Wonderful Town and My Sister Eileen

Today marks the anniversary of the opening of the musical Wonderful Town, which premiered at the Winter Garden Theatre on February 25, 1953. The musical—by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green—was one of many adaptations of Ruth McKenney’s memoir, My Sister Eileen. The show focuses on the book’s last two chapters, which take place during Ruth and Eileen McKenney’s six months living at 14 Gay Street in Greenwich Village.

The McKenney sisters moved from Ohio to New York in the early 1930s. Eileen was a struggling actress; Ruth, a writer, eventually landed a job working for the New Yorker chronicling their lives. In 1938, those stories were collected into My Sister Eileen.

Though Wonderful Town is today the most famous adaptation of the book, the story has been produced many times on stage, screen, radio, and TV.

In 1940, a stage adaptation of My Sister Eileen by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov opened at the Biltmore and ran for 864 performances. By the time the play was set to open, Eileen had married novelist Nathaniel West and they’d moved to California, where she worked for Walt Disney. Four days before the Broadway debut, Eileen and West were killed in an automobile accident en route to the airport to fly to New York for the opening. Ruth went into mourning and never saw the play.

Two years later, Hollywood adapted the Fields/Chodorov play into a film with Rosalind Russell as Ruth and Janet Blair as Eileen. The movie was then adapted for CBS radio; in 1946, Russell and Blair reprised their roles for a half-hour radio play that served as a pilot for a regular series. However, instead of picking up the series, CBS instead began airing My Friend Irma—which seemed to be enough of a knock-off that Ruth McKenney ultimately received a settlement from the network.

This finally brings us to February 25, 1953, and Wonderful Town, which took the Fields/Chodorov play and set it to music.

Once again, Rosalind Russell played Ruth; in this incarnation, Edith Adams played Eileen. Interestingly, though the book is set in Ruth and Eileen’s basement at 14 Gay Street and the original play in a “one-room Greenwich Village studio near Christopher Street,” Wonderful Town moves the action to Christopher Street itself. The show’s memorable opening number, Christopher Street, has a tour guide showing gawking out-of-towners around the Village. He shows them the “painters and pigeons” in Washington Square; Waverly Place (a “bit of ‘Paree’ in Greenwich Village”), and everything else that America’s Left Bank was supposed to have (“Poets! Actors! Dancers! Writers!”). Bernstein, Green, and Comden—who had worked at the Village Vanguard as a group called the Revuers—clearly knew the scene they were parodying.

Wonderful Town won five Tonys in 1953, including Best Musical and a nod for Rosalind Russell’s performance as Ruth. A 2003 revival also earned a number of Tony nominations, ultimately only winning best choreography.

There were two more notable adaptations of My Sister Eileen after the success of Wonderful Town. A new film version came out in 1955; it was a musical, too, but it wasn’t the Broadway show. When the film rights to Wonderful Town proved too costly for Columbia Pictures, they simply hired Jule Styne and Leo Robin to write a new score. The film starred Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, and Bob Fosse. In response, Wonderful Town was then filmed for television and aired in 1958. (You can see an excerpt of Rosalind Russell performing Swing! here.)

Finally, in 1960, the original Ruth McKenney stories served as the basis for a television series called My Sister Eileen, which ran for one season with Elaine Stritch as Ruth.

Today, there’s still a studio apartment in the basement of 14 Gay Street (between Waverly and Christopher); indeed very little on the street has changed in the 75 years since Ruth and Eileen called it home. If you are the area, take a stroll; who knows—maybe Poets! Actors! Dancers! or Writers! will suddenly appear and serenade you.

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Remember the Maine!

Today marks the anniversary of the sinking of the USS Maine, which went down in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, and sparked the Spanish-American War. Though the war is less remembered today than perhaps it should be, it was very important to the United States territorially. By the end of the conflict, America had gained control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, and had established a military presence on Cuba that remains to this day.

The war is also famous in New York for ratcheting up the so-called "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal American. Together, these two newspapers whipped up the reading public's frenzy for war and against Spanish imperialism. (Though not often quoted today, the full slogan of the war was "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!")

As we write in Inside the Apple:

As Cuban citizens struggled for their independence from Spain, the U.S. sent the battleship Maine to Havana to patrol and protect American commercial interests. On the night of February 15, 1898, the Maine’s forward ammunition magazines exploded and the ship sank. Two days later, Pulitzer’s World asked: “Maine Explosion Caused by Bomb or Torpedo?” Hearst’s Journal didn't bother to frame it as a question