Author: GY

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Queens History Revolutionary History

George Washington’s inauguration and the 1939 World’s Fair

Today (April 30th) is the 230th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington, sworn in atFederal Hallas the first President of the United States.  It is also the 80th anniversary of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.  That was not an accident.

The monumental events of America’s founding would be immortalized by the fair in some rather unusual ways 150 years later.  Both April 30th events were occasions of great patriotic ceremony (and both even slightly kitschy) in their own ways.

Courtesy New York Public Library

April 1789
 It took George seven entire days to get to New York from his home in Mount Vernon, as his procession was met every step of the way with throngs of patriotic crowds and flamboyant celebratory displays.

Washington’s vice president John Adams had already arrived in New York, on April 21st.  The building which greeted him, the former City Hall building on Wall Street, had been the center of city’s government since 1699, when the British used materials from the city’s demolished north defense wall to construct it.

Courtesy New York Public Library

The heavily remodeled building which now stood in its place, later to be calledFederal Hall, was designed by successful city contractor and former Continental Army engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant.  According to author David McCullough, “it was the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style.” (Sadly, this building was ripped down in 1812; the ‘Federal Hall’ which stands in the same spot today was built as a customs house in 1842.)

L’Enfant would later work on the creation of Washington DC out of Maryland swampland.  He would ultimately be fired from that project — by George Washington.

George finally arrived in New York two days after Adams, April 23, via a barge from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and was met at the Wall Street pier by the current mayor of New York James Duane and the state’s governor George Clinton.

From there, he was taken to his new home on Cherry Street (long demolished, around near the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage today) and spent the day greeting dozens of well-wishers.  That night, Governor Clinton hosted an elaborate dinner in his honor; the pomp and extravagance by this time were probably getting tiresome to the stately Virginian farmer.

Meanwhile Adams spent the week at Federal Hall in Senate chambers, hashing out such things we take for granted — such as how to even address the new president — until at last they were ready for the ceremony to begin, on April 30.

According to Ron Chernow: “Washington rose early, sprinkled powder in his hair, and prepared for his great day.”  Like some detail from a fairy tale, Washington left his Cherry Street home at noon in a yellow carriage driven by white horses, legions of soldiers marching proudly behind him.

The streets of Manhattan were clogged with people, over ten thousand cramming Broad and Wall streets, as far as the eye could see both ways.  Sitting on the balcony of his own home on Wall Street was Washington’s closest confidante Alexander Hamilton, certainly reveling in the moment.

After greeting the Congress, Adams led Washington to the second floor balcony along with Robert Livingston, the Chancellor of New York (the highest judicial office in the state), who held out a bible owned by the St. John’s Lodge Freemasons and delivered the oath of office, probably not loud enough for anybody in the street to actually hear.

Washington, even less audibly than Livingston, swore to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  He then possibly threw in a ‘so help me God’ for good measure (although there are many doubts that this occurred).

Courtesy New York Public Library

New Yorkers went crazy then, firing cannons, screaming and waving flags, playing music and dancing in the streets.  After returning inside to address the new Congress — by this time with tears in his eyes — Washington and his entourage went up Broadway to receive on invocation at St. Paul’s Church, the scrappy survivor of the great fire the destroyed much of the city in 1776.  Washington would be a regular here for his entire stay in New York; the pew where he planted himself for two years is still on display there (illustrated above).

Martha Washington would not arrive in town for another month, but that didn’t stop the parties.  The official inauguration ball took place a week later, on May 7th, at the Assembly Rooms at 115 Broadway.

Although a bit stiff and silent, George was still popular with the ladies and danced “two cotillions and a minuet,” often seen with Alexander Hamilton’s young bride Eliza. When Martha arrived on May 17, landing at Peck Slip, she was greeted with similarly grand fanfare, and yet another ball was held in her honor.

James Earle Fraser’s colossal Washington statue out in Queens. (NYPL)

April 1939
One hundred and fifty years later, the 1939 New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the second largest American fair up to that time (only St. Louis’ 1904 event was larger).

This celebration of human advancement — as demonstrated through miles of utopian kitsch and strikingly bizarre architecture — was a reason for Robert Moses to turn the unsightly Corona Ash Dumps into a Queens super-park.  The fair was advertisement as entertainment, with hundreds of modern gadgets displayed as novelties and staples of the future.

Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

But the celebration was planned with the past in mind as well.  It opened on April 30, 1939, coinciding with another great day in New York City history — Washington’s inauguration.  That’s how important the city thought the opening of the fair was.  (Life Magazine was a little more cynical; in 1939, they refer to Washington as “the excuse” for the fair.  The purpose, of course, was profits.)

A 61-foot-tall statue of Washington by James Earle Fraser stood mightily over the fair’s Constitution Mall, peering perhaps quizzically at Paul Manship’s massive sundial sculpture.  A cluster of buildings called the Court of States recalled the Colonial architecture of Washington’s day.  Even Federal Hall was recreated.

Below: The World’s Fair presented a recreation of Washington’s inauguration, except with lots of flag dancing. (NYPL)

A replica of Mount Vernon (sort of) called Washington Hall was the pet project of a New Yorker with presidential ties.

Museum of the City of New York

According to the New Yorker, “Mr. Messmore Kendall, is responsible for the Hall.  Mr. Kendall, president of Sons of the American Revolution and owner of the Capitol Theatre, [developed] plans for erecting, entirely at his own expense, a $28,000 building to house a collection of Washington relics. Before the Fair closes, he expects the whole thing will have cost him more than $50,000. He has given more than money to the project; he has given the family cook, so that whenever he wants a home-cooked meal, he has to go all the hell out to Flushing.”

The Hall received a host of reenactors who had made their way up from Mount Vernon in emulation of Washington’s own footsteps.  On May 6th, a child named Robert E, Lee Williamson opened Washington Hall in a grand ceremony, bringing “three consecutive weeks of neo-Federal quaintness to a close.” [source]

The president also sits (sometimes awkwardly) upon a variety of World’s Fair merchandise.  Light shows and fireworks unheard of in Washington’s time were dedicated in his honor throughout the fair.  He even starred in a popular musical pageant at the fair called American Jubilee, with books and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. 

It was another great president who kicked off the fair 75 years ago.  With 200,000 people in attendance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave an opening speech extolling the virtues of American ingenuity as he became the first president to be broadcast to television audiences.  Few had televisions in their homes at the time.  But NBC founder David Sarnoff helpfully scattered a few dozen of them throughout the city in a clever publicity stunt.

Roosevelt starts off his speech referencing Washington. “[T]here have been preserved for us many generations later, accounts of his taking of the oath of office on April thirtieth on the balcony of the old Federal Hall. ….. And so we, in New York, have a very personal connection with that thirtieth of April, one hundred and fifty years ago.” [Read the whole speech here.]

Defined by the odd Trylon and Perisphere buildings, the fair seems like something truly dreamlike.  The land where the fair once stood now contains the ruins of a New York’s other World’s Fair, the event from 1964-65.

TODAY

You can still find a tribute to George Washington in Flushing Meadow Corona Park today. George Washington as Master Mason by Donald De Lue was installed here in 1967, a replica of a much larger Washington statute, made of plaster, that stood at the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 within the Masonic Pavilion. (That’s right; the Freemasons had a World’s Fair pavilion).

