Richard Howe is the author of New York in Plain Sight: The Manhattan Street Corners. He is currently working on a book, The Look of the City, to show what it is that makes Manhattan look the way it does. His “Little Pre-History of the Manhattan Grid” and “Notes on the Deforestation of Manhattan Island” have previously been featured on the Gotham Center’s History Blotter.

The extraordinarily rapid growth of New York in its “long” 19th century, 1790–1910, rarely fails to astonish, and this is true not only of its 100-fold population increase — 70-fold in the old city, i.e., in Manhattan — but also of the increase in its numbers of buildings: a 20-fold increase in Manhattan alone. In 1790 there were perhaps as many as 5,000 buildings in the built-up part of the City of New York, most of them below today’s Duane Street on the west side of the island of Manhattan and below Broome Street on the east side, but only a very few of them east of Rutgers Farm, i.e., east of today’s Montgomery Street. A century later, in 1889, the Bureau of Building Inspections reported 105,746 buildings on the island of Manhattan, probably the peak year or very near to it, after which the increasing pace at which older and smaller buildings, especially downtown, were being replaced with larger ones led to an ongoing decline in the total number of buildings on the island, though not in the volume of space enclosed by them. At that time the island was almost solidly built-up as far north as 135th Street, and building activity extended up to 155th Street and even beyond. The year 1887 had marked what turned out to be an all-time high of about 3,500 new building plans filed in Manhattan, after which the number of new plans filed also began an irregular but marked decline, falling below 1,000 after 1910 and, after a modest boom in the 1920s, declining to well below 500 in the Great Depression. The figures suggest that the 1890s marked the onset of a “closing of the frontier” on the island: by 1910 there were few unimproved lots left to build on, so that new construction involved the additional expense of acquiring already improved properties and demolishing the existing structures standing on them. After peaking at 2,331,542 in 1910, the population of the Manhattan began a 70-year decline, reversing what for over a century had been the most important driver of new construction in the city.

New York in 1789. Shading shows the built-up area of the city.

So it is safe to say that Manhattan was initially built up almost entirely in the city’s “long” 19th century, 1790–1910. Another century on, in 2010, the island’s resident population was 1,585,573, down 32% from the 1910 figure, and the number of buildings on the island had fallen by 50%, to about 46,200, though the total volume of enclosed space may have increased by as much as 40% or more. Nevertheless, nearly half of Manhattan’s existing buildings were erected prior to 1910, so that Manhattan is — as any walk off its main avenues and cross streets will confirm — still in considerable part a product of the 19th century. And, despite the later 20th century’s metal and glass curtain walls, Manhattan is still a city not only of brick exteriors but also, in much of its 19th century low-rise construction, of brick load-bearing walls.

Though iron came into use as a building material as early as the 1830s in Manhattan, and cast-iron architecture became iconic of the new commercial metropolis in the 1850s, most new building in the 19th century was brick or, rather, a combination of brick and timber, though stone was also used, both as a structural and as a facing material. Only in 1892 did the city’s building code begin to include provisions regulating the structural use of iron. The steel-cage skyscrapers that captured the world’s imagination were remarkably few in number in the early 20th century: out of the total of 92,749 buildings on the island in 1912 only 1,048 were above ten stories in height, only 51 above 20 stories, and only nine above 30 stories. As late as 1882, nearly 27% of Manhattan’s buildings were still built entirely of wood; only 73% were considered fireproof or semi-fireproof and most of the latter were the “ordinary” construction used in buildings of six stories or less: brick load-bearing walls supporting the timber joists and rafters of wooden floors and roofs, with wood-framed and wood-lathed walls for the interior. The fireproof and semi-fireproof buildings, even those with cast-iron fronts, were often heavy users of brick for exterior side and rear walls.

New York in 1850. Shading shows the built-up area of the city.

That’s a lot of bricks, even more than the raw building counts would suggest, for along the way to its peak of over 100,000 buildings, Manhattan saw the demolition of tens of thousands of older buildings dating from before the Civil War. The figures given in Valentine’s Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York 1841–1870, the Real Estate Record, and other more or less contemporary sources suggest that Manhattan saw the erection of something on the order of 150,000 buildings 1790–1910, which implies that something like 57,000 were demolished or otherwise destroyed, e.g., by fire or structural failure, in the same period of time. These 150,000 or so buildings divide not quite equally into some 73,000 pre-1865, of which perhaps 60% or 49,000 were brick construction, and 77,000 post-1865, of which as much as 87% or about 67,000 were brick, i.e., something on the order of 116,000 brick buildings went up in Manhattan between 1790 and 1910.

New building plans filed in Manhattan, 1834 to 1912. Compiled from Valentine’s Manuals, the Real Estate Record’s History of Real Estate, New York city database searches via the Office of Metropolitan History website, and miscellaneous contemporary sources.

How many bricks is that? We should be very lucky to arrive at an estimate that is correct to within a factor of two, and of course we have no way of directly checking our result — if we did, we would use that data instead of our estimate — and must instead rely on a rough consistency with the available data on brick production in the region in the 19th century and such data as the decennial census collected on occupations. But even with these reservations, the exercise of estimating Manhattan’s demand for bricks in the 19th century may tell us something about how the city as it stands today came to be. We may be guessing, but we can educate our guessing, and it is this education that, if anything, makes the effort worthwhile.

Some simplifications, to begin with: the 1811 Commissioners Plan made it relatively straightforward to subsequently divide the largely undeveloped island into some 100,000 building lots, usually 20–25 feet wide and 100 feet deep. It is reasonable to assume that most of the buildings put up in the 19th century fit onto single lots of this size, though of course there were many variations, as when a developer would buy three 20-foot lots and put up two 30-foot wide buildings. But assuming that half the lots were 20 feet wide and half of them 25, the average width would have been 22.5 feet. The back part of the lot was needed for outhouses, trash, stables, etc., so a building was usually no more than 60–80 feet deep. Again, split the difference and call it 70 feet. And we know from the 1912 survey that buildings in Manhattan at that time were, on average, 4.8 stories or 58 feet high, to which we might add another ten feet to account for foundations and basements.

Fifth Avenue to Convent Avenue, 125th Street to 136th Street, 1891. Vacant lots (white) and brick buildings (pink), with old farm boundaries. The area is almost solidly built-up. Bromley’s Atlas, 1891

On these assumptions, we can define a fictional but useful “standard issue post-Civil War developer’s building”: two load-bearing brick side walls 70 long feet by 70 feet high (basement and foundations included) and front and back brick walls 22.5 feet wide by 70 feet high (again with basement and foundations included). Multiplying these dimensions together and then subtracting 720 square feet for doors and windows front and back, we arrive at a nominal estimate of 12,580 square feet of brick walls and foundations. Insofar as these buildings complied with the city’s later 19th century building code, they were on average five bricks thick — thicker at the bottom, thinner at the top. At 32 bricks per square foot of wall of this thickness, we arrive at a total of about 379,520 bricks for our “standard issue post-Civil War developer’s building.” A comparably “standard issue pre-Civil War developer’s building” would be only three to four stories high or on average 42 feet, with load bearing walls averaging only four bricks thick, 24 bricks per square foot, for a total estimate of only 218,784 bricks per such building. (The precision of these figures is, of course, an artifact of calculation; what is meaningful are the rounded numbers, e.g., in this latter instance, 220,000, or even 200,000, rather than the seductive but spurious exactitude of 218,784.)

Now combining these results with our estimated numbers of “standard developer’s buildings” and adding 10% for other uses — e.g., street and sidewalk paving, big water mains, sewage conduits — we arrive at an estimated total of roughly 40 billion bricks laid on the island of Manhattan 1790–1910 — given the roughness of the calculation we might more safely say somewhere in the range of 28–56 billion bricks. That is, in the vernacular, “a ton” of bricks. More precisely, it is on the order of 100 million tons of bricks, or something in the range 70–140 million tons.

Madison Avenue to St. Nicholas Avenue, 136th Street to 147th Streets, 1891. Vacant lots (white) and brick buildings (pink), with old farm boundaries. Most of the area is yet to be developed. Bromley’s Atlas, 1891

A brick-layer in the 19th century was expected to be able to lay 1,000 bricks in the course of a ten-hour day. At the 19th century hourly rate, i.e., 100 bricks per hour, it would take 400 million brick-layer hours to lay 40 billion bricks, i.e., 40 million brick-layer days, or, figuring a 3,000 hour work-year — 50 six-day workweeks at ten hours per day — 133,333 brick-layer years (again, the precision is spurious), which amounts to an average of 1,333 fully-employed brick-layers each year for a 100 years. The number of new buildings erected in each year varied by a factor of four or more, and with it the number of actively employed brick-layers, from perhaps as few as 500 in the earlier part of the century to as many as 6,000 towards its end, with fewer actually working during the recessions that followed the many financial panics of the century, especially the major crises of 1837, 1865, 1875, and the long depression of the 1890s. The peak boom years of course had the opposite effect, requiring more brick-layers than usual.

Vacant lots in Inwood, 1891. Inwood has been laid out, but development has yet to begin. Vacant lots (white) and brick buildings (pink), with old farm boundaries. Bromley’s Atlas, 1891

These numbers accord reasonably well with the census statistics on occupations in the city for the later 19th century. These statistics also suggest that unemployment was a regular part of the brick-layer’s life in the city, with as many as a fourth of all those claiming to be brick-layers reporting being unemployed for a month at the time the census was taken and another fourth reporting being unemployed for several months. Masonry, including the brick-layer’s trades, was organized early in the century but despite the efforts of these early unions, employment was frequently by the job or even by the day and offered little in the way of job security.

At 1,000 bricks per day, and actually working, on the above assumptions, perhaps 200 days a year on average, a brick-layer would lay some 200,000 bricks a year, or some six million bricks in the course of a 30-year working life — life expectancies were shorter then. This suggests that Manhattan was built in the long 19th century by the efforts of a total some 6,000–7,000 full time-equivalent brick-layers — perhaps actually 10,000 individuals, when unemployment is taken into account. And for every two brick layers there was typically a third man carrying the hod, and none of them would have been working had not the basement been dug by unskilled laborers and large numbers of rough carpenters, finish carpenters, roofers, plasterers, plumbers (though not in the early years), glazers, painters, and so on, engaged to finish the job.

The closing of the Manhattan frontier: Above 155th Street, Washington Heights and Inwood. By 1924 the island had been almost completely built-up: even in Inwood few unimproved lots remained open for new construction. Aerial survey, 1924.

The city’s northward expansion up the island of Manhattan 1790–1910 progressed at a rate of about two blocks per year across the whole width of the island, though with many year-to-year variations, and with the center of the island generally leading the rest. Put differently, the city expanded northward at an average rate of roughly a thousand buildings a year, albeit again with wide variations year-to-year.

This extraordinary rate of growth resulted from an exceptionally positive confluence of four factors: demand, supply, labor, and capital. Demand was driven above all by the enormous increase in population, together with the demand for commercial buildings — offices, warehouses, and industrial lofts for manufacturing — to support the equally enormous increase in the city’s commercial development. It is unlikely — probably impossible — that this demand for buildings could have been met had it not been for the mechanization and industrialization of brick manufacturing that made brick a mass produced commodity in hitherto unprecedented quantities at unprecedentedly low prices. By the late 19th century, the brickyards in the Hudson River valley were supplying the city with as many as a billion bricks a year, while the advent of the steamboat and the railroad made supply at this distance feasible. The seemingly endless stream of immigrants assured that there was no shortage of cheap labor, both skilled and unskilled, for the building of New York. The post-1811 parcelling of the island into 100,000+ building lots, the capital requirements for would-be developers and made it possible for many more to work in parallel: the New York Real Estate Record’s 1898 History of Real Estate lists about 150 “leaders” active in real estate and building at that time; the total number of active developers was surely even larger than that.

Bricks, circa 1910. The pattern is called Flemish Bond and is one of the most commonly found in New York. Photo by Richard Howe.

The legacies of New York’s long 19th century are manifold and many of them quite grand; among the least grand but most pervasive is the visual experience of the city as a texture of brickwork. Despite their many variations in color and texture, bricks are relatively uniform in size as a result of their haptic relationship to the dimensions of the human hand. Seen, as they usually are, in great numbers and at the distance of a street width or more, bricks are perceived as brickwork, as a texture that varies in roughness but rarely approaches the smoothness of concrete or glass. It is a texture more akin to jute than to silk or satin, with the difference perhaps that in the case of bricks, the coarser texture is the more pleasing to the eye, particularly in the cross-lights of early mornings and late afternoons. Though there are perhaps only half as many bricks in Manhattan today as there were 100 years ago, bricks remain by far the most numerous of all the ubiquities that constitute not only the physical structure of the city but the foundation and greater part of its visual unity as well. They are quite literally the building blocks not only of the physical city but also of our visual experience of it. They tell us, over and over again, in a way that the newer expanses of concrete, metal, and glass perhaps do not, that the city is a human creation, and a hand-made one at that, built by people and ultimately for  people: the material spirits who made — and make — New York their home.

Sources and further reading

New York City Clerk David Valentine’s Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York (1842–1866 & 1868–1870) provide numerous statistics on building in New York as well as maps for the years 1849–1853 and 1856 that show the built-up blocks of the city.

The Union History Company’s long out of print History of Architecture and the Building Trades of Greater New York (1899) remains an astonishing source of data on just about every aspect of its subject, including the uses of wood and the commerce in it in New York, as well as statistics on the numbers of buildings for various years, starting in the 17th century.

The Real Estate Record’s 1898 History of Real Estate, Building, and Architecture in New York City During the Last Quarter of a Century, drawn from this trade paper’s reporting over the years, is another astonishing compilation, with detailed statistics on building in the city as well as overviews of the leading real estate and construction firms.

The Heights of Buildings Commission’s 1913 Report is both a detailed survey of contemporary building trends and statistics in New York and a comparative study of these trends in other large cities both in the United States and in Europe.

Christopher Grey’s Office of Metropolitan History website is an invaluable source of advice and tools for 20th century buildings research.

Charles Lockwood’s Manhattan Moves Uptown (1976) provides a fine narrative of the northward growth of the city in the 19th century.

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, on-line at http://www.davidrumsey.com/, is an unrivalled resource for very high quality images of maps of New York, including, especially, a number of real estate atlases of Manhattan in the 19th century (including the 1891 Bromley’s used in this research note).

by Michael Nichols

Michael Nichols lives in New York City and is an ardent scavenger of city lore and other historical curiosities.  His first contribution to the Blotter was “An Afternoon at Blackwell’s Light.”

Edgar Allan Poe came to New York for what would be his last time in 1844, and busied himself with his writing, his magazines, and tending to his ailing wife Virginia.  In less harried moments, he explored the city and its outskirts…roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta.  On the shores of the Hudson River, near the Brennan farm where he lived, he sat on rocky outcroppings brooding on the river and the blue Palisades on the other side.  He strolled along the deck atop the massive Egyptian-like walls of the Distributing Reservoir on 42nd Street, watching the city below and beyond–and such vistas, too, in those days, from river to river and all the way downtown.  He even found time to go rowing in the East River.  He took stock of the city and reported what he saw in a weekly gossip column he called “Doings of Gotham” for the Columbia Spy, a small Pennsylvania newspaper.

On the eastern or “Sound” face of Mannahatta (why do we persist in de-euphonizing the true names?) are some of the most picturesque sites for villas to be found within the limits of Christendom. These localities, however, are neglected–unimproved. The old mansions upon them (principally wooden) are suffered to remain unrepaired, and present a melancholy spectacle of decrepitude. In fact, these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already “mapped” through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but “town-lots. ” In some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brown-stone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it.

–Doings of Gotham, May 14, 1844

Poe wrote as if an outsider, which he was to New York, never quite taking the city into himself despite his having lived here off and on several times during his career–an  outsider looking in for the benefit of his readers who were true outsiders.  But he knew what he saw.  Writing of the emerging city,  Poe is remarkably prescient, although some things bear explaining.

By “suburban residences,” Poe means the country houses on the east side belonging to the Astors,  the Beekmans, the Primes, the Rhinelanders, the Crugers, the Gracies, and other families–all names of the day, and all federated by business deals, dinner parties, and intermarriage.

By “mapped,” Poe is referring to Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which laid out Manhattan in the gridiron pattern to which the city’s future growth would adhere.  This far uptown, the grid still exists only on paper, and the map awaits its filling out with actual streets and avenues.  But the inexorable uptown advance of the city pushes, and keeps pushing.

By “the spirit of improvement…with its acrid breath,” Poe means that nothing can be left alone.

Years before, in 1839, Poe had published “The Fall of the House of Usher” in which a man draws a house whose qualities are those of the doomed minds that inhabit it.  Evidently the “melancholy spectacle of decrepitude” that certain houses present is not forgotten.

* * *

Eliza Greatorex: “Country seat of John Jacob Astor”

Eliza Greatorex

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees…

–House of Usher

…the sentience of vegetable things…

In the spring of 1869 the artist Eliza Pratt Greatorex visited this neighborhood with her papers and drawing pens.  She was nearly fifty years old, her reputation as a landscape pen-and-ink artist still to be made.  She would make it later, with sketches of Oberammergau, Italy, Colorado, and with the sketches she was now doing of New York City, including these neglected houses and cottages overlooking the East River.

By the time she got here the neighborhood was changing from rural to urban.  The nearby village of Yorkville was growing into a middle-class suburb of merchants and bookkeepers, the airy new tenement buildings lining the crosstown streets a welcome relief from the cramped Lower East Side.  But that was several blocks inland.  Out here, the margin of Manhattan is still a vegetative world, and this is what Greatorex elects to capture.  Like Poe, she sees a dying paradigm and what new one might be mapped in its place does not matter.

Every one of her drawings has this one thing in common: a house as the focal point, but so completely surrounded by vegetation that it is not the house that matters but the captivity of the house.  Her drawings are like those of the 19th century explorer-artists who intended to describe exotic lands as precisely and scientifically as possible, but which today look nothing less than Romantic.  Nowhere are people.

Not that people did not exist.  While sketching the Astor house a curious bystander happened by, an old Scot, presumably a servant of the house.  He spoke to her of the bygone days when Mr. Astor was still alive and how he maintained the good and pleasant fashions of the olden times.  There were many servants in the house, and fires of blazing hickory were kept even in summer–a wise precaution against country chill and damp.

But now the hickory’s run out, or maybe just those who would tend the fire.  In 1873, Mr. Astor’s house would be torn down.  There was no point in letting it linger on, lest it fall and become part of the vegetation.  Greatorex got there just in time.

* * *

Eliza Greatorex: “Gracie Mansion”

Gracie Mansion

A story:  Mister Mayor, says the real estate agent, I have the perfect house for you, a 19th century French chateaux.  Note the mansard roof, the ornate accoutrements, very grand, befitting the mayor of the greatest city in the world, no?   Answers Fiorello H. LaGuardia, the mayor of the people who talks up to President Roosevelt and who reads the funnies on the radio to children during the newspaper strike of 1945: What! Me in that?  Wait, says the agent, I think we might have something more you, crosstown, on the East Side.

Mayors speak of budgets and let the furniture do the history.  That Gracie Mansion, the official home to the Mayor of the City of New York, has survived this long can be credited to its being a shape-shifter.  History knows Archibald Gracie more for his house than for him.  He was hard-working, industrious, scrupulous, and successful until President Jefferson’s embargo in 1807.  Thereafter, it was all downhill.  To pay off his debts, Gracie sold the house in 1823 to Joseph Foulkes, who later sold it to Noah Wheaton whose family kept it until his death in 1896.  The family sold it to the City of New York, and not knowing what to do with it, the City of New York allowed it to languish, but never to the point where it was beyond rescue.  It served time, variously as an ice cream parlor, a public bathroom, and the Museum of the City of New York.  In its rooms today are fine old Georgian furniture, paintings, carpets, and some cannon balls from the days when this site was a Revolutionary battlement.

Gracie wasn’t the first to build on this knoll.  In 1770, Jacob Walton, built an elegant Georgian mansion on the site.  Walton was from a prominent family.  His grandfather William was a shipbuilder, known as Boss Walton, and also Captain, as he sailed his own ships to the West Indies and along the Spanish Main.  Jacob’s generation was more settled, business-like, married to responsibility and good sense.  With his brother, Jacob ran the largest insurance underwriting business in the city.  He married well, to Polly Cruger, of the Cruger family, active in business and Loyalist politics.  For a few years Walton lived in peace, but it was bad timing on his part to build his retreat just as a world war was breaking out.  Strategists knew the place, too.  General Washington, looking at the map, decided he needed this promontory, and as General Lee was in charge in these parts, Washington ordered Lee to take it.  Which he did.  Perhaps that Walton was a Loyalist made Lee’s job easier, perhaps it didn’t matter.  The Waltons were expelled, and the house was turned into a bivouac for the rebels who were to man the redoubt down the hill.  In September, 1776, the British fired at the redoubt from across the river, at Hallett’s Point.  Their missiles also hit the Loyalist’s house, burning it to its foundation.  Walton had dug a tunnel from his house down to the river’s edge, an escape hatch, which unfortunately he could not escape to in time.  It was found decades later by workers on the grounds of Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s house.

