Clothing cutters, horseshoers, shoemakers, upholsterers, printers, house painters, freight handlers, cabinet makers, varnishers, cigar makers, bricklayers and piano makers.
The first American Labor Day began on September 5, 1882, with 10,000 workers from a wide variety of occupations circling Union Square, then parading up to the area of today’s Bryant Park. (A picnic ‘after party’ of sorts took place at a park at today’s Columbus Avenue and 92nd Street.)
Individual workers organizations had taken to the street before, sometimes violently. But this peaceful protest, this public solidarity, took the issues of New York laborers to the heart of the city in a way that could not be ignored.*
*New Yorkers got the Labor Day idea from Canada.Read more about the differences between May Day and Labor Day in this article
Illustration of the first Labor Day parade around Union Square, 1882
We take it for granted today. Labor Day is no more than a day off for most people today.
But looking at the original press notices from newspapers of the day (from the following day, September 6, 1882) suggest an event certain New Yorkers recognized as monumental.
Others considered it trivial, a nuisance or even a dangerous gathering of malicious intent.
Union Square would continue to be the location of Labor Day festivities for decades afterwards. The image below is of a parade from 1909 (courtesy LOC):
TheNewYork Tribune begins nice enough. “The men who took part in the labor parade generally appeared to be persons of no small intelligence.” The paper’s vitriol was saved for the leaders of the movement, in this case organizers from the Central Labor Union, “demagogues of the worst kind.”
“It is a pity that workingmen allow themselves to be so cheapened.” The Tribune accuse the organizers of an ulterior motive — political chest-thumping.
“But it is not at all unlikely that certain demagogues and dishonest leaders thought it a good time of year to show the two great political parties that there are ten thousand ballots in this city in the hands of men who … might be at the disposal of somebody — for a consideration.”
Indeed, there would be a statewide election exactly two months later, sweeping a host of Democrats into office, including Grover Cleveland into the governor’s office.
Even their reporting of the parade itself is tinged with a little condescension.
“The parade of workingmen yesterday morning was not nearly as large as was expected by the leaders. Â This is probably due to the unwillingness of many workmen to lose a day’s work.”
Labor Day parade in Union Square, 1887 (NYPL)
TheNew York Times seemed to find the parade slightly whimsical, almost superfluous. It echoed the disappointing turnout, but describes the event as calm, “conducted in an orderly and pleasant manner.”
The coverage focuses undue attention on the paraders’ fashionable attire.
“The great majority smoked cigars.” However they stress that the good behavior is attributable to the fact that organizers banned alcohol. This detail is mentioned in no other coverage that I read.
Where the Tribune attested the lower-than-expected turnout to men not leaving their posts, the Times found a different reason — “due to the fact that [laborers] preferred to enjoy the day in quiet excursions in Coney Island, Glen Island and elsewhere.”
Children at the Union Square Labor Day parade, 1909 (NYPL)
The enthusiasticNew York Sun describes it as a dry and brutal day. “[T]he rays of sun even in the early morning were very hot, and not a breath of wind brought relief from the oppressive heat.”
The same parade considered disappointing by the Tribune and the Times was conversely described by the Sun as a mob scene.
“As far ahead as one could see and as far down the side streets as forms and faces could be distinguished, the windows and roofs and even the lamp posts and awning frames were occupied by people anxious to get a good view of the first parade in New York of workingmen of all trades united in one organization.”
Many newspapers outside New York mentioned the parade the following day. St. Paul’s Daily Globe in Minnesota said “the great labor demonstration today was a success,” quoting a number in attendance (20,000) almost double the actual projected number.
Trauma in Times Square: An electrical sign destroyed by the massive windstorm of February 22, 1912. One Times Square sits to the left, and the Hotel Astor is in the distance. [LOC] Shorpy has an another angle of this damaged storefront.
“The great gale that blew in with Washington’s birthday will not soon be forgotten. It was the biggest New York ever knew.” — New York Evening World, Feb. 23, 1912
On February 22, 1912, a catastrophic weather anomaly occurred in New York City, an event the New York Times referred to as ‘The Big Wind’.
This particular day has also been called “a significant day in the history of tall buildings,” although I doubt anybody today will be celebrating this rather vicious and sudden test of architectural endurance.
New Yorkers thought it might be worse. The storm system began the previous day as a blinding Midwestern blizzard, paralyzing the railroad and killing cattle. St. Louis received its greatest snowfall ever up to that time from this churning storm, and Chicago reported winds of up to 50 miles per hour.
If it held this pattern by the time it hit the East, New Yorkers feared another storm of the level of the Blizzard of 1888, which buried the city in snow, rendered transportation useless, and killed more than 200 people.
In one respect, the city was fortunate that snowfall was relegated to upstate New York. The grim meteorological trade off, unfortunately, was a day of powerful, otherworldly wind gusts, almost double the strength of those during the infamous 1888 storm.
The worst of it came after midnight, when a terrifying frozen bluster “swooped down on the city with all its length and breadth” at speeds of 96 miles per hour.
At one point, devices in Central Park registered an unthinkable 110 miles per hour. By morning it had settled to 70 miles per hour and held that speed steady for much of the day. [source]
Some called this “giant among gales” a day-long cyclone, and it certainly acted like one — uprooting trees, destroying rooftops and even depositing whole houses into the river. People were blown off their feet, carts went flying and pedestrians dodged falling telephone poles in terror.
Most leaving home wearing hats ran back inside without them. If any of those women from yesterday’s Astor Place post were trekking through the plaza with their home-work today, they most likely lost it to the wind.
Foremost on the minds of most New Yorkers was the fate of its skyline. In 1888, during the last harsh storm, there were no skyscrapers. In 1912, there were several over 30 floors, including the city’s tallest, the 50-floor Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower off Madison Square.
Although most buildings were designed to withstand significant wind trauma, none of them were prepared for winds above 70 miles per hour. And the building slated to become the next tallest in New York — the Woolworth Building — was still under construction, its metal skeleton now a potential arsenal of deadly debris.
Panes of glass shattered throughout the city, but it appears most of New York’s tallest structures survived without significant damage. In fact, it was the shorter, older structures that fared worst, many of them designed with little protection from powerful winds.
Below: the downtown Manhattan skyline in 1912. Most of these buildings survived the ‘Big Wind’ with only damage to their windows. [pic]
Not that modern invention came away unscathed that day. The electrical signs of Times Square, many no more than a few months old, were no match for the powerful gusts. Several were destroyed, including a one provocative sign at 47th Street, featuring “two scantily clad electric boys who box nightly in Summer underwear.” [source]
Next to the Hotel Knickerbocker, a 200-foot electric sign crumbled to the sidewalk below in front of Hepners Hair Emporium, a police officer racing into the establishment a minute before the sign crashed into the plate glass window of the railroad ticket office next door.