Courtesy Hightstown-Apollo Lodge

That 11-foot plaster statue of Washington stood next to the actual Masonic Bible on which Washington took his oath of office. Today the bible is on display — at Federal Hall.

For this article, I’ve re-purposed a couple pieces of writing I did on these events a few years ago.  The original pieces can be found here and here.

Categories
Bowery Boys Bookshelf Sports

Opening Day at Shea Stadium: A nostalgic trip to the New York Mets’ beloved old home

Shea Stadium has been gone ten years now.

With mourning fans looking on, the final section of seats were torn out on the morning of February 18, 2009. Awaiting fans a short distance away was the sparkling new Citi Field which would open for business with a thrilling game between the San Diego Padres and the field’s home team the New York Mets.

Shea was not a perfect stadium. Neither was Ebbets Field, the former home of the Brooklyn Dodgers that has nonetheless entered into the realm of sports mythology. But nostalgia holds a special power in sports history, and the further we get from the classic moments which took place at Shea, the more remarkable it becomes in memory.

Quite frankly, Queens has not been quite the same.

Shea Stadium Remembered:
the Mets, the Jets and Beatlemania
by Matthew Silverman
Lyons Press

Journalist Matthew Silverman is such an ardentMets aficionado — if you’ve read a book about the beloved Queens baseball team, he probably wrote it — that his official website is MetSilverman.com. And so of course Shea Stadium Remembered: the Mets, the Jets and Beatlemania, his tribute to the Met’s most famous home, has a breezy pitch-perfect charm to it.

Arranged in tiny chapters, little blips of history, Shea Stadium Remembered revels unashamedly in sweet nostalgia, recalling a place that matched the charisma of its underdog baseball team and a home for an accomplished football team back when it was actually situated within the city.

The birth of the Mets and their home for over 40 years begins in a moment of great turmoil in New York City sports history. In the 1950s, both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers left New York City, the latter after a vicious public battle between Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley and New York power broker Robert Moses.

Moses wanted a team situated in Queens, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, an eventual companion to Moses’ pet project — the World’s Fair of 1964. With Ebbets growing inadequate for modern baseball crowds, O’Malley wanted a new stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, keeping them in Brooklyn. (That’s near the spot of today’s Barclays Center.)

But nobody overpowered Robert Moses in the 1950s. The Dodgers split for Los Angeles.

Shea Stadium, late 1970s — Sports Photo File/Mitchell Reibel

Fortunately, lawyer William Shea convinced the National League to expand their roster, leading to the creation of the New York Metropolitans, the name a nod to a 19th century baseball club and eventually shortened. After a short stint in the decrepit Polo Grounds, they moved to their new home — named in honor of a man who never played for them but was nonetheless instrumental to the history of New York City sports.

In Shea Stadium Remembered, Silverman gives us a compilation of the stadium’s greatest moments, weaving the Met’s history in with the other notable events at the stadium — from the Beatles to Pope John Paul II.

Not to say that the Jets aren’t prominently featured here as well — they played at Shea for almost twenty years — but the Mets were truly at home here, through thick and thin (often very thin). The Mets gave Shea some of its personality and Shea gave the Mets its hometown pride.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium, August 1965 (AP)

For more information, check out these catalog episodes of the Bowery Boys podcast:

Categories
Bowery Boys Bookshelf Bronx History Pride Collection

When Brooklyn Was Queer: The forgotten history of gay existence on the periphery of urban life

Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer embarks on a modern quest to find the roots of the LGBTQ community in the pages of history.

A reader might hope to pick up Ryan’s book and find a reflection of their own world in the back alleys and parlors of Old New York — or rather, Old Brooklyn, the former city turned borough with its own genteel and sometimes stubborn personality. After all, many components of modern queer life were available and even thriving a century ago — homoeroticism, gender-swapping apparel, drag queens, cruising.

For a more in-depth look at the general history of downtown Brooklyn, listen to our podcast episode. And for a rundown of drag in New York, listen to this podcast episode: Absolutely Flawless.

When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History
Hugh Ryan
St. Martin’s Press

But the wondrous discovery of Hugh Ryan’s exceptionally well-researched book is that there really is no through line. The emotional or sexual desires might be similar, but the visibility of those we might label gay, lesbian and transgender today was either in performative contexts (vaudeville or sideshow entertainers) or ephemeral in nature (encounters in late-night saloons). The most celebrated individuals — the writers, artists and dancers — were often cloistered away in townhouse parlors.

Most of the connective tissue that might exist between these groups is undocumented. Like the ghostly voids of Pompeii, we see only the shadows of the lives they left behind.

Hart Crane in 1928, at 110 Columbia Heights — Courtesy Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Fortunately, Ryan provides those links in a rich and nuanced narrative, uniting the biographies of a group of extraordinary and often forgotten people.

But why Brooklyn? After all, Manhattan had the Greenwich Village coffeehouses, the Broadway shows, the Harlem drag balls, the most notorious speakeasies — all magnets for different aspects of historical LGBTQ life.

Ryan allows the transformation of Brooklyn from city to borough to parallel the shifts in modern thinking about gay and lesbian encounters.

Naturally, the story begins with Walt Whitman — born 200 years ago this year — whose story provides us with some of the earliest recollections of gay life in Brooklyn. For many gay writers, the legacy of Whitman was a literal beacon, drawing them to consider Brooklyn as a place to live and create. [For a deeper look into his life, listen to our podcast episode on Walt Whitman.]

Those readers hoping for anecdotes about a fabulous gay underworld in one of Brooklyn’s current centers of LGBTQ life — Williamsburg, Bushwick, Park Slope — will be disappointed. The bulk of Ryan’s stories are centered in the oldest areas of Brooklyn — Coney Island, Brooklyn Heights and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.


Brooklyn Navy Yard 1907 — Museum of the City of New York/ Ignatz Stern Communications

The Navy Yard! A magnet for tawdry saloons and horny sailors, the scene that centered around Sands Street resembles nothing we would recognize today because gay identity had yet to be fully established. “Properly gendered behavior … insulated men from being considered queer,” writes Ryan, “even if they were known to have sexual relations with men (or boys).”

Even by World War II, the streets surrounding the Navy Yard were well known for brothels catering to homosexual desires, most notably the wonderfully nicknamed Swastika Swishery.

One scintillating cabaret Tony’s Square Bar “was just ‘a couple of hundred yards’ from the Sands Street entrance to the Navy Yard and had a sign on the door that read NO MINORS UNDER 20 ALLOWED (in response to which one journalist wryly noted, ‘Minors age rapidly on Sands Street’).”

Meanwhile, increased employment opportunities for women during the war brought lesbians like Rusty Brown to the Navy Yard, a real-life Rosie the Riveterwho later became a professional drag king.

Mabel Hampton Courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton collection

Before the 1940s, Coney Island offered the best opportunities for same-sex encounters and, in particular, the amusement district provides Ryan with the most appealing anecdotes of working-class Brooklynites and New Yorkers — from Loop-the-Loop, a trans sex worker named for a popular Coney Island ride, to Mabel Hampton (pictured above), an African-American dancer who had her first lesbian experiences here.

Another world emerges in the austere townhouses of Brooklyn Heights, the destination for artists and writers escaping Greenwich Village in the 1920s. The recollections of Hart Crane, Carson McCullers and W. H. Auden are some of the fullest descriptions we have of gay Brooklyn, albeit from the eyes of individuals who would become literary legends.

