Category Archives: New York City

When in doubt, blame Robert Moses

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Monuments and Statuary, New York City

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The powerful New York City Parks Commissioner (1934-60) Robert Moses makes a convenient foil.

Last week a friend at work brought this small blurb about World War monuments and Robert Moses to my attention. The vignette is a capsule summary of why there are so few World War Two monuments in New York City, in contrast to the significant number of memorials to the First World War. Though he does site other factors, the author in a nutshell blames Robert Moses. This led my friend and me to quip that when one wants to blame anything gone wrong in New York City, blame that once seemingly all-powerful builder and planner. Moses makes a great target; he held significant authority over huge public works projects for decades and was not afraid to use that influence. Thirty six years after his death, New Yorkers still very much live in the city and state that he gave us.

By the time Robert Moses became Parks Commissioner in 1934 New Yorkers had built hundreds of monuments large and small. Kevin C. Fitzpatrick chronicles these memorials in his recent book World War I New York: A Guide to the City’s Enduring Ties to the Great War. By the time Moses came to power the Treaty of Versailles had taken place fifteen long years previously. Gone were the romantic notions of fighting for civilization and to end war. Hitler was by now in power in Germany, and Stalin was firmly entrenched in the Soviet Union. Besides, the Depression was full on and even if people wanted to build monuments to the Great War dead there was little money to do so. When World War Two ended in 1945 Moses was adamant that there be no repeat of the cacophony of doughboy memorials we still see today in our parks. Each borough was to get one public monument. Of these, the only one actually built was the Brooklyn War Memorial in Cadman Plaza, something my students studied and wrote about last year. Whether this was good or bad depends on one’s perspective.

Moses indeed played a strong hand in all this. He had a vision for the city, state and region and wanted no obstacles that might intrude on that. Nothing would be built in his parks if he didn’t want it there. Still, the paucity of memorials was as much demographic and cultural as it was political. The soldiers, sailors and marines of 1941-45 were away much longer than the doughboys of 1917-18. When they came home they wanted to get on with their lives. There were four times more American in uniform–16 million vs 4 million–during the Second World War than in the First. They had seen killing and devastation on a scale that Americans had not witnessed in the trenches of France. Sixty million people had been killed around the world. The Second World War ushered in the Atomic Age and the Cold War. The veterans new full well it hadn’t been a “good war.” On the personal level, unlike their doughboy fathers, they had the GI Bill when they came home to attend school and get an education. Upon graduation, they had low interest loans that allowed them the opportunity to own their patch of grass in the suburbs. The question really is not why there were so few monuments built in the decade or so after the Second World War, it’s why there were any at all.

(image/New York Public Library)

Howard R. Haviland plays

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Jazz, New York City

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Howard R. Haviland of Brooklyn played and taught for the war effort.

Pianist Howard R. Haviland began a series of concerts one hundred years ago today at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The show, put on for about 1200 workers and sailors, was the first in a series Haviland performed under the auspices of the YMCA’s National War Work Council. Haviland and the YMCA had set a high bar: to play at every camp in the United States over late summer and fall. Later that same week Haviland played at camps in Mineola and Hempstead, Long Island; Queens; and upstate at Plattsburg. Haviland was a Brooklynite who spent his summers playing in hotels in New Jersey. (Then and now New Yorkers got out of the Big City in July-August if they could.) Haviland had spent July playing at the Hotel Montclair, where he helped the Red Cross raise $100,000,000 for the war effort.

Haviland noted that “the boys” in the camps preferred lighter tunes to the classical stuff and wanted material with which they were familiar. His sets were heavy on light opera, which is a reminder that opera was not always Opera as we perceive it today: as a distant High Art, something for which you pay top dollar and put on a tuxedo to listen to. There was a time, not that long ago, when the genre was very much part of the popular vernacular. Think of the organ grinder and his monkey. Havilland’s tour was a smashing success. By early November he was back in Brooklyn at his parents house on Grand Avenue. Still he continued on with his war work. On behalf of the Red Cross he taught piano to advanced and beginning students alike to raise funds and awareness for the Allied war effort.

