The South Street Seaport is the home for a great many nautical treasures. It’s also the location of a memorial to nautical tragedy.
The Titanic Memorial, a 60-foot white lighthouse, sits in the little plaza at Fulton and Water Streets.
This was no mere decorative lighthouse as it seems today.
For much of its history, it was an operational light source, a beacon over the East River.
The memorial’s first home, atop the Seamen’s Church Institute (Courtesy NYPL)
The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 people from all social classes.
The loss shook society to its core. Among the victims were prominent New York businessmen and benefactors such as John Jacob Astor IV and Benjamin Guggenheim.
As New Yorkers mourned the loss of loved ones, they immediately funneled their grief into the building of memorials, the physical remembrance of a disaster that left virtually no trace behind.
Mayor William Jay Gaynor gathered community leaders to City Hall in May 1912 to solicit ambitious ideas of the new memorial.
The Evening World attributes one idea for a lighthouse to engineer Carroll Livingston Riker, who suggested “the lighthouse should be located at some perilous point on the coast, illuminated by a most powerful light and with a great fog horn that may be heard many miles as part of its equipment.”
Meanwhile, a less dramatic lighthouse memorial (pictured above) was funded by J.P. Morgan and planned for the top of the new Seamen’s Church Institute at 25 South Street.
From a 1912 handbill, drumming up support for a proper memorial. (Courtesy Seaman’s Institute)
The lighthouse was equipped with a time ball which was lowered at noon to help distant sailors adjust their equipment. (This same sort of ball is affixed to the top of One Times Square in 1908, dropped every year at ring in the new year.)
The lighthouse memorial was dedicated on the first anniversary of the disaster with many family and friends of victims in attendance.
The New York Times claims the lighthouse and ball drop atop the Institute “were simply features of the existing plan, relabeled as a memorial.” [source]
However it became New York’s most prominent remembrance of the Titanic disaster after all when, over at City Hall, nobody could make up their mind on a truly grand memorial. (All you need to know about the city’s failed efforts is illustrated in this 1912 headline on one meeting — “One Man Made 18 Speeches.”)
Meanwhile, there were other Titanic memorials being planned in other parts of the city.
In Greenwich Village, in the Washington Square studios of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the artist began work on a sculpture for a national memorial in Washington D.C.
She displayed a model for the memorial in February 1916 that drew gasps from society women.
“[T]he present figure with its pedestal extends from floor to ceiling and catches interesting lights that add to the highly dramatic conceptions.” [source]
A study of the Titanic memorial which was displayed at Whitney’s Village studio. (Courtesy AAA/Whitney Museum)
Yet another Titanic memorial was planned in June 1912 to honor philanthropists Isador and Ida Straus near their home on the Upper West Side. A competition was held in 1913 for aspiring sculptors, with Augustus Lukeman’s pondering nymph the eventual winner.
Featured at the dedication ceremony were 800 children who had been helped by Straus’ Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side.
Below: Dedication of Straus Square and its curious monument. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
As for the Titanic Lighthouse Memorial?
It sat dutifully atop the Seamen’s Institute for decades, its green light a welcome beacon to those entering the harbor.
By the 1950s, shipping no longer came through the area of New York’s waterfront, and the Institute eventually sold its building.
The lighthouse was donated to the South Street Seaport Museum in 1968, then a budding institution formed just a couple years prior to protect the historic structures of the area.
For a time, the lighthouse actually sat on the waterfront before relocating back to its present home in 1976, in a park partially funded by Exxon Oil.
There was one other memorial to the Titanic disaster — the Wireless Operators Memorial at Battery Park. This bronze cenotaph and fountain was dedicated in 1915 to nine intrepid employees — “wireless heroes” — who died on the Titanic and in other ocean disasters.
Wrote J. Andrew White in 1915: “It is an eloquent reminder of a tradition that has grown out of the brand of courage which seeks no precedent, which, founded on the heroic action of a mere boy, has been written in the indelible annals of the men who go down to the sea in ships.”
After sitting in storage for many years, the memorial can once again be found in Battery Park.
Let me take you back to a simpler time, back to a time where it might have been okay to hate the actual World Trade Center.
The World Trade Center was originally seen as a representation of New York’s own dreams and failures. The buildings represented progress to some, disruption to others.
An entire business district — Radio Row— was eliminated in its construction. Another neighborhood — Battery Park City — sprang up in its shadow. The monumental design by Minoru Yamasaki radically altered (distorted?) the skyline. Some of New York’s oldest streets were now blocked from sunlight. On the other hand, an area of Manhattan that would have been susceptible to rising blight was now renewed.
It was the apotheosis of post-modern design, the apex of New York City construction.
Everything grand and intolerable about New York City in the late 1960s/early 1970s was embodied here in these two impossibly tall shafts of metal.
Many saw a waste of resources and state governments with skewered priorities. Business interests were hopeful the buildings would reinvigorate the Financial District. They would, eventually.
But back in 1973 many openly wondered how its owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were even going to attract tenants.
Below: The view of downtown Manhattan from a New Jersey marina
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York, Edmund V Gillon
After years of construction that transformed lower Manhattan, the buildings were officially opened in a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 4, 1973. Far from a rapturous embrace, the opening of the world’s tallest buildings was met with relief, resignation and turmoil.
Few were in a mood to celebrate two shiny new symbols of wealth in a city slowly nearing bankruptcy.
Here are a few more details from its opening day and its aftermath:
People were already over it: The opening was occasioned by severe rain. (It’s in good company; the opening of the Statue of Libertywas also met with a downpour.) Even without it, however, the celebration would have been heavily muted.
The ground was broken on the World Trade Center site almost seven years before, and New Yorkers had plenty of time to get used to the rising towers. The first tower had been completed by 1970, but by then, the city had become rather jaded to the expensive buildings. As it was, lower levels of the second building were still not even completed.
Disagreements: The top luminaries at the opening were New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and New Jersey governor William T. Cahill. The World Trade Center was a Port Authority project; PATH trains to New Jersey were rumbling underneath (or were supposed to be, see below).
While the two governors seemed in playful spirits, Cahill openly resented the backseat his state took in the finished product. According to author Eric Darton: “Cahill implies that New Jersey’s commuter rail needs have taken second place to the trade center, and Rockefeller, still grinning, points towards the Jersey shore. ‘You see all those magnificent container ports,’ he says, ‘that took all those jobs away from New York.’ “
In Absentia: Gone were the days when U.S. presidents showed up at the opening of New York landmarks, but President Richard Nixon did send a statement, hailing WTC as “a major factor for the expansion of the nation’s international trade.” That very same month, the Watergate cover-up erupted into the scandal that would eventually lead to his resignation the following year.
STRIKE! Not only was Nixon not there, but the man he designated to read the speech — Peter J. Brennan — was not even there. Three days earlier, the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen union began a strike against Port Authority. Because of the strike, the PATH train — that glorious feature of the new World Trade Center — was closed for a total of 63 days. Brennan was Nixon’s new Secretary of Labor, so it would hardly seem proper to break the picket line. Nixon’s speech was delivered instead by a Port Authority chairman.
Critics, Part One: Noted labor leader and powerful mediator Theodore W. Kheel was violently against the states’ interest in the World Trade Center. Calling it “socialism at its worst,” he demanded the governors take the podium on ribbon-cutting day and sell the building to private investors “at the earliest possible date.”