Across the street, at the Times Building, a drug store window exploded, and “many bottles of perfume and drugs” were hurled at passers-by.
Most boats all along the waterfront were either damaged or untethered. Predictably, beach houses on Rockaway Beach and other quieter locales fared the worst. The luckiest structures survived with nary a window remaining; those less fortunate were found floating offshore. In Astoria, Queens, the roof to the jail was taken off, to the fright of the occupants inside.
At right: Times Square in August 1912. The White Rock sign was probably not around for the February wind storm. The ‘electric boys’ sign described above sat at this intersection.
In Red Hook, Brooklyn, turbulent winds kept a raging fire alive at a brick manufacturing plant, distributing flaming pitch shrapnel to several buildings across the street, including a hay and horse feed dealership! (One of many reasons they don’t keep hay dealerships in crowded cities today.) The brick factory, which took several hours to control, was about three blocks from the location of today’s IKEA store.
February 22, 1912, happened to be the 180th anniversary of George Washington‘s birth, and hundreds of veterans tried marching from Jefferson Market to Union Square. Flags raised aloft in celebration were torn to ribbons. Nobody was injured, although the gusts caused major inconvenience, “Salvation Army object lessons and banner bearers bowled over by the wind.” [source]
Others were not as fortunate. The Times attributed at least one death to the storm and over a dozen concussions from flying debris, messenger boys and seamstresses blown into windows or railings or hit by signs or dislodged cornices.
One man, waiting for his wife at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, had his neck slashed by flying glass. Where physical harm was avoided, humiliation took its place. A society woman on Riverside Drive, wearing “superabundantly costly furs,” was picked up and thrown into a horse.
Meanwhile, down at the Battery, Frank Coffyn was preparing for another takeoff off the water on his pontoon-equipped airplane. The wind had other plans, ripping the wings off the plane and spoiling Coffyn’s flight. Later that day, Coffyn wired his old boss Wilbur Wright for replacement parts. (See my previous post for more information of Coffyn’s harbor flights..)
By the late evening, winds had died down to a mere 44 miles per hour. (For comparison, New York City’s average wind speed today is just 12.2 miles per hour.) In the morning, things were back to normal — except for huge mess of metal and glass left scattered on the streets.
PODCAST The tale of the Black Tom Explosion which sent shrapnel into the Statue of Liberty and rocked the region around New York harbor.
On July 30, 1916, at just after 2 in the morning, a massive explosion ripped apart the island of Black Tom on the shoreline near Jersey City, sending a shockwave through the region and thousands of pounds of wartime shrapnel into the neighboring Ellis Island and Bedloe’s Island (home to the Statue of Liberty).
Thousands of windows were shattered in the region, and millions woke up wondering what horrible thing had just happened.
The terrifying disaster was no accident; this was the sabotage of German agents, bent on eliminating tons of munitions that were being sent to the Allied powers during World War I. Although America had not yet entered the war, the United States was considered an enemy combatant thanks to weapons manufactures in the New York region and around the country.
But the surprising epicenter of German spy activity was in a simple townhouse in the neighborhood of Chelsea.
ALSO: New Yorkers still feel the ramifications of the Black Tom Explosion today at one of America’s top tourist attractions.
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We are producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve and expand the show in other ways — publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are creators on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.
Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are several different pledge levels. Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
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The location of Black Tom Island in relation to Jersey City, circa 1880.
Courtesy New Jersey City University/Â Prepared for the National Board of Health, Washington, D.C.(Hoboken, N.J.: Spielmann & Brush, 1880)
The Statue of Liberty in relation to Black Tom (situated in the background) in 1912
New York Public Library
The view of Jersey City from a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, 1918.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Images of the grim aftermath of the explosion (courtesy Liberty State Park):
Associated Press
This series of photos (courtesy Library of Congress) shows the efforts of divers and salvagers looking for remaining munitions that had sunk into the harbor!
The front page of the New York Tribune the following day:
The Kingsland munitions explosion of January 11, 1917, caused millions of dollars in damage, but no lives were lost thanks to the efforts of a single switchboard operator named Tessie McNamara who stayed at her post throughout the disaster.
To give you some idea of the size of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, here’s a picture of its replacement during the 1984 renovation. It can only be accessed via a very narrow stairway.
The summer blockbuster Spider-Man: Homecoming may be the greatest New York City superhero movie ever.
It doesn’t treat New York like a series of famous backdrops (although there certainly are a couple); it has a familiar landscape and there’s a particular care given to depicting Queens, the home of Peter Parker. There’s even a couple scenes with a mangy deli cat; you can almost smell it! (We will over look one major flaw that anybody riding the Staten Island Ferry will immediatelynotice.)
The film reinforces the notion of Spidey as the premier urban heroic figure. Indeed, in when faced maneuvering through a suburban neighborhood, he’s virtually useless, ripping through trees, tumbling into backyards.
In tribute I thought I would update my tribute to Spider-Man, New York City’s ultimate hero.
A shorter version of this article originally ran ten years ago at the start of that other reboot of the Spider-Man movie franchise. The following article was also inspired by a box of old comics books which have followed me around to various apartments for the past two decades. Last week I moved to yet another new apartment and the boxes are still with me.
From Amazing Spider-man #176
THE KING OF QUEENS
Spider-Man might be considered the superhero version of the New York Mets. Ever in the shadow of stronger, older, perhaps stodgier renditions from a different league (Superman, the Yankees), both Spider-Man and the Mets have origin stories which begin in Queens in the 1960s and are often considered New York underdogs. Their fans call them Amazing.
No modern fictional character inhabits a city quite like Spider-Man does with New York City.
Like other creations from the stable of Stan Lee, Spider-Man was meant to reflect a normal human being in a familiar setting, unlike the characters of DC Comics, who were space aliens, amazons or billionaires.
Yet it’s only Peter Parker’s humble beginnings as a teen from Forest Hills, Queens, that seem ordinary; as Spider-Man, he nimbly darts over the city, never in need of public transportation, elevators or a taxicab.
BITTEN BY THE BUG
Writer Steve Ditko** fleshed out Lee’s vision of an awkward teenager-turned-acrobat who could virtually sail through the streets outside their window.
The locations of Marvel’s offices and studios — formerly in the Empire State Building, but at 635 Madison Avenue by 1962 — certainly played a role in developing Marvel’s early characters as urbanites.
Most all his adventures take place in New York, and the city plays backdrop to these melodramatic, often cataclysmic events.
Upon the covers of hundreds of comics books that Spider-Man has appeared since his debut in August 1962, the webslinger has perilously dangled over the grid, either swinging down the avenues or bouncing super villains against an endless number of brick walls. (Like more than a few fashionistas, he sometimes even wears all black to work.)