(image/Musical America)

 

One man’s trash . . .

14 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in New York City

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Brooklyn street scene, Monday afternoon

I was going down the street earlier today and had to stop and take this photo of an abandoned Singer Sewing Machine. When I was going back in the other direction a few hours later the board was still there but the Singer was gone. I was glad someone took it. Hopefully its new owner will ether bring it back to life or salvage its parts for use in other machines.

Artists of the Sanitary Fair

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Museums, New York City

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I have been off this week and am trying to write 5000 word on my book project. I came across this photograph taken at the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair and thought I would share it before I sit down for my first wave of writing. I popped a jazz cd into the record player. I find I usually can’t write when music with vocals is playing. Today is Wednesday and thus getaway day for Major League Baseball; so there will be baseball on the radio here in a few hours.

The photograph above comes from a small work, what amounts to a scrapbook, that Matthew Brady published in small quantity in 1864 called Recollections of the Art Exhibition, Metropolitan Fair, New York. Many of the leading artists of the day may various various contributions to the April 1864 Metropolitan Fair, either putting works up for sale or on display where patrons who paid the fundraising entrance fee could see them. It was at the 1864 New York sanitary fair that New Yorkers saw Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” What I am trying to do in my book make New York City a more central aspect of the American Civil War.

Unfortunately the artists listed here are not annotated. The one we do know for certain is Brady seated in the center. It was his studio’s photographs after the battle of Antietam, which were shown in his New York studio shortly after the engagement, that brought the war “home” to most New Yorkers, who lined up to see them in fall 1862.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

 

 

Sunday morning coffee

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Governors Island, New York City

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The New York City draft riots raged from July 13-17, 1863.

Good morning, all. I am having my coffee before setting out for Governors Island in a little bit. We are interviewing a lady who served in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps and after that a gentleman who was a high-level officer here during the Coast Guard years. It is always special to speak to people who lived and worked on the island. The lives people have led can be nothing short of extraordinary, even if they are unaware of it in the moment.

I was listening to the radio the other day on what turned out to be the 40th anniversary (July 13) of the 1977 New York City blackout. There was intense rioting and looting then and over the next several days. When I moved here and began working for the public library in the late 1990s, patrons in my branch told me that in the week after the riots, which at this time were only twenty years past, people were gathering in a sort of ersatz bazaar/flea market in the local park around the corner from the branch to exchange their ill-gotten gains. It would be three pairs of sneakers for a color television set, a gold chain for a transistor radio, or what have you. In my book about Civil War New York I am trying to put the July 1863 draft riots into perspective, explaining that such unrest has a long history in the city. There were several riots in the decades before the Civil War. There were major riots here and elsewhere in summer 1919 just after the First World War, and in New York City again in 1943 during the Second.

I was in Green-Wood Cemetery recently when I came across this new headstone for Edward Jardine, a Union officer from Brooklyn who was wounded in the Draft Riots. Jardine died 124 ago today, on 16 July 1893.

Oh, sleep, that hast fled away

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in New York City, Union League Club

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They fight, but we must weep
For our boys that are gone and dead,
God send the sleep we cannot sleep
To every soldier s bed!

I was at the New York Public Library yesterday reading through issues of The Spirit of the Fair, the newspaper published during the Metropolitan Fair of April 1864. The fair was held by the Union League Club and U.S. Sanitary Commission, effectively the same thing, in April 1864 as a fundraiser for The Sanitary. The lines above are an excerpt from a poem published in the newspaper. Here are a few photos I took along the way.

They are available electronically but there is nothing like holding the real thing in your hands. The issues have held up quite well and show no signs of yellowing. I’m sure they used rag paper and not newspaper pulp.

