Happy 100th Birthday, Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson rookie card, 1947

100 years ago today Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia. On April 15, 1947, he broke baseball's color line went he was sent out start at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a Dodger, he lived at 5224 Tilden Ave in East Flatbush (now a national historic landmark), and later at 112-40 177th St in Queens.

The Dodgers were founded in Brooklyn in 1883 as the Brooklyn Grays, but by 1895 had acquired the nickname "Trolley Dodgers" after the increasing need for residents of Brooklyn to speed across streets to avoid oncoming trolleys. Not everyone was successful, and news reports of the era are filled with trolley accidents.

For years the team went by many names, including the Brooklyn Bridgegrooms and Hanlon's Superbas and did not officially adopt the Dodgers moniker until 1933.

To get some sense of what trolley dodging was like, watch this film from the early 1900s taken from the front of a trolley making its way around Manhattan.

Robinson spent his entire Major League career with the Dodgers, retiring in January 1957. That year, he took a job as vice president for personnel at Chock Full O' Nuts coffee, becoming the first black person to serve as vice president of a major American corporation.

Robinson died in 1972. His funeral was held at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights. That year, the Dodgers retired his number, 42, and in 1997, all other Major League Baseball teams followed suit, making his number the first to be retired by every team.

* * *

Read more about the evolution of Brooklyn in
Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

 

and don't forget our first book

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
NOW OUT AS AN AUDIOBOOK!

Postcard Thursday: Bob Dylan's Birthday

Happy 77th Birthday to Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, who was born May 24, 1941, in Duluth Minnesota. His birth name was Robert Zimmerman, and, as we write in Footprints in New York:

he grew up in the tight-knit Jewish community in Hibbing, his mother’s hometown. After graduating high school in 1959, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota but only lasted one year. While he was there, he tapped into the burgeoning folk scene and began consistently using the stage name Bob Dylan. Having been a rock and roller, Dylan’s musical trajectory changed around this time when he was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, which, in Dylan’s words, “made my head spin.” 

In January 1961, he arrived in New York City determined to do two things: perform in Greenwich Village, the center of America’s folk music revival, and meet Woody Guthrie. By the end of his first week, he’d done both. Dylan probably got to the city January 23, the day the front page of the New York Times proclaimed it the “coldest winter in seventeen years,” a line Dylan would borrow for one of his earliest compositions, “Talkin’ New York.” In No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan’s early career, the singer remembers that first day: “I took the subway down to the Village. I went to the Cafe Wha?, I looked out at the crowd, and I most likely asked from the stage ‘Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?’” 

Singer-songwriter Fred Neil presided over the bar’s eclectic all-day lineup. Dylan showed his chops by backing up Neil and singer Karen Dalton on the harmonica and was hired to “blow my lungs out for a dollar a day.” 

Immersing himself in the music scene, Dylan soaked up everything he heard, from live acts in the bars and coffee houses south of Washington Square to the records he’d spin at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center down the street from Cafe Wha?. In the meantime he continued to embellish his back story. In No Direction Home, Izzy Young recalls Dylan telling him, “I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, moved to Gallup, New Mexico; then until now lived in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota (for a little bit). Started playing in carnivals when I was fourteen, with guitar and piano. . . .” 

Later, newspapers picked up the fake biography, writing about the cowboy singer from Gallup. Stretching all the way back to the city’s Dutch pioneers, people have come to New York to reinvent themselves, to cast off their old identities and strike out in new directions. Dylan’s fanciful back story may have been an extreme case, but it was effective.

Today, Dylan's career shows no sign of slowing down. In 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first musician to be given the honor. In 2017, he released Triplicate, a triple album of standards, many of which had been recorded by Frank Sinatra. And he continues to tour regularly, with a swing through Asia, Australia, and New Zealand coming up this summer.

This summer we'll conduct a tour of Bob Dylan's New York -- watch this blog for details.

In other news, our blog recently had its millionth visitor. Thank you all so much for your support!

* * * * 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

Postcard Thursday: Happy Birthday, Saint Nick

Saint Nicholas (the patron saint of -- among other things -- sailors, repentant thieves, brewers, and pawnbrokers) was purportedly born on March 15 in the year 270 CE. Of course, what Saint Nicholas is most famous for these days is as the basis for our modern-day Santa Claus, a Dutch tradition that was popularized in New York City by its Dutch-American inhabitants, including poet Clement Clarke Moore.

