Postcard Thursday: Wall Street

For nearly four centuries, the lower tip of Manhattan has been defined by Wall Street, the path of which was originally marked by a nine-foot-high wooden palisade.

James digs deep into the the street's history for Curbed NY in his most recent feature story, which you can read here: https://ny.curbed.com/2018/9/26/17900962/wall-street-new-york-city-history.

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REMINDER: On Sunday, October 7, at 11:00AM, we will be guiding a tour of Gilded-Age New York. All the details are at http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2018/09/postcard-thursday-gilded-age-walking.html. There are only a few spots left at just $15 a piece -- book now!

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Want to hear more about NYC history?

Inside the Apple has recently been released for the first time as an audio book!

Visit Amazon or Audible to download today

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: Examining History with an Old Guidebook

James has a story that ran in Curbed NY yesterday detailing a walk around Lower Manhattan using a guidebook written in 1909.

Initially, his plan was simply to see how accurate that guidebook could be today, but along the way, he encountered a number of plaques and markers commemorating the Revolutionary War, and this set him on a different tack. You can read all about it in the article: https://ny.curbed.com/2018/3/28/17168160/new-york-city-walking-tour-historic-guidebooks-1909.

A number of the spots talked about in the story will also feature in our walking tour on Saturday, April 21, "Hidden History" of Lower Manhattan. There are only a few spots left for this unique walk, so please read all the details at http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2018/03/hidden-history-lower-manhattan-walking.html and sign up today!

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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: Last Chance for the Bowery

Reservations are going fast..... While the "early bird" deadline for signing up for our Sunday, June 25, tour of the Bowery is technically June 21, there are only a few spots left, so if you are planning to attend, do reserve at your earliest convenience. Full details below.

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THE HISTORY OF THE BOWERY WALKING TOUR

Sunday, June 25 | 11am - 1pm

Join award-winning journalist, author, and guide James Nevius for a walk up New York City's oldest street.

From country road to immigrant entertainment district to Skid Row (and beyond), the Bowery has witnessed New York's rich history. Together, we will explore 400+ years of New York's story along this famous thoroughfare.

The tour is $20 per person for those who reserve before Tuesday, June 21 (when the price goes up to $25 per person).

To reserve, email walknyc@gmail.com with

• Your name
• The number in your party
• And a cell phone where we can contact you the morning of the tour if there's any problems

Exact details of where to meet will be emailed to you within 24 hours of receiving your reservation.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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: The Black Crook

courtesy of the New York Public Library

Last night, we saw a terrific production of The Black Crook at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side.

First performed in 1866 at Niblo's Garden on Broadway in what is today Soho, The Black Crook is considered by many to be the first modern musical comedy, where drama, dance, and song combine to tell a story. The story is a fantastical tale of a young woman, Amina, who is betrothed against her wishes to an evil count, who in turn imprisons her beloved, a peniless painter named Rudolphe.

Rather than play it entirely straight, this modern production intersperses the Black Crook story with the tale of how the musical came about. After a fire at the Academy of Music on 14th Street, a troupe of dancers from Paris and a theatrical producer were forced to team up to merge their two forms. The original production ran for over 400 performances (then a record) and one song from the production, "You Naughty, Naughty Men," quickly became a standard.

We don't want to give too much away, but the musical is by turns funny and moving, and everyone in the cast -- most playing two or three roles and a musical instrument -- is excellent.

If you go, stop in the lobby for a homebrewed 19th-century beer made from water, yeast, and molasses. It's a bit strange for modern palates, but will definitely help you transport back to the period.

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THE BLACK CROOK
Abrons Arts Center at Henry Street Settlement
through October 7
TICKETS are $25 at http://www.abronsartscenter.org/on-stage/shows/joshua-william-gelb-black-crook-1866-world-premiere/

Postcard Thursday: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, March 25, 1911

Tomorrow, March 25, marks the anniversary of the deadly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911. It remains one of the deadliest industrial fires in American history and a turning point for worker safety and unionization in America.

The factory was predominantly staffed with young women who lived in Little Italy and the Lower East Side, and when we are giving walking tours of those neighborhoods, our clients are sometimes surprised to discover that the factory was in Greenwich Village. So much of that neighborhood—including the Asch Building, where the fire occurred—is now dominated by NYU that it is easy to forget that the stretch of the Village on both sides of Broadway was once a vital part of New York’s garment industry. In Inside the Apple we note:

Long before the fire broke out, the factory was infamous for its poor labor practices. In 1909, New York’s largest job action, known as the “Uprising of the 20,000” began when workers walked off the job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For months, the majority of the city’s shirtwaist factories were crippled by the strike, but the factory owners refused to budge. Though the International Ladies Garment Workers Union brokered a settlement in 1910 that stopped short of forcing the recognition of their union, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, refused to agree to it. The factory’s workers went back to work having gained few concessions. 

On the day of the fire, a Saturday, only about half of the factory’s 500 employees had come to work. Just as the afternoon shift was ending, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. Typical of garment centers of the day, the factory floor was a virtual tinderbox, with clothes, scraps of cloth, and unswept trimmings everywhere. When the fire started, the majority of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape,* but those on the ninth floor had been locked in. This was done, some speculated, to cut down on unauthorized breaks, though it is also likely that it kept union organizers off the factory floor. Soon the elevators stopped working, which meant that the only remaining exit was the fire escape. Tragically, the fire escape had been poorly installed and maintained, and when too many young women began to climb down, it collapsed beneath their weight, sending them plunging to their death. The rest of the women on the ninth floor were then faced with jumping out of windows or waiting to burn to death. Many chose the former, raining down on the assembled crowd from above. The fire department did arrive, but as their ladders reached no higher than the sixth floor, it did little to save the women. In the end, 146 women died, most of them at the scene—some were only thirteen years old.

* Blanck and Harris, the owners, were able to get up to the roof and escape from there.

The building today, courtesy of Google street view

Though the fire forced the Triangle's owners to abandon the factory, the building still stands at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. Then known as the Asch Building, it was renovated and reopened the next year. However, a New York Times article from 1913 noted that the building's tenants hadn't learned many lessons from the fire -- "they were, in fact, heaping its floors with scraps of clothing and flimsy material... and permitting smokers to stand near these heaps--(revealing) once more the singular carelessness of humanity." The building was purchased by NYU in 1929 and renamed the Brown Building; today, it houses university classrooms.

This post in adapted from an earlier entry in 2009, and one marking the centennial of the fire in 2011.

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SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, April 21, at 6:30pm

we will be talking about Footprints in New York at

The Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library

details to come

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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