Others were perhaps understandably concerned that the buildings, given special tax status, were now a quarter-filled with state offices and certainly destined to empty and bankrupt office buildings with no such tax breaks in the surrounding area. Luckily, Kheel did live to see the building sold to private concerns in 1998.
Critics, Part Two: Somebody else was saving up some vitriol for opening day — noted architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Having years to craft some well-worded jabs, she did so in a column in the New York Times the following day. “These are big buildings, but they are not great architecture…..The Port Authority has built the ultimate Disneyland fairytale blockbuster. It is General Motors Gothic.”
Critics, Part Three: Labor leaders were disgruntled. Critics dismissed it. But many New Yorkers outright loathed it. It’s a bit disturbing to read such outright disgust over structures that we have very different feelings about today. From the Village Voice a week after the opening:
“The ecology-minded and those who are concerned with the energy crisis are fond of predicting that the building will have to be torn down — or at the very least abandoned — on that not-to-distant day when the power it consumes puts an intolerable strain on our already-diminishing power reserves.”
Nowhere to Eat: The World Trade Center could facilitate thousands of employees, but, on opening day, it had one restaurant, called “Eat and Drink,” where “the waitresses wear hard hats and its busboys wear vests inscribed “Ecologist” on the back.”
In the second building, a makeshift sandwich shop opened on the unfinished 44th floor. Needless to say, outside food vendors in the area were not displeased.
Subversion The ribbon-cutting ceremony also marked the end of One World Trade Center’s dominance as the world’s tallest building. Chicago trumped it when Sears Tower topped out at 1,454-feet less than one month later.
In New York, the buildings quickly became a totem of excess, of something that could be symbolically overcome. You may be familiar with the daredevil Philippe Petit and his insane and unbelievably majestic (and illegal) tightrope walk between the towers. But you may not remember that it took place just sixteen months after the opening, on August 6, 1974.
Two years later, King Kong performed a similar sort of feat in the 1976 remake starring Jessica Lange.
But there was magic in the air. On the very same day as the ribbon-cutting, in a hospital across the water in Brooklyn, a woman went into labor and gave birth to a child who would later become the nightclub-loving illusionist David Blaine. The World Trade Center and David Blaine — born on the same day!
Photography on this page, from various periods, by Edmund V. Gillon, courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York. Check out their online gallery for some more beautiful black-and-white shots.
This article originally ran on September 11, 2014.
One of the great narratives of American history — immigration — through the experiences of the Irish.
We just reedited and reworked our 2017 show on Irish immigration in time for St. Patrick’s Day and a celebration of all things Irish! So much has changed in our world since 2017 and this history feels more relevant and impactful than ever before.
You don’t have a New York City without the Irish. In fact, you don’t have a United States of America as we know it today.
This diverse and misunderstood immigrant group began coming over from Ireland in significant numbers starting in the Colonial era, mostly as indentured servants. In the early 19th century, these Irish arrivals, both Protestants and Catholics, were already consolidating — via organizations like the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and in places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Emigrants leaving Queenstown for New York / M.F. [Published] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress
But starting in the 1830s, with a terrible blight wiping out Ireland’s potato crops, a mass wave of Irish immigration would dwarf all that came before, hundreds of thousands of weary, sometimes desperate newcomers who entered New York to live in its most squalid neighborhoods.
The Irish were among the laborers who built the Croton Aqueduct, the New York grid plan and Central Park. Irish women comprised most of the hired domestic help by the mid 19th century.
The arrival of the Irish and their assimilation into American life is a story repeated in many cities. Here in New York City, it is essential in our understanding of the importance of modern immigrant communities to the life of the Big Apple.
PLUS: The origins of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade!
LISTEN HERE: When The Irish Came To New York
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St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, the embodiment of early Irish pride in New York. Below: A photograph by Edmund Gillon from 1975.
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Irish Emigrants Leaving Home — The Priest’s Blessing (dated 1851)
A lithograph by Maurer and Currier (of Currier and Ives) illustrating a rather stereotypical scene of Irish life.
An anti-Catholic illustration from 1855.
Library of Congress
In 1860, fear of foreigners inspired a San Francisco cartoonist to draw this image, imagining laborers from Ireland and China (responsible for building the railroads) ‘swallowing’ up the country. A mixed Irish/Chinese caricature completes the job.
Library of Congress
St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, a new signpost for the acceptance of the Catholic religion in America, sits alongside acres of hot real estate in 1905. Its neighbors would slowly transition from luxury manors to upscale shops and department stores.
Image courtesy Shorpy
By 1872, you were seeing much more thoughtful depictions of Irish Americans such as this one  by Duval and Hunter. “Print shows a mother pinning clover on her son’s suit lapel, on the right is a young girl standing at an open window waving a banner “God save Ireland.” A domestic scene in a palor with a sewing machine on the left.”
LOC
The departure of the 69th Infantry Regiment, the ‘Fightin’ Irish’ brigade headed to the battlefields of the Civil War. Lithograph dated 1862.
The caption, dated 1866 — “Irish Emigrants Leaving Their Home For America — The Mail Coach From Cahirciveen, County Kerry, Ireland.”
From a Harpers Weekly article from 1874 — leaving Queenstown (today’s town of Cobh) for New York.
Library of Congress
The insanity of Castle Garden, the prime immigration station in New York in 1880, before the construction of Ellis Island. Below that, registering names at Castle Garden in 1871.
NYPL
The hazards of immigrants leaving Castle Garden, as vividly illustrated by Puck Magazine.
The flow of immigrants were better accommodated by Ellis Island, pictured here in 1907.
MCNY
Irish women line up at the Emigrant Savings Bank, withdrawing money to send back to relatives in Ireland. (1880)
Library of Congress
Irish vaudeville often poked fun at their own stereotypes — and promoted many others. This 1880 Harrigan and Hart sketch was called ‘Ireland vs Italy.’
MCNY
An 1886 cartoon by Bernard Gillam, illustrating the Tammany Hall tiger with Irish accoutrement.
Courtesy MCNY
‘Professor’ Mike Donovan, an Irish-American boxer who performed out west then became a boxing instructor in New York up until his death in the Bronx in 1918.
LOC
A typical example of an Irish-themed song from the Gilded Age, of the type which is obviously playing with some stereotypes of Irish people.
By 1895 the St. Patrick’s Day Parade is a genuine event, drawing New Yorkers of all kinds. These pictures are along 57th Street.
The parade in 1909, featuring a banner for the Kerrymen’s Patriotic and Benevolent Association.
The St. Patrick’s Day Parade, between 1910-15
LOC
A version of this podcast and page was originally released in March 2017.
Despite the Academy Awards being a celebration of all things Hollywood, New York has actually hosted the Oscar ceremony on more than one occasion. Or rather, they co-hosted the event — from 1953 to 1957 — in a rare and soon abandoned bicoastal ceremony that taxed the mechanics of television’s earliest production crews.
There were two reasons for this complicated arrangement. NBC, who was broadcasting the event, had most of their principal stages in New York. After all, the first NBC studios were at Rockefeller Center, where they still remain today. Even The Tonight Show, perhaps NBC’s first and most famous Burbank production, filmed in Manhattan until the early 1970s.
Just as important, many film stars were in New York, unable to get out of theatrical commitments on Broadway. And frankly, in the years before international television viewership, the Oscars simply did not have the same urgency as they do today. Thus, the award show came to them.