Strange that mayors, who can get away with saying My city, never say it.  It is always Our city, with that careful inclusion of the body politick.  But I’ll bet more than one mayor has stepped out onto the yard of this citified country house on some languorous summer evening—and smelling the sea, and taking in the view of the wide Hell Gate, the twinkling lights of the bridges, the great buildings up river and down, the barges plying the water, the gulls, the sky framed by a stand of oak and London plane, the evening’s descent—I’ll bet more than one mayor has said to himself, My city.

* * *

Eliza Greatorex: “Hell Gate Ferry Hotel”

Hell Gate Ferry Hotel

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity.  The discoloration of ages had been great.  In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air.

–House of Usher

Again her timing is perfect.  Eliza situates herself somewhere near Avenue B, now East End Avenue, but then hardly an avenue at all, and looks down a rutted East 86th Street toward the East River.  From that perspective, the arching branches of trees and the rock walls create a kind of gyred tunnel.  At the end, in a small space of light, is the Hell Gate Ferry Hotel.  In its day, about twenty years before, when it was run by a Mr. Dunlop, the place was something of a resort, if Dunlop’s advertising cant can be believed: “An obliging host, beautiful summer retreat, refreshments of the first quality with horses and pleasure wagons to let.  Also, boats and tackle for fishing, renders this spot second to none in the vicinity of New York City.  Murphy’s stage, every fifteen minutes to City Hall, for six cents.”

But when Greatorex arrives, well, there’s not much activity for a hotel.  In fact, it seems a ruin, about the oldest house come upon yet.  It is built of heavy stone, its sills and ledges of lighter brownstone.  Inside, the place gives the appearance of a once comfortable dwelling, roomy, with small panes of glass set in windows and doors.  A rambling balcony remains, affording a wide view of the river, if one can trust to step out on it.  Should travelers come by wanting to summon the ferry, they need only alert the ferryman by blowing through a conch shell.

Yet traces of this topography remain, the scene is vaguely familiar today.  The cut Greatorex depicts still exists, though widened and fashioned into an arcade of cherry blossom trees and bluestone walks, and now ending not at the river but at the embankment built in 1940 to cover the FDR Drive that skirts the river.  A garden has been planted in the embankment and a double-staircase framing the garden leads to the promenade above.  But what defines this place now is what defined it then: the walls of Manhattan schist and the London planes and elm trees that enclose the arcade on both sides.  The massive blocks of schist are weathered and worn, their fissures and faults overcome with new growth of snakeroot and moss–a reminder that what the earth tosses up is not to be completely obliterated.  And so it remains today, the cut done up a little more formally, but as out of the way and ancient now as it was then, in Poe’s phrase…with no disturbance from the breath of the external air…which down here means the din and trouble of the city.

Main Sources

Eliza Greatorex, M. Despard.  Old New York: From the Battery to Bloomingdale (Vol II).  New York, 1875.

Edgar Allan Poe. “Doings of Gotham.” Columbia Spy, 1844.

Joseph Scoville.  The Old Merchants of New York City (Vol I). New York, 1870.

Mike Wallace & Edwin G. Burrows.  Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.  New York, 1999.

Anthony Lofaso.  Origins and History of the Village of Yorkville in the City of New York. New York, 1972.

John Austin Stevens, et al.  The Magazine of American History.  New York, 1879.

All images are courtesy of The New York Public Library.  www.nypl.org

Richard Howe is the author of New York in Plain Sight: The Manhattan Street Corners (http://www.newyorkinplainsight.com). He is currently working on a book, The Look of the City, to show what it is that makes Manhattan look the way it does. His “Little Pre-History of the Manhattan Grid” was featured on the Gotham History Blog last spring (http://gothamcenter.org/blotter/?p=499).

Simply, clearing was America.
Michael Williams

When the Dutch West India Company established what was soon to be called Nieuw Amsterdam in 1624-1625, the island of Manhattan was 80%–85% forested, with as many as several million trees covering some 10,000+ acres of its then total area of about 13,000 acres. What remains of this forest today is no more than a few thousand trees on a few hundred acres of forested parkland at the northern end of the island, and there are indications that much of the clearing of the island had in fact been accomplished no later than the early 18th century and possibly as early as the late 17th century. Is this possible? Could a town that had begun with just a handful of settlers in 1623–1624 and numbered only 7,500 souls a century later have cleared even a million trees from the island in 100 years or less?

Surviving primal forest on Inwood Hill in Manhattan, some of which is still standing today, as seen in 1898. (photo: James Ruel Smith)

Living in an age in which oil and coal have become our most important fuels, metals and concrete our most important structural materials, and plastics the most common material of the ordinary objects of our everyday lives, it is easy to forget that throughout human history, and as recently as 150 years ago, wood was unquestionably our single most important raw material: crucially important as a fuel, indispensable for building, the most workable material for many smaller objects, and the principal source of caulks, sealants, glues, and solvents as well as—via its ashes—key ingredients for fertilizer, glass, cements, bleaches, gunpowder, and soap.

Of these many uses of wood, fuel was by far the most important. Fully half, and probably much more, of all the wood ever actually used—as opposed to simply wasted: destroyed as a side-effect of forest clearing for other purposes—was burned as fuel, either directly for heating and cooking, or indirectly as charcoal to provide the high temperatures required for metal working and for brick, pottery, tile, and glass making. There was no economical alternative: wood was abundant and readily available while coal, though a superior fuel, was available only in the very limited amounts provided by surface outcroppings, and for all practical purposes oil and gas were to be a 19th century discovery. Like air and water, food and clothing, wood was the very stuff of life.

Wood is, as we have learned to say now that we are becoming aware of the larger ecological value of the world’s forests, dead trees. Its source is live trees, and these, in great dense stands, constitute the forests that once covered the greater part of the habitable earth. They were cut or otherwise cleared—usually by burning—not only for their many uses as wood but also because the forest is antithetical to the intense cultivation of domesticated grains, which requires open skies. The bucolic vista of sunlight dappled fields is a human creation, produced at the expense of forest cover. If much of Manhattan above the northern limit of the town in the 18th and 19th centuries was rural in character, it was because this great transformation, from forest to fields, had already been accomplished, mostly by the first few generations of European settlers. The supply of wood and wood products from the island north of the town was as much a by-product of this need for clearing as it was an effort to meet the town’s demands.

It is safe to say that nearly 100% of the energy requirements—heating, cooking, and basic manufactures—of 17th and early 18th century Nieuw Amsterdam and New York were met by fuelwood, the exceptions being a few wind, horse, and water mills, one of them a saw-mill up near today’s East 75th Street. Houses—even the chimneys—were built mostly of wood, as were ships and fences. Demand for wood and wood products was so great that within just a few years of its founding, Nieuw Amsterdam was importing wood from elsewhere in the region, and traffic in wood was becoming an industry and a branch of commerce in its own right.

Detail of the 1664–1668 Nicolls Map incidentally showing the approximate extent of the island’s deforestation up to that time. (in Stokes I: plate 10Aa)

Wood was so vital to the material life of the town that the Common Council had to take steps to regulate the growing commerce in it. Regarding a dispute over the right to cut wood the Council ruled in 1657 that anyone was permitted to cut trees on an unfenced property but if the property were fenced no one but the owner had that right. In 1677 the Council stipulated the cord as the legal measure of cut wood: 128 cubic feet or a stack of four foot pieces eight feet long and four feet high. The Council also appointed official corders to assure that the quantities put up for sale were honestly measured, though of course complaints about fraudulent measures continued even so. In 1684 the Council forbade the unloading of “Timber, Pipe Staves, wood or Other Lumber” at the Great Dock on the East River; and appointed market places for the selling of wood along the waterfront; more were added in 1688.

The Council’s regulatory interventions should not be taken to mean that the supply of wood from the island north of town was exhausted, only that its supply was no longer simply a private affair or a purely local concern. Lumber is said to have been rafted to the town from very early on in the Dutch adventure here. A cord of wood weighs as much two tons or more, and rafting wood in from New Jersey and Long Island would have been cheaper than carting it any distance on the island, with the result that the rate of clearing would get slower the further north it got. (The occasional evidence of 18th century drawings suggests that this was indeed the case, e.g., a view of Harlaem in 1765 shows a thoroughly wooded background to the village, though one must also make allowance for artistic license.) But this tells us little if anything about how long the process of deforestation went on before it was effectively complete, i.e., when there was nothing more to be gained from going any further with it.

View of Harlaem from Morisania in the Province of New York September 1765. (in Stokes I: plate 39)

There is—if only just barely—enough data to estimate the town’s annual aggregate demand for fuelwood for domestic use. Forest yield data lets us also estimate the acres of forest—whether on Manhattan or elsewhere—required to meet this level of demand. Expressing this acreage as a percentage of the original Manhattan forest, the running total of the annual demands is then the cumulative potential impact on the forest of the town’s demand for fuelwood. The data are sparse and treacherous and we must not be seduced by the spurious precision of such calculations—and in any event no single factor could ever explain it all. Nevertheless, the effort may give us a feel for the limits of the possible, and perhaps for the relative importance of other factors as well.

Aggregate demand for fuelwood for domestic use is in the first place a function of population, for which we have data for the years 1624, 1627, 1643, 1664, 1698, 1703, 1712, 1723, 1731, 1737, 1746, 1749, 1756, and 1771. I interpolate linearly to get the missing years; cumulative lived years is their running total. Williams cites per capita consumption figures ranging from a low of 0.8 cords per person per year to a high of 4.5. I use the mean of these figures: 3.7 cords per person per year. Annual aggregate demand is then just the population estimate for each year multiplied by the per capita mean. Williams’ figures for forest yield are equally wide-ranging; I follow his suggestion of 20 cords per acre as a “medium” yield. Sanderson estimates 10,331 acres of forest on the island of Manhattan around 1600; somewhat arbitrarily, I use 80% of that figure to define “effectively complete” deforestation, the remaining 20% being more than enough to leave the island north of today’s 155th Street largely untouched.

Estimated Consumption of Fuelwood in Nieuw Amsterdam / New York as Percentage of Original Manhattan Forest Acreage 1620-1720

Mid-range estimate assumes 3.7 cords fuelwood consumed per capita per year and a forest yield of 20 cords of fuelwood per acre

The calculations show that a date of as early as 1672 for an 80% deforestation of the island is not inconsistent with the data and assumptions described above. Moreover, it shows that the use of wood for domestic fuel alone could account for this, which is not at all to suggest that other factors did not, in fact, also play important parts. Different assumptions yield different results: a few variations may suffice to show the range of effects:

• halving the assumption for per capita per year consumption of fuelwood for domestic use from 3.7 to 1.85 cords postpones the 80% deforestation year by about a dozen years, to 1685–1686;

• doubling the forest yield from 20 to 40 cords of wood per acre produces the same result; and, more importantly,

• taking both together postpones the 80% deforestation year by another two decades, to around 1706–1707.

Like the other figures in the calculation, these dates can only be suggestive of a range. What they tell us, really, is that a late 17th to early 18th century date for the effective deforestation of the island is not inconsistent with the little that we do know that can be brought to bear quantitatively on the question.

Demand factors other than fuelwood for domestic use would tend to speed up deforestation of the island, even as the economics of transportation would tend to slow it down. Williams estimates that a furnace producing 1,000 tons of pig iron annually could consume over 300 acres of forest. The temperatures required for brick and tile kilns and for glass-making are broadly comparable and at these rates even a few such enterprises would be significant for local deforestation, whether on Manhattan itself or elsewhere in the immediate area. Ten such enterprises would go through over 30,000 acres of forest in a decade: three times the extent of the original Manhattan forest.

Relative to the demand for fuelwood, demand for wood for buildings, ships, and fences was minor enough to safely ignore, at least for these early years. As late as 1744 there were only 1,141 buildings in the city. Braudel’s figure of five big trees to construct an in-town house in Europe suggests that no more than about 6,000 big trees were used for this purpose by 1744. On the plausible assumption of 100 such trees per acre of forest, this equates to no more than about 60 acres. Even doubling Braudel’s figure from five trees to ten would raise the total to only 120 acres of forest, a little more than 1% of the forest acreage at the start of settlement. The number of ships built in Nieuw Amsterdam / New York in these years was still too small to affect the deforestation rate appreciably, and much the same can surely be said about fencing.

There remains the question of labor productivity and the feasibility of accomplishing the deforestation of most of the island within the span of 50–80 years suggested by our calculations. Williams cites figures that range from an acre a month to an—in his view unlikely—high of an acre a day, but supports the view that “a healthy man with an ax” could clear an acre of forest in a month. The arithmetic alone implies 8,000 ax-man months or 667 ax-man years to clear 80% of 10,000 acres of forest, i.e., about 13 ax-man years per year to get the job done in 50 years or eight ax-man years per year to get it done in 80. These are modest numbers indeed and would be even if they proved to be too low by as much as a factor of four. So labor would not have been a gating factor, and in any event it seems likely that much of the actual work of clearing was done by slaves, first “imported” to Nieuw Amsterdam in 1626.

Manhattan, near today’s 94th Street, 1853–1854. (photo: Victor Prevost)

Manhattan was never completely deforested by the Europeans—though there are indications that this may have largely been accomplished once before by the island’s Native American inhabitants in the centuries prior to the demographic disaster that followed the 1492 ecological invasion, after which the forest gradually returned again—and some remnant of the forest of 400 years ago still stands in Inwood Hill Park at the northernmost extremity of the island. But by the end of the 19th century there were those who feared that a near total deforestation of the island was not far off and who then launched a movement to create a new “urban forest” in the form of street trees. This movement has continued, intermittently but effectively, on down to the present day, most recently in Mayor Bloomberg’s “Million Trees NYC” program, which aims to raise the street tree total in Manhattan from the 5,000–10,000 of a hundred years ago to something on the order 60,000 by year 2017. The program is already well ahead of schedule as of this writing (January 2012).

Deforestation was only the first of a number of major transformations, both physical and abstract, that have been wrought upon Manhattan in the course of New York’s 400-year history: others include the conveyance of the island into the conceptual space of European property law, the expansion of its dry land area by shoreline landfills and swamp drainings, the levelling—albeit often over-estimated—of its naturally hilly terrain, the subordination of two-thirds of the island to the speculative real estate logic of the grid plan of 1811, the replacement of its originally pervious surface—its soil—with an impervious surface of brick and stone, concrete and asphalt, and the physical connection of Manhattan to other islands of the New York archipelago and to the North American mainland via bridges and tunnels.

These transformations overlapped one another substantially in time and are causally related to one another in seemingly infinitely—and often frustratingly—complex ways. Nevertheless, the primary physical transformation—primary both as the first and as the foundation for all the rest—was deforestation: the clearing of Manhattan’s forest. It was on this basis, largely achieved in the first century of the fledgling city’s existence, that subsequent generations of New Yorkers accomplished the most profound of transformation of all: the creation of the greatest—the richest, the most powerful, the most civilized—city on earth.

For further reading:

The late Michael Williams’ great Deforestation of the Earth: from Prehistory to Global Crisis (2002) and his equally great Americans and their Forests: A Historical Geography (1989) are an introduction to the subject that is in equal measure encyclopaedic and entertaining.

Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta is an endlessly fascinating reconstruction of the ecology of the island as well as a rich source of data on all its aspects prior to the European settlement.

Ira Rosenwaike’s Population History of New York City (1972) collects and analyzes a remarkable range of statistics from the city’s earliest years on through to 1970.

The Union History Company’s long out of print History of Architecture and the Building Trades of Greater New York (1899) remains an astonishing source of data on just about every aspect of its subject, including the uses of wood and the commerce in it in New York, as well as statistics on the numbers of buildings for various years, starting in the 17th century.

Max Page’s chapter on the “Uses of the Ax” in The Creative Destruction of Manhattan 1900–1940 (1999) takes the story of Manhattan’s deforestation well into the 20th century.

Amy Johnson’s fascinating essay on “The Saw Kill and the Making of Dutch-Colonial Manhattan” can be found on the Gotham History Blotter at http://gothamcenter.org/blotter/?p=280.

I. N. Phelps Stokes’ Iconography of Manhattan Island (1915–1928) remains, as usual, indispensable for just about everything.

Dondiego Nunziata is a fourth generation Neapolitan-American living in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two children.  The focus of his blog, Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?, is to highlight the forgotten culture of so many Neapolitan-American and Sicilian-American families who mistakenly identify themselves as “Italian” and to begin a journey to regain self-determination for a region of Europe that for all but the last 150 years was one of the most successful and productive in human history.

I’ve begun my discussion on my blog (www.italianamericantoday.tumblr.com) focusing on the history that led up to the mass exodus of Napolitans and Sicilians, from their homelands, to the four corners of the globe over a hundred years ago.  Many of us who read these histories do so in a language different from that of our ancestors, who last laid eyes on our beautiful motherland.  Forced to flee by the advances of an invading army; forced to flee from the repression cast down upon them from a foreign legion; forced to flee the rape, murder and thievery of their culture, and of everything they held dear – our ancestors faced an even more daunting challenge once their decision to leave their fallen Kingdom became the reality of their new lives.  Here’s one experience, of the millions of exiled Napolitans and Sicilians, once they arrived on the shores of their new countries, many of which were just as unfriendly as the homeland they left behind.

Napolitans Waiting to Leave the Harbor of Napoli, circa 1900

The truth of the matter is, America was a very hostile place for most immigrants, but especially for those who didn’t speak English, and for those who were Roman Catholic.  As Napolitans, our ancestors were both.  And for many of them, like 13-year-old Carmela Pietropinto, the arduous journey itself began a period of twelve years in her life that must have felt like hell on earth.

As a schoolteacher by trade, I get to witness first hand the trials and tribulations of the teenage set.  Thirteen-year-old girls and boys, easily molded by their early experiences, come in and out of my life each year, and I know that what they experience and learn during this crucial time in their lives has an impact that exceeds no other.  The trials these children face, however – even the worst and most heartbreaking ones – pale in comparison to what young Carmela had to endure as she journeyed to America and beyond.

It began by saying goodbye, to her entire family, in the tiny Lucanian village of San Fele…

San Fele, Basilicata Today

Carmela’s father Francesco set up a nice life for his young family in San Fele – or so he thought.  As a medical doctor, Francesco Pietropinto was a successful man, but with the advances of the Piedmontese army he had seen his paying customers dwindle down to zero.  Being in a remote Lucanian outpost also meant that he was probably servicing many of the briganti who were desperately fighting the occupying Piedmontese for their lost freedom.  As a result, this left these villages, if they were ever reached by Piedmontese forces, as prime targets for angry Northern soldiers seeking vengence.  Because of this, Francesco decided to pick up and move his entire family to New York City, where a large number of San Felese, including Carmela’s future husband, had already set up shop.

Simply living in and being from a place like San Fele meant you were taking a chance that what had happened in the villages of Pontelandofo and Casalduni, could happen to you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casalduni

“No stone should remain standing,” was the Piedmontese order given at Pontelandofo.  The town’s most beautiful woman – or at least whom we think was the most beautiful woman, because all of the invading Piedmontese took their turn with her – Maria Izzo, was tied to a tree naked, her legs raised in the air, and repeatedly raped until the last soldier finished with her.  That soldier then forced his bayonet into her belly, leaving her to bleed out.  We can now see why it was of the utmost importance for Francesco, our last King’s namesake, to get his family out of Lucania.  Even though the massacres at Casalundi and Pontelandofo occurred thirty years prior, the prevailing attitude and oppression remained – and still remains today throughout the South.

Pontelandofo then and now

Francesco Pietropinto, Carmela’s father, and her three older sisters, clearly labeled “HELP” in their occupation column, filling us in to what Francesco expected of his children in America, to work.

Despite being a medical professional, Francesco wasn’t able to secure passage to America together.  He was able to find four tickets.  One for himself, and three for his eldest daughters: Maria Michela, 20; Rosa, 18; and Lucrezia 16.  This left his youngest daughter, Carmela, to take an earlier ship arriving in New York fifteen days before the rest of the family – alone.  Traveling on the Karamania by herself, Carmela endured the painful journey away from the only home she’d ever known, in solitude.  When she arrived on the shores of a land whose language she did not speak or understand, she was left to do so alone.  Alone, she waited for 15 days, before her sisters and father arrived on board the Algeria on August 15, 1896.

Carmela, found on line 151, aboard the Karamania arriving at Ellis Island Aug. 1, 1896.  Note she has no relatives around her, and after a search of the entire manifest, none could be found.

Once she arrived, things didn’t get any easier.  As you can see from the first ship manifest of the Algeria, which arrived at Ellis Island on August 16, 1896, Francesco expected each of his children, for whose migration he had paid, to chip in and work to help pay the rent at their tenement house apartment at 210 East 59th Street.