Ryan writes:

“In 1929, budding author Parker Tyler (who would write a scandalous gay novel entitled The Young and Evil just a few years later) encountered a campy gay waiter in a restaurant of Brooklyn Heights.

Tyler was so tickled by their interaction, and what he learned about the neighborhood, that he immediately wrote to friends to say, “Brooklyn is wide open and N.Y. should be notified of its existence.”

Categories
Music History

Why New York City needs a tribute to Billie Holiday, our sweet Lady Day (UPDATE: They’re building it!)

UPDATE (March 11, 2019): The city has announced that it will commission a Billie Holiday memorial, joining new statues for Elizabeth Jennings Graham, Katherine Walker and Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías.

Graham, the subject of a landmark case that desegregated New York City mass transportation, was also suggested by our readers.

The city previously announced the creation of a monument to Shirley Chisholm.

Here’s our pitch for a monument to Holiday which ran back in July 2018.

The She Built NYC! campaign, a new program from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Cultural Affairs, seeks to commission “a public monument or artwork on city property with a focus on women’s history.” The Bowery Boys would like to put our two cents into this debate and we’ve recently presented five nominees for this honor.

Throughout the month, we will shed a little light on a few of these choices. And we’d love to hear yours! Leave a choice in the comments section and we will compile them in a couple weeks in a dedicated article. At the end of the month, we’ll send all the choices — both yours and ours — to the nomination committee.

Artists and entertainers make natural candidates for statues and public commemorations as many become immortal with the passage of time, their influence imprinted on future generations. There are several such honors for artists in New York — all men (but one).

Among the city’s statuary entertainers are Edwin Booth, Jackie Gleason, Duke Ellington, George M Cohan, Ludwig Van Beethoven, William Shakespeare and countless other writers and composers (many in Central Park). But in Bryant Park, one can find a single bust dedicated to a female writer — Gertrude Stein.

New York City needs another! And we nominate one of the greatest vocalists in American popular music – Billie Holiday.

New York City, June 1946, with her dog Mister, courtesy Library of Congress

Her impact upon American music is profound, changing the way vocalists interpret songs, bringing out extraordinary subtlety and richness beyond the lyrics and instrumentation.  And she did it within a set of important Manhattan music venues, from Midtown to Harlem. Hers is the story of New York’s own jazz legacy.

Her story is full of drama and paradox, moments of sadness, others of pure ecstasy, in the midst of New York’s history in the making. At its core, her biography is a reflection of the black experience in the 1930s and 40s and how separations of race effected the music scene, how those impressions still reverberate today.

She was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, and first arrived in New York as a teenager. Her first home was in Harlem, a neighborhood in the midst of a renaissance of black art, music and literature.

She worked her way through many of Harlem’s great music venues of this period (Small’s Paradise, Covans), singing at 2-3 in the morning, working for tips, hoofing from table to table.

She experimented with her voice, understanding what captivated an audience, learning to interact with gangsters, randy young men, even white movie stars. She shook off her ragged appearance, recognized that a little glamour, a fancy dress, would also help sell her songs. It was at this time she took her stage name Billie, from a white silent film actress named Billie Dove, and Holiday from her father.

What she learned to do was style music, using her vocals in much the same way as a jazz instrumentalist. She stepped back from the precise hit-every-note style of predecessors for discovered ways of dramatizing music with what some called a slurred or sauntering tone, perhaps one beat behind where a traditional songstress would have come in. By the mid 1930s, she had already invented a singular musical style, captured in recordings for Columbia Records.

In 1937 she began touring with famous big-band orchestras – first with Count Basie, then Artie Shaw. On the road, she came up immediately against the racial and gender prejudices of the day.

Sadly she didn’t even need to leave New York to experience this.  In the late 1930s, most hotels in New York City had strict segregation policies. One October evening in 1938, the manager asked Shaw to tell his young singer to use the freight elevator as they did not want guest to think that a black woman was staying there.

Holiday performing at Cafe Society

But a life changing experience was just around the corner — a Greenwich Village club named Café Society, a venue specifically designed to mix black and white audiences.  The novelty of it all brought a lot of attention to Café Society, as did its coterie of progressive celebrities. And this brought attention to Holiday, just at the moment that many of her recordings were now being listened to across the country.

For in April 1939 a Jewish songwriter named Abel Meerepol asked Holiday to perform a new song – one about racism in the South. “If you think it’s okay man, I’ll do it,” said Billie.

“Strange Fruit” was a stark and graphic song about the lynching of black men. She would sing ‘Strange Fruit’ for the remainder of her career, a rare political message in a career mostly comprised of swing and torch songs.

In the 1940s Holiday became one of America’s most famous recording artists, but the real magic happened inside a cluster of smoky music clubs around the area of 52nd Street, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues. Billie Holiday was Swing Street.  She played most of these places during the mid and late 1940s — the Onyx Club, Kelly’s Stable, the Famous Door and Club Downbeat.

She lived the life of a night owl, eyes stinging from smoke filled bars, drinking continuously. But fans would have clearly noticed a startling change in her off-stage demeanor by the time she got to Onyx. At some point in the 1940s she had begun turning heroin, eventually shooting it up before shows. Her addiction worsened throughout her life, even as she graduated to larger, more ‘respectable’ venues like Town Hall and even Carnegie Hall (pictured below in 1946).

Library of Congress

Perhaps due to a renewed interest by the curious public (her substance-abuse troubles had made the papers), the Carnegie Hall concerts were sold out for weeks, and additional seats were placed on the aisle, with even 600 people sitting on the stage behind her.

That first night, she sang 21 song and 6 different encores. People claim it was the greatest concert she ever gave.

In 1958 Frank Sinatra said of her: “With few exceptions every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing of the last twenty years.”

Holiday died on July 16, 1959, leaving the world countless recordings of undeniably beauty (not to mention her biography Lady Sings the Blues).

A public memorial to Billie Holiday would serve not only as a tribute to her impact on modern music, but would also function as a tribute to New York City’s forgotten musical districts — Harlem’s 133rd Street, Midtown’s 52nd Street, the Village’s integrated music clubs.

For more information on Holiday’s bittersweet career, check out our podcast Billie Holiday’s New York. Portions of the article above are taken from this podcast. You can hear the entire thing here:

Categories
American History Bowery Boys Bookshelf

WILD BILL: The real man behind a Western legend — and a reluctant Broadway stage star

“Hickok was a celebrity. He was famous. He was feared. He was already a legend. It is estimated that over fifteen hundred dime novels were written just about Buffalo Bill Cody, beginning in 1869, when he was only twenty-three, into the 1930s, and during the early years. Wild Bill was in that category of iconic western hero. He had risen to the heights of both reputation and fabrication … and now the slow, inexorable descent began.” — Tom Clavin

How do you write a book about a historical figure who seems more fiction than real? The Western folk hero Wild Bill Hickok lived a life that was thrilling, dangerous and brash, amplified by the fascinations of the American press into a virtual Western superhero.

Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter
by Tom Clavin
St. Martins Press/2019

Tom Clavin’s Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter, a biography as frisky and unpretentious as its subject, attempts the noble task of walking back 150 years of mythology surrounding the Illinois man named James Butler Hickok, a drifter who wandered from job to job through Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas. During the Civil War, he worked as a wagon master and later a scout for the Union Army.