If superheroes existed, New York City’s maintenance and security costs would well exceed its annual budget, and nobody would dare build a new skyscraper. Why, the budget to clean buildings of Spidey’s used webbing would reach into the thousands each year! (Ed. note: I’ve since been informed that the hero’s webbing is basically biodegradable. Great for the environment!)
Most structures depicted in his greatest adventures are mere abstractions, simple ledges for perching and windows for smashing. We rarely see pedestrians fleeing the falling debris or the contractors assessing the damage for disgruntled landlords.
YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD TOUR GUIDE
Spider-Man doesn’t fly. The superhero and the city have a symbiotic relationship; he needs the city’s height to swing around, and the city needs him to protect it. And so New York landmarks have frequently popped up on Spider-Man comic book covers, perhaps more than any other superhero creation. He gathers his strength from the famous skyline itself.
You can actually take a tour of the city through Spider-Man covers, from the 1960s to today. Below are several examples of New York’s guest appearances.
Swing along with him as he takes you past 1) the East Village, 2) Federal Hall, 3) the subway, 4-5) the Roosevelt Island tram, 6-7) the Statue of Liberty, 8) Cleopatra’s Needle, 9) the George Washington Bridge, 10) the American Museum of Natural History 11) the New York Marathon, 12-13) the Empire State Building, 14) the New York Public Library, 15) a vehicle from the New York Police Department, 16) a yellow cab, 17) the Brooklyn Bridge, 18) Rockefeller Center, 19) Times Square, 20) the Chrysler Building, 21) the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 22) Grand Central Terminal, 23) One Times Square. (Not pictured: the Flatiron Building, where the Daily Bugle is located in the earlier films.)
**Note: There is some controversy over whether legendary artist Jack Kirby might also have been involved in the creation of Spider-Man. I have re-edited the story above, however I send you to i09’s 2009 article Who Created Spider-Man? which discusses artist’s possible involvement. (7/9/12)
Â
And finally, Marvel and the creators of Spider-Man did pay tribute to the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Appropriately, for a comic book that often wantonly celebrates the crumbling of random structures in high-flying battles with super villains, the creators chose to use no image:
Top image courtesy IGN. A couple of these are from Sam Ruby, a couple of them are my own scan! You can see the complete collection of Spider-Man covers over at Cover Browser where I borrowed a couple of these as well.
All art, images and characters on this page are courtesy Marvel Comics.
PODCASTThe history of the New York City taxicab, from the handsome hansoms of old to the modern issues facing the modern taxi fleet today.
In this episode, we recount almost 175 years of getting around New York in a private ride. The hansom, the romantic rendition of the horse and carriage, took New Yorkers around during the Gilded Age. But unregulated conduct by — nighthawks — and the messy conditions of streets due to horses demanded a solution.
At first it seemed the electric car would save the day but the technology proved inadequate. In 1907 came the first gas-propelled automobile cabs to New York, officially — taxis — due to a French invention installed in the front seat.
By the 1930s the streets were filled with thousands of taxicabs. During the Great Depression, cab drivers fought against plunging fare and even waged a strike in Times Square. In 1937, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia debuted the medallion system as a way to keep the streets regulated.
By the 1970s many cabdrivers faced an upswing of crime that made picking up passengers even more dangerous than bad traffic. Drivers began ignoring certain fares — mainly from African-Americans — which gave rise to the neighborhood livery cab system.
Today New York taxicab fleets face a different threat — Uber and the rise of private app-based transportation services. Will the taxi industry rise to the challenge in time for the debut of their taxi of tomorrow.
Listen Today: The Story of the Yellow Taxi Cab
Albert Fenn/Office of War Information, cleaned up image courtesy Shorpy
A snugly dressed cabbie awaiting some fares at the Battery Park elevated train station — 1895. Note that the poor horse too is swaddled up for a bad winter.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
A hack from 1896.
New York Public Library
A hansom cab from 1906. This was still the dominant cab ride in New York during the period despite the introduction of the ‘horseless carriage’ onto the city streets.
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
A fleet of electric cars in 1896, and a couple Electrobats in action outside the Metropolitan Opera House 1898. Compare these with the picture of the hansom above.
Courtesy New York Public Library
Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
Johanne Marie Rogn/Pinteresst
A taxicab waiting outside Alwyn Court (West 58th Street/7th Avenue)
Museum of the City of New York
A cab waiting passengers at West 150th Street.
Photography by Charles Von Urban, courtesy Museum of the City of New York
A view of the bustling street life of Herald Square, 1935. The horses are off the street but there are many other kinds of transportation options joining the taxicab.
Courtesy New York Public Library
Grabbing a Checker Cab on Park Avenue 1944
Courtesy Life Magazine/Getty Images
A row of Checker Taxis, sitting idle during a taxicab strike in 1940.
: Keystone/Getty Images)
Some vivid 1960s photography by Ernst Haas capturing the mystery and allure of the New York taxi.
Courtesy Ernst Haas / Getty Images
Some scenes from the 1970s…
Courtesy City Noise
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We are producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve and expand the show in other ways — publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are creators on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.
Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are several different pledge levels. Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.
In honor of the 100th birthday of television icon Norman Lear (creator of All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times and many, many more) I’ve revised and re-edited this, yes, rather strange round-up originally published in 2013 about New York City and television intros and theme songs.
Please play the TV themes as you scroll through this article. Note that a few of the videos can only be watched on YouTube directly.
And now, on with the show….
The camera zooms over the New York City skyline as an earnest pop tune — usually devoid of any rhythm or edginess, but insanely catchy — descends as though sent from outer space.
The next shot focuses on one particular landmark, a bridge or a park, letting you know, see we’re not in some television studio in L.A., we’re really here, the Big Apple!
We meet the rest of the cast, a wacky bunch of people, urban people, who find themselves in comedic situations. The city appears again in the background, but we’re already off with our new friends — the stars of 1970s prime time.
From Rhoda with the great Nancy Walker and Valerie Harper
That’s how a great many television programs began during the 1970s. New York City was heavily represented on television during the decade, an easily identified setting that could be depicted in two or three establishing shots before moving on to introduce the stars.
It popped up in no-nonsense crime dramas and sitcoms alike, an almost singular destination for television characters. After the ‘rural purge‘ of folksy TV shows likeBeverly Hillbilliesand Green Acres(two shows which lampooned the urban snob), there was little room for small-town America; places like Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Chicago and of courseLos Angeles filled out the schedule.
In reality, New York was entering a dark period of deteriorating public services, high crime and financial woes. While television news would often dramatically reflect this image out to America, television entertainment would do the opposite.
Few TV series of the period accurately reflected New York’s troubles outside of a few occasional crime dramas and action shows (like 1977’s Amazing Spiderman).
