Author: Bowery Boys

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Brooklyn History Parks and Recreation

The disappearance and mysterious death of Calvert Vaux

On November 19, 1895,  Calvert Vaux went for a morning walk from his son’s home in Brooklyn. He never returned.

The 70 year old architect had helped to create the greatest parks in the cities of New York and Brooklyn.

His landscape collaborations with Frederick Law Olmsted had given Manhattan its Central Park and Brooklyn its Prospect Park and Fort Greene Park.

His own architectural work could be seen at Jefferson Market Courthouse, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1895 he still retained an honorary role as the parks department’s landscape adviser, although he had mostly retired from public life.

Calvert Vaux, circa 1865-1871

Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

His son Calvert Bowyer Vaux lived in a house on Twentieth Avenue between Bath and Benson Avenues in today’s neighborhood of Bath Beach. The elder Vaux often stayed with his son and was known for taking morning walks along the waterfront

On November 19, 1895, it was gray and foggy on the morning that Vaux departed his son’s home, leaving behind “a gold watch and chain and his vest” with about two dollars in his pocket.

Below: The New York Tribune made a brief mention of Vaux’s vanishing in the following one-sentence bulletin:

Trib Nov 21

At some point during the day he was spotted by a “Captain Ditmar” — possibly Captain Walter Earl Ditmar — on a pier near the water, and the two briefly spoke. Vaux is reported to have said to the captain, “I’m admiring the improvements you’ve made hereabouts.”

The two briefly talked about methods in which to make the beach area more amenable to visitors before Vaux proceeded to walk the piers by himself.

Ditmar was the last person to see Vaux alive.

The architect must have been known for taking very long walks for he was only discovered missing in the late afternoon. 

By the evening his family became worried; the police were called the following morning. All the local hospitals and hotels were checked. While it was well-known that Vaux was a frail man, he was often known to walk up to Prospect Park, several miles from his son’s home. But fears that he may have fallen into the bay were already present.

Below: An 1889 map of the district Vaux’s son lived in. The elder Vaux was last seen along the shoreline depicted here.

1

The following day the body of Calvert Vaux was indeed found in Gravesend Bay at the foot of Bay 17th Street, very close to the site of today’s Bath Beach Park.

As described by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“A workman on Fry’s coal dock [later identified as Benjamin Butler] first saw the body being tossed about in the rough water, but when he rushed to the shore to secure the corpse it disappeared. It was some minutes later before Mr. Fry himself saw it drifting alongside the bulkhead out to sea again. With a boat hook he succeeded in bringing it close to shore.”

Below: Headline from the New York Sun

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The police were called, bringing Vaux’s son down to the shore to identify the body. He could scarcely bring himself to look into his father’s face, recognizing his father’s well-worn suit before looking away.

“There was a bruise on the head, a slight cut over the eye, and the hat, spectacles and left shoe were missing,” reported the Times.

Given the circumstantial evidence, it seems clear as to what may have happened to Mr. Vaux. While on a walk along the shore, he may have fainted or tripped, falling into the water and drowning in the waves.

Below: An engraving from the New York Tribune:

tribune

The Sun further speculated: “As he was interested in the construction of the pier, it may be that he leaned over the stringpiece to examine the foundation piles. In doing so he may have fallen into the water, as he was ill and feeble, being 70 years old.”

Most press reports of the day made it clear no foul play was suspected. Vaux Jr. brushed away any suggestions of suicide on his father’s part. “The theory of suicide has been disclaimed by his relatives who said that [Vaux] had been cheerful and mentally able the evening before he disappeared.” [source]

But not everybody was convinced, and the Tribune reported that the “theory [of suicide] prevails with some people.”

Weeks earlier Vaux had told his daughter that he wanted to live long enough to see the completion of his plans in Central Park. “If I can only manage to live until 1898, my plans for the improvement of Central Park will be completed, and I won’t worry about any other work.”

Sadly Vaux’s death did have a certain impact on Central Park. Without the dutiful eye of its co-creator, maintenance on the park gradually deteriorated, and it would not be until the installation of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses that the condition of the park would be improved.

Today, nearby the place where Vaux’s body was discovered, you may enjoy a picnic and a sunset at Calvert Vaux Park in Gravesend.

Below: Calvert Vaux Park (the former Dreier-Offerman Park) has greatly improved since the 1960s when it was essentially an undeveloped mess, linked by a pedestrian bridge. Picture courtesy the New York City Parks Archives

1968

It was once called Dreier-Offerman Park for the former home for unwed mothers which once sat here. It was changed to honor the architect in 1998 when it was radically re-landscaped and improved. Knowing that he died close to here, I kind of think being named after an unwed mother’s home is the less depressing name.

Picture at top: A forlorn pier from 1890, located at West Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Photograph by Robert Bracklow. Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Photograph by Robert Bracklow. Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

And here are some photographs I took in Calvert Vaux Park from a couple years ago:

This article originally ran in 2015.

Categories
Parks and Recreation

Ten unusual views of Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza

Prospect Park Archives

When park designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux regrouped after the success of Central Park to design another great park for Brooklyn — encompassing Prospect Hill and the Revolutionary War site Battle Pass — they preserved a greater amount of natural topography than they had in Manhattan. But that doesn’t mean that Prospect Park hasn’t gone through a few radical changes of its own since it opened between the years 1867 and 1873.

Their Grand Army Plaza has experienced few changes since it opened in those years, but the structures around it have certainly changed, presenting some surprising views at the mighty war monuments.

New York Public LIbrary

1. Women of the Wellhouse
The caption for this stereoscopic view (taken sometime in the 1870s-80s) calls this a ‘well house’, although it may have also been a a coal storage shed or even an outhouse! Brooklyn’s main reservoir was on Prospect Hill, and the park was constructed partially to protect the water source from encroaching developers.

2. Prospect Park Dairy
As they had done in Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux infused the landscape with various romantic, fairytale-like structures, including this dairy house, providing guests with milk straight from the cow. Central Park still has a version of their dairy, but Prospect Park’s was regrettably torn down in the 1930s to make way for the Prospect Park Zoo. (NYPL)

Library of Congress

3. Brooklyn Sheep

 Sure, you many know Sheep Meadow in Central Park once had actual sheep grazing — they were considered a rustic design ornament and a natural landscaper — but what happened to the animals after Robert Moses kicked them out in 1934? Like so many trendy things, they moved to Brooklyn! They joined Prospect Park’s already thriving sheep colony (pictured below, from 1903) before moving on to other pastures. (Courtesy LOC)

New York Public Library

4. Floral Steps, 1904
The manicured flora that grace these steps predates the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by several years. The stairs are still there today, of course, though unadorned.

Courtesy Dept of Records

5. Drinking Fountains
With water aplenty, Prospect Park has been dotted with drinking fountains since its inception. This rather unusual fountain, from 1938, may still be around, but I doubt you’ll see anybody drinking from it.

6. Deer Paddock
The zoo also replaced the rather extraordinary Deer Paddock, where the sometimes docile creatures were allowed to wander around. This despite some of them occasionally escaping and running into the surrounding neighborhood (as one adventurous buck did in 1906).

NYPL

7. Stately Reservoir Tower
High atop Brooklyn’s second highest point on Mount Prospect sits the reservoir tower, only a couple decades old (1893) but looking like a medieval ruin in this image. Date of this picture is unknown, although the ground for the Brooklyn Public Library main branch building was broken in 1912, so it was clearly sometime before then. The Brooklyn Museum is in the distance. [NYPL]

Library of Congress

8. And, yes, the Reservoir itself
The reservoir was built here in 1856 and was meant to be included within the park designs. With Flatbush Avenue ultimately cleaving the hill from the rest of the proposal, Olmsted and Vaux left it out. This picture is from between 1910-1920. [LOC]

9. From high above
This bird’s eye view from 1951 illustrates the plaza’s similarities to that of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

 

10. Library vista
And this view is from two weeks ago! During the Partners In Preservation Open House, the staff at the Brooklyn Public Library main branch led guided tours to the rooftop, offering a very particular take on the plaza. And if my camera had been better, you would see off in the distance the Statue of Liberty, situated several miles away.

 
 

This post originally ran in July of 2017.

Categories
Parks and Recreation Religious History

The Convent of Central Park and a famous Revolutionary War site

Courtesy New York Public Library

Pictured above is a remarkable structure that once dominated the scenery on the northern side of Central Park.

