Grand Army Plaza, June 11

30 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Memory, Monuments and Statuary, Museums, New York City

I was at the Brooklyn Museum of Art this afternoon to meet with officials about the walking tour I am doing on Sunday 11 June from 12:00 – 1:00 pm for the museum. The idea was to do a walkthrough of the presentation to see if it fits into the time slot and to decide if any changes or additions might be in order. I ran two people though the walking tour, and we had a fun and productive time running though the thing. I got some good feedback as well. There is nothing like the live audience to keep you humble. Grand Army Plaza was laid out by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in the years just after the Civil War. The area is one of the places of Civil War memory not just in New York but in the United States. So many people walk past it all every day with no idea. I am looking forward to this event.

Decoration Day 1917

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Charles S. Whitman (Governor), Governors Island, J. Franklin Bell (General), Leonard Wood (General), Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City

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I wanted to share a few images from Decoration Day 1917. These photographs were taken near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Turn out was higher than for Decoration Day parades in recent years, which is not surprising given that this was the first Memorial Day since the call for war. The parade route was actually cut shorter in 1917 to accommodate the increasingly infirm veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. About four hundred GAR veterans marched in New York City’s 1917 Decoration Day parade, one hundred and thirty fewer than just a year earlier. Veterans of the Spanish-American War and New York Guardsmen recently returned from Texas fell in behind. All told, 18,000 men and women marched in the parade through the Upper West Side. For the first time ever there was a regiment of Negro troops included in New York City’s Decoration Day parade. Though many would not have grasped it at the moment, the perceptive understood that this was an early sign of the coming of what became the New Negro Movement.

That is Major General J. Franklin Bell, commander of the Department of the East on Governors Island, and Governor Charles S. Whitman on the review stand. In the two middle image, they are there on the right in the box. Conspicuously absent is Leonard Wood, though his spirit in a sense was present. Before leaving New York City several weeks earlier he had given his blessing for a parade of the Public School Athletic League. While the veterans’s event was going on, a separate parade comprised of 40,000 schoolchildren was taking place south of here.

Memorial Day also means baseball. Just north of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument in the Polo Grounds Grover Cleveland Alexander of the Philadelphia Phillies lost 5-1 to the New York Giants. He went on to win thirty games that season. The following year Alexander was in France fighting the Germans. The Yankees were in Philadelphia playing the other team from the City of Brotherly Love, the Athletics. The Yankees won a double header and held the A’s scoreless over twenty-four innings. The Dodgers, then still the Brooklyn Robins, lost 2-0 to the Braves in Boston. It’s worth noting that the American League was less than twenty years old at this time and very much a competing association with the National. American League owners consciously put teams in cities were the Senior Circuit already had a presence. It says something about the size and influence of Gotham that unlike Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities New York ended up with not just two but three teams.

Enjoy your Memorial Day, everyone.

(images/Library of Congress)

Sunday morning coffee

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Heritage tourism, Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City

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I read with sadness yesterday about the death of Greg Allman. He was the second from the Allman Brothers Band to die in 2017. Drummer Butch Trucks committed suicide in January. I am listening to Live at the Fillmore East as I type this. Personally I never thought the band was the same after the 1971 death of Duane Allman in a motorcycle accident. The band was still tight and had its moments but Duane was the true artist. The death of his younger brother is nonetheless sad. Seeing them play during one of their annual month-long stints each March at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side was something I always thought about but never got around to doing. Now that will never happen.

I was in Green-Wood Cemetery yesterday playing tour guide for a friend. Afterward we had lunch in an Italian restaurant near the 5th Avenue entrance. The cemetery was buzzing with activity. There were at least three funerals happening all at once. Perhaps there were so many because the officials and families usually do not hold burials during the winter months. Instead the departed are kept in a temporary resting place before final interment come spring. I came across the trailer you see above on my way through the cemetery to see my friend. It’s a hearse on motorcycle. I had a ten minute talk with the fellow responsible for the vehicle. He said that about eighty people on motorcycles were to be in the procession. Sure enough, we saw the motorcade go by about an hour later.