Of course, most television shows about New York City in the 1970s were actually filmed in Los Angeles. And you couldn’t fault sitcom creators for wanting to eschew real-life troubles that would distract from their clean and cheerful worlds of comic misunderstandings.
Even great detective shows like Kojak pulled their punches, largely because reality was often too graphic to present in prime time.
That doesn’t look like a New York City public phone.
But an alternate world emerges from watching a series of television intros from the 1970s, pulled from top sitcom and dramas of the period. New York City is essentially Midtown and Central Park (but for the few shows that ventured into the other boroughs), glamorous and utterly harmless, without edge.
And in those few shows that did exploit the city’s dangerous side, the intros made clear — through artistically rendered graphics — that the danger was merely of the pulp variety.
A Woman’s Playground
Many shows of the decade presented Manhattan as an aspirational destination, especially for women, even as thousands of people in real life fled the city. Television was finally focusing on the adventures of single women, but to do so, New York had to be depicted as nearly flawless.
The iconic example of this is That Girl starring Marlo Thomas. In this 1970 opener, New York is nothing but glamour, shopping, Lincoln Center and Broadway.
The lousy sitcom On Our Own, New York’s variant of Laverne & Shirley, opens with a couple of crazy gals heading to their job at an advertising agency. The intro actually features a bit of physical violence against one woman, played up for laughs!
Not every show was so blind to the rough edges of New York. But it required a tough lady like Rhoda, a native New Yorker, to maneuver all those sliding locks and tough-talking cabbies. (The third season intro is below, but the first season intro is probably the more memorable one.)
The Hustle-and-Bustle
As with the On Our Own intro, many workplace comedies chose to contrast their wacky interior antics with the frenetic urban rhythms of New York City. It’s as though the comedy you were about to see generates from walking through the crazy, chaotic streets of Midtown.
The intro to the Garment District comedy Needles and Pinsratchets the enthusiasm of That Girl‘s intro down to a quiet, confident strut. Yeah, I work here.
A variation of the buzzing energy of New York City being a impetus for comedy is seen in the intros for Saturday Night Live, even to this day.
The Taxi City
One identifying symbol of New York is the taxicab or, more specifically, the cabbie. While films like Taxi Driver were putting an ominous spin on this image, television still relied on the cab as shorthand for the modern urban experience.
And if you could somehow combine it with a basketball court — as with Busting Loose — then you know it’s really, really New York.
The taxi is a vehicle of love in the romantic comedy Bridget Loves Bernie. There’s no way to see this today as anything other than slightly creepy especially in light of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (which came out a few years later). This extended intro ticks off all the boxes — cabs, school yards, the Queensboro Bridge, Central Park….
Taxis were so representative of the New York experience that one of the era’s greatest sitcoms was centered around the industry. Taxi survived well into the 1980s showing a more realistic version of New York than other shows of the day.
It also features the Queensboro Bridge, a heavily used symbol for the expanse of the city. Since shows of the period rarely went downtown, the Queensboro could sit in for the Brooklyn Bridge when long vistas of the East River were required. (Taxi actually did go downtown; it was set in a garage at Charles and Hudson Streets.)
The Outer Borough
Television shows often went to the other boroughs when they wanted to express the clashes of modern life, contrasted against a more suburban backdrop which many Americans could more easily identify.
Most everybody knows the iconic theme song from All In The Family as delivered by Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton. What you may not remember is yet another establishing shot of Manhattan, used to contrast with the rows of Queens homes. In these few seconds, the intro excellently sets up the conflicts of modernity, a quiet residential present, and a duo that seem stuck in a sheltered past.
The same sort of pull-away from Manhattan is used in O’Connor’s follow-up series, Archie Bunker’s Place, which yanks the viewer away from the skyline, back over the Queensboro Bridge and down Northern Boulevard. Archie has changed since those years at the piano, and so have his surroundings. The blocks of uniform homes have been replaced with subway graffiti and bustling street life.
13 Queens Blvd went even deeper into Queens but still relied on the establishing shot of Manhattan to let viewers know how far we are from real urban issues. The show’s situations were driven by the comic misunderstandings within an apartment complex, a little like One Day At A Time (set in Indianapolis) or Three’s Company (set in Santa Monica) perhaps. The show didn’t last long.
Brooklyn was represented in the 1970s by Welcome Back Kotter. Set in a fictional high school, it is New Utrecht High School that’s used in the opening. While other sitcoms used a Manhattan establishing shot, Kotter prefers a beat-up sign that announces Brooklyn as the 4th largest city in America. With its painted trains and lines of laundry, this might be the grittiest depiction of New York in a sitcom, even as its high school students (the Sweathogs) were incredibly unrealistic.
Movin’ On Up
Mostly though, sitcoms preferred the fantasy, Manhattan as an Emerald City. (It was literally depicted as such in the 1970s musicalThe Wiz.) No amount of deterioration seemed to supplant the image of Manhattan as having ‘made it’, especially when dealing with African-American television characters.
Taxis are again the vehicle of transformation in The Jeffersons, plucking George and Louise Jefferson from the land of Archie Bunker — again, using the Queensboro Bridge — and putting them in a luxury accommodation on the Upper East Side.
Two African-American boys are saved by a wealthy white man in Diff’rent Strokes.For emphasis in the intro, Arnold and Willis are playing basketball, the de facto symbol in 1970s television of the inner city.
I don’t know if the show was any good, but the intro to the 1970 sitcom Barefoot In The Park seems refreshing in retrospect. The show, based on the Broadway show, features a young black couple trying to make it though the first years of marriage in Manhattan. It seems to handle the subject with the same euphoria used in ‘That Girl’.
They’re riding a horse-and-carriage drinking champagne! It literally does not get cheesier.
Unvarnished New York
There were a few shows that felt embedded within the actual New York experience. Their intros reflect a certain melancholy, a feeling that perhaps the city was not always a whirlwind of breezy excitement. The champagne remains corked.
Barney Miller is one of the few shows actually set in Greenwich Village. Perhaps as a result, its establishing shot of Manhattan is moody, even dreary, a perfect backdrop for a comedy television show about criminal behavior.
In the opening to The Odd Couple, New York is an embodiment of its characters’ anxieties and differences. There is no establishing shot of Manhattan, no attempt to glamorize the big city. These two are actually at odds with the city, not each other, as presented here. The intro ends with a rare pan-up of the two characters with the city looming behind them.
The Wild East
In an opposite reaction to rural shows like Green Acres (where people fled New York), a maverick sensibility came to New York in the 1970s, especially in the detective genre, with iconoclastic characters bringing foreign forms of justice to an ungoverned city.
On McCloud, a New Mexico detective wrangles up a few pimps and car thieves, bringing fun but clumsy cowboy tropes to Times Square. Unlike sitcoms, detective dramas actually went to 70s Times Square all the time for obvious reasons. Although most did not bring stagecoaches with them.
