The muralist’s romance with a particular wall may be nothing more than a personal fantasy, often punctured when building owners withhold permission or further investigation reveals that a building is slated for sale, renovation, or demolition. A wall may meet all of the artist’s physical criteria yet not be the right choice for a community mural. In reality, the group sponsoring a project usually has a site in mind. Even if that wall has imperfections–doors, windows, patches of tar, crumbling brick–the muralist has no choice but to embrace it.

The artist accepts that the mural design is open to discussion and change until the community’s final approval of the drawings. Ideally, the community also accepts that no fundamental changes will be made to the design after its approval. This does not mean that the artist-community dialogue shuts down. On the contrary; leaving the solitary and protective environment of the studio for the exposed, unpredictable public arena of the street, muralists are thrust into daily contact with residents and workers, a large number of whom opt to join the conversation. On the wall, artists act as the sponsoring organization’s representative to the community at large and must be prepared for questions from passersby. No matter their motivations, they observe, question, critique, and on occasion influence the artistic process. This dialogue is often as powerful as the visual content of the finished mural.

Willard Whitlock, Celebrate the Angels All Around Us Every Day, 2002, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, (c) Crown Heights Youth Collective, photo (c) Janet Braun-Reinitz.

The completion of a mural is a notable moment in neighborhood life. The mural’s success depends on the participants’ experience in the collaborative process as much as its value as a work of public art. For the community, these murals–as long as they last–lend stature to their surroundings and are a continuing source of pride.

A bittersweet understanding accompanies the phrase as long as they last. Very few murals from the early 1970s and 1980s have survived, and many more recent ones from the 1990s and 2000s no longer exist. Community murals are, by their very nature, a temporary art form. Despite the knowledge that their work has a limited lifespan, muralists continue to paint. Philosophically accepting that murals can have brief lives, many artists are still brokenhearted to learn that their walls have deteriorated, been vandalized, or painted over. Some muralists simply move on, not wanting to know of the peeling, fading, and “tagging” that occur over time. Others regularly visit their murals to check their condition and touch up damaged areas. As time passes, neighborhoods as well as community concerns inevitably change. Even when community murals no longer retain their initial power and the motivation for their creation is unknown or resolved, they remain vibrant threads in the daily fabric of neighborhood life.

By John Tauranac

It was 30 years ago, almost to the day, that a new subway map was brought into play. It was a quasi-geographic map, the product of a committee at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that I chaired for the bulk of its existence. The map reflected the notion that the official New York City subway map should not show the city in a void but should reflect the city it serves.

The publication of that map flew in the face of modernism. Schematic, or orthogonal, non-geographic maps had become the standard for mapping transit systems by the 1970s, a direction that the Transit Authority had begun taking in 1958.

When the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was created in 1968, Chairman William J. Ronan wanted an even more modern look to the system than the 1958 map reflected. He wanted a clean, well illumined map as the poster boy for the subway, and he asked Massimo Vignelli of Unimark International to do the job.

In 1972, when the Vignelli map was published, the schematic map movement came into full flower in New York. This was the ultimate manifestation of “less is more” in cartographic terms. Compared with Vignelli’s schematic map, the idea of a geographic approach to mapping the subway – a map that even made an attempt at showing some of the complexity of service – was conservative, almost reactionary.

The committee started work on the map in 1976, and two years later a prototype was ready to be tested. A show called “The Good, The Bad … The Better? A New York City Subway Map Retrospective” was mounted at the Cityana Gallery that showed the history of mapping the subway and asked what direction should next be followed. The consensus was that a geographic approach was a good one.

In the same testing period, the Municipal Art Society sponsored The Great Subway Map Debate in the Great Hall of Cooper Union (see “Going Places” in The New Yorker, July 24, 1978), , with a panel of experts to discuss the pros and cons. Massimo Vignelli graciously represented his position on schematic subway maps. As the chairman of the subway map committee, design chief and standard bearer, I spoke for a new approach, a more geographic approach to mapping the subway.

The idea of two different approaches to mapping the subway, one schematic, the other geographic, was put forward by Jonathan Barnett, who was one of the panelists and a professor of urban design at City College at the time. “Why can’t we have both maps?” asked Professor Barnett. “Why can’t we have both a schematic map and a geographic map?”

The MTA wasn’t prepared for two maps, but I personally kept wondering “Why not?” and now, thanks to Pro-fessor Barnett’s suggestion of so many years ago, I have a new subway map on the market under the Tauranac Maps imprint.

One map, unlike the classic cheap bathrobe, does not fit all, so I decided to create a pair of subway maps on one sheet of paper – a schematic map on one side, a geographic map on the other – for the best of both possible worlds

Each style, with modifications, has its own rewards. If the immediate goal of a subway map is to get you from one station to the next, then the barest-boned schematic map can ordinarily work fine. The ultimate goal of a subway map, however, is not merely to get you from one station to another – from A to B – but to get you from where you are (A) to the closest subway station (B) that will get you the subway station (C) that is convenient to your ultimate destination (D).

I am more pragmatist than aesthetician, and I know that the New York subway system is hardly the republican ideal. Not all stations, for instance, are created equal.

A station might host one subway line 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The same station might have one line stopping there weekdays but not weekends, while another line might only make stops at that station weekends, ordinarily hurtling by as an express.

Unless passengers are forewarned, they might be standing on a platform waiting for a train that might not come for hours, even days.

Further, some stations have only local service, others have both local and express. Some stations allow you to transfer to trains on the same line going in the opposite direction, others do not. And, contrary to a commonly held belief, although the subway system operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, not all stations are open all the time. There is no service on the Brown Line (the J, M, and Z) at Fulton Street or Broad Street on the weekends, so the Broad Street station, which only serves those lines, is completely closed. The J, M, Z platform at the Fulton Street station, which is part of a major complex, has no service either, which, in transit parlance, means that it too is closed.

The amount of information required to navigate the New York system can be daunting, and space is required to impart it, even when the information is reduced to the pithiest, most easily understood terms. That’s why a schematic map, which is not bound by the confines of geographic accuracy, is the ideal solution to showing the system in all its complexity. In my new take on subway maps, the schematic map is the workhorse.

The average subway map might simply tell you the number or letter of a line that stops at a station. A more informative map might use different styles of type – boldface v. lightface, Roman v. italic – to indicate that a line stops at a station all the time or just some of the time. The drawback is that you still have to consult a service guide to ascertain the specifics of which line does what and when.

To alert riders to the vagaries of service and to specify when a line serves a station, my map color-codes the service at each station. The color coding tells you whether a line stops at a station seven days a week, 6:30 a.m. – 12 midnight, or weekdays only, or weekends only, or rush hours only, or some variation on the theme.

The really good part is that you’re given the critical information right where you need it, right on the map itself, so you don’t have to stumble your way through a service guide.

One usually overlooked complication is that there are trains labeled “Express” that operate express for only some of their runs, while some “Local” trains might indeed be truly local on their namesake runs in Manhattan, only to operate express in another borough. A number or letter within a right-angled symbol at a station indicates that the line – whatever its designation – makes local stops in both directions from that station; a number or letter within a circle-like symbol indicates that the line operates express in at least one direction from that station.

The station designation includes the primary station name, any secondary names, and the street of operation. That way readers stand a chance of getting their bearings, even in the schematic void.

This map incorporates a “No U-Turn” symbol at stations where you may not reverse direction without exiting and re-entering the system, thus having to pay another fare. If you’ve missed your station and want to reverse direction without paying another fare, just stay on the train until you come to the first station without a “No U-Turn” symbol and change there to save money.¹

But even schematic maps have their limits. With the complexity of the operation of the New York City subway and the fact that it operates seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I wound up with two schematic maps. The difference in service between night and day is the difference between night and day, so the primary map depicts daily service, 6:30 a.m. – 12 midnight. On the reverse and on a smaller scale is a Late Night map, which shows service from 12 midnight – 6:30 a.m.

Late-night service is truncated. Some lines that operate express during the day operate local, such as the A, the 2, and the 4; some lines only serve as shuttles, such as the R in Brooklyn; some do not operate at all. The D & Q operate express in Manhattan, the F in Queens, and in a fairly recent development, the 3 Line now operates express between 42nd Street-Times Square and 96th Street-Broadway, and local between 96th and 148th Streets.

Reference might be made to late-night service in service guides in other maps, but as far as I know, no other subway map includes a late-night subway map, which is a real oversight.

A service guide is arranged alpha-numerically and is written in a style that I like to describe as “plain speak.” I have tried to avoid transit talk.

As a bonus, an index of stations provides the grid coordinates so that you can find a station on the map, as well as the color-coded daily service at each station. Now these questions can be answered: Where, in The Bronx, is Zerega Avenue? The answer: grid coordinate E2. And what stops there? The 6. You don’t even have to consult the map. As far as I know, no other map of the New York City subway includes even a simple station index, let alone an index with the service at each station.

The geographic subway map takes another tack, which is to show the subway in relation to the city it serves. The geographic subway map does not depict every street in the city. Otherwise, it would grow to Brobdingnagian pro-portions and become unwieldy. The goal is to put things in perspective, so subway information is limited to the routes and station names. The bulk of the space is given over to showing streets, places of interest, parks, etc.

The streets of operation are labeled, and streets are included that are parallel to the routes of the subway so that you know you are walking in the right direction as you leave or approach a station, along with key intersecting and parallel streets. Some streets are included because, like Everest, they are there, or they loom large in the story of New York. Charlotte Street in The Bronx, the site of so many visits by politicians in the 1970s when The Bronx was burning and now a model of urban renewal, is on the map, as is Amboy Street in Brooklyn, which is included in honor of the fictional Amboy Dukes.

Places of interest include museums, major tourist attractions, every historic house open to the public that is operated by the Parks Department, colleges and universities, hospitals, and major (and many minor) parks and cemeteries. Many of the sites serve as landmarks in the true sense of the word, since they literally mark the land. And there is an index to all the institutions.

Manhattan poses the greatest problem in terms of congestion – subway lines and places of interest are all a jumble, with one on top of the other in many places. An in-set that measures 4.25 by 14.25 inches shows an enlarged image of Manhattan from the island’s southern tip at the Battery to north of 163rd Street in Washington Heights. Even at that scale, not every street can be shown, but the scale allows places of interest to be shown in their appropriate sites in relation to the subway and geography.

There is a downside to all this mapmaking business, especially when it comes to New York City. The moment that any truly detailed map comes off the press it is ordinarily already out of date, or it soon will be. My new subway map came out last November. Some hospitals have since closed, which might be only the tip of the icebergial problems. Draconian cuts might still be made by the MTA. On the bright side for riders and on the dark side for mapmakers, this spring the connection was made between the South Ferry and Whitehall Street stations.

As an old Brooklyn dodger fan, I early on learned the rallying cry “Wait ‘til next year.” In the case of mapping the city, “Wait ‘til the next printing” has to do. We mapmakers also serve who only stand and wait.

# # # # #

1. Since I’m by nature a loner, I always like to say that the best committee is a committee of one, but I clearly need several more sets of eyes for proofreading. A colleague very gently pointed out that I goofed at the 23rd Street-Eighth Avenue station, where you can indeed transfer from one direction to another. I’ll get it right on the next edition.

We have been documenting New York City’s mom-and-pop storefronts for ten years. Astoundingly, almost one-half of the stores that we photographed have disappeared. This is a trend we couldn’t help noticing and what set this project in motion. We witnessed first hand the alarming rate at which the shops were disappearing, and decided to preserve what remained.

Our journey began while photographing the city’s streets and walls for an altogether different project. During the late 1990’s, we combed the streets of New York City searching out and documenting its graffiti art scene for a book we were making that also involved large-scale photography. In the process of publishing two books and several articles documenting graffiti art, we got to travel and discover many distant neighborhoods of the city. The nature of graffiti art is such that it constantly changes as new art covers what had been there before. We would often return to the very same locations and see new artwork there, necessitating many trips to a particular block. Despite the short time frame between visits however, we noticed that some blocks looked drastically different. Many neighborhood stores had closed, or we would come across “old” stores, still in business, but somehow different. They were either refaced, remodeled, or original signage had been substituted with new, bright and shiny plastic awnings. The whole look and feel of the neighborhood had changed and much of its individuality and charm had gone. The result was unsettling.

The traditional storefront that has prevailed in some cases for nearly a century is facing several new setbacks. These family-run businesses started out as traditional ‘mom and pop’ stores, and there was a time when they defined our neighborhoods. Many were humble stores tucked away on narrow side streets, while others had become well-known institutions on historic avenues. Each store turned out to be as unique as their customers, run by owners with a commitment to tradition and special service. The neighborhood store has always been a foothold for new immigrants and a comfortable place where familiar languages are spoken, where ethnic foods and culture are present. These shops are lifelines for their communities, vital to the residents who depend on them for a multitude of needs. When these shops fail, the neighborhood itself is affected. Not only are these modest institutions falling away in the face of modernization and conformity, the once unique appearance and character of our colorful streets suffer in the process.

We made it our mission to thoroughly document these stores, setting out with our 35 mm camera and micro-cassette recorder. After taking only a few pictures and speaking with only a handful of storeowners, we knew we had a compelling story. Many storeowners felt honored that we would take the time to photograph their business and ask about their store’s history. We often sat down with them for hours, talking and reminiscing. We felt welcomed into their ‘homes’ and many wouldn’t let us leave without taking ‘tokens’ of their appreciation such as loaves of bread, pastries, sausages, or pizza. We taped the interviews with a recorder, it being less obtrusive than a video camera.