'Twas the night before Christmas

And all through the house

Not a creature was stirring

Not even a mouse.

Those immortal words, first published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel in 1823, have become a central part of the American Christmas story. They were penned by Moore, a prominent New Yorker; together with Thomas Nast's depictions of Santa later in the century (such as the 1881 version pictured here), Moore's poem helped shaped our modern ideas of Santa Claus.

Moore was a major landowner and important to the growth of both Greenwich Village and Chelsea. As we write in Footprints in New York:

To his contemporaries, Moore was best known as a Greek language scholar at the Episcopal Church’s General Seminary, and for his vast farm, Chelsea, which gave rise to the neighborhood of the same name. Today, people recognize him as the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”), the well-known poem that imbued the American Santa Claus with a healthy dose of his mother’s family’s Dutch traditions. 

In Inside the Apple, we note that

Moore was descended from distinguished New York families: his large family estate, Chelsea, which gave rise to the modern-day neighborhood, had originally been owned by his grandfather, Major Thomas Clarke, a veteran of the French and Indian War. Moore’s father, Bishop Benjamin Moore, was the head of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and twice president of Columbia College. 

In 1817, soon after Bishop Moore’s death, the Episcopal Church convened in New York to establish the General Theological Seminary. Jacob Sherred, a member of the Trinity Church vestry, donated $70,000 and Clement Clarke Moore agreed to donate 66 lots from his Chelsea estate to house the school. (The seminary met elsewhere until construction could begin in the 1820s.) Moore, already the author of a well-regarded Hebrew lexicon, was also hired to serve on its faculty, teaching Biblical languages until 1850.

Thomas Nast, meanwhile, is probably best remembered today for his role in bringing down William "Boss" Tweed through his political cartoons in The New York Times and Harper's Weekly. Nast's poison pen was so famous, in fact, that there's a folk etymology that the word "nasty" comes from his name. That's not true, but it gives a sense of how damning his pictures could be.

Nast is also the person who gave us the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party and the donkey for the Democrats. In an 1870 issue of Harper's Weekly, Nast launched the donkey as a symbol of the Democratic party. In the cartoon, Nast was lambasting the Copperhead faction of the party -- which had opposed the Civil War -- and those Democratic papers that continued to criticize Lincoln's recently deceased Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. Nast's critique is not terribly subtle: Stanton is "lionized" by the cartoonist and the Democrats are branded jackasses.

Despite Nast's pointed political statements, he had a soft spot for the holidays. Beginning in 1863, he would draw pictures of Santa Claus or families celebrating together for Harper's, culminating in 1881 with the image at the top of this post, which is still seen by many as the iconic depiction of St. Nick.

****

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

Postcard Thursday: Lillian Wald and International Women's Day

In honor of International Women's Day today, here's an update of a post we ran two years ago about Lillian Wald, the remarkable woman who founded the Henry Street Settlement. This Saturday would have been her 151st birthday.

On March 10, 1867, the pioneering nurse Lillian Wald was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the subject of one our chapters in Footprints in New York. As we write, Wald

came to New York City in 1889 to study nursing; three years later, having worked for a time in the overcrowded conditions at New York’s Juvenile Asylum on Tenth Avenue, Wald decided to improve her training, enrolling in medical school. 

While studying, Wald also volunteered at a school on Henry Street; it was there that an encounter with a young girl—in the midst of a lesson on how to make a bed—changed her life. As Wald recalled in her memoir:

The child led me over broken roadways—there was no asphalt, although its use was well established in other parts of the city—over dirty mattresses and heaps of refuse . . . through a tenement hallway, across a court where open and unscreened [water] closets were promiscuously used by men and women . . . and finally into the sickroom. . . . That morning’s experience was a baptism of fire. Deserted were the laboratory and the academic work of the college. 

It wasn’t long before Wald hit upon the notion of a “settlement” house— unaware that other progressive health professionals were having the same idea. The idea was simple: Too often, charity work consisted of throwing money at the poor, or convening panels or government agencies to study a problem.... Wald wanted something different—a place where professionals would actually help the poor on an ongoing basis. In order to do that, they would need to live, or “settle” in the neighborhood. Wald and her friend, a fellow nurse named Mary Brewster, moved to a tenement on Jefferson Street, originally dubbed Nurses’ Settlement.