The provenance of how these types of materials reach libraries and archives is a fascinating story in and of itself. The Reverend Henry Bellows donated the Sanitary Commission papers to NYPL around 1890. As we can see here, this item arrived independent of Bellows’s gift.

I love the stamp. That said, there were no “best practices” in the late nineteenth century to tell conservators not to mark up historical items. The ad for the Complete Works of Washington Irving is a nice touch. These books and other items were on sale at the fair, with the proceeds going to soldiers’ relief.

 

 

 

T.P. O’Connor visits America

05 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Gettysburg, John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Woodrow Wilson

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Irish journalist and Parliamentarian T.P. O’Connor visited the United States in June-July 1917 to discuss America’s role in the Great War and the future of Irish Home Rule.

After the United States entered the Great War in 1917 diplomatic and military missions from various European nations came to speak to Wilson Administration officials and engage in public diplomacy with the American people. One hundred years ago today T.P. O’Connor of the Irish Nationalist Party met with President Wilson n the White House. The meeting seemed to go well. O’Connor had arrived in the United States on June 24 and set up headquarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel at 42nd and Broadway in Manhattan. The affable and indefatigable Irish politician and writer had audiences with as many as forty individuals on any given day before moving on to Washington. The war was an obvious topic of discussion wherever O’Conner went. One of his visitors was John Purroy Mitchel, the New York City mayor who was one of the strongest supporters on America’s entry into the war. In a speech in early July during the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg he went out of his way to mention the Irish Brigade and Thomas Francis Meagher. Meagher was not at Gettysburg but the audience understood the sentiment.

General Thomas Franics Meagher, born in Ireland in 1823, led the Irish Brigade from First Bull Run through Chancellorsville and was an inspiration to many Irish and Irish-Americans. He fell from a steamboat in the Montana Territory in 1867, 150 years ago this month, and his remains were never recovered. This memorial stands in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

O’Connor’s primary objective, as he readily acknowledged, was garnering support for the Irish Nationalists in the lead-up to the Home Rule Convention to be held in London in late July. The reason for so many meetings was to gauge the sentiments of the Irish-American community. His was a difficult task. It was just fifteen months after the Easter Uprising and representatives from Sinn Féin were coming to the United States shortly after O’Connor returned to London.

(top image/New York Public Library)

Remembering Alfred Restaino

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Those we remember

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Alfred Restaino is incorrectly commemorated as “Albert J. Restaino” on Eastern Parkway.

Though his tablet is incorrect, Restaino’s tree has fully grown.

I wrote about six months ago about the tress along Eastern Parkway dedicated to Brooklyn boys who had died in the Great War. For my Grand Army Plaza tour I wanted to do a deeper dive and discuss a few of the men. So I did a little digging. Here we have a tablet laid for one “Albert J. Restaino.” When I began checking I discovered sadly that this is an error. The solder is actually Alfred Restaino. Here is the card with his personal information. He was wounded and subsequently died of pneumonia. Note that under Person Notified of Death it lists “Mrs. Restaino–Mother.”

Restaino is on the far right in the second row from the top.

The story only gets more interesting. I wanted to know where Restaino was buried. I never found his final resting place, but did discover that he indeed returned to the United States. In 1920 they held the Summer Olympics in Antwerp in a gesture for all that Poor Little Belgium had suffered during the Great War. In doing an Ancestry search for when or if Restaino came home, Restaino arrived in the United States on the US Army Transport Ship Sherman in September 1920, almost two years after the Armistice. That led me to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, in which I searched for any articles about the Sherman published that September. That led incredibly to an article describing the return of the U.S. Olympic Team coming back on the Sherman with the remains of 763 doughboys.

Here is the documentation of Restaino’s return on the Sherman, 11 September 1920.

and an excerpt from the 12 September 1920 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article in which an Olympian describes the journey home.

Stories like this are why monuments and memorials are as poignant as they are.