According to Francesco’s death certificate, once he arrived, this once proud medical doctor from San Fele, was only able to secure himself a job as a veterinarian in New York City.  Most likely, his language and status as an immigrant prevented him from obtaining a medical license in New York at the time.  But before succumbing to heart disease in 1905, Francesco managed to become the catalyst in an extremely heart-breaking, but unfortunately all-to-common, narrative — the narrative many Napolitans and Sicilians shared once they arrived here in the “land of the free”…

Death Certificate of Francesco Pietropinto, NYC January 13, 1905

When Carmela’s father arrived two weeks after her debarking from the Karamania alone, it was a reunion not too difficult to imagine.  Father and daughter, separated for two weeks, most likely longer than they had ever been apart before then, this time in a new world, again felt each others’ warm embrace.  It was a world where the language was unknown, and the culture even more foreign.  It was a place where the realities of city life set in quickly for the rural family who knew nothing else.  In order to feed and house his family, Francesco needed his family.  He needed them more than ever. And he needed them to work.

Carmela though, was a fourteen-year-old girl.  And for those who have not had the pleasure, fourteen-year-olds are not the most easily convinced once they get their heads wrapped around an idea.  I have a daughter of my own, and everyday I fear the future, that one day she will be fourteen.  One day she will think she knows best, and I will know I’m done for.  That day came for Francesco when his daughter Carmela refused to take work in the bustling city of Manhattan in August of 1896.  To Francesco, he had no choice.

It may seem cold and calculated, but knowing what I know of Napolitans, it was necessary.  Francesco gave his youngest daughter a choice: work and help support the family and herself, or go. Carmela refused to work.  Perhaps it was the two weeks she spent in Manhattan with her fellow San Felese emigres.  Perhaps it was the false freedom that America promised, and still promises its people, new and old alike, today. But something told Carmela to refuse her father’s demands to work and earn, and instead make a demand of her own, a demand to learn and go to school.

She perhaps had read about the work of brave women like Susan B. Anthony, and realized that for her future she needed to learn.  She already knew how to read and write Lucanian, but here in America, that wouldn’t get her far past Mulberry St.  She wanted to learn English and go to school.  Instead of dropping her off at school, though, her father dropped her off at an orphanage for young girls in Rockaway, Queens.  Today, only St. John’s Home for Boys remains near the beaches off the Atlantic, but at the turn of the century orphanages and alms houses were a necessary part of New York and American Society, and the Rockaways housed many.  Like many immigrants to this new land, Francesco had to make a heart-breaking decision: keep his daughter and risk starvation, or give her up, and know she’ll be fed and educated and perhaps have a chance at a better life.  In reality, he had no choice.  He had to say goodbye to his little star.

Carmela was his little star.  She was always different, and always felt she had been destined to do something great with her life.  But with conditions in Naples deteriorating as each year passed since 1860 and the fall of the Due Sicilie, the Pietropintos knew that their destiny wouldn’t be fulfilled there.  So they looked across an ocean, to New York, as millions of other Napolitans did after “unification”.  So for the moment, she was a little star without a sky, ready to burst, and burst she did, in a flaming ball of raw emotion, as she said good-bye one last time to her family, and to her father.

After this latest exile, she cut off all ties to her family, and took to heart the message given to her from the Protestant Orphanage where she lived until she turned eighteen.  However, in doing so, she lost a connection to her homeland, her Catholicism, and her parents.  Even though a reunion did take place with her mother after her father’s death, things were never quite the same and the distance was clear even to Carmela’s children.

She eventually did find love and a family, when she met and married fellow San Felese Leonardo Dondiego, a successful barber and business owner from Sullivan Street.  They were married in 1907, on September 1, and a year later had their first child, a daughter, Rose.  A year and a half later, their first son Vito was born.  By 1911 they had moved to Brooklyn, and had three more sons, and two more daughters.  In 1912 Frankie was born, 1914 Joseph arrived, followed by Leonard in 1916, Margaret in 1917, and Vivian, my grandmother, in 1919.  And from July 6, 1928, she did so again, alone.  Her husband Leonardo, died of a heart attack while shaving a man in his Coney Island barber shop after years of working seven days a week.

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/NYBROOKLYN/2002-10/1033961380

Her star may not have been realized in a very public life, but she managed to raise seven successful children.  Two became veterans of the Second World War, serving the United States honorably in Europe, helping to defeat the Nazis and free Western Europe.  One son went on to become a Medical Doctor, fulfilling the intellectual promise first set forth by her father, and another became a New York City Police Officer who served his home community of Coney Island for almost fifty years.

Carmela eventually died in October of 1949, but she laid the foundation for a star bright future in our temporary country of residence.  Carmela’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren include lawyers, educators, writers, and stage performers who all carry on her pride, her work ethos, and her spirit of individuality.  It would appear that, even though her star was nearly extinguished on a cold August day in 1896, it’s shining today as bright as ever.

I hope that Carmela’s spirit is carried into the next century, and perhaps even back to a repatriated homeland, by my daughter, Carmela’s great-great grand daughter and my own personal “piccola stella.”

Jeffrey Scheuer writes mainly about politics, media, and history, and is the author of The Sound Bite Society: How Television Helps the Right and Hurts the Left (NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999; Routledge NY, 2001) and most recently, of The Big Picture: Why Democracies Need Journalistic Excellence (Routledge NY, 2007).

On a summer afternoon in 1894, a despondent American expatriate walked along the Thames Embankment in London and contemplated ending his life in the river.  Charles B. Stover was a thirty-three year old former divinity student from Pennsylvania, was suffering a crisis of faith, of unknown origin, which had led him to give up the ministry.  But then, something magical happened.  Gazing down at the Thames, an epiphany prompted a change of mind.    As he later recalled, he heard “a rush of angel-wings, which stirred the waters, and thrilled me with an impulse to get back to New York and engage in the battle for the right.”

Charles Stover would live for another third of a century, and play an important role in the life of New York City.  His most notable, but by no means sole, achievement was his instrumental role in creating many of New York’s parks and playgrounds.  Although adept at publicizing his crusades, Stover didn’t seek the limelight; in fact, quite the opposite: he  had a curious habit of vanishing from time to time, and then reappearing without explanation.  Yet no one ever worked harder than this quirky, enigmatic, childless, and fiercely idealistic man – or for less financial gain or public recognition – to make New York a better place for children.

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

In a flurry of urban activism that began in the early 1890s and continued well into the new century, Charles Stover and his allies on the Lower East Side, worked to achieve a broad range of reforms.  A series of organizations emerged early on: the Chadwick Civic Club; the Social Reform Club, which monitored labor conditions in the neighborhood; the East Side Civic Club, a merchants’ organization that was instrumental in widening Delancey Street.  Most of these groups were headquartered at Stover’s residence on Forsyth Street.  The men and women who gathered there organized petition drives, testified at hearings, wrote letters to the press, and lobbed in Albany for progressive legislation.   They commissioned studies of social conditions in the Tenth Ward which reflected the infancy of modern social science, publishing the University Settlement Society’s annual reports and eventually a periodical, the University Settlement Society Quarterly; a monthly called the Guild Journal would follow in 1907.

During 1893-1894, Stover conducted a protracted, virtually single-handed campaign for municipal ownership of the planned subways,  a relatively novel idea at a time when private franchises were the rule.  He is believed to have spent his entire private inheritance of some $6,000 in that effort, which ultimately led to municipal control of the lines when the City’s subways opened in 1904.  A bill before the state legislature would have put the trains in private hands; at the last minute, Stover won inclusion of an amendment calling for a city-wide referendum.  He then slipped away to Europe in exhaustion and despair.  But in November 1894, the city’s voters rejected private ownership by more than three-to-one.

In the spring of 1896 Stover was back New York, once again in the thick of the reform battles.  The timing was right for just such a leader – an independent, high-minded, free-wheeling organizer, advocate, and gadfly.   By the mid-1890s, University Settlement was at the epicenter of the reform movement in New York.  In 1898, when University Settlement moved to a new building at the corner of Eldridge and Rivington streets (which it continues to occupy today), Mark Twain was among the speakers at the dedication.  A few years later, a well-born young visitor from uptown, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose fiancée taught dance at University Settlement, was shocked by the living conditions in the neighborhood.  He would later call the Settlement “a landmark in the social history of the nation.”

It was never a one-man crusade; but Stover was at the hub of the talented group of change-agents that emerged at University Settlement, including Ernest Pool; William English Walling,  a co-founder of the NAACP; Walter Weyl,  founding editor of The New Republic; Arthur Bullard, Kellog Durland,  Howard Brubaker, the novelist Isaac Friedman, and settlement scholar Robert Hunter.  The social historian Allen F. Davis, in Spearheads of Reform, calls them “one of the most remarkable collections of young reformers and writers ever assembled.”

In 1910, Stover’s friend and ally William J. Gaynor was elected mayor of New York.  As Gaynor’s biographer writes:  “[T]o be  Park Commissioner and President of the Park Board – a  department riddled with political hangers-on – Gaynor appointed an unworldly settlement-house worker, Charles B. Stover, whom he liked because he could quote the Bible and Shakespeare at length.”  In part, it was belated recognition of the work Stover had done over the years at University Settlement.

As Park Commissioner he immediately set about creating the Bureau of Recreation, which built thirty new playgrounds in the first three years of its existence. The Bureau reclaimed some ten acres of land from the waterfront along Riverside Drive, using stone excavated for the boring of the Catskill Aqueduct through Manhattan’s bedrock.  Stover also engineered the city’s acquisition of the land that in 1913 became Jacob Riis Park.  The ground he had sown as an advocate over the previous decades was bearing further fruit.

Relations with the press deteriorated, however, during a productive but increasingly stormy tenure in which Stover made new enemies and refreshed old antagonisms in his pursuit of a greener New York.  Though he was hardly new to political controversy, the criticism now weighed heavily on Stover; and in October 1913, toward the end of his four-year term as Park Commissioner, there occurred the strangest incident of his public career.  He suddenly vanished for more than three months, prompting a nationwide search.

Finally, after mailing his resignation from Cincinnati, Stover showed up again in New York in January 1914, claiming he had been touring cities in the South to study their parks.  He never provided a full account of his absence.  In a city whose history is rich in colorful characters and shocking events, the episode remains one of the most bizarre footnotes.

Compounding the Stover enigma is the fact that, despite all the years of effective advocacy for causes great and  small, and many loyal friends and colleagues,  he left  behind a scant paper trail.   Newspapers reported on his public activities from the 1890s through his Park Commissionership. But most of what we know of him beyond those press accounts is fragmentary and anecdotal.

Those anecdotes paint a partial but intriguing picture.  Lillian Wald described him as “a completely selfless man,”  and perhaps there is more to the comment than she intended. He was by all accounts unselfish in the extreme, living ascetically in a paper-piled room on Forsyth Street, and later at University Settlement, while devoting his life and personal fortune to civic causes.    But beyond that, Stover seems to have lacked all of the trappings of a private life, living entirely within his missionary zeal to improve New York City. His friends would leave glowing accounts of his work, in private letters as well as in a short posthumous biography, Charles B. Stover: His Life and Personality, compiled by his long-time colleague James K. Paulding in the 1930s.

The final mystery is how so prominent and successful a figure, revered by his allies,  could also attain – almost as if he had willed it – such posthumous obscurity.   And indeed, he may have willed it.  In a letter to a friend in 1927, Stover hints at writing a memoir and speaks of “the foolishness of letting others tell my story.”  But then he continues: “My real preference is to be writ in water – just such complete obliteration as the poet Keats feared would be his fate.”

Of a piece with that obscurity, only two photographic portraits of Charles Stover are known to survive.   The first was taken during his prime at University Settlement, most likely in the early 1900s.  It’s a handsome formal portrait of a rather striking figure: bald and large of frame, with a thick moustache and a large round head, in a suit and tie, looking vigorous and determined; the quintessential Victorian gentleman fiercely devoted to good works.  He could be anyone’s favorite uncle or inspiring minister.  There is both kindness and steel in the eyes.

In the second picture, taken in the mid-1920s, Stover  is seated on a bench at University Settlement’s camp in Beacon, N.Y.  Though still in a suit, he now looks rumpled and grandfatherly, his large hands crossed in his lap, in a slightly awkward, wind-blown pose: an elder statesman in his dotage.  His high-lace shoes seem like relics of an earlier time, as, in a way, does the man. (At an event marking University Settlement’s 40^th anniversary in 1926, Stover would declare that the institution’s “chief mission is the up-building of character.” Long separated from the ministry, he was still about saving people’s souls.)

The 1920’s were also the dotage of  New York’s pioneer generation of reformers – Stover, Low, Wald, Paulding, and others – who  had built institutions, lobbied for legislation, and created or protected community  organizations and public spaces, filling the gaps left by government and private charity in responding to the urban squalor associated with industrialization and mass immigration.  In the process, they had helped to invent the civil society of 20^th century urban America, advanced the nascent field of social science, and paved the way for the eventual professions of social work and urban planning.

Stover’s death in 1929 galvanized a vast society of friends and admirers, reflected in the encomiums in Paulding’s book.   As one former colleague, Jonah Goldstein, typically recalled: “He accomplished more with less than any person I ever knew.”    Whatever his quirks or secrets, he had touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers – in most cases without their ever knowing his name.

As Park Commissioner under Mayor Gaynor, Stover had established the 4-acre Shakespeare Garden in Central Park.  Two decades later, in 1936, a wide, semicircular bench of Vermont granite was set into the rock atop a small knoll in that garden, looking out toward Central Park West near 80^th Street, and dedicated to Stover.  The Charles B. Stover bench, also known as the “Whisper Bench,”  is a comparatively small and inconspicuous monument.  The graceful curving slab of granite is an  understated  tribute, if a fitting one, to a  man who loved Shakespeare almost as much as he loved parks and children.   Its modesty, however inadequate to history, would no doubt have pleased him.

Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia presided at the dedication on Nov. 5, 1936.  Standing next to him on the knoll that chilly afternoon was his Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses; and for all their sharp contrasts, Moses deserves credit for ensuring that the memorial to his predecessor was established.  It bears a simple plaque:

CHARLES B. STOVER
1861-1929
FOUNDER OF OUTDOOR PLAYGROUNDS
WHO DEVOTED HIS LIFE TO PUBLIC SERVICE
IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION

For a full-length version of this essay, please contact the author at www.jscheuer.com and include a mailing address.

Christine Parker is a student at Queens College in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.  She is the Communications Coordinator for the Queens Memory Project, a digital archive of the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Queens College.

One of the hallmarks of the borough of Queens, New York is its incredible cultural diversity.  Walk down any street or neighborhood and you will quickly encounter a language or custom other than your own.  This diversity is part of what informs the identity of local communities and makes the tale of their history a rich tapestry weaving together different voices and stories into one.  In order to preserve that history for future generations, those voices are now being recorded and made available to the public in a unique archive of collective memory known as the Queens Memory Project (QMP).

The project seeks to innovate as digital archives for audio and visual records presenting both contemporary and historical materials to create a unified portrait of the history of Queens.  Oral history interviews have played an important role since the project’s inception, since they can directly record the memories of current residents reflecting upon how their communities have changed over time.  Each oral history brings a unique voice into the stream of the historical record and provides the personal, rich details that bring archival materials to life.

Annalou Christensen with her younger brother and sister in the Waldheim neighborhood where they grew up

Interviews in the collection include those of Annalou Christensen (née McQuilling, 1918-2011).  She grew up in the Waldheim neighborhood of Flushing during the era of the Great Depression, and had a wealth of memories that she was willing to share with the Queens Memory Project.  In one interview on the history of movie theaters in Flushing, Annalou recalled the Janus movie theater on Main Street and Northern Boulevard nicknamed the “Itch and Scratch”.  It was broken down, and probably earned its nickname from the bug infestations.  The boys used to go there because it showed cowboy movies. There was also the Prospect Theatre which showed MGM movies, and the Taft Theatre. Christensen went to the first screening at RKO Keith’s Theatre of the movie, “In Old Arizona,” and recalled how the theater was designed with a Spanish style open courtyard.  Annalou shared these and many other memories in her interviews, which can be browsed as part of the QMP collection.

Yet oral histories are only a part of what the Queens Memory Project has to offer.  Digitized historical photographs, maps, news clippings and other rare archival records from the holdings of both Queens College and Queens Library are included to provide an enriching context for the contemporary materials.  Director Natalie Milbrodt says of the project: “We hope to provide a gathering place for the stories, images and other artifacts that tell the story of contemporary Queens. We also hope to bring attention to the rich holdings in our public archives. These materials belong to the people of Queens and they document our lives here in the borough.”

The Queens Library archival holdings within the QMP include photographs, maps, news clippings, personalpapers, ephemera, and other holdings.  This round lapel button that advocates saving the Flushing River (properly known as Flushing Creek) dates from the early 1970s.  The creek has been infamous for its pollution over the years and had a landfill created on its west bank by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company in the mid-19^th century.  This dump site was most famously remembered in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as the “valley of ashes.”  The button remains as one source of memory for this portion of Queens’ past.  The Postcard Collection at The Archives at Queens Library has also contributed a great number of items to the Queens Memory Project, which includes historic images and artwork from all over the borough.

Current events in Queens are also being documented in image and sound as they happen in order to unite the contemporary with the historical.  “La Naval De Manila” ceremony and procession took place in Flushing on October 3, 2010.  The Queens Memory Project was there to document the event through photographs, sound recordings, and collected ephemera.  This ceremony is an important observance in the Filipino community which commemorates a series of naval battles fought in the Philippines in the 1600s between Spanish and Dutch forces.  These battles ultimately prevented the Dutch from invading the country and the Virgin Mary was invoked as the cause of the resulting triumph.  Today the festivities of “La Naval de Manila” honor both Mary and the miraculous series of victories attributed to her intercession.  The 2010 event was hosted by St. Michael’s Church, in Flushing where the formal procession started and then traveled onto Union Street, 41st Avenue, and Parsons Boulevard before returning to the church for a ceremony and socials.

The public face of the Queens Memory Project is its website which officially launches this fall and is currently accessible at http://www.queensmemory.org.  This resource allows historians, researchers, and residents alike to access the digital objects within the collection through one user-friendly online location.  One of the foundational goals of the project has been to increase access and to make public records more public.  Each record will be available through the site for review and interaction with an easy to use tag and comment system.  Visitors can add to the conversation and enhance what they find – resulting in a true collaboration between archives and the communities they serve.

“For years, people from all over the world have come to Queens to make a living, raise a family and experience the American and New York dream,” says John Hyslop, Digital Assets Manager, Archives at Queens Library.  “QMP’s ability to capture this diverse population through the oral tradition and raise awareness of it through QMP’s interactive website, is incredible.  The Queens Library is thrilled to be a part of such an interesting project and looks forward to its success.”

The Queens Memory Project is a new and exciting initiative.  Its efforts to unify otherwise scattered archival materials and personal stories in one searchable site of collective memory are harnessing the power of technology to increase access to these unique materials of historical value.  Never before have the contemporary and the historical been used to archive the memories of a community in real-time in order to preserve that memory for future generations.  Through such proactive captures and contextualization of materials, the Queens Memory Project hopes to lead the way into a future that makes sure its memories will remain a part of history.

Jonathan R. Wynn currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, but can still give a pretty good tour of the area around the CUNY Graduate Center. His next book will be about how music culture is used to brand three cities: Nashville, Newport, and Austin.

The following is an excerpt from Wynn’s book, The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (U. Chicago Press, 2011).

The Seeker

Tourism has been of particular interest because it is alternately seen as an avenue to finding “authentic” culture for the general public and, in the eyes of scholars, it can potentially undermine the very existence of that authenticity (Gotham 2007; Grazian 2003; Kelner 2010). Lower East Side guides, for example, have told me of Jewish and Italian groups attempting to return to the “homeland” through touring, looking to purchase Judaic trinkets or sip Italian espressos to enrich their experiences. A fieldnote of the “Immigrant Foods of the Lower East Side” walking tour with an independent guide provides evidence of this during a break in the tour:

Still noshing on knishes from Yonah Shimmel’s famous bakery we walk up to Russ and Daughters. The guide tells our group of ten out-of-towners that “this establishment has been in the family for four generations, starting as a pushcart back in 1914. It is now in the National Register for Historical Places and the Smithsonian deemed it an official piece of New York culture.” We all file into the deli to pick out something to put on a bagel. As we get our tickets from a red dispenser, the fishmonger tells us that they specialize in eight kinds of salmon, from lox, “which is cured in brine, not smoked,” to “Kippered,” “which is what people know as baked salmon.” I get my favorite, sable (which is also called “Black Cod” and is filleted and cured in salt and brine) on a poppyseed bagel, which sparks a conversation with a middle-aged tourist from Connecticut, in town for the day with her daughter:

“A good Jewish order!” she says.

“Oh, thanks. I’m not Jewish, though.”

“Have you been on this tour before?” she asks.

“No, no. I just love this,” I say but, realizing she is looking for some locus of expertise, I add, “I live here.” I ask, “Why did you come on this tour?”