In 1865, he shot and killed the gambler Davis Tutt in the town square of Springfield, Missouri. This quick-draw duel — essentially over a pocket watch — took place in the early evening, not high noon. But whispers of this outrageously bloody event inspired a journalist named George Ward Nichols, working for New York’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, to profile Hickok.

Hickok shoots Tutt in Springfield town square, as depicted in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1867.

It was in Nichols’ piece that Wild Bill Hickok — the fastest gun in the West — and indeed the genre of Wild West pulp fiction was born.

“[N]o single published piece catapulted a man on the American frontier more than Nichol’s article did for Hickok,” writes Clavin. With “the fertile imagination of a writer who could cash in on a sensational story and an outlet that offered that story to thousands of eager and mostly gullible readers, America had its first postwar frontier star.”

The attention only made Hickok more of a target with foolhardy men seeking him out in efforts to best the now-famous gunslinger. (It never ended very well for them.)

Wikimedia Commons

Clavin depicts an unruly but realistic western (or, more accurately, midwestern) landscape of chance encounters, brief romances and wide, arduous journeys. Yet even a hardened adventurer like Hickok would occasionally take a moment to bask in his fame.

In 1873 he joined his longtime friend ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody in the cast of a ham-fisted play Scouts of the Plains at New York’s Niblo’s Garden, becoming a major box office draw.

Today we might call him, um, difficult. “Hickok felt like he was risking his integrity and dying a bit with every performance because he became further convinced that acting was a foolish occupation. One night … he took one of his real pistols and shot out the spotlight that had been fixed on him. The audience applauded the dramatic reality of the production as well as Hickok’s famous marksmanship.”

On August 1, 1876, Hickok was murdered during a poker game in Deadwood, a frontier town in the Dakota Territory, cutting short any future stage performances but securing his position in the pantheon of Wild West mythology.

Wild Bill Hickok, “Texas Jack” Omohundro, and Wild Bill’s longtime front “Buffalo Bill” Cody, in a cabinet photograph for Scouts of the Plains, 1873

At top: An issue of the 1964 comic book Wild Bill Hickok #12, published by Super Comics

Categories
Holidays

Happy New Year! Photographs from over a century of Chinese New Year celebrations in Manhattan

Head over to Chinatown this Sunday afternoon (February 17, starting at 1pm) for the Lunar New Year Parade and Festival, topping off two weeks of celebrations in honor of the Year of the Pig. (Find the parade route here. And get there early for a great spot.)

[We also did a podcast episode on the history of New Year’s Eve across the neighborhoods in NYC.]

Although this is the 20th anniversary of the Better Chinatown Society‘s involvement with the parade, New Yorkers have been celebrating the Chinese New Year here in Chinatown for over 150 years.

By the early 1860s, a small enclave of Chinese people (mostly men) had settled in the area of Mott Street, slightly east of the notorious Five Points slum. As that neighborhood’s dynamics would change by the 1890s – from Irish to mostly Italian immigrants — the Chinese community would develop a strong foothold as their neighbors here on Mott Street, Bayard Street, Pell Street and, of course, ‘bloody’ Doyers Street.

And it would be here, in the nucleus of modern New York Chinatown, that the first Chinese New Year celebrations would be held.

Here’s how the New York Times reported on one such celebration in 1874:

What follows are images of Chinese New Year celebrations in Manhattan’s Chinatown over the years, subtly modernizing while retaining many of the same traditions. Today you can find certain places on Mott Street that still look a bit like these earliest images.

Library of Congress
Chinatown, New York City – New Years feast, Jan. 26, 1906/Library of Congress
[1900] Library of Congress
Three people on sidewalk in foreground, Chinatown, Chinese New Year (taken between 1909-1913)
Port Arthur restaurant on Mott Street, decorated for the New Year, Jan. 21, 1909
Chinese child with an adult on step outside of building, Chinatown, New York City, 1909. Library of Congress
Three children posed, New Year’s Day, 1909//Library of Congress
[Jan. 30 1911] Library of Congress
Chinatown, New York City – altar in Joss House, 1911

A rare video of the Chinatown celebration from 1928. Can you identify the street?

Jumping ahead to 1931 and the traditional dragon costume, entertaining a sea of fedoras on Pell Street.

New Year’s dragon in Pell St. of New York City’s Chinatown. 1931.

The parade in 1936.

Museum of the City of New York

The Chinese New Year Parade of 1943 was decidedly more patriotic, reflecting the wartime alliance between China and America. According to the Daily News that year: “American flags were presented with those of the Chinese Republic and American soldiers of Chinese descent marched with Chinatown members of the United States war organizations.”

Museum of the City of New York

A resident of Chinatown, 1942, photographed by Marjory Collins

Library of Congress/Photographed by Marjory Collins

The parades begin draw drawing of thousands of onlookers by the 1950s, enamored of the lions and dragons, the live music, festive costumes, and allure of what had now become some New Yorkers most favorite food. Here’s a selection of images from the 1960 parade. (And you can check out more from this series at Mashable).

BIPS/Getty Images
BIPS/Getty Images
BIPS/Getty Images

Another image of the festival in the 1960s, in a photograph by Jan Yoors.

Jan Yoors photographer

According to Karlin Chan, a lion dancer in the parade during the 1970s, “The city would just close down the streets around here for the New Year, and since every [dancing] group was on their own, it was basically a free for all.” [Read more of his interview with The Villager here.]

Leo Vals / Getty Images

By the 1980s, vibrant Chinatowns has developed in Queens and Brooklyn. And in Manhattan, immigrants from Fuzhou, speaking Mandarin, would develop just west of ‘old’ Chinatown in a neighborhood sometimes called Little Fuzhou today. For those non-fluent in Chinese, it would appear Chinatown as a whole has expanded its original confines on Mott Street, although in reality today’s Chinatown area reflects a multitude of different cultures, languages and customs.

Here’s a New Year’s procession on Bayard Street, 1984:

[You can find more fabulous images of 1980s Chinatown, taken by Bud Glick, here.]

Bud Glick photographer/The Atlantic

You can also get a sampling of Glick’s work here:

A news report from the 2002 parade, held just months after Sept 11, 2001:

And some festive video from the 2010 celebration:

For more information on the history of the Chinese New Year in New York City, listen to our recent show on the history of New Year’s celebrations — A New Year In Old New York

And for more information on the neighborhood, check out our older show on the history of Manhattan’s Chinatown:

Categories
Bowery Boys Bookshelf

Romare Bearden: ‘An American Odyssey’ through the Harlem Renaissance and the SoHo art scene

Sometimes an artist’s biography can work on two levels, providing both the sweep of history within the subject matter of the artist’s own output and a grand view of American art history in the artist’s working life.

In Mary Schmidt Campbell’s absorbing biography of the painter, illustrator and collagist Romare Bearden, we get to look at the New York City art world of the 20th century with insights into the life of an African-American painter who managed to remain relevant in a career of almost 60 years.

In An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden, Campbell emphasizes Bearden’s role as a seminal New York City figure — an artist who projected the city’s vitality and sometimes even its geography into his work.

Campbell, currently the president of Spelman College, knew Bearden leading up to her role as executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem in the 1970s and 80s. (The appendix features copies of handwritten letters from Bearden written on stationary from his Canal Street studio. That alone gave me chills.)