Our choice to use a 35 mm film camera, rather than a digital camera was obvious; we wanted to remain “old-school” like the stores we were documenting. We also produced panoramic composite photographs depicting the feel of entire blocks. This was our only concession to modern technology: to combine successive single 35 mm film images of rows of storefronts, which comprise an entire city block, into a seamless linear presentation using a computer. With these panoramas, the viewer gains a bold, new perspective. Splendid details such as signage, architectural adornment, and hand-made window displays are presented in context, as they exist on the street. This allows a truly stunning and comprehensive view otherwise impossible to experience. These panoramic photographs are the only way to view these entire blocks of storefronts at once, with no obstruction from parking meters, street signs, parked automobiles and trucks, or any other element of New York’s crowded sidewalks.

In our interviews, we learned many fascinating details from the owners about the struggles of surviving as a business in New York City. One of the most common things we heard was how their neighborhoods have changed over the years and how this has affected their business. Gentrification and skyrocketing rents were huge concerns. Owners who were fortunate enough to own the entire building where the business was located still worried about the future. In some cases they had no one in their family who wanted to take over the business when they retire, bringing to an end a long line of family tradition. Many owners told us about New York City’s rules and regulations concerning store signage and awnings, and the aggravation and huge expenses these cause. We had no idea permits and fees were required for neon signs or large overhanging signs, and that the city is no longer issuing new permits. In fact in many areas of the city, strict zoning ensures that storefront signage and awnings remain discreet and not hang over 18 inches from the sidewalk. Older stores are often forced to comply with these newer regulations and must modernize despite the owners’ wishes.

Some of the highlights of our interviews included finding out that true delicatessens like Katz’s Delicatessen in the Lower East Side are rare because they continue a tradition of meat preparation and preservation that pre-dates refrigeration. We discovered that McSorley’s Old Ale House in the East Village was the last bar in New York City to admit only men. We were dismayed to learn that the closure of E. Kurowycky and Sons Meat Market in our own neighborhood of the East Village occurred because the owner was suddenly forced to remove the smoked ham, bacon, salami, and pork kielbasa hanging from hooks in his store window. A fate shared by many. We heard that the water in New York City is crucial to the resultant taste and texture of homemade mozzarella. Many cheese-producing shops that relocated out-of-state must now arrange to have New York’s water tanked in to their shops, sometimes as far as to California! We discovered the oldest teahouse in Chinatown, learned that Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village was the first to introduce cappuccino into the United States, and could confirm first-hand that the C & N Everything Store in The Bronx literally does sell everything! The Wonder Wheel in Coney Island was bought as a wedding present for the wife of its owner. The owner’s son told us the gift was akin to “a ring so big that everyone in the world would see how much he loved her.” The birthplace of the teddy bear, next door to Jimmy’s Stationery & Toys in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had President Teddy Roosevelt’s personal blessing.

There is no typical New Yorker but there are quite distinct neighborhoods in New York City, often defined, in part, by their storefronts.

To view more of our Storefront photos, please go to: www.jamesandkarlamurray.com

Alan Solomon was born and raised in the Boston area, and has lived in New York City since 1996. He is the owner of Solomon Wood Co, a dealer in reclaimed woods from dismantled buildings. He has experienced the perils of Pearl Street, though as a preservation advocate for 211-215 Pearl Street.

The ups and downs, scams and swindles, building booms and busts, the wisdom and folly of New York City’s business district. It was all happening in the early 19th century, and recounted in a semi-humorous novella of 1834, The Perils of Pearl Street: and a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street by A Late Merchant (Asa Green) - a quintessential New York tale of aspiration and redemption (of sorts). The 175 yr. Sesquicentennial offers a time to reflect on this heritage.

Pearl Street, New York c. 1834 - Looks innocent enough.

Our guide through the perils is “a late merchant” named William Hazard, with the story is set in the early Erie Canal era (1825-30s), a period that would establish lower Manhattan as the commercial capital of the United States. Hazard moved to New York from an upstate village, a young man with dreams of becoming a merchant-prince on Pearl Street, the country’s wholesale hub for dry goods - carpets, wallpaper, crockery, lumber, upholstered furniture, mirrors, finished cloth, hardware, dishes and flatware, shoes, books, and on and on.

The story begins:

Of all the various professions, occupations, or employments of life, none perhaps afford greater vicissitudes than that of the merchant. None lead through more trials and difficulties; none expose their votaries to severer hazards of shipwreck, both in money and reputation.

Early merchants were intimately familiar with the street’s commercial perils, common enough to have slang expressions like Shinning, Drumming, Flying the Kite and the services of Peter Funk. The following provides a slight survey of tactics from the district, and their modern day equivalents.

Shinning

When a merchants debts accumulate - notes due to importers and auctioneers, rent, salaries to employees, living expenses, etc., - and creditors failed to pay on time, or all together, a firm faced potential bankruptcy.

Hazard, and his business partner Alfred Launch (Launch & Hazard) found themselves in this bind. And like many others that were strapped for cash, fell back on Shinning, which meant ʻrunning about to ones acquaintances to borrow money to meet the emergency of a note in bank”. In the search for funds, the desperate funds seeker, losing sight of boxes, barrels, piles of bricks and other obstacles, was likely to bang up their shins.

When the individual arrives at a potential lender, they say “anything over?” By this they mean to ask if they have anything over and above their own debts - for a Bailout. Shinning appeared to be so regularly practiced that you could identify a merchant by the “…discolored and battered condition of their shins”.

In recent times, investment banks and the auto industry, facing collapse, resorted to this practice,nearly crippling their shins in pursuit of billions in bailout funds from the Federal government, theone lender that had, or at least could borrow, tax, or print “anything over”.

Drumming

Hazard gets off to a slow start in New York, struggling like generations of future newcomers, to find an entry-level clerkship, or even decent room and board. He eventually falls into a job ‘Drumming’, mercantile-slang for the soliciting of customers. The work was not considered very dignified by more
established Pearl Street merchants, who regarded active Drummers to be ‘very slippery fellows’. Hazard admits to making “awkward work at drumming”.

The practice usually amounted to scouting out hotels for country merchants, engaging the target in a pitch, and directing them to the “…most celebrated establishment in the dry goods lines of any house on Pearl Street.” The uninitiated country merchant was generally lead to low quality and over-priced goods, or to bid against the notorious Peter Funk, who could be found at many mercantile houses at the same time, helping to bid up prices at fraudulent auctions.

Modern sales and marketing is now a national institution, though practices and ethics vary widely. But even Pearl Street merchants or Phineus T. Barnum, who wrote The Humbugs of the World (1866), a mid-19th Century line-up of scams, fraud, corruption and hoaxes, from spirit rappers and lottery sharks to false prophets and medical quacks, may still be stunned by the epic Ponzi Scheme at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, where the ring leader established a network Feeder Funds that drummed up billions from imperiled clients, including sophisticated investors that were duped like unsuspecting country merchants. Madoff pleaded guilty to his crimes on March 12, 2009 at the U.S. District Court at 500 Pearl Street.

Flying the Kite

Another popular means of raising funds when debts came due and cash was short involved Flying the Kite. The well known practice was defined to be, “…a combination between two persons, neither of whom has any funds in bank, to raise money by an exchange of checks…each taking care to deposit funds before the regular bank exchanges”. It carried risk, but was not an uncommon maneuver, with a firm able to keep up the show for a long time, “… when all beneath was perfectly hollow.”

Although Wall St. in recent days may have looked like a Kite Flying festival, amid the worst financial climate in history, a major participant was AIG (American International Group). Executives of the venerable insurance giant parked their cars in an open lot adjacent to 215 Pearl St. But much of the troubles took root at the AIG Financial Products office in London, where the conditions were more favorable. Since the unit was not subject to American insurance regulations, drumming could go on with abandon, even if the complex derivatives that were sold far exceeded anything that AIG, the largest insurer in the world, could cover. The scheme is still under investigation for securities fraud.

Peter Funk

The services of Peter Funk were despised by some and loved by others, but he was well known among all merchants on Pearl Street. Described as “…a little, bustling, active, smiling, bowing, scraping quizzical fellow, in a powdered wig…”, and at the same time, a person who was always transforming. Funk was the era’s prototype for every kind of scam operator in the district. His core business was at the auction houses, where he’d position himself in the crowd, and keep bidding prices at a premium.

Peter Funk lives on, with his transformations multiplied, and his geographic scope gone national. In the first decade of the 21st century, he turned more of his attention to the real estate sector, consulting with investment and mortgage banks, the government, and the media to bid up property values. He worked around the clock as a sub-prime lender, created esoteric mortgage backed securities, greeted countless clients at open houses, and ran NO MONEY DOWN investment seminars at the Learning Annex. Funk even predicted the markets irrational exuberance, seeing values resting on a foundation of air, and unloading his portfolio before the perils hit.

Speculation

Hazard lost the battle to avoid the swindles of the mercantile trade, and eventually went into bankruptcy - twice. But with the prospect of retrieving losses, he tried his luck at stock speculation, experiencing “…a taste of the dangers of Wall Street”. [Note: The American stock market had just been established in 1825, and white collar law enforcement by the Fed, or oversight by the SEC were not yet instituted, and perhaps still].

An early associate introduces Hazard to “one of the most ingenious arts of modern speculation”, first selling, and later buying stock. Or otherwise betting that a stock price will fall - today known as ‘Selling Short’. Going on the advice of “shrewd calculating men that look deeply into cause and effects”, the partners are convinced that shares of the Mammoth Institution, held at the United States Bank, must go down (“…and pretty roundly too”). “Bears and Bulls!” exclaims Hazard when he hears this term for the very first time, and is then instructed by his advisor to not alert the Bulls, for there will certainly be a ten percent price drop in the stock within a couple of months.

Hazard doesn’t let the opportunity pass. He puts up everything he owns (except for his clothes), and holds out for the two months, when he will no doubt arrive at “a safe harbor with all his sails spread”. Unfortunately, the stock of the Mammoth Institution refused to drop (“the bulls triumphed; the bears retreated to their dens”). Hazard was finished.

211 Pearl Street, New York

But the commercial and financial scene on Pearl and Wall was not without a counter-force, largely
represented by established merchants that were philanthropists and populists - and often evangelical, during an early 19th c. era of religious revival that historians have called the Second Great Awakening.

Manufacturers and Merchants, Revolutionaries and Revivalist Architects (Top left to right: William Colgate, A.A. Low (son of Seth Low Sr.), Rally at Birmingham, UK sandpit lead by Joshua Scholefield; Ithiel Town, revivalist architect and founder of country's first architectural firm, Town & Davis.

A surviving business building from the period, a five story brick and granite warehouse at 211 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan is a representative example. It was built for the soap maker William Colgate, the son of a political exile from England. He founded the American Bible Society, lead the volunteer fire department, and laid the foundations Manufacturers and Merchants, Revolutionaries and for the Fortune 500 company Colgate-Palmolive.

His commercial tenants were also early models of corporate citizenship. Seth Low Sr., a founder of Brooklyn, who was instrumental in opening trade with the far East; and a UK hardware merchant, Joshua Scholefield, who organized mass rallies in the Birmingham sands pits which lead to modern Democracy in England during the 1830s. The Greek revival style of the building is based on a design of the architect Ithiel Town for the Abolitionist silk merchants, Arthur and Lewis Tappan at 121 Pearl Street.

Facadicide on Pearl Street - no. 211 in Dec. 2007. Photo: Fabrizio Costantini.

In late 2002, the downtown block where 211 Pearl is located was slated for demolition. Preservationists responded with a public protest and appeal to the NYC LPC (Landmark Preservation Commission) for a hearing, with historian Paul E. Johnson calling the building “..a rare surviving relic of the process that transformed New York into America’s great city.”

The preservation campaign was lost - but not entirely. The facade of 211 and a mysterious brickwork symbol on its interior wall were preserved in an agreement with the real estate giant Rockrose Development, who
were granted Liberty Bonds in exchange.

Questions about business ethics can be as complex as Pearl Street’s ancient and crooked street pattern. Preservationists nonetheless, said that 211 Pearl “…told a different kind of story about American business” as Burkhard Bilger wrote in the New Yorker Magazine (Mystery on Pearl Street, Jan. 08). “In 1831, the city was as corrupt as it would ever be, and men like Colgate were a deliberate counter-force to all that vice…211 was more than a charming vestige of old New York. It was proof that you could make a buck without screwing your neighbor”. There’s evidence that the historic counting house is something that Wall Street can use.

Benjamin Feldman has lived and worked in New York City since 1969. His essays about New York and Yiddish culture have appeared on-line in The New Partisan Review, Ducts literary magazine, and in an earlier edition of The Gotham History Blotter. Much of his work can be read on his website, The New York Wanderer. His books include Butchery on Bond Street- Sexual Politics and The Burdell-Cunningham Case in Antebellum New York and the forthcoming Call Me Daddy - The Lives and Loves of Edward West Browning, New York’s Jazz-Age Lecher King.

[Author’s Note: This essay, like several I’ve written, is liberally sprinkled with Yiddish words, transliterated with English letters via the standard system adopted by the YIVO Institute many decades ago. In most places I’ve translated the word(s) in a parenthetical immediately thereafter].

WHAT’S IN A NAME? goes the popular refrain. Redolence, I say. Taste and smell. When I encounter something delicious, I’m often tempted to take a Dagwood-sized bite. Sometimes, though, caution dictates just a nibble. Especially when I walk through a burial ground.

Fear whacked me right in the face as I ventured across Richmond Avenue in Graniteville, Staten Island a few weeks ago. Don’t Walk cried the red khamsa (five-fingered hand) on the street corner, warning me not to dare scurrying across the newly-paved boulevard on my way into Baron de Hirsch Cemetery. Graveyards can be creepy places, filled with sadness and prematurely-ended lives. Unkempt lots and forgotten tombstones, vandalized memorials fill so many Jewish graveyards. I already knew my destination to be no exception.