“I wanted my daughter to know what my grandfather’s life was like here in the Lower East Side. We get to taste exactly the same food that he would’ve eaten.” When her number is called she breaks off the conversation by saying, “I want the same thing,” and orders sable and cream cheese on a bagel. She tells me the tour is the educational part of their trip, a deal brokered with her teenager who “just came for the shopping.”

Spilling back out on Broadway, people’s hands are full with coffees, bagels, and knishes. A husband-and-wife team keeps rotating the delicacies between them. We walk another block and stop outside Katz’s Delicatessen. “A famous New York landmark too crowded to pop in for a taste.” There’s a groan from the group that rises above the street noise, even though few have even made dents in the snacks that are already in their hands.

“This place is authentic, no doubt—it has been around since 1888—but it has been overrun with tourists ever since that scene in When Harry Met Sally. . ., and it’ll just take too long to get something from here.” Still attempting to assuage the group, she continues: “If you want to go and wait in line for a pastrami sandwich, that’s great, but we’re going to head over to the Essex Market.” She does, however, take a minute to explain a sign that reads, “Send a salami to your boy in the Army,” which has hung in the window since World War II.

[Big Onion guide] Erik Goldner explained his experience with these kinds of folks:

[They] come from all over the country and want to come to the Lower East Side to learn about the Jewish history of the Lower East Side, when the current Jewish population on the Lower East Side today is about one-fiftieth of what it was, and it’s disappearing fast. Well, some of the old places are being rejuvenated, but anyway. So a lot of people do come to hear about an “authentic” Jewish community. A lot of people are searching for that.

Walking guides feel the pressure of this newfound interest, bristling when they feel a participant expects a more “touristy tour,” and “real” New York experiences, when guides would like to focus on the stories they feel are most important rather than address what they perceive as the tourist’s imagined cultural history.

Negotiating Edutainment

From interactions with this mixture of tour participants, the guide usually adapts his or her tour content. […] Because she was writing her dissertation on how social activists investigated the seedier problems of brothels and gang activity in New York City, [Big Onion guide] Jennifer [Fronc] draws from deep wells of New York scandals, but still hopes to walk the line by also sharing the more sober, social conditions of working-class folk. The topic of “Lower East Side Immigrant Labor” brings in clientele more inclined to the latter emphasis, but when taking other groups around the neighboring areas of Little Italy and Chinatown Jennifer describes feeling, “almost immoral” about telling salacious stories of Irish and Chinese gangs, and the mafia. She says it is difficult to avoid being too sensational on these “more touristic” tours and if she sees attentions wane she tends to offer up stories about the Raines Law, or how Jewish prostitutes would have to walk the other side of the street from the Italian prostitutes, or that a “stand-up” cost 75 cents. When I asked for an example of when she felt this pressure most pointedly, she described an event on one Chinatown tour:

I had this group; I think they were ninth or tenth graders, just a couple of months ago. This kid said to me, “Don’t you think that the people who are living in these tenement apartment buildings feel upset that you stop in front of their house and talk about what a crappy building it is?” And I really didn’t know how to answer that. I stammered something out about how it is a historic neighborhood, and I’m talking about how the city doesn’t care about working people, but I’ve been really plagued by that question ever since.

To moderate her self-image as a historian with the expectations of her clients, she has tried to develop a concluding frame for these reluctantly told stories about gangs and crime in the neighborhood to make herself feel better about it:

I’ve just recently started wrapping it all up in something like: “It’s interesting to think that—particularly among the Chinese and the Italians and less so with the Irish—these were men who were here without their families, they didn’t have the sort of intimate personal relationships. So what does the gang mean for the political history of the city, with patronage, blah blah blah.” So, I try to say that it’s not really about these craven, horrible immigrants killing each other, it’s a different meaning. But I don’t feel good about that either.

Such a balancing act is the nature of the business. Buff- and Seeker-type participants crave details and more educational tales, while Kids want to be entertained. The perspectives of two prominent guides provide two ends on this particular balance, and how they approach each other in the in-between: Seth Kamil and Jane Marx. Over breakfast at Dizzy’s Diner in Brooklyn, Jennifer’s boss, Seth, portrays Big Onion as giving “lecture tours.” He explains, “There are people out there that sing on their tours, there are people who do a song and dance, there are people who do costumes. We don’t do any of that.” “Whether you are fifty years old and have lived here all your life, or you are an eighth-grader, you are going to learn. That,” he emphasizes, “is entertainment enough.” […] Obviously, guides with more of an academic background can still be entertaining. While Jennifer describes her labor tour as “more educational,” she conducts other tours, on Wall Street and Five Points, for example, which she pejoratively refers to as “pure tourism.”

At the other end of the spectrum stands Jane Marx, the silver-tongued guide who makes every attempt to create an entertaining tour, although she is quick to insist that she doesn’t do “pure fluff.” As we sat at an Upper East Side diner, she jokingly claimed that one of the reasons she’s a guide is because she has “Adult Attention Deficit Disorder” and that her quirkiness is a draw rather than a detriment. She insists clients come back for her as much as for the content. As she breaks a blueberry muffin apart with her hands for us to share, she tells me, “They won’t remember a goddamned thing from the tour. But they’ll remember that they had a great time, and that they love New York. My persona is what clients come back for.” I saw the aspiring actress in her come alive on tour, reminding me that jazz is not the only cultural world where idiosyncrasy is rewarded. I press her with questions that would get at how such an entertaining, charisma-based disposition actually develops on tour; she recalls that, when giving one of her first tours, a child told her that anyone who wears a hat is fun, and she has worn a hat for every tour since. She tells me she wears four watches for the same effect. “All I have to do is look,” pulling her wrist up a few inches from her face, “and people get that I am a wacky person.” “It’s all presentation, dah-ling, only 25 percent of it is facts.” “It’s vaudevillian. Charisma, however, is god-given. People see right through someone if they are faking it.” She tells me, on stage and on the streets, that she “can wake up a stone.” […] Willing to get a group interested by focusing on the more humorous and engaging aspects of a topic in a similar spirit, autodidactic guide Mark Shulman explains it is all “about liking people, wanting to make the tour an enjoyable experience, and realizing that the balance between education and entertainment should skew toward entertainment.” […]

Coming from different ends, guides still hope to situate their work somewhere in the in-between. A few describe themselves as “pure” historians who divulge facts and tell precise stories, vehemently opposing the idea of being an entertainer, but most negotiate these distinctions, offering what has been called “infotainment” or “edutainment.” […] Such issues over edutainment are not particularly new. As a prime mover of Disneyfication, the tourism industry writ large is often seen as staging “pseudo-events” and “invented traditions” to leave a subgroup of tourists seeking canned experiences for at least fifty years. Research on the topic portrays tourists who have a fully developed “symbolic complex” or “set” of expectations—existing before arriving at any touristic destination, like the Lower East Side or Harlem—that determines the success of their thematized visits. […T]hese touristic desires are tangible and can be a source of great anxiety for guides, particularly for those who disliked the more “mass touristic” aspects of bus tourism and those who come from academia. Even still, guides spoke with empathy when talking about the expectations of participants, particularly Seeker types. Erik Goldner told me:

I wrestle with presenting [these touristic aspects]. Personally, I don’t want to say it’s crap. I tell them that Hasia Diner writes about how a group from Iowa will come to the East Side and buy a loaf of rye bread from a kosher bakery, and by the time they get back to Iowa, it’s stale. And basically, it’s the same as the rye bread that you can get from the kosher bakery in your hometown. But to them, that bread, that’s from the Lower East Side. That means something. And that’s a very human impulse, I’m not against it.

To grapple with these impulses another BOWT guide, Annie Polland, described her strategy of flipping the mass-market expectations into a history lesson that she is more comfortable with when faced with a challenging group from a “spoiled suburban school” by reorienting their pervasive interest in shopping to talk about how their grandparents (particularly if they are Jewish) were at the very beginnings of the fashion industry in New York and on the Lower East Side, as both producers and consumers. She says, “All they can refer to is shopping [and ask] ‘Where is H&M?’ ‘Where is Niketown?’ and they are completely divorced from that historical perspective. As an academic I feel comfortable dealing with it my way.” Both Erik’s and Annie’s comments pivot upon sensitivity to a group’s perspective, but also their own feelings of who they are as aspiring academics and how they believe they should present their material.

Below is an excerpt from LaBennett’s new book, She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2011).

China takes the A train to the Fulton Street/Broadway Nassau stop to get to her job as a sales clerk at a clothing store near Ground Zero, one of two after-school jobs China holds. It is just after 4 p.m. on a Friday in August, and, on this particular afternoon, China rides the train with her best friend, Nadine, and two other friends, Neema and Mariah.[1] The subway car is full of businesspeople leaving early from Wall Street jobs, vacationing tourists, and a few local New Yorkers of varying ethnicities. The businesspeople are mostly White and dressed in suits. The tourists, dressed in shorts and tee shirts with cameras swinging from their necks and purses held close, are also White. Both the tourists and the businesspeople appear to be uneasy sharing such close quarters with the Black teenage girls. China and Nadine wear jeans, tight tee shirts, and sneakers, while Neema and Mariah wear cotton shorts with matching tank tops, and inexpensive, trendy sandals. The four girls are acutely aware of how the other commuters regard their presence on the subway car. The girls seem to spontaneously react to and feed the avoidance and the silent disapproval of the White passengers by yelling loudly across the subway car, taking up more seats than they need, and laughing boisterously. China, whose hair is dyed the same shade of gold as that of her idol, the R&B/hip-hop singer Mary J. Blige, is listening to her iPod. She sits on the opposite side of the subway car, facing the other girls. China sings loudly over the divide, entertaining her friends (who are in hysterics at her poor singing) and visibly annoying the other commuters around her.

China: [singing melodramatically] Another lesson learned! Better know your friends! Or else you will get burned! Gotta count on me! ’Cause I can guarantee that I’ll be fine. . . . No more pain, no more pain, no more drama in my life, no one’s gonna hurt me again.

An interviewee smiles for the camera in Brower Park, a popular hangout spot for Crown Heights youth. Photo by the author.

China is severely off-key as she belts out the Mary J. Blige ballad “No More Drama,” from the album of the same name. Hamming it up, arms flailing, China does her best impersonation of Blige’s performance in the song’s music video, as her friends’ laughter and the stares of the other passengers intensify. Although the Blige song is about the pain of a broken heart, sung from the perspective of a woman looking back on her youth, the lyrics seem especially relevant to China’s life. At seventeen, she has already experienced prolonged separation from her mother, who initially left China in Barbados before reuniting with her when China was ten. China has come to rely heavily on her best friend, Nadine, a first-generation Trinidadian, who moved in with China’s family after Nadine’s mom took a job in a southern city during Nadine’s senior year in high school. Like many West Indian children and adolescents, even before immigrating to the United States, these girls were accustomed to being cared for by extended kin. Nadine’s and China’s experiences of being raised by grandmothers in the Caribbean for several years before reuniting with their mothers is a common practice of “child fostering,” a Caribbean kinship solution to the rifts accompanying immigration.[2] Both girls know the heartache of such separation, and the self-reliance they learned in their parents’ absence continues to shape their lives; they use their own hard-earned money for luxuries like iPods, cell phones, and professionally manicured false nails, in addition to necessities like food and clothes. China’s life story parallels Blige’s song in terms of both the hardship of parental separation and the “drama” that characterizes life for children in the Caribbean who learn to be independent at young ages and who face daily challenges and dangers, including tending to younger siblings and walking to school without adult supervision. To attend school, these children journey alongside speeding cars on poorly paved roads where pedestrians are routinely struck and killed.

China identifies with the adversity Mary J. Blige has overcome, as illustrated both in her music and in the performer’s personal narrative. Asked why Blige is her favorite singer, China responded:

She’s mad real. She don’t front for nobody. If you listen to her music you learn stuff about her life and how she struggled to get where she is. She’s not just singing about how she’s out at the club. She’s mad real.

While Blige’s personal struggles, which include overcoming poverty and drug addiction, resonate with China, her subway performance is less about China’s own “drama” and more an action staged in defiance of her surroundings. Unlike the many child performers, such as break dancers and candy sellers who earn a living on the subway, China’s mini-performance is improvised and not intended to please anyone other than herself and her friends. She negotiates the public space of the subway as if on the attack and uses her poor singing as an affront to the other riders. China and her friends are accustomed to adults, especially White adults, regarding them suspiciously in public settings. When they shop for clothes, salespeople and other shoppers observe their every move, certain that they are shoplifters. At school, asserting a West Indian identity can sometimes put China in the good graces of teachers, but in settings such as the subway and retail stores, China is stereotypically marked by her age, gender, and race.

Placing Black Youth

China and Nadine are among the West Indian teenage girls you will get to know in this book. While China’s raucous rendition of Blige’s song took place on a New York City subway, Black teenage girls are overwhelmingly represented in national and global popular discourses in negative terms, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases or as helpless victims of inner-city poverty and violence. Examples include the pregnant, overweight, and abused young woman depicted in the film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire and the fat-lipped and scarred pictures of Barbadian hip-hop/R&B star Rihanna after famously being assaulted by her boyfriend, singer Chris Brown. Meanwhile, popular images represent their male counterparts as dangerous menaces to society or as hapless casualties of pathological family life; common portrayals of a Black inner-city teenage boys include dark-faced, hooded drug dealers, aspiring rappers, and, the character Precious’s male equivalent, the illiterate football player rescued by an affluent White family in the film The Blind Side. These representations do not fully convey the diverse, real life experiences of Black teenagers. However, such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological. This book is intended to intervene and to heed the alarm educators, policymakers, parents, and the media have sounded with regard to the negative ways in which teens in general, and Black teenage girls in particular, are being “influenced” by popular Black youth culture. She’s Mad Real takes Black youth culture as its starting point, arguing that West Indian adolescents are strategic consumers of popular culture and that, through this consumption, they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. The consumer and leisure spheres are revealed not as unabashed arenas of pleasure and power but as dynamic sites in which marginalized Black teenage identities are produced and contested, confined and liberated. Indeed, we will see that youthful racial, gender, and nation-based identities are critically constructed in popular representations.

West Indian culture and American consumption are juxtaposed in Crown Heights: Charlie’s Calypso City is adjacent to McDonald’s on Fulton Street near Nostrand Avenue. Photo by the author.

Popular representations of and about Black teenagers do not exist in a vacuum but, rather, are placed within local, national, and global contexts. This ethnography examines the relationship between place and Black youth culture, exposing the spatial construction of West Indian girls’ subjectivities. China and her friends attend an afterschool program in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The afterschool program and her job near Ground Zero are two wage-earning positions China holds in addition to attending high school. Yet, in public places such as subway cars, movie theaters, and clothing stores, China and her friends are viewed not as hardworking citizens and valued consumers but as threats to civic decorum. This book situates West Indian girls’ consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to interrogate the ways in which teens like China are marginalized and policed while they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York’s contested terrains.

She’s Mad Real: Authenticity, Femininity and Popular Black Youth Culture

She’s Mad Real paves new ground by engaging concerns about female adolescent identity formation vis-à-vis consumer culture with the social construction of West Indian notions of belonging. It addresses questions such as: What constitutes Blackness in today’s global world? Are teenage girls equipped to form strong self-definitions in the face of a hip-hop culture that is largely characterized as corruptive? The pursuit of “authentic Blackness” takes center stage in youthful constructions of Black femininity, and China emphasizes this centrality when she describes Mary J. Blige as “mad real.” She plainly articulates African diaspora scholars’ theorizations regarding the importance of authenticity in popular Black youth cultures (Fleetwood 2005; Gilroy 1993; Gray 1995; Hall 1996; Jackson 2005; Kelley 1997; Ogbar 2009). This book puts West Indian and African American girls in dialogue with scholars who have analyzed the paradoxes attached to notions of Black authenticity. The West Indian and African American girls you will meet strive to identify “real Black people” among the contradictory media images routinely offered to them. This is, of course, a tangled and precarious exercise. For West Indian youth in particular, “realness” is contingent and deeply problematic—they struggle to negotiate “authentic” West Indian selves while sometimes simultaneously identifying with African Americans. The quest for authenticity also has significant implications for the youths’ gender identities. For China and her friends, calling a performer like Mary J. Blige “mad real” is the highest compliment they could bestow because it connotes a feminine style that confronts and circumvents mainstream racialized and classed notions of beauty. Thus, being “mad real,” “really for real,” and “keepin’ it real” reemerge throughout this text as a central trope.

The anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr. has critiqued how authenticity functions in contemporary academic discourses, charging that a reliance on authenticity “explains what is most constraining and potentially self-destructive about identity politics” (Jackson 2005, 12). Jackson follows philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in highlighting the shortcomings of social authenticity, arguing that this form of collective identity formation relies heavily on “scripts,” or narratives “that people use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories” (Appiah 1996; Jackson 2005, 12). Jackson writes:

These scripts provide guidelines for proper and improper behavior, for legitimate and illegitimate group membership, for social inclusion or ostracism. We use these scripts as easy shorthand for serious causal analysis, and scholars who invoke “racial authenticity” usually do so to talk about how such scripts delimit individuals’ social options—describing how racial identity can be made to function a lot like social incarceration, a quotidian breeding ground, claims Paul Gilroy, for even more brutal forms of fascism (Gilroy 2000; Jackson 2005, 13).

Rather than interrogating authenticity to “delimit individuals’ social options,” in this book we will come to see girls’ reliance on “being mad real” as central to their subjectivity formations as critical social actors. While a number of scholarly analyses interpret the pursuit of realness as serving to essentialize Black people and limit Black youths’ chances for success by situating them outside White mainstream America, She’s Mad Real reveals how girls use invocations of realness to (re)write their own social scripts (Fleetwood 2005; Gilroy 1993).

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.

“You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse” goes the popular refrain.  I beg to differ, though: sometimes one may.

Browsing among the vast piles of bric-a-brac in a Chelsea flea market right before Hannukah, a tiny leather change purse caught my eye.  Sifting through piles of dust-covered junk, golden lettering on the item’s battered side gleamed at me like a nugget in dirt.. The Yiddish version of the old saw sprang into my head, my grandfather’s shmaltz-coated voice ringing in my ears:  Fun a khazerishe ek, makht men nisht keyn shtraymel” “From the tail-end of a pig, one doesn’t make a Hasidic man’s fur-banded holiday headpiece.”

Suddenly I was sure I had beaten the odds. Though designed for small coins and subway tokens, and ostensibly empty, I knew right away that this little sack held lode-bearing ore.  Sol. Goldberg’s Cafe and Restaurant 71 Canal Street 2111 ORCHARD glowed from the crinkled skin.  This lagniappe, this swag, held a big, fat story.  Who was my fellow, this Jewish version of Oscar Delmonico, dreaming success for his little hash house?  Likely, his reach exceeded his grasp.

Desperate to know, I rushed downtown to Allen and Canal Streets and found Sol’s building still standing there, now home to Chinese restaurant suppliers and factory lofts with no names on their doors.  The scent of secret commerce and bribery filled the air. Nearby loomed a ghost-ridden tower.  The florid 1912 shell of Jarmulowsky’s Bank still dominates the corner of Eldridge and Canal. That family fortune started in Hamburg, where in the 1870s patriarch Sender J. sold  steerage tickets to multitudes of Sol Goldbergs on credit, and then “safeguarded” their tiny savings from miserable New York sweatshop salaries squirrelled away after paying off their passage debts.  Thousands of depositors lost everything at the outbreak of The Great War when the bank suddenly failed.  The deceased founder’s two sons had been “jumpers” in Harlem real estate schemes, using hard-earned passbook dollars to speculate, instead of protecting their depositors’ gelt. A near-riot ensued as a mob marched on City Hall, demanding justice and restitution.  As I gazed on the majestic facade of the failed institution, all about me drifted vapors of cheap booze on the breaths of disconsolate barflies, drowning the misery at Sol’s bar and brass rail. Then I hurried home with my precious purchase.

Consider the phone number in the purse’s gilt lettering.  Why its strange order?  I knew the purse was old, but exactly from when? New York telephone exchanges disappeared in the 1960s with the introduction of “all-number” dialing.  Memorialized by novels like BUtterfield 8, two letters and a digit corresponding to the third letter of the old exchange names began all connections after 1920.  But on this leather trinket, as was the custom before 1921, four digits precede the exchange.  A determined push through the fog of Manhattan telephone and borough address directories cleared the glass.  Sol Goldberg was a liquor dealer and saloon operator down on Canal Street, handing out change purses while striving to stay alive after Prohibition’s 1919 start.

A visit to the New York County Clerk’s Office followed my phone book leaf-through.  I found another listing in a reverse directory for 1920 at 71 Canal next to Sol Goldberg and his cafe.  The “Eagle Non-Intoxicating Wine Company” fit right in.  A quick visit to the New York County Clerk’s Office confirmed the formation of this majestic-sounding enterprise by Sol and his elder son Herbert.  Hope and khutspeh survived, even after Carrie Nation won the brawl.  But business was lousy or perhaps it needed a quieter address. By 1921, Sol and Herb disappeared from Canal Street without a trace.