Hubert V W Card’s headstone and weathered flag from a past ceremony. Boy Scouts were out in force yesterday putting fresh flags on the headstones of other veterans in preparation for Memorial Day.

Leaving the house yesterday, I ran into my neighbor walking her dog. I explained that I was meeting a friend in the cemetery and that Green-Wood has been a focus of Decoration/Memorial Day observations going back almost a century and a half. I saw teams of Boy Scouts putting flags on veterans’ headstones. One of them even offered me a flag but I said no thank you, figuring the banners were meant for the veterans themselves. I wanted to take a picture of the flag planting but it didn’t seem appropriate. When I got to the other side I saw that cemetery workers had already set up the tents for tomorrow’s Memorial Day program. As I said remembrance events in Green-Wood date back to the Grand Army of the Republic’s call for a Decoration Day in the late 1860s. GAR veterans were joined by soldiers from the Spanish-American War, the Great War, and our other engagements in subsequent decades.

One thing I have always wondered is if there was a drop-off in Memorial Day ceremonies in such New York City places as Green-Wood Cemetery in previous decades. There was a demographic shift from New York City to the suburbs and the Sun Belt in the 1950s-1990s, which took many veterans and their families away from Brooklyn and the other boroughs. It would seem too that the hard years of the 1970s and 1980s would have led to a drop-off in heritage tourism and public ceremony even in gated places like Green-Wood. New Yorkers found their history again in the 1990s when the city itself began revitalizing and became safer. I myself am part of these trends.

Remember that Memorial Day is more than barbecues and a day off.

Through the Valley

19 Friday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Memory

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Hanoi, North Vietnam: American servicemen, former prisoners of war, are cheering as their aircraft takes off from an airfield near Hanoi as part of Operation Homecoming, February 1973

Last night I finished Through the Valley: My Captivity in Vietnam, former POW William Reeder Jr.’s unflinching but in the end hopeful memoir of his experiences. I hope more first-person accounts of the Vietnam War are released in the coming years; veterans of this era are now in the late stages of middle age and if they don’t tell their stories now the accounts may be lost forever. Each narrative is another tile in the mosaic. Now is actually an opportune time because each year through 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the events. The New York Times is running a yearlong account of the events of 1967 which one can read here if so inclined. It will be interesting to see if they do the same for 1968, which was the year the war turned after the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite’s visit, and the growing intensity of the protests leading up to the presidential election that November.

Reeder’s account is a harrowing one but ends with his hard-earned lesson that whatever situation one may in there can always be reason for hope if one chooses. Daily or the now almost half century since his return he reminds his children, now grown and some with kids of their own, that every day offers an opportunity and something to treasure. Remember during this Great War centennial that other events worthy of recognition are taking place as well.

(image/National Archives and Records Administration)

Sunday morning coffee

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Memory

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Little did I know when Sami invited me to the circus at the Barclays Center three Februaries ago that Ringlings would be shutting down a few years later.

There were so many people in the city yesterday on this unseasonably warm weekend. I’m headed out in a bit to hang out with a friend for the day. Often I work on Sundays but today I’m putting it all aside as I rest and gather for what will be a busy week. Earlier this past week my friend Sami Steigmann emailed me and others the link to his new website. As I have said before Mr. Steigmann is becoming an increasingly known figure in the field of Holocaust memory. He was born in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe in 1939 when Europe and the rest of the world seemed determined to commit suicide. The Second World War reached the small enclave that was his village a year or so later, with terrible consequences.

We are almost two decades into the twenty-first century and the events of the twentieth are still playing out in ways big and small all around us. Sami’s is just one of the hundreds of millions lives touched by those events. The mind can’t wrap itself around such numbers however; the only way to comprehend it is through stories about individual people. I don’t know if Sami put it together himself but the website is beautifully done. It is a helpful reminder that that World War 2, and even the First World War, are not merely history but in a very real sense current events, with the effects being felt today on personal lives.

