Category Archives: New York City

Sunday morning coffee

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Herbert Hoover, New York City

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Depression Era Hooverville in New York’s Central Park, circa early 1930s

Good morning, all. I have spent a good portion of the morning putting together this week’s presentations for our class on the life, times, and legacy of Robert Moses. I have learned a tremendous amount already this year. I thought I would share this incredible image I intend to show tomorrow in class. This is a so-called Hooverville in Central Park during the Great Depression. These squatter camps were ubiquitous across the United States and were so named in derisive “tribute” to President Herbert Hoover, who Americans unfairly blamed for the onset of the financial crisis.

I am often taken aback looking at old photographs of such cities as New York, London and Paris and seeing how dirty and chaotic they were not so very long ago. Yes, this was the era of the Great Depression and a Hooverville to boot; still, the early twentieth century cities were not the gleaming metroplises we know today. When I moved to New York City twenty-two years ago in 1997 the Bowery still had the last of its flop houses. Today those are gone and in their place are boutiques selling expensive retail goods.

(image/skyscrapercity.com)

The United War Work Campaign of November 1918

18 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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The YMCA was one of the seven organizations involved in The United War Work Campaign in November 1918.

The Armistice of November 11, 1918 coincided with the start of The United War Work Campaign, a national initiative to raise a staggering $170,500,000 in 1918 dollars to aid the American Expeditionary Forces. The project began back in the summer and was, to put it mildly, a massive undertaking; in addition to raising that extraordinary sum, organizers hoped to marshal one million Victory Boys between the ages of 12 and 20 to feed, entertain, and provide educational instruction to doughboys. The United War Work Campaign was the effort of seven agencies: the YMCA, the YWCA, the National Catholic War Council of the Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare Board, Salvation Army, American Library Association, and the War Camp Community Community Service. Clearly the intent was to involve as many constituencies as possible across religious and other lines. The chairman of the initiative in New York City was none other than John D. Rockefeller  Jr., who spoke at various functions around the city in early October drumming up interest. Another prominent New Yorker involved in the campaign was Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke at the Manhattan Opera House on November 1 for that same purpose. Colonel Roosevelt implored his audience that while the kaiser was on his heels there was still much work to be done in winning the war.

As mentioned above the campaign began on November 11 just as news of the Armistice was coming in. For much of the the next week while the celebrated Americans still went out and participated in charity gold tournaments, bake sales, benefit concerts, and so many others things besides. When it became obvious that the funding goal would be a bit short come the November 18 deadline organizers pushed the date back, first to the 20th and then to the 25th. This had the desired results. In those two weeks just after the German surrender Americans donated $203,179,038 to the campaign.

(poster/Library of Congress, designed by Neysa McMein)

 

On the cusp of the Armistice

10 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in Great War centennial, Incorporating New York (book project), New York City

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I hope everyone’s autumn has been good. These first ten days of November have been busy, thus the lack of posts here.

Readers may recall when I posted just after Memorial Day that I sent a proposal to an academic press regarding “Incorporating New York,” my book project about Civil War Era New City. I heard back earlier this week from the editor asking for the full manuscript. I sent it in this past Thursday. We shall see what happens. I have also been putting the final touches on a talk and interview I will be doing tomorrow for Armistice Day at All Souls Church in Manhattan. It all came about quickly when I got asked to do it a few weeks back. There is a nice bit of serendipity in the thing because All Souls plays a significant role in my history of Civil War Era New York. As Kramer would say, my worlds are colliding. The concert begins at 5:00 pm with my talk and interview an hour before that.

Seward Park, Canal and Essex Streets, November 10, 1918

The image we see above was taken in Seward Park on the Lower East Side 100 years ago today. It is the dedication of the J.W.B. Canteen Hut sponsored by the Jewish Welfare Board. Attorney, reformer, and American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the Wilson Administration Abram L. Elkus oversaw the proceedings. Present also was banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff. Organizers knew that the war was about to end, though they certainly were not aware that it would be the following day. Schiff told the crowd we see here “Now that the war is ending happily for everybody . . . war work organizations will for many months need our support more than ever, our soldiers and sailors will demand more attention when the grim business of battle is over and the guns have ceased. When the boys come back we want them to feel that we did what we could for them.”

The J.W.B. Canteen did its part; in just the next two months alone the site served over 8000 meals to returning servicemen. The Seward Park canteen continued its work for much of 1919 as men continued coming from Europe en route home.