This was the Academy of Saint Vincent on a hill that bore its name. Located on the northern portion of the park, next to the charming Harlem Meer (and nearest 103rd Street), the Academy sat nestled amid a collection of hills and bluffs left over from its original pre-park topography.

Below: House on the hill: the stark and mysterious convent of Central Park, 1861

Washington Passes Through

A narrow passage next to the convent was named McGowan’s Pass after Andrew McGowan, owner of a popular tavern that sat here called the Black Horse Tavern. (It is often spelled McGown.)

It was through McGowan’s Pass that George Washington traveled on September 15, 1776.

He and a portion of the Continental Army had escaped up to today’s Washington Heights area; when hearing that part of his army had been stopped by the British, Washington rode down the pass and led the remaining troops back up to their fortification in the Heights.

He rode back through the pass again seven years later, this time as the victor.

The British and their Hessian mercenaries built forts here to cut Manhattan off from the mainland. Later New Yorkers would seize upon this idea during the early days of the War of 1812.

Not willing to become property of the British once again, Manhattan mobilized for any potential battles, building forts all over the island and throughout the harbor.

The Ghost of Old Forts

It was here at McGown’s Pass that a couple fortifications were built, including Fort Clinton (not to be confused with the fort in Battery Park, although both were named for DeWitt Clinton) and Fort Fish, named after Major Nicholas Fish, father of the New York senator Hamilton Fish.

Nothing much remains of these two old forts, which were never used as the war thankfully never made its way to the city. There are, however, two remaining structures from the early days.

A stone ledge overlooking the meer is all that remains of Nutter’s Battery, named after a farmer who owned the property. And nearby stands the Block House, its stone face still fairly solid, once armed with cannons and used to hold ammunition — that were, of course, never needed.

The Block House was fairly intact when Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux included it in their plans for the new park, incorporating the existing building as a ‘picturesque ruin’ covered in vines.

Here’s an illustration of how the Block House looked in 1860:

Holy Sanctuary

Before there was a park, however, there were nuns. In 1847 the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul arrived at the still-bucolic region of Manhattan and opened the Academy of St. Vincent, a school and convent.

The nuns left when the area was incorportated into the park, however the building remained standing and utilized for several purposes. During the Civil War, it was briefly used as a hospital; later, it was a “restaurant and hostelry,” with some certainly spectacular views for guests.

Below: Some sculptured works of Thomas Crawford in the interior of Mount St. Vincent’s Convent, Central Park, north end.]

Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

The stone chapel was even refashioned as an gallery for artwork and “stuffed specimens of animals of considerable value.” Unfortunately, the structures were destroyed in a fire in 1881. (This site has some great pictures of where the convent once stood.)

Below: The buildings on the hill, circa 1863. By this time, the Catholic sisters had moved onto a new location in the Bronx (from Wikimedia)

Time for a Drink

While the convent was gone by the 1880s, the area was not through with McGown/McGowan or his old tavern.

Although the Black Horse Tavern had been torn down decades earlier, a two-story refreshment pavilion was constructed at this site — “heated throughout by steam and lighted with Edison’s incandescent lights” — and later renamed McGowan’s Pass Tavern.

In 1895, McGowan’s was strangely granted its own election district as, being inside the park, it lay outside normal district boundaries. “There were four voters in this territory last year,” declared the New York Times. “They are four men employed at McGowan’s Pass Tavern.” The tavern was eventually torn down in the late 1910s.

Below: McGowan’s Pass Tavern (date unknown, but possibly around the early 1910s)

This is a bit tangental, but I love this story:

A plaque was erected at the old site of Fort Clinton in 1906 and unveiled in a publicized community event for children. It was apparently difficult for some people to find the location and “several chivalrous lads” guided people through the park to the unveiling.

However, the Times reports an incident that might be the only real battle that ever occured at this storied historical spot:

“Among the boys interested in the tablet unveiling were several whose spirit of mischief overcame their sense of the proprieties. These made misleading arrow signs …. and caused a number of persons to go far afield and arrive at the exercises late and angry. These mischievous youngsters were caught at their annoying trick by boys who were more sober and serious. Then there was a short scrimmage, and the mischievous lads scurried away through the Park.”

Finally, from a 19th century book on the War of 1812 comes this spectacular map of the various fortifications built in anticipation of battle.

Its dimensions are greatly distorted of course, but it lists the forts and blockhouses that stood in this area as well as those such as Fort Gansevoort and Fort Greene (click on the image to look at it more closely):

**This story originally ran in 2011. All pictures courtesy the New York Public Library except where otherwise noted

Categories
Parks and Recreation

Where was Manhattan Square? The Gilded Age remaking of a neglected park

Theodore Roosevelt Park (77th and 81st Streets, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue), which contains the beloved American Museum of Natural History, is the oldest developed section of the Upper West Side, purchased by the city in 1839 as a possible strolling park to be called Manhattan Square.

Museum of the City of New York

Central Park was but a gleam in the eye back in 1839! The Grid Plan of 1811 had divvied up upper Manhattan into organized blocks but not much was properly developed in the early 19th century. There were few suitable transportation options and thus upper Manhattan was only sparsely populated.

Near this spot on the grid was the old African-American settlement of Seneca Village, which was later wiped away with the development of Central Park.

Below: A sketch by Egbert Viele from 1857 showing the remains of the small village of Seneca Village. Manhattan Square would have been off to the upper left portion of this image.

The original grid plan had no significant parks built into it so later city planners had to carve some out themselves.

Unfortunately, the city almost literally forgot all about Manhattan Square — it’s even included in an 1860 New York Times article headlined NEWLY-DISCOVERED CITY PROPERTY! 

To be fair, the land had been granted to the Central Park Commission which was rather busy developing the park proper. As a result, Manhattan Square’s rugged and unpleasant terrain became an eye sore and rather dangerous for any actual visitors.

Samuel Ruggles, developer of both Union Square and Gramercy Park, once squawked, “It is a disgrace to the city. It is in some places forty feet below the grade and well characterized as a pestilential hole of stagnant water.”

Below: From the late 1870s, the solitary American Museum of Natural History building sits on the spot of Manhattan Square, now leveled out for public enjoyment, even if the lots surrounding it are quite barren.

In the early 1860s, the city proposed selling off this sorely underused area of land.

At one point, during the Civil War, some suggested it be turned into a proper military parade ground.

“Manhattan-square [has] been proposed for the parade-ground; over Manhattan-square the Commissioners have control and it is understood that they are willing to assign it, but, just now, they have not the funds which its preparation would require.” [source]

The next plan was to make a zoo! 

Animals had accumulated near the Central Park Arsenal as a make-shift ‘menagerie‘ — abandoned pets, former circus animals, far-flung beasts brought over on ships. At one point it was determined to move those animals to a more formal Zoological Garden, to be built on the much abused area of Manhattan Square.

From 1865: “The Zoological Gardens are about to be commenced at Manhattan-square, and the commissioners fully expect to have this valuable garden completed before the Summer wanes.”

Below: The chaos of the Central Park menagerie, depicted in an 1866 illustration

Harpers Weekly

Those planned fell through of course. Today the Central Park Zoo marks the location of that former menagerie.

By 1872, the Central Park Commission would utilize Manhattan Square for another mission, designating it the home for the American Museum of Natural History.

The first structure would be completed in 1877. (For more information on the institution’s development, check out our podcast on the subject.)

Apartment developers later flocked to the park’s edges, drawn to its proximity to other fashionable apartment houses in the neighborhood like the Dakota Apartments (at 72nd Street, built in 1884).

Luxury apartment living soon transformed the Upper West Side, and the fate of Manhattan Square — renamed Theodore Roosevelt Park in 1958 — changed with it.

Below: 44 West 77th Street. Manhattan Square Studio Apartment, photographed in 1910

MCNY

Of course, you may not know it by that name today either. From the New York Department of Parks and Recreation: “Neighborhood residents have traditionally referred to the parkland as Museum Park or Dinosaur Park.”

Below: The fully expanded museum as it looked in 1913

MCNY

The above is an expanded excerpt from our book The Bowery Boys Adventures In Old New York, now available at bookstores everywhere.

Categories
Friday Night Fever Gilded Age New York

What’s behind the Bronze Door? Gambling in the Gilded Age

Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street, location of the post gambling den. (Detroit Publishing Company

A tantalizing stretch of New York nightlife history lies in the shadows, illegally operated, often fueled by police bribes — the opium dens of Chinatown and the speakeasies of the Village and midtown.