Turning to Lincoln on the brink of war

12 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Great War centennial, Memory, Woodrow Wilson

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Lincoln to Wilson, 12 February 1917: “Let us have faith that right makes might . . .”

I wrote last week of the dramatic turn in American diplomacy after the German renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare in late January 1917. Today is February 12, Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday, and as the United States drifted toward war one hundred years ago Americans took pause to think of Lincoln and his legacy. It is important to remember that this was only fifty-two years after the Great Emancipator’s death and that there were still many people living who remembered the sixteenth president first hand. That remembrance was not always positive. This was both the nadir of Jim Crowism and the High Water Mark for the Lost Cause. How the sons and grandsons of those defeated by Mr. Lincoln’s Army might respond to a draft and an overseas deployment was of concern to many. Lincoln’s oldest son Robert was himself still around and rigorously guarding his father’s legacy. The Lincoln Memorial was still five years off.

The Monday 12 February 1917 Brooklyn Daily Eagle captured the gist of prominent clergyman Samuel Parkes Cadman’s talk about Lincoln and the increasing threat of war.

The newspapers, pulpits, and public spaces were full of stories about Lincoln that week. The Sunday 11 February 1917 New York Times ran an article about Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, which the presidential candidate from Illinois had given in February 1860 when it looked like America might well go to war against itself. That article was accompanied by an extended excerpt from muckraker Ida Minerva Tarbell’s ongoing biography of Lincoln. The Reverend Dr. S. Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn’s Congregational Church gave a talk that same day at a local YMCA pondering what Lincoln might do if he were in Woodrow Wilson’s place. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recounted the next day, Cadman concluded that he had no idea. Cartoonist Edwin Marcus captured Wilson’s plight as he sits at his desk turning the calendar from February 11th to Monday the 12th with Lincoln’s ghost hovering above. The text is difficulty to make out but it is the closing line of Lincoln’s February 1860 speech at the Cooper Institute: “Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. Lincoln.” Intentionally or not, Marcus captures the loneliness of Wilson’s predicament.

(images/top, Library of Congress; bottom, Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Living–and telling–history

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, Museums

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Museum of Jewish Heritage, 29 January 2017

This past Sunday morning I was at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on the Battery to see my friend Sami Steigmann participate in a ceremony to remember the Holocaust and other crimes committed in Europe in the twentieth century. Sami Steigmann was born in 1939 in Bukovina, one of those regions whose nation status changed hands numerous times in that span during and after the World Wars. The other day I wrote about the 135th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That may seem like ancient history, but it is incredibly humbling to meet people like Sami Steigmann, whose lives were changed through the decisions made by the leaders of the twentieth century. Sami and his parents were imprsoned in a concentration camp, where as a toddler he was the victim of medical experiments. Just typing these words is difficult.

We have known Mr. Steigmann for eight years now. I even wrote a book chapter about it that was published last year during the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service. I am glad to see that Sami is becoming an increasingly prominent national figure. Even while we are still early in the new year, his 2017 calendar is already filling up with speaking engagements. And why not? Still a relatively young man in his mid-seventies, he is uniquely positioned to tell a personal narrative of the mid twentieth century in a way that few people today can. Sunday’s event had just the right balance of seriousness and levity. There was even a young all-male song and dance troupe of boys strongly reminiscent of what one might have seen at a borscht belt camp ground circa 1955, and that’s a compliment. When it was all over I didn’t stay long. The crowd to meet Sami was so deep that I said a quick goodbye and headed out the door into the January light.

The FDR 135th

30 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, National Park Service, Those we remember, Woodrow Wilson

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World War II in Europe was reaching its climax in late winter 1945.

