Yearly Archives: 2011

Visitor Center, RIP?

03 Friday Jun 2011

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I don’t see the visitor centers at our National Parks going anywhere anytime soon, but I can imagine fewer VCs being constructed and existing ones having shorter hours in the decades to come.  Increasingly, visitors are finding information (including ticket information) online before even setting out for their destination.  I myself spent the past few days searching Park websites to find the logistical details for our upcoming trip to Pennsylvania and Maryland, including the full complement of interpretive programming at Gettysburg for the summer season.  Social media have already changed the way the Park Service interacts with the public.  This trend will certainly continue and probably accelerate.

Digital technology increases the options of the consumer and puts the power in the hands of the customer, which are always good things.  My experience as a volunteer in the Interpretation Division at Ellis Island has taught me, however, that people still want that human interaction.  According to Laura Petersen:

. . . people still seek out rangers at parks they do not regularly visit. After pre-trip planning information was posted online for Yellowstone National Park, rangers expected a drop in visitor center activity, said Diane Chalfant, the agency’s deputy associate director of interpretation and education. “But what actually happened is the visitors came in more informed and curious because they had more in-depth questions to ask,” said Chalfant, who was Yellowstone’s chief of interpretation for 10 years.

The role of ranger is changing from providing basic facts and directions to discussing more detailed elements of the park. It means they have to know their subject matter in and out, Chalfant said.

Whatever does happen, it is safe to say that the NPS will look different even five short years from now when it celebrates its centennial.

The Smithsonian’s Bigger Picture

03 Friday Jun 2011

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Hey everybody, as I mentioned the other day I spent Memorial Day weekend in our nation’s capital.  Although my mother was born in Washington DC and lived there for several years as a young girl, I myself had never visited the city until just a few years ago.  My favorite thing to do is visit the Smithsonian.  The Hayfoot and I have had this on the heavy rotation since I returned last Sunday.  One thing  was surprised to learn when I visited for the first time a few years ago was that the Smithsonian Institution is not one site, but a system of museums and research institutions dedicated to preserving and disseminating our nation’s scientific, historical, and cultural heritage.  Visiting Washington over Memorial Day weekend has whetted my appetite to learn more about the Smithsonian and its history.  Earlier today I inter-library loaned some titles on the history of Mr. Smithson’s museum.

Ambrotype of Abraham Lincoln by William Judkins Thomson (1858); Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

The Smithsonian also has a blog presence and is posting frequently about the Civil War, particularly on how the war affected the organization for good and ill.  The museum was founded in 1846, just fifteen years prior to the start of the conflict, and as you can imagine was vulnerable on a number of different levels.  According to a recent post:

As the war erupted in April 1861, the Board of Regents experienced a major upheaval, with more members leaving the Board over the course of the year. Several were expelled for their loyalty to the Confederacy, including Lucius Jeremiah Gartrell, a US Representative from Georgia, and James Murray Mason, a US Senator from Virginia. In June, the board lost another strong supporter when Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois died. Douglas had been appointed to the board in 1854 and had been an advocate for the Institution in the Congress...

…As the war wore on, yet another member was expelled for “giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the Government.” Other strong supporters were also lost, including Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, who had been a Smithsonian regent from 1847 to 1851, and was a close friend of [Smithsonian] Secretary Henry.

I can’t wait to go back next month.  Until then, here is the next best thing.

Billy Martin, Civil War historian

02 Thursday Jun 2011

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From the “Who knew?” department:

Shortly before his untimely death on Christmas day 1989, Billy Martin had met videographer Tom Molito to discuss making a video detailing Martin’s managerial strategies.

Billy was dressed in his usual cowboy outfit, which might have been incongruous for anyone at a business meeting in New York City, but for Billy, it seemed perfectly natural.

Tom and Billy agreed that the video would emphasize his New York Yankees years as well as the strike-shortened 1981 season when Martin led the Oakland A’s to a division title.

As Billy gulped his drink, the topic switched from managing baseball games to managing the Union Forces at Gettysburg. Billy really was a student of the Civil War and he became quite animated discussing the Confederacy’s tactical errors that cost them victory.

I remember seeing the advertisements for the Martin documentary mentioned in the article when I visited Yankee Stadium for the first time in 1990.  The Bronx was truly a zoo that season.  It was the year George Steinbrenner fired manager Bucky Dent, Commissioner Fay Vincent banned the Boss from day-to-day team operations for spying on Dave Winfield, and the Yanks finished with the worst record in the American League.  Good times.

Feeling like summer

31 Tuesday May 2011

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Hey everybody, I got back from DC yesterday.  Being in the nation’s capital during Memorial Day weekend was a great experience.  I saw the Elmer Ellsworth exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.  It will be on display through March 2012.  If you can make it, I highly recommend.  Adam Goodheart tells the Ellsworth story captivatingly in 1861: The Civil War Awakening.

