Postcard Thursday: Apollo 11

Today marks the 46th anniversary of the massive ticker tape parade held for the Apollo 11 astronauts: Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. At the time, many claimed it was the largest ticker tape parade New York had ever seen, but as we were researching Inside the Apple, we found that same claim was made for many parades and it’s almost impossible to verify. (Four million people were said to have attended the Apollo parade—an impressive number, even if it’s not the largest.)

Certainly, it was the longest parade. The city’s traditional parade route runs from Bowling Green Park at the foot of Broadway to City Hall. The Apollo astronauts, however, after receiving the key to the city, continued up Broadway to Herald Square and then on to Times Square. As the New York Times noted, the confetti in Midtown was “made up more of paper towels and pages from telephone directories than tickertape” and that it grew “so dense that the astronauts could hardly see.”

As we write in Inside the Apple:

It was also one of the fastest ticker tape parades. The astronauts started at Bowling Green at 10:17 a.m. (about half an hour ahead of schedule) and arrived on the steps of City Hall just fourteen minutes later! Many people who showed up for the parade were disappointed to discover that the astronauts had already passed them by…. By 1:15 p.m. the astronauts were back at Kennedy airport to go to Chicago. They ended the day with festivities in Los Angeles. Having just been to the moon and back, a quick one-day jaunt across North America must not have seemed like such a big deal.

 

As Buzz Aldrin has been tweeting recently, the astronauts had to go through customs upon their return--follow this link to see the astronauts declaration form ("Departure from: MOON. Arrival at: Honolulu, Hawaii, USA").

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,

you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: Lost Landmarks

The Leonard Jerome mansion.

The New York Merchandise Mart, which replaced the Jerome mansion

Yesterday, Curbed NY ran a story that James wrote about two New York City landmarks that were demolished in the 1960s: the Leonard Jerome mansion on Madison Square and 71 Pearl Street, a commercial building in the Financial District.

While it's not surprising that 71 Pearl was never part of a picture-postcard view (and, in fact, James was able to find only one photo of it, below), it was a little surprising that the Jerome mansion, which later housed the Union and Manhattan clubs, never warranted a postcard image.

The building in the center (slightly obscured by the El tracks) is 71 Pearl Street. Notice the arched windows on the second floor, the basis for its landmark designation.

After searching our own archives and coming up short, we looked through dozens of postcards of Madison Square hoping to find an inadvertent image of the Jerome mansion. Here's the only one we discovered:

Courtesy of the exhibition "Flatiron High and Low." (https://vanalen.org/projects/flatiron-high-and-low/)

If you look just to the right of the tower of Madison Square Garden, you can see the roof of the Jerome house peeking over the treeline.

Read James's entire story about these two demolished landmarks at http://curbed.com/archives/2015/04/29/how-some-of-nycs-first-landmarked-buildings-became-rubble.php.

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.