 

There were few doctors on the Lower East Side, and most tenement dwellers would not have been able to afford them anyway. Wald’s team of nurses made the rounds to the tenements (today’s Visiting Nurse Service of New York is the direct descendant of Wald’s settlement house), helping expectant mothers, acting as midwives, and focusing on preventative care. Wald coined the term “public health nurse” to describe her work, and over the course of her lifetime, thousands of families benefited from her care. In 1895, financier Jacob Schiff bought Wald an old townhouse at 265 Henry Street as the settlement’s new headquarters. Over a century later, the organization is still there.

* * * *

SAVE THE DATE

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2018

we will be leading a walking tour of

Lower Manhattan's Lost History

details to come

****

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

Postcard Thursday Redux: Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe! Born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Poe would, in his short life, become one of the most important American writers of all time. He invented the modern detective story, was an early champion of not just horror but science fiction, was a brilliant poet, and a cunning hoaxster.

Below are some highlights from posts we've done about Poe over the years. Of course, he also has an entire chapter in Footprints in New York, so pick up a copy today!

Edgar Allan Poe didn't live in New York City all that long, but he left an indelible stamp. Of all the places he lived, only one still survives, Poe Cottage in the Bronx. The postcard above depicts what is considered by many to be Poe's most important NYC residence -- the place where he wrote "The Raven."

As we write in Footprints in New York:

As [Poe's wife] Virginia’s tuberculosis worsened in 1844, the Poes took the only advice most doctors could give: move out of the city and get her into cleaner air.... [T]hey rented rooms from Patrick and Mary Brennan in “an old-fashioned, double-framed” farmhouse on the west side on what would eventually be 84th Street. The house was surrounded by 216 acres of woods. According to one of Poe’s earliest biographers, the family “received no visitors, and took their meals in their room by themselves.” Mrs. Brennan recalled Poe as a “shy, solitary, taciturn person, fond of rambling alone through the woods or of sitting on a favorite stump of a tree near the banks of the Hudson River.” In Poe’s era, Riverside Park had not been created, and the waterfront was not yet developed this far north. This meant Poe probably didn’t actually scramble all the way down the Hudson’s banks for his reveries; he watched the river drift by from the top of [a nearby outcropping of rock known as] Mount Tom.

courtesy of The Museum of the City of New York

The Poes’ room—unaltered until the house was torn down in 1888— was small but filled with light, having windows that faced the river on one side and the Brennans’ forest on the other. Years later, people who knew the house recollected that the Poes’ room was exactly like the chamber in “The Raven,” complete with the “pallid bust of Pallas” above the door. This may have been wishful thinking, but the house does seem, from photos and drawings, to have been a pleasant place. Pleasant enough, in retrospect, to make one almost forget the Poes’ straitened circumstances. Poe had difficulty making the rent. For much of his marriage, he had trouble putting food on the table. When Poe won a $225 judgment in a libel lawsuit, he used the money to buy some furnishings and a new suit; he could never afford to own more than one suit at a time, and the previous one was probably beyond repair.

Most inconveniently, the Brennan house’s distance from the city may have provided fresh air, but it also meant that any time Poe needed to meet with a publisher, he either had to take a stagecoach down the Bloomingdale Road—a costly inconvenience—or walk the ten miles round-trip.

* * * *

Poe Cottage in the Fordham section of the Bronx; courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Poe Cottage, the third-oldest building in the Bronx, is open for visitors on weekends. If you want to travel farther afield, you can actually stay in a full-sized replica (above) of the house at the Dearborn Inn in Michigan.

* * * *

The morning of April 13, 1844, New Yorkers awoke to find an astonishing headline in the New York Sun:

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS! 

SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON'S FLYING MACHINE!!

The article went on to detail how Monck Mason and his traveling companions had set off from England in the gas-filled balloon Victoria and landed in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, three days later. An amazing triumph, Monck's flight promised to revolutionize transportation and communication.

Of course, it wasn't true. Two days later, the Sun had to publish the following retraction:

The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought a confirmation of the arrival of the Balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our Extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the Balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible. 