(Source: The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes: Volume One, The Opening Battles; Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

It is starting to feel like summer in New York: hot and humid.  Things are picking up here.  This Saturday a friend and I are going to see the just-opened “Honoring Their Sacrifice” exhibit at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.  Unfortunately I missed their Memorial Day programming because I was out of town.  I’m starting at Governors Island the next day.  I also have a few writing projects I’m working on.  Then in a few weeks we’re headed to Gettysburg and Antietam.  We have gone each June the last few years and have gotten it down to a science a little more each time.  I’m hoping to squeeze in Monocacy as well.  We will be there a week and it is difficult to squeeze in everything.  We’ll see how it goes.

Remembering Miles

26 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in Jazz, Those we remember

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Miles Davis would have turned eighty five today.  It is hard to believe he has been gone twenty years.  This rendition of “So What” comes from the 1959 special The Sound of Miles Davis, which was something of a sequel to the 1957 The Sound of Jazz.  Both programs were organized by Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice and Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker and produced by early television pioneer Robert Herridge.  Coltrane’s playing is especially confident during this period, and he would of course strike out on his own just a few months later.  Today we take it for granted that such things are easily available to us at the click of a mouse and the touch of a keyboard; up until even the late 1990s, however, such was not the case.  I remember watching this for the first time at the Museum of Television & Radio (now the Paley Center for Media) when I came to New York City for a job interview in 1997.  Enjoy.

 

To Brooklyn Bridge

25 Wednesday May 2011

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Earlier this spring I read The Great Bridge, David McCullough’s magnum opus about the creation of the span connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.  One reason for doing so was because, after spending so much time reading about the death and destruction of the Civil War, I wanted to turn my attention to something being built not destroyed.  The bridge is down the street from where I work and I often have my lunch there.  It is also where I took my wife after our wedding reception.  Yesterday was the one hundred and twenty eighth anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Museum Collection

I sometimes think many New Yorkers assume the bridge has always “been there,” a natural part of the landscape.  Actually it was the brainchild of German-born John Augustus Roebling, who was wounded on the construction site and died prematurely years before the bridge’s completion.

Brooklyn Museum Collection, Gift of Paul Roebling

It was up to his son, Colonel Washington Augustus Roebling, to complete the task.  He did so, but at great personal expense.  Roebling contracted caisson disease, or the bends, from his frequent trips below the water to the excavation site and suffered in horrific pain the rest of his long life.  He lived until 1926.

Roebling was an officer in the Army of the Potomac and participated in many of the war’s most important events.  He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness among other places.  He also personally witnessed the engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimac in 1862.  Roebling married Emily Warren, the sister of General Gouverneur Kemble Warren, in January 1865.

Looking at the bridge today…

Harpers, 1890

…it takes a leap of faith to imagine it as it was just after its completion.

The road in the top photograph is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  Below that in the same photograph is a new park being built along the Brooklyn side of the East River.  The waterfront has not been part of the daily fabric of New York life for decades, since the collapse of the shipping industry in the mid-twentieth century.  The city has been working hard to change that in recent years with a number of adaptive reuse projects.

(Author: H. Finkelstein & Son; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The bridge has always been a favorite of painters and poets.

May 24, 1883 (Source: Brooklyn Museum Collection)

May 24, 2011


Green-Wood’s Memorial Weekend

24 Tuesday May 2011

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Regular readers of The Strawfoot know how much I cherish Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.  This past Saturday I was walking the grounds aimlessly when I came across the final resting place of Major General George Crockett Strong.  General Strong was wounded during the attack on Fort Wagner in July 1863 and died in New York a few weeks later.  Yes, this was the battle depicted in Glory.

Strong finished fifth in the West Point class of 1857.

The storming of Fort Wagner, lithograph by Kurz & Allison Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Earlier this week the New York Times wrote about a Confederate general interred in Green-Wood, Robert Selden Garnett.  According to the Times:

Robert Selden Garnett, the first general killed in the Civil War, was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but his family did not want visitors to the cemetery to know it.

Named brigadier general in 1861, Garnett briefly commanded Confederate troops in western Virginia before being shot dead in the battle of Corrick’s Ford on July 13, 1861.

According to research by the cemetery, one of his last cries on the battlefield was “Three cheers for Jeff Davis!”

But that Confederate pride did not follow Garnett to the grave.

Union forces turned over Garnett’s body to his family, who buried him in Baltimore. Four years later, the family decided he should lie in Brooklyn alongside his wife and son, who had died before the war. They exhumed Garnett’s remains and secretly re-interred him in Green-Wood, leaving his grave unmarked for fear of anti-Southern sentiments.

If you are able, I hope you get the opportunity to visit Green-Wood.  There has never been a better time.

For the younger generation…

23 Monday May 2011

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I wouldn’t recognize rapper 50 Cent if he walked past me on the street, which being that we both live in New York City is a distinct possibility.  Be that as it may, tonight at 9:00 pm VH1 is airing 50 Cent: The Origin of Me.  In the documentary the Queens native travels to South Carolina to trace his roots.  In the words of the producer:

The basic idea was to connect the “genealogy chic” movement with a younger audience than watches Henry Louis Gates’s ancestry shows on PBS, and to bring hip-hop-generation African-American stars face-to-face with the legacy of slavery.

I have seen a few snippets and the results are interesting indeed.