It’s another country out there. The sidewalks were empty; cars rule the road in the land where John McCain carried the day. I walked past Castellano’s House of Music, its cheesy signs blaring ads for wannabe metal-heads who amp up their Fenders and pound on trap sets all over Richmond County, dreaming Springsteen sugarplum dreams. Salinger’s “DeDaumier Smith’s Blue Period” somehow comes to mind. New York City overflows with strange juxtapositions: across the street from this local Juilliard sits stone-cold quiet Baron de Hirsch Cemetery, with its thousands of permanent residents.

Founded by the philanthropy of its British railroad-magnate namesake, the burial ground is home to the sacred plots of dozens of Jewish burial societies. Many were part of landsmanshaft (homeland kinship) societies, owned by the benevolent organizations of immigrants from Eastern European cities and towns. Chernigov, Pistyn, Tysmienica, and many, many others are represented in force. Other societies served vanished Jewish congregations from Hudson County, New Jersey. The ner tamid, the Eternal Light, long ago flickered out behind the pulpits of nearby synagogues: Gone are the congregations of Tifereth Israel of Jersey City, ditto, Adas Israel of Bayonne.

Novigroder Young Mens Benevolent Association - Erected August 30, 1918

Jews were joiners: from the earliest days of the Eastern European immigration, the drive to assimilate, to become all-rightniks, was a monstrous thirst, slaked by becoming part of a club. The burial societies give witness: The stone gates list, in Yiddish and English, the names and titles of the many. Despite the ocean voyage, (most times in steerage) at the sweatshop you were still a galley slave; nothing had really changed since the era of Pithom and Ramses. But here, in America, you could be someone: an officer, a dues-payer, a member in good standing. Deracination barreled ahead. International organizations that admitted Jewish chapters are well represented at Baron de Hirsch. The Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias chartered many Hebrew lodges. Officers, past and present, gate committee members, recording secretaries, financial secretaries: all are listed, their yikhes (pedigree) recorded.

The persecution, both economic and religious, that drove so many millions of Jews from Eastern Europe to America, also tarred them with the name of anarchists. Belief in Jewish complicity in events such as the infamous 1886 Chicago Haymarket Square bombing was widespread. Left-wing Jewish agitators in Europe and the USA were a mortal danger to those of the chosen people who wanted nothing to do with socialist politics. So names were chosen to cloak the many centrist tailors with the flag. The William McKinley Benevolent Association at Baron de Hirsch is only one example. Daniel Webster, James A. Garfield and other Americans of unquestionable patriotism and integrity were embraced whole-hog, everything but the treyf (un-kosher) squeal put to good use. I wonder if the old Yankee Doodles would have minded had they known to what assimilatory advantage their good names would be put?

In Honor of Di Goldene Medine, The Golden Land

Nearby the cemetery, the arching Bayonne Bridge leads from nowheresville to ek velt (the end of the world): Bayonne, New Jersey is literally a corner, a narrow peninsula jutting out into Newark Bay. A bridge of sighs to the world to come, this graceful steel span carried countless funeral processions that led across the Kill Van Kull from Hudson County to the Staten Island final resting ground. In the late 19th and early and mid-20th centuries, Bayonne was home to a significant Jewish population. Who knew? ¹

Three times I’ve visited Baron de Hirsch in the past 18 months. What draws me back there? It’s the promise of uncovering unknown histories, revivifying lives that are lost to our collective memory. And in some sense connecting to relatives I never knew. Just this past visit I stared grimly at one of the freshest graves, a polished black granite tombstone of a Soviet Jew named Alexander Dikshteyn, containing his portrait, photo-etched on the stone. Their custom seems so un-Jewish to me, but among secular Jews there is long precedent. In Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens, one sees porcelain photo medallions on many graves, sadly deteriorated after seventy and more years of weather. But then I was put off by a different reason… The unfortunate Russian’s first day on earth was all too familiar: June 24, 1952. Intimations of mortality shivered through my frame. That’s my birthday. Maybe this whole project was DOA.

I fought back, though: riches beyond measure were strewn all over; each society’s plot a mystery of place and affiliation to be untangled from the vines of neglect. Inscriptions in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Russian, even the Albanian tongue, decorate the stones and portals of fenced spaces. Cyrillic and Arabic effloresce on many of the newer markers. Ashkenazic Jews have not dominated the count of daily interments in Baron de Hirsch in many years.

In A Field Not Far From The Tower of Babel...

Despite the wilderness of unkempt gravesites, this sacred Jewish resting ground is covered with a holy cloth. Much like the gold-trimmed, wine-velvet fabric that bedecks the table on which Torah scrolls are laid to be read in the synagogue, a blanket of history covers the entire site. No matter the six-foot tall reeds that obscure all stones in the most-neglected plots; no problem the broken, un-mended gravesites: The dishabille of the place amidst the brilliant autumn colors sharpened my eyes and then delivered a huge reward.

Tkhies hameysim, the raising of the dead, can be done with very large groups. At Baron de Hirsch, whole populations can be levitated. Jewish bagel bakers rose before my eyes. How many years have gone by since they did it, unionized Jewish men, in numbers great enough to organize, baking our favorites, forming a lodge?

The day before my Staten Island visit I’d come across a listing of archives of fraternal organizations at the YIVO archives. One title stood out, almost laughable in these times. Ershte Beygl Beker Krankn Untershtitsung Farayn. First Bagel Bakers Sick and Benevolent Society. Warm aromas filled the air: Poppyseed, Salt, Garlic, Everything: Perhaps I could find a remnant of this group’s existence. My question would be answered: What’s in a name?

Then next day I returned and walked the cemetery, totally naïve, unsuspecting, then boom ! A piece of mazl (good luck) came my way: Leaning against the granite columns at the entrance to the plots of the United Varshaver Sick Benefit Society were three rusted iron gates, a pair and an odd one. The single belonged there, the other two not. The entrance to the world to come which the matched pair guarded lay immediately across the path. The name on the iron mirrored the inscription of the pediment cater-corner: Ershte Beygl Beker Krankn Untershtitsung Farayn.

Before the 1937 formation of Bagel Bakers Union Local 338, smaller organizations served the needs of this critical trade. Bagel bakers belonged to Locals 505, 507 and 509 of the larger Bakery Worker’s Unions. Jewish Bakers Associations were organized in the Bronx and Brownsville Brooklyn. Membership meetings of many groups were held in downtown halls where not a trace remains today of their glorious union past.
Local 31 of the Jewish Bakers Union was formed on the Lower East Side in 1885, but it was short lived, even after its resurrection in 1890. It’s no wonder a sick and benevolent society was needed. Bagel bakeries on the Lower East were basement gehennas of filth and squalor, where the men labored bare-chested among roaches and mice fourteen hours a day. The heat, fatigue and germs surely shortened many bakers’ lives. For $665 the First Beigel Bakers Kranken Unterstuetzungs Verein of 145 Suffolk Street acquired a place in the country for its members to take a final break. Section G, Lots 1100-1109 would be the site, Baron de Hirsch the resting place.

1938 Ledger of "Westchester Branch, Bakers Union Local 507, Yonkers, NY"

1937 saw the formation of Local 338, its offices located at 111 East Houston Street (sadly now demolished) and at other times at 121 University Place. Membership in Local 338 was nepotistic. Sons and other male relatives were accommodated. Others not. Closely affiliated with the United Hebrew Trades movement and other large-scale labor organizations, Local 338 pushed hard to make all bagel bakeries union shops. The invention of bagel-baking machinery and the rise of Lenders Bagels in West Haven, CT in mid-century spelled the end of Local 338, though. An industrial irrelevancy, its remnants merged with Bakery Workers Local 3 in the early 1970s.From the Forverts, n.d.: “Bagel Bakers Boss Leybovitz Has Settled With the Union” - The Bagel Bakers Union Local 338 makes known that the protracted strike against Boss Leybovitz from the Rockaway Bagel Company is settled with a victory for the union. Boss Leybovitz, whose bakery is located at 4814 Rockaway Boulevard, Rockaway Beach, has signed a contract with the union agreeing to all the union requirements…

****************

The names on the Bagel Bakers’ tombstones smelled as rich and tasty as the dough they rolled: M. Stein, Helk Ziperstein, Yankev Shoykhid (a misspelling of shoykhet?: Jewish kosher slaughterer) Where did these men live? How long were their days? Did they love to play pinochle? Bet on horses or drink?

I’ll keep working the archives for some answers, but next time I visit the graveyard, I’m taking precautions: I’ll carry a box of Sterling Kosher Salt. Every three steps I’ll stop and pour some. A handful to throw over my shoulder like my elterbobe (my old great-grandmother) did for good luck. Dusk was falling as I walked along Baron de Hirsch’s Section G paths. It was nearly closing time when I spotted bagel baker Harry Fertel’s stone. Again, a chill grabbed me. “Maybe I should high-tail it outta here,” I said to myself quietly. Harry Fertel died the day I was born.

Acknowledgments:

For intellectual guidance on the broadest scale in the preparation of this article and ongoing inspiration I am indebted to my friend Benjamin Sadock. His contributions to this effort are second only to the guidance and support of my wonderful wife and partner of 32 years, Frances Stern. I am also tremendously grateful to Baron de Hirsch Cemetery’s brilliant and kind Superintendent and General Manager Raphael Bochbot, to Leo Greenbaum, chief archivist at YIVO, Larry Gutterman of Gutterman’s Funeral Home of Bayonne, NY and the members of HudsonJewish.org who so rapidly assisted me in my research; to Gail Malmgreen, Associate Head for Archival Collections and her staff at Tamiment Library/ Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU, and authors Matthew Goodman (at work on a screenplay about Local 338 and bagel making in general) and Maria Balinska (who just published a marvelous account of that most Jewish of foods entitled simply The Bagel.

1. Jack Klugman as Ben Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus jumps to mind: The pater familias of a Newark, New Jersey plumbing supply business might well have grown up among the predominant Italians in 1920s Bayonne, decamping for a leafy cul de sac in Bergen County with his two daughters, wife, and Carlotta the black maid. Suddenly it all jumps to life: It’s only yesterday I heard Jack squawk to Ali MacGraw during her boyfriend Richard Benjamin’s first visit to the family’s overloaded dinner table “She eats like a bird !” and to Michael Meyers (when her brother, Mr. Ohio State super-jock, helping out for the summer at the family’s plumbing supplies yard tried a bit of workers’ schedule juggling management consultancy and was shot down by his high-school drop-out Dad): “We all go to lunch at the same time !” A scene in Baron de Hirsch as an old family member is gently lowered into their grave could well have been cut into that sweet film, showing us all whence we came and where we’re going.

Michael J. Agovino has written for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, Salon, Elle, and The New York Observer. He was born and raised in New York City, where he still resides.

It was Super Bowl Sunday, the only day of the year my mother served dinner in front of the television set. She knew that my father had a vested financial interest in the game and that I was a boy who deeply cared about sports. So she conceded, as she had for many years now: dinner in the living room with the Sony Trinitron. I began to suspect she enjoyed it.

The menu was a concession, too, solely for me this time. Gone was our usual midwinter southern Italian Sunday feast: a homemade ragu over rigatoni, with braciola, sausage, polpette, broccoli rabe on the side or roasted peppers, and a carafe of Valpolicella. No, on this day, my mother, desperate to put meat on my little bones, served up my favorite, determinedly un-Italian: roast beef, roasted potatoes, Boston lettuce, and mountains of green beans sautéed with garlic and olive oil.

My older sister refused to take part. She never would. She always hated two things—red meat and sports. Above all, she hated my father’s gambling, the ebb and flow of anxiety that came with it, the screaming matches it provoked between my parents, the dark silences after a bad day at “the office,” the absurdity of risking our future on Tampa Bay minus the three and a half or TCU or some horse, maybe Foolish Pleasure.

For my father, gambling and bookmaking were a second job, his clandestine second life. He had been gambling in some form or other since FDR’s second term. By the 1980s, it had become his main source of income, his main source of hope and of despair.

On that Super Bowl Sunday in 1984, in our Bronx apartment twenty-two stories above the spindly, Waiting for Godot tree sticks, the three of us—my parents and I—watched the Washington Redskins play the Los Angeles Raiders. The Redskins were the defending title-holders and a three-point favorite. My father had wagered heavily on the Raiders. How heavily, I do not know; I knew not to ask. It was my father’s business.

Besides the Yankees—the Yankees made him an American, he told me this, more than being born in East Harlem did—he never had favorite teams. Gamblers and bookmakers can’t get attached, can’t afford to, but he liked the Raiders. Kenny Stabler might have started it; my father had a thing for lefties. And the Raiders were always the bad guys. That helped.

Washington had the self-aggrandizing quarterback Joe Theismann and the impudent receiving corps known as the Smurfs. The Raiders had the stoic Tom Flores and the unfashionable Jim Plunkett—two scions of industrious Chicano laborers who came up the hard way.

In the third quarter, when the game was still a game, there was a play—a very famous play. You remember. Marcus Allen, bright, young stealthy, took a handoff from Plunkett. He ran to the left side of the line of scrimmage, saw it was clogged, spun 180 degrees to the right, got a feeble but well-intentioned block from Plunkett, and turned upfield. For a few interminable seconds, we didn’t talk, we didn’t chew, we didn’t breathe. Our eyes widened, and we watched Marcus Allen run. He kept on running, a silver-and-black streak, away from the pack for seventy-something yards and a touchdown.

Roasted potatoes, sautéed green beans, and shouts of joy flew into the air. My sister, eavesdropping, came out of her room, relieved. It was now apparent that the Raiders would win. Her perpetually in-arrears tuition at Clark University would be paid. Outside, a horn honked, someone howled from a windswept terrace. The howl echoed. The Bronx resonated, at least this multiracial, multiethnic, increasingly tensioned corner of the Bronx, an eyesore of gray schematic towers. It was called Co-op City. I heard it called Nigger City, Shvartze City, Jew Town, Throw-up City, depending.