(image/Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Center for Jewish History)

Pennsylvania Station, 1910-1963

28 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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They began tearing down the original New York Pennsylvania Station fifty-five years ago today. It was a mammoth undertaking that would go on for three years into 1966. When built in 1910 everyone assumed it would stand on the west side of Manhattan for the ages, and yet it lasted just barely more than half a century. In some ways it lasted less than half a century: a major renovation in 1958 had already obliterated much of Charles McKim’s original design. Penn Station’s destruction was a tragedy from which we have never fully recovered and yet its demolition made sense in a way. First of all it was private property, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to tie Manhattan to the continental United States. Before Penn Station opened in 1910 passengers traveling eastward by rail had to disembark in New Jersey and ferry across the Hudson River. It was a perilous undertaking; the ferry boats zigzagged their way between other ferries, around tug boats, and dangerously close to the huge ocean liners that came into New York Harbor daily.

The first act in the demolition of the original New York Pennsylvania Station on October 28, 1963 was the removal this eagle. It was one of twenty-two granite eagles that adorned the structure.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, like all the major railroad companies, was hugely powerful and profitable. It would have been difficult to imagine when the station opened just a decade into the twentieth century that it and most other railroads would be rendered obsolete by the 1960s. By this time however, the highway were largely built. Trucks and automobiles, not locomotives, now moved people and products. For longer travel, why spend five days on a train when an airplane could get you there in five hours? Like Kodak after the invention of digital photography, the railroad company’s demise happened swiftly.

New York City and the nation were fortunate Pennsylvania Station opened when it did. It proved hugely important to the Allied war effort, moving men and materiel across the country. Interpreted a certain way it can be seen as a triumvirate of public works projects done in time for the war: Pennsylvania Station in 1910, Grand Central in 1913, and the Panama Canal in 1914 just as the Guns of August began going off. On one day in June 1918 alone over 4,000 men were inducted into the U.S. Army and shipped off from Pennsylvania Station to training camps in various locales. Just a few weeks after his tragic plane accident John Purroy Mitchel’s remains were brought back from Louisiana on a train that pulled into Pennsylvania Station. Theodore Roosevelt, his health rapidly declining in that same summer of 1918, traveled to and from Pennsylvania Station on various trips out West to advocate for the American war effort. I could go on but one gets the idea.

This eagle is one of four from the original New York Penn Station that was moved to Philadelphia’s Market Street Bridge after the destruction of the iconic Manhattan train station. Philadelphia Penn Station is in the background.

Fourteen of the twenty-two eagles that once adorned New York Pennsylvania Station are still known to exist. A few remain in New York and others got sent elsewhere. Four of them decorate the Market Street Bridge in Philadelphia, which is where I took the photo one sees directly above a few summers ago.

(top image/New York Times)

 

 

The 1902 Rochambeau Delegation

13 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in Antietam, General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Henry Cabot Lodge, Horace Porter, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Washington, D.C., William McKinley

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One of the most famous moments in American diplomatic history was the Viviani-Joffre Mission to the United States in April-May 1917. This was when the French politician René Viviani and Field Marshal Joseph Joffre, among others, came to America to discuss military and diplomatic details after the United States declared war on Germany that spring. Viviani, Joffre and officials from other Allied governments toured the entire United States for several weeks to meet the American people, many of whom, especially in the South and Midwest, were suspicious of European leaders’ intentions. Fifteen years earlier there was a lesser known diplomatic mission: the 1902 Rochambeau Delegation.

The British Museum acquired this painting of General Joseph Brugère in 1902, the same year this French military leader led a goodwill tour to the United States solidifying Franco-American relations. Many of the individuals involved would go on tour serve in the Great War.

The event was so-called because the central moment of the mission was the May 24, 1902 dedication in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Park of a memorial to Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, the French military leader who had fought with George Washington during the American Revolution. The early 1900s were an interesting moment in diplomatic relations. The United States had recently won the Spanish-American War and was becoming a true world power; the brutal Philippine Insurrection, the final phase in the Spanish-American War, ended on June 2, 1902. One month earlier, on May 6, General Joseph Brugère boarded Vice Admiral Ernest François Fournier’s Gaulois in Toulon and sailed for Washington. One of the driving forces of this mission was Horace Porter, the United States ambassador to France.