Solomon Goldberg emigrated from Lithuania (called Russia in the census documentation) in 1892 in his late teens, and then left New York to stay with relatives in Virginia where he found work in a sheriff’s office.  By 1898 he had returned to New York, and lived with his parents Wolff and Mary Goldberg at 149 Ludlow Street.

Engaged to Rosa Fridlander, Sol married his lantsman in 1898 in a non-religious ceremony performed by alderman James Gaffney at 232 East 22nd Street in front of two gentile witnesses.  Sol leased one of his first saloons at 17 Ludlow by 1902,  a modest structure on the west side of Ludlow, just north of Canal.  Though the ethnicity of the building and surrounding blocks is overwhelmingly Chinese today, 17 Ludlow, its back house, and the immediate environs bear a remarkable resemblance to how they looked in 1902.  Overcrowded apartments and small businesses dominate the neighboring tenements.  Steam vents still pour from upper floor windows.  Chinese signs are plastered on doorways. Mandarin or Yiddish, it’s all the same: struggling to survive remains the game.

With the backing of the omnipresent Lion Brewing Company, Sol signed a formal lease for 17 Ludlow’s northerly store and the four dwelling rooms above, for a term of five years, starting March 5, 1903.  The rent was pegged at  $75 a month, with Sol giving a promissory note of $103 for security, while also agreeing to pay charges for “Croton Water.”

In a move probably calculated to frustrate future creditors,  Sol assigned his Ludlow lease to his wife thirteen months later, setting a pattern for his post-Prohibition life.  On the Lower East Side or deep inside Russia, A Jewish boy stayed ahead of the law.  The couple apparently did well enough to sell the Ludlow Street saloon in 1908 right after renewing the lease, and moved to a larger tenement at 236 East Broadway when Sol began his liquor business at 71 Canal Street.

Trow’s Directory also lists a Sol Goldberg in East Harlem as a bottler in 1909-10.  The alcohol trade may have been an up and down one (or the 236 East Broadway apartment too small for an ever-growing family), because by 1911, Sol and his brood moved to 97 East Broadway where they lived with Rosa’s unmarried milliner sisters Gertrude and Mollie.  #97 though dilapidated inside, still stands on a block that was permanently cast into shadow by the construction of the Manhattan Bridge and its 1909 opening.

Several children were born to Sol and Rosa: Herbert in 1899, George Milton in 1904 and Helen in 1908.  As Sol’s liquor and saloon business prospered at 71 Canal, the family moved from 97 East Broadway to #259, a slightly newer structure, and then left the squalid and overcrowded East Side, moving first to a tenement on Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville and then to a sizable, newly-built attached brick house on Martense Court in central Flatbush.  With the advent of the First World War and the August 1918 amendment to the prior year’s Selective Service Act, all males between 18 and 45 years of age were required to register.  One year under the limit, and clearly a poor choice for a return trip to Europe, Sol, a naturalized US citizen, did his duty anyway, but wasn’t called.  But even with the Versailles treaty inked and official, a live shell still landed, smack in his face.

The Volstead Act of 1919 struck a violent blow to Sol and his family as well as tens of thousands of families, Jewish and gentile alike.  All over America, alcohol went underground, and tens of thousands of formerly legal, respectable jobs disappeared.  In America, Sol had followed a time-honored Jewish trade. Though barred from many professions in Eastern Europe, Jews had been tavern owners there at least since the 18th century, filling a strange function in Catholic-dominated societies where the “sin” of facilitating inebriation was pawned off on the unclean killers of Christ.  The liquor trade also supported large-scale agriculture to produce the basic grains and potatoes that fed the distilleries and provided significant tax revenues to the state.  The gradual tightening of Polish governmental restrictions on Jewish tavern keepers grew through the early 19th century, though, and they were forced into all sorts of extra-legal gymnastics to avoid starvation.  With the closing of his hopeful “cafe and restaurant” at 71 Canal, Sol Goldberg would trod a well-worn path.

My research trail went very cold after 1920, Sol’s name disappears from directories.  His wife, who owned title to 1 Martense Court, sold the house in 1922, and it is unclear where the couple and their young adult and teenage children moved next.  By 1930 they had landed at 80 Winthrop Street, not far from their Martense Court home in halcyon days.  Listed as a “restaurant owner” on official documents until his dying day, I couldn’t first figure Sol’s sudden disappearance.  What was he up to after the Volstead hammer blows rained down?  Did Sol open a candy store, a luncheonette or a deli?  None of the post-1920 Manhattan or Brooklyn phone books yielded a clue, and the trail of possible living relatives to question went very cold.  After months of frustration and useless detours, I hired an expert and uncovered the truth.

In one day’s work, a professional genealogist unlocked the secret, linking together a 1930 birth announcement in the New York Times together with a current Nevada phone number for a possible hit. Sol’s estate administration papers, filed in Kings County Surrogate’s Court at his death in 1943, list a widow and three children, among them one George Milton Gardner, who had changed his last name.  I had already found George, back when his last name was Goldberg, living on East 21st in Manhattan when he married May Klein in a religious ceremony in 1925.  On March 9, 1930, Mr. and Mrs. “Rube” Goldberg (nee May Klein) announced the birth on February 21st of that year of a son, Robert Allen.  It was too close a coincidence.  I’d found my man.

My voice trembled a bit as Allen Gardner answered the call.  “How did you get my number?” an old man said.  I tried to hide my own trepidation.  Another person was listed at the Reno address, a Dar Es Salaam.  Perhaps an Al Qaeda terrorist cell?  After a bit, Allen warmed to my interest, being still careful about what he disclosed.  81 years old and retired from a distinguished career as an animal behaviorist, Allen and his late wife had taught the chimp Washoe to use sign language in 1969.  I easily recognized the famous chimp’s name.  Talk about swag!  Then we cut to the chase.  When Allen was a baby, his parents would take him for rides in their car, traveling Brooklyn’s leafy streets.  The police never stopped a young couple with a baby.  Even with cases of hooch on board.  Milton and May did the deliveries.  Sol handled the wholesalers.  The family scraped by.  Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein controlled the flow of juice to Sol’s customers until Rothstein was rubbed out at the Park Central Hotel in 1928 and members of his minyan, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, took control.

The sow’s ear started morphing as I talked to Allen longer.  The shape of that fancy Jewish headgear began to appear.  As with any raiment, these bonnets come in gradations.  I ended up with the finest in the store.  “Perhaps you heard of my late brother Herb?” the old man said. “He was a playwright, kinda well known.”  “Herb Gardner?” I shot back.  “The name is familiar.”  “His last play was Conversations with My Father, not so very long ago.”

My spine tingled like icicles on my bare neck in winter.  I’d loved the show on Broadway in ’92.  Judd Hirsch played the lead roll, Eddie Goldberg.  The set was a dingy bar on Canal Street, New York.  As we talked more, my excitement only grew.   Herb Gardner also authored  A Thousand Clowns, I’m Not Rappaport, Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, and The Goodbye People. What a piece of true dumb luck.  Blanks had been missing.  The play, albeit fiction, fleshed a lot out.  I nabbed it forthwith from the library stacks, eating the words off the pages, scarfing down the beak and the bones.

Sadness informs and infuses Conversations.  In it Sol Goldberg is portrayed as an upright man whose insistence after Prohibition began on selling only legal near-beer and his refusal to deal with bootleggers got him murdered in Cortlandt Alley.  The alley seems dangerous, perhaps moreso today:  It runs south of Canal and west of Lafayette Streets, hard by the ancient loft buildings where upstairs warrens of dark storehouses harbor soft goods counterfeiters.  Gullible tourists are robbed blind there now every day of the week.

Eddie Goldberg, modeled after Allen and Herb’s father George Milton Goldberg (Gardner), is a tough-talking cynical barkeep and irascible father, slinging drinks in a low-end dive that he keeps remodeling and redecorating to try and attract a better clientele than the alkies and bums who drift in from the streets near the Tombs and the court houses.  8:00 a.m. each day finds a line at the door. The play, in truth, is a confabulation.  Sol Goldberg played along with Rothstein and more.  The year after Prohibition ended in 1933, Sol’s wife, son Herbert and a fellow named Israel Civin  from Borough Park, formed a corporation and leased a bar at 258 Canal Street, where McDonalds sits today.  Strangely, Sol’s name does not appear on the corporate formation documents, though the following year, trade name documents were filed in New York with Sol and without Mr. Civin, registering the trade name “Silver-Gate Restaurant” at 258 Canal Street, with Sol’s younger son, George Milton Gardner (f/k/a Goldberg!) listed as an owner also.

The Silver Gate Bar and Grill operated there until Sol’s death from cardiac failure and pulmonary edema on August 8, 1943,  Dr. Bertha Kalish pronounced Sol dead at Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn where he had lain for 12 days prior.  Manhattan’s Riverside Funeral Chapel handled the arrangements when Sol was buried at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, eleven days later.  Why the delay is an open book.  Rosa, his widow, did not last long.  After suffering at their home at 57 Lincoln Road for six months from hyper-nephroma and hypertension under the care of her neighbor, Dr. Gustave Bers, Rosa passed away on May 2, 1944 and was buried along Sol the next day.  Her son, George Milton, who had altered his surname to Gardner at least 20 months before, must have had a change of heart or felt guilty as the molokh hamoves, the angel of death, came knocking again at the family door.  On Rosa’s death certificate, he is listed as informant.  George Milton Goldberg resumed his boyhood role.

Sometimes success will skip generations.  Sol’s swift-footed career didn’t end so well.  The Silver Gate Bar was sold by his widow and two sons in 1945.  His estate was probated with almost no value attached to his assets.  Business at the Silver Gate must not have supported three households well.  At Sol’s death he and Rosa were still renting their home.  At least the couple tried to do the sewing.  For a Jew, pig skin is tough to cut and stitch.  Though the end result of Sol Goldberg’s Cafe was certainly no fancy headpiece, it still outshines many, its lettering still aglow.

For more information about Feldman and the creation of this essay see the July 3rd 2011 article in The New York Times at:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/chasing-a-name-lost-to-time-2/

Richard Poethig grew up in the old law tenements of New York’s Yorkville neighborhood.   He attended public schools and graduated in history from the College of Wooster, Ohio.  He studied social ethics with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary and was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry. He served fifteen years in the Philippines with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines in urban-industrial ministry.  He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a Special program in urban and region studies  in developing countries (SPURS).  He was dean of the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and executive of the Institute on the Church in Urban-Industrial Society based at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.  He is married to Dr. Eunice Blanchard Poethig and has five children and lives in the Hyde Park area of Chicago.

The following essay is an excerpt from his autobiography, On the Sidewalks of New York, about his years growing up in Yorkville from 1925 to 1945. The complete autobiography is available on the web here.

Chapter 1: The Political Education of a Yorkville Boy

My life was shaped in the stormy days of the Depression. I grew up in the Yorkville of the 1930s. We think of neighborhoods, and Yorkville was my neighborhood, as places of social nurture, where a sense of history and family values are passed on. My neighborhood was also the place where my political education began.

As a child of the Depression—I was four when Wall Street crashed—insecurity was in the air you breathed. A great uneasiness lay over the country. The sidewalks of New York showed the harsh face of economic insecurity. To this day I can still see in my mind’s eye the pictures which became symbolic of the early 1930s. The snow-covered belongings of a family evicted from their apartment piled on the sidewalk. It terrified me to see someone’s furniture, lamps and boxes in front of a tenement. At six years my mind moved quickly to: “Where will these people go? Who will take them in? How close is our family to this? What if my father lost his job? Where would we get money for the rent?

This scene was so much a part of life that children incorporated it into their daily play. A settlement house worker in New York recalls that one of the games nursery school children played in her neighborhood was eviction. “They don’t play keeping house any more or even having-tonsils-out. Sometimes they play Relief, but Eviction is the favorite—it has more action and they all know how to play.” (1)

I soon discovered the consequences of eviction. One Sunday afternoon in the late Fall my father took me for a walk to Central Park. It was the height of the Depression. I was about seven years old. Conditions had gotten worse in the city with more evictions and more unemployed people flocking to the cities for work. Whether my father had taken me on this walk for a purpose or as a chance outing I will never know, but a message came through to me that day. We walked across 79th Street into Central Park. It was a brisk walk since the weather had gotten colder. We passed rock overhangs in the Park against which people had built makeshift shanties out of scraps of lumber, cardboard and odd-sized metal sheets. People stood forlornly outside their shacks around small fires trying to keep warm. The scene was deeply etched in my mind. It was the beginning of my political consciousness. (2)

The author Richard Poethig (age 15) and his sister Erna (age 6) on the roof of 1582 First Avenue (between 82nd and 83rd St. in Yorkville)

At the same time as we were deep in our own Depression, trouble was brewing in other parts of the world. The mix of nationalities in Yorkville kept one sensitive to events taking place in Central Europe. Many of those who had come to Yorkville after the First World War still had relatives living in Europe.   Germans  in the neighborhood were continually  reminded by their relatives of the hyper-inflation in Germany.  Every family had their souvenir million Deutschemark notes sent by a relative. People in the neighborhood from Czechoslovakia were proud of their new nation, newly formed out of Austro-Hungary. But they were also wary of its precarious state with Czechs and Slovaks trying to live together. We also began to hear of a man named Adolf Hitler. The impact of his rise to power in Germany was being lived out in the tenements, the shops, the movie houses, the restaurants and beer halls, and on the streets of Yorkville.

As street kids the changing shape of Europe was not uppermost in our minds.  We went to school and after school played our street games. We let our parents do the worrying. But there was no escaping it. We were conscious of who we were—children of Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Russian, Austrian and German ancestors. The events which made the headlines in the Daily News or which were dramatically portrayed in Pathe News at the Saturday movies kept slipping into our consciousness.

On Saturdays, we would take off to the Monroe Theatre on 76th Street and First Avenue for our day at the movies. It was an all day affair for twenty-five cents. It was an expenditure our mothers were happy to make. They knew where we were and that was some comfort. Besides the double-features, there were cartoons, and one of the chapters in a fifteen-chapter serial thriller. Each chapter had a cliff-hanger ending which whetted our appetites for next Saturday’s miraculous deliverance of the hero or heroine. But in the midst of this movie mélange there was the Pathe News—the one bit of reality invading our Saturday movie excursion.

The news from Europe was greeted with a hushed silence—especially the footage on recent events in Germany. The pictures which grabbed one’s attention were those of  massive political gatherings. These were usually scenes of a vast sea of people gathered in a huge stadium for some celebration and Hitler on a podium delivering a hysterical oration. Most of us were thinking as we watched his gyrations: “What’s this guy so excited about?” From the masses of people came the automatic outstretched right arm, and the shouts: “Sieg Heil Sieg Heil.” It was a powerful image—not easily forgotten—one which instinctively we knew was significant and suspected someday would affect us.

Our Saturday experience during the thirties was our one weekly engagement with moving visual pictures. Today’s continuous T.V. images overwhelm the eye, their multiplicity dilutes their true importance. In the 1930s we recognized, even as youngsters, there was something menacing in what we were seeing.

One of the foreboding signs was the anti-Semitism which began showing up in the neighborhood. In the 1930s most families had a radio. Father Coughlin’s broadcasts out of Detroit were adding fuel to the fire of anti- Semitism. I remember once briefly hearing his staccato voice over the radio. My mother turned to another station before I got any of his message.

Augusta Wagner in 1913 when she was a student at Wellesley College. "Gussie" went on to teach in Yenching College for Women in Peking, China, and wrote the book Labor Legislation in China.

Out of nowhere on our streets appeared another anomaly, a covered wagon bearing a man named Joe McWilliams. McWilliams would choose a busy street corner in Yorkville for his anti-Semitic diatribe. I once saw him on 79th Street and First Avenue. He spoke from the back end of his covered wagon. I didn’t know the word at the time, but he was “haranguing” the crowd. Some people passing by stopped to listen. Others moved quickly on, making some comment under their breath. The listeners were spread far apart. One of McWilliams supporters handed out leaflets to those who had stopped. At one point in his speech, he came down from the wagon and walked through the crowd with a lantern looking for “Eskimos.” I later learned that this was his terminology for Jews. At the time his antics were beyond me. People I knew dismissed McWilliams as a screwball.

Anti-Jewish feeling in Yorkville was never evident to me. I experienced no hostility to Jews among my friends. There were few Jewish young people on our block. Our gang gathered on 83rd Street near the corner of First Avenue. On occasions Morty Dworkowicz would play ball with us. His family owned the children’s dress shop which was part of our 1582 First Avenue building. Our family had moved to this tenement in 1935 from 1543 First Avenue. My mother bought many of my sister Erna’s clothes from the Dworkowicz shop. Morty went to a school out of the neighborhood. Only occasionally was he available to join our ball games. He liked to play ball and we welcomed him into our group. Morty’s mother would come looking for him. She was concerned about his health,  since he was not a robust kid. She was always afraid he would get overheated. Morty would resist her, but she made him stop playing ball. This was annoying when it was in the middle of a game. Then we got annoyed at anyone who broke up a ball game.

There were many small shops owned by Jews along First Avenue. As a teenager two of my after-school jobs were with the corner pharmacy on 83rd Street and with a hardware store in our 1582 building, both of whose owners were Jewish. Our tenement was owned by a Jew, Lionel Taubert. Since we were superintendents of the building, our family had close relations with Mr. Taubert. Our family doctor was Jewish. I respected Dr. Dick and felt comfortable in my visits to his office.

Grandfather Poethig’s Socialist background and his association with Jews of similar persuasion laid a foundation for openness to Jewish people in our family.  My grandfather, Richard was a cigarmaker.  He had emigrated from Germany in 1881 to avoid Prussian military conscription and in his case, the anti-Socialist campaign of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. My aunt Helen told me that grandfather had written to his sister in Germany critical of the political events that had brought Hitler to power in Germany. When his sister replied, she expressed uneasiness with his opinions. She asked that he not make any further comments on politics in Germany. When Hitler’s National Socialist Party finally took over the Reichstag and the German government, grandfather’s classic comment was: “We now have a lunatic running an insane asylum.”

For some German immigrants, the early events in Germany under Hitler, particularly the growth in employment, brought a sense of relief. Many of them had come out of Germany after the First World War. The humiliation of Germany after her defeat, whether she was right or wrong in the First World War, left a residue of bitterness. For those who remained in Germany, the devastating inflation and the hard times were continually reported to relatives in the United States. Each family had their collection of inflation Deutschemarks. Even our family, which had been in New York City for two generations, had a handful of German inflation notes whose paper value was in the hundreds of millions of Deutschemarks. One note is for fifty million Deutschemarks. The money conjures up a picture I once saw in a history textbook of a man pushing a wheelbarrow of German inflation notes to buy a loaf of bread.

Having a German background in the United States in the 1930s, and especially during the First World War, was not easy. It was probably for this reason that those of German heritage assimilated more easily into American culture. Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan make this point in “Beyond the Melting Pot,” their study of ethnic groups in New York City. Among all the immigrant groups coming to the United States, they write, the Germans have made the quickest and the easiest transition. By the third generation most connections with one’s European heritage have waned. Even living in a German neighborhood, where the German language was still heard in the shops or on the streets, my efforts at learning German in junior high school were poor. Perhaps it was the way it was taught. But I believe a reverse psychology was also at work: to do poorly in German was to prove that you were fully assimilated into the United States.

The Yorkville neighborhood in the 1930s with the author's aunt and uncle, Helen Poethig Wagner and Bill Wagner, and the old Third Avenue El in the background.

In our neighborhood, political events were part of everyday conversation. We began hearing them discussed in the stores in which we worked. When I was twelve in 1937 I went to work on Saturdays at Carl’s butcher shop on First Avenue, between 81st and 82nd Street. My job was to ladle out sauerkraut from a large barrel in the backroom and to make meat deliveries. Carl, a balding red-headed German, had immigrated from Germany after the first World War. He was fast on the quips and had a good sense of humor. Louie, his helper, was Jewish. Every so often, events in Germany would come up for discussion. Carl would make some over the counter caustic remark about them, with the added word about how glad he was to be in America. Carl was sensitive about what was happening in Germany. He never let anything get out of hand.

One of my regular meat deliveries was around the corner on 82nd Street to St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church, a Hungarian parish run by the Franciscan Order. On one occasion I got a lesson in geo-politics. The Franciscan Father in the kitchen sat me down on a stool and put a piece of hot apple pie in front of me. He had a map of Japan on the wall. He pointed out the small land mass and told me about islands under tremendous population pressure. “Now what do you think is going to happen when you have a small land mass and so many people?” Answering his own question: “Why they will want more room. They will expand. That’s why we have a war in China.”