The hoax was the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Nine years earlier, the Sun had perpetrated the "Great Moon Hoax," and, as Matthew Goodman argues in his book The Sun and the Moon, Poe was annoyed at the newspaper for, in his mind, appropriating an idea from one of his own short stories for that series. The balloon hoax may have been Poe's way of getting back at the newspaper. If Poe is to be believed, the balloon hoax brought on a surge in sales for the Sun--and thus would have caused them great embarrassment when the story had to be retracted. (There's some thought that it was Poe who wrote the retraction, as well.)

The complete balloon hoax can be read online at http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=balloonhoax.

(If this post seems familiar, it is; it is largely a repeat of our post from last year on Poe's birthday.)

* * * *

 

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

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe! Born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Poe would, in his short life, become one of the most important American writers of all time. He invented the modern detective story, was an early champion of not just horror but science fiction, was a brilliant poet, and a cunning hoaxster.

Below are some highlights from posts we've done about Poe over the years. Of course, he also has an entire chapter in Footprints in New York, so pick up a copy today!

Edgar Allan Poe didn't live in New York City all that long, but he left an indelible stamp. Of all the places he lived, only one still survives, Poe Cottage in the Bronx. The postcard above depicts what is considered by many to be Poe's most important NYC residence -- the place where he wrote "The Raven."

As we write in Footprints in New York:

As [Poe's wife] Virginia’s tuberculosis worsened in 1844, the Poes took the only advice most doctors could give: move out of the city and get her into cleaner air.... [T]hey rented rooms from Patrick and Mary Brennan in “an old-fashioned, double-framed” farmhouse on the west side on what would eventually be 84th Street. The house was surrounded by 216 acres of woods. According to one of Poe’s earliest biographers, the family “received no visitors, and took their meals in their room by themselves.” Mrs. Brennan recalled Poe as a “shy, solitary, taciturn person, fond of rambling alone through the woods or of sitting on a favorite stump of a tree near the banks of the Hudson River.” In Poe’s era, Riverside Park had not been created, and the waterfront was not yet developed this far north. This meant Poe probably didn’t actually scramble all the way down the Hudson’s banks for his reveries; he watched the river drift by from the top of [a nearby outcropping of rock known as] Mount Tom.

courtesy of The Museum of the City of New York

The Poes’ room—unaltered until the house was torn down in 1888— was small but filled with light, having windows that faced the river on one side and the Brennans’ forest on the other. Years later, people who knew the house recollected that the Poes’ room was exactly like the chamber in “The Raven,” complete with the “pallid bust of Pallas” above the door. This may have been wishful thinking, but the house does seem, from photos and drawings, to have been a pleasant place. Pleasant enough, in retrospect, to make one almost forget the Poes’ straitened circumstances. Poe had difficulty making the rent. For much of his marriage, he had trouble putting food on the table. When Poe won a $225 judgment in a libel lawsuit, he used the money to buy some furnishings and a new suit; he could never afford to own more than one suit at a time, and the previous one was probably beyond repair.

Most inconveniently, the Brennan house’s distance from the city may have provided fresh air, but it also meant that any time Poe needed to meet with a publisher, he either had to take a stagecoach down the Bloomingdale Road—a costly inconvenience—or walk the ten miles round-trip.

* * * *

Poe Cottage in the Fordham section of the Bronx; courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Poe Cottage, the third-oldest building in the Bronx, is open for visitors on weekends. If you want to travel farther afield, you can actually stay in a full-sized replica (above) of the house at the Dearborn Inn in Michigan.

* * * *

The morning of April 13, 1844, New Yorkers awoke to find an astonishing headline in the New York Sun:

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS! 

SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON'S FLYING MACHINE!!

The article went on to detail how Monck Mason and his traveling companions had set off from England in the gas-filled balloon Victoria and landed in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, three days later. An amazing triumph, Monck's flight promised to revolutionize transportation and communication.

Of course, it wasn't true. Two days later, the Sun had to publish the following retraction:

The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought a confirmation of the arrival of the Balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our Extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the Balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible. 

The hoax was the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Nine years earlier, the Sun had perpetrated the "Great Moon Hoax," and, as Matthew Goodman argues in his book The Sun and the Moon, Poe was annoyed at the newspaper for, in his mind, appropriating an idea from one of his own short stories for that series. The balloon hoax may have been Poe's way of getting back at the newspaper. If Poe is to be believed, the balloon hoax brought on a surge in sales for the Sun--and thus would have caused them great embarrassment when the story had to be retracted. (There's some thought that it was Poe who wrote the retraction, as well.)