Bearden’s body of work is unique in that it reflects, in its longevity, both the changing tides of 20th century art and his own conflicts with depicting the American black experience on his canvas.

He came of age in Harlem in the 1920s, among the creative swirl of the Harlem Renaissance, even as his formal training came from the famed Art Students League in Midtown Manhattan. His mother Bessye Bearden was a noted journalist whose connections to such Harlem figures as Duke Ellington and A’Lelia Walker introduced Romare to a new world of possibilities for black creators. “She not only found her way into Harlem’s inner circle,” writes Campbell, “but she also helped define and expand its perimeter.”

Young Students – Romare Bearden, 1964 – Romare Bearden Foundation

Romare developed into both an renowned artist and an insightful critic of the art world, setting up a studio right above the most famous place in Harlem — the Apollo Theater. It was here that he later pivoted his style away from concrete representational forms, finding his own path into the world of abstract modernism.

The Block by Romare Bearden, 1971 — Romare Bearden Foundation

By the late 1940s he oddly found himself an outsider — wanting to break out from shows that only featured black artists but eventually excluded from mainstream galleries for not being sufficiently abstract.

It took a revitalizing intellectual journey to Paris, a change of scenery within New York City (to the newly developed artists’ enclave in SoHo) and a shift to collage work to reinvent Bearden’s role in the art world. His groundbreaking 1964 show Projections also established him as an artist in conversation with the American civil rights movement.

Bearden in his Long Island City studio

By 1987, when Ronald Reagan awarded Bearden the National Medal of the Arts, the artist had secured his legacy. Yet today his body of work — including some of his most profound collages — often remains unseen.

As Campbell explains, “Despite Bearden’s care in the assemblage of materials, his collages with their multitude of different materials are a preservationist’s nightmare. Major museums exhibit his works infrequently because they are so perishable.”

“Bearden’s legacy is as complicated as his art; he would become many things to many people — all at once.”

At top: Three Folk Musiciansby Romare Bearden / Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Categories
Wartime New York

Nazis In New York: Watch the Oscar-nominated documentary short “A Night At The Garden”

Events such as these used to be unthinkable, anomalies of history that once played like speculative fiction. But this really did happen.

Eighty years ago this month — on February 20, 1939 — over 20,000 members of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization, gathered at Madison Square Garden (at its Hell’s Kitchen location on Eighth Avenue) to unite the philosophies of American exceptionalism and Nazi worldview, gathering under the pretense of celebrating the birthday of George Washington.

Just a week earlier, on February 12, 1939, the Garden was filled with thousands of prized canines as part of the Westminster Dog Show. Eight days later, the famous arena was occupied with a more menacing sight.

From the New York Daily News:

I find the matter-of-fact reporting from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle the following day to be almost chilling:

“Marked by scores of street fights in which anti-Nazis, Nazis and police clashed frequently, the German-American Bund’s “American-ism” rally in celebration of George Washington’s birthday last night gave the vicinity of Madison Square Garden the liveliest six hours it has known in recent years.

The meeting itself, attended by more than 18,000, was without incident, except for the beating by Storm Troopers and subsequent arrest of Isadore Greenbaum, Brooklyn unemployed plumber, who attempted to attack Fritz Kuhn, Bund leader, as he spoke from the platform.”

The Oscar-nominated short documentary A Night At the Garden looks at this event from an ominous bird’s eye view, capturing the united enthusiasm of the crowd and even Greenbaum’s attempt to storm the stage. The director Marshall Curry (who made the excellent film Street Fight — about Newark politics — over a decade ago) lets the footage speak for itself, allowing the audience to make their own contemporary parallels.

You can watch the entire film here. It’s up for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject against four other astounding films. (End Game and Period. End of Sentence are both on Netflix. And you can find Black Sheep and Life Boat on YouTube.)

Categories
Podcasts Pride Collection Writers and Artists

Walt Whitman at 200: Celebrating his life and legacy in the cities of New York and Brooklyn

A very special episode of the Bowery Boys podcast, recorded live at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn, celebrating the legacy of Walt Whitman, a writer with deep ties to New York and its 19th century sister-city Brooklyn.

On May 31, 1819, the world will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Whitman, a journalist who revolutionized American literature with his long-crafted work Leaves of Grass. The 19th century cities of New York and Brooklyn helped shape the man Whitman would become, from its bustling printing presses to bohemian haunts like Pfaff’s Beer Cellar.

To help them tell this story, Greg and Tom are joined by guests from the worlds of academia, literature and preservation:

Karen Karbiener, NYU professor and head of the Walt Whitman Initiative, an international collective bringing together all people interested in the life and work of Walt Whitman

Jason Koo, award-winning poet, and founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets, celebrating and cultivating the literary heritage of Brooklyn, the birthplace of American poetry

and Brad Vogel, executive director at the New York Preservation Archive Project and board member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, leading the drive to protect New York City-based Whitman landmarks.

This episode was recorded as part of the Brooklyn Podcast Festival presented by Pandora.

Listen Now: Walt Whitman New York Podcast

________________________________________________________

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.

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 five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.

And join us for the next episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, an exclusive podcast provided to our supporters on Patreon.

We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

_________________________________________________________

For a list of Walt Whitman celebrations in New York City and around the country, visit the Walt Whitman Initiative for details. And the week of Whitman’s bicentennial (May 27-June 1) is International Whitman Week!

Some images from our live show:

jenna_scherer/Instagram

Jason Koo reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Courtesy Marie Carter

Jason Koo, Brad Vogel and Karen Karbiener

Courtesy Marie Carter

This is a recording of what many consider the actual voice of Walt Whitman, recorded on wax cylinder, reading a section of his poem “America”. (There is some controversy over its veracity.)

An illustration of the interior of Pfaff’s Beer Cellar, depicted here in 1857 (the seated gentleman is Whitman).

The location of Rome Brothers printing house (at Cranberry and Fulton streets), depicted here in 1949 in an illustration by Josephine Barry.

Museum of the City of New York

Whitman’s birthplace in Huntington, Long Island, still stands and is well worth a visit. It’s lovely! Unfortunately the landscape around the house has changed dramatically.

Whitman in 1854

Library of Congress

Whitman in 1890, photographed by George C. Cox

Museum of the City of New York

FURTHER LISTENING

Before Whitman, Poe found inspirations for his poetry in New York and in another future borough — the Bronx:

Whitman was a young man living in New York when a terrible blaze destroyed much of the city (not to mention job prospects):

Downtown Brooklyn, the area where Whitman once lived and published, has gone through several transformations since he lived here:

Categories
Film History Friday Night Fever

The film ‘Green Book’ visits the Copacabana, the pillar of New York’s glamorous, volatile nightlife

NOTE: This post features a slight spoiler of an event which occurs in the film’s first five minutes.

The period film Green Book — nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture — goes cross-country with pianist Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali) and his chauffeur/bodyguard Tony Lip (played by Viggo Mortensen), depicting the varying gradients of class and race relations in America in the year 1962.

But the film is bookended by a look at vintage New York City from the perspective of three locations. Shirley really did live in one of the sumptuous artist units above Carnegie Hall — In fact, he lived there for over 50 years! — and the venue is depicted in all its regal, timeless glory. Meanwhile, Tony Lip — real name Tony Vallelonga — lived in an Italian neighborhood in the South Bronx, its street life and storefronts displayed in all their nostalgic beauty.