Porter had served under Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War and went on to serve in various capacities over the next several decades. He was the driving force to fund and build Grant’s Tomb, which finally came to fruition on April 27, 1897 when William McKinley dedicated his predecessor’s final resting place. Several weeks after that dedication Porter was off to Paris, where he would be President McKinley’s representative to France. Civil War veterans were still very much running American life; the president himself had been in the Battle of Antietam; his Secretary of State, John Hay, had been one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries; and right then in 1902 Secretary of War Elihu Root was putting Ambassador Porter in for the Congressional Medial of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Brugère, Fournier and a sizable contingent visited George Washington’s resting place at Mount Vernon on the afternoon of May 22 and were hosted that evening by Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. The big event came two days later when Ambassador Porter, President Roosevelt, General Brugère, Vice Admiral Fournier, scores of dignitaries, and thousands of others turned out at Lafayette Square Park for the Rochambeau statue dedication. Henry Cabot Lodge was the featured speaker. It was all a huge success.

A few days later the Brugère/Fournier contingent would be fêted across New York City. Among other things they got a look at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, dined with mayor Seth Low, and received a tour of Columbia University from college president Nicholas Murray Butler. Columbia is conveniently located next to Grant’s Tomb and on May 28 Ambassador Porter took Brugère, Fournier and the rest of the French delegates to the mausoleum that he had done so much to build. At the time the general public could not walk down to the sarcophagi as one can today. As leader of the Grant Monument Association however Porter was naturally able to take the Rochambeau delegates down the marble steps, where they all stood in hushed stillness for ten minutes. (At the time it was still only Ulysses; Julia passed away seven months later in December 1902.) After the visit, the delegation walked north of the tomb to the Claremont Inn, where several dozen people had a sumptuous meal.

(image/The British Museum)

 

 

A World War One era Steinway

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in New York City

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Now here is something you don’t see everyday, let alone in a thrift store: a 1917/1918 Steinway & Sons grand piano. I saw this in the city yesterday on 23rd Street. I was a little confused at the 1917/1918 designation. I would have thought it fairly easy to trace the provenance of such a thing; as I understand it Steinways come with serial numbers and other identifying information to track their provenance. Or, maybe due to the war they were producing models on something other than an annual basis? Whatever the reasons, one can’t blame the people in the thrift store for not knowing.

This century-old 1917/1918 Model M Steinway & Son piano is currently in a thrift store on Manhattan’s 23rd Street.

Whenever I see something like this, I wonder how it got there. Was it in someone’s New York City apartment for decades until said person either passed on or moved in to a smaller place? Did the family donate the thing to a thrift store during a house cleaning? What famous pianist might have played it along the way over the past century? There is no way to know. That is the wonderful mystery of such things.

I have passed the Steinway crypt in Green-Wood Cemetery dozens of times over the years. A Wikipedia search informs us that the company was founded by Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg in New York City in 1853. Steinweg had emigrated from Lower Saxony and come to the United States with his sons after the failed revolutions of 1848. It was a wise move; the family avoided much of the tumult of the next 75 years. Steinway the Elder died in 1871 in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War. By the time of the Great War the Steinways were part of the fabric of New York City life and it does not seem they suffered from the anti-German sentiments so common during the Great War. Steinweg himself had anglicized the family name when first coming to the New Country. Perhaps the less overtly Germanic “Steinway” saved the family such grief.

Steinway pianos then and now were made in Queens. During the war the city was building a Steinway tunnel to connect Queens to Manhattan via a new subway line. Frederick Loeser & Co., a Brooklyn-based department store, was one place to buy a Steinway, among dozens of other piano makes and models. Loeser newspaper ads from 1917 and 1918, the period in which the Model M we see above was manufactured, list the original price of a Steinway grand piano at around $1000, just over $18,600 in today’s currency. Loeser’s however was selling them at a steep discount. It would be interesting to know if such discounts were customary or due to the war.

 

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Mitchel Square

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Great War centennial, John Purroy Mitchel, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Quentin Roosevelt

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Yesterday I put the final touches on my upcoming talk this Sunday at Camp Doughboy on Governors Island about John Purroy Mitchel. Later I did a dry run for a friend in my department to work out the kinks. A dress rehearsal always helps with these things in turns of timing, avoiding ambiguity, and just making certain that are sufficiently clear. I am as ready as I am going to be.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney sculpted this doughboy statue in Upper Manhattan in 1923 and later founded the Whitney Museum of Art. Quentin Roosevelt was engaged to her daughter when killed in an airfight in France in July 1918.

In part of the talk I discuss the ways the JP Mitchel is remembered in New York City. Mitchel Square at 168th and Broadway is just one memorial to the Boy Mayor. There too is this beautiful statue that we see above, which was not sculpted expressly for Mitchel himself but for the men on Washington Heights who fought in the war. I happened to be in northern Manhattan a few weeks ago on my way to somewhere else when I stumbled upon it. Yesterday after my walk through my friend and I were discussing Mitchel and breaking down some of the details of his life and times. Color me ignorant but I did not know that the statue in Mitchel Square was designed by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Gertrude was the mother of Flora Payne Whitney, Quentin Roosevelt’s fiancée. Of course Quentin himself died in a military plane incident above France just two weeks after Mitchel was killed in Louisiana two weeks earlier.

