Postcard Thursday: The 19th Amendment

courtesy of the Library of Congress

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting women the right to vote across America.

The postcard above dates from ca. 1913, and was just one of many tools used by suffrage activists to convince the general public that women deserved a say in electoral politics. Though women were granted the right to vote in Wyoming as early as 1869, the campaign to open up the polls to all women was a long, hard battle.

A group of men -- and a few women -- gather at a women's suffrage rally at Park Row in Lower Manhattan. (They are clustered around the statue of Benjamin Franklin that still sits in front of Pace University.) Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

Of course, on the other side, anti-suffrage activists had long waged a campaign to keep women from the voting booth. In this image from 1880 (below), the illustrator shows caricatures of "women dressing and interacting in society as men; drinking; voting for handsome candidates; driving ugly men from the polls; and a domestic scene showing a man taking care of children."

images courtesy of the Library of Congress

In 1915, the satirical magazine Puck took aim at men who opposed universal suffrage. If voting were opened to women, how many all-male bastions would be left? The passage of the 19th Amendment was a major milestone, but as Slate recently pointed out, it didn't actual result in universal suffrage: poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers made it difficult for many women to exercise their rights. * * * * Read more about NYC history in   Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

News PAPER Spires at the Skyscraper Museum

At the end of the nineteenth century, when newspapers were at their peak, there were 43 daily papers in New York City. Most were published from "Newspaper Row"--the blocks of Park Row near City Hall--from grand skyscrapers that were among some of the first truly notable high-rise buildings in the city.

While most of these newspapers are gone and their headquarters have been torn down, the Skyscraper Museum has brought them back to life in their new exhibition "News PAPER Spires," running through July 15th. The small exhibition makes good use of archival drawings, blueprints, photographs, and newspapers themselves to tell the story of some of the city's most famous skyscrapers, including the World, Tribune, and Times buildings. (Of those three, only the Times building still stands--it's the building from which the ball drops on New Year's Eve.)

Of particular interest in Joseph Pulitzer's World tower, which was the first skyscraper to proclaim itself the tallest in the world. Designed by George B. Post (who also built the New York Stock Exchange and City College), the building reached to 309 feet to the top of the dome. It was a "giant among giants" to use the paper's PR terminology, and soon the Times and Tribune were racing to expand their buildings as they increased their circulation. Alas, the World tower came down when the approach ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge were expanded.

The show also focuses on the improvements in technology--from the use of rag paper to the invention of the linotype machine--that kept millions of papers circulating every day.

The Skyscraper Museum is located at 39 Battery Place (next to the Ritz Carlton) and is open Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm. If you can't make it in person, there's a virtual exhibition on the museum's website.

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To read more about the race to build skyscrapers in New York

check out

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Another New York First: The Ice Cream Shop

With the unofficial start of summer behind us and the solstice less than two weeks away, signs of the season are all around us. In New York, that means the ice cream wars are heating up, whether it's dueling ice cream trucks in Queens or the sudden proliferation of mobile gourmet desserts across the city. (We'll forget about Pinkberry and its ilk for now.)

Today, June 8, marks what is considered commercial ice cream's birthday in America; 223 years ago today, a "Mister Hall" (no first name given) advertised the first ice cream shop in New York. It was located at 76 Chatham Street, near City Hall. (Chatham Street--originally named for William Pitt, Earl of Chatham--is today called Park Row; the ice cream shop would have stood roughly where Pace University now stands. New York also has a Pitt Street and a Chatham Square named for the famed British politician.)

Little is known of Mister Hall or his ice cream shop. Evidently, it was a favorite of George Washington during the 15 months that the United States capitol was located on Wall Street. Washington is said to have run up a bill of $200. Estimating conservatively that a serving of high-quality ice cream cost as much a 5 cents, that would be 4,000 servings -- worth $14,000 today at the Van Leeuwen ice cream truck. (And if a serving cost as little as a penny, that would be 20,000 servings--today $70,000--of ice cream!)

Chatham Street remained an ice cream haven for many years. In the 1850s, the New York Times reported that vendors hawked 3-cent ice cream along the street:

Every one of them, from early morning to late evening, is surrounded by a crowd of customers. The delicious and democratic compound is served out in a wine glass to each, and each disposes of it as is his pleasure, with the aid of a pewter spoon, or with the more primitive implement for securing palatal pleasures, the tongue. The majority of the patrons of the cheap cream sellers are little ones. But yesterday we saw a new bride...stop and enjoy half the proceeds of her groom's six-penny investment.

By the 1880s, one of the city's leading ice cream manufacturers, J.M. Horton, was located on Chatham Street. The book New York's Leading Industries marveled that their freezers could "congeal forty quarts of ice cream solid in twenty minutes!"

Today, the most common ice cream sighting in the area is a ubiquitous Mister Softee truck. In the summer of 1978, a Mister Softee truck just south of Park Row, at the corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, exploded, injuring 130 people. At first the NYPD suspected a bomb, but it was later determined that the truck's auxiliary gas tank had exploded.

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Our new book, Inside the Apple, has a great, self-guided walking tour of the City Hall area that examines both well-known and forgotten historic site in the vicinity of Park Row. It's a nice stroll to do on a summer evening with an ice cream cone in hand. Visit our website to find out more about the book or purchase it online today.

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In other news, we'll be appearing on WCBS AM 880 this Tuesday, June 9, at 12:45 p.m. to talk about the book; if you are in the area, listen in, or stream it online.

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What's in a Name?: The Bowery

Last week, Curbed and Racked pointed out that at least one new boutique on the ever-gentrifying Bowery would like to rename the entire neighborhood the “Bowery District.” This is just the most recent in a long line of attempts to change or repurpose the Bowery name over the years.

The original lane that now bears the name Bowery—the English corruption of the Dutch bouwerij or “farm”—led from the city of New Amsterdam into the countryside. The original lane now goes by three different names in its different sections: Park Row, the Bowery, and Fourth Avenue.

The most famous Dutch bouwerij was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark’s in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. 

Mark’s in the Bouwerie; its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.

A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer)* Peter Cooper.

A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.

Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed “The Bouwerie,” to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue “El,” and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue—which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the “El”—and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street’s cachet and, presumably, retail rents.

(See our earlier post about York Avenue for another example of a street renaming in the same era for much the same reasons.)

* Peter Cooper and his gelatin fixation will be the subject of a future post.

 

You can read more about the Bowery in Inside the Apple; visit our home page www.insidetheapple.net.

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