Another bizarre crime-fighter to the New York skyline was the Amazing Spider-Man. We get a Manhattan establishing shot here, comically interrupted by Spiderman’s awful costume. They spend a great amount of time with Spidey on the Empire State Building; in fact most of the show was filmed in L.A.
You didn’t even need a reason to bring in a cowboy. In the 1970 sitcom Mr Deeds Goes To Town, a folksy newspaper editor takes on the big city. The intro lays it on thick.
Groovy 70s Noir
A few crime dramas of the 1970s were actually filmed in New York City and thus could highlight the city a bit more fully in their intros.
The short-lived television version of Serpico features numerous places throughout the city, from the Battery to Times Square. And, yes, the Queensboro Bridge is again represented here via its subway stop.
New York’s greatest television crime fighter of the 1970s was Kojak, so cool that the city is given a trippy noir vibe, peeking from the nooks of swirling graphics. Of course most of Kojak was filmed in Los Angeles, but, according to writer Burton Armus, the production crew went to New York on occasion for “surrounding shots, background shots, one or two scenes.”
Taking its cue from Kojak in its tone, Eischied was also a bit of a cowboy, bringing some Southern swagger to the mean streets of Manhattan. Its credit sequence is a confused mess.
The city was in the midst of a devastating heatwave gripping in the entire Northeast during the first two weeks of July 1911. There was little escape from the scorching temperatures among the cramped tenements. New York’s beaches offered some respite, but you had to cram into a sweltering train cabin to get there. Rudimentary air conditioning had only been invented a few years before and was hardly widespread.
Oh baby, it’s hot! Some tots seek shady shelter during the July 1911 heat wave.
In New York, the thermometer never broke a 100 degreeslike it did in Washington or Boston. But the humidity was deadly, and the city too crowded and ill-prepared for such withering conditions.
Below: A disturbing infographic from the Tribune
Naturally, the brand new subway was not the place to be either.
Riders going from the Brooklyn Bridge to Grand Central suffered a 45 minute ride, and a few passengers passed out. But others underground found relief from the heat; workers drilling the Penn Railroad tunnels under the Hudson River reported luxuriously cool temperatures in the 60s.
Below: Dozens slept underneath the shady trees in Battery Park at the hottest point of the heat wave.
The sizzling conditions literally drove people insane.
One drunken fool, “partly crazed by the heat,” attacked a policeman with a meat clever. A child on Tenth Avenue, escaping to the rooftop for relief, tumbled down an air shaft. The hospital was filled to capacity. Staten Island’s fire commissioner succumbed to the heat and died in his home.
Some levity as a boy takes off his cap to cool off in a park fountain:
Library of Congress
After July 7th, the temperatures dipped to normal levels but the humidity kept the city in sweaty discomfort. Or as the Tribune dramatically states: “The monstrous devil that had pressed New York under his burning thumb for five days could not go without one last curse, and when the temperature dropped called humidity to its aid.”
By the time rain came to relieve the city, a reported 211 people had fallen to heat-related deaths. But the largest number of victims came from New York’s army of horses, trudging by the thousands through the city’s busy, stagnant streets.
The New York Times estimates that over 600 animals died during the heat wave, so many that the city was unable to pick up all the bodies from the streets. Frequently seen were dead animals pushed to the sides of the road. Add in the oppressive humidity, and I’ll leave you to imagine how horrific it would have been to experience.
George Washington’s copy of the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most well-known of the almost 200 copies first made of the document.
As a facsimile, it’s certainly not the the most valuable document held by the Library of Congress — after all, they have Thomas Jefferson’s actual rough draft of the Declaration, along with tens of thousands of his other papers — but it’s certainly an inspiring artifact in its own right.
Below: The document in question.
Because Washington wasn’t in Philadelphia at the time of the actual declaration on July 2 or the completion by Jefferson of the finished copy on July 4.
Later, as news of a British arrival to New York became evident, he moved his headquarters to City Hall, then on Wall Street and Broad Street.
Below: Washington’s two headquarters pre-July 1776:
Internet Archive Book Images
Hundreds of British war vessels had stationed themselves off of Sandy Hook by the first of July, so fearful a presence that many of New York’s 20,000 residents had fled in fear.
By July 9, thousands of Continental Army soldiers had amassed in New York, turning the port town overnight into a military outpost. The key gathering point for Washington and his men was the Commons, a former livestock area that had been the scene of protests against the British for over a decade. Many a liberty pole had stood here, an age old protest against despotism.
George Washington, painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1776
But on that day, July 9, there was not a single inanimate symbol of protest, but rather many thousands of animate ones, all summoned to gather by 6 p.m. to await Washington’s words.
From the text of Washington’s order that day:
“The several brigades are to be drawn up this evening on their respective Parades, at Six O’Clock, when the declaration of Congress, shewing the grounds and reasons of this measure, is to be read with an audible voice.
The General hopes this important Event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms: And that he is now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country.“
A copy of the Declaration — the one pictured above — had been hand-delivered to Washington on that very day. However the General himself did not read it aloud. Rather he had one of his aides read it to the gathered crowd.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation….”
Below: A British map of New York as it was played out in 1776:
These weren’t empty phrases. Upon the completion of the reading, New Yorkers knew their city would be attacked. The men of Washington’s army knew they would fight and possibly die.
The words were greeted with joy, fear, anticipation and rage. The crowds surged with excitement. Most ran to their places — to Kings College, to the counting-houses of Hanover Square, to the ships docked along the East River — and prepared for the world to change.
Many people certainly ran to their local taverns to get wasted. (Samuel Fraunces must have hosted a lively crowd that night.) Some New Yorkers went to their homes, packed their belongings and fled.
Needless to say, the reading had gone off as intended. General Washington’s letter to the Continental Congress is an almost amusing example in understatement:
“Agreeable to the request of Congress I caused the Declaration to be proclaimed before all the Army under my immediate Command, and have the pleasure to inform them, that the measure seemed to have their most hearty assent; the Expressions and behaviour both of Officers and Men testifying their warmest approbation of it.”
In fact, not only did his army and the gathered New Yorkers approve of the Declaration, but later that night, they actively demonstrated their approval by rushing down Broadway to Bowling Green, where they proceed to pull down the loathsome statue of King George!
Afterwards, Washington had his personal copy sent to Artemes Ward, his major general stationed in Massachusetts. Washington’s note to Ward also survives:
“The inclosed Declaration will shew you, that Congress at Length, impelled by Necessity, have dissolved the Connection between the American Colonies , and Great Britain, and declared them free and independent States; and in Compliance with their Order, I am to request you will cause this Declaration to be immediately proclaimed at the Head of the Continental Regiments in the Massachusetts Bay.”