This past summer when I was at Hyde Park I had a conversation with one of the rangers in which we discussed that 2017 was the 135th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s birth. He was born there at Springwood on 30 January 1882. I usually visit Hyde Park every summer and have spoken to different rangers in recent years about the dwindling number of visitors who have that emotional, visceral attachment to FDR when visiting the site. It is no wonder, with so many Americans having grown up hearing the four-term president on the radio regularly throughout the Depression and Second World War. Nowadays there are still a few such on the pilgrimage, but for the most part that cohort has aged out. I find this photograph intriguing on a number of levels. The image is of Sergeant George A. Kaufman of the 9th Army and was taken in Germany on 9 March 1945. The public did not know it at the time, but Roosevelt was failing quickly by this time. He would die in Warm Springs just over a month later.

Roosevelt’s life and times spanned much of the American moment, an era that sadly might be winding down before our eyes seven decades after his passing. Roosevelt attended Harvard at the turn of the century, served as Wilson’s Assistant Navy Secretary during the Great War, governed New York State in the late 1920s and 1930s, and was in the White House the last dozen years of his life. It is easy to forget that he was only sixty-three when he died. I see on the Hyde Park/NPS website that they are having a program today at 3:00 pm in the rose garden behind the library. The Hudson Valley is cold this time of year, but it looks like the weather will cooperate. I am curious to see if there is more to come over the course of the year.

(image/National Archives)

Building the national WW1 memorial

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Memory, Monuments and Statuary

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This article from the Wall Street Journal came through my in-box earlier today and I thought I would pass along. Remember that one of the primary missions of the World War One Centennial Commission is to build a memorial in Washington D.C. I did not know until reading this earlier today that the studio work is being done here in New York City, in the Bronx no less. From the looks of it things are proceeding well. In an era when luxury condos are going up seemingly on every corner here in Gotham, even in the out boroughs, it is warming to see work like this being carried out here the way it once was. Check out the piece.

(image/American Engineers returning from the St. Mihiel front, National Archives)

The trees of Eastern Parkway

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Memory, Monuments and Statuary

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I was at the Brooklyn Museum of Art this morning and afternoon for two separate meetings. On the way, going up Eastern Parkway, I came across the small plaque you see here. I have seen these several times over the years and have even written about them here a little. There used to be many in Cadman Plaza as well, but they seem to have disappeared during the recent renovation. If anyone saved them I have no idea. Note how the tablet says “Died in the World War.” That means it was placed in the 1920s or 1930s. If it were dedicated later, the marker would say “First World War,” or words to that effect to differentiate it from the later conflict.

The tablet is nearly a century old but as you can see the tree in the small plot is obviously much younger. You can see the marker in the upper right hand corner of the little square.

This got me curious about the other trees. Directly behind the one you see above is this larger tree with its own tablet dedicated to another doughboy. I imagine, given its size, that this big boy goes back to the time of the placing of the marker.

For even greater perspective, here are the two trees in one image.

To give you some perspective if you live in Brooklyn, the trees above are on the eastern side of the Brooklyn Public Library’s central branch. Now a little up the parkway, almost in front of the botanical garden, are these two stumps. My guess is that these trees too were dedicated for Brooklyn’s Great War fallen and that they were felled somewhere later in their life. Sadly the plaques too are gone.

Cobblestones embedded in some of the other trees give a sense of time’s procession.

Vandals too take a toll. Tablets are often stolen and sold for scrap metal. This was a problem especially during New York City’s hardest years in the 1970s and 1980s. Note the stone, sans tablet, in the lower left corner.

The Strawfoot

~ a New Yorker's American History blog

Category Archives: Memory

Grand Army Plaza, June 11

Decoration Day 1917

Sunday morning coffee

Through the Valley

Sunday morning coffee

Turning to Lincoln on the brink of war

Living–and telling–history

The FDR 135th

Building the national WW1 memorial

The trees of Eastern Parkway