There were also hundreds of illicit gambling rackets, called ‘poolrooms’, throughout the city in the late 19th century, usually alongside the seediest of taverns, brothels and poolrooms.

Naturally, the pastime was not looked upon lightly by proper society. “The poolroom keeper, like the proverbial worm,” remarked one New York Times article from 1900.

But New York’s wealthy elite liked to gamble as well, and there was no need for them to step into such filthy, disreputable places. The rich had their own houses of vice.

And one, the House with the Bronze Door, which opened in 1891, would have rivaled the great casinos of the day in terms of its lush presentation.

House of Cards

The fine townhouse at 33 West Thirty-third Street sat right around the corner from the Waldorf-Astoria, so close to respectable Fifth Avenue that people certainly strolled by it with no clue of the entertainments within.

Its glorious, defining feature — and where it gets its name — was a $20,000 Italianate Renaissance, 15th century bronze door which gave the building the feel of a classic structure, or perhaps a bank vault.

Luxury greeted those who were fortunate to peer behind that door, imported old school finery, from vases to oil paintings on rich wallpapered walls, along hallways in red velvet carpeting, leading to game rooms with European oak tables hosting games of roulette, poker and baccarat.

In a place where wealth exchanged hands nightly, it was reflected in the imported banisters and marble bathrooms.

High Stakes

And it wasn’t just how it looked, but who designed it to look that way — none other than Stanford White of the city’s most prestigious design firm McKim, Mead and White, a gambling man himself who hired a team of Venician craftsman to give the gambling house its distinctive glamour.

The building next door also belonged to the casino, but was less impressively designed; its sole purpose was as an exit in case of police raids.

The owner Frank Farrell* was New York’s gambling kingpin, using profits from the Bronze Door to fund over 200 illegal gambling houses throughout the city and grease the palms of police officers to ensure they all stayed open.

If that name sounds familiar to sports fans, it’s because of a riskier gamble Farrell made in 1903 with his business partner William Stephen Devery. (Yes, the former police chief. See how it used to work back then?)

The two purchased the Baltimore Orioles, moved them to New York, lost a lot of money, renamed the team as the New York Yankees and promptly sold them to beer mogul Jacob Ruppert.

Below: Farrell with a Yankees team member in 1912. He would sell off the losing team a few years later. Courtesy Library of Congress

A Night at the Tables

The only people taking risks at the Bronze Door, however, were the rich and well connected clientele. On any given evening you could find the head honchos of Tammany Hall smoking cigars in the corner, or ‘Diamond’ Jim Brady and his entourage at the upstairs roulette wheel.

According to Lloyd Morris: “The casino was conducted with the quiet decorum of a gentleman’s club.” These men expected the royal treatment, and they got it. A midnight buffet of lobsters and steaks, open bar of the best liqueurs, fine cigars for a $1 apiece. More importantly, Farrell strictly applied a philosophy of ‘the customer is always right’. Unlike many of Farrell’s downtown dive, where the house often rigged games and marked cards, the gambling den behind the Bronze Door was straight.

There was little nickel and diming here. It’s purported that fifty thousand dollars would hit the tables each night.

Gamblers would win, and then lose, vast fortunes each night. As Luc Sante so elegantly states: “… the stories of rich men dropping enormous sums in a single evening kept topping each other, so that the phenomenon almost comes to seem like a version of potlatch, in which wealth is proven by the ability to shed it.”

Depiction of a 19th century casino. At the House of the Bronze Door, it was unlikely that women were allowed however.

Luck Runs Out

The casino stood in defiance of the law for almost a dozen years thanks to Farrell’s connections and the reputation of its clientele. However, given the New York’s waxing and waning reform movements, its time would eventually come, and it did so at the hands of one William Travers Jerome, New York’s district attorney with a particular bent for reform.

Jerome shut down casinos and poolrooms throughout the city and didn’t discriminate, successfully breaching that imposing door and raiding the club in 1908.

Although the games were gone, the place remained open for many years afterwards, as a restaurant owned by the Waldorfs according to official sources. What its true nature was in these later years is unknown.

The building is completely gone today, replaced with a condo and the shadow of the Empire State Building.

Below: District Attorney Jerome, 1915

*Farrell had other partners in the casino, including racetrack owner Gottfried Walbaum and Billy Burbridge, who later became a hotelier in Havana, Cuba.

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Bowery Boys Bookshelf

The Doomsman: an apocalyptic view of New York City in 2015, written in 1906

“Such is the world, or, rather, one infinitesimal portion of the cosmos, in the year 2015, according to the ancient calendar, or 90 since the Terror.”

From the original illustrations of The Doomsman: a look up Park Row in 2015, a decrepit row of deteriorating structures. You can clearly see the ruins of old Post Office at the foot of City Hall Park. Compare this view to the photograph at the bottom of this post.

The destruction of New York City is a literary pastime that began in the late 19th century, usually in the hands of moralist writers seeking a little comeuppance upon the great evil of modern life.

By the year 1900, Manhattan had already been destroyed by nitroglycerin bombs (Park Benjamin Jr‘s ‘The End of New York,” 1880), left to waste in a future dystopia (John Ames Mitchell‘s The Last American, 1889), and cleansed with poison gas in a ‘revolutionary holocaust’ (Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, written in 1890 by Congressman Ignatius Donnally).*

In 1906, the Episcopalian minister William Van Tassel Sutphen entered the fray with his own version of post-apocalyptic New York City in the novel The Doomsman, first serialized in Metropolitan Magazine.

What makes this book especially interesting today is that the breathless plot takes place in the year 2015. We’ve lived through that year so we can address what Sutphen got right. (The answer: nothing.)

Hole in One

Sutphen, an intellectual and New York literary sophisticate, is perhaps best known today as an early sports writer, best known for his observations on the sport of golf.

In 1898, he wrote the very Dr. Seuss-ian Golfers Alphabet. (“A is Arithmetic, handy to know/When the score figures up to a hundred or so.“) His most popular book remains 1901’s The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair Green, featuring humorous stories along the sporting course.

He was closely associated with Harper Brothers, writing and editing for the publishing house for most of his life. It was for Harpers that Sutphen wrote The Doomsman, his first non-golf book.

Doom and Gloom

The Doomsman is Anglo-Saxon fantasy, Game of Thrones lite, turning the New York metropolitan era into a landscape of wild vales and stockades. But its most interesting element is the depiction of a future Manhattan neglected and overcome, its ruins lorded by the vicious remnants of mankind.

Keep in mind however this is 1906 Manhattan.

This is the futuristic version of an old landscape. The novel’s version of a dismantled America should be familiar to anyone whose watched a recent disaster film or enjoyed an episode of The Walking Dead.

“For miles and miles the ruined city stretched away, a wilderness of brick and mortar. Here and there were areas of blackness and vacancy, where fire had worked its will. 

The business section, with its substantial shops and warehouses, and the central district, made up of the clubs, churches, theatres and the handsomer private homes, remained intact. And yet, withal, the spectacle was a singularly mournful and depressing one, for nowhere were there any signs of life.”

It’s 2015, and New York City is now called Doom. At some point in the 1920s, a Great Change occurred, so instantly that few could prepare for the aftermath.

The wealthiest New Yorkers, “seiz[ing] upon the shipping in the harbors for their exclusive use,” fled via steamships. The remaining population were ravaged by the Terror, a combination of panic and disease, and left only a handful of survivors.

Most fled to the countryside but died there. All industry, “every form of thought and progress,” ceased to be. “The relapse into barbarism was swift.”

People escaped into new walled encampments and quickly divided into medieval classes. Walled fortifications appeared over the ruins of the outer boroughs, Long Island and Westchester.

Our hero Clemens is raised at Greenwood Keep (pictured above), some kind of stockade presumably in the area of Greenwood Cemetery.

The area is constantly terrorized by The Doomsmen, inhabitants of the ruins of Doom. When Clemens’ own home is savagely destroyed in an attack, Clemens vows to venture into Doom and seek his revenge on the nefarious warrior Quinton Edge.

Days of Future Past

In 1906, the year Doomsman was published, there was not yet a Woolworth Building, but downtown Manhattan was in the midst of a colossal building boom unlike any other.

The author plays upon the fears of the day. Unusual gases seeped from the broken sidewalks. Old stone adornments fall the sky, almost killing our hero.