Today the Washington Declaration — or rather, a fragment of it — is only one of 26 Dunlap copies that are still believed to exist. It lives, naturally, in Washington D.C. However three copies of the ‘Dunlap’ Declaration are in New York City — at the Morgan Library, at the New York Public Library and another, in the hands of an unknown private collector.
The superstar and civil rights activist Lena Horne had such a dynamic, multi-faceted and enduring career — starting in 1933, she worked regularly well into the late 1990s — that we all may have different views of who she was.
Horne was one of the first African-American women to break through in Hollywood in the 1940s though it was her successes on stage and in nightclub acts that would cement her reputation as a sterling jazz voice of uncommon elegance.
In 1958 she became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award.
If you’re a ’70s and ’80s kid, you probably remember Horne for her television work on Sesame Street, the Muppet Show or the Cosby Show.
By this point she was already a musical icon; as a kid, I was transfixed watching her on Sesame Street, never understanding the political undertones of a seemingly simple performance such as “Bein’ Green,” sung here with Kermit the Frog.
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born 105 years ago today in Brooklyn. As a tribute, here are a few addresses around New York City that helped play a role in her development, her career and her legacy.
A tour of Lena Horne’s life begins in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, home of the ‘black bourgeoisie‘ of the 1930s, middle and upper class African-Americans whose wealth and professional careers set them apart from black enclaves in other parts of the city.
It was here that Horne was born on June 30, 1917 at 189 Chauncey Street. (And for a time she also lived at 519 Macon Street, a house that was recently on the market). She lived there with her grandparents for only a short time before traveling to Georgia for many years, returning to Brooklyn as a teenager.
Horne enjoyed her time at Girls High School (later Boys and Girls High School), a towering institution where Shirley Chisholm would attend school just a decade later. But Lena’s mother Edna pulled her from school before she could finish, making her attend a secretarial school instead.
But Lena wouldn’t waste too much time dictating and typing. In 1933, at just 16 years of age, she made her debut as a chorus girl at The Cotton Club, the segregated music club which had helped define Harlem as a pivotal nightlife destination during Prohibition.
As much as it may horrify us today thinking of a 16-year-old girl in a rowdy nightclub, Lena was well protected (chiefly by the guys in Cab Calloway‘s orchestra who nicknamed her ‘Brooklyn’) and her charm, beauty and crystal voice soon got her engagements with traveling musicians (notably Noble Sissle, best known for the musical Shuffle Along).
It would be at the Cotton Club that the song “Stormy Weather” would make its debut — but sung by Ethel Waters.
During the 1930s she became a modest presence of the stage and screen. She received her first mention in a New York Times review by Brooks Atkinson in February 13, 1939, for a show called Blackbirds of 1939: “Among those present is a radiantly beautiful sepia girl, Lena Horne, who sings “Thursday” and “You’re So Indifferent” in an attractive style, and who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”
Below: “Lena Horne Conserves Fuel” — A wartime public service announcement she filmed for the Office of Emergency Management
The club was explicitly political. According to its proprietor Barney Josephson: “I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front. There wasn’t, so far as I know, a place like that in New York or in the whole country.”
Read more about Cafe Society here or check out the Bowery Boys podcast on the life of Billie Holiday for more information (Episode #174)
6) Waldorf-Astoria, 301 Park Avenue, Manhattan
Perhaps no other music venue in New York is more important to Horne’s legacy than the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Her New Year’s Eve debut on December 31, 1956, captured her at the height of her talents. From the New York World-Telegram:
“The woman is so stunningly gowned to accent a beautiful figure that this, in itself, would catch an audience’s attention. But the ultimate hypnotic effect is the music, the arrangements and an intensity of delivery that finds its essence in eyes that seem to bore into you.“
Her performances there would inspire an album Lena Horne At The Waldorf-Astoria (1957), becoming the highest selling album by a female RCA recording artist up to that time.
Despite her fame, Horne (as well as many other famous African-Americans) found it difficult to find apartment owners who would rent to her due to her race.
Harry Belafonte had ran into a similar problem in the late 1950s but found a unique solution, simply buying an entire building on West End Avenue. He rented the penthouse to Horne.
“[W]e [she and her husband Lennie Hayton] went through the hysteria of trying to find an apartment “ all those stupid problems“ and when we finally found a place that would admit both me and Lennie, we put our roots down.”
Horne got a late career boost in 1981 when the wildly successful musical revue Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music which garnered her a Tony Award and a world tour.
From the New York Times review: Miss Horne is out to prove something in this revue, and it’s not merely that her talents and looks are unbruised by the years that have passed since she first danced across a Cotton Club stage an era ago.
She doesn’t simply present herself as a survivor – a favorite device of older stars who come back to Broadway – but as an artist who is still growing, who is only now reaching the peak of her powers.
Here’s Horne accepting her Tony Award for the performance:
9) Brooks Atkinson Theatre Lena Horne Theater (256 W. 47th Street)
This month it was announced that the Brooks Atkinson Theatre — currently home to the musical Six — will be renamed the Lena Horne Theater starting in the fall. The Broadway playhouse, which first opened in 1926, was originally called the Mansfield Theatre, named for British Shakespearean star Richard Mansfield.
This article originally ran five years ago on the 100th anniversary of her birth
The story of New York’s most prominent abortionist of the 19th century and the unique environment of morality and secrecy which accommodated her rise on the fringes of society.
Ann Lohman aka Madame Restell was one of the most vilified women of the 19th century, an abortion practitioner that dodged the law to become one of the wealthiest self-made women in the Gilded Age. But is her wicked reputation justified?
Thoughts on abortion and birth control were quite different in the 1830s, the era in which Madame Restell got her start. It was societal decorum and marital morality — not science and religion — that played a substantial role in New Yorkers’ views on the termination of pregnancy. Restell and countless imitators offers a wide range of potions, pills and powders to customers, provided for in veiled wording in newspaper advertisements.
By the 1860s Restell was insulated from serious interrogation and flaunted her unique position in society by planting her Fifth Avenue mansion in a very controversial place. But she soon became a target of New York’s most dogged reformer, a man who considered her pure evil and the source of society’s most illicit sins.
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Ann Lohman aka Madame Restell, featured in the National Police Gazette for the crime that would get her sent to Blackwell’s Island, March 13, 1847
A drawing of Madame Restell made in 1888, long after her death.
The New York Illustrated News, 1878, heralding the arrest of Madame Restell by Anthony Comstock (and, later in the issue, Restell in the Tombs):
Thanks to Victorian Gothic for this image!