The complete balloon hoax can be read online at http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=balloonhoax.

* * * *

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

Postcard Thursday: Happy Birthday, LGA

Sometimes, there's a method to postponing Postcard Thursday by a day. (At least that's the story to which we are sticking.) For example, today -- December 2 -- is the birthday of New York City's oldest commercial airport, LaGuardia, which opened on this date in 1939.

The famous story is that in 1934, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was flying back from Pittsburgh but refused to disembark from his plane in New Jersey since his ticket read "New York." The airline, TWA, agreed to fly him to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn instead. The whole thing was a publicity stunt, as reporters were waiting in Brooklyn to hear the mayor complain that New York City was losing out by not having a major commercial airport.

Five years later, La Guardia got his wish when the New York Municipal Airport, opened in Flushing, Queens. Almost immediately, the term "La Guardia Field," was attached to the airport, and by 1947 the name was officially attached. Somewhere along the line the space between "La" and "Guardia" was dropped.

The oldest building at the airport is the Marine Air Terminal, a wonderful piece of a WPA-era architecture and well worth a look if you have time to kill when you are next leaving the city.

LGA is currently undergoing a massive renovation, scheduled to be finished by 2021.

_________________

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

Postcard Thursday: Elizabeth Ann Seton

Though you can't see it on this classic linen postcard view of St. Patrick's Cathedral, the church features magnificent front doors:

... and one of the figures on those doors is Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose was born on August 28, 1774, which makes her America's first-born saint (not the first American to be sainted).

As we write in Inside the Apple:

Born Elizabeth Ann Bayley, Seton was the daughter of Columbia College’s renowned professor of anatomy, Richard Bayley, and a member of the de rigeur Episcopal parish, Trinity. In 1794, the Episcopal Bishop of New York officiated at her marriage to merchant William Seton and in 1801, the Setons moved into a waterfront house on State Street near the Battery. However, William Seton’s health was failing and just two years later the family moved out, embarking on what they hoped would be a restorative trip to Italy. 

Sadly, William died in Pisa shortly after their arrival. Rather than turn right around (for what was an exceptionally long sea voyage), Elizabeth stayed in Italy for a few months grieving—and discovering the Catholic Church. After returning to New York the next year, she began seriously considering conversion and in 1805 she was received into the Catholic faith—much to the chagrin and embarrassment of her friends and relatives.

Had Elizabeth contented herself to be privately Catholic, it perhaps wouldn’t have mattered so much, but soon her sister-in-law came to her with an interest in conversion. When that happened, Elizabeth’s family began threatening to have powerful allies in the state legislature kick her out of New York for proselytizing. (Or so the story goes—they never followed through.) Elizabeth didn’t give them the satisfaction; instead, she moved to Baltimore in 1808 to open a school and then founded America’s first convent, the Sisters of Charity, the next year. She died at the convent in Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1821. In 1963, she was beatified by Pope John XXIII, and in 1975, she was elevated to sainthood for her posthumous miracles, making her the first American-born saint.

Though there is a shrine to Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton on the site of her State Street home, her house is no longer standing. The house next door (which is part of the shrine) dates from 1790s and is one of the oldest left in Manhattan.

* * * *

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.

Elvis in New York: The Early Years

Friday marks what would have been the 75th birthday of the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley, who was born January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Though most associated with Memphis -- where Elvis and family moved when he was 13, where he cut his first, influential Sun Records tracks, and where he later lived in the mansion/shrine Graceland -- the King had an important relationship with New York City, especially during the earliest part of his career.

Elvis first came to New York on March 23, 1955 to audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, a CBS program that showcased unheralded talent. Though he had already cut his first single, "That's All Right"/"Blue Moon of Kentucky," for Sun, Elvis was virtually unheard of outside the south and was still mainly playing the high school concert circuit. The trip to New York was his first plane ride. Elvis and the other two members of his trio (Scotty Moore and Bill Black) spent the day sightseeing before the audition, which took place at Godfrey's offices at 501 Madison Avenue.

The audition did not go well -- Elvis was nervous and deemed too outlandish for Godfrey's mainstream audience -- and the next night the trio was back on stage in the Marianna, Arkansas, high school auditorium. (The one bright spot of the trip was seeing Bo Diddley, one of Elvis's idols, perform at the Apollo in Harlem.)