New York’s skyscrapers still exist in 2015, but all were empty, hollowed out and falling apart; one skyscraper on Park Row “had settled and was leaning over at a terrifying divergence from the perpendicular.”

He eventually arrives at the main branch of the New York Public Library (above) — lion-less and half-completed in 1906 — and meets the tempestuous young Esmay whom he will eventually fall in love with.

With a little detective work, you can figure out many of the real-life locations depicted here. For instance, the walled city Croye, “the principal city of this western hemisphere in the year 2015,” is actually Yonkers. Perhaps because it’s already so ancient looking, one landmark retains its name — the High Bridge.

But most of the action takes place in Citadel Square, alongside the Palace Road (Broadway).

That’s actually Madison Square, which has become the encampment of the Doomsmen, many of whom are holed up in the White Tower — most likely the medieval-looking tower upon old Madison Square Garden.

Our hero takes up a home on the fourth floor of the peculiar building to its southern side, a structure that would have been sparkling new in the mid 1900s. “The building had been constructed upon a narrow, triangular plot of land, and its ground-plan bore a fanciful resemblance to the shape of a flat-iron.” From this vantage within the Flatiron Building, Clemens is able to launch arrows upon his enemy.

But perhaps its strangest detail comes from another obsession of the late 19th century — electricity. The Doomsmen worship The Shining One, an electric dynamo in an abandoned power plant. A crazed priest has been able to reconnect the power and turn — get this — an electric chair into the central relic of worship!

The Doomsman is hardly an unfairly forgotten masterpiece. Its racial and ethnic politics are frankly repellent, its female characters mostly stock characters of helpless maidens and selfish harpies. The prose is occasionally cinematic — that’s cinema in 1906 — perfect for a silent film adaptation that regrettably never happened.

At right: The original cover of the book featured the Flatiron Building

For a modern audience, it’s most interesting for its descriptions of Gilded Age ruin, of a city that never developed to embrace automobiles.

In a book that’s so conventionally swashbuckling, it’s startling to read passages like, “Hats and garments, cash-boxes and accountbooks, littered the hallways and were piled in little heaps at the entrances of elevators.”

The book is in the public domain if you would like to read it for yourself.

**If you’re looking for more Victorian era tales of future destruction, check out this paper by Mike Davis and other authors called ‘Dark Raptures’.

Below: A look at City Hall Post Office and Park Row before everything went to hell. Compare with the image at the top.

Originally published in 2015

Categories
Gilded Age New York Podcasts

Electric New York: Illuminating the shadows, re-visualizing the night

This classic episode of the Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast (originally released in December of 2021) is featured in this week’s episode of the History Channel podcast HISTORY This Week.

Since 2011 the Bowery Boys Podcast has revisited a few of the themes featured in this show. After listening to this episode, give these installments a try:

A more in-depth look at the life of Nikola Tesla:
Edison’s role in the creation of the moving picture:
The second half of this show features the history of Christmas lights:

PODCAST The streets of New York have been lit in various ways through the decades, from the wisps of whale-oil flame to the modern comfort of gas lighting. With the discovery of electricity, it seemed possible to illuminate the world with a more dependable, potentially inexhaustible energy source.

First came arc light and ‘sun towers’ with their brilliant beams of white-hot light casting shadows down among the holiday shoppers of Ladies Mile in 1880.

But the genius of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison, envisioned an entire city grid wired for electricity. From Edison’s Pearl Street station, the inventor turned a handful of blocks north of Wall Street into America’s first area entirely lit with the newly invented incandescent bulbs.

ALSO: It’s the War of Currents, the enigmatic Nicola Tesla and the world’s first electric Christmas lights.

The home of Samuel Leggett, the first to be illuminated with gas lighting, at 7 Cherry Street. This home stood  just a few blocks from the location of Edison’s Pearl Street Station (255-7 Pearl Street), which would also change the way people consider lighting their city. (NYPL)

Inside the Pearl Street Station: Direct current surged through Edison’s generators to the neighboring blocks.

Laying the electrical wires under the streets of the blocks surrounding the Pearl Street station was an arduous, potential dangerous task. It took well over a year to complete the job. (Courtesy NYPL)  

‘New York The Wonder City‘, and indeed it was, thanks to electricity. Whole neighborhoods, like Times Square and Coney Island, were defined by it. Landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, thoroughfares like the Bronx’s Grand Concourse and even Broadway itself were transformed at night by electric power. (NYPL)

Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian inventor who spent his final decades in New York living at the Hotel New Yorker.

Behold! The first Christmas tree with electrical lighting, courtesy Edison employee Edward Hibberd Johnson. This tree glittered and twirled from Johnson’s home in Murray Hill. (Courtesy Jim on Light)

On the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the lightbulb, an elderly Thomas Edison ‘reinvents’ it in 1929 at a reconstructed laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan, to the delight of Henry Ford and newly elected President Herbert Hoover.

Categories
Film History Science

The original IMAX: Jacob Riis and his magic lantern

Jacob Riis changed the world with “How The Other Half Lives.” By using the new technology of flash photography, Riis was able to capture the squalid conditions of Manhattan tenements in a way no mere paragraph, drawing or sermon could.

The startling photographs contained in this book did not originate there, however. Riis debuted them — and would continue to exhibit them — in “magic lantern” lectures, essentially the first slide shows.

But calling them magic lanterns is far more exciting, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you have gone to class a lot more had you known your professor was lighting up the magic lantern?

The magic lantern’s “real” name, the stereopticon, used a succession of glass slides (as few synthetic, transparent materials were not available at the time) transposed with a negative image that could be projected onto a hanging sheet.*

The magic lantern was created in the 1840s in Philadelphia and was originally intended for entertainment. In fact, one of Riis’s first schemes in New York used the magic lantern in a rather clever way.

He and a business partner would set up a stereopticon in a public park — a precursor to the Bryant Park film series — and project images of attractive people and international public landmarks, interspersing the pictures with advertisements from businesses nearby.

By 1888, however, Riis (pictured right) was using the technology to display the devastating images he had taken in the various slums around town. His first show was to the New York Society of Amateur Photographers, giving a vivid account according to some sources.

“Mr. Riis was so ingenious in describing the scenes and brought to his task .. a vein of humor,” according to a newspaper account quoted in Tyler Anbinder’s book Five Points.

Riis eventually took his ‘illustrated lectures’ on the road, electrifying audiences both taken with the modern marvel of the magic lantern and the images captured by the newly developed flash photography. “His viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images but as a virtual reality that transported the new York slum world directly into the lecture hall.”

In essence, Riis was giving the equivalent of a show-stopping IMAX show to illuminate the plight of New York’s poorest and the unsafe conditions of their tenements. His shows could be considered the prototype of the film documentary.

The presentations would come with fiery speeches by Riis, often using the rhetoric of religious sermons in service of a more progressive, social cause. The shows were so successful that Riis grabbed a book deal and in 1890, his lectures and photographs were contained in his masterpiece “How The Other Half Lives.”

Interest in the magic lantern hasn’t waned today; in fact there’s a national organization that still revels in the wonder of the projected still image.

By the way, you can still find Jacob Riis all over the city. There are the Jacob Riis Houses on East 10th Street and Avenue D, built in 1949 on the site of a clump of tenements Riis railed on about, as well as the Jacob Riis Settlement House in western Queens and high school in the Lower East Side. And of course, there’s a huge Robert Moses park in Far Rockaway named for him.

*Read here for an interesting short history of the magic lantern and how images adhered to the glass

Below: a home on Bleeker Street (at Mercer and Greene streets), a Jacob Riis image that certainly must have popped up in one of his magic lantern shows

Categories
Landmarks Neighborhoods

When the Statue of Liberty left her arm in Madison Square

Above: The arm of the Statue of Liberty stood solitary in Madison Square for six years, from 1876 to 1882.

Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, one of the forgotten names in Statue of Liberty history was born in Paris.  As the godfather of historical restoration, Viollet-le-Duc would rescue countless medieval structures from decay, helping to preserve the spirit of French architecture through such buildings as Notre-Dame and Mont Sant-Michel.

But it’s through his association with his student Frédéric Bartholdi that Viollet-le-Duc would make his mark in America, as the original designer of the Statue of Liberty‘s brick-laden skeleton.  

Viollet-le-Duc would work with Bartholdi in creating both the head and the arm, parts that would then travel to the United States to raise funds for the completed structure.