A few choice pages from an 1896 scandal novelization about the life of Madame Restell by Rev. Bishop Huntington:
Courtesy Hathi Trust
A sampling of ‘abortion pill’ advertisements from the late 1830s and early 1840s, from Madame Restell and her impersonators. NOTE: It’s hard to discern if these so-called medicines were for abortions or for other “female issues” given the vagueness of language:
Even before Madame Restell, there was the ‘Widow Welch’s Female Pills’. Both these ads ran in the New York Morning Herald on November 8, 1837:
Library of Congress
An early Madame Restell advertisement, New York Morning Herald, December 9, 1839:
A successful rival of Madame Restell was Madame Costello who worked off of Lispenard Street. Her ad from the Herald, October 10, 1842:
A series of advertisements for an assortment of female ‘solutions,’ New York Herald, August 4, 1867:
Madame Restell’s Fifth Avenue mansion (at 52nd Street), an area so newly developed in 1857 that there was nothing else around — except for the construction site of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The mansion in later years after Restell’s death. The apartment building next to the mansion was also commissioned by Restell because nobody else would buy the property!
Courtesy NYPL
An illustration of the death of Madame Restell as imagined in Recollections of a New York Chief of Police by George P. Walling.
A big thanks to our special guest — author Nicholas Syrett, Associate Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado!
Welfare Island (once the more enticingly named Blackwell’s Island) was New York’s depository of human services, once a dour place of horrifying asylums and miserable workhouses.
In the 1960s Mayor John Lindsay was preparing to revitalize the East River island with new housing and increased support for the hospitals there. Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee were brought in to rethink the urban space as a largely automobile-free community.
For this grand experiment, all they needed was a name. Luckily there seemed be a couple prominent figures being egregiously ignored in the city — Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor:
“It is astonishing, and becomes more disgraceful with every passing year, that within the city there is still no memorial to this great New Yorker (except for FDR Drive, a dubious honor).
The opportunity is, however, immediately at hand. Welfare Island, now slowly undergoing a total reconstruction and rebirth, would take on a new symbolic significance if its name were changed to Franklin D. Roosevelt Island — or, better yet, to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Island in honor of that extraordinary woman who was even more closely identified with New York City than was the president himself.”
By the following year Mayor Lindsay submitted a proposal to re-name Welfare Island for the president and the first lady.
From Jan. 21, 1973:
It was officially approved later that summer but with a revised name — Franklin Roosevelt Island.
To the Council, “a witness testified that the name of Welfare Island should be dropped because plans were under way to start marketing this September the thousands of apartments already built and still under construction as part of a $300-million ‘new town’ designed to replace outdated medical facilities.” [source]
Below: The island in April 1961, photo courtesy the New York Fire Department
She finally did get her own memorial in New York City — an understated statue tucked away in Riverside Park.
It was unveiled on October 5, 1996 by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Oddly enough, Hillary regaled the crowd with a story of imaginary conversations she liked to have with Eleanor. “When I last spoke to Mrs. Roosevelt, she wanted me to tell all of you how pleased she is by this great, great new statue.”
Top picture courtesy Museum of the City of New York
The fascinating story of Grant’s Tomb — and a quirky history that includes an ambitious architect, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, lots of ugly raspberry paint, and strange charges of animal sacrifice.
The history of Grant’s Tomb plays an important role in the story of Riverside Park (released in 2018). Listen to that tale here:
And listen to the story of Grant’s Tomb in this very early episode of the Bowery Boys podcast from 2008.
Ulysses S. Grant – perhaps America’s most famous man in the years following the Civil War. As president of the United States, Grant would be known for important political reforms — and a series of corruption scandals.
His wife Julia Dent Grant, entombed next to him
An ominous view of the Tomb during World War I, as battleships pass by it
A great photo illustrating how somewhat barren that area of town was at the time. The silo-like building in the background is apparently a gas shell.
The website of the Grant Monument Association details some of the disasterous deterioration of the memorial during the 1970s:
Frank Scaturro, the Columbia University student who helped bring Grant’s Tomb back to life (photos courtesy the GMA website)
Grant’s Tomb today, complete with unicyclists (in foreground). Photos by Greg Young (taken in 2008)
Hudson River Bridge near Waterford, New York, 1832. Courtesy New-York Historical Society
People have schemed to put a bridge over the Hudson River for well over two hundred years. That task would prove most difficult to those in Manhattan, given the distance between its shores and those of New Jersey.
After several failed proposals, the two were linked with the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels (1910), the Holland Tunnel (1927), and finally, the George Washington Bridge (1931).
Above: A wooden bridge in Kentucky using the Burr truss, invented by Theodore Burr and first used over the Hudson River’s first bridge span. (Courtesy LOC)
But further upstate, industrious New Yorkers had an easier time of bridging the two sides, as the river became narrower in places and engineers could work upon sparsely populated lands.
The first bridge over the Hudson River rose at the village of Waterford(near Albany) in 1804, the work of inventor Theodore Burr, the cousin of Vice President Aaron Burr.
From an 1820 map of the Hudson River. You can see where Burr’s bridge was located, situated over the Hudson until the 20th century (courtesy NYPL):
While Aaron was engaging in a vituperative war of words with Alexander Hamilton, his cousin Theodore was crafting an extraordinary bridge, described in a later history by his ancestor as “four combined arch and truss spans, one of 154 feet, one of 161 feet, one of 176 feet, and a fourth at 180 feet.”
By this point, he was already a well-known, even adventurous builder, but the Waterford bridge was truly something unique. He eventually patented his design, which became known as ‘a Burr Truss,’ used in the construction of covered bridges throughout the United States.
A sketch of the Waterford bridge, as illustrated by Thomas Cooper in 1889, and an excellent view of what became known as the Burr Truss:
The bridge was coming along nicely by the spring of 1804. The local paper noted that “the erection is proceeding rapidly, the abutments, (on shore sides) and one of three piers are already near finished, and the frames of the arches are in a state of equal preparedness.
Concerning the abutments and piers, there is not the least doubt that they will render the bridge secure from ice in spring seasons.”
I’m not sure where Theordore was in July, whether at the bridge site or back at his grist mill in Oxford. The bridge was over one-third completed that month when Theodore got word that his esteemed cousin had met Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, 150 miles down river, leading to the death of Hamilton.
But while Aaron’s reputation would quickly deteriorate, Theodore’s would briefly flower, becoming America’s most prolific bridge engineer in the early 19th century. His most impressive span, the Susquehanna River Bridge in Pennsylvania, survived until 1857.
Strangely, however, Theodore’s eventual fate would eventually mirror his cousin’s. Many of his bridges fell apart, and his finances were ruefully mismanaged.
He actually disappears from the historical record; according to author Donald E. Wolf, “[h]is heirs report that he died in 1822, but they have been unable to say what caused his death or to identify the place of his burial.”
Originally exposed to the elements, the bridge was later sheathed in a covering. It held sturdy over the Hudson River until it was destroyed in a gas fire in 1909.