I had a close up view of the Sino-Japanese war when Gussie Wagner came home from China with her friend Margaret Speer for their furlough in 1937–38. Augusta Wagner—the family called her Gussie—was my Aunt Helen Wagner’s sister-in-law. My Uncle Bill, Gussie’s brother, was a bartender at a neighborhood family bar and restaurant on 87th Street and York Avenue. Gussie had grown up in Yorkville. By dint of hard work and good connections, she had gone to Wellesley College on a scholarship. It is also possible she had some help from Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church where she was a member. She was a good friend of Henry Sloane Coffin, the pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

After Wellesley, Gussie went on to serve with the YWCA Board. Then in 1925 she was sent by the Yenching College Committee of New York to serve as a secretary to the dean of Yenching College for Women in Peking, China. She came back from China in June 1929, via the Trans-Siberian Railroad and a ship from Hamburg, Germany, to study economics at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. in economics. She had become interested in the working conditions of Chinese laborers, particularly children, in the factories in the cities of China. Her thesis topic was on “Labor Legislation in China,” a book which was published in Peking in 1938. Gussie became a professor of economics at Yenching College for Women in Peking, a position she held until 1942 when she was imprisoned by the Japanese.

In 1937, at the same time as I was getting my lesson in geo-politics from the Franciscan Father, Gussie Wagner and Margaret Speer returned on furlough from China.  Gussie and Margaret decided to invite the Poethig nephews to an elegant downtown Chinese restaurant. My cousin George Spohrer,  cousin Richard, my uncle Albert’s son, and I were the three invited to share in the occasion.  This was a special treat to have a Chinese dinner with Gussie. This was not to be chop suey or chow mein, but the real thing.

We were all about twelve at the time and had never been to a Chinese restaurant. The courses came fast and furious. We did the best we could considering that the courses appeared exotic to our pure American tastes. Finally the waiter came in with a large platter, on it a huge fish, covered with onions, Chinese vegetables, and a deep red sauce. The waiter set the fish down with its head looking me directly in the eye. Without a word, I gave my cousins a quick glance. Their eyes told the story. Gussie, an old Yorkville neighborhood girl, knew that the whole affair was overwhelming us, and let us off the hook.

I kept in touch with Gussie as I went on to college and when we met on holidays at my Aunt Helen’s. Gussie helped deepen my political insights into the Chinese situation. With the entry of the U.S. into the war, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Gussie and Margaret Speer were interned in the Shantung Compound in Weihsien by the Japanese military. They were repatriated in 1943 on the second journey of the Swedish “red cross” ship, the Gripsholm. On her return to the U.S. Gussie was asked by the U.S. State Department to work in their Special War Problems Division. She was assigned to investigate and report on the conditions of the internment camps in the Southwest United States in which the U.S. government had interned Americans of Japanese ancestry.

The author's grandfather, Richard Poethig, and his daughter Helen, circa 1915.

During her years of teaching economics at Yenching University she had among her students some who were to become part of Mao Tse Tung’s government. One woman, Kung P’u-sheng was a representative of the People’s Republic of China at the United Nations Disarmament Conference in the early 1980s. When the People’s Republic of China sent its first Ambassador to the United Nations, Gussie, who was living in retirement in Bryn Mawr outside Philadelphia, was sent a special invitation to the opening of the People’s Republic of China United Nations Mission. The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Huang Hua, had remembered her intercession on his behalf during the students’ outbreaks against the Japanese occupation in 1936. (3)

The question of identity took on a different dimension when I moved to Ohio for college. On the streets of New York one’s identity was related to a person’s ethnic background. This point of identification changed when I arrived at the College of Wooster. Many  students at the college came from small towns or rural communities, or were from the suburbs of Ohio cities. They identified themselves not by ethnicity but by class, or by their father’s occupation, or by family status in their community. To be identified as a New Yorker, and from the tenements of New York, marked you as a character, a character worth knowing, but a person without substantial roots. Against this background, I became more conscious of class as a major shaper of identity.

My immersion in the events of the late 1930s was a preparation for my long-term interest in history. That immersion was also laying the groundwork for my future political orientation. Daily life in a working class family in a working class neighborhood during the Depression had prepared me for the political discussions in which I would find myself during college days.

End Notes

(1) Cited in Allen F. Davis, “Spearheads for Reform” (NY: Oxford University Press, 1967)

p. 239

(2) These images were to last a lifetime. Memories of the “Hoovervilles” of the Depression years were to be replaced in my experience by the squatter communities of Manila and other Southeast Asian cities, which I visited during my years in the Philippines. Their existences were political issues for me. Their massiveness—squatter areas were one quarter to one third of the population of a Southeast Asian city—could not be solved by an appeal to private charity. There needed to be a structural approach on the part of a conscientious government. I also believe the church needed to engage in these communities  and stand with  people in their struggle for humane living conditions.

(3) The story of Augusta Wagner’s years at Yenching University are part of the correspondence which Margaret Speer gathered together in a book “Letters From Yenching: 1925-1943.”  The initial mimeographed copy  was published at Haverford in February 1982. Before Margaret Speer died in 1996, she published her letters as a book.  Not only does it show the struggles of women in their roles in education, but shares insight into the relationships between Chinese faculty and students and overseas mission personnel. The 1930s were times of great upheaval in China. The Japanese had occupied Manchuria and threatening to take over all of North China. Their presence and actions in Peking was a harbinger of what was to come. Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalist Chinese were in no condition to take on the superior Japanese forces. The students at Yenching and at the other colleges in Peking continued to hold strikes and protest marches against the Japanese actions in China. A small group of Communist students began to take the lead in these actions. The inaction of the Nationalist Chinese brought more students into the Communist camp. It was during one of the student actions that Huang Hua, an active Communist student leader, was being sought by police. He asked Augusta for overnight asylum at the residence of the Dean. He slept on a cot in the living room. Within the next week he was apprehended by the police on campus. He went on to become the Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic and the first representative of the PRC to the United Nations. It was on this occasion that he sent an invitation for Gussie Wagner to attend the opening of the People’s Republic of China United Nations mission.

By Richard Howe

Artist and photographer Richard Howe is the creator of New York in Plain Sight: The Manhattan Street Corners (http://www.newyorkinplainsight.com). He is currently working on a book, The Look of the City, to show what it is that makes Manhattan look the way it does.

March 22 marked the 200th anniversary of the formal filing of the 1811 Commissioners Plan for the City of New York — “the greatest grid,” in Edward Spann’s apt title — which has been Manhattan’s bane and glory ever since. The impact of this plan on the life of the city — for better and for worse — has been so great that it is only natural to wonder why the Commissioners elected to lay out the city as they did — despite their having explained it themselves in the plain enough English of their remarks to the plan:

. . . a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and . . . straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive. . . . the work in general should be rectangular . . . If it should be asked why was the present plan adopted in preference to any other, the answer is, because, after taking all circumstances into consideration, it appeared to be . . . attended with the least inconvenience.

But beyond their reference to straight-sided and right-angled houses, the Commissioners had nothing to say about the inconveniences they claimed their grid would minimize, which suggests that they thought them too obvious to need explaining.

It is tempting to read the February 2, 1807, “memorial” to the Legislature by the Common Council of the City of New York that formally triggered the creation of a state commission for “laying out streets and roads in the city” as defining these inconveniences. After stating the need for a plan that would “unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and . . . promote the health of the City,” the Council recited the “evils continually Accumulating” as a result of the city’s rapid population growth and subdivision, which included in particular

. . . the incessant remonstrances of proprietors against plans . . . wherein their individual Interests do not concur and the Impossibility of completing those plans thus opposed by a tedious and expensive course of Law.

But though the Commissioners declared in 1811 that one of their most important objectives had been “to amalgamate [their plan] with the plans already adopted by individuals,” they acknowledged that “various unsuccessful attempts had proved the extreme difficulty” of meeting this objective, which they then abandoned “from necessity.” Whatever the inconveniences were that the Commissioners were claiming to minimize, the incessant remonstrances of proprietors were not among them.

But what may have been obvious to the Commissioners in 1811 has since become obscure, so much so that it is easy to lose sight of the fact they were responding to a problem that had dogged the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of New York for most of the quarter century that had passed since civil — and American — governance of the city was resumed in late 1783.

~~

Everyone alive is alive somewhere, at every moment occupying some particular place either by right as its owner — or as someone to whom the owner has extended at least a temporary privilege of occupancy (either directly and explicitly or indirectly and implicitly) — or else as a trespasser. To be able to say, with certainty, to whom any given square foot of land belongs and to whom, if anyone, a privilege of occupancy has been extended (and under what terms), is so fundamental to civic order as we know it that not to be able to do this is to be drifting towards chaos. And this was the situation New Yorkers found themselves in immediately after the Revolutionary War. The city that the British troops departing New York on Tuesday, November 25th, 1783, had bequeathed the victorious patriots was a shambles, physically “the ruins of [a] once flourishing city,” administratively heir to all the “Doubts . . . arisen from the late Invasion and Disorder,” and financially simply “deranged.”

By 1775 colonial New York had become a “flourishing city” of perhaps 25,000 souls and some 4,000–5,000 buildings, nearly all of them jammed into the half square mile triangle forming the southern tip of the island. Most New Yorkers were Loyalists, some 20,000 of whom fled the patriots’ Spring 1775 takeover of the municipal government, abandoning their property and leaving behind a largely deserted city in the hands of the revolutionaries. The British forces regained the vacated city in September, 1776, but scarcely a week after their return a major fire consumed at least an eighth of the city’s buildings and possibly as many as a third or more. Nevertheless, the Loyalists began returning to the city: some 7,000 were back by the end of 1777, and by 1781 the civilian population was once again at its pre-war level. British troops and refugee Loyalists from elsewhere in the provinces raised the total in and around the city to as much as 40,000–50,000. A year later, in anticipation of the British withdrawal, the patriots began to return, and by the summer of 1783 the second Loyalist exodus had begun, with some 40,000 — relatively few of them originally New Yorkers — departing by the end of the year.

The result of these repeated upheavals was indeed something approaching civil chaos. So many properties had been abandoned, reclaimed, and abandoned again over the preceding eight and a half years that chief among the “Doubts . . . arisen from the late Invasion and Disorder” were the frequent uncertainties as to who could legitimately claim to own a given property or who owed what to whom in the way of rents or damages — a situation soon compounded by the uncertain status of claims originating during the occupation against the Loyalist properties now being forfeited to the city. Worse yet, even when the ownership of a given property was clear it was often difficult to say exactly where its boundaries lay, since so many of the old markers and reference points had been lost or disturbed. As the largest of the island’s landowners, the city was the most affected by these uncertainties, especially since — having no power to tax directly — sales and rentals of its properties were among its principal sources of income. Worst of all, it was unclear what authority the city had for dealing with this unprecedented situation.

These issues were so pressing that they dominated the early meetings of the city’s newly reconstituted Common Council. The minutes of its first regular session, on February 10, 1784, record that

. . . many Persons are greatly in Arrears for Rents and Quit Rents due to this Corporation [i.e., the city]; and the Exigencies of the City [render] it necessary that the said Arrears be collected as soon as possible.

A week later the Council was presented with one petition for a lease renewal and two for rent abatements; the next week brought half a dozen more such, and the Council ordered an inquiry into “the State and Circumstances” of the city’s properties on the North River, along with the first of many surveys large and small to come. By the time of its fourth meeting, on March 2, 1784, the increasingly apparent magnitude of the problem prompted the Council to order a committee “to report an Estimate of the Losses this Corporation have sustained in consequence of the late War.” But the number of petitions, complaints, and disputes laid before the Council regarding its own and others’ properties continued to rise.

The information available to the Council for resolving these issues was incomplete, inconsistent, or otherwise erroneous — and often contested. Perhaps despairing of the situation, on April 22, 1784, the Council ordered its treasurer

. . . to discover where all and every part of the Real Estate of this Corporation now lies, by whom every part of it hath been occupied during the late War, by whom [it] is now occupied; how long the present & respective late Tenants . . . have occupied the same.

A few weeks later a similar order was issued regarding the city’s extensive properties — “the Commons” — in the Out Ward (i.e., the rural 90% of the island that lay to the north of the city); just two days after that, with the approval of the Legislature, the Council appointed Commissioners “to settle and adjust any Differences” between proprietors in the burnt parts of the city and for altering the adjoining streets if and as necessary. The “burnt parts” Commission made their first report within a month, but their final recommendation was only ready a year later, in March, 1785; the Council at first accepted it, only to reject it two months later. Meanwhile the Council undertook to sell off the city’s newly surveyed North River properties, in consequence of “the deranged State of the Finances of this Corporation & the Heavy Debt which hath accumulated against it in consequence of the late War.”

The plague of real estate issues of all kinds was to continue for years to come, with the Council by turns playing the role of a frustrated landowner, a harassed landlord, and an unofficial land court. A turning point might have been reached as early as 1785, when the Council ordered a survey of its holdings “between the Post & Blooming Dale Roads,” subdividing them into five-acre lots. The result was City Surveyor Casimir Goerck’s 1785 “Plan of the Commons belonging to New York,” which, though not the first map of the city to propose a grid, was the first to extend one, however irregularly, as much as two miles northward up the center of the island. By 1789, at least some of these lots had been put up for sale by the city.

In these few years the Council had begun progressing, however haltingly, away from its initially ad hoc, case by case, approach to resolving the chaos left by the British occupation and towards a more general solution. But after 1785 this progress came to a decade-long halt. Possibly an equilibrium had been reached: though the “case load” of property issues remained high, it no longer threatened to become overwhelming; possibly the new country’s constitutional crisis and the precarious state of its economy made for more pressing concerns.

Serious attempts to deal with the situation resumed in 1796 when the Council had yet another survey of its Out Ward properties made, with “streets regularly laid down.” This survey is probably the one documented by Goerck’s second “Map of the Common Lands,” on which he extended his 1785 grid and made it more uniform. The lower stretches of what would be Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Avenues in the Commissioners Plan were laid out and the land between and to either side of them was divided into parcels — twenty per mile going northwards — whose east-west property lines correspond to the Commissioners’ numbered cross streets. These lots too were offered up for sale, and nearly sixty of them had been sold by the end of 1796.

In 1797 the Council contracted with Goerck and a newly appointed surveyor, Joseph Mangin, to make a new survey of all the city’s streets, existing as well as proposed. This might have been the end of the matter, and the intended result might well have come to play the part later taken by the Commissioners Plan, but Goerck died before the work was finished and although Mangin eventually delivered a map and the Council had it engraved, it was subsequently found deficient for the Council’s purposes and in November, 1803, a recall and refund was ordered.

Just as the Goerck-Mangin plan was collapsing, DeWitt Clinton was appointed Mayor. Settling the city’s ongoing property issues was an important adjunct to his larger vision of the city as the Atlantic port for his already projected Erie Canal. Clinton was a mover and shaker if ever there was one, and from this point on the pace of the efforts to resolve the city’s interminable property issues began to accelerate, though several years’ worth of failures and frustrations still lay ahead.

In January, 1804, almost immediately after the Goerck-Mangin fiasco, the Council appointed a new committee “to determine upon the propriety of ordering a new map to be made . . . [and] of laying out Streets.” A few months later they received a plan, but apparently it was not to their satisfaction, as nothing more was reported about it. Early in 1805 the Street Commissioner was ordered to prepare “an estimate of the expence of making a map of the Island of New York” which would show both the city’s real property and the existing roads. He reported deficiencies in the surveyors’ landmarks in the built-up parts of the city and the Council issued yet another order for resurveying the existing city streets. Apparently nothing came of this effort either, for another year on, in January, 1806, the Council once more resolved “that a correct Survey and map be made of the Island of New York,” this one to show the island’s topography as well as the existing roads and both individual and city properties. The Council hired the Philadelphia surveyor Hasler, but illness prevented him from even starting the job.

Behind these endlessly frustrating attempts to resolve the city’s property issues lay the irresolvably conflicting interests of the Common Council’s members regarding any such plans whatsoever. Then in 1806 — doubtless at DeWitt Clinton’s instigation — the Council began drafting an “Act for the appointment of Commissioners to regulate and lay out Streets in this City,” and in February, 1807, the Council formally appealed to the Legislature for its “wisdom” in these matters. The legislation enacting the requested wisdom — which consisted of taking the matter out of the hands of the fractious Common Council altogether— was passed a month later, on April 3, 1807. Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt, and John Rutherford were named as Commissioners; they were given four years to complete their assignment.

The work got underway — initially with Simeon De Witt as surveyor but from 1808 on under the supervision of the much younger civil engineer John Randel, Jr. — only to be stalled for another two years by the legal and even physical opposition of Out Ward landowners. Further legislation enacted in 1809 extended the authority of the Commissioners sufficiently for the work to move forward, though by now only two years remained in which to complete it. On November 29, 1810, with just four months to go before their commission expired, Gouverneur Morris informed the Mayor that

. . . the Commissioners for laying out the Manhattan Island have completed their work so far forth as it depends on them; but much is yet to be done on the ground. . . . So much, however, is accomplished, that . . . it will be practicable, to make within the time fixed by the Statute a report complying substantially, if not literally with the law, shewing all the streets to be laid out . . . .

Three copies of the map were then drawn by Randel and notes to it supplied by the Commissioners. The first of three required filings was made in Albany on March 22, 1811; the second on March 29 in Morrisania, and the third on April 1 at the City Clerk’s office in New York.

The pre-history of the Manhattan grid ends here, though Randel’s “work on the ground” would continue for fully another ten years. Its real history begins with a petition to the Council from “sundry inhabitants” in May, 1811, requesting the opening of the newly planned “Third Avenue.” This history has continued to unfold for 200 years so far, and most likely will continue to do so for untold years to come.

One of Randel’s three hand-drawn maps of the Commissioners Plan,
with signatures and seals for the filing

By way of a conclusion, I would like to hazard an hypothesis regarding “the inconveniences” the Commissioners had claimed to minimize by laying out the city as an unprecedentedly vast grid, without regard for natural topography or existing features and property lines.

The Commissioners were men who had witnessed the wartime devastation of New York first hand and afterwards had seen the shadows of its destruction lengthen into months, years, and finally decades of uncertainty in the relationships of real property that underlay their city’s civic order. Against that overwhelming experience of vulnerability and transience the grid offered the ultimate security of the purest mathematical objects: two points determine a straight line and the corners of a rectangle are each and always 90º. Against the ever present possibility that the city could be lost again, the mathematical logic of the grid vouchsafed its civil resurrection: if even only two of Randel’s thousands of survey markers survived a future catastrophe, the entire grid together with all its implicit property lines could at once be reconstructed from them with reference to nothing more than the widths of the streets and avenues and the lengths of the blocks between them as described in the Commissioners’ remarks to their plan. With the grid, the foundation of New York’s civic order would not only be inscribed on the island’s temporally all too mutable landscape, it would also be writ for all eternity in the immutable perfection of a geometric ideal.

For further reading

The two classic studies of the Manhattan Grid are Edward K. Spann’s “The Greatest Grid: the New York Plan of 1811″ in Two Centuries of American Planning, Daniel Schaffer, ed. (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; pp. 11-39), and Peter Marcuse’s “The Grid as city plan: New York City and laissez-faire planning in the nineteenth century” (in Planning Perspectives 2 1987: 287-310).

Reuben Rose-Redwood’s Rationalizing the Landscape: Superimposing the Grid Upon the Island of Manhattan (State College: Pennsylvania State College Master’s Thesis, 2002) offers a wide ranging epistemologically oriented analysis of the grid, and Rebecca Shanor’s The City That Never Was: Two Hundred Years of Fantastic and Fascinating Plans That Might Have Changed the Face of New York City (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1988) provides a rich account of the subsequent history of the grid.

More readily accessible accounts of the genesis of the grid are in Edwin Burrows’ & Mike Wallace’s  Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999: 419-422), and, most recently, two articles by Sam Roberts in the New York Times (March 21, 2011): “200th Birthday for the Map that Made New York” and “No Hero in 1811, Street Grid’s Father Was Showered With Produce, Not Praise.”

Extensive primary source materials are to be found in the Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York 1784-1831, Everett A. Peterson, ed. (New York: City of New York, 1917); the Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York, David T. Valentine, ed. (New York: Common Council, annually 1841–1870); and I. N. Phelps Stokes’ indispensable The Iconography of Manhattan Island 1498-1909 (New York: Robert H. Dodd, six volumes 1915-1928).

Rille

“Rille, rille,” my mother says to her mother. The two women sit at the large, chipped enamel table, with the blue and white checked edge which fills the kitchen “up the farm.” My grandmother’s table is the still point around which we inevitably converge. It’s the large flat plane to which we inevitably belly. The rest of us live in a slack, uneven circle on the streets and roads nearby.

“Rille, rille.”

Sundays we sweep in, crowding the table as we press and rush to eat and drink and talk and demand each other’s attention. We children slip into the crevices between our rocks, the grown ups. Rille, rille, tell, tell, we say and the stories from “the other side,” are told and retold. The words vibrate and rotate among us so often so they become our stories too. After Sunday dinner, the kids play wild in the woods while the grown ups crack nuts, play cards, take long, loose naps, then we all eat and drink again and finally pour off home. Our grandparents are the spin of the planet, the forces that affix us to the earth, then loosen us to the wind.

Rille is our dialect for dillo, tell.