Judy Holliday gives Jose Ferrer a friendly squeeze — and Gloria Swanson bursts with joy — as Ferrer’s name is announced as the winner of Best Actor, at La Zambra in midtown. (Getty Images)
23rd Annual Academy Awards Best Picture winner: All About Eve March 29, 1951
Before splitting the broadcast, the Oscars once tried a very strange live radio remote from a New York nightclub.
For the 23rd Annual Academy Awards, held on March 29, 1951, many nominees like Judy Holliday and Gloria Swanson remained in New York. Both Swanson and Jose Ferrer, starring in the Broadway comedy Twentieth Century, were nominated that year.
Instead of disappointing a sell-out theater audience, Ferrer invited all the nominees to an after-theater party at the La Zambra (127 W. 52nd Street), a nightclub owned by Spanish guitarist Vincente Gomez. A live radio link was set up among the tables, and nominees wined and dined waiting for their categories to be announced out in Los Angeles.
The club was hopping that night. Ferrer won Best Actor (for Cyrano de Bergerac), and Holliday won Best Actress (for Born Yesterday), giving their speeches into a radio microphone as champagne corks popped in the background. (Swanson, who thought she might win for Sunset Blvd., was less enthusiastic for Judy’s win.)
It’s appropriate they were in New York, as Ferrer and Holliday both won for film adaptations of Broadway shows in which they had starred. And clearly underscoring the power that the New York stage still had on the film business, Best Picture went to the stage drama All About Eve.
Shirley Booth accepts her Oscar in New York, as the audience in Los Angeles watches on. (LIFE images)
25th Annual Academy Awards Best Picture winner: The Greatest Show On Earth March 19, 1953
While the Los Angeles crowd were entertained by host Bob Hope, the attendees to the first official bicoastal New York ceremony were met by co-host Fredrick March, a two-time Academy Award winner. The event was broadcast from 5 Columbus Circle, at the International Theatre.
In 1953, the International was a worn out, tired New York stage, having gone through a host of different owners and renovations since it first opened — as the Majestic Theatre — in 1903. At different periods of time, it was owned by Florenz Ziegfeld and William Randolph Hearst, and its stage played hosts to virtually every form of entertainment, from burlesque to ballet.
Definitely an odd setting for an awards program, especially given that this was also the first Oscar show to be broadcast on television. But the International was owned by NBC, who had agreed to fund the inaugural broadcast. And NBC’s fees to broadcast the program were especially valuable to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as the film studios had refused to fund an elaborate bi-coastal show.
The broadcast began 7pm PST and 10 p.m. here, to accommodate the Broadway stars just stepping off the stage. Due to staggered entrances, many of the seats at the International were empty for much of the ceremony.
Among the nominees sitting in the Columbus Circle theater was Best Actress nominee Shirley Booth (above), who was starring in the Broadway play The Time Of The Cuckoo on 40th and Broadway at the now-demolished Empire Theatre. She won the Oscar for the film version ofCome Back, Little Sheba; she had won a Tony Award for the stage version in 1950.
Given the limitations of early television technology, it’s amazing they were able to broadcast simultaneously between two coasts at all. Glitches did cause a few amusing gaffes for television audiences. When the universally reviled film The Greatest Show On Earth somehow won Best Picture over the favorite High Noon, the camera switched to the New York audience, who sat there not clapping and in mild confusion.
There would not be another Oscar telecast at the International, or anything else for that matter. The very next year, NBC moved out, and the theater was unceremoniously torn down, replaced with one of Robert Moses’ pet projects, the ill-fated Coliseum convention center.
Audrey snatches off her blonde Ondine wig as her limousine races her to the Oscar ceremony uptown.
26th Annual Academy Awards Best Picture Winner: From Here To Eternity March 25, 1954
For the remainder of the Oscars’ short stay in New York, they were broadcast from the New Century Theater*, at Seventh Ave. and 58th Street, right off Columbus Circle and best known as the theater that Orson Welles and his spirited cast stormed in 1937 to perform his musical The Cradle Will Rock.
Film fans were set up in bleachers outside, just as they’re popularly done out in Los Angeles. But one New York nominee didn’t get there in time to meet her fans. Audrey Hepburn was down at the 46th Street Theatre performing the play Ondine, costumed in a blonde wig.
After the show, she raced to the Century in a limousine (with police escort, no less), ripped off her wig, rushed to the bathroom to wipe off her stage makeup, then settled into her seat for less than ten minutes before standing again to accept the trophy for Best Actress for Roman Holiday.
Audrey, off Columbus Circle: Hepburn sits in nervous anticipation at the New Century Theatre, moments before she wins for Best Actress.
The show, hosted in New York again by Fredric March, had another New York icon receiving an Oscar that year — Frank Sinatra, Best Supporting Actor for his role in the Best Picture that year. However, he was in Los Angeles to accept it.
(You can find tons of pictures of Audrey in her post-Oscar glow at the NBC Photo Bank.)
Claudette Colbert and Joseph Mankiewicz presided over a sedate New York audience, while out in Los Angeles, audiences were energized by young comedian Jerry Lewis. (Courtesy Oscars)
27th and 28th Academy Awards Best Picture Winners: On The Waterfront, Marty March 30, 1955; March 21, 1956
It became obvious to most viewers that the bicoastal productions were becoming lopsided. After all, it was early evening in Los Angeles, and most of the young, fresh talent was there. In New York, it was post-theater time, and attracted the older stars — some exhausted from stage productions. Nothing exemplifies this more than the 28th Oscar ceremony, hosted in New York by proper Claudette Colbert and Joseph Mankiewicz and in Hollywood by the hot new comedian Jerry Lewis, whose ribald antics made the New York cutaways seem drab.
But the awards were all about the East Coast. The Best Pictures these two years were for films set in Hoboken, NJ and the Bronx, respectively. Much of the cast of On The Waterfront were actually at the New York ceremony, including Best Supporting Actress winner Eva Marie Saint (pictured below), her pregnancy concealed by a jacket as she mounted the stage to accept her award. (Here’s the video of her win, again highlighting the difference between the New York and the L.A. ceremonies.) Best Director Elia Kazan was also here to accept his trophy. Marlon Brando, however, was out in Los Angeles, apparently where the fun was.
The following year, this time with Colbert going solo as the East Coast mistress of ceremonies, Best Picture went to Marty, another show originating from New York. But not from a Broadway stage. As a symbolic move towards the importance of the small screen, the Ernest Borgnine vehicle was based on a teleplay from the Goodyear Television Playhouse.
Below: Eva Marie Saint, in shock, approaches the podium to accept her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for On the Waterfront, her tasteful ensemble barely concealing her pregnancy. (Courtesy Life images)
29th Academy Awards Best Picture Winner: Around The World In 80 Days March 27, 1957
It was clear by this time that the two coast production was more trouble than it was worth. While Hollywood went with Jerry Lewis again, while New York opted for the elegant but comparatively unexciting Celeste Holm.
This would be the last year New York hosted the Oscars. And this would be the last hurrah for the New Century Theatre as well. It would be torn down in 1962 and replaced with the rather sleek, curvy200 Central Park South co-op.
NOTE: To make this story slightly confusing, New York also had a Century Theatre on the other side of Columbus Circle that was demolished in the 1930s. Hopefully I’ve gotten these theaters all straightened out!
ALSO: You might like to see the Life Magazine photographs of Audrey pictured above in the context of the original Life Magazine article.
The bulky and yet somewhat elegant contraption above is the short-lived Loew Bridge, which once hung over Broadway at Fulton Street back in 1867 and 1868, an early cast-iron pedestrian bridge at one of the busiest intersections in the city.