But when the film begins, we’re ushered into a space quite different from a concert hall or a Bronx apartment. In fact, we’re in one of the classiest, most renown nightclubs in New York City history — the Copacabana.

Copacabana circa 1950 / © Photofest

If you had to guess where the Copacabana was, most likely you would not have placed it at 10 East 60th Street near the entrance to Central Park and the aging mansions of Fifth Avenue. When it opened in 1940, Midtown Manhattan was exploding with nightlife, from the big-band supper clubs to the tiny jazz clubs of 52nd Street. (Billie Holiday was ruling the dives of Swing Street when during the Copa’s early years.)

The supper club scene was built for the wild and the wealthy, with fining dining and cocktails paired with floor shows by major stars and late-night dancing, a scene which greeted you whether you were at the Rainbow Room or El Morocco, The Cotton Club or the Stork Club.

But the scene was mostly operated by the mob, whose foothold into New York nightlife began during Prohibition and reached its crescendo in the 1960s. Organized crime syndicates controlled virtually all aspects of going out, from West Village gay bars to even the most respectable spots in Midtown.

The Copacabana was owned by Broadway producer Monty Proser and was renown for its dazzling floorshow entertainment. Indeed its emblem was the face of Carmen Miranda herself, a Portuguese-Brazilian singer and dancer famous for her exotic, fruity headwear. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who also made their name at the Copa, sometimes performed with Miranda before she died in 1955.

(We mentioned the Copa in our recent podcast on the history of live comedy.)

Tony Lip was a bouncer at the Copa, and at the opening of Green Book, we see a fight break out on the floor. Despite the club’s elegant airs, fights often broke out at the Copacabana, a venue which specifically courted wealthy (and famous) patrons known for partying a little too hard. Throw a bunch of drunken sports celebrities and mob bosses into the mix, and you were sure to see an ‘unplanned floor show’ at least once or twice a week. Lip was a busy man.

The most famous brawl of all happened on the night of May 16, 1957, during a performance by Sammy Davis Jr.

Below: A flyer for Davis’ 1960 show, apparently holiday themed.

Like many Manhattan supper clubs (including some in Harlem), the dining area was for white patrons only — at least until 1957 when this racist policy was finally dropped. But many black musicians and dancers entertained at the Copa well before then, including Davis, who first performed for the all-white audience here (as part of the Will Mastin Trio) in 1954.

During the spring of 1957, Davis returned to the Copa, now with an integrated dining room, and it was during one performance in May that a group of men began heckling Davis, reportedly spewing racial epithets. Unfortunately for these men, also in attendance that evening were a table of six drunken New York Yankees, including Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford, out celebrating the birthday of Billy Martin.

The players retaliated, attacking the table of hecklers. Right-fielder Hank Bauer reported broke the nose of one man. “BEAK BUSTED BY BAUER CLAIMS FAN.”

Sammy Davis Jr would later become the Copa’s most popular draw, breaking attendance records in 1964.

The Copacabana — in its supper club incarnation — would close in the early 1970s, later reopening as a discotheque.

And then, in 1978, this happened.

For the rest of the story and for more information on the Copacabana, reach back into our back catalog and listen to a whole episode on the night club’s history! (Episode #24)

NOTE: This was recorded a few years before a new incarnation of the Copacabana reopened in Times Square in 2011.

Originally published December 7, 2018

Categories
Bowery Boys Movie Club Podcasts

Taxi Driver: Looking at 1970s New York City in Martin Scorsese’s gritty thriller classic

Welcome to the Bowery Boys Movie Club, a new podcast exclusively for our Patreon supporters where Tom and Greg discuss classic New York City films from an historical perspective. As we are currently prepare the newest episode for our patrons, we thought we’d give our all our listeners a taste of the very first episode (which was released back in September).

In the Bowery Boys Movie Club, we’ll be revisiting some true cinematic classics and sprinkling our recaps with trivia, local details and personal insight — and lots of spoilers of course.

In this inaugural episode, the Bowery Boys take a trip to Times Square in the 1970s (not to mention Columbus Circle, the East Village and even Cadman Plaza in Downtown Brooklyn) in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Taxi Driver.

How does the director use New York’s unique geography to tell his story and categorize his three main characters? What does this film have to say about New York City in the 1970s? And how much has the city changed since Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, and Jodie Foster starred in this grim, noir-ish thriller?

FEATURING: Diners, cafeterias, porn theaters and old elevated highways!

LISTEN HERE:

_________________________________________________________

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.

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 five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.

And join us for the next episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, an exclusive podcast provided to our supporters on Patreon. Our new show on the 1958 classic Auntie Mame arrives in your exclusive feed next Wednesday.

We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

__________________________________________________________

Some New York City locations featured in Taxi Driver and mentioned on our show:

One Times Square

Terminal Bar, Eighth Avenue

East Village (13th Street)

From the film:

Columbus Circle (in front of the Maine Monument)

From the film:

Cadman Plaza West, Downtown Brooklyn

From the film:

Belmore Cafeteria (28th Street/Park Avenue South)

All images and video clips are the property of Columbia Pictures
Categories
Brooklyn History Podcasts

Treasures of Downtown Brooklyn: Remnants of the former independent city, hidden in plain sight

PODCAST The fascinating history of Brooklyn’s most bustling — and most frequently misunderstood — neighborhood.

Downtown Brooklyn has a history that is often overlooked by New Yorkers. You’d be forgiven if you thought Brooklyn’s civic center — with a bustling shopping district and even an industrial tech campus — seemed to lack significant remnants of Brooklyn’s past; many areas have been radically altered and hundreds of old structures have been cleared over the decades.

But, in fact, Downtown Brooklyn is one of the few areas to still hold evidence of the borough’s glorious past — its days as an independent city and one of the largest urban centers in 19th century America.

Around Brooklyn City Hall (now Borough Hall) swirled all aspects of Brooklyn’s Gilded Age society. With the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and a network of elevated railroad lines, Downtown Brooklyn became a major destination with premier department stores on Fulton Street, entertainment venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and exclusive restaurants like Gage & Tollners.

The 20th century brought a new designation for Brooklyn — a borough of Greater New  York — and a series of major developments that attempted to modernize the district — from the creation of Cadman Plaza to New York’s very own ‘tech hub’. In 2004 a major zoning change brought a new addition to the multi-purpose neighborhood — high-end residential towers. What will the future hold for the original heart of the City of Brooklyn?

LISTEN HERE:

_________________________________________________________

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.

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 five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.

And join us for the next episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club, an exclusive podcast provided to our supporters on Patreon.

We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

__________________________________________________________

And a video about the history of MetroTech Center from NYU Polytechnic

The scene just north of Brooklyn Borough Hall, in a photo taken in the early 1900s. The Henry Ward Beecher monument would be moved further north with the creation of Cadman Plaza.

Detroit Publishing Company / Library of Congress

Downtown Brooklyn in 1892, a year of momentous change for the neighborhood. Here you see the elevated railroad snaking up Fulton Street with Brooklyn City Hall on the far left.

The classic interiors of Gage & Tollner’s exclusive restaurant on Fulton Street. The interiors are landmarks and you can actually peer into the storefront on Fulton Street to see them (although no business currently occupies the space.)

