Arthur Miller’s house in the Heights. The playwright lived in several Brooklyn locations before divorcing, marrying Marilyn Monroe, and leaving the borough.

I’m sorry about the lack of posts recently. Being the weeks before spring break, it has been a busy time. Plus I got sick with a cold I just could not shake for about two weeks; It really threw off my routine. Today my class and I went to Brooklyn Heights, where we had arranged for an Arthur Miller scholar to talk about the cultural significance of the neighborhood. Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, Hart Crane, and Miller himself are just a very few of the writers who lived in the area at one time or another. Incredibly the Heights as we know it would have been destroyed had Robert Moses gotten his highway where he wanted it. Personally I think Moses gets a bad rap, but in this case it’s tough to argue that his was the right position.

Arthur Miller lived in several houses in Brooklyn Heights, first as a renter and then as a homeowner when his plays began hitting it big on Broadway and the money started coming in. The house above is one that he owned until he sold it and bought a place a few blocks away. According to the story we heard today, he wanted a new place because his ground floor tenants were too demanding. The new house, which we also saw, was smaller but came with no renters to bother him. I’m sure he had way more money by then as well. Incredibly Arthur Miller sold the house you see above to none other than W.E.B. Dubois. Yes, that W.E.B. DuBois. The two knew each other from their mutual involvement in Civil Rights and other causes. That was the craziest story I have heard so far this week.

We always tell our students: history is all around you if you open your eyes to it.

New Yorkers turn out at the the Russian Consulate, 22 Washington Square, for the blessing of Studebaker ambulances headed for the Eastern Front.

New York City’s centrality to the Great War effort is lost on many today. It should not be surprise anyone, though, that Gotham played an outsized role. The city, with its great ports and access to human and financial capital, is right here on the East Coast. What’s more, there were so many Europeans from the various belligerent nations already living here; the 20+ years prior to the war were the decades of the Great Migration. Immigrant communities often lived in their own enclaves with their own churches, schools, and home-language newspapers, and were tuned in to events overseas. Still it must have be an unusual sight when, on 10 April 1916, passersby in Washington Square came across the dedication and blessing of fifteen Studebaker ambulances soon headed for the Eastern Front. An American physician and West Pointer, Dr. Philip Newton, was to be put in charge of the ambulances on the Eastern Front. He had married a Russian the year before and would eventually be made a general by Czar Nicholas II. Russia of course would not remain in the war much longer. There was already growing unrest in the country and the Revolution took place the following year. Still in the spring of 1916 there was still hope.

(images/Library of Congress)

Borough Hall in 1908, the year the subway opened at this location. Note the two transit entrances.

Our class was turing Cadman Plaza yesterday in the second installment of our walk-through of the site. After dipping in to Borough Hall for five minutes to talk and get out of the cold–it could not have been more than 28 degrees at the time–we wrapped up in the downtown Brooklyn subways station. The Borough Hall subway opened in May 1908, a full ten years after the consolidation of the five boroughs. A student noted that the plaque placed during the station’s opening contained the seals of both Brooklyn and New York City itself. This led to a discussion about how strategic and intentional the laying of the subways lines were when the tracks were being planned and laid out in the 1900s. The real answer is I don’t know–a student will be looking into that in the coming months–but it sounds feasible; the main purpose of the Brooklyn Bridge was to link Brooklyn and Manhattan’s city halls, which are only about two miles apart as the crow flies. In this sense the subway was a continuation of the Great Bridge’s main purpose.

The subway did more than ease movement however; it had the ancillary but still important purpose of binding Greater New York together. I made the point to the class that Staten Island is the least New York-like of the five boroughs culturally and politically. It’s more complicated than this, but what does Staten Island lack that the other four boroughs all have? . . . Subway lines.

The mayor at the time was none other than George B. McClellan, Jr., son and namesake of the Civil War general. It has never been clear to me why Mac Jr. gets so little recognition. He did so much to build New York City’s infrastructure and worked tirelessly to make Gotham a twentieth century city. He even served in World War One a few years after leaving city hall. I suspect he has never received his just due because his mayoralty came after that of Seth Low, who with LaGuardia and a few others is remembered as the top-tier of New York City leaders. It is strange how we fixate on some historical figures at the reputational expense of others.