It was a place no one wanted to be, not anymore. The good intentions covered in graffiti, the rest in puddles of urine in our elevators. A socialist experiment in how we would live, in how we would interact, improve, a product of the Great Society, the biggest housing cooperative in America, some said the world, and maybe it was, brought to you by the unholy troika of Governor Nelson Rockefeller; big labor, communists among them; and Robert Moses, his last big mistake. Thirty-five skyscrapers, soaring, identical, some with views of the World Trade Center, the city’s other bookend.

Up here, you could see everything, hear anything, as if you were down there on the street. Sound carried. Especially from boom boxes: At one time it was Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, the O’Jays; later, B.T. Express, the Brothers Johnson; and now Afrika Bambaataa and Melle Mel.

Our apartment was one of 15,382 units; we were four of sixty thousand people, none of whom were Rockefellers. This was Le Corbusier’s vision, tower in the park, put into practice before our eyes, us in the midst of its maquette. Open space, with plenty of green, for children to play, families to blossom. This was rhetoric come to life.

It was front-page news in The New York Times, above the fold, in November 1968, and it continued, on and on inside: “Co-op City, a Vast Housing Project Rising in the Northeast Bronx, Is Dedicated.” Rockefeller said this: “I think we are on the threshold of a new era in coping with our great urban problems. Today we dedicate a symbol to that era.” Co-op City was “a spectacular and heartwarming answer to the problems of American cities.” Newsweek called it a “Kibbutz in the Bronx.” Time said it was “relentlessly ugly.”

Einstein Loop, Carver Loop, Dreiser Loop, Debs Place, De Kruif Place, Defoe Place, it all looked the same. Was this the ugliest place in America? Or just the weirdest. Or was it ahead of its time, so far ahead, so way, way ahead, that it was backward? It was the biggest; that we knew. That they kept telling us.

“How did we end up here?” my mother said again and again. How did we end up here?

Half of the Bronx was rubble; from that, we were sequestered but we were also sequestered, somehow, from the upper reaches of New York City. We were still the Bronx, we were reminded, in abrupt and subtle ways. But how to get out, how to become more?

The object was to get out of this place. You wouldn’t live with urine puddles in your elevators. So why us? Most of our friends, the young families that made it go, that made it healthy and optimistic, had left. Now it was people with nowhere to go. And old people, waiting to die.

And here we were, sixteen years later, tied to this place, a family matured, in our sanctuary on the twenty-second floor, amid the wind, the unrelenting wind, tonight an arctic one, watching a game, a man run, watching a man we never met, save us, to give us opportunity, a way out, a chance, at least, for another experience, as other athletes, great and insignificant, had before. If they and their actions, or nonactions, on the field didn’t get us to Westchester, the promised land just north, they got us to Italy, Iberia, Morocco, Britain, the Netherlands, Mexico, the Caribbean, to the Prado, the Tate, the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre. Maybe it wasn’t as grand a gesture as Marcus Allen’s just now, maybe it was a broken-bat, opposite-field single by Doug Flynn in the bottom of the ninth, just out of the second baseman’s reach, or a Sly Williams put-back, late in the fourth, David Overstreet going the distance out of the wishbone on a Saturday afternoon, Rick Upchurch bringing one back at Mile High, during the four o’clock game, that must be Curt Gowdy’s voice, followed by Mutual of Omaha’s Wild
Kingdom. Whatever it was.

That night, for us, Marcus Allen saved the world. The absurdity.

This excerpt is from The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family From The Utopian Outskirts of New York City published by HarperCollins in September 2008.

William Sharpe, professor of English, joined the faculty of Barnard in 1984. In addition to his teaching duties for the English department, Professor Sharpe is affiliated with the American studies program at Barnard. Professor Sharpe specializes in the literature, art, and culture of the modern city, particularly New York. He teaches courses in urban literature, modern poetry, Victorian literature, and literary criticism. Professor Sharpe’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published numerous articles on literature, urban studies, and the visual arts. His new book on images of New York City at night, called New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Art, Literature, and Photography, was published in 2008 by Princeton University Press.

A Mighty Woman with a Torch

Conceived in 1871, cast in 1873, erected and dedicated in 1886, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty lifted its torch to arriving European immigrants. By 1920 it had hailed over five million prospective New Yorkers. At 305 feet tall, the statue surpassed Brooklyn Bridge to become the tallest thing on the continent. With the torch-bearing hand so powerfully lit that it soon had to be dimmed so as not to disorient mariners,
and with the base illuminated by electric lamps of eight thousand candlepower, the statue’s nocturnal debut on November 1, 1886 was as impressive as its daytime aspect. In October 1892, four hundred years after Columbus had first visited the New World, the rest of the statue was illuminated with four million candlepower, so that “the whole outline of the figure was brought distinctly to view.”

Two relics of Liberty’s multistage birth are particularly striking. In March 1883, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt appeared at her own ball dressed as “Electric Light,” with real diamonds sparkling on her white satin ball gown. She may have been thinking of Edison’s lighting of downtown Manhattan in November 1882; in a carefully posed photograph she holds aloft what seems to be a shining electric torch, as if she were an elaborate lamp stand. But she is also unmistakably personifying the Statue of Liberty—whose disembodied arm and torch had been jutting from the ground in Madison Square Park since 1876, awaiting installation.

In the same year as the Vanderbilt ball, a Jewish poet named Emma Lazarus, who would die before the statue’s unveiling, wrote a poem to aid the construction fund. Eventually affixed to the base of the statue on a bronze plaque in 1903, the poem, “The New Colossus,” became an inseparable part of the icon it helped construct. The writer created the more lasting tribute, but both Vanderbilt and Lazarus grasped the visual and symbolic importance of the woman’s arm brandishing an electric light.

Lazarus’s poem begins by contrasting the male Colossus of Rhodes, between whose legs ships are said to have sailed into an ancient Greek harbor, to the “mighty woman with a torch” who welcomes outcasts to modern New York. Self-consciously shunning the “storied pomp” of antiquity, the “Mother of Exiles” offers refuge to the weary and unwanted masses of the Old World:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Lazarus uses an old-world poetic form, the Italian sonnet, to sing a new form of maternalistic love song to the downtrodden of the earth. With a Whitmanesque inclusiveness, Liberty offers “world-wide welcome” and a place to “breathe free.” But given the battered condition of her guests, we have to imagine Liberty as cast in the caring mold of Florence Nightingale, an earlier “Lady with the Lamp,” as she was reverentially called. Liberty presumably stands ready to nurse her huddled immigrant children into political health.

Bartholdi had planned that “Liberty Enlightening the World”—his original title for the statue—would hoist a gilded torch in recognition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals that spurred the revolutions inboth the United States and France. But Lazarus and her readers knew that the more “American” take on these historical principles would be to break with the past. They would signal the country’s ingenuity and technological superiority, not to mention its economic opportunities, via electric light. The natural forces of darkness and thunderbolts would be conquered by “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning.” When President Grover Cleveland spoke at the statue’s dedication, he kept Lazarus’s male/female, Old World/New World contrast in play, as he dwelled on the electric radiance that would eventually unite all nations: “Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and death [like Zeus], she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement. There it shall gleam upon the shore of our sister republic in the East. Reflected and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance . . . until liberty enlightens the world.”

But the statue itself does not fully square with the democratic meanings draped on its classic form. With her Greco-Roman garb, regal crown, and stolid mien, New York’s Liberty bears little resemblance, for example, to Eugène Delacroix’s bare-breasted, barricade-hurdling revolutionary heroine, Liberty Leading the People. Rather, with her darkness-piercing lamp and record book (it says “July 4, 1776”), the New York statue might be taken for “Liberty Processing the People.” Under Liberty’s watchful eyes, the bureaucratic sifting of “wretched refuse” was carried on with American efficiency day and night, first at Castle Garden and then, beginning in 1892, on nearby Ellis Island, under electric lighting. It is not clear from the poem or the pose whether Liberty will treasure the varied ethnicity of her huddled masses, or simply toss them all into the melting pot for immediate purification. In the glare of Anglo-Saxon racial values, Lazarus’s vision of enlightened inclusivity was mostly turned into an assimilationist bleaching of cultural difference.

President Cleveland spoke of Liberty illuminating “the way to man’s”— not woman’s—“enfranchisement,” but her female character is what makes her receptiveness so immensely audacious. In many ways, Liberty plays off William Holman Hunt’s famous painting The Light of the World (1851–1853), where Christ beckoningly holds a lantern toward the viewer. To show how few heed the Gospel, Hunt positions Christ near a closed
door covered by briars. But the motherly, Greco-Roman Liberty opens her arms to millions every decade. Democracy trumps religion; Liberty’s golden door (and her kingdom, if we would go by the crown) is definitely “of this world.”

It was only a matter of time before someone saw the sexual side of the “Mother of Exiles” and imagined how she got to be a mother in the first place. Near the turn of the twentieth century, the Yiddish poet Melech
Ravitch passed Liberty’s portals, and later he addressed her in a poem called “In the New York Statue of Liberty”:

Woman, hollow, steel giant
With the torch in your right hand high,
You are a golem-woman, with a tinny skin
Taut over a steel skeleton.
Your tin lips have never kissed bread.
Your iron ribs have never cradled a man in bed.

And yet the poet confesses that he loves her, even though “in your veins of wire and steel / Flow electric lights.” Her hollowness is both inhuman and inspiring, since she can take in so many children and lovers: “Oh, is it true, you woman, you freedom, you’re today a fallen woman,” Ravitch asks, realizing that her promiscuity is what makes her so attractive: “And perhaps—perhaps because of that is my love for you so tender and so deep.” Writers have never tired of telling New Yorkers that just as the burning candle draws moths to its flame, so the city draws men and women to their ruin. But the Statue of Liberty lifts her electric beacon to attract the tired, the poor, the huddled masses to their salvation. The Mighty Woman with a Torch may be a fallen woman, one more lady of the (street)lamp after all, but her free and easy ways have only improved her reputation.

an excerpt of the 2008 publication by Matthew Goodman

Matthew Goodman’s nonfiction writing has appeared in The Forward, The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Brill’s Content, and the Utne Reader. Goodman received an MFA from Vermont College; his short stories have appeared in leading literary journals, including the Georgia Review, the New England Review, and Witness. He is a lifetime New Yorker and lives in New York City with his wife and children.

In the summer of 1835 Richard Adams Locke was thirty-four years old, and at the height of his powers – editor of the most widely read newspaper in the city. As New York newspaper editors went, Locke cut a decidedly unimposing figure, being of slim build and middling stature (Edgar Allan Poe, who stood five-foot eight, guessed Locke to be an inch shorter than himself), nowhere near as tall as James Gordon Bennett or James Watson Webb, and without Webb’s military bearing, or the literary glamor of the Evening Post’s William Cullen Bryant, or the aristocratic burnish of Mordecai Manuel Noah of the Evening Star. Still, he had a certain presence: In The Literati of New York City Poe observed that Locke’s eyes contained a “calm, clear luminousness”; there was “an air of distinction about his whole person,” as though he had carried with him to New York, along with the family’s five bags and bedding, some of the genteel manner of the world he had left behind.

Despite the often heated attacks launched by Richard Adams Locke from his desk at the Sun, many of them directed against the city’s other newspapers, there are no recorded instances of his ever being involved in any physical confrontations, a rarity among the high-strung New York editors of the time. (Even James Gordon Bennett, who was not known for his graciousness toward rivals, acknowledged that Locke was “very gentlemanly in his manners.”) In a world of furious self-promotion, he always avoided the spotlight, preferring to declaim from offstage – a consequence, perhaps, of the crossed eyes and badly scarred face that had marked him since childhood. (“His face,” Poe did not fail to observe, “is strongly pitted by the small-pox.”) Though a newspaper editorship was among the most visible positions in the city, providing a useful stepping-stone for many editors in their post-journalistic careers, Richard Adams Locke never ran for public office, never parlayed his contacts into lucrative business opportunities, never wrote his memoirs or collected his writings for publication; indeed, nearly all of his best work was written anonymously – including, of course, the moon series that made him, for a time, famous.

For the past several years Locke’s reading had focused almost entirely on the natural sciences. Science was his true intellectual love, even more than literature or politics, and astronomy in particular had long held a special interest for him. When he was seventeen, shortly before he left East Brent for London, he had composed an epic poem entitled “The Universe Restored,” in six cantos of nearly a thousand lines each, that put forward his own theory of the ceaseless destruction and reproduction of the universe. Under his editorship the pages of the Sun often carried news of the latest astronomical developments. It might have seemed curious material to give the readers of the Sun, who were accustomed to news made much closer to home, but those were the journals he was reading and could draw upon for his items – and, in any case, almost everyone these days had at least a passing interest in astronomy, thanks in part to the imminent arrival of Halley’s Comet, an event awaited with excitement as well as a certain trepidation, for there was still a tendency to see comets as omens of disaster, portents of God’s wrath, an age-old imposition of religion onto science of the very sort that Richard Adams Locke had long found so objectionable.

The idea for his moon series came to him as he was leafing through an old volume of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, the distinguished British quarterly of arts and sciences; he had been a regular reader of the Journal back in England, and had brought several copies with him aboard the James Cropper. He was perusing the premiere issue, published in 1826, when he came upon a brief article entitled “The Moon and its Inhabitants.” The article reported that the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers considered it “very probable” that the moon was inhabited by rational creatures, its surface covered by a vegetation very much like that of the earth’s; the astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen likewise maintained that he had recently discovered “great artificial works in the moon, erected by the Lunarians,” and was at present considering the possibility of communicating with the inhabitants of the moon – perhaps by means of an immense geometrical figure to be built on the plains of Siberia. That idea had met with the approval of “the great astronomer Gauss” (the mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss), who believed that “a correspondence with the inhabitants of the moon could only be begun by means of such mathematical contemplations and ideas, which we and they must have in common.”