In particular, the arm and torch would be displayed in the northwest corner of Madison Square Park, from 1876 to 1882.  On July 4th, 1876, a gigantic painting by Jean-Baptiste Lavastre of the completed statue was displayed on a building across the street from the arm.

Below: The arm would also make its way to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.

Sadly, Viollet-le-Duc would never again see these portions of the statue, as he died in 1879 before the entire structure was completely built.   Bartholdi then turned to another architect to complete the work — Gustave Eiffel.  It’s Eiffel’s redesigned interior that supports the statue today.

In 1889, three years after the Statue of Liberty finally made its home in New York harbor, Eiffel debuted his better known work — the Eiffel Tower — at the Paris World’s Fair.

But the somewhat radical theories of restoration espoused by Viollet-le-Duc would inspire American architects and inform the direction of modern historical preservation.

Categories
On The Waterfront

In 1863, the Russians invaded New York City

In 1863, New Yorkers flocked to the waterfront to see a startling sight — Russian war ships in New York Harbor. They were here as a display of force, but not to threaten the United States.

The fleet of Russian ships, sailing into New York Harbor in September 1863, as depicted by Harper’s Weekly.

Russia’s Atlantic Squadron, as the fleet was known, was patrolling the Atlantic Ocean as a show of strength against England’s Royal Navy.

They arrived in the harbor on September 24, 1863, initially anchoring in Flushing Bay, and stayed in the city for a couple months. (A description of the various Russian vessels can be found in this 1863 New York Times report.)

The fleet was led by the massive frigate Alexander Nevski (pictured below), an American-designed ship commissioned and built by the Russian government.

A reporter for Harper’s Weekly, joining a reception onboard the vessel, praised its beauty.  “A lady with the most immaculate skirts and kid gloves can move any where, on deck or below, without danger of soiling either, so perfectly clean every thing about the ship is kept.”

America was in the midst of the Civil War, and New York itself was still recovering from the Draft Riots that July. 

Many Americans believed the appearance by the Russians underscored a healthy support for the Union over the Confederacy, but most scholars today believe the Russians were acting with far more self-interest.

Still, most New Yorkers embittered by war welcomed the impressive show by friendly foreign powers, kicking off “a slight craze in the public mind.” 

Harper’s Weekly remarked, ” [E]very citizen felt bound to do what in him lay to testify to the Russians our sense of gratitude for the friendly manner in which Russia has stood by us in our present struggle, while the Western Powers [England and France] have done not a little to work our ruin.”

New Yorkers marveled at the mighty mast of the Alexander Nevsky, “lying almost on a line westward from Trinity Church,” as it shot off its cannons and a band on-board attempted to play ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’

The ship officially docked on the west side at 23rd Street, and the procession, joined by city leaders, marched through the streets (pictured at left, courtesy NYPL), past Union Square and down Broadway.

“[T]he scene became splendidly animated.  The moving pageant rolled in a glittering stream down the broad thoroughfare between banks of upturned human faces, the trappings of the equipages, the gold and silver epaulets of the Muscovite guests and the sabres, helmets, and bayonets of the escort reflecting back in unnumbered dazzling lines the glory of the evening sun.”

In particular, New York women were captivated by the brawny Russian contingent in their handsome uniforms.  “Throngs of ladies in the windows most vigorously waved their ‘kerchiefs, to the great delight of the Russian officers, who never left off bowing, smiling, and even uttering their thanks aloud, while they doffed their gold-laced chapeau.”

(Not every woman was infatuated. The following day, two Russian officers reported being robbed by three women “at a disreputable house.“)

Below: A group of Russian soldiers, taken October 1863, courtesy Library of Congress



The finest hotels of New York were adorned with American and Russian flags. Tiffany’s, at its location on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets, unfurled a gigantic Russian banner that stretched the length of the building.

Throughout the following weeks, the Russians were continually feted by the grateful Americans.  At a dinner with Mary Todd Lincoln and other American dignitaries, Mrs. Lincoln toasted the Russians for their kindness. 

Russian dignitaries frequently met with Mayor George Opdyke and the Common Council and were wined and dined at virtually every hotel in town, including an opulent banquet at the Academy of Music in early November (depicted below in an illustration in Harper’s Weekly).



“They are dined, walked, driven, and are, with unconcealed gratification, availing themselves of the many opportunities of seeing us and all around and about us,” said the New York Times that October. “Yesterday, a number visited Central Park and enjoyed its fine drives and beautiful walks; others were whirled to High Bridge, and others were entertained with City sights of interest.”

The Russian ships would remain in American waters for almost seven months, darting up and down the coast, including a period of time in Washington D.C.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THIS WEBSITE IN 2013.

Categories
Gilded Age New York

Chelsea’s former opera house and the shocking murder of a New York ‘robber baron’

One hundred and fifty years ago this month (more specifically, on January 7, 1872), a shocking assassination took place at the northwest corner of 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue. 

And it took place at a quite surprising venue — the Grand Opera House. Surprising in the sense that it seems unusual that an opera house stood at this spot at all.

There’s a movie theater close by — and a theater for the School of Visual Arts just down the block — but I’d hardly call this intersection an entertainment mecca.

Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

Above: the opera house in 1925 as seen looking east on 23rd Street. Below: in a picture from 1895

Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York
Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

Pike’s Place

The opera house sprang up in 1868, the project of Samuel N. Pike, who purchased the land directly from Chelsea estate owner Clement Clarke Moore himself. In fact, the original Moore estate was located only a block away.

The Pike Opera House, as it was called in those days, was Pike’s play for legitimacy in New York. A German immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1837, Pike lived in New York for a few years and made his fortunes in wine imports. Aspiring to upper-crust tastes, Pike fell in love with opera music after viewing performances by PT Barnum chanteuse Jenny Lind.

The author E.T. Harvey painted an extraordinary picture of Pike in 1916:

“Samuel N. Pike was an extraordinary man in many ways. In appearance he was rather above the middle height, and slender. He wore a heavy, full mustache, after the manner of that period, and though dark complexioned, had very piercing steel-gray eyes. He had a short, abrupt way of speaking, and though good to his employees, was not familiar with any of them. He always dressed in the height of fashion, wore a silk hat and used perfume……

He was crippled in one of his fingers, but in spite of this was accounted a fine amateur flute player.”

Pike constructed a massive opera house in his adopted home of Cincinnati in 1859 and many years later built a companion here in Manhattan at 23rd Street. It officially opened on January 9, 1868.

He was banking on the growth of the New York theater along 23rd Street. Meanwhile the wealthy preferred the Academy of Music down on 14th Street. While some stages would come to 23rd Street, it would be the arrival of retail and Ladies Mile that would come to define this street by the 1880s.

Courtesy New York Public LIbrary
Courtesy New York Public LIbrary

A Stage for Scoundrels

The theater was spectacular — perhaps too spectacular for the location. “A striking feature seen on entering is the grand foyer, the largest in any theater in the city, open in part to the roof. A stairway of unusual width leads to the balcony….The stage, one of the largest in New York, is eighty feet wide and seventy feet deep, and the green-room is much the most extensive in the city.” [Kings Handbook]

The following year, Pike sold his lavish hall to two rather unlikely investors — Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, grade-A robber barons, pals of Boss Tweed and the orchestrators of the Black Friday Panic of 1869. Why would these two nefarious characters want an opera house?

Below: A detail from the Grand Opera House taken in the 1930s

Photo by Berenice Abbott
Photo by Berenice Abbott

The house’s upper floors doubled as the offices of their own Erie Railway venture. Fisk’s mistress Josie Mansfield was frequently installed into productions at the now-named Grand Opera House; it was even rumored her next-door apartment was connected to the opera house with an underground tunnel.

However it does seem that Fisk and Gould were legitimately aficionados of the theater, or at very least fans of the elite who would attend them, and the profits that would follow. The Grand Opera House would soon showcase a great number of theater endeavors outside of opera.

But unfortunately for Fisk (pictured below) the greatest show the Grand Opera House ever presented was his own wake.

fisk

The Murder of Jim Fisk

On January 7, 1872, Fisk was fatally shot at the Grand Central Hotel by Manfield’s new lover Edward Stiles Stokes. He died the following day. The robber baron was so associated with the Opera House that his body lay in state here, attended by thousands of mourners and perhaps tens of thousands of curiosity seekers.