It was named not for its architect, but for the comptroller of New York at the time, Charles E. Loew.
Crossing the street was indeed a challenge then, in an era of no traffic lights and conveyances operated by horses. A couple blocks to the north lay the heart of city government and the publishing industry, not to mention St. Paul’s Church and the Astor House, New York’s finest early hotel. (Both are seen in the photo below.)
New York Public Library
The bridge, which opened in April 1867, provided a respite to New Yorkers frustrated with dirty streets and impossible crossing options for pedestrians. One fanatic was even inspired to pen a lengthy poem to its honor.
Unfortunately, it was not popular with surrounding business owners, particularly the one at 212 Broadway. That storefront, the hatter of one Charles Knox, was obscured by the bridge’s latticework and decreased business opportunities, he alleged.
It seems unusual that one businessman would be able to effectively crumble a new bridge to the ground, but Mr. Knox had the city’s sympathies.
Two years earlier, his original shop had been destroyed in the same fire that incinerated Barnum’s American Museum. However he managed to unite some business owners of the area and eventually “brought suit against the city for $25,000 damages.” [source]
Most likely, Knox was more concerned with the belief that he was losing business to a rival hat shop across the street. (After all, to paraphrase a popular cliche, the hats are always cleaner on the other side.) Thanks to his efforts, the city ripped the bridge down less than two years after first erecting it, and citizens went back to their filthy and treacherous street crossings.
Back to square one, it seems. I think the situation is very well summarized in this letter from ‘B.’ to the New York Times, published on December 20, 1868:
“Taking down the Broadway Bridge appears to cause few remarks from the press, and when they have spoken they have rather been in favor of the removal.
“It appears to me the bridge, at certain periods was a great convenience, notwithstanding its needless height. When the snow slush is a foot thick, and the street blocked up with stages and trucks in a dead lock, it is a great accommodation to have a bridge to cross. It is almost impossible for women and children to cross Broadway, near Fulton Street, at such times; and if men get over it is at the risk of being covered with filth.
“Before the bridge was built, the writer has walked from Liberty Street to near Wall before getting across. At that time the papers were continually talking about ‘relief to Broadway”; but since the bridge was built, that has ceased. I think we shall hear it again on the first thaw after a heavy snowstorm, when crowds will be seen standing at the corners wondering how they will be able to get over the street.
“If the bridge is an injury to private property, the owners should be remunerated for the damage; not that a few shopkeepers, because their business is injured, or they think it is, should be the means of inconveniencing the whole public by having it removed.
“If that were the case with railroads, every farmer would have the power of stopping the road going over its land, because he thought it injured it — and there would not be a railroad in this country.”
Images above from the New York Public Library digital collection
Federal Hall National Memorial, currently administered by the National Park Service, has always been a popular landmark with tourists thanks to its position on one of the most photographed intersections in New York. Who can resist that noble statue of George Washington silently meditating on the financial juggernaut of Wall Street?
In 2015 Federal Hall was officially named an official American National Treasure, part of the ongoing Saving Places programby National Trust for Historic Preservation calling attention to endangered landmarks of national significance. (The following article was originally posted that year in honor.)
While this sounds like a distinction that might pique the interest of Nicolas Cage — after all, he broke into Trinity Church up the street in the first National Treasure film — the National Treasure program gives a boost to historic places that may be otherwise neglected or under-appreciated. When’s the last time you were there?
Here are a few facts about the history of Federal Hall that you may not have known:
2. That Federal Hall was remodeled by a controversial architect.Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a successful city contractor and former Continental Army engineer redesigned the structure in time for its use as the first national capital.
According to David McCullough, it was the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style. Lâ’Enfant would later work on the creation of Washington DC from Maryland swampland and be fired from that project by George Washington.
4. The original Federal Hall was torn down in 1812 when city administration moved to the new City Hall. Its materials were sold off to make other buildings in the city.
Below: Wall Street in 1825 without a Federal Hall, either old or new!
5. The current Federal Hall is actually the original U.S. Custom House which opened in 1842, replacing a structure used for that purpose at 22-24 Wall Street.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
6. The offices of the Custom House again moved in 1855, and the building was used as the U.S. Sub-Treasury building. In 1913 it became the first place in New Yorkto buy the original buffalo nickel.
Below: Suffrage proponents Mrs. W.L. Prendergast, Mrs. W.L. Colt, Doris Stevens, Alice Paul stop in front of Federal Hall
The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s stoic portrait and one of the most valuable paintings on earth, came to America during the winter of 1963, a single-picture loan that was both a special favor to Jackie Kennedy and a symbolic tool during tense conversations between the United States and France about nuclear arms.
The first stop was the National Gallery in Washington DC, where over a half million people spent hours in line to gaze at the famous smile.
Then, on February 7, 1963, she made her debut to the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the medieval sculpture hall, for a month-long exhibition that would become one of the museums most attended shows in history.
New York tourist Mona Lisa
In the second half of this week’s show, we’re joined by Patrick Bringley, a former security guard at the Metropolitan Museum and a current tour guide. His book All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum and Me, published by Simon & Schuster, recounts a decade of purpose, sorrow and epiphany while working in America’s largest museum.
For more information on the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, check out our podcast from last fall celebrating the museum’s 150th anniversary:
And for some dazzling backstory on the Mona Lisa and just exactly why she’s so famous, check out the Gilded Gentleman’s podcast The Theft of the Mona Lisa, Paris 1911.
Here’s an excerpt of the article in which this week’s podcast is based:
On that first day, thousands lined up outside in the freezing cold to catch a glimpse of the iconic painting; the first in line, a taxi driver named Joseph Lasky, got there at 4:30 in the morning.
By week’s end, already a quarter of a million people had visited the museum to see the Italian masterpiece.
Accommodating such a famous painting required some unprecedented changes in protocol. As a favor to the two governments, no admission fee was charged to view the painting, and weekday hours were extended until 9 pm each night.
Thousands of schoolchildren crammed the museum every morning, funneling by the modest-sized painting in a daze.
Museum director James Rorimer told the New Yorker, “The dirt we expect, from them and everybody else! The accumulation of dust from scuffling shoes! We’ll have literally balls of dust.”
From reports, it sounds like they got the dust and air quality under control. The painting was secured by bulletproof glass and a couple Secret Service agents.
A line down the block to see Mona. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum
But the museum sprinkler system almost created an international incident by nearly destroying the painting in an unplanned shower.
According to a memoir by former museum director Thomas Hoving, he arrived at the museum storeroom one morning to find people frantically scurrying around with towels.
“No one ever discovered why, but some time during the night one of the fire sprinklers in the ceiling broke its glass ampoule….The Mona Lisa, according to the Louvre official, was ok. He told me that the thick glass covering it had acted like an effective ¦raincoat.”
By the time the painting was packed up aboard the US United States for her journey back to the Louvre, the Mona Lisa had been seen by well over one million people.
According to the New York Times, the museum was able to identify the one-millionth visitor — one Arthur Pomerantz of New Rochelle — who was given a reproduction of the painting and gifts for his children.
The final tally, according to the Times:
This article was originally published on this site in July 2013.
On Memorial Day in the year 1913, one of New York City’s great war memorials was finally unveiled — the Maine Monument, at the southwest corner entrance of Central Park.
The monument pays tribute to the 266 American soldiers who perished on the USS Maine, which exploded in Havana, Cuba, on February 15, 1898.
