Monthly Archives: January 2017

Bring on 2017

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in New York City

≈ 2 Comments

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 25 January 1946

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 25 January 1946

I got back from vacation today. I was actually in the Ft Lauderdale airport this morning on my way back from my destination. I had passed through it just two days prior to the events of the late last week. Lines were long in places but authorities had things in hand and moving quickly.

With the holidays now fully in the rearview mirror I am looking forward to a fun and productive 2017. I don’t want to give way too much right now, but as things move along I’ll talk more here about various endeavors I have in the works, some in collaboration with others. I’m excited and a little nervous, as if I’m working without a net. That said, I am confident that with hard work and good preparation things will work out as expected. I’m thankful I have interesting projects to work on. I thought I share the above photo of the USS New York leaving the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1946 on its way to the 1946 atomic bomb testing in the Pacific. I find the grainy imagery to be striking. Anyways, here is to a good 2017. Enjoy these winter days.

Frederick W. Whitridge, 1852-1916

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Those we remember, WW1

≈ 2 Comments

The funeral of Frederick W. Whitridge was in Manhattan's Grace Church one hundred years ago today.

The funeral of Frederick W. Whitridge was in Manhattan’s Grace Church one hundred years ago today.

Theodore Roosevelt was in Manhattan on 2 January 1917 for the funeral of his friend Frederick W. Whitridge. Whitridge had been the long serving president of the Third Avenue Elevated Line and had died on 30 December. The funeral was at Grace Church on Broadway and 10th Street. Colonel Roosevelt was a pallbearer along with Joseph H. Choate, J.P. Morgan, British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice and others. It was fitting that Ambassador Spring-Rice was there; Whitridge, an American, was the son-in-law of British poet Matthew Arnold.

The Third Avenue El was part of New York life for decades.

The Third Avenue El was part of New York life for decades.

One can say this of anyone in any era but Whitridge’s funeral signaled an interesting before-and-after moment. Decades earlier Whitridge had been a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt Sr., coming to his aide after the powerful New York senator Roscoe Conkling blocked his appointment to the New York Custom House during the Hayes Administration. In the 1880s Whitridge was a Civil Service reformer, which is presumably where he came into Roosevelt’s orbit. As mentioned Whitridge was the president of the Third Avenue Elevated Line, one of the four commuter rails that took New Yorkers about their daily lives until being torn down after the Second World War. As leader he was charged with the thankless tasks of negotiating stock portfolios and handling worker strikes. This was no small thing: the elevated lines were part of the daily fabric of New York life and any disruption was duly noted by the public.

One person who missed the funeral was Frederick’s son, Captain Arnold Whitridge, who had been serving with the British Royal Field Artillery since 1915. Arnold was actually an American, a 1913 graduate of Yale, who was attending Oxford when the Great War broke out in summer 1914. With his father’s death he was back in the United States though not for long. When the U.S. entered the war in April 1917 he joined the A.E.F. and soon found himself in France once more.

(top image, Library of Congress; bottom NYPL)

Happy New Year

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in New York City, WW1

≈ 4 Comments

American newspapers captured the mood of early January 1917.

American newspapers captured the mood of early January 1917.

I have a candle going and am sitting here with my New Years Day coffee.

It was such a help when the Brooklyn Public Library digitized and published the first half of the BDE morgue’s run about 10-12 years ago. When they completed the second half of that project a few years later, things because even better. I always knew that the Eagle was Brooklyn’s paper of record from 1841-1955, but I don’t think I truly realized how authoritative the periodical was until earlier this past year when I began co-teaching my course and using it so heavily in the classroom. New York with its dozen or so dailies was always a newspaper town–the newspaper town–until the papers began consolidating in the 1950s. By the 80s and 90s only three were left. I suppose I always thought of the Eagle as separate from New York’s newspaper culture because Brooklyn until fairly recently was markedly distinct from Manhattan. The answer is probably not that difficult to earn, I don’t even know if they sold the Eagle in Manhattan.

In its 3 January 1917 edition the Eagle published a series of cartoons that other papers had printed in the days around the turn of the year. The one above in particular caught my attention. It may seem that 2016 with its crazy election season and so many other things was the worst of times, but for perspective  remember that a century earlier was the year of Verdun and Somme. When the new year came in 1917 there was still no end in sight for what this cartoon pointedly calls the European War. The Americans did not enter the conflict until April.

Happy New Year. Enjoy your day.

(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)