Lucia Santorsa, child of cheese makers, is Lucana, a woman from the ancient region of Lucania, now called Basilicata. Su nata in Tolve, provincia di Potenza. Her daughter, my mother, is asking her to tell us one of the stories about making cheese with her father and uncle. I drift in to my mother’s side.

Rille adess, my mother says again. Tell us now.

“Ma, rille di che?” But what should I say?

“ Mo’ gli dic’, u nom’ du padre e che facev’.” Now you tell your father’s name and what he did.

My pader* had cows and he make a lot of cheese. He went to deliver the cheese every day and he went all over: Naples, Potenza, all those places. My pader sell all that cheese. Eh. That’s the life my father had.

And Papa, he wann’ ‘a make me go a’ scuola and I wann’ ‘a go, but Mama no wan’ a makea me go. I stay home to help my mader. But Papa was so nice. He talked so nice and he took me with him to the masseri’ where they kept the cows. That’s where they make the cheese. I learn how to make ‘em. My pader give me a piece of ‘a stuffa to eat, a lilla piece but I went in the back to work the stuffa, to make lilla thing, sola sol’.. And Papa and Zi’ Gerardo, the brother of my papa, make little things for le kids: na cavallozza, na uccellozza, na anellozza. A little horse, a little bird and a little ring. The two brothers always make those things with me. We bring to the kids at home. When they dry they so hard. Once when I had too many in my hands, they cascat’ a terr’, sono’ rott’ perchè it was so hard, eran tropp’ tost’. E quan’ so’ cascade, sono rott’, they fell on the ground and because they were so hard, they break.

“All right, Lucia,” Zi’ Gerardo say to me, “I give a little more. What am I gonna do? We make a little more. We bring ‘em home to tutti le kids and you give ‘em, one each.” He was so patient for le kids. Zi’ Gerardo always thought a bringa things to the creature, for all the kids, not justa me. He brought cosarella tutti le kids i vicin’. How many things my Zi’ Gerardo makea for me! I was always with my father e him. He did everything with me, because I was the only daughter. He likea so much.

But these cosarell’, were so hard nobody can chew him. One time my uncle Gerardo made una special thing just for me. He fatta na doll. From na stuffa from the cheese, Un doll, a regular doll. Cosi beautiful. I love that doll so much. I’m a so careful. I make sure I never drop that doll. I don’t want to breaka my doll.

Ma one day my doll fall sulla terr’ and break into little pieces and my mother she take the pieces and she pick him up and she put ‘em in the minestra. I cry. And I cry. I wanta my thing.

2

Until I got married, I stayed in Tolve.

And I was in Italy. There were a lot of marriage proposals for me from many young men. My mother was mad at me. She said, “Why do you do this? Why won’t you accept any of these proposals. You’ll wind up never getting married.”

“Ah,” my father said, “Leave her alone. We’ll keep her with us.” But then what happened happened. Vito was taking such a long time to come back from America that my father said, “Lucia, your mother is right. I know you gave your word but are you going to keep your word even if it’s for a hundred years?” These words hurt me so much. My father was so nice, no matter what he was talking about. But now he agreed with my mother.

Someone from Tolve had gone to America and he told Vito that there were many young men who wanted to marry me so Vito knew that if he didn’t come back to marry me, he was going to lose me.

Well, I used to stand by the door hoping Vito’d come back for me. And I was standing there one day, just standing there waiting. Someone came to our house and said, “Vito is coming.S”

Vito is coming? No, I couldn’t believe it. After all this time he was going to be here in five minutes.

When he arrived at the door, he asked, “Can I come in?” just as my father had always said he would. He shook hands with my father, and he talked to him about America. He told my father about the life he had in America.

Then my mother-in-law came and said to me. “This one isn’t going to stay here.” And so I got married. And that was the end of that.

While Vito was in Tolve to marry me, he was walking in the town square when someone met him and blurted out, “Your father’s dead. Vito, your Papa passed.” Vito lost consciousness. His father had died suddenly of pneumonia in New York. That was one of only two times that I saw Vito faint. The other time was later when your little brother Pasquale died. So he went back to America. I waited three years for him in Tolve. I had Archangela (her first daughter).

3

Tre` Casse: Arriving in America

So tell us about when he came to America and then tell us the story about why you finally came to live in America. And tell us about the houses you saw when you came here

Vito said he didn’t like New York, and he wanted to come back, so I built a house in Tolve. My father helped me and I made a home for us. I built a house in Italy. After I had lived in that house for a year—it was such a nice house, built out of stone—so nice. Then he went to Waterbury to visit some people from our town, Tolve. Then he wrote to me and said, “I like Waterbury, it’s like Tolve and I’m not going to come back to Italy no more. You have to come to America.”

All my people were there. I didn’t want to leave them. I had a nice big family (tenev’ una bella famiglia) and so I didn’t want to go to America. I complained for a year. Then my father said, “You want to lose your husband? Your husband will not come back here; you have to leave.” And so I was forced to go to America. It seemed so bad. My parents had to force me to get into the cart. I didn’t want to leave them.

Pasquale, my cousin, came with me up to Naples. We were going to travel together to America. But when we got to Naples they stopped him from getting on the ship because he had something wrong with his eyes. Pasquale said to me, “Lucia I can’t come.”

My father had told us that if someone couldn’t go ahead. the other one should go on alone. And so I obeyed my father’s words. And so I came alone. I didn’t want to leave Pasquale. And I came alone, me and the girl (her daughter, Arcangela). It was really bad on the ship. There was a storm, the water was stormy. I couldn’t hold anything down. Not even water I could keep in my stomach.

When you got off the boat what happened with your trunks? Tell us, when you got off what happened with the trunks.

I had three wooden trunks with me. They were filled with linens and things to eat. When I arrived in New York they let us pass through customs, but they wanted me to go through without my trunks. And I said I am not leaving here if these trunks don’t come with me.

And there were so many people on line. No, they said, I had to pass through without them. “They don’t come through with you.” But I wouldn’t leave the trunks. I wouldn’t leave unless they came with me. I only had three trunks with me. So I sat down on them and refused to leave. Then an Italian man came over to me and said, “Don’t worry Signora. You won’t lose these trunks. They will come with you. Here take these.” And he gave me three papers.” (claim checks)But now you take the boat,” (off Ellis Island into the harbor of New York).

Then Donato” (her brother-in-law) came to me and I said, “What do you want? I didn’t know him at first. Then I looked at him and said to him, “O Donato, Thank God you are here.” And all my fear went away…

I told him these are the papers for the trunks and he said, “Don’t worry. I have a friend in New York. He’ll help us get the trunks.” And his friend helped me.

I got here and there was no one here that I knew, no one from Tolve. Just Vito and Donato. I felt so ill. I was sick. I had come to the end of the world for Vito and I was alone. I was so all alone. When the distance from your family is great it’s very bad. What are you going to do? You have to make someone happy, either your husband or your family. I cried many times over it. And datsa’s the life.

Tre Casc’-Tre Casse-Three Chests

Excerpted from chapter 1 (“The Life Stinks Club”) of The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975), by Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner (SUNY Press, 2010). The chapter deals with the early life of Hugh Carey, who as governor (1975 – 1982) succeeded in keeping cash-strapped New York City out of bankruptcy.

 Robert Polner is a public affairs officer at New York University and former reporter for Newsday based in New York City.

Seymour P. Lachman is Distinguished Professor in Residence Wagner College of Staten Island and directs the college’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform. He previously served five terms in the New York State Senate.

[Hugh L.] Carey’s grandparents raised two daughters and two sons in Park Slope. The older boy, a gifted athlete, died tragically as a teen from a misdiagnosed case of peritonitis. The younger one, Denis J. Carey – Hugh’s father – attended Public School No. 9 in the same neighborhood; his formal education ended in the ninth grade. Once out of school, he worked any job he could find to help support his parents and sisters. Energetic and resourceful, he worked as an oil hostler at the Tidewater Oil depot near the family home, servicing trucks and rail engines at the end of their run. With a friend, he established a motor fuel distribution business in the 1920s, calling it Eagle Petroleum. Once he had married and his sons were arriving, he spent his days and nights focused, even fixated, on building up the company. At home, the Careys didn’t subscribe to popular general-interest publications such as the Saturday Evening Post or Colliers, but to the National Petroleum News and Journal of Commerce. Home was office, and office was home, Hugh remembered. The nightly dining room table talk was peppered with stories of fuel deliveries, tank trucks, expenditures, and revenues, and when the Great Depression arrived and deepened in the 1930s, the living room discourse was edgier, revealing the pressures and tactics exerted by Eagle’s creditors.

The story of how Carey’s parents met is intertwined with Denis Carey’s desire to succeed in the oil business, in an era when the automobile was becoming more familiar and kerosene-fueled heaters would give way to basement oil-burning boilers and furnaces. Margaret Collins – Hugh’s mother – was the youngest of five children and the daughter of immigrants from County Tyrone, Ireland, and when she married DJ Carey, she not only became his wife but also his unofficial lifetime associate and assistant throughout his business career. At Erasmus Hall High School, a public school in Flatbush, she did so well that she continued her education in stenography and typing and became a valued employee at the Battery Place home-office of the American Steel Barrel Company, as the assistant to the owner, Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, otherwise known, nationally and internationally, as Nellie Bly, the untiring adventurer, daredevil, social reformer, and pioneering woman reporter who covered World War I, defended poor and exploited children and women, and who, at her death in 1922, was described by the New York Journal as “the Best Reporter in America” for her expose on the appalling way the mentally disturbed were treated in state insane asylums. While working for the New York World, Bly had posed as a mental patient at the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City, later called Welfare Island and now Roosevelt Island, and wrote about her experiences in Ten Days in a Madhouse, published in 1887, which detailed the degrading and tragic indifference she observed first-hand, scenes similar to those which Hugh would find at [The] Willowbrook [Development Center in Staten Island] almost ninety years later.

As a prominent businessperson in her own right, Bly would regularly depart for globe-trotting jaunts, entrusting “Miss Collins” to serve in her stead at the American Steel Barrel headquarters in lower Manhattan. Soon, Collins became so integral to the day-to-day functioning of the company that its owners named their petite fifteen-gallon barrel after her – the “Collins Barrel” – one of which Carey and his brothers were delighted to see washed up on the shores of Long Island when Hugh was still in parochial school.

With petroleum use increasing, steel barrels were in demand. The more steel barrels a striver like Denis “DJ” Carey could get his hands on, the more fuel he could decant from railroad tanker cars and deliver to corner filling stations. So DJ decided to see if he could get to know the reserved but sociable Margaret Collins; he arranged to invite her to a formal evening ball. Denis’s business was going well, growing so reliably that within a matter of four or five years it would monopolize the back page of the indispensable Red Book directory with a prominent display advertisement. As fate, or luck, would have it, Bly’s assistant agreed to go on a date with the confident Denis. In the full measure of time, their attraction grew, and the “the oil man” and “the barrel lady” eventually married.

Carey’s parents started out in downtown Brooklyn as newlyweds. Gradually, they moved up the avenues and acquired social status. The most prosperous proceeded “up the hill,” reaching out of the lower strata toward Third, Fourth, and the even more socially elevated Fifth Avenue, with its stately homes filled with fine silverware, grand pianos and lace curtains. From roughly the time their boys were out of diapers, the business-minded couple, who ultimately resided on Park Place – but not the crest, Prospect Park West – dreamed of starting a series of modest petroleum delivery businesses for the boys to one day operate. Margaret, with her serious disposition and withering and wise delivery, commanded her children’s march toward straight A’s (or nearly so) on their report cards, while insisting that they maintain a respectful presence before their elders. But it was his father who, Hugh remembered, looked out one sunny Saturday over their dining room table as the kids pored over their homework, and commented on the attractiveness of a tin container marked Peerless Pepper.

“That’s a good name for a company,” he mused. “Peerless.”

Eventually, the Peerless Oil Company was born, to be followed by the Remington Oil Company, named in honor of the Remington typewriter Hugh’s mother used to type up the business records. The Peerless and Remington companies advanced from their beginnings at the dining room table – led by eldest brother Ed. At first, Ed worked closely with his father and brothers, but, inclined more to giving orders than taking them, he broke off to form his own series of oil companies, for which Hugh worked. By the late 1960s, Ed was on his way to becoming one for the richest individuals in America, and by 1960 was in a position to help Hugh launch his political career.

But Edward M. Carey’s phenomenal success was unimaginable when the Great Depression descended, bringing traumatic and demoralizing years that weighed heavily on Denis and Margaret Carey, their business, and the family. Margaret struggled to keep up appearances of middle-class prosperity, never letting her husband leave the house without a derby, smartly atilt on top of his head, and a pristine starched white shirt. As the family’s finances tightened, she also took to inserting cardboard cutouts in the worn-out shoes worn by her sons, as there was never enough money for new shoes. She sent the children to school after serving them a watery gruel for breakfast; the days of waking up to the smell of bacon sizzling on the stove were, if not completely over, then quite out of the ordinary.

Denis Cary’s Eagle Petroleum faced crushing and eventually insurmountable obstacles when the stock market crashed. As American laissez-faire capitalism teetered on the brink of collapse, Denis’s modest enterprise suffered a staggering blow—the denial of credit by the giant oil companies with which he did business. Eagle functioned by decanting fuel from freight cars into fifty-five-gallon steel barrels and loading the barrels onto its delivery trucks and then delivering them to gas stations. It depended on thirty days’ credit from the sellers, roughly the amount of time the corner stations (Eagle’s customers) needed to pump enough gas to pay for the bulk fuel deliveries.

Eagles wings were clipped by the monopolistic bond forged by the Seaboard Midland Railroad Company and Standard Oil, both owned by John D. Rockefeller. Trampling over all small competitors in their path, in ways documented earlier in the century by progressivism’s fearless muckraker, Ida Tarbell, the behemoths simply stopped extending credit to tiny, local distributors like Eagle, which lacked cash up front to pay for its principal product. When the Rockefellers, through their corporations, determined that they would not accept credit as payment, it was only a matter of months before they controlled the petroleum industry to an even greater extent, and Denis J. Cary’s trucks were driven away empty from rail depots of Queens and Brooklyn. His company survived in name only under a pile of debts and creditors’ demands for repayment.

In spite of it all, the Carey family managed to remain somewhat better off than most of the city’s desperate unemployed, keeping their heads above water with the modest rents Denis Carey collected each month on a few small parcels of land he’d bought when he was better off (the telephone company rented one of the properties to store its poles). But Eagle’s creditors kept the pressure on, for Hugh’s father refused to enter a claim of bankruptcy to preserve the few remaining assets of Eagle Petroleum. Long after it stopped doing business, Denis showed little patience when friends suggested he get out from under his company’s debts by declaring it insolvent. Bankruptcy was a condition he viewed as shameful, akin to reneging on a promise or shirking responsibilities to one’s loved ones and community.

“It was just anathema to my father,” Hugh said years later. “He considered bankruptcy a stigma, or simply, a disgrace to the family name.”

Michael Nichols lives in Manhattan, works in Jersey City, and is an avid city wanderer and collector of historical names, lore, facts, relics, documents, souvenirs, and ruins.  His project is to find in these bits and particulars their place in the historical landscape.

Dedicated to Thomas Maxey, a true isolato–if he even existed.

Island of Many Names

Call it Varkens Eylandt–Hog Island–for the hogs that were pastured here.

Call it Paradise Island. When the Blackwells took it over in 1686, the whole of it was theirs and theirs alone.

Call it Asylum Island—it’s only a few hundred feet from shore on either side, but that’s still a long distance to swim in a swift current, even for the robust, never mind the sick, the old, the diseased, the destitute, the insane, the accursed.

Call it Penitentiary Island.

Call it Theatre of Cruelty Island, for the reporters who came to expose the barbaric conditions and the day-trippers who came to heap sympathy. Or Melancholy Island, for the infirm gazing at the black water and their attendants gabbing into cell phones.

Call it Welfare Island.

Call it First Family Island, or Patroon Island, for the great Dutch name of city, state and nation, Roosevelt, whether Nicholas, Theodore, Alice Longworth, or Franklin Delano or Eleanor or the both of them, or maybe all of them.

Islands are natural quarantines, hard to get to and hard to get off, so it was natural that the islands of the East River would find their purpose as a repository for those who would not or could not learn to live in public. Give me your tired, your poor… the country air will do them some good. Blackwell’s Island, the long and narrow outcropping of rock bisecting the river just below Hell Gate, gained its history as being just such a place apart. Especially attractive were the island’s base of gray gneiss and the fact of a captive labor pool of inmates, whom the city pressed into service to build the workhouses, prisons, almshouses, and asylums that housed them. The first in the long line of isolatos to be exiled here was Captain John Manning, who owned the island at the time and whose misfortune it was to be serving as a provisional governor of New York during that fractured period when England and Holland were exchanging the colony back and forth like a ping-pong ball. On one volley, in 1673, the English ceded to Dutch after nine years of rule, and though there wasn’t a blessed thing Manning could do about it, blame focused on him as it was he who was in charge. After a court-martial, Manning’s own sword was broken over his head at a ceremony at City Hall and he thence retreated to his island. But Manning eventually salved his isolation. In the best of New York traditions, he threw parties, entertaining his friends with bowls of rum punch. Manning’s daughter married a man named Robert Blackwell and the island thereafter changed hands, and soon the name of its new owner caught on, Blackwell’s, in the possessive.

The Lighthouse

The lighthouse stands at the northern tip of Roosevelt Island Designed by James Renwick and built in 1872, the lighthouse is 50 feet tall with an octagonal shaft, and built of hewn blocks of gneiss in Gothic style. It is an imposing structure. City planning has since created a circular plaza around it and bulwarked the plaza with low seawalls and rip-rap. The whole of this looks like a ship’s prow: the seawalls are the bulwarks, the river on three sides is the sea. At the bulwarks are fishermen who have cast their lines and now sit for hours on end and wait. They are trying for bluefish and bass. These are top-feeders and so, it is said, are not dangerous to eat, as the surface water is ocean water owing to the constant ebbing and flooding of the river. The fishermen are a mute bunch. None seems to know any of the others, and each has his place along the bulwark.

Melville, Moby Dick: Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel…

He was speaking of the harpooners aboard the Pequod and what he meant by isolato was a man of skill and workmanship, loyal to those skills and not necessarily to any captain.

Legend: Fort Maxey

Within Fort Maxey, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February, 1866

Beneath the lighthouse and its plaza is a cluster of rocks, on old maps called the Bread and Cheese Rocks, which until a century or so ago stood off the tip of the island by several yards. Legend has it that before the lighthouse was built the outcropping was the site of a small fort and house belonging to the fort’s builder and who thereafter became the de facto caretaker of the property. To build the fort, the builder used materials found nearby and which were common on the island: clay, rock, dirt, and tall grasses. To get the materials to construction site on the outcropping, the builder faced an engineering challenge: the watery gap between island and outcropping. He solved his problem by creating a landfill using the clay, till, and rock. The power to accomplish all this work was supplied by the builder’s own brute strength and intelligence, working alone and by his own hand. It took determination, imagination, and time. Time was something he had in spades, as he was an inmate at the Lunatic Asylum, located just down the road apiece from the fort. His name was Thomas Maxey.

What we know of the legend of Maxey and his fort comes from the pen of W. H. Davenport, who re-visited Blackwell’s Island as a reporter–he claimed to have once been a patient there–and who wrote of his sojourn for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in February, 1866. Escorted by commissioners and doctors, Davenport met a variety of grotesques who made good copy, including one who imagined herself to be a steam boiler, another who believed she was the wife of President Buchanan, and a “jolly, clever darkey,” Black Jimmy, fisherman, who furnishes the resident physician’s table a “fine mess of black-fish, bass, and eels.” But Davenport saves the best till last, a visit with Maxey at his impossible fort, and the small house in its midst. Though it is only twelve by eight feet, it is commodious enough to contain two sleeping compartments, a sitting room and a kitchen. With its garden of overgrown hollyhocks and sunflowers and the causeway that leads to a huge stone gate, the place today would be an example of “outsider art,” the art of the unschooled, the undisciplined, or the insane, and almost always vivid, ingenious, and strange. But it was home. Its real purpose, though, was to serve as the city’s defensive battery against an imminent invasion by rebel privateers or possibly the British. (Presumably Maxey is Irish, and fighting the long war.) Thus the reason for the leftover Civil War cannon that Maxey procured, possibly from the gardai.

Luckily, Maxey is there to greet the commissioner and his guests, though in no time the brief interview descends into a Rabelaisian burlesque, at Maxey’s expense of course.

“Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you Mr. Thomas Maxey. These distinguished guests of the Commissioners, Sir, have admired all your workmanship that they have seen, but desire you will favor them with deeper insight into your domain.”

“Yes, yes, it isn’t done yet; when the magazine and other improvements are finished, then–”

“It is a wonderful performance, Mr. Maxey.”

“Yes, it will be valuable to Government, no doubt of it; but my gains are small. Is this a good bill?” He exhibits an undeniable five-dollar greenback.

“First-rate!”