Locke had found this item near the back of the journal, as part of a survey of various disciplines under the heading “Scientific Intelligence.” Toward the front was a longer article by the Scottish astronomer Thomas Dick about a new telescope he had invented, which he had dubbed the “Aërial Reflector.” In the past decade Thomas Dick had risen from obscurity (he had until recently been a schoolteacher in Perth) to become one of the most widely read authors in the field of science. The book that had made him famous was called The Christian Philosopher, or, The Connection of Science and Philosophy with Religion. First published in 1823, it had gone through several editions since then, at least one of which – the one Richard Adams Locke had read – contained a statement of Dick’s beliefs about life on the moon. In an appendix called “On the means by which it may probably be ascertained whether the Moon be a habitable world,” he proposed that a vast number of astronomers be enlisted worldwide to maintain continuous observations of the moon’s surface; over time, he believed, these observations would reveal changes on the surface brought about by “the operations of intelligent agents” – a forest being cut down, for example, or a city being built on what had earlier been only an open plain. Even if the lunarians were not themselves seen, their presence could be inferred, just as a sailor passing an uncharted island concludes that it is inhabited after noting the presence of huts and cultivated fields. If such a plan were to be put into effect, he wrote, “there can be little doubt that direct proofs would be obtained that the Moon is a habitable world.”

Immense Siberian figures, astronomers the world over watching for signs of lunarian cities: It was all, Locke thought, utterly absurd. Yet these were respected scientists, their views aired in prestigious journals. They were so very confident in their predictions of lunar life; they believed it was only a matter of time until, in Thomas Dick’s mathematical phrase, “direct proofs” were obtained and humanity knew itself to be alone no more. Life discovered elsewhere in the universe: what a sensation that would make. Locke began to imagine how such an event might be reported in the newspapers – the triumphant announcement, the awestruck descriptions of the fantastic become real. He could picture the exclamatory headlines, the long columns of black type, each day’s account concluding with that most captivating of phrases: To be continued. It would be the most remarkable news story in the history of the world.
And all the better, for his purposes, for being entirely untrue….

Reprinted with permission from THE SUN AND THE MOON: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman. Copyright © 2008 Basic Books

Peter Kurtz is a freelance writer currently living in Ohio, though he was born in metropolitan New York City. An amateur genealogist, Kurtz traces his New York ancestry to 1624 and the first Dutch settlement at Fort Orange. His third great-grandfather was New York merchant Jacob A. Stamler.

For ten years she had served as home to upwards of seventy working class girls and boys on the shores of both the Hudson and East Rivers in New York City. Referred to as the “Deep Sea Floating Hotel,” the vessel had minimal qualifications to lodge, and an advertisement of the day claimed “The poorer you are, the more cheerfully you will be received, provided you are respectable.”¹ But on this day, August 6, 1915, the New York Times reported the gloomy news:

70 TO LOSE HOMES IN FLOATING HOTEL

The Good Ship Stamler, John
Arbuckle’s Philanthropy
Will Be Dismantled.²

***

The Jacob A. Stamler was built at the North Sixth Street, Williamsburg shipyard of Thomas Stack, and launched on the afternoon of October 11, 1856.³ Her chief owners were William Laytin and Edwin H. Hurlbut, prominent New York shipping agents whose office on venerable South Street dispatched numerous coastal and trans-Atlantic ocean liners before the Civil War.⁴ Minority owner Jacob A. Stamler was a New York merchant who had achieved financial success in the city’s lucrative butcher markets.⁵ His namesake vessel weighed over a thousand tons and had a depth of roughly twenty feet, a size characteristic of the large merchantmen being built in the 1850s.⁶ The Stamler was a sailing packet ship and held to an established route on a fixed schedule. Her original port of call was Antwerp, Belgium, after which she changed agents and sailed in the Havre Second Line between New York City and Le Havre, France.

Berthed in the North River, the Le Havre ships concentrated on immigrant traffic rather than freight. Germans and Swiss comprised most of the Stamler’s passengers. Eventually, steamships displaced the sailing packets, but the Stamler was the last ship placed into service in the Havre Second Line, and she sailed the line until it folded in 1870. She then continued as a general trader to Le Havre, under Wall Street agents Boyd and Hincken.⁷

1880 painting by Edouard Adam of 'Jacob A. Stamler' departing Le Havre, France. The three-tailed house flag of Boyd and Hincken flies atop the main royal. Digital image courtesy of Louis J. Dianni Antique Marine Art.

In 1899, however, a man named John Arbuckle purchased the Stamler. Arbuckle was a self-made millionaire. He was born in 1839 in Pittsburgh, the son of a Scots-Irish immigrant. In school, young John rubbed shoulders with future magnates Henry Phipps and Andrew Carnegie. He dropped out of Washington and Jefferson College to join his brother Charles and others in a wholesale grocery business in Pittsburgh. Arbuckle’s invention of a machine to weigh and package coffee resulted in a popular coffee he dubbed “Arbuckle Ariosa,” which is marketed even today.⁸

John Arbuckle aboard his 'Deep Sea Floating Hotel.'

Arbuckle’s business eventually became the largest importer of coffee in the world. By the late 1800s, Arbuckle had moved to Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn and built an office across the East River at Old Slip and Water Street. He walked to and from work every day, through “roustabouts and longshoremen on the river-front.” In his office he talked to department managers, as well as workers who faced financial hardship, and “to many outsiders who hoped to gain his ear for charity.”⁹

Arbuckle was a member of the Plymouth Church, headed by noted abolitionist and reformer Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher had a profound influence on Arbuckle, and Arbuckle himself would cultivate a reputation for engaging in philanthropic and humanitarian causes with a drama that rivaled his business successes. Living in the noisome filth of turn-of-the-century New York City led him to concoct a host of eccentric schemes to aid the disadvantaged. He built a retirement colony for senior citizens on Lake Mohonk, north of New York City. He also converted a ship into the Riverside Home for Crippled Children.¹⁰ But his most audacious idea involved a much older ship, the Jacob A. Stamler.

***

By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City had undergone the most massive population explosion in American history. The unification of the five boroughs in 1898 helped create a city of over 3.5 million people, many of who lived in tenements constructed to meet only the barest requirements for size, ventilation, and light. Horse defecation, heat, polluted water, garbage, and cramped living conditions helped push the death rate in the city to an astonishing twenty percent of the total population in 1900. Tuberculosis, in particular, raged through the poorest and most unsanitary slum neighborhoods.¹¹

Millionaire philanthropist John Arbuckle had an idea to give working class New Yorkers relief from the fetid streets of the city, particularly during the hot summer months when conditions were at their worst. He would take an old, dilapidated ex-packet ship, refit and refurbish it for human occupancy, and “give tired brain workers a chance to do a little yachting.”¹² Arbuckle planned to sail women and children, and later men, around his coffee and sugar factories and “give them a lunch and a good time.” Overnight trips would also be offered. The watery excursions would be free at first, continue through the summer, with proceeds from later trips going to the Consumptives’ Home.¹³

The maiden voyage of the strange “Deep Sea Floating Hotel,” as the papers called it, was on July 17, 1901. A small tugboat, the John Harlin, pushed off from the foot of Atlantic Avenue at six p.m. with a paying group consisting of Arbuckle’s friends, business associates, publicists, newspapermen, and socialites. The tug met up with the Stamler off Liberty Island, transferred her passengers to the Stamler, and the Harlin gently pulled the city’s first floating hospice past the Narrows and down the lower bay. The journey lasted till five a.m., during which several speeches were made, though Arbuckle politely declined to speak. A luxurious dinner was served of consommé, broiled bluefish, fillet of beef with mushroom sauce, pineapple fritters, roast lamb, mashed potatoes, rice pudding, ice cream, and coffee. “I am a Brooklyn man,” ex-Pittsburgher Arbuckle boasted. “Here I have made money, and here I propose to spend some of it.”¹⁴ Despite the fact it was a rainy night, the inaugural trip was deemed a success.¹⁵ It could be argued that this New York harbor trip was the earliest American commercial pleasure cruise.

Attractions on board the vessel included carpeted saloons for men and women (only milk and ginger ale were served), a smoking room, Pullman berths, and a dumb waiter connecting the “culinary department” and pantry. There was a ten-ton ice refrigerator, and a giant steam-driven fan to keep guests cool during the hottest days of summer. Fare for Saturday evening trips, including a berth, dinner, and breakfast, totaled $2.50. Saturday-to-Monday trips were twice that, and weekly trip tickets cost twelve dollars. Arbuckle assured patrons that “I will have a couple of special policemen, big and strong enough to shake the toenails of anyone who attempts to cause annoyance on board, and pitch him in the black hole on the John Harlin afterward.”¹⁶ The Company also made assurances that “a woman of character, culture and refinement” would be on board to chaperone any young woman without a partner.¹⁷

Promenade deck on the 'Floating Hotel'

One of the most bizarre contrivances was a portable fishing tank, a large boat on davits that could be lowered to selected fishing grounds, filled with fish, then hoisted again to the ship’s side, while a stream of saltwater was pumped into the boat to keep the fish alive. Passengers were given fishing poles and allowed to catch one fish apiece, which were cleaned, cooked, and served so “the fortunate fisherman will have strictly fresh fish.”¹⁸

Well-dressed patrons in the 'Stamler's dining quarters. The vessel had yet to be converted to a home for disadvantaged 'boys and girls.'

But soon after regular excursions commenced, problems arose. Passengers complained that the sleeping berths were too narrow, and the four-person berth arrangement made things too crowded. Also, the small size of the portholes (a mere six inches diameter) excluded all but a small stream of air, which often included small swarms of mosquitoes from the Jersey Shore that would “make miserable the night of those aboard.”¹⁹ In April of 1902, the U.S. government sued Arbuckle for $2,500 in damages, after the Stamler broke free of her Staten Island moorings and drifted against the U.S. steamship Manises, crushing the Manises’ cabin and part of her deck. Ticket sales for the pleasure trips didn’t take off as expected, either. Although Arbuckle had advertised journeys as distant as Cape May and Newport, it appears the Stamler rarely voyaged beyond Sandy Hook, off the north Jersey shore.²⁰

After the government’s libel suit in 1902, little news was reported of the Stamler for the next three years. In February 1905, she found a new home near today’s Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex. Rather than cruising as a pleasure ship, however, the Stamler opened as a stationary hotel. She kept the moniker “Deep Sea Floating Hotel,” though she stayed tied to the piers.²¹

Her “guest list” was now restricted to young, working class men and women. Lodging for women was forty cents per day, and men were charged ten cents more. A circa 1906 advertisement distributed by Arbuckle’s Deep Sea Hotel Company makes no mention of any minimum age or income level, only that “we do not accommodate people past middle age, or in ill health.” The ad boasted that a hundred people could receive accommodations while enjoying “home-like cooking; comfortable well-ventilated bed-rooms…reading room, Piano, daily papers and monthly magazines for free use.” Alcohol was still forbidden, and security was maintained by a night watchman who made “frequent rounds after 10 p.m. to see if ‘All is Well.’” The advertisement assured that the Stamler’s guests comprised “one large happy family, enjoying all the conveniences of a modern Hotel.”²²

Despite several scares that Arbuckle would close his novelty, the ship remained open, although she shifted her moorings to Brooklyn, then East 23rd Street on the East River.²³ In July 1905, she made headlines again when Wall Street workers filed a complaint, asserting that music from a steam calliope on the Stamler’s new tug, the Wise, was disturbing them. However, not everyone was upset. The Times reported that neighboring yacht owners actually enjoyed the calliope, and the disgruntled tenants “were prompted by their love for the classic and their contempt for such tunes as ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘The Wearing of the Green.’”²⁴

For the next ten years, the Stamler remained open to her working class guests (they were eventually restricted to girls who made less than seven dollars a week). On March 27, 1912, John Arbuckle died after a long bout with malaria, probably contracted while in South America on coffee business.²⁵ In its obituary header, the New York Times pointedly noted that Arbuckle had “Built a Home Afloat for Workers.”²⁶

Slightly overexposed photo of the 'Stamler' in 1913, tied to the piers on the East River. No longer ocean-bound, at this late date she was more hotel than ship, providing food and shelter to working-class New York youth.

Although Arbuckle’s surviving relatives assured everyone that the Jacob A. Stamler would remain open, the sun was setting on the former immigrant ship. A headline in the Times on August 6, 1915 announced that seventy girls would soon be homeless, because the Stamler was scheduled to be torn apart. The ship had been constructed almost sixty years previous, and the city’s fire department was concerned about fire hazards, leaks, and the fact that the Stamler’s doors opened inward rather than outward.²⁷ There was a short reprieve when wealthy sympathizers offered to finance the hotel – “All Gay Over a Hot Supper” read one headline - but the final curtain fell on November 10, 1915. The Fire Prevention Bureau shut down the Stamler as a hotel for good, evidently in response to a fire in Williamsburg the week before.²⁸

Fortunately, the thirty-eight girls still living on the Stamler were found new homes on land. Arbuckle’s sisters “had investigated all the other hotels and found them suitable,” according to the Times, “and would pay the expenses of moving for each girl.” The vessel’s captain, cook, and other employees were promised new employment. The paper reported that “many girls who used to live on the Stamler and have moved out because they got married or earned more money, came back for a last look at their old home, to laugh a little and cry a little with the girls who were leaving.”²⁹

There are no extant records describing the Stamler’s ultimate fate. It’s rumored that she did ultimately burn in a fire, in 1916, at the foot of North Henry Street, but this is still unsubstantiated.

But for her fifteen minutes of fame/novelty as a floating hotel, the Jacob A. Stamler made few headlines during her sixty-year lifespan – a frenetic period of constant change, encompassing the Civil War, the great migration to Ellis Island, the dawn of the automobile and aviation ages, and the sinking of both the Titanic and Lusitania. She lived forty years longer than the average wooden sailing vessel, and repeatedly cheated the hangman during that time. Thomas Stack undoubtedly selected strong timber when pounded together her hull.