“The showy coffin, liberally adorned with gold-plated ornaments, rested on two low stands, and in this, garbed in the gold-laced uniform of the colonel of the Ninth [regiment], lay Fisk, his mustache carefully waxed, white kid gloves on his hands, and his feet buried in white flowers, in various devices.” [source]

His business partner Gould would continue operating the Opera House for several years afterwards, eventually renting it out to vaudeville shows and ‘second-run’ Broadway productions, its fortunes disintegrating as theater moved uptown and the Chelsea neighborhood became more middle-class.

Changing the Scenery

Like many old stages before it, the Grand Opera House switched to films in the 1920s. RKO tried its best to rehabilitate the space, hiring Thomas Lamb to renovate the theater with modern flourishes, reopening the space as the RKO 23rd Street Theatre (seen below in 1927):

Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

Outside the opera house-turned-movie theater:

Courtesy New York Public Library
Courtesy New York Public Library

The site remained a movie house through the 40s and 50s, finally closing on June 15, 1960. In a further indignity, the Opera House was thoroughly gutted in a fire.

Today a three-story office and retail building sits on the spot of the opera house. Most New Yorkers are familiar with this corner due to the Dallas BBQ which graces the corner. Fisk might have been way into their Texas-sized margaritas.

Photo courtesy Mighty Sweet
Photo courtesy Mighty Sweet

Portions of this story originally ran in an article on this site on August 18, 2009

Categories
Wartime New York

The Kingsland Factory Explosion (and the switchboard operator who saved the day)

Today is the 105th anniversary of the Kingsland factory explosion. To mark the occasion I’m reposting this article originally released on the 100th anniversary of this mysterious disaster.

On the afternoon on January 11, 1917, workers in downtown Manhattan skyscrapers were jolted from their desks by a startling sight in New Jersey — an exploding munitions plant in Kingsland, a small community about nine miles south of New York City.

“For four hours Northern New Jersey, New York City, Westchester and the western end of Long Island listened to a bombardment that approximated the squad of a great battle — a bombardment in which probably half a million three-inch high explosive shells were discharged.” (New York Times)

A map from the New York Tribune:

A Canadian company Canadian Car and Foundry had been producing weaponry for Russia and Great Britain in Kingsland. All of it went up in a dramatic and deathly burst. Two square miles of town completely flattened.

Given the dangerous work of manufacturing exploding devices, unfortunate accidents occurred all the time. But was this something more? Was this an act of sabotage?

A slightly less interesting map from the New York Sun:

The region had been on edge for a few years. Although the United States had still not yet entered the European conflict, fireworks and munitions plants had been producing weapons for Allied forces — France, the United Kingdom and Russia.

By 1917, America was clearly considered an enemy agent by the warring Germans.

Just a few months earlier, on July 30, 1916, the area shook with the horrific explosion at Black Tom Island in Jersey City, NJ, an act of sabotage that blew out thousands of windows and even damaged the Statue of Liberty. (We recount the entire story in our podcast from 2016 about the Black Tom Explosion.)

Courtesy Lyndhurst Historical Society

Seven people died in that explosion the previous year. But in Kingsland that day, with a deadly blast even greater than that which had occurred at Black Tom, nobody died.

This is attributed to the heroism that day of a single woman — Lyndhurst resident Theresa Louise “Tessie” McNamara.

Tessie was a switchboard operator at the plant that fateful day. The explosions began in a building used for cleaning artillery shells. Once they began, the company’s buildings were a scene of confusion and chaos.

McNamara was immediately informed of the blaze, but kept to her station, broadcasting messages to every building in the complex, even as most others fled the site fearing for their lives.

From the New York Tribune: “McNamara, operator of the Kingsland Central, stayed in her revolving chair, with the receivers clamped to her ears, keeping the terrified town in touch with the outer world until the wires were blasted away. Then she fainted, with her job well done, and was carried away to safety by Fred Walters, of East Rutherford.”

From the New York Sun: “It was emphasized from a dozen sources that one girl’s bravery stood between many hundreds of men and shocking death.”

From an interview of Miss McNamara: “Shells were dropping all around and I thought every minute would be my last. About a dozen buildings were now on fire and I had completed 36 calls. No more were coming in and I started for the door without coat or hat. Just then three of the boys who had missed me appeared in the office doorway. One of them shouted, “Come on now, Tess!” but I couldn’t walk. My courage left me and I needed their assistance to get out” [source]

The explosion stranded tens of thousands of passengers along train lines in New Jersey. The explosion’s curious timing — at the end of the day, near closing time — meant that trains were filled with commuters on their way home from work. Nobody was injured, but nobody got home in time for dinner that evening.

This begs the question — was the Kingsland Explosion purposefully set? Nobody was ever arrested, although many reported the mysterious behavior of an employee named Fiodore Wozniak who lived in New York.

From a statement by Wozniak’s foreman: “I noticed that this man Wozniak has quite a large collection of rags and that the blaze started in these rags. I also noticed the he had spilled his pan of alcohol all over the table, just preceding that time. I also noticed that someone threw a pail of liquid on the rags or the table almost immediately in the confusion ….. Whatever the liquid was, it caused the fire to spread very rapidly and the flames dropped down on the floor and in a few minutes, the entire place was in a blaze.

It was my firm conviction from what I saw, and I stated, that the place was set on fire purposely, and that has always been and is my firm belief.“

Wozniak later disappeared and never questioned.

In the 1970s, Germany did pay tens of millions of dollars in reparation for various acts of sabotage within the United States, but did specifically accept the blame for the Kingsland disaster.

Today you can visit a unique site associated with the explosion — a smokestack that somehow survived the disaster, near a plaque dedicated in Miss McNamara’s honor. [More details here]

For additional information visit the Lyndhurst Historical Society page on the disaster.

Categories
Know Your Mayors Politics and Protest

Mayor Aaron Clark: New York’s lottery king

Aaron Clark, from his official City Hall portrait, painted by Henry Inman. Courtesy NYC City Hall

New York City has a new mayor — Eric Adams! So we think it is time that you Know Your Mayors, becoming familiar with other men who’ve held the job, from the ultra-powerful to the political puppets, the most effective to the most useless leaders in New York City history.

This longtime feature of this website is being rebooted with new articles and newly researched and refreshed earlier entries in this series. Check back every other week for a new installment. Read past articles here.

Mayor Aaron Clark
1837-1839 (two one-year terms)

Aaron Clark has many claims to fame in New York City history, none of them really things that recommend him as a defining leader of our city. His most defining characteristic was that he was often very lucky.

Clark is the first mayor ever elected representing the anti-Democrat, anti-Andrew Jackson Whig Party — a political party abolished less than 20 years after Clark’s victory.

He was known as the ‘Dancing Mayor’, which was not an accomplishment but a mockery.

He called himself the New York’s most prestigious lottery operator, which he considered an accomplishment but was perceived by some as a disqualification.

And finally he was elected amidst one of the worst financial crises in its history– the Panic of 1837.

Previously on ‘Know Your Mayors’

Clark, perhaps more honorably, was also the second man to ever be popularly elected as mayor of New York, i.e. chosen directly by the people of the city.

Previously, the position was selected by the Common Council (city council), district representatives who often chose men beholden to their whims.

When the state finally changed mayoral selection to one of popular election in 1834, the result caused violence at the polls and mass pandemonium. (See the last installment.) Cornelius Lawrence would come out ahead for three consecutive one-year terms.

Lawrence had been a candidate of Democratic machine Tammany Hall — with their influence, who else would be the first mayor? — but Democrats were facing strong opposition from an ascendent Whig party.

A rather dramatic illustration from 1837 of the Tammany Hall split. The Loco-Focos, in this case, are the wife. (Edward Williams Clay, The Death of Old Tammany and His Wife)

The Whigs and the Locos

In fact, the Whig candidate in 1834, Gulian Verplanck, very nearly won; the animosity between the Democrats and Whigs was so contentious that right before the election, Tammany thugs stormed their opponents headquarters, destroyed everything inside and even killed a man.

During Lawrence’s tenure, the Whigs remained strong as the Democrats got weaker.

In a situation which certainly has some reflection in current national events, Tammany was split between conservative and liberal factions (an ‘Equal Rights’ faction, as they called themselves).

During a Tammany meeting in 1835, the Equal Righters stormed a Tammany committee meeting loaded with conservative members and threw them out.

When the lights were turned out on the party-crashers, they lit Spanish matches or ‘loco-focos‘ and continued. The opposition, which would eventually run the conservatives right out of the party, would forever be known as the Locofocos. (For more on their particular beliefs, read here.)