The Waiting Game: Down at the White Star Line's Broadway offices near Bowling Green, anxious New Yorkers line the streets waiting for news about the sunken vessel. 1912
Over fifteen hundred people died the night the Titanic sank, April 14-15, 1912. The early reports from the New York newspapers, of course, spent their time mourning the city’s most connected figures to society.
Even from some of the most obsessive sources on the Titanic, the details on the lives of dozens of men and women who died below deck are sometimes hard to locate.
There’s always been something slightly unsettling about using primary news sources for Titanic research. The bias towards wealthy lives over poor ones — and of American and British lives to all others — can be a little unsettling.
For instance, an anecdote from an April 20, 1912, article in the New York Times: “…[I]t became known among those saved from the Titanic were six or eight Chinamen who were among the steerage passengers on the big liner. It seems that they climbed aboard one of the lifeboats without anybody making objection, despite the fact that many of the women in the steerage of the Titanic went down with the ship.“
Titanic’s Lifeboats at The White Star Lines Pier 54 in NYC after Sinking. [source]
But this was indeed a tragedy that shook most of the entire world to its core and, in particular, changed the lives of many Americans, from tenements to townhouses.
The old-family names and the wizards of business (Astor, Straus, Guggenheim) have been well documented. But here I present the fates of five well-off but perhaps lesser-known New York women who survived the sinking of the Titanic with intriguing stories of their own to tell:
Dr. Alice Farnham Leader Born in New York, May 10, 1862
Alice would have been among the second generation of women trained in medicine, and a career in pediatrics was one of the few that a women of her day could ably progress towards. As late as 1907 she was employed at Bellevue Hospital as ‘a social service nurse‘.
However she wasn’t a practicing doctor by the time she boarded the Titanic; the 49 year old had retired when her husband died in 1908.
She was rescued by lifeboat no. 8, commanded by one of the Titanic’s most famous names: Noël Rothes, the Countess of Rothes. “The countess is an expert oarswoman and thoroughly at home in the water,” Alice told the press, who sadly seemed more interested in the fate of the titled gentry than of this mysterious doctor who appears to have avoided the spotlight for the remainder of her life.
Afterwards: Dr. Leader is mentioned in a Utah newspaper in 1916, discussing the crisis of graying hair. Her solution: “A head exercise for circulation is to lie on the couch with the head projecting beyond the couch. Bend the head forward, backward, to each side, to each side, then rotate.” Died: April 20, 1944
Irene (Rene) Harris Born: June 15, 1876
A New York stage actress with some considerable credits to her name, Harris boarded the Titanic with her husband Henry Birkhardt Harris, the theater impresario and partner (with Jesse Lasky) in the Folies Bergere, which has just opened in midtown the year before.
Irene made it to a lifeboat but her beloved husband perished on the Titanic. The Times recounts her cable to the Hudson Theater: “Praying that Harry has been picked up by another steamer.”
Afterwards: Returning to the New York theater in grief, she sued the White Star Line for a large petition of damages, and perhaps with good reason; she discovered when she got home that her husband was nearly bankrupt from the Folies Bergere venture and other flops.
So she decided to make her own money, soon becoming one of Broadway’s first female producers with such shows as ‘Lights Out’ and ‘The Noose’ and buying a Park Avenue apartment.
But her wealth didn’t make it out of the Great Depression, and she spent her last days living in Manhattan hotels. In 1958, she was subjected to a screening of the Hollywood film ‘A Night To Remember‘. “I think your film title is a mistake,” she said. “It was a night to forget.” Died: September 2, 1969
Margaret Hays Born: December 6, 1887
If not for the tragic sinking of the Titanic, Margaret Hays’ fate might have made a charming family comedy. The young woman lived at304 West 83rd Street and had gone to Europe with two school friends Olive and Lily.
And there was another lady with her on the Titanic that fateful night — Margaret’s Pomeranian dog.
All three friends and her little dog too made it to a lifeboat, but Margaret’s story was just beginning.
Onboard the rescue ship Carpathia were two small frightened French boys.
The ‘Titanic orphans’, named Michel and Edmond (not Louis & Lola!).
They had been separated from their father Michel who was never found. Hays, who spoke French, took the boys into her care during the somber voyage and well after they arrived in New York. They stayed at her home on West 83rd — she distracted the distraught boys with carriage rides up Riverside Drive — until their mother arrived from France.
On her arrival, it was revealed that their father had taken the two boys against their mother’s will during a bitter divorce battle.
Afterwards: Hays married a Rhode Island doctor and lived in relative comfort, dying during a vacation in Argentina. Died: August 21, 1956
Leila Meyer Born in New York, September 28, 1886
The young socialite and daughter of Andrew Saks (founder of Saks Fifth Avenue) met aspiring Wall Street broker Eugene Meyer and married him in 1909.
While traveling, Leila was wired the tragic news that her father had died. (Later, she discovered that a sizable part of their fortune had been willed to her.) Leila and her husband boarded the Titanic to return home. She made it to a lifeboat; her husband died aboard the ship.
Afterwards: She later remarried and lived the remainder of her life at 970 Park Avenue, rarely speaking to the press about her tragedy, although her spectacular jewelry collection was frequently remarked upon in women’s magazines. Died: November, 27, 1957
Mrs. Charlotte Appleton Born in New York, December 12, 1858
Charlotte was well versed in the thrill of ocean travel. Her father, once a well-known dry goods importer, worked for the firm which operated theBlack Ball Line, one of the oldest shipping companies in New York and no stranger to a few shipwrecks of its own.
She married into the prestigious Appleton publishing family and was on the Titanic with two sisters, returning from a funeral in England.
Afterwards: Mrs. Appleton’s name is familiar with Titanic buffs as she was an acquaintance of Col. Archibald Gracie IV, the great-grandson of the man who built Gracie Mansion and one of the more notable bold-faced names on the Titanic. Mrs. Appleton lived the remainder of her life at 214-33 33rd Road, the oldest house in Bayside, Queens.
Died: June 25th, 1924
Some pictures and many of the birth/death dates above are courtesy Encyclopedia Titanica. Top picture courtesy the Library of Congress.
This story was originally published on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic and refreshed the honor the 110th anniversary.
Benjamin Franklin helped to create the modern world. His legacy is all around you — from the electricity which powers and illuminates our homes to the ideas that form our system of government.
For the past three episodes of The First: Stories of Inventionsand their Consequences (the Bowery Boys spin-off podcast from 2016-2018), Greg Young has taken you through the story of the Founding Father’s extraordinary life by way of his inventions — printing innovations, the Franklin stove, the bifocals.
In his final years, as the most esteemed member of Congress, he brought his scientific mind into service to create a new country.
All three episodes of this series are now available. You can find The First: Stories of Inventions on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast or wherever you get your podcasts. (Just search for ‘The First Stories’.)
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