The Jacob A. Stamler will forever be linked with John Arbuckle and his beloved adopted New York City. Early on, the ship was considered a joke, another of Arbuckle’s eccentric, philanthropic follies. But it proved a victory for visionary humanitarianism, and a philanthropic tribute to Arbuckle’s beloved pastor and mentor, Henry Ward Beecher. The Stamler was Arbuckle’s gift to those “tired brain workers” who had assisted in his success – hard-luck and hardened New Yorkers, many undoubtedly the children and grandchildren of the exiles who once sailed on the ship. The floating hotel crystallized two favorite maxims of Arbuckle’s. The first was a Thomas Carlyle quote found in an open notebook next to Arbuckle’s bed the day he died: “Only workers with hand and brain are worthy of respect; all else is chaff and rubbish.”³⁰ The second was less hard-edged: “Politeness is the cheapest commodity on God’s earth. It costs nothing, and will carry you farther and pleasanter through life than any other ticket you can travel on.”³¹

1. Arbuckle’s Deep Sea Hotel Co. (Brooklyn, NY), advertisement circa 1907, in possession of author.
2. New York Times, August 6, 1915.
3. New York Herald, October 12, 1856.
4. Carl C. Cutler, Queens of the Western Ocean: The Story of America’s Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines (Annapolis, MD, 1961), 397. The Laytin-Hurlbut firm started as E.D. Hurlbut & Company, then became Laytin, Ryerson and Hurbut – John H. Ryerson retired just before the Stamler was built.
5. Colonel Thomas Farrington De Voe, The Market Book: Containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets in the Cities of New York… (New York, 1867), 503; see also Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831, (New York, 1917); see also New York Times, Sept. 9, 1866.
6. New York Marine Register: A Standard of Classification of American Vessels, and of Such Other Vessels… (New York, 1857), 38; Nautical publications differ on the Stamler’s exact weight and draft, but generally agree she was just over a thousand tons with a draft of twenty to twenty-five feet. The New York Marine Register, launched in 1857 in emulation of Britain’s distinguished Lloyd’s ships register, was the earliest official maritime publication giving the ship’s weight and dimensions.
7. Maine Maritime Museum Research Library, Bath, Maine, “The Jacob A. Stamler.”
8. Francis L. Fugate, Arbuckles: The Coffee That Won the West (Austin, 1994), 29; see also Clayton A. Copp, “John Arbuckle: Entrepreneur, Trust Buster, Humanitarian,” The Freeman, vol. 40 no. 5 (May 1990): 1; Many sources give Arbuckle’s birth date, erroneously, as 1838.
9. “How Arbuckle Beat the Trusts,” in The Literary Digest (New York, Apr. 13, 1912), 783; see also Fugate, “Arbuckles: The Coffee That Won the West,” 31. The Literary Digest was a general interest magazine in the early twentieth century. It was purchased by Time in 1938, after it conducted one of the most flawed presidential election polls in U.S. history.
10. Copp, “John Arbuckle: Entrepreneur, Trust Buster, Humanitarian,” 6.
11. The Living City/NYC, 1890s-1910s,” http://www.livingcityarchive.org/htm/home/htm (accessed Aug. 30, 2008).
12. Brooklyn Eagle, June 10, 1900.
13. New York Times, June 16, 1901.
14. New York Times, June 16, 1901. See also Brooklyn Eagle, June 16, 1901.
15. Brooklyn Eagle, July 18, 1901.
16. Brooklyn Eagle, July 17-18, 1901.
17. Ibid, July 7, 1901.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid, Aug. 18, 1901.
20. Ibid, Aug. 18, 19, 1901, and Apr. 25, 1902.
21. New York Times, Apr. 20, 1905. On June 15, 1904, a tragedy had occurred in the city. A steamship called the General Slocum had caught fire in the East River. She was carrying members of the St. Marks Evangelical Lutheran Church on a chartered excursion. Over a thousand people, mainly women and children, either drowned or died in fire in the worst disaster to befall New York until the twin towers fell. The Slocum disaster convinced John Arbuckle that the Stamler and her patrons would be safer close to shore.
22. Arbuckle’s Deep Sea Hotel Co. (Brooklyn, NY), advertisement circa 1907, in possession of author.
23. New York Times, Apr. 20, 1905.
24. Ibid, July 21, 1905.
25. Fugate, Arbuckles, 34. See also New York Times, Mar. 28, 1912. Fugate erroneously writes that Arbuckle died on March 11, 1912. Nevertheless, his biography of Arbuckle is one of the more extensive.
26. New York Times, Mar. 28, 1912.
27. Ibid, Aug. 6, 1915.
28. Ibid, Aug. 29 and Nov. 11, 1915.
29. Ibid.
30. Fugate, Arbuckles, 34.
31. Ibid, 33.

An excerpt
By Harold Schechter

December 9, 2007

Harold Schechter, Professor of English at Queens College, is the author of more than twenty books, including a series of historical true-crime accounts of notorious American murder cases.

When Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in May, 1883, a typical front page consisted of a half-dozen columns of densely packed type, unrelieved by illustrations or eye-catching headlines. Viewed from a slight distance, the page resembled a solid block of gray print, so dreary in appearance that the layout was referred to as a “tombstone.” 1

The content was equally numbing. On May 10, 1883 – its last day under the ownership of the financier Jay Gould – the World ran page-one stories on the recent nominations submitted to the Board of Aldermen, the forthcoming dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the election of the executive committee of the American Cocker Spaniel Club. Little wonder that the paper had a daily circulation of less than 12,000 copies and was losing $40,000 a year.2

All that changed the moment Joseph Pulitzer got hold of it. An immigrant himself, Pulitzer saw himself as a champion of the weak and oppressed. The World, as he conceived it, would be a paper “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than to that of the purse potentates.” In an early editorial, he laid out his goals, a ten-point program that included “punishing corrupt office holders,” along with levying taxes on luxuries, inheritances, large incomes, monopolies, and “privileged corporations.”

His method of achieving these lofty aims was to appeal to his reader’s lowest instincts. After all, he reasoned, the best a publisher could do was to “go for a million circulation, and when you have got it, turn the minds and the votes of your readers one way or the other at critical moments.”4 And the most effective way to reach that million circulation was by printing the kind of wildly sensationalistic stories that ordinary people have always gobbled up.

He lost no time in putting his plan into action. The very first issue of the World edited by Pulitzer featured front-page stories on a New Jersey fire that claimed the lives of a half-dozen people; the last hours of a convicted killer who had beaten his wife to death in a drunken rage; the public execution of another murderer, a hardcase named M’Conkey who went to his death cursing his jailers; a deadly lightning bolt that killed a man on Long Island; and a dynamite attack by Haitian rebels that left four hundred victims dead or wounded.5

The following days brought more of the same: headline stories about human sacrifices performed by religious fanatics; a little boy killed when his pony stumbled and fell on top of him; a smallpox scare in Hoboken; a killer tornado in Kansas; plus assorted homicides, suicides, holdups, beatings, and even a grave robbery.6 By the following March, a typical week brought such attention-grabbing headlines as “A CHILD FLAYED ALIVE,” “A BRUTAL NEGRO WHIPS HIS NEPHEW TO DEATH IN SOUTH CAROLINAS,” “STRANGLED BY ROBBERS,” “DIED A DESPERADO’S DEATH,” A LADY GAGGED IN A FLAT,” and QUINTUPLE TRAGEDY – AN ENTIRE FAMILY ANNIHILATED BY ITS HEAD.”7

The very look of the paper underwent a radical alteration. Headlines now stretched over several columns or were splashed across the entire top of the page. And there were cartoons, caricatures, lurid illustrations, and other voyeuristic visual aids. Not only were grisly murders reported in graphic detail; they were diagrammed so that readers could picture the horrors more clearly. When, for example, a New York City clergyman named Klemo slashed his wife to death in their fourth-floor apartment, then cut his own throat and hurled himself from the window, the story was accompanied by a drawing of the crime scene with a helpful alphabetical key:

A – Door stained with blood; B – Window stained with blood from which Klemo leaped; C – Bed covered with blood; D – Table set and covered with blood; E – Chair in which Mrs. Klemo sat; F – Sink in which knife was found; G – Pool of blood.8

Soon, Pulitzer had added a Sunday supplement, providing readers with such uplifting Sabbath fare as “a long treatise on weapons used to commit murder in recent years, including a nail, a coffin lid, a red-hot horseshoe, an umbrella, a matchbox, a window brush, and a tea kettle”; “an account of the careers of two Vienna cutthroats who had specialized in courting lonely women and then murdering them”; “a description of life in the death house at Sing Sing”: a “thrilling narrative of cannibalism at sea”; and the supposedly true-life tale of an English explorer thrown into a pit of vipers by “fiendish” African tribesman.9

Pulitzer’s sensationalistic strategy succeeded beyond all expectation. By March, 1885, the World had a daily circulation of more than 150,000 copies – an astonishing tenfold increase in less than two years. That figure would double again before the end of the decade.

The age of “yellow journalism” had arrived.

* * * * * *

Before his expulsion from Harvard in 1886, William Randolph Hearst – pampered heir to a mining fortune – had served as the business manager for the college humor magazine, the Lampoon. The experience had awakened in the aimless young man a keen interest in journalism. Studying the various dailies from New York and Boston, he found himself enthralled by Pulitzer’s newly reinvigorated World. Everything about it – from its crusading zeal to its shameless sensationalism – filled him with admiration. “If a man can be in love with a newspaper,” declares one biographer, “Hearst was downright passionate about the World.10

As it happened, Hearst’s father, George, owned a paper himself. In 1880, the elder Hearst – a shaggy-bearded ex-prospector who had struck it rich in gold, silver and copper – had purchased the San Francisco Examiner as a propaganda tool to advance his political ambitions. Though George would eventually get elected to the United States Senate, the paper was a financial disaster, losing more than a quarter-million dollars during the years he controlled it.11

George’s boy, Willie, thought he could do better. While still in college, he wrote a letter to his father, insisting that the Examiner could turn a profit by imitating publications like the World – “that class [of newspaper] which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy, and a certain startling originality.” Illustrations, were important, too, since they “attract the eye and stimulate the imagination of the lower classes.”12

Twenty-four-year-old William got a chance to put his theories into practice in March 1887 when – after spending a year as a reporter for the World – he persuaded his father to give him the Examiner. Emulating Pulitzer, he set about creating a paper that, as one of his first employees put it, would fill readers with the “gee-whiz emotion.”13 Like Hearst’s later publications, the Examiner was less a traditional newspaper than a “printed entertainment – the equivalent in newsprint of bombs exploding, bands blaring, firecrackers popping, victims screaming, flags waving, cannons roaring, houris dancing, and smoke rising from the singed flesh of executed criminals.”14

Within a week of taking it over, Hearst was already trumpeting the Examiner in half-page advertisements as “THE MONARCH OF THE DAILIES!” with “THE MOST ELABORATE LOCAL NEWS, THE FRESHEST SOCIAL NEWS, THE LATEST AND MOST ORIGINAL SENSATIONS!”15 Determined to “startle, amaze, or stupefy” readers on a daily basis, he served up the subjects that have always thrilled and titillated the public: scandal, sentimentality, sex, gossip, disaster, adventure.

And always, of course, crime, depravity, and murder – the more shocking the better.

* * * * *

Given the ubiquity of serial killers in our movies, TV shows, and paperback thrillers, a person might be forgiven for thinking that our country is crawling with homicidal psychopaths. In reality, the number of serial killers at large in the United States at any given time is, relative to the total population, infinitesimal: no more than fifty, according to the most reliable FBI estimates. The average citizen, in other words, is far less likely to be stabbed by a psycho while taking a shower than to slip in the bathtub and die.

The same sort of disparity existed in the nineteenth century in regard to poisoners. According to one crime historian, “poisoning accounted for less than one percent of murder cases that entered the criminal justice system” in the 1800s.16 And yet, poison-murder was everywhere in the popular culture of the time. At least a hundred true-crime books were devoted to the subject, while writers of “sensation novels, detective stories, and other popular fiction turned frequently to poisoning as a plot device.”17

Gilded age newspapers were quick to exploit the public’s fascination with poisoners. During one month-long span in the late 1800s, the New York City dailies ran no fewer than five poison-related headlines: “POISONED COLOGNE SENT TO BROOKLYN GIRL,” “ARSENIC IN JELLY,” “HIRED TO POISON A CHILD,” “GRANDMOTHER ACCUSED OF POISONING NEIGHBOR’S WELL,” and “POISON IN WINE PRETTY GIRL INDUCED HER LOVER TO DRINK.” Even an instance of alleged pet-murder – “DOG DEAD BY POISON, SAYS MASTER” – made the front pages.18

Several poisoning cases became bona fide media sensations. In 1891, for example, New York City was riveted by the story of Carlyle Harris, a medical student who murdered his young wife by putting a lethal dose of morphine in her sleeping pills. The following year, a Manhattan physician named Robert Buchanan used the same narcotic (mixed with some belladonna to conceal the symptoms of poisoning) to rid himself of his own wife, a former brothel keeper he had wed for her money. Shortly after Buchanan’s trial came to an end, yet another physician, Dr. Henry Meyer, was convicted of murdering an acquaintance with arsenic and antimony as part of an insurance scam.

And then there was the irresistibly lurid case of the San Francisco femme fatale, Mrs. Cordelia Botkin.

The estranged wife of a fellow with the unlikely name of Welcome A. Botkin, Cordelia was thirty-eight years old in 1892 – already past her prime in an era when a woman of forty was considered to be “in the cold and constricting clutch of middle age.”19 “Time had laid upon her the unkind stigmata of full-blown maturity,” as one commentator puts it.20

Despite her advanced years, however, she possessed a powerfully seductive charm and, in September of that year, embarked on an affair with a young cad named John P. Dunning, a journalist ten years her junior with a wife and children of his own in Delaware. Their liaison lasted for nearly six years, until Dunning, tired of his “maturely alluring” lover, broke off the relationship and decamped for Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War as a correspondent for the Associated Press.