How Luck Elected A Whig Mayor

So what does this have to do with Whig man Aaron Clark? At another period in history, Mr. Clark might never have gotten to experience life in City Hall.

But the dissention within the Democrats opened the door for the fleeting Whig party to reign briefly in New York. With that sort of luck, it’s no surprise to learn that Clark’s primary occupation up to then was as operator of a lottery business.

Privately-run lotteries were, believe it or not, quite common in early American history.

King’s College (today’s Columbia University) was founded with a lottery pool. A young P.T. Barnum operated one up in the 1820s. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington both held fund-raising lotteries in their day.

Even Alexander Hamilton opined that “everybody … will be willing to hazard a trifling sum for the chance of considerable gain.”

A view of the City Hall, New York, during the drawing of the lottery, New York Public Library

By the mid 19th century, private lotteries would be associated with more disreputable elements and would be abolished at the end of the century. Clark was thus a successful operator of an industry in the 1830s that would soon be looked upon as scandalous and unseemly.

However, in 1837, it was a highly regulated but legal trade. In Charles Haynes Haswell’s classic Reminiscenses of New York by an Octagenarian, Mr. Haswell writes:

“As lotteries, under certain regulations as to the drawings, which were had upon the esplanade in front of the City Hall, in the presence of an alderman, were authorized by law, there were many offices in the city, notably one at the southwest corner of Broadway and Park Place* kept by Aaron Clark, a much reputed citizen.”

*The Woolworth Building now stands on the spot where Clark’s business once stood.

“He was a great lottery seller and made a fortune of it,” says one source. A recollection from an 1890s New York Times article shortlists Clark as one of the “best known rich men” at the time.

Huzza for Clark, Fortune’s Favorite!

Clark was born in 1787 in Massachusetts, a veteran of the War of 1812, and spent his early years as a clerk of Albany state assembly.

He moved to New York to pursue banking and eventually fell into his lottery endeavors, becoming wealthy and, by extension, highly suitable for early 19th century public office. Clark was soon elected to an alderman’s seat, typically a neat launching pad into the mayor’s chair.

The Whigs announced him as their candidate in 1837 against the intensely split Democrats. Conservative Tammany ran John Jordan Morgan, while the Loco-Focos put up the interestingly named Moses Jacques, considered “the patriarchal leader of the Loco-Focos.”

Clark’s opponents certainly tried to use his occupation against him. Wrote William Leggett : “If we elect Aaron Clark for Mayor who knows but he may get up some ‘splendid scheme’ and insure ‘a grand prize’ to everyman who assisted in making him manager of the municipal lottery. Huzza for Clark, Fortune’s Favorite!”

The Evening Post repeated this nickname — Fortune’s Favorite — March 1837.

However Morgan and Jacques cleaved the opposition in two, and for the first time in New York history, on April 11, 1837, a Whig became mayor.

He then would be re-elected in 1838 when Tammany’s conservatives threw their support to him out of spite towards their liberal LocoFoco brethren. (There was apparently a shocking amount of fraud going about that year, which also helped matters.)

Night-fall. St. Thomas’ Church, Broadway, New York, a beautiful painting by George Harvey from 1837. (The Museum of the City of New York)

Fortune’s Favorite?

Clark was certainly the wrong mayor for the moment. He was an ardent Native American, meaning he generally despised the boatloads of Irish emptying into New York slums, driving “the native workmen to exile,” he said in a meeting to the Common Council.

His campaign was openly hostile to ‘clannish’, ‘untrustworthy’ Irishmen, and his tenure as mayor only stirred up xenophobic sentiments. He advocated for keeping new immigrants on ships, directing them away from city and charging them ‘commutation fees’ of $10.

Clark aimed his racial paranoia at the lower classes at large, fearing that the charity organizations already in place were turning the city “into a rendez-voux of beggars, paupers, vagrants and mischievous persons,” according to the book Gotham.

One general benefit of this alarming hysteria was an improvement to the system of nightwatchmen and security patrols throughout the city, a “military arm” to assuage rioting and general chaos. Clark was no light-weight; he would frequently lead these local militias through the city himself, breaking up rabble-rousing groups.

The Unfortunate Fop

Most unfortunately, however, Clark’s charms were limited. His attempts to woo over New York’s elite in a series of parties at his home on Broadway and Leonard Street fell flat.

This type of social governance was a winning recipe for mayors like the honorable Philip Hone. As mentioned in a prior installment of this column, Hone’s parlor “hosted a nightly gallery of political and foreign dignitaries mixing it up with New York’s social strata.”

Clark, however, was roundly ridiculed for attempting such grand ‘entertainments’. In fact, in an early form of political snark, Clark was ironically called ‘the Dancing Mayor’, not for his graces assumably or even the class of his “splendid patent leather pumps” but for his pretensions of trying too hard.

Also on his watch, the Croton Aqueduct continued apace although its workers went on strike not once but twice in 1838 for better wages.

“The Great Embarrassment“

He also governed the city through the beginning of a grueling financial crisis, known today as the Panic of 1837.

Not even a month into Clark’s first term, on May 10, 1837, New York City banks ran out of gold and silver, having loaned out too much due to months of high inflation. President Jackson had hollowed out the central bank and refused to recharter it, leading to bank collapses across the country.

“During the Panic of 1837, approximately ten percent of U.S. workers were unemployed at any one time. Mobs in New York City raided warehouses to secure food to eat. Prominent businessmen, like Arthur Tappan, lost everything.” [source]

The Panic froze real estate developments across the city. Construction projects in Union Square and Gramercy Park sat unfinished.

“A deadly calm pervades this lately flourishing city,” wrote former mayor Philip Hone in his diary. “No goods are selling, no business stirring, no boxes encumber the sidewalks of Pearl Street.”

A Different Kind of Prize

It became clear that Clark was out of his depth. Two years of a Whig in office — with the tide of immigrants hardly abating — was quite enough.

In the election of 1839, Tammany put up Isaac Varian, who had been defeated the year previous by his political machine’s fractious split. Despite the usual cries of fraud, in this round Varian was the victor. Clark’s luck, if that’s ever what it was, had run out.

Clark left public life afterwards, dabbling in real estate and insurance enterprises, most notably becoming a supporter of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Since 1859, the school has presented an oratory prize in his name.

During its first year, The Clark Prize had eight competitors. “It is expected that the exercises will be unusually interesting and attractive,” claimed one article.

When Clark died in 1861, he was buried right here in the city, at the old New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village. The gates to this historic burial ground are occasionally opened to the public so I recommend bringing a lottery ticket to his headstone.

Categories
It's Showtime Podcasts

West Side Story: The Making of Lincoln Center

Image courtesy Baruch College

PODCAST Steven Spielberg’s new version of West Side Story is here — and it’s fantastic — so we’re re-visiting our 2016 show on the history of Lincoln Center, with a new show introduction discussing the film and the passing of musical icon Stephen Sondheim.

Warm up the orchestra, lace up your dance slippers, and bring the diva to the stage! For our latest show we’re telling the origin story of Lincoln Center, the fine arts campus which assembles some of the city’s finest music and theatrical institutions to create the classiest 16.3 acres in New York City.

Lincoln Center was created out of an urgent necessity, bringing together the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, the Julliard School and other august fine-arts companies as a way of providing a permanent home for American culture.

However this tale of Robert Moses urban renewal philosophies and the survival of storied institutions has a tragic twist. The campus sits on the site of a former neighborhood named San Juan Hill, home to thousands of African American and Puerto Rican families in the mid 20th century. No trace of this neighborhood exists today.

Or, should we say, ALMOST no trace. San Juan Hill exists, at least briefly, within a part of classic American cinema.

The Oscar-winning film West Side Story, based on the celebrated musical, was partially filmed here. The movie reflects many realities of the neighborhood and involves talents who would be, ahem, instrumental in Lincoln Center’s continued successes.

FEATURING Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, James Earl Jones, Imelda Marcos, David Geffen and, naturally, the Nutcracker!

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The Metropolitan Opera House, in 1904. In the far distance, you see One Times Square being constructed in Longacre Square.

Courtesy MCNY
Courtesy MCNY

The New York City Ballet had its first home at City Center while the New York Philharmonic was housed for decades at Carnegie Hall.

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Below: Lincoln Square, 1920. This picture is actually taken from the spot where Lincoln Center stands today.