Given the various wars which have involved the United States since then, this event is sometimes overshadowed, but it so horrified and angered Americans that emotions helped fuel the conflict known as the Spanish-American War later that year.
This is often considered a war manufactured by New York publishers as anti-Spanish rhetoric in the papers — the seeds of so-called ‘yellow journalism’, featuring outlandish exaggeration or out-right fabrication to sell their product to New Yorkers — led directly into military engagement.
Newspapers were not only behind the causes of war; they were behind its monuments too. Within days of the explosion, William Randolph Hearst called for donations for a memorial to the Maine’s fallen crew.
Just as Joseph Pulitzer had done a decade earlier for the Statue of Liberty, Hearst went directly to its readers, young and old, to help fund a tribute to the Maine.
Given the wall-to-wall coverage of the war that year and the ample profits from newspaper sales, it’s strange that Hearst couldn’t just fund the whole thing himself.
Less than a month after the disaster, people around the country were fund-raising for the Maine Memorial.
In March 1898, a traveling comic opera crew was raising money in Oklahoma when its lead actress killed herself.
The following month, a vaudeville benefit at New York’s Koster & Bial in Herald Square was overtaken by sailors who took to singing patriotic songs from the balconies.
Hundreds of special benefits were hosted in theaters and stages across the country over the next decade.
It’s unclear how much of the proceeds ended up funding the monument, as it took well over a decade for money to be raised and its design — by New Jersey architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle, America’s go-to memorial designer of the Gilded Age — to be approved.
Magonigle enlisted his frequent collaborator Attilio Piccirilli to create the bronze and marble sculptures.
Some of that earnest enthusiasm seems to have disappeared when the memorial was finally dedicated on Memorial Day 1913.
According the New York Sun, leading New York artist erupted in “a storm of criticism” at the shiny, ostentatious design, with aesthetes calling the work a “misfit” and “a disgrace to the city.”
Many thought its relationship to the actual Maine was lost in vague theatrical symbolism.
“Architecturally and constructively the whole thing is cheap and bad.”[source]
Picture courtesy Museum of the City of New York
The memorial was unveiled with a grand military parade and the attendance of ten warships in the harbor, including one from Havana.
There was, of course, one great conflict on everybody’s mind that day when, in the official ceremony, sworn enemies Hearst and Mayor William Jay Gaynor met at the unveiling. (Among many grievances, Hearst had unsuccessfully run against Gaynor for mayor in 1909.)
With utmost restraint, Gaynor managed to shake Hearst’s hand without punching him in the face.
Two years later, a second memorial to the Maine was placed in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. And in 1926, a lavish monument was placed in Havana, Cuba.
Taken 1920, courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Dorothy Catherine Draper is a truly forgotten figure in American history. She was the first woman to ever sit for a photograph — a daguerrotype, actually, in the year 1840, upon the rooftop of the school which would become New York University.
The circumstances that got her to this position were rather unique. She was the older sister of a professor named John William Draper, and she assisted him in his success and fame even when it seemed a detriment to her. The Drapers worked alongside Samuel Morse in the period following his invention of the telegraph.
The legendary portrait was taken when Miss Draper was a young woman but a renewed interest in the image in the 1890s brought the now elderly matron a bit of late-in-life recognition.
LISTEN NOW: THE FIRST WOMAN EVER PHOTOGRAPHED
This episode originally appeared on Greg’s podcast called The First which had a respectable run a few years ago. The feed for that show will be going away soon so we wanted to present some of that show’s greatest hits over the next few months, in between regular episodes of the Bowery Boys as bonus stories about American history.
For information on how to visit the Draper homestead, head over to the website for the Hastings Historical Society. And the site is right off the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail which we visited in a show last year. So why not make a day of it?
Dorothy Catherine Draper in the first portrait photograph ever taken (no previous test examples survive) and the first photograph of a female face.
Draper in the 1890s, in a photograph taken by her nephew.
After pouring their drinks, a bartender in Julius's Bar refuses to serve John Timmins, Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell (1940 - 1993), and Randy Wicker, members of the Mattachine Society, an early American gay rights group, who were protesting New York liquor laws that prevented serving gay customers, New York, New York, April 21, 1966. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)
It’s here that one moment of protest (the Sip-In of 1966) set the stage for a political revolution, “a signature event in the battle for LGBTQ+ people to gather, socialize, and celebrate openly in bars, restaurants, and other public places.”
So we thought it would be a great time to revisit our 2019 show on the history of Julius’ and a look at the life of gays and lesbians in the mid 20th century.
The now-iconic photograph by Fred W. McDarrah (Courtesy Getty Images)
PODCAST Many Americans may now be familiar with Stonewall Uprising, a combative altercation in 1969 between police and bar patrons at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village. It was this event that gave rise to the modern LGBT movement.
But in a way, the Stonewall Riots were simply the start of a new chapter for the gay rights movement. The road leading to Stonewall is often glossed over or forgotten.
By the 1960s, a lively gay scene that traced back to the 19th century — drag balls! lesbian teahouses! — had been effectively buried by decades of cultural and legal oppression.
A few brave individuals, however, were tired of living in the shadows.
In this episode, we’ll be zeroing in on the efforts of a handful of
young New Yorkers who, in 1966, took a page from the civil rights
movement to stage an unusual demonstration in a small bar in the West Village. This event, called the Sip-In at Julius‘, was a tiny but significant step towards the fair treatment of gay and lesbians in the United States.
IN ADDITION: We’ll be joined by Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, at the bar at Julius’ to talk about the forgotten lives of queer people in the ever-changing borough of Brooklyn.
Listen Now — Sip-In at Julius’ Bar: Celebrating New York’s Newest Landmark
This episode features an audio interview clip from the podcast Making Gay History, an excellent source for gay history. Be sure you check out their coverage of Stonewall 50.
We also feature a musical clip of ‘I Hear A Symphony’ by The Supremes
(Motown). The song hit Number #1 on the Billboard charts in November of
1965. The most popular song in the nation at the moment of the Julius’
Sip-In? The Righteous Brothers’ “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.”
Julius’ Bar: A Short History
This month is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a
chaotic, rowdy altercation that bloomed over the course of the weekend
to energize the New York’s LGBT movement. (If you haven’t already, give our podcast on the history of the Stonewall riots a listen.) But despite its reputation, Stonewall is not the oldest gay bar in New York. Not even close.
For that honor, you need only march a few steps to Waverly Place and 10th Street to that beloved old institution Julius (159
W. 10th St). It also happens to be the location of a pre-Stonewall
protest of angered gay activists, an event both revolutionary and even
occasionally amusing.
Julius is truly an old bar although nobody seems to know exactly how old. The bar itself settles on the year 1864, easily making it one of the oldest bars in New York, just a tad younger than McSorley’s Old Ale House.
The building itself is even older, dating from 1826, becoming a grocer
in 1840 before transforming to its current, more jovial purposes.
It has many things in common with McSorley’s. The walls are plastered with memorabilia from days gone by. The bar is a well-worn relic, the tables and benches made of old beer barrels.
Like McSorley’s, they even serve burgers, and really, really good
ones at that. Its history is a tad more shrouded than McSorley’s but
equally studded with famous clientele.
Courtesy the National Park Service
Surviving the 20th century
It was a popular speakeasy throughout the 1920s, evidenced today by Julius’ still existing sidedoor with a peephole. Both Fats Waller and Billie Holiday are rumored to have performed in the backroom, quite likely as Holiday worked at the nearby nightclub Cafe Societyduring the 1930s.