(image/Irving Underhill, Library of Congress)

Today marks an interesting day in Brooklyn history: the Daily Eagle published its last edition on this date in 1955. Students in my upcoming course will be studying the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and its significance to Brooklyn, New York City, and American history. The BDE dated back to the 1840s, when Walt Whitman was an editor for several years before leaving over political differences tied to his Free Soilist leanings. The Eagle seems to have been silent on Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1860 visit to Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, where the soon-to-be presidential candidate attended services the day before his Cooper Union speech launched him to national prominence. The newspaper’s apparent silence on Lincoln’s visit is not surprising given its publisher’s Democratic leanings. The Eagle came into its own during the Gilded Age but took a blow with the consolidation of New York City in 1898. It was still a great paper–it lasted another half century and then some. Still, once Brooklyn was subsumed into Greater New York it could not compete with the papers across the East River.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle building stood in what is now Cadman Plaza.

The Eagle continued performing its yeoman service documenting local and national events. It was so successful that it eventually outgrew its original building and moved into a new facility in what is now Cadman Plaza. For those who know Brooklyn, the building you see above stood where the New York State Supreme Court building is today, across the street from the post office. The paper coverage was especially good during the Great War, which is fortunate given that the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Governors Island military base, and New Jersey piers shipping men and armaments across the Atlantic were all with a stone’s throw of Eagle offices. The paper continued doing well until, like the rest of Brooklyn, it became victim to Brooklyn’s decline and the mass exodus to the suburbs that took place after the Second World War. In its final edition the editors explained that the paper fell victim to the “Manhattan Pattern” that had been underway “since Brooklyn became part of New York City.” Indeed as the paper noted in that editorial sixty-one years ago today, the papers was always a step-child compared to Manhattan’s more privileged status within the municipal infrastructure. That’s true, but the Eagle’s demise was due also to trends taking place in the publishing industry at the time; many dailies were either going away or consolidating, a victim to the rise of television, frequent newspaper strikes, suburbanization, and other issues.

Brooklyn became a lesser place when the Eagle shut down. Even worse, the borough is saddled with the monstrous eyesore of a building that took its place when the Eagle building was then down. When the Brooklyn Dodgers finally broke through and won the World Series that October the Eagle was sadly not there to cover it. In a cruel irony, the iconographic headline “THIS IS NEXT YEAR” celebrating the Dodgers’ win appeared in the October 5, 1955 edition of the New York Daily News.

(image/Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Brooklyn Daily Eagle.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1903. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e3-f806-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

Navy grenadine

I was at the New York Public Library doing some work today when at lunchtime I took a break and ran around the corner to the storefront of Winston Tailors: it was my goal to–hopefully–buy one of Paul Winston’s ties. The name may not ring many bells outside the world of men’s clothing but Mr. Winston’s father was the founder of CHIPP, a clothing store once on Madison Avenue across the street from Brooks Brothers. J Press was right there as well. I assume they were where they were due to the proximity to Grand Central Station. Brooks Brothers opened its flagship store at 44th and Madison in 1915, two years after Grand Central opened. CHIPP outfitted Cy Vance and John F. Kennedy among others. I read in an interview after getting home that Mr. Winston accompanied his dad on fitting trips to the Carlyle Hotel when President Kennedy was in town.

CHIPP is gone now but the family tradition continues through Mr. Winston. Now in his mid-70s, he runs his tailor shop out of the lobby of a building on 44th Street between 5th and 6th. He also sells ties through what he apparently considers an entity separate from the tailoring itself; he calls the tie business CHIPP2. When I got to the building today I could not find it, and so asked the concierge. He couldn’t find CHIPP2 in the directory and with incredible graciousness looked it up on his own cell phone and called. (I didn’t know at that moment that the tailor shop was the site too for the ties.)

I did not want any tie but was specifically looking for a navy grenadine: the most conservative of conservative neckwear. Why can’t men dress the way they did between the world wars? As my luck would have it a shipment had come in an 1 1/2 hour earlier. When I told him what I wanted, he literally went behind the counter and pulled it out of the box that the postman had delivered that morning. In other words–as he told me–had I come in at 11:00 instead of 1:00 I would not have gotten the tie. What is more, many in the delivery were pre-orders that were already spoken for. I had never met Mr. Winston before but he is clearly a witty and charming raconteur. It was so strange that I had showed just after he had received the shipment that we had a brief discussion about fate and coincidence. On the way out I thanked the building concierge once again and also shared with him that right there in the building works the man who with his father once made John F. Kennedy’s suits.