Not long afterwards, on the afternoon of August 9, 1898, a package arrived at the Dover, Delaware post office addressed to Dunning’s wife, Elizabeth. Inside was a box of chocolate bonbons, along with a handwritten note reading: “With love to yourself and baby. Mrs. C.”

That evening, after a dinner of trout and fritters, Mrs. Dunning sat on the porch and shared the treats with her older sister, her nephew and niece, and two young neighbors, Misses Bateman and Millington, who had stopped by for a visit. A few hours later, all six became violently ill. The children and the two young ladies eventually recovered, but Mrs. Dunning and her sister – who had devoured the lion’s share of the candies – died painfully a few days later. Autopsies revealed the presence of lethal doses of arsenic in the viscera of both women, a finding confirmed when the leftover bonbons were analyzed by chemists.

John Dunning was immediately summoned home. He needed only a glance at the handwritten note to know who had sent the package. “Cordelia!” he gasped, then – “broken with grief and abased with shame”21 – he proceeded to spill out the story of his affair with Mrs. Botkin.

The San Francisco papers quickly got wind of the investigation, and Hearst’s Examiner turned the case into a full-fledged media circus. His “murder squad” located the confectionery store where the bonbons had been purchased, traced the arsenic to a local drug store, and tracked down Cordelia Botkin herself, who had taken refuge at her sister’s house in St. Helena. One of Hearst’s ace women reporters, Lizzie Livernash, immediately sped to Mrs. Botkin’s side and, ingratiating herself with the fugitive, wangled a series of interviews that were splashed across the Examiner’s front pages.

The frenzied coverage of Mrs. Botkin’s trial – which began in early December, 1898 – boosted the already sky-high circulation of the Examiner to stratospheric new heights, proving that few stories could sell more papers in that era than a poisoning case with the right sensational ingredients. Hearst – then in the thick of his newspaper war with Joseph Pulitzer – could only hope that Fate would supply him with an East Coast version of the Botkin affair which he could exploit to equally dramatic effect in the Journal.

And then – even before Mrs. Botkin’s inevitable conviction was handed down – Fate obliged.

1 Ezra Bowen, ed. This Fabulous Century: 1870-1900 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1970,p. 166.
2 George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 6 and 51.
3 Bowen, p. 168.
4 Ibid.
5 Juergens, pp. 51-52.
6 John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p.70.)
7 Juergens, pp. 67-69.
8Denis Brian, Pulitzer: A Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), p. 74.
9 Ibid, p. 55.
10 W. W. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Scribner’s, 1961), p.41.
11 Ibid, p. 47.
12 Benjamin Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863-1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 41.
13 See Swanberg, p. 43.
14 Ibid, p. 193.
15 Ibid, p. 49.
16 Roger Lane, Murder in America (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1997), p. 320.
17 Mark Regan Essikg, Science and Sensation: Poison Murder and Forensic Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, January, 2000), p 5.
18 See the New York Sun, 3 March, 1899, New York World 11 March 1899, New York World 16 March 1899, New York World 2 April 1899, and New York World 7 April, 1899.
19 Edward H. Smith, Famous Poison Mysteries (New York: The Dial Press, 1927), pp. 30.
20 Ibid. p. 31.
21 Ibid, p. 22.

November 3, 2007

Minnette Coleman is an actress and writer still living in Harlem and working for The New World Foundation.

September 10, 2007 marked the 75th Anniversary of the A train. I recalled a passage from the Billy Strayhorn biography1 about the origins of the song that would soon become a subway anthem. Most people think Duke Ellington wrote the song but Strayhorn actually composed the catchy tune from instructions the Duke gave him to find the “quickest way to Harlem.” The first time I came to New York on my own, I just knew the A train would take me anywhere in Harlem I wanted to go. I soon found out that Harlem is a big place and not every New York resident is sure where it begins and ends.

Because I am from the south, my initial understanding of the boundaries of Harlem came from a movie, Barry Shear’s 1972 film Across 110th Street.2 The title gave the code that every New Yorker at one time understood: anything north of 110th Street was considered Harlem. Once I had moved to the Big Apple, I wondered why the A train didn’t stop at 110th Street. In another movie, Brother from Another Planet3 (John Sayles, 1984), the silent brown skinned alien sits on the A train while a brother, from this planet, tells him that he knows how to make all the white people disappear. The for once ungarbled voice comes over the intercom of the train: “This is 59th Street Columbus Circle. Next stop 125th.”

Of course, that was before living in Harlem became once again in vogue.

In 1984, I resided on 143rd St next door to one of the actors in the movie. My husband and I had decided to forgo our Southern suburban roots and look for a brownstone in the city that never sleeps. Within a few weeks, I could tell that Harlem was the most convenient place to live in New York City. I lived between the IRT and the IND subway lines; I had easy access to the bridge to New Jersey; and on a good day, I could get to LaGuardia Airport in under 15 minutes.

So we started looking for brownstones in the only affordable bastion for home ownership on the island. Because my husband had a job with a fortune 500 company, everyone steered us to Strivers Row,4 an elegant area on 138th and 139th Streets originally built for middle class black families. While totally out of our price range, I learned the historic significance of the area I visited. The name came from the ambitious people that lived on those streets in the 1890s. The rowhouses were built by David H. King. Ironically Vertner Tandy, the
first registered black Architect in New York resided there.”5

Then someone suggested we look for a place in Hamilton Heights since we already lived there. Not wanting to appear ignorant, I did not say, “But I thought we lived in Harlem.” Listening to new friends and neighbors, I soon learned that Harlem contained many different communities.

Hamilton Heights extends from 135th Street on the south to 155th on the north, the Hudson River on the west, and St. Nicholas Avenue on the east.6 The name comes from the founding father and statesman Alexander Hamilton who lived the last two years of his life in the area when it was still farmland. His home is the Hamilton Grange National Memorial.7 The area today includes City College and beautiful St. Nicholas Park.

Even though most brownstones in 1984 were contracted by word of mouth, we got a real estate agent to show us one on 150th Street between Convent and St. Nicholas Avenues. She explained that the lavish interior wood carvings and designs were thought to have been done by the carpenter accused of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. And she also let us know in no uncertain terms that we were now shopping for a home in the community of Sugar Hill.8 This new label only added to my confusion. Sugar Hill, it seems, is a part of Hamilton Heights but my friends said “not really.” There were too many confusing border issues for Sugar Hill as well as too many different reasons for the name. Of the stories I have heard, I believe the one that sticks is that the name came about during the Harlem Renaissance when those who lived in the area were known to enjoy “the Sweet Life.” Sugar Hill boasted the Cotton Club, Smalls Paradise, and the Savoy. Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, WEB Dubois, Thurgood Marshall, and Paul Robeson lived there.9

All of this was very interesting and it was gratifying to know that we would be living in an area that boasted more history than we could have imagined. For my family and friends in the south, Harlem was still basically the ghetto. The bottom line was I just wanted to live in a brownstone in Harlem. Of course, it was not that simple.

It was suggested we look in Washington Heights,10 even though at the time some of my acquaintances swore that Hamilton Heights was part of Washington Heights. The area was named for Fort Washington, a hilly fortified area occupied during the Revolutionary War. Originally its southern border was considered 125th Street. Troops moved to the highest point on Manhattan Island to defend the area from the British. If you go to the Morris-Jumel Mansion11 (Jumel Terrace at 160th Street), you will learn that not only did Washington sleep in this oldest surviving house in the city but that during the Revolutionary War, one could actually see all the way to Staten Island from this place atop Harlem Heights.

Harlem Heights???? I thought this was Washington Heights!

It turns out Harlem Heights is just an area designated by an important battle that took place on September 16, 1776.12

Today, Washington Heights is considered the northern most neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, running north from Harlem (it’s not a part of Harlem?) at 155th Street to Inwood around Dyckman Street. It also boasts being the highest point in Manhattan, 265 feet above sea level. Besides Fort Washington, the neighborhood contains The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to Medieval art;13 the Hispanic Society of America, which houses the largest collection of paintings by El Greco and Goya outside of the Museo del Prado;14 ‘Minnie’s Land,’ the home of John James Audobon;15 and of course, Hilltop Park, the original home of the New York Highlanders (aka the Yankees) from 1903 to 1912.16

But in 1984, everyone I knew still considered it part of Harlem. After all it was across 110th Street.

Next we looked in the area of Mount Morris Park, a place, according to everything I heard, located in Central Harlem. It’s a 16 block area from 118th Street to 124th Street and from 5th Avenue to 7th Avenue. Nobody seems to know where the name came from, but its sites include the Apollo Theatre, the National Black Theatre, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Marcus Garvey Park.17

We finally settled on a comfy brownstone on 148 St. between Broadway and Amsterdam. The area is not as high as the Fort Washington area, but if I stand on my front steps, I can actually look down the hill to Riverside Drive and across the Hudson to New Jersey. Over the years there have been many different maps drawn of Harlem. In fact, one report says that Harlem now begins at 96th Street.18 (I get that feeling more on the east side where Spanish Harlem runs from 96th Street to 125th Street) In some reports and maps, sometimes the block I live on is not included as a part of Harlem. The news media often gives the area the distinction of being Sugar Hill, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights and occasionally plain old Harlem. We are too far north to be considered part of Manhattanville or Morningside Heights and too far south to be part of Upper Manhattan. One thing that’s certain is that we are definitely part of Community Board 9.20

So when those living outside New York City who would not be able to tell where Museum Mile begins and ends, where the Village meets SoHo, or where exactly to find the Bowery, ask where I live, I usually say that since 1985 I have lived in Harlem.

Or Hamilton Heights.

Or Sugar Hill.

Most of time its simpler to just say, I live in New York City. That works. . . I think.

1 Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996
2 http://imdb.com/title/tt0068168/
3 http://imdb.com/title/tt0087004/
4 The Black New Yorkers, Dodson, Moore and Yancy, the Schomburg Center, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2000
5 http://www.nyc-architecture.com/HAR/HAR.htm
6 www.hamiltonheights.org
7 www.nps.gov/hasgr; www.harlemonestop.com
8 www.sugarhillmap.com
9 www.sugarhillharleminn.com
10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Hieghts%2C_
Manhattan
11 http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_about/parks_divisions/historic_houses/hh_morris_jumel.html
12 The War for Independence and the Transformation of American Society; War in Society in the United States, 1775-83, Harry M. Ward, Routledge 1999
13 www.metmuseum.org/events/ev_cloisters.asp
14 www.hispanicsociety.org/hispanic/museum.htm
15 http://www.audubonparkny.com/AudubonParkBrief/History.html
16 www.sportsecyclopedia.com/al/nyyanks/yankees.html
17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Morris_Park_Historic_District
18 http://uptownflavor.wordpress.com
20 www.cb9m.org

October 1, 2007

This piece is derived from a chapter of Dough. Dough: A Memoir is winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2007. For a readers guide or more information visit www.ugapress.org.