In subsequent years the clientele was decidedly a mixed lot and Julius would ply writers like Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote with drink and companionship.
By the 1960s Julius had become a low-key staple of the West Village
gay scene. However, it appears that it was ‘straight enough’ that it
survived Mayor Robert Wagner’s cleanup of the city in preparation of the1964 World’s Fair, a wholesale shutdown of West Village gay bars and other ‘undesirable’ places.
The
film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, set in the early 1990s, has several
scenes set and filmed at Julius’. (Courtesy Fox Searchlight)
Julius’ Bar in the 1960s
Even through this Julius lived on, although patrons and management
alike had to maneuver through rather arcane and sometimes humiliating
rituals.
According to writer Edmund White,
“There was even a period when we weren’t allowed to face the bar but
had to stand absurdly with our back to it to prove, I suppose, that we
had nothing to hide.”
It gets even more absurd. The New York State Liquor Authority banned
bars from serving drinks to gays and lesbians. This rule was sometimes
ignored by brazen Village bartenders, but the constant fear of such a
twisted regulation being suddenly enforced by an undercover cop
eventually drew action from a burgeoning group of young gay activists.
A curious ad for tolerance distributed by the Mattachine Society in 1960.
Members of the Mattachine Society, one of New York’s earliest
gay organizations, planned on challenging the rule by going into bars,
loudly announcing their homosexuality and ordering a drink.
Their statement at the bar would be calm and simple: “We are
homosexuals. We are orderly, we intend to remain orderly, and we are
asking for service.”
The key would be that they were followed around by a phalanx of press
representatives. So, when the bar refused to serve them, the Mattachine
Society would have their moment, captured and ready for print.
More Than Just A Drink
The challenge came on April 21, 1966, more than three years before
the Stonewall riots. They told members of the press to meet them at the Ukrainian-American Village Restaurant but management closed shop before they arrived. They tried two other bars, a Howard Johnson’s and a place called Waikiki, and each time they were served without incident.
But of course, the organizers were looking for an incident. They arrived at Julius for their big moment.
The now-legendary Julius Sip-In, as the event as come to be called,
was a carefully engineered event with a few unexpected detours, yet it
served its purpose. The New York Times even ran the story, under the
rather backhanded headline, “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” The law was successfully challenged in court.
Since then, Julius has quietly sat on the sidelines, ceding the
historical spotlight to Stonewall around the corner, observing both the
curious changes to the neighborhood and the development of a viable and
open gay community in the Village and elsewhere.
You don’t have to be gay to appreciate its unique place in New York
City history. Just grab a stool and spend awhile admiring the bar’s
warm, lived-in details.
Oh, and you really must try the burgers. Did I say that already?
By the way, who the heck is Julius? According to one speculation, Julius was the name of the original owner’s basset hound.
FURTHER READING Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution by David Carter Gay New York by George Chauncey Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America by Martin Duberman Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman Greater Gotham by Mike Wallace
and of course Hugh Ryan‘s When Brooklyn Was Queer. Thanks to Hugh for coming on the show and joining us at Julius Bar!
Hugh Ryan, Tom Meyers, Greg Young and Julius’ owner Helen Buford
FURTHER LISTENING
Three companion shows to this episode that you’ll definitely want to listen (or re-listen to) after Sip-In At Julius: Gay New York in the 1960s:
On January 1, 2023, New York City will celebrate a special moment, the 125th anniversary of the formation of Greater New York and the creation of the five boroughs — The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.
In honor of this special moment in New York City history, we are celebrating a bit early, reissuing our episode (originally #150) on the Consolidation and the formation of the boroughs, with a new introduction.
And stay tuned for new episodes of the Bowery Boys Podcast for the rest of the year!
Artwork Julius Schorzman; modified by Astuishin, courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Here’s the story of how two very big cities and a whole bunch of small towns and villages — completely different in nature, from farmland to skyscraper — became the greatest city in the world.
This is the tale of Greater New York, the forming of the five boroughs into one metropolis, a consolidation of massive civic interests which became official on January 1, 1898. But this is not a story of interested parties, united in a common goal.
In fact, Manhattan (comprising, with some areas north of the Harlem River, the city of New York) was in a bit of a battle with anti-consolidation forces, mostly in Brooklyn, who saw the merging of two biggest cities in America as the end of the noble autonomy for that former Dutch city on the western shore of Long Island. You’ll be stunned to hear how easily it could have all fallen apart!
In this podcast is the story of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island (or Richmond, if you will) and their journey to become one. And how, rather recently in fact, one of those boroughs would grow uncomfortable with the arrangement.
LISTEN NOW: BIRTH OF THE FIVE BOROUGHS
The hero of our story — Andrew Haswell Green
Below the prize-winning anti-Consolidation song mentioned in the podcast (courtesy NYPL):
Style: “Music_Sep4E”
A map of Richmond from 1874
FURTHER LISTENING
This show was recorded in 2013 and since then, many aspects of this story have been turned into their own podcasts. After listening to this show, dive back into these episodes:
Early one spring day in 1922, while dutifully posing at the Art Students League on West 57th Street, Santa Claus had a fatal heart attack in front of a classroom of students.
Above — He knows when you’ve been bad or good: A Christmas issue of Judge Magazine from 1919 by Guy Lowy, who studied at the Art Students League and very likely used Mnason for his model. (Courtesy Jon Williamson)
“The man who was Santa Claus is dead,” said the New York Tribune. “He was a man of many names, but at the Art Students League, where he posed for beginners, and in the studios of the best known artists, where he was sent for when a ‘Santa Claus type’ was needed, he was known as Mnason, the first ‘n’ being silent.”
They called him Mnason, although his full name was even more spectacular — Mnason T. Huntsman. (Or Huntsman T. Mnason or even Paul Mnason. His aliases were legion.)
Man of Mystery
The burly artists model lent his body to the ages; thanks to the scores of influential artists who hired him for Christmas projects, today’s modern Santa Claus probably looks more like Mnason than perhaps any other actual human being in history.*
The poet Arthur Chapman declared: “It’s no exaggeration to say that Mnason posed for most of the Santa Claus pictures that have been made in recent years. And he figured in a good many for which he did not actually pose — as such pictures have been copied from originals for which Mnason was the model.
“Probably there isn’t a man today whose picture has been cut out more times and is treasured in more scrapbooks.”
Mnason, the definitive Santa Claus of the 1910s and early 1920s, was a true “man of mystery” for many who painted and drew him. A few knew the details of his past; perhaps it held the secret to his magnetic allure, to the deep, ancient gleam in his eye.
For Mnason was a former religious cult leader and proselytizer who had served time in jail for child abduction and religious blasphemy, and once he was actually tarred and feathered by an angry mob. He was a charismatic to some, a psychotic to many others.
Below: Painter Kenyon Cox and his students at the Art Students League in 1887, a couple decades before the arrival of Mnason (Courtesy aaa.si.edu)
Making A Cult Leader
Mnason was born in Pennsylvania sometime in the 1850s, orphaned at eight years old. His early religious teachings were strict but conventional for the period.
In the 1880s, he worked for New York’s Sunday Closing League, visiting New York shops and saloons to ensure they were not selling anything too amoral on church day. In 1883, he testified that one shop owner illegally sold cigarettes to young boys, but not before the judge excoriated Mnason for lying on the stand.