Museum of the City of New York
Susan De Vries/Brownstoner

Flatbush Avenue Extension from Fulton Street, 1914 (a few years after the opening of the Manhattan Bridge). Note the Crescent Theatre to the far right. It opened as a vaudeville/burlesque house and transitioned to silent films.

Library of Congress

Brooklyn Borough Hall in 1908 with its new neighbor, the Temple Court Building (constructed 1901).

Irving Underhill/Library of Congress/ 1908

The post office was once next to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle offices. The Eagle building was demolished, as was Washington Street. (It became Cadman Plaza East.)

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

The post office building on Cadman Plaza in 1976, with the newly situated Henry Ward Beecher monument.

Edmund Vincent Gillon, Museum of the City of New York

A 1963 photo of Abe Stark, Brooklyn borough president, hovering over a model of the ‘new’ civic center plan for downtown Brooklyn.

Higgins, Roger, photographer/Library of Congress

The Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn is an oddity among the old retail shops of Fulton Street but its classical architecture has helped it survive the wrecking ball.

Look above the first or second floors on Fulton Street and you’ll find some curious and spectacular architectural finery.

The landmarked Offerman Building, the most beautiful former department store on Fulton Street.

More department store richness:

The New York Telephone Company Building and the NY and NJ Telephone and Telegraph Building both remain standing amid a sea of new supertall residential construction.

Some curious features of MetroTech Commons — two whimsical animal-themed sculptures and the Bridge Street Church, a historical landmark associated with the Underground Railroad.

A block north of MetroTech Commons, you’ll find the historic George Westinghouse High School.

The old Brooklyn Fire Headquarters on Jay Street, built in 1892 in a style most unusual for the neighborhood — Richardsonian Romanesque Revival.

The Jay Street-MetroTech station still contains some quirky details from the past.

This undistinguished old building was once the home of Gage & Tollner’s, the most exclusive restaurant in Brooklyn.

The austere Municipal Building was constructed in 1924 and the skyscrapers which surround it also joined the neighborhood in the same decade.

Brooklyn Borough Hall and Columbus Park:

The 1892 Federal Building and Post Office with a tribute to Henry Ward Beecher (which once sat closer to Brooklyn Borough Hall).

Further Listening:

If you like Brooklyn history, check out these episodes from our back catalog that are referenced in this week’s show.

Categories
Podcasts Revolutionary History

New York City during the Revolutionary War: Besieged and occupied by the British (1776-1783)

PODCAST What was life like in New York City from the summer of 1776 to the fall of 1783 — the years of British occupation during the Revolutionary War?

New York plays a very intriguing role in the story of American independence. The city and the surrounding area were successfully taken by the British by the end of 1776 — George Washington and the Continental Army forced to escape for the good of the cause — and the port city became the central base for British operations during the conflict.

While British officers dined and enjoy a newly revitalized theater scene, Washington’s spies on the streets of New York collected valuable intelligence. As thousands of soldiers and sympathizing Loyalists arrived in the city, hunger and overcrowding put the residents of the city in peril. When the sugar houses and churches became too filled with captured rebels, the British employed prison ships along the Brooklyn waterfront to hold their enemies.

This is a very, very special episode, a newly edited combination of two older shows from our back catalog.  PLUS several minutes of brand new material, featuring stories that we overlooked the first time.

Listen Now: Revolutionary War NYC Podcast

_________________________________________________________

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.

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 five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). 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.

_________________________________________________________

Since 2008, we’ve taken a deep dive into New York’s Revolutionary years with several shows focusing on many different aspects of these trying times. For more information, check out these shows from our back catalog:

FRAUNCES TAVERN
Fraunces Tavern is one of America’s most important historical sites of the Revolutionary War and a reminder of the great importance of taverns on the New York way of life during the Colonial era.

Van Cortlandt House Museum

BRONX TRILOGY (PART ONE): THE BRONX IS BORN
Before it was the borough of the Bronx, the southern portion of Westchester County was populated with wealthy, prominent British families who faced a tough choice during the Revolutionary War? Remain loyal to the Crown or support the rebels?

GOWANUS! Brooklyn’s Troubled Waters
Back when the Gowanus was a marshy creek, an early battle in the quest for American independence was fought here. The Old Stone House today pays homage to this pivotal skirmish.

THE GREAT FIRE OF 1776
The circumstances surrounding the Great Fire of 1776, the events of the Revolutionary War leading up to the disaster, and the tragic tale of the American patriot Nathan Hale.

BEFORE HARLEM: NEW YORK’S FORGOTTEN BLACK COMMUNITIES
Featuring a chat with Kama’u Ware of Black Gotham Experience about the struggles of enslaved and free black people during the colonial period

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S NEW YORK INAUGURATION
After Washington resigned as head of the Continental Army in 1783, many did not ever expect to see him back in New York. But providence — and a new nation — called.

Categories
Health and Living The Alienist

Scenes from New York’s public baths: How tenement dwellers got clean and cool

HISTORY BEHIND THE SCENE What’s the real story behind that historical scene from your favorite TV show or feature film? A semi-regular feature on the Bowery Boys blog, we will be reviving this series as we follow along with TNT’s limited series The Alienist. Look for other articles here about other historically themed television shows (Mad Men, The Knick, The Deuce, Boardwalk Empire and Copper). And follow along with the Bowery Boys on Twitter at @boweryboys for more historical context of your favorite shows. 

Public bathhouses were an integral component of tenement districts in late 19th and early 20th century New York City. Running water was uncommon in the poorest areas of the city, and when it was available, rusty, filthy pipes ensured that its consumption would be an unpleasant and often unhealthy experience.

And of course there was often very little available for bathing. As a result, life was so very fragrant back then.

Temporary outdoor baths sprang up around the city during the summer such as this one off Fifth Street on the East River in 1870.

NYPL
NYPL

From Harper’s Weekly, August 20, 1870. “We give on this page an illustration of the swimming bath at the foot of Charles Street. It contains 68 rooms, the water is four and a half deep and 200 bathers can be accommodated at one time. The success of these experiments should lead to the establishment of other baths in sufficient numbers to accommodate all who desire to avail themselves of these healthful privileges.”

New -York Historical Society

But the city’s objectives in opening public bath houses (starting in the 1880s) weren’t merely related to cleanliness. Most believed access to clean water promoted health and kept epidemics from spreading. This wasn’t strictly for the benefit of the poor, but for the wealthier classes who interacted with them in daily life.

From Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace: “[I]n the late 1880s, [German professor Simon] Baruch began a campaign stressing that baths, in addition to benefiting the poor and helping create “civic civilization” out of “urban barbarism,” were in the interest of “the better situated classes”: no longer unwashed, the employees, servants, laborers, and tradespeople next to whom they sat on crowded cars would not carry so many deadly germs. ”

Public baths also provided relief in hot summer months — air conditioning and affordable electric fans were decades away — and encouraged physical activity. The public bath, in effect, gave rise to the urban swimming pool movement, drawing children from dangerous piers and swimming holes and into carefully monitored (if incredibly crowded) water environments.

In 1888, New York installed several outdoor baths within the city, imposing 20 minute time limits on swimmers to keep the water clean. (No matter; adventurous children hopped from pool to pool to skirt the rules).