“Dr. —–’s son gave it to me. Many gentlemen pay me well for my trouble in showing the improvements.”

“Why, yes, your pocket-book seems bursting.”

“Oh it’s not all money. I wish to keep some root-beer and ginger-bread for visitors; but it is hard to get them.”

“Ah, this is the house. May we go in?”

“Certainly.” And he pushes open the door. We enter one at a time, the building will not hold more than three (and they knock one against the other), so filled is it with woodwork and the masonry of an oven. The furniture consists of the refuse of the Institution. The proprietor is sorry he has nothing to offer us.

“By-the-by, Mr. Maxey, you have not yet given me the solution of that problem I once proposed to you.”

“What problem?”

I enunciate the old college question for debate: “Can a Chimera, ruminating in vacuum, disseminate second intentions?”

Mr. M. looks puzzled: “I hardly understand, Sir.”

“Pshaw! a man of your intellect! It is plain enough.”

I repeat the formula, emphasizing each word.

“Well, Sir, it is doubtful if Apollo and the Nine Muses ever sowed seeds in Uruguay. The moon and the stars now revolve in their orbits; electricity and the printing-machine have worked wonders, but –”

“Do you think, Sir,” I seriously ask, “that Briareus has any thing to do with it?”

“Brirus? Well, it is perhaps probable. What did you say–the Crimea?”

“Yes.”

“Diana and mythology.”

“Pshaw! Mr. Maxey, you’re a man of genius; but you can’t have carefully studied the question I propounded. You are straying from it. Hadn’t you better think it over?”

Tom’s jaw hangs in a vacant expression as he replies: “Perhaps I had. My larnin’, Sir, may not be equal to yours, but–”

“Of course you’ll master it; and now good-day, Sir.”

Before taking his leave of the island though, the author is distracted by something else: the sight of Black Jimmy on the dock, “busy at his piscatorial occupation,” and he stops to make a sketch.

Ruminating

Some excitement from a row of fisherman: Hold onto it, yells one to another. A fisherman lifts his line out of the water and at its end is a large bluefish flapping its body wildly to free itself of the hook in its mouth. The fisherman lifts him over the seawall and begins to extract the hook. He retrieves a length of line but no hook. Then he sticks his hand through a gill opening it wide enough so that one can see daylight on the other side. What appears to be blood, copious streams of it, drip down the side of the fish. The fisherman drops it on the slabs of the walk and then he takes residence in his beach chair parked in the shade of the lighthouse. The fish flaps its tail, lies still, then minutes later flaps again. Then the end, the fish’s small pectoral fin extending vertically in what appears to be a kind of rigor mortis. Not ten minutes has passed. Death comes quickly, at least to those not going through it. Later, the fisherman carries it away by its tail and returns without it. A half-hour later, other fisherman are still talking about the guy up there who caught a blue. It was about two feet long, maybe longer. Later still, at a picnic on the lawn, a family munches a fresh catch, just grilled, gingerly lifting the soft meat off paper plates.

One imagines Maxey fishing for his supper from this spot, maybe the jolly Black Jimmy nearby, their solitude regained, and Maxey certain of two things: that a man is his own empire and that his fortress could withstand an invasion whether by the British or officials from the city of New York.

END

Sources:

W. H. Davenport, “Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Feb 1866, Vol 32, No 189

Making of America, Cornell University Library, http://dlxs2.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/

John Romeyn Brodhead, History of the State of New York, Vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871)

Roosevelt Island Historical Society, “Lighthouse”

http://www.rihs.us/landmarks/lighthouse.htm

NYC Dept of Corrections, “The Islands of Correction” http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/nycdoc.htm#islands

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

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

This translation is by Regina Galasso, a professor of Spanish language and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, published by Jorge Pinto Books, Inc. with a foreword by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

116^th is the busiest street. Years ago, a leader of El Barrio had the great idea of naming it after Luis Muñoz Marín, a man who betrayed the people of Puerto Rico. His soul was dirty like his teeth. He was a Governor whose name meant something; however, everyone knows who’s really in charge of Puerto Rico. He built hotels and highways, but he left the poor people without work in filthy neighborhoods. That’s why the working class is here. El Barrio has just as many stupid Boricuas as San Juan.

My barber is from Ponce. They call him an amateur because he’s pro-independence. The discussions that you hear there are all over the place. That barbershop is like a mini UN in the heart of El Barrio. Not too long ago he had the Cuban and Puerto Rican flags on a mirror. The customers said, “Look, Man, take that down. Cuba is a communist country.” But he didn’t touch a thing. And when they really insisted he explained that Cuba and Puerto Rico had the best baseball teams in the Americas. That shut everyone up and he just kept on cutting hair.

There were a billion stories about El Barrio during those years. Every day you’d hear about another robbery, murder, rape, or some other crime. They’d cut anyone’s face with a Gem blade. Most people were terrified. In any barbershop, no matter where you are, you always hear all about everything. The old men sat down to talk. They’d get off track about what they were saying, but you’d learn something about a bunch of different things. Since I never went to school, I enjoyed listening to old people talk. That’s how I learned most of what I know.

In the barbershop, I found out how the Latino neighborhood was formed. It didn’t happen overnight. It took some time. Spanish Harlem, East 96^th Street to 125^th Street, was a completely Jewish neighborhood. Then it changed, as did many other neighborhoods in the city. It’s Hispanic for a while and then it’s Middle Eastern. This city has a constant flow of foreigners. It’s like a Parcheesi game. El Barrio started to take off in the 20s. Before that, Latinos usually lived in Chelsea, where I still live, in Washington Heights, Brooklyn, Queens…

In the barbershop, someone was usually talking about the strikes in San Juan and baseball. Many workers came to New York because they were wanted in Puerto Rico: anarchist tobacco rollers and peasants. Some were arrested when they arrived and accused of a plot to kill President Wilson. They never wanted a liberal Hispanic newspaper here. That’s why they arrested Puerto Ricans. The talk of the town was the confiscation of newspapers such as El Corsario and the mechanization of the tobacco industry. That caused the uprising of hundreds of little stores throughout El Barrio.

In the early 50s, people still had beat-up furniture. When they were evicted it was a painful sight to see. They used shopping carts to move to another place, always in El Barrio, of course. You’d see them carrying one or two cots and a rickety chair. In the barbershop, they talked about all of this and about nationalist leaders and benefactors. They also talked about the supportive opportunists that had to do with the government of guys like Montgomery Reilly. People still talk a lot about those political issues. The nationalists hung out in one place, the socialists in another. It was basically chaos or revolú as they say. The old people remember a lot about Jesús Colón and Bernardo Vega, the founder of the 1920s newspaper Gráfico. According to some, they were spokesmen for rights for Boricuas. What can we say about Vito Marcantonio, Puerto Ricans’ favorite congressman? He was the one who said, “I don’t have knives to sharpen, nor family members who’ll benefit.” It was true. Vito was always in favor of independence of the Island.

El Barrio became full of criminals. Many came in through the back door from Latin American countries. They did their sketchy business and gave the Puerto Ricans a bad reputation. They pushed their way into El Barrio and the Jews and the Blacks got out of there and let them do their thing.

El Barrio looked like a circus. It’s the same today. Only it’s not a happy one. People mill around in the streets because they’re unemployed. They go in and out of the bodeguitas, botánicas, and cafés. They walk as though they’re lost, starring into space, dressed in rags. It’s disturbing to see so many human beings like this. Religion gives them comfort, it’s the only thing the poor people have in this country. That’s why there are more botánicas in El Barrio than anywhere else, but they don’t do well because people don’t have any money. When people go there, they buy a fruit of the Seven African Powers, luisa herb or some amansaguapo or rompezaraguey spray. Cuban Santería introduced this city to herbs they’ve never heard of before and much more. Every day there are more botánicas all over New York. It’s incredible. Even in the marketa they now have Cuban herbalists. Between the barajeros and the santeros, or what would be something like the priests of Santería, they flooded New York. It’s a way of making a living just like any other. And of course it doesn’t require much physical effort.

In spite of everything, Miguelito and I both thought that El Barrio was the most entertaining place in New York. It was appealing to us as Latinos. Besides all the vice and blood, they also held dances and beauty contests among the girls from the countryside back home. I went to a bunch of benefit dances for political organizations and local newspapers. They were in different places, nowhere special; fairly big lofts, where they had some Latino group playing sons, guarachas, danzones, and chachachás.

Cuban and Puerto Rican dance music is very similar. That’s why it was easy for us to follow them. There was a group called Yumurí, another called Cubaney. The most popular was Machito and His Afro-Cuban Boys. They played at a high-life place, or somewhere with a little something extra, like Manhattan Center on 34^th and 8^th Ave., St. Nicholas Arena, and the Paladium. That was more stylish. Sometimes I went, but I liked the atmosphere of El Barrio better. At Manhattan Center, families would bring food in baskets. They’d make a real picnic there under the theater’s roof.

The Arts League also threw popular dances, which tended to be a bit posh. I saw the crowning of Jenny Rivera there. She was a girl from the Peñuelas countryside crowned by the Banana Club of fruit merchants. But the good places were in small joints on 116^th or Lexington. There was one every three or four blocks. I remember El Cano, a dive very close to St. Cecilia’s Church on Lexington between 105^th and 106^th. Miguelito, his woman, and I would go out on the town when we had some change in our pockets.

By that time drugs were all over the place. It was bad marijuana: cheap and harmful. It was only smoked discretely, not like now how it’s all out in the open. Luckily, I was never a fan of it. There are some who say, “Marijuana isn’t bad for you. But alcohol is.” I’m not the one to make that decision. For me both create a vice and a person with a vice is only half there. I’ve seen it all and I’m not afraid of anything in life. I always want to have my eyes open in order to enjoy everything to the fullest and with all five senses.

Vito Marcantonio severely condemned the bad reputation that was attached to Puerto Ricans in New York. There was a time during the 50s, when they were treated worse than any other national group even though they were US citizens. When an American from Oklahoma got to New York, he was well received; but when a Boricua got there, they slammed the door in his face. They could only get jobs as servants, and that was only in some places. It was like a big filter and very few made it through.

Nothing’s changed. That’s why nobody forgets about them. And although many sellouts and traitors go to the barbershop, in general most of the customers are progressive. I’ve been getting my haircut there for thirty years. The barber and I both went gray at the same time. He’s always saying that when he retires, he’s going to Ponce to buy himself a little ranch. But he’s old enough and he hasn’t moved an inch. I can understand him. Why jump out of the frying pan and into the fire? It’s not worth it. In Puerto Rico he has to deal with taxes and the entire family’s problems. He’s spent a good deal of time thinking about it. That’s why he’s still cutting hair in New York, although he won’t admit it. His son is a Nuyorican, he’s never been to Puerto Rico, but he’s more Puerto Rican than his father. This happens a lot here. The boy speaks English better than Spanish because he was born in New York. The Nuyoricans go to Puerto Rico when they’re twenty-one and make some money. Until then it only exists in their imagination.

“You Cuban! You’re rich, damn it.”

Because I’ve always lived in Chelsea and that’s downtown and a stone’s throw away from the Village, people think I have it good. I don’t go to the Village for anything. It’s for rich people and artists. I go to work and on the weekends visit a friend or my wife’s family. The closest I get to the Village is when I have work there or go to some party at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on 14^th Street. The masses and novenas there are in Spanish and sometimes Celia gets the urge to go. She’s Catholic, so she says; a very unique kind of Catholicism if you ask me. I walk her to the door and while she prays and goes around the church, I take a walk on 14^th: a gigantic flea market in the hands of Latinos, Jews, and Arabs. Or I go to La Casa de las Américas and wait for her to have Cuban food for lunch with Cuban friends and old emigrants like myself. La Casa de las Américas is our club, the only form of entertainment for the progressive Cubans here. But I’ll talk more about that later.

By James D. Livingston

Jim Livingston is a Brooklyn native, now living in Massachusetts, who writes about New York history. His book of the above title, published in July 2010 by SUNY Press in their Excelsior Editions, can also be considered family history, since the main protagonist, Mary Alice Livingston, is his cousin (three generations removed). Jim’s website is www.jamesdlivingston.net.

For over six weeks in May and June of 1896, New York was fixated on the sensational trial of Mary Alice Livingston for the alleged murder of her mother. During the lengthy trial, Governor Levi Morton finally signed the controversial bill that would in 1898 consolidate Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx into the city, more than doubling the city’s population and increasing its area tenfold. Thomas Edison’s new fluoroscope was on display at the Electrical Exposition, and people stood in long lines for the novel experience of viewing the bones in their hands. Another Edison novelty then exciting New Yorkers was his “Vitascope” motion pictures showing at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall. The city’s first horseless carriage race was held, with John Jacob Astor one of the judges. But the bicycle was still king, judging from a twelve-page supplement of Hearst’s Journal that estimated 200,000 New Yorkers were avid cyclists. Two among them were millionaire “Diamond Jim” Brady and his close friend, actress and singer Lillian Russell. Russell cycled regularly in Central Park. The theatre season was nearing its end, and featured the final stage appearances of the year of Sarah Bernhardt, the French performer considered the outstanding actress of the period. But for over six weeks of 1896, the murder trial of Mary Alice Livingston was Manhattan’s top news.

Her alleged motive for murdering her mother Evelina Bliss, who had married Henry H. Bliss after the death of her first husband, Robert Swift Livingston, was to gain an inheritance from Robert Swift’s estate. That Mary Alice was arrested in her mourning clothes after attending her mother’s burial added extra interest to the story, as did the fact that the bizarre instrument of death – a pail of arsenic-laced clam chowder – had been delivered to the victim by her ten-year-old granddaughter. An especially scandalous factor was that Mary Alice was the unwed mother of four children, the youngest of whom was born in prison while Mary Alice awaited trial. If convicted, she would become the first female victim of the newfangled electric chair. All these lurid details became the central focus of an all-out circulation war then underway, particularly between Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal.

The trial was held in the recently completed Criminal Courts Building, adjacent to the building in which Mary Alice was held, the infamous city prison known as the Tombs. Modeled after an Egyptian tomb and completed in 1840, the imposing main entrance of the Tombs featured four massive columns at the head of a wide set of stairs. Connecting the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building over Franklin Street was a pedestrian bridge known as the “Bridge of Sighs.” The name derived from a bridge in Venice that connected the old prison to the Doge’s palace, a bridge whose windows reportedly offered prisoners their last view of beautiful Venice before being taken to their cells. This bridge was romanticized by Byron in his poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” in which he wrote, “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, a palace and a prison on each hand.” New York’s Bridge of Sighs also had windows, but rather than a beautiful view of a canal and the harbor of Venice, they looked out on unbeautiful Franklin Street and busy Centre Street. Mary Alice would traverse the Bridge of Sighs, from her prison cell to the courtroom and back, every day of her trial.

Presiding over the trial was Recorder John Goff, the top judge of the city’s Court of General Sessions. The title of recorder was held over from earlier days when a judge had the responsibility of keeping a record of various happenings in the city. Goff had been elected recorder in November 1894 as part of a reform-minded fusion ticket organized to defeat Tammany Hall. The reformers called themselves the Committee of Seventy, reviving the name of a group that, twenty years earlier, had toppled the notoriously corrupt Tammany boss, William Tweed. Anti-Tammany Democrats had urged Goff’s nomination for mayor, but the many Republicans in the fusion movement, including J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, were unwilling to nominate a Democrat at the top of the ticket. So Republican William Strong became their candidate for mayor and Goff ran for recorder, a post that some argued was more important, since the recorder had a fourteen-year term while the mayor was elected for only two years. After a brief but intense campaign – the time between nomination and election was little more than a month – the reform ticket of Strong and Goff won handily, garnering about 60 percent of the vote. Goff received 4,000 votes more than Strong.

Among the noteworthy members of the Strong administration was Theodore Roosevelt, who, as president of the Police Commission, proceeded to tackle corruption by removing various bad actors from the police force. In his new position, Roosevelt was strict in enforcing city laws, including the blue law forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sundays, a law that was especially unpopular with the many people working six-day weeks. Occasionally President Roosevelt was more lenient. When a woman was arrested in Central Park for riding her horse astride, which policemen believed to violate decency standards, he ordered her released, asking, “Why shouldn’t a woman ride a horse astride, if she want to?”

The defendant Mary Alice was only five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds. She continued to appear in mourning dress, and was often referred to in the press as “the little woman in black.” Her fourth child, born only five months before the trial opened, shared her cell in the Tombs. His birth certificate gives his name as Robert Livingston Fleming, his father’s name as “unknown,” and his mother’s name as Mary Alice Livingston Fleming. Mary Alice had recently taken Fleming as her surname, the name of the father of her first child, and she had been booked under that name. Her many cousins in the socially prominent Livingston family were pleased that the sensational trial was therefore described in the press as the Fleming trial, rather than the Livingston trial. Baby Robert was the only male resident of the women’s wing of the

Tombs, and he became immensely popular with the other women prisoners. His mother was not the only accused murderer to hold him and play with him in the early months of his life.

The lead prosecutor in Mary Alice’s murder trial was assistant district attorney John McIntyre. In his long and highly successful career, he prosecuted 614 cases of murder and manslaughter and won 580 convictions. Mary Alice’s chief counsel was Charles W. Brooke, a skillful, resourceful, and combative criminal defense attorney. Mary Alice’s well-publicized status as an unwed mother caused many in Victorian New York to consider her highly immoral and perverted, and McIntyre and the prosecution team hoped that jurors might feel that someone so immoral would not be above murder. Brooke, on the other hand, reminded jurors that a guilty verdict would send the defendant to her death, leaving unsaid but known to all that such a verdict would also send four children to an orphanage, including a five-month-old baby.

On the opening day of the trial, Hearst’s Journal called Mary Alice “the strangest woman ever charged with crime in the courts of New York.” Intense publicity of the trial drew many prominent New Yorkers to the courtroom to view this “strangest woman,” and among the first was the Reverend Charles Parkhurst, president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. Parkhurst’s 1892 crusade against vice, which included his visits in disguise to the city’s saloons, gambling houses, and brothels, had led to public outrage and committee hearings, and contributed to the election in 1894 of the anti-Tammany fusion ticket. A few days later the trial received a visit from another person known to be deeply concerned about the city’s vice, Anthony Comstock, founder and head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Also drawn to see the trial and study the face of Mary Alice was Joseph H. Choate, a prominent corporate lawyer active in both the earlier anti-Tammany reform movement that ousted Boss Tweed and in the recent fusion reform group that elected Strong and Goff. Choate had been among the founding fathers of two important city institutions, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and three years after Mary Alice’s trial, would be appointed ambassador to Great Britain by President William McKinley.

Filling the jury box with twelve men required over two weeks of questioning, with many being excused by claiming opposition to capital punishment or, in a more limited excuse, capital punishment of women. The next three weeks were devoted to the case for the prosecution, which elicited testimony from over two dozen witnesses. Among them were two analytical chemists who reported the detection of substantial amounts of arsenic, “the king of poisons,” in the stomach of the deceased and in the remnants of the clam chowder. They were followed to the stand by eleven-year-old Florence King, playmate of Mary Alice’s daughter Grace, who testified that in August 1895 she and Grace had delivered the fatal clam chowder from Mary Alice’s apartment to the home of the victim, Grace’s grandmother. The doctor who performed the autopsy and other expert witnesses all argued that the victim clearly died from arsenical poisoning.

The sixth week of the trial was devoted to the case for the defense. They presented a series of expert witnesses who offered alternative explanations of Evelina Bliss’s death, hoping to provide jurors bases for “reasonable doubt.” They further argued that Mary Alice would not have taken the risk of sending poisoned clam chowder by her own daughter. And since the arsenic found in Evelina’s stomach and in the remnants of the clam chowder was the strongest part of the people’s case, the defense argued that one of the prosecution’s chemists had deliberately introduced the arsenic himself in order to gain a conviction and advance his career.

Monday of the seventh week of the trial was devoted to the closing statements by prosecution and defense. On Tuesday morning, Recorder Goff carefully read his lengthy charge to the jury. He finished at twenty minutes past one, at which time the jury was instructed to retire to consider their verdict. It was a long and nervous afternoon and evening for Mary Alice. Her lawyers had told her to expect an early acquittal, but as the hours passed slowly by, she became more and more concerned. She spent much of this time on the Bridge of Sighs, looking out at the streets below with the hope that she would once again be able to enter that world of freedom, rather than be sent to Sing Sing to face the electric chair. Midnight passed, and many in the courtroom went home, thinking that the jury would be locked up for the night. But at one in the morning, nearly twelve hours after they had started their deliberations, the jury returned with their verdict. Throughout her trial, the “little woman in black” had appeared calm in the courtroom, radiating confidence in her acquittal. However, when told to stand and face the jury, she was visibly shaking and required the support of one of the matrons of the Tombs. This was the first time that Mary Alice had clearly shown any evidence of fear.

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.

This article first appeared in the August 6th edition of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/8/5/a-mosque-and-new-york-city/another-ruckus-another-war

“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.

This article first appeared on August 23, 2010 at www.huffingtonpost.com

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