At some point between that moment and 1888, Mnason was “inspired and bidden by God” to become a preacher. His message was not well received; at one point, the “wild and absurd behavior” of this “obstreperous” man of God got him thrown into jail for disorderly conduct.
By then, he had started a religious commune called the Lord’s Farm in Pascack Valley in New Jersey, where he began to attract (or lure) a young, impressionable flock.
He called himself “The Holy One” or “The Modern Christ” and granted bizarre nicknames to his most loyal followers. Collectively, they were called the Angel Dancers, or the Church of the Living God.
In 1888, Mnason was arrested “on the charge of blasphemy,” and of enticing two young women who claimed they “were obliged to do anything he required.” He was reportedly tarred and feathered by irate residents. (It is at this point that you might notice the odd coincidence of the name Mnason and ‘Manson’, as in Charles.)
Mnason T. Huntsman, from an image used in the New York Tribune
The Angel Dancers
Even still, the Angel Dancers managed to attract on oddball list of adherents, including a local farmer’s wife and her two children. Eventually, according to a 1893 New York Times article, “the band was increased by two long-haired men, who called themselves ‘Silas’ and ‘John the Baptist’.
This fanatical cult would reportedly practice ‘angel dancing’, “scantily robed and waving a huge blanket with which to drive away the devil.”
Also notable to the press of the day: Mnason and his flock were all vegetarians. “Nothing save what grows in or on the ground may be eaten.” [source]
From The Times in Philadelphia, November 25, 1895
The entire lot were arrested in April 1893 for attempting to swindle the aforementioned farmer, although it’s obvious that some religious intolerance was embedded within the charge as well.
The affidavit read: “The conspirators deny, ridicule and curse all regular religion and religious customs, recognize no Sabbath, and set up a false god of their own, declaring the said Mnason to be the only and living God.”
From a syndicated article which ran in the Ironwood News-Record in Michigan, January 11, 1896, courtesy Newspapers.com
The Compound
A few years later, the Angel Dancers had taken over the farmhouse and had grown to a membership of nine males and nineteen females, with two children.
After the reported death of a child in 1897, the Times intoned, “No physician was called to be of any service. Mnason is ‘the Christ’. The dancers are vegetarians.”
Another ugly abduction case reared its head in 1900, when two “little girls” were taken from the compound and then kept in jail for months in order to testify against Mnason. The cult leader seemed to survive these charges, too
From the same article as above.
The Lord’s Farm became so notorious that by 1909, the state found a good excuse to evict Mnason and his followers. The charismatic moved to New York City and briefly opened a church for black parishioners.
It is then that former ‘Modern Christ’ then disappears, for a time, from public view. But the Times in 1909 noted the following: “Mnason is a man of many aliases.”
The Art Students Leave, photo by Jim Henderson, Wikimedia Commons
Finally, he popped up again, in 1916, at the Art Students League, and not unnoticed.
The New York Sun mocked his new profession (headline pictured below): “[R]ecently he had turned himself into Santa Claus or King Lear or any other whiskered person that the embryo John Sargents of the Art Students League wish him to be¦.”
It’s no surprise he would find his way into an art collective — he was a vegetarian, after all — and his timing was rather perfect, given his particular look and body size.
Making Santa Claus
The character of Santa Claus had gone through a major style makeover in the late 19th century.
His annual routine already immortalized in the popular verse A Visit From St. Nicholas — penned by the godfather of the Chelsea neighborhood Clement Clarke Moore — magazine and postcard illustrators began morphing the popular Christmas figure from a thickly robed saint to a child-friendly, candy-colored superhero.
This change came about through the hands of American artists and illustrators, led by Harper’s Weekly artist Thomas Nast in New York. Some of the modern look and mythos is credited to Nast, his influential pen elaborating on Santa’s girth (eventually to rest on near-corpulency) and placing his residence in the North Pole.
By the early 20th century, Santa’s physical characteristics were locked in place, but his spirit and personality were still very much uncertain. Should Santa be energetic or world weary? Wise or playful? Approachable like a parent, or unfathomable like a god?
Perfect Pose
Many of New York’s great illustrators of the period were associated with the prestigious Art Students League, and it was here that Mnason contributed his own sparkle to the characters, as artists recommended the man for his poise, mystery and sparkle.
“They found in him the ideal type, on account of his snowy beard, his bearing, the jolly twinkle in his eye, his fine color and his intelligence.”
Blow: J.C Leyendecker‘s 1919 cover for the Saturday Evening Post. You can easily tell Leyendecker’s influence on later Evening Post artist Norman Rockwell. Given the artist’s connection to the ASL, Mnason very likely posed for this painting.
It’s clear that many of these legendary artists were aware of some version of their Santa’s past. “Mnason would hint to his artists friends regarding certain experiences in his life in which his pronounced and individualistic religious views played a part.” [source]
One year, he was even hired as a department store Santa where he notably espoused his religious views to the children who had come to present their Christmas wishes.
And To All A Good Night
His days of Lord’s Farm were behind him, but Mnason kept writing religious verse while living suitably on his artist-model wages. For years, he was passed among New York’s most renown illustrators, who claimed him the iconic visage of the holiday’s most jolly proponent.
“Nothing could dampen his cheerfulness, but behind his smile there was an element of mystery which the embodiment of Santa Claus maintained to the last.”
When he died in 1922, Mnason had been drawn and painted as Santa Claus dozens of times.
Eventually, Santa Claus would go through his final evolution in the 1930s, thanks to artist Haddon Sondblum, hired by Coca-Cola for their colorful advertising campaigns.
Sondblum’s iconic depiction is directly influenced by Moore’s famous poem, and but equally so by the dozens of artists and magazine illustrators before him, most of which who had used Mnason as their inspiration.
*A retired salesman named Lou Prentice was used by Haddon to create early versions of his Coca-Cola Santa and so might lay claim to being the most important physical inspiration. But Mnason was used by more artists and within several pivotal publications of the day.
Clement Clarke Moore, the lord of Chelsea (the manor for which the neighborhood is named), lived a long and distinguished life as an educator and land developer, dying in 1863 at his home in Newport, Rhode Island.
He was originally buried in the churchyard of St. Luke-in-the-Field (pictured below) in the area of today’s West Village.
What does all this have to do with Christmas you ask?
Moore was a revered scholar, former president of Columbia College (later Columbia University) and the developer of the General Theological Seminary on his old Chelsea property.
For well over one hundred years an unusual and special ceremony has taken place at Church of the Intercession, the house of worship which sits upon the grounds of Trinity Church Cemetery.
Church of the Intercession
The tradition was apparently initiated by a vicar at the chapel named Milo Hudson Gates.
First initiated in 1911, Gates, according to a 1933 New York Daily News report, “and his child parishioners trouped across to Trinity Cemetery to pray and sing at the grave where Dr. Moore’s bones have rested since they were removed from the vault in St. Luke’s Church on Hudson Street.”
From the 1914 New York Sun
Hundreds of children, carrying lanterns and torches in the old days, have gathered around Moore’s gravestone and sang Christmas songs over the years.
“Carols were sung and wreaths placed on the grave,” according to a 1919 report. The famous poem by Moore was then recited.
“His name was Clement C. Moore. His body sleeps beneath the Christmas trees that grow in Trinity Cemetery.” [December 23, 1918]
Below: Children surrounding the grave of Moore’s, sometime in the 1920s or 1930s (according the church website).
This tradition has survived into modern day with some interesting variations.