Public Bath #10 on the Hudson River

Three years later, a grand People’s Bath (at Grand Street and Centre Street) provided people with soap and towels for the modest admission of five cents.

In 1895, public bathing became a priority for Mayor William Strong who authorized a Sub-Committee on Baths and Lavatories which reported that “New York City was lagging far behind European and other American cities in the building of baths and urged that the city begin immediately to remedy the situation.” State government soon concurred, passing a mandatory bath law that year, “making the establishment of public baths mandatory for all first- and second-class cities in the state.” [source]

Museum of the City of New York

New public baths began opening by the new century, many in the Lower East Side; the first, Rivington Street Bath (pictured above), even had 91 showers and 10 bathtubs.

An advertisement for baths in 1935:

They’re mostly forgotten about today but a few remaining historical structures bear evidence of these important structures.

One such relic sits at Madison Street in the Lower East Side, within the La Guardia Houses development. (It’s listed in the above advertisement at 5 Rutgers Place.)

Matt Green/Flickr

Nicknamed the Whitehouse, the bathhouse opened on December 23, 1909, and was one of thirteen public bath facilities in New York at that time. By the 1940s indoor plumbing had rendered the public bath obsolete, and so it was converted into a public swimming pool and gymnasium. Today it sits unused, like many others throughout the city, a ruin from another time.

Others have been rescued and serve new purposes such as the Milbank Memorial Bath at 325-327 East 38th Street (pictured below). Today the structure is the Indonesian Mission to the United Nations, but when it opened, it was one of the biggest bathhouses in the city, serving up to 3,000 people.

MCNY
Jim Henderson/Wikimedia

The grateful visitors of Milbank’s bath house:

MCNY
MCNY
MCNY

Perhaps the best known — and most beautiful — example of a public bath house standing in New York City today is the Asser Levy Public Bath in Kips Bay. (It’s also listed in the billboard image as 388 Avenue A.) Its unusual beauty is perhaps what saved it from demolition, and today it’s part of Asser Levy Recreation Center, serving in its original function — as a swimming pool for neighborhood children.

Wikimedia
Categories
The Alienist True Crime

The Alleged New York Murders of Jack the Ripper

HISTORY BEHIND THE SCENE What’s the real story behind that historical scene from your favorite TV show or feature film? A semi-regular feature on the Bowery Boys blog, we will be reviving this series as we follow along with TNT’s limited series The Alienist. Look for other articles here about other historically themed television shows (Mad Men, The Knick, The Deuce, Boardwalk Empire and Copper). And follow along with the Bowery Boys on Twitter at @boweryboys for more historical context of your favorite shows. 

In 1888, a serial killer terrorized the Whitechapel district of London, leaving a set of disturbingly gory crime scenes which horrified the public and galvanized the press. It was soon believed at least five of the victims (and possibly many more) were killed by the same hand — a shadowy figure referred to as Jack the Ripper. The victims, all women, were Whitechapel prostitutes.

In 1891, the killer struck again in as gruesome a fashion as before. The victim was again a prostitute, a middle-aged woman “of dissolute and intemperate habits” named Carrie Brown who was found murdered in a lodging house on April 24, 1891. The only significant difference to the brutal crimes of 1888 was its location.

Carrie Brown was murdered in New York City.

Jack the Ripper’s alleged ‘New York City spree’ is the sinister pretext for the murder investigation depicted on The Alienist. Investigators in 1896, just five years after the death of Carrie Brown, would have had knowledge of Jack’s possible appearance on the streets of New York.

Of course, nothing has ever been proven that Brown’s death was associated in any way with the 1888 murders in Whitechapel. But that didn’t stop the press from speculating. After all, such twisted, grotesque crime sold newspapers.

The circumstances of Brown’s ghastly murder were indeed extraordinary.

Let’s quote from that defining text of New York City crime folklore — Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury. “The first Jack-the-Ripper murder in New York is said to have occurred [at the old East River Hotel at Catherine and Water streets] when an old hag known as Shakespeare was cut to pieces.”

Brown was known as Shakespeare for her habit of quoting the bard whenever possible. According to Asbury, “Shakespeare always claimed that she had come from an aristocratic family and that in her youth she had been a celebrated actress in England. She supported her contention by reciting, in return for a bottle of swan gin, every female role in Hamlet, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice.”

Her lifeless body was discovered the next morning, stabbed and repeatedly slashed with a cross cut into her thigh.

Below: Brown’s body wore mutilations similar to those found in the Whitechapel killings

Buffalo Morning Express, April 25, 1891

From the Evening World the day following her murder: “No crime which has been committed in this city for years has stirred the Police Department to such tremendous activity as the horrible butchery of Carrie Brown, alias ‘Old Shakespeare’ by ‘Jack the Ripper or his double, at the East River Hotel.”

Police chief inspector Thomas F. Byrnes had previously chided Scotland Yard for their inability to catch a killer. Perhaps that’s why there was an immediate arrest in the case — an Algerian man named Ameer Ben Ali (nicknamed Frenchy). He was convicted of the crime and unjustly sent to prison, despite little evidence of his involvement in the murder. (He remained there for eleven years before he was eventually exonerated.)

Evening World, April 30, 1891

There were doubts about Ameer Ben Ali’s involvement with the murder from the very beginning — as evidenced by this poem in the Buffalo Morning Express, published a couple of weeks after the murder.

It didn’t matter that, in 1891, Jack seemed to have resumed his murder spree at the very same time in London. It’s unclear whether the London slayings attributed to this singular killer were related to the 1888 murders but newspapers made the assumption anyway. In total, eleven ‘Whitechapel murders’ from 1888 to 1891 are attributed to Jack.

Below: Puck Magazine, published at the Puck Building on Houston Street, speculated on the Ripper’s identity in 1889.

Brown’s murder was not the only one eager newspaper publishers linked to the legend of Jack the Ripper. It happened with such frequency that Twentieth Century Magazine (published in May 1891) attempted to explain the phenomenon. “A little more than a month ago a homicide was committed in New York, the incidents of which were so like those attending the London homicides that the unknown perpetrator of the deed was also called Jack the Ripper. So that the name of Jack the Ripper stands for a person who kills a woman or women and afterword mutilates the body or bodies.”

Jack the Ripper was reportedly seen throughout New York, due to the many eyewitness descriptions of both the London killer which ran in American newspapers and descriptions of the suspected New York killer.

Below: Such headlines ran in the newspapers even before the Carrie Brown murder (New York World, March 8, 1891)

Below: From the Buffalo Evening News (May 25, 1891)

Publishers’ verve in linking any and all grisly murders to London’s killer might have inspired the following letter, sent to the New York Evening World offices on December 17, 1892:

(For those following The Alienist, Bleecker Street is also the destination of choice for that story’s killer.)

In the late fall of 1893, the body of a mutilated woman was found in the East River, and it too, for a time, was linked to Jack the Ripper. “On the hasty examination made last night some marks, taken to be somewhat similar, were discovered, but a thorough examination made this morning shows that they were simply bruises.”

By 1894 people stopped looking for Jack the Ripper in New York although several arrested murderers were described very explicitly as Ripper-style killers. One example from February 3, 1894: “Only a little over two years ago Henry G. Dowd rivaled the fiendish Jack the Ripper by slashing seven intoxicated, but inoffensive men in the Fourth Ward.”