The Forecast for December 26, 1947, from the United States Weather Bureau:
NEW YORK CITY AND VICINITY – Cloudy today with occasional snow ending this afternoon, followed by partial clearing, highest temperature near forty.
The city that never sleeps slept. At 3:20 A.M., snow flurries provided a preview of coming attractions but no one noticed.
The snowfall officially began at 5:25 A.M. At 7, when Uncle Joe removed the copper-colored Yale padlocks and pushed the front gate open, two inches of snow covered the sidewalk in front of the store. The snow muted the usual screeching of the rusty metal gate. It was a powdery snow, the kind that was easy to push off your sidewalk provided there was not much accumulation. Based on the forecast, Uncle Joe figured he would shovel in the afternoon when it stopped snowing. Inside, he coerced the store’s good-for-nothing heater into action, removed his coffee from a paper bag, took the lid off, and watched the steam rise.
Yesterday was Christmas. Only one bakery in the largely Ukrainian neighborhood had been open, and it had been a busy afternoon. Customers had left with cake and dinner rolls, but no deliveries had arrived at the tiny bakery on 9th Street just off First Avenue.
But on that particular snowy morning in 1947 the shelves were empty, except for a few rum-and-brandy-flavored fruitcakes. Uncle Joe was untroubled. To him, fruitcakes got better with age, and customers were never a problem at the store. The question was merchandise, which meant the bread and cake once it was in the store ready for sale to customers. Who was going to deliver stuff, their name for the bread and cake before it arrived, on a day like this? A Friday, the day after Christmas, children off from school, the day cold and bleak, beds snug and warm.
Uncle Joe sat on the cold white tiles of the display window shelf, sipped the sugarless black coffee he favored, stared out at the snow, and waited for the deliveries he was certain would come when the snow stopped. And it had to stop soon. In Uncle Joe’s superstitious mind, snowstorms arrived in New York only after New Year’s Day. He was convinced the weather was familiar with the major holidays and acted accordingly. No matter the actual weather, Uncle Joe started to wear short-sleeve shirts on Memorial Day and went back to flannel long-sleeve shirts on Labor Day.
Mom and Uncle Harry drifted in at 10 A.M. My mom still lived with her mother and two brothers in the house where she grew up on Hegemen Avenue, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. After their five-block walk from the 14th Street subway station, their hats and the shoulders of their coats wore a layer of snow that needed brushing off.
Outside the store, seven inches of white powder had fallen in less than five hours. A car clanked as it snaked down the block, the metallic sound of its chained tires muffled by the snow.
“What do you think?” Uncle Joe said. “It can’t keep up like this much longer.”
“It’s snowing very hard,” Uncle Harry said.
“Do you think anyone will deliver today?” Mom asked.
Harry said, “Maybe Cohn – he’s crazy enough to work in this weather.”
“So why are we here?”
“Like I said, Helen, only the meshuggeners.”
According to the New York Times, Benjamin Parry, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s chief meteorologist in New York City, noted the remarkable rate of the snowfall that morning; it was all snow with virtually no wind. So, according to him, this was not a blizzard, which, he said, was a snowstorm accompanied by high winds and zero or subzero temperatures. Lay observers called it a snow cloudburst. Descriptions did not matter. Visibility vanished. When mom and her brothers peered through the display windows, they could barely see the buildings across the street.
At the height of the storm, between 3 and 4 P.M., the snow fell at more than three inches per hour. By then, nineteen inches of snow covered the city. The sanitation department was losing the battle to keep roads and bridges clear. “It’s like trying to sweep the sea back,” said one worker.
All flights were cancelled at LaGuardia Field. There was no bus service in Manhattan and the Bronx. Ships entering the harbor dropped anchor and those scheduled to leave remained at their piers. UPS hoped to resume normal deliveries the next day. Eskimos from Alaska, in New York to take part in an exhibition at the Grand Central Palace, hitched up their huskies to their dog sleds and gave them a workout on the barren wilderness of Park Avenue.
Many stores and companies closed early and sent their employees home, but getting home was a pilgrimage. After an announcer assured commuters that trains were running on time, passengers boarded the 5:19 for Chappaqua at Grand Central Station. The announcement was correct about only the departure time. The 5:19 took seven hours to crawl from South White Plains to North White Plains – usually a seven-minute trip. The train stopped short of the station, and passengers were last seen walking through the snow on the rails. At Pennsylvania Station, passengers fortified themselves at the new liquor store; there was a bottle party in almost every car. At 6:09 P.M., service on the Long Island Railroad was suspended indefinitely.
Travelers were stranded even in Manhattan. A woman bringing a cooked turkey to a party boarded a downtown bus at Broadway and 160th Street. The bus got no further than 83rd Street. After several hours, she, her fellow passengers, and their driver ate the turkey.
New Jersey commuters took the subway uptown hoping to find a bus or taxi to get them back home across the George Washington Bridge. But, with no buses or cabs to be had, thousands of people, barely visible in the snowy twilight, walked across the bridge to New Jersey, collars raised, heads down, in meager defense against the storm.
By 5 P.M., the store was still. Customers had stopped coming in hours ago.
“How much you think is out there now, Harry?” Mom asked.
“They said a couple of feet on the radio,” Uncle Harry replied.
“What are you talking about?” Uncle Joe said. “It can’t be more than a foot.”
“Maybe it’s time to go home?” Mom suggested.
“Wait. Let’s see how it goes,” replied Uncle Harry. “Getting home is no problem. We walk to Fourteenth Street, take the train to New Lots, and walk home from the station like always.”
Meanwhile, groceries delivered daily - such as bread, milk, and eggs - were almost completely gone from the shelves of retail stores. There was ample supply; the problem was getting delivery trucks through. Milk trucks bound for New York City were stalled throughout Westchester. State troopers tried to escort the trucks, but even the escort cars got stuck in the snow. A man died of a heart attack on the Saw Mill River Parkway, and policemen had to carry his body for two miles because ambulances could not get through the drifts.
On WNYC, New York City Fire Commissioner Quayle announced, “Life and property, from fire hazards, have never been in such jeopardy.” With streets practically impassable, he urged all New Yorkers to refrain from lighting their Christmas trees until the snow emergency had passed.
As the when-to-go home debate swirled at the store, Suzy the bakery’s black cat, lifted her head from her stained-cake-box throne on top of the heater. Then Uncle Harry, Uncle Joe, and my mom heard the muffled clank of tire chains. The faint clanking grew louder. A delivery truck came to a halt in front of the store; the driver-side door swung open; and someone descended, disappearing into a snow bank behind a buried car. The figure reappeared, high-stepping in the direction of the store, holding a pyramid of cake boxes aloft.
“Well what do you know,” said Uncle Joe. “It’s Cohn.”
Mr. Martin Cohn turned his back to the front door and pushed it in with his rear end. Inside, he turned to face his appreciative audience.
“Hi Cowboys, I was in the neighborhood and figured you could use some bread and cake on a beautiful day like this.”
It was not long before Mr. Cohn returned to his high-riding truck and disappeared behind a curtain of falling snow. The muted clanking of his tire chains was heard long after he was out of sight. His tire prints and footprints quickly filled with snow, leaving no trace of his daring. But, in the store, merchandise was no longer a problem.
And, though thousands of cars and trucks were stuck in their tracks all over the tri-state area, Mr. Cohn was not the only delivery man who completed his appointed rounds that day. At the height of the afternoon snowfall, a Railway Express employee delivered a Hartz Mountain canary to a New York Times pressman at his Bellmore, Long Island home. He had ordered it from a Manhattan pet store two weeks before.
By 7 P.M., twenty-four inches of snow had fallen. Further uptown, Times Square, usually packed with holiday revelers, was deserted. Some bars hosted one or two commuters hoisting a few and wishing they had hotel rooms for the night. The absolute stillness was an object of wonder to the policemen on duty there. They had never experienced anything like it.
At about the same time, downtown, in Battery Park, a woman named Carly Beckwith wandered around in the storm with a twenty-four-inch-long cedar rod marked in tenths of an inch. She wore a polo coat, a bright scarf, and ten-inch-high rubber boots with lots of snow in them. She was thirty-one years old and was said to have never caught cold.
But she had a dilemma. As the snow depth exceeded two feet, her measuring stick became useless. This had never happened before. She discarded her rod and started working with a yardstick, even though it was not meteorologically approved equipment. Accuracy mattered to Miss Beckwith. She was the official snowfall reader for the U.S. Weather Bureau in New York City.
Her fellow Weather Bureau employee, Mr. Parry, made it clear that the only reason his department’s snowfall prediction was two feet short was because the storm originated from a point off southern New England where the bureau had no observation points. Twenty-six inches of snow blanketed New York City - the highest snowfall ever recorded in the city’s history until 2006. It was even more than the Blizzard of 1888, which, Mr. Parry said, was a “real blizzard.”
At about the time Carly Beckwith picked up her yardstick – the peak of the storm several hours past – customers were heading back to the Store. Mom, Uncle Harry, and Uncle Joe waited, shelves full, staring out at the snow still slowly falling. And this is where I will leave them, as winter closes in.

August 11, 2007

This essay was presented at the CUNY Black Male Initiative Inaugural Conference.
It would be a daunting task to give a historical overview of the position of black men in American society. Even if I were John Hope Franklin, I don’t think I could summarize the impact of slavery, Jim Crow, deindustrialization, and the rise of the prison industrial complex.
Instead, this essay will focus on my own research on African American communities in the Bronx in the 1940’s and 1950’s and analyze how the position of black men in those communities offers insights and possible lessons for trying to reengage young black men with the educational system and the mainstream economy.
The two communities I have been studying have been Morrisania, which emerged as the Bronx’s largest African American neighborhood as a result of a massive migration from Harlem in the 1940’s, and the Patterson Houses, the Bronx’s first low income public housing development, which opened in 1950. In the last 3 ½ years, with the help of a team of community researchers, I have done over 150 oral history interviews with people who moved to, or grew up in those two communities, in the 1940’s and 1950’s and collected photos and documents which bring the stories told in those interviews to life.
The image which emerges with overwhelming force, both from interviews and documents, is of strong, cohesive neighborhoods where working class black and Latino residents looked out for one another, shared their cultures, raised one another’s children, and looked to the future with considerable optimism. In 1951, an African American magazine called Our World described Morrisania in terms that almost no one today would apply to Black or Latino neighborhoods in the Bronx
“Right now, most of the Bronx’s 75,000 Negroes live between 160th Street and Crotona Park South. To them, the Bronx is a borough of hope, a place of unlimited possibilities.”
African-American men played a central role in creating this atmosphere of security and hope. The majority of adult men in these communities were in families and in the labor force and black men played key roles as mentors to local youth in churches, community centers, and after school and night centers in the public schools. Most of the people I interviewed have spoken of the influence of ministers, teachers, community center directors, and their own fathers in guiding them through the sometimes perilous pathway to adulthood. Figures like Reverend Edler Hawkins of St Augustine’s Presbyterian Church, Floyd Lane of the PS 18 night center, Vincent Tibbs of the PS 99 night center, and Eddie Bonnamere, a music teacher at Clark Junior High School, are mentioned in interview after interview as people who saved lives and inspired people to achieve more than they ever dreamed possible. In these working class black and Latino neighborhoods, which were not without problems – they had gangs, alcoholism, and heavily tracked schools – adult black men were a powerful presence in families, voluntary institutions, and public funded recreation programs and they passed on a legacy of strength, optimism, and community responsibility to young men in the next generation, some of whom went on to careers in civil service, teaching, social work, health professions, the media, politics, and business.
However, even in these relatively optimistic times, racism in the city’s labor and housing markets were chipping away at the stability of these neighborhoods and undermining the ability of black and Latino families to accumulate social capital and transfer it successfully to the next generation. With few exceptions, the portraits of black fathers that emerge from my interviews is of men who worked two or three jobs in the most fragile sectors of the secondary labor market- they drove cabs, loaded trucks, worked in factories and cleaning establishments, operated elevators, cleaned buildings, and worked as cooks and porters on trains. Although there was a small component of government workers – especially postal workers and people who worked for the New York City Transit – and a few people who owned small businesses, what is strikingly absent – especially in comparison to what you would find in Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods at the time – is skilled unionized workers in the construction, printing, or garment trades. In the 1950’s, and even into the 1960’s, New York had tens of thousands of high paying, unionized, blue jobs that could be passed on from father to son and elevate a family into the middle class and black men had virtually none of them! The worst example of this was the construction trades. Even though many black men came from the South and the West Indies with construction skills, they could not get jobs as electricians, plumbers, steamfitters, or sheet metal workers on major construction projects even when they were located in black neighborhoods. The following is a quote from Oliver Leeds, a leader of Brooklyn CORE who led massive sit-ins during the construction of Downstate Medical Center in 1963 (this is courtesy of my colleague Brian Purnell who is writing a dissertation on the history of the Civil Rights movement in Brooklyn):
“I went in the Army and I tried to join the Tank Corps. When I got to Louisiana, I found I was in the Corps of Engineers. And you know what we do? We worked to win the war. We built anything that could be built: bridges, tunnels, houses, officers quarters, mess quarter, roads, airstrips. We loaded and unloaded ships. We did anything in the way that involved work, construction work. You know when I got back to the United States, after the war, I couldn’t get a job in construction and there was no union that would let me in. And there was damn little that I couldn’t do in the way of construction work. They’ll take you and turn you into construction workers in the army, in a segregated army, and then when you get back into civilian life, you can’t get a construction job.”
The corrosive effect of this discrimination is visible in several ways. 1) Most black men had to work two or three secondary labor market jobs to make the salary of a single unionized construction worker, making the task of supporting their families far more stressful than for their Irish, Italian, or Jewish counterparts. 2) Black men had no marketable craft skills, or union connections, to pass on to their children. 3) The blue collar jobs that black men did have were, unlike construction, vulnerable to elimination as the city shifted from an industrial to a finance and information based economy.
This had devastating consequences for black families and communities. Basically, from the 1950s through the 1970s, a period when the city’s economy was losing hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs, African Americans, unlike their Jewish, Irish, or Italian counterparts, could not attain upward mobility within the working class, or achieve middle class incomes through blue collar occupations. Indeed, black male youth who did not graduate from college actually faced worse employment prospects than their fathers because many of the jobs their father worked at were being eliminated.
This helped trigger a fragmentation of the social structure of working class black and Latino communities like Morrisania or the Patterson Houses. As college educated and upwardly mobile families from these communities moved to the North and East Bronx, Queens, Westchester, or New Jersey, men who remained, who for the most part had high schools educations or less, faced an economy that offered them lower wages and even more humiliating conditions of work than their fathers had experienced. For many, the underground economy was their only realistic option, but this was not the relatively benign, non violent, underground economy of their father’s day, which was organized around the numbers business. This was the fierce high stakes heroin trade of Nicky Barnes and Guy Fisher, which left corpses, broken lives, and shattered communities in its wake. In this fierce and frightening atmosphere, being a husband, father, and a family man was an overwhelming strain on even the best intentioned young men Many cracked under the strain and many young men weren’t up to it, a tragedy presented with great power in the Hughes brothers’ brilliant movie Dead Presidents.
To make matters worse, as the job crunch on young working class black men intensified, and the violence of their daily lives became more overwhelming, New York City underwent a fiscal crisis, and with the help of the Emergency Financial Control Board, decided that youth culture mentoring and recreation was expendable. All the after school and night centers in New York public schools were shut down, recreation supervisors were removed from the parks, and the great music programs in the city’s junior high schools were eliminated. So at a time when young men needed them the most, the Floyd Lanes, Vincent Tibbs, and Eddie Bonnameres were removed as forces in Bronx neighborhoods and other places like them around the city.
By the beginning of the 1980s, the idea of cohesive, safe working class black and Latino communities in the South Bronx with a strong male presence in families and the legal labor force had become unimaginable to people growing up in those neighborhoods. They faced a world of mean streets, shattered families, and a legal labor market that offered them little but stagnant wages and a humiliating work culture. And that was before crack!
The world we live in now, one where young black men feel so alienated and marginalized, has been shaped by many historical forces, some of them going back to slavery, but many of the problems have roots in labor market discrimination in the relatively recent past and short sighted and pernicious government policies implemented less than thirty years ago.
Fifty years ago, black men were a central part of every formal and informal institution in South Bronx neighborhoods and were an integral part of the leadership structure that made these communities safe and cohesive. If we change government priorities and challenge racial hierarchies in the labor market, there is no reason why they cannot play that role again. ]]> http://gothamcenter.org/blotter/?feed=rss2&p=44