New York Daily News 1944
Frequently a person dressed as Saint Nicholas (the saint, not the Santa) leads the procession. In recent decades, a person of some renown reads the poem such as in 2003 when basketball great Isiah Thomas brought Moore’s words to life.
Below: In 1990, Joyce Dinkins, wife of the mayor David Dinkins, was invited to read the poem.
THE 112TH CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE MEMORIAL CANDLELIGHT SERVICE WILL BE HELD ON DECEMBER 18, 2022 AT 3:00PM
This year, the poem will be read by The Rt. Rev. Catherine S. Roskam, former Suffragan Bishop of New York.
Following the service, we will process out to Trinity Cemetery to lay the wreath on Clement Clarke Moore’s grave and sing “Silent Night” at the Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleum.
One of you may be related to Pietro, the boy in the picture. He was one of thousands of Italian immigrants who arrived in New York in the 1870s-80s. He seems to have been intelligent and even exceptional, weathering a set of truly dreary circumstances that would have defeated most men.
Pietro was not yet 13 years old when he was almost killed in a streetcar accident. He was permanently scarred and unable to support his family. If not for witnessing a shooting outside of his home, we might never know his name.
But in 1892, Pietro became a profoundly moving subject in a new book by one of the greatest social reformers of the Gilded Age.
Jacob Riis was a pioneer social activist who used journalism and photography to change the living conditions of thousands of poor New Yorkers. He took his bulky camera to the most decrepit nooks of lower Manhattan, documenting a world entirely unseen by most people.
In 1890 he published How The Other Half Lives, exposing the squalid living conditions of downtown Manhattan’s mostly immigrant population.
Riis did help to change the face of New York. In Five Points, the worst tenements were demolished and replaced with government buildings and one very manicured park. But his depictions of ethnic groups, in retrospect, could be very simplistic, even condescending. In his goals to highlight an overwhelmingly malignant condition, he often glossed over some telling details of some of his subjects.
Pietro (I haven’t been able to find his last name) is one of Riis’ favorite subjects. He makes his debut in The Children of the Poor, Riis’ 1892 follow-up to How The Other Half Lives, as a model ofthe striving young student. Pietro is an ambassador of sorts, an avatar of social improvement, bringing “[e]very lesson of cleanliness, of order, of English” taught to him in school back to his tenement life.
He was born sometime in the early 1878 or 1879, just as the sudden increase of southern Italians began to permanently change the nature of the old tenement neighborhoods.
He lived in a single room with his parents and four younger siblings. As a small boy, he attended classes at the school run by Old St. Patrick’s until “his education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his graduating into the ranks of the family wage- earners.”
Being the eldest son, he would have gone to work immediately. In this case, as a bootblack, the most common occupation for poor Italian immigrants in the 1880s.
1897 Yard in Jersey Street (now gone). A woman holding a child, and men sitting in a rear yard of a Jersey Street tenement. Pietro lived on Jersey Street and one of these buildings may have been his home.
Probably around age 11 or 12, Pietro began shining shoes in a saloon somewhere in the neighborhood. One day, while crossing Broadway, he was struck by a streetcar and mangled so badly that it was assumed he would not survive. “They thought he was killed but he was only crippled for life.”
He met Riis one dayat the police station at 300 Mulberry Street. He was there as a witness to a shooting which had occurred in front of his home. As Riis describes:
“With his rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but for his maimed hand and his oddly grave but eager face, which no smile ever crossed despite his thirteen years.”
Riis gained the boy’s confidence and was invited into his home to document his life. Pietro was devoting his energies to education, improving both his Italian and English skills. It appears the accident left one or both of his hands impaired.
As Riis observes:
‘By ‘m by,’ said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, ‘I learn t’ make an Englis’ letter; maybe my fadder he learn too.’
I had my doubts about the father. He sat watching Pietro with the pride in the achievement that was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused by the boy.
‘Si! si!’ he nodded eagerly. ‘Pietro he good a boy; make Englis’, Englis’!’ and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were making the English letter that was the subject of their common veneration.
Riis clearly views Pietro as a charity case burdened with the extraordinary responsibility of assimilating his family into American life.
At the maimed 13 year old eldest child of immigrants, his days of innocence were long gone. His situation had utterly defeated him. At least, that’s the image Riis very poignantly meant to convey in his final anecdote, turning to Pietro as he watched over his baby brother:
‘Pietro’,” I said with a sudden yearning to know, ‘did you ever laugh?’
The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.
‘I did wonst’, he said quietly and went on his way. And I would gladly have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had forgotten his laugh.’
We never see Pietro again. He’s used as a pitiful example of life in the Italian slums and then fades into the background, lost among the thousands of individuals who lived in the Mulberry Street slums.
Riis, however, does use the generic name ‘Pietro’ — now a stand-in for all disadvantaged Italian immigrants — in his 1902 book The Battle With the Slum.“
One of Riis’ photographs, illustrated for the book Children of the Poor.
Did Pietro ever make it out of the tenements? Did he get married, have children, begin a career? Did his physical condition ever improve? It’s rather likely that either he or one of his siblings had children, and one of those children might be your grandmother or grandfather.
You can read Jacob Riis’ Children of the Poor here.
Richmond Hill, the spacious mansion and 26-acre estate on the outskirts of town that had once been George Washington‘s headquarters and later the home of John Adams, was also home to another vice president — Aaron Burr. This was the place he lived on that fateful day, July 11, 1804, when he entered into a duel with Alexander Hamilton. Here’s a lovely description of the home from an 1861 biography of Burr by author James Parton:
“[Burr’s] style of living kept pace with his increasing income. In a few years we find him master of Richmond Hill, the mansion where Washington had lived in 1776, with grounds reaching to the Hudson, with ample gardens, and a considerable extent of grove and farm. Here he maintained a liberal establishment and exercised the hospitality which was then in vogue.
The one particular in which Richmond Hill surpassed the other houses of equal pretensions, was its library. From his college days, Colonel Burr had been a zealous buyer of books, and his stock had gone on increasing till, on attaining to the dignity of householder, he was able to give to his miscellaneous collection something of the completeness of a library.
It is evident enough, from his correspondence, that his favorite ethos were still those whom the ‘well-constituted minds’ of that day regarded with admiring horror. The volumes of Gibbon’s History [The Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire] were appearing in those years, striking the orthodox world with wonder and dismay. They had a very hearty welcome in the circle at Richmond Hill.”
After the duel, Burr liquidated his assets, selling Richmond Hill to John Jacob Astor. With the grounds heavily cut up and sold, he had the mansion rolled on logs to the newly carved street corner and turned into a theater and opera house. At this time, he also moved the carriage house further north, where it was later re-purposed and today houses the romantic restaurant One If By Land, Two If By Sea.
It made for a very sumptuous opera house, it appears. According to author Eric Homberger, “Boxes at the Richmond Hill were furnished as though they were an extension of the elegant parlors of St. John’s Park, with ‘light blue hangings, gilded panels and cornice, arm-chairs, and a sofa.'”
It was parallel in style, perhaps, to the Astor Place Opera House across town. Eventually it deteriorated into a lowly roadhouse and saloon — but certainly, the most gorgeous one in town — called the Tivoli Saloon before being torn down in 1849.
Today the site of Richmond Hill and its former ground are occupied by this building, currently the home of WNYC, and the surrounding blocks of this area of the far West Village.
Top image courtesy the Museum of the City of New York
![[Richmond Hill, residence of Aaron Burr.]](https://boweryboyshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/M3Y29313-300x208.jpg)