Just a few months later, however, Presley returned to the city. Now fully under the management of Colonel Tom Parker and under contract to RCA records, Elvis returned in November 1955 for a round of publicity photos and in January 1956, he was back again to make his first national television appearance on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show, where he performed "Shake, Rattle & Roll"/"Flip Flop and Fly" and "I Got a Woman."

Elvis in the RCA Studios, July 1956

But perhaps the most important contribution New York made to Elvis's early career were the tracks he cut at the RCA Studios in January, February, and July 1956. On January 30, the King reported to the studios at 155 East 24th Street (now, sadly, demolished) and over the next two days recorded a string of songs that would appear on his debut album, including the hit "Blue Suede Shoes."

In February (after another Dorsey Brothers appearance), Elvis returned to 24th Street to cut "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and "Shake Rattle & Roll." Then on July 2, he cut one of the biggest singles of his career: "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel." In the six months since his first national TV appearance, Elvis's popularity had skyrocketed. Moreover, he'd become both confident and meticulous in the studio: "Hound Dog" took 31 takes to perfect and "Don't Be Cruel" was recorded 28 times. (Granted, in the days before overdubs almost all playing was "live" in the studio and the only way to rectify a mistake was to start from the beginning.)

When "Don't Be Cruel"/"Hound Dog" was released it spent 11 weeks at the top of the charts and Elvis was a certified phenomenon. In September he appeared on Ed Sullivan -- his first number famously shot so that the TV audience would not see his swiveling hips -- and the program brought in an 82.9% share of the television audience.

While Presley would return to New York later in his career, most notably for concerts at Madison Square Garden in the 1970s, he never recorded another track here.

Don't Be Cruel - Elvis Presley

* * *

Interested in more Rock and Roll history? Take our NYC Rock and Roll audio tour -- hosted by famed DJ Ken Dashow -- and produced by our partners at CityListen.com

Read more about New York in the 1950s in
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.
Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.

Happy Birthday, Fiorello!

courtesy of the LIFE magazine archive at Google.

Today, December 11, marks the 127th birthday of Fiorello La Guardia, who some argue was New York City's greatest mayor.*

The future mayor was born Fiorello Raffaele Enrico La Guardia on December 11, 1882, at 7 Varick Place.** His father, Achille, was a Protestant musician from Southern Italy and his mother, Irene, hailed from a Jewish family in Trieste. La Guardia was raised as an Episcopalian -- did he attend the Italian-Episcopal Church of San Salvatore on Broome Street as a child? We'll have to research this and find out.

When La Guardia was three years old, his father took the position of bandmaster for the Eleventh Infantry Regiment and the family moved to Fort Sully, South Dakota. At age 18, La Guardia entered the foreign service and returned to New York in 1907 to study law at New York University. A gifted linguist (he knew at least eight languages), La Guardia worked as a translator at Ellis Island before entering politics, first as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of New York, then as a U.S. Congressman. He first ran for mayor in 1929, but was defeated by the incumbent, "Gentleman" Jimmy Walker. By 1933, Walker had resigned in disgrace and La Guardia won easily, serving as the city's mayor until 1945.

La Guardia died in 1947 at his home in the Bronx. That same year, the New York Municipal Airport that La Guardia had championed -- and which was already known to many as LaGuardia field -- was officially renamed LaGuardia Airport. In 1959, La Guardia became to only former mayor to get his own Broadway musical, Fiorello!, which starred Tom Bosley of Happy Days fame as the mayor. The show went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, a rare feat for a musical.

In 1967, then-council member Edward I. Koch introduced a bill to rename a section of West Broadway near the former mayor's Sullivan Street birthplace and on September 25th of that year, Mayor Lindsay created La Guardia Place. If you are in the Village today, go pay a visit to the statue of La Guardia by Neil Estern that was erected there in 1994 and wish him a happy birthday!

* Readers of Inside the Apple will note that our vote goes to DeWitt Clinton -- you can read more about him in the book and we'll blog about him in the future.

** Varick Place was the name for a stretch of Sullivan Street south of Washington Square Park. When the entire street was renamed Sullivan in the 1916, the La Guardia family's residence was renumbered 177 Sullivan; the building collapsed in 1987 during a renovation.

* * *

Read more about Fiorello La Guardia, Jimmy Walker,
and New York during the Depression and World War II in
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.
Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.