Postcard Thursday: Armistice Day and Sgt. York

This Saturday marks the 99th anniversary of the end of World War I. In 1919, America created a new holiday, Armistice Day, to mark the fact that the peace treaty was signed on November 11, 1918. In 1954, that holiday became Veterans Day, honoring all those who have served in the armed forces.

The photo above shows Wall Street in 1918 celebrating the end of the war with a spontaneous barrage of ticker-tape.

After the war, Avenue A on the Upper East Side was named York Avenue after one of the heroes of the war, Sgt. Alvin C. York. Below is the text from one of our most popular posts (slightly modified) about York and his eponymous street.

* * *

Most New Yorkers probably haven’t given a second thought to York Avenue, the thoroughfare that runs from 59th Street to 91st Street just east of First Avenue. And if they have thought much about its name, they probably ascribed it to the Duke of York, for whom the city was named back in 1664.

However, York Avenue is actually a much more recent appellation: it was named in 1928 to honor Sergeant Alvin C. York, America’s most renowned World War I hero. Alvin York (1887-1964) was drafted in 1917. Though a conscientious objector (his application for CO status was denied), York became a hero during the Battle of the Argonne Forest. In an improbable feat of courage, York found himself in charge of his unit after many of his compatriots were killed and he managed to kill over 20 Germans soldiers and capture 132 more.

York was awarded the Medal of Honor and upon his return to the United States was feted in New York with a ticker tape parade. York regularly stayed in the news over the next decade, both for his efforts to help the rural poor of Tennessee (his home state) by building a school as well as for his aversion to accepting charity. When offered a free honeymoon, he turned it down stating it would just be a “vainglorious call of the world and the devil.”

In April 1928, York had the honor of having Avenue A from 59th Street northward named for him. The move was sponsored by the First Avenue Association in an effort to revive the fortunes of the east side, which was better known for its German enclave (later dubbed “Yorkville”) and Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert’s brewery. Back in 1807, when the city deployed surveyor John Randal, Jr., to map out the new Cartesian grid plan, he and his team chose to create twelve wide avenues that ran the length of the island from Houston Street north. However, this left the problem of the area of the Lower East Side and Upper East Side where there was enough room east of the grid plan for more streets. Randal solved this problem by naming these eastern avenues “A,” “B,” etc. and on the original 1811 map of Manhattan, there is both an Avenue A in today’s East Village and one on the Upper East Side. (East End Avenue was originally designated Avenue B.)

This idea of renaming a street after a war hero to bolster its real estate values was not new. Anthony and Orange streets—two of the worst streets leading into the old Five Points neighborhood—were renamed Worth and Baxter in the early 1850s after two of New York’s two great heroes from the Mexican-American War, General William Jenkins Worth and Colonel Charles Baxter.

* * * 

 

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

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Friday: The Knickerbocker Hotel

The former (and soon to be once again) Knickerbocker Hotel at Times Square is going to be one of the stops on our War & Peace in NYC walking tour this Sunday. On the day World War I ended, opera star Enrico Caruso came out on his balcony and serenaded the crowd with the national anthems of Italy, France, and the United States.

To read more about the tour and sign up, go to: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2014/11/postcard-thursday-pearl-harbor-day-tour.html

To find out more about the Knickerbocker Hotel: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2012/01/knickerbocker-hotel.html

And to hear a less salubrious story about Caruso, visit: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2010/11/enrico-caruso-and-monkey-house-incident.html

The Black Tom Explosion: July 30, 1916

This week, the Statue of Liberty (aka "Liberty Enlightening the World," its official name) will be turning 125 years old. In celebration, the National Park Service is installing five webcams atop the statue's torch, allowing virtual visitors the opportunity to see a view that's been off limits for nearly a century.*


There are many reasons the torch has been closed since 1916: it is very difficult to access; it was never designed for tourists (indeed, none of the statue's interior was built to host millions of visitors, giving rise to many of the statue's structural problems of the last few decades); the climb from the shoulder to the torch was done in near darkness.

But the major reason the torch closed was an explosion on the night of July 30, 1916, on Black Tom Island in New Jersey, where millions of pounds of ammunition was being stored by the National Storage Company and the Lehigh Valley Railroad for eventual shipment to allied forces in Europe. It was the largest explosion in modern history--the equivalent of a 5.5 earthquake--and was felt in five states: Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

Black Tom Island was originally a small island between Liberty (then Bedloe's) Island and Jersey City. By 1916, landfill had connected the island to the New Jersey mainland, and it was used as a major freight depot by the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

On the evening of July 30, the night watchmen noticed that there were fires on the pier where Johnson Barge No. 17 was moored. (The barge--which held 100,000 pounds of TNT--turned out to be illegally berthed there in order to avoid port charges. Even had it been legally moored, it seems like that would have made little difference.)

When it became clear that the fires were too large for the night watchmen to fight on their own, the Jersey City fire department was called in; however, it was too dangerous for them to proceed and at 2:08a.m. the first of a series of explosions rocked the island. Shrapnel and munitions were blasted in every direction; some lodged in the Statue of Liberty (which ultimately cost $100,000 to repair), some made it was far away as the Jersey City clock tower, stopping the clock at 2:12 a.m.

Almost everyone in Manhattan was awoken by the strength of the blast and there were numerous injuries, mostly from falling glass. As the head of the New York Plate Glass Insurance Company noted the next day, a million dollars of glass had rattled out of its casements in the city, mostly south of West 44th Street. (At least one person was injured from falling glass, however, at Third Avenue and 89th Street.)

At first, the guards at the pier were brought in for questioning, as it was believed that the smudge pots they'd lit to keep mosquitoes at bay had caused the fire. Soon, it became clear that the explosion was sabotage, and suspicion fell quickly on German agents living in the United States. Though the exact identities of the bombers were never known, the Mixed Claims Commission (set up after World War I to adjudicate claims against Germany) eventually decided to fine Germany $50 million for the explosion. The money was finally paid in 1979.

Meanwhile, the management of the Statue of Liberty decided that Lady Liberty's arm had been too weakened by the explosion to allow tourist traffic to continue to climb to the torch; the torch was never reopened.

The torch cams will go online on Friday, October 28, and can be accessed at http://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/statueofliberty/?cam=liberty_str.


* A handful of maintenance workers have been allowed access to the torch since 1916, but no regular visitors. Still, that doesn't stop a lot of people from reminiscing about having "gone up to the torch" in the 1940s and 50s. Unless those people were VIPs or statue staff, it is very unlikely.

***

Read more about the Statue of Liberty in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Dashiell Hammett's New York

Today, May 27, marks the birthday of Dashiell Hammett, the author credited with creating "hard-boiled" detective fiction. His most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon, follows Sam Spade, a San Francisco detective and is based on Hammett's own years living in California and working as a Pinkerton Detective.

After the publication of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett met playwright Lillian Hellman and the two began a three-decade affair. Based now in New York, Hammett began work on his final novel, The Thin Man, at the Kenmore Hall Hotel on West 23rd Street. (Hammett was perpetually broke and his friend, author Nathaniel West, was the night clerk at the hotel and managed to let Hammett stay there for free. There is also a story from this time--perhaps apocryphal--of Hammett sneaking out of the Pierre Hotel in drag in order to avoid paying his bill.) 

Published in 1934, The Thin Man provided a wonderful window into Prohibition-era New York and became Hammett's best-selling work. It was adapted into a film starring William Powell and Myrna Loy and though Hammett never wrote another book, the film series lived on through numerous sequels, finally giving Hammett some financial stability. 

Though suffering from tuberculosis after his army service in World War I, Hammett reenlisted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was eventually sent to the Aleutian Islands as a private, where he edited a camp newspaper. Upon his return to New York, he moved to 28 West 10th Street, where it is said he enjoyed the building's lack of adequate heat because it reminded him of Alaska.

While living on West 10th Street, Hammett became heavily involved in left-leaning political causes, including the Civil Rights Congress, which was later designated a Communist front. Hammett was jailed for 22 weeks in 1951 for refusing to provide the list of names of donors to the Congress's bail fund. During the McCarthy era, the author was also blacklisted for refusing to testify, thus ending what was left of his Hollywood career.

After his release from jail, Hammett lived most of the rest of his life in Katonah, New York. He died at Lenox Hill Hospital on Upper East Side in 1961 and is buried--as a soldier who had fought in both World War I and II--in Arlington National Cemetery.

So, if you are out and about today in Greenwich Village, take a stroll down West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues--one of our favorite blocks in the city--and pay your respects to a great New York writer on his birthday.

* * *

More about Greenwich Village and Prohibition-era New York can be found in our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

* * *

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Or, to subscribe via email, follow this link.

York Avenue and Sgt. Alvin York

Most New Yorkers probably haven’t given a second thought to York Avenue, the thoroughfare that runs from 59th Street to 91st Street just east of First Avenue. And if they have thought much about its name, they probably ascribed it to the Duke of York, for whom the city was named back in 1664.

However, York Avenue is actually a much more recent appellation: it was named in 1928 to honor Sergeant Alvin C. York, America’s most renowned World War I hero. And since Tuesday is Veteran’s Day—originally Armistice Day*, a World War I holiday—we thought we’d devote a couple of paragraphs to Sgt. York and his eponymous street.

Alvin York (1887-1964) was drafted in 1917. Though a conscientious objector (his application for CO status was denied), York became a hero during the Battle of the Argonne Forest. In an improbable feat of courage, York found himself in charge of his unit after many of his compatriots were killed and he managed to almost single-handedly kill over 20 Germans soldiers and capture 132 more. York was awarded the Medal of Honor and upon his return to the United States was feted in New York with a ticker tape parade. York regularly stayed in the news over the next decade, both for his efforts to help the rural poor of Tennessee (his home state) by building a school as well as for his aversion to accepting charity. When offered a free honeymoon, he turned it down stating it would just be a “vainglorious call of the world and the devil.”

In April 1928, York had the honor of having Avenue A from 59th Street northward named for him. The move was sponsored by the First Avenue Association in an effort to revive the fortunes of the east side, which was better known for its German enclave (later dubbed “Yorkville”) and Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert’s brewery. Back in 1807, when the city deployed surveyor John Randal, Jr., to map out the new Cartesian grid plan, he and his team chose to create twelve wide avenues that ran the length of the island from Houston Street north. However, this left the problem of the area of the Lower East Side and Upper East Side where there was enough room east of the grid plan for more streets. Randal solved this problem by naming these eastern avenues “A,” “B,” etc. and on the original 1811 map of Manhattan, there is both an Avenue A in today’s East Village and one on the Upper East Side. (East End Avenue was originally designated Avenue B.)

This idea of renaming a street after a war hero to bolster its real estate values was not new. Anthony and Orange streets—two of the worst streets leading into the old Five Points neighborhood—were renamed Worth and Baxter in the early 1850s after two of New York’s two great heroes from the Mexican-American War, General William Jenkins Worth (who we’ll revisit in a later blog posting) and Colonel Charles Baxter.

And perhaps the most remarkable change in an avenue’s real estate fortunes came when Fourth Avenue—aka “Death Avenue”—was renamed Park Avenue.

More about street names can be found, as always, in Inside the Apple, which is available for pre-order now.

* Armistice Day was created in 1919 to mark the signing of the armistice with the Germans on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. In 1954, the holiday was renamed Veterans Day to honor those who had served in all wars.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.
Or, to subscribe via email, follow this link.

Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.