The triangular plaza pictured here would later be called Dante Park (a statue to the Italian writer would be placed here a year after this photo was taken). Take note of the 9th Avenue elevated streaking up Columbus Avenue at the bottom of this image.

Arthur Hosking/Museum of the City of New York
Arthur Hosking/Museum of the City of New York

And that building to the right? That’s the Hotel Empire which is still standing there today (albeit in a greatly modified form). Here’s an ad for the Empire from 1909.

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Robert Moses’ slum clearance plan for San Juan Hill, published in 1956.

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Scenes from old San Juan Hill — 1932, 65th Street and Amsterdam Avenue

Charles Von Urban/MCNY
Charles Von Urban/MCNY

1939 — the stoop scene in San Juan Hill, street unknown

Courtesy MCNY Lee Sievan (1907-1990). San Juan Hill. 1939
Courtesy MCNY Lee Sievan (1907-1990). San Juan Hill. 1939

Below: An early effort to improve the housing quality in the neighborhood — the Phipps Houses, built in 1906.

An interesting New York Times article describes a few residents: “A typical tenant was the steamboat steward Joseph Craig, 36, classed as ‘mulatto’, who was born in Trinidad and arrived in the United States in 1891. Another was the horse breeder Daniel Moore, 43, born in Missouri and married for six years to Tilly Moore, 30, born in Cuba and in the United States since 1892; she worked as a domestic.”

MCNY
MCNY

The scene in April of 1963. The Philharmonic Hall was already opened by this point. This really brings home the fact that there must have been so much noise pollution due to construction which must have perturbed the organizers of the Philharmonic greatly!

(MATTSON/DAILYNEWS)
(MATTSON/DAILYNEWS)

The opening sequence of the Oscar-winning film West Side Story was filmed on the streets of San Juan Hill, the structures around the actors clearly boarded up and ready for demolition.

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(The website Tom mentioned on the show — Pop Spots NYC — shows a very detailed comparison of film scenes with maps and old photographs. Highly recommended!)

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An overhead view of Lincoln Center in 1969 with most of the major venues completed by this point. At the bottom right you see the Empire Hotel, then (moving clockwise around the fountain): the New York State Theater, Damrosch Park, the Metropolitan Opera House, the library and the Vivian Beaumont Theater and Philharmonic Hall.

Getty Images
Getty Images

Philharmonic Hall, later Avery Fisher Hall, then David Geffen Hall — designed by Max Abramovitz.

MCNY
MCNY

The Metropolitan Opera House, designed by Wallace Harrison.

MCNY/Edmund Vincent Gillon
MCNY/Edmund Vincent Gillon

The New York State Theater, later the David H. Koch Theater.

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Opening night at the New York State Theater, April 24, 1964

Bettman/Corbis
Bettman/Corbis
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Eero Saarinen’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, the reflecting pool featuring a sculpture by Henry Moore, and the Julliard School, designed by Pietro Belluschi.

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Patricia McBride and Edward Villella in front of the unfinished New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, in Tarantella costume, choreography by George Balanchine, 1964

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Patricia Wilde and Andre Prokovsky in Raymonda posing in front of fountain in plaza at Lincoln Center, choreography by George Balanchine, 1965

Courtesy NYPL
Courtesy NYPL

Program from the 1967 revival of South Pacific which played at the New York State Theatre……

NYPL
NYPL

….starring Florence Henderson as Nellie Forbush! Here she is with Richard Rodgers and Georgio Tozzi (who played Emile de Becque).

NYPL
NYPL

The plaza at Lincoln Center is always a place where surprises greet visitors. Here’s an image from a couple years ago of a video installation which sat in front of the fountain:

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And 2019 when they hosted the premiere of Game of Thrones. With a life-size dragon!

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Martin Scorsese! He introduced a screening of his film The Age of Innocence at the New York Film Festival.

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FURTHER LISTENING

Back catalog episodes mentioned on show or shows with similar themes that we think you’ll enjoy.

Categories
Holidays New Amsterdam

How Dutch New Amsterdam helped create the American Christmas tradition

After reading this article on the origins of Christmas in America, find some information about a virtual Christmas in Old New York tour from Bowery Boys Walks.

There are many different ways to celebrate Christmas, a national holiday derived from the union of Christianity and capitalism. How one chooses to mark the occasion is a reflection of one’s own traditions and faith (or lack thereof).

Christmas can be intensely religious for some, not at all for others. It is ever evolving to fit the population’s needs.

However, if none of the present ideas work, then there is the Puritan way: don’t celebrate it at all.

Below: A 1659 notice forbidding the celebration of Christmas in the Puritan-led colonies

There was such opposition to the holiday within the first communities of the New World that it was outright banned among the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Puritan leaders, ironically enough, took this abolition directly from the Bible; there was no celebration authorized in the book, and since it was doubtful Jesus was actually born on December 25, they considered the day a sinner’s excuse for debauchery.

As Puritans were by nature a homogeneous community, differing traditions were frowned upon, although modest observance of Christ’s birth was occasionally allowed. Generally speaking, December blew through the early English colonies with nary a festivity.

So where did the ingredients of modern Christmas first wash up onto the shores of North America? All signs point to New Amsterdam.

Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

The New Netherland colony of the 17th century was not ruled by such strict restriction of belief.

New Amsterdam, New York’s precursor, was a company town. While laws suppressing the celebration of Christmas were on the books until 1681 up in Massachusetts and other places, down in New Amsterdam, rudimentary holiday traditions were openly, even casually, celebrated.

The settlers of Dutch New Netherland could theoretically celebrate how they wished.

There were certainly observations of Christ’s birth — called Kerstydt — but, it was often overshadowed by a more popular December holiday: Sinterklaas, a Dutch gift-giving tradition where children sat their shoes outside their homes to be filled by a visiting St. Nicolas on December 6th.

(Often, perhaps due to inclement weather, it made sense to have the shoes remain inside, and perhaps better still, to hang stockings near the fireplace.)

A whimsical illustration of St Nicolas over a Dutch city, very possibly New Amsterdam. Artist unknown.

New Netherland’s population in 1624 was only 270 people, with few if any children. Over the next 40 years, however, dozens of families populated the outpost, passing down family customs and linking their distant home with the mainland.

With Dutch residents eventually outnumbering the others, their traditions became the most prevalent.

Combine that prevalence (with its extra-exciting gift-getting component) with the envy of the other non-Dutch children, and suddenly Sinterklaas becomes a highly anticipated holiday among the entire population of New Amsterdam.

This, despite Peter Stuyvesant‘s disgust at any holiday which promoted moral laxity (also known in some circles as fun).

NYPL

Or as author Russell Shorto describes it: “[A]mong the English, the French, the German, the Swedish families of Manhattan, pressure was brought to bear on parents, and the Dutch tradition was adopted and, later, pushed forward a couple of weeks to align with the more generally observed festival of Christmas.”

And New Amsterdamers didn’t stop at Christmas; the party kept going for weeks afterwards, throwing Manhattan’s very first New Year’s parties.

According to one source, “On Nieuw Jaar (New Year) and Kerstydt (Christmas) the Governor’s house was ablaze with candles and the young men and maidens danced in the ‘entry’.”

Official business was closed for weeks after, and “the burghers and their families spent much of their time in firing guns, beating drums, dancing, card-playing, playing at bowls or nine-pins and in drinking beer.”

No wonder Peter Stuyvesant hated holidays!

Over time, Christmas and Sinterklaas — one an observance of Jesus’ birth, the other honoring one of his most popular saints — would melt into each other. Even when the Dutch were kicked out of Manhattan in 1664, Sinterklaas was still celebrated in the region, further infused with English Christmas customs.

However, even as the British were expelled from Manhattan, American holiday traditions were still localized, often tied to one’s specific ethnicity and hardly unified.

It would take New York city leaders in the 19th century and the work of New York’s greatest writers to define new holiday symbols for a national audience.

In some Dutch pockets of upstate New York, the tradition of Sinterklaas is still celebrated today.

Want to hear more about the history of Christmas in New York? Take a Bowery Boys Walking Tour and get into the holiday spirit with a merry virtual stroll through The Big Apple!

On the Christmas In Old New York tour, guide Jeff Dobbins unveils the history of how the Big Apple became the center of all things Christmas from Macy’s to Rockefeller Center.

Book your tickets today! There are several dates available in the month of December. Get your tickets here.