Check out the schedule for Camp Doughboy 2018 here.

 

John Mitchel, Irish nationalist

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Irish nationalist John Mitchel was put on trial in 1848 and eventually sentenced to “transportation” to Tasmania. He escaped to New York City and eventually moved South to support the Confederate cause. Seventy years later his grandson would be killed in a military training exercise getting ready to go to France to fight in the First World War.

Over the past few days I have been drafting the outline for my talk at next week’s Camp Doughboy weekend on Governors Island about John Purroy Mitchel. When I have more details I will share them here. Some may recall that in early July I wrote a piece for Roads to the Great War for the 100th anniversary of his death. Space constraints prevented me from going deeper into the Mitchell family than I would have liked. JP Mitchel was the grandson and namesake of famed Irish nationalist John MItchel. Mitchel the Elder was born in 1815 and put on trial by the British in 1848 when Ireland was in turmoil during the failed European revolutions of that year. He was sentenced to exile–what at the time was called “transportation”–to the Australian outpost Van Diemen’s Land, what we today call Tasmania. There on the Van Diemen penal colony too was Thomas Francis Meagher.

Mitchel and Meagher independently escaped to New York City. Mitchel ended up Brooklyn, living on Union Street and working as a journalist when he wrote his memoir Jail Journal; or Five Years in British Prisons. As the secession crisis heat up he eventually took his family down south, first to Tennessee and as the war went on to Richmond. Mitchel is testimony to the notion that life and humans are complicated; throughout his life he remained engaged in the Irish freedom struggle but was a staunch defender of slavery and the Confederacy. Mitchel was all in for the Confederate cause and all three of his sons served. Ironically two of the boys fought against the Meagher’s Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg in December 1862. One of Mitchel’s sons was killed in Pickett’s Charge near the Codori farm and another died while commanding Fort Sumter in 1864. The third, James, was wounded several times and lost an arm. Mitchel worked as a journalist for several Southern papers supporting President Davis. Ulysses S. Grant because a frequent foil after the general moved east in 1864. As the war wound down Mitchel escaped Richmond with Jefferson Davis’s entourage but was eventually captured and held at Fort Monroe before being released late in 1865. He soon became an editor with Benjamin and Fernando Wood’s New York Daily News, a Democratic vehicle that had given Lincoln much grief during the war and afterward turned it wrath on Reconstruction.

Mayor John Purroy Mitchel (center in top hat) and Cardinal John Murphy Farley reviewing St Patrick’s Day parade, March 17, 1914

John Purroy Mitchell was born in the Bronx in 1879, four years after his grandfather’s death. For reasons that are not clear to me, JP Mitchel was raised Catholic whereas his grandfather had been a Presbyterian. These were not small matters in Irish and Irish-American communities. I am assuming the Catholicism came from his mother’s side; the Purroys were Catholics who had come to New York City from Venezuela. I’m not going to rehash the Mitchel story here, though I probably will go into it more over the coming week as we get closer to Camp Doughboy. By the time he became mayor of New York City in January 1914 John Purroy Mitchel was thoroughly engaged in the Reform movement to clean up government. When war came later that year he was one of the earliest advocated for American Preparedness. It is intriguing to think of Mitchel being so actively engaged in the Preparedness Movement. Many Irish and Irish-Americans supported the Germans because they were fighting the British.

Like his grandfather during the American Civil War however, John Purroy Mitchel was all in for the Allied cause, eventually giving his own life on that Louisiana air field in July 1918. The world is indeed a complicated place.

(top image from The Citizen uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Domer48; bottom, Library of Congress)

The Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee, September 1, 1858

01 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Media and Web 2.0, New York City, Philately

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In the mid 1980s your humble writer, fresh out of high school, had a job for a year or so working in a survey crew in West Texas laying out the routes for fiber optic cable lines through the desert. Running parallel to these new lines were old ones consisting of copper coaxial cables, some of which remained and some of which got extricated to make make for the new digital. This all came back to me when reading the other day of the Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee of September 1, 1858. One hundred and sixty years ago today New Yorkers turned out by the thousands to celebrate the laying of the first cable crossing that ocean span. The work was that of Cyrus W. Field, owner of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The first official transatlantic communication (after a test run to make certain things were in working order) had been sent two weeks earlier, when on August 16 Queen Victoria in London messaged President Buchanan, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, in Washington. There had been several attempts in the days before this that had failed for technical reasons.

A somewhat forgotten event today, the Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee was held in New York City on September 1, 1858. Transatlantic telegraphy did not come into its own until after the American Civil War and would be part of daily life well into the twentieth century.

Everyone understood the significance of the transatlantic cable. York City, for one, had only had running water for sixteen years at this point and was not unique in its lack of infrastructure and public utilities. Letters still took weeks to cross the ocean. The initial rate in August and early September 1858 to send a transatlantic message was $5 per word. By comparison: the average working man earned between $1-$2 per day. It took seventeen hours to transmit Queen Victoria’s fourteen-word message to Buchanan. Thousands turned out for the Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee but the event seems to have been largely forgotten over the ensuing decades and up to the present time. That is probably because the cable broke with a few short weeks and was essentially inoperable by early fall. Such failures are not unusual in these types of projects. Transatlantic communication did not come to full fruition until after the American Civil War. In 1866 Field managed to build the first true, permanent cable. By then, message time was down to about eight to fifteen words per minute.

The United States Post Office held the First Day Cover ceremony for the transatlantic cable centenary stamp at the Farley Post Office in Manhattan on Friday August 15, 1958. George Giusti, an Italian who fleed Europe in 1939 during the Second World War, was the designer.

The transatlantic cable was hugely important well into the twentieth century. By 1908, fifty years after the first cable massage, there were at least six companies and over a dozen lines crossing the ocean. Rates were down to four cents per word. Even with that there was much public talk about high rates and unfair trade practices. One way was to make it cheaper to send messages at night, just like cell phone companies encourage us today to use our phones on evenings and weekends by making calls less expensive. Consolidation soon followed. Transatlantic communication was hugely important during the Great War. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, and indeed there was some telephone communication in the First World War, but like the airplane it was still in its infancy. Thus telegraphy’s continued significance.

Albeit anomalously, cable messaging continued even into the twenty-first century. It was not until February 2006 that Western Union sent its last telegram. I remember saying that to a class of technology students the day after that happened and the students responding with virtually no reaction.

(images/top, NYPL; bottom, U.S. Post Office)

 

Brooks Brothers, 1818-2018

11 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by in Chester A. Arthur, Edwin D. Morgan, Incorporating New York (book project), New York City, Style

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I was in the city running a few errands and having a little fun yesterday, buying a chambray shirt, renewing my library card at NYPL, and taking in the Brooks Brothers exhibit on display through September 5 in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall. Brooks Brothers began in 1818 on the more southern portion of Manhattan, where most New Yorkers still lived and worked. Grand Central opened in 1913 and Brooks Brothers opened its now-flagship store across the street at 346 Madison in 1915 to serve the commuting businessmen. It was fortunate for the Great War effort the the spacious train terminal was built when and where it was, accommodating as it did the mass influx of men and material on their way to France.

an October 24, 1861 letter from Assistant Quartermaster Chester A. Arthur letter to Brooks Brothers…

Taking in the Brooks Brothers exhibit was a journey in time and made me a little rueful at how far the once iconic temple of men’s style has fallen. Really it is not all Brooks’s fault; societal changes, many of them for the better, have rendered much of traditional men’s styling obsolete. That said, when they put me in charge of the world, jackets and repp ties will again be required for all men. There were many striking and iconic things to see but two that struck me the most were these. The first is a letter to Brooks Brothers from New York State Assistant Quartermaster Chester Alan Arthur requisitioning 300 overcoats. The letter is from October 24, 1861, three days after the Battle of Ball’s Bluff.

…and a contract signed by the four Brooks brothers and Governor Edwin D. Morgan on August 3, 1861, two weeks after First Bull Run. Note the fabric swabs in the upper right corner.

The second is a contract signed by Governor Edwin D. Morgan two month and a half months earlier. It is a mark of the great import of the transaction that all four actual Brooks brothers signed the document. This came at an important time in the war effort, just two after the fiasco at Bull Run. I write about this moment in the manuscript of Incorporating New York. By early August men like Morgan and Arthur were cleaning up the mess and preparing for what everyone now knew would be a long war. I know the images are not that great, having been taken through the glass in the display case, but note the red wax next to each signature marking it official. Governor Morgan’s is on top and then the four brother’s below. I don’t know for certain but my guess would be that the fabric swabs were included in the contract after earlier incidents of clothiers–including Brooks Brothers–providing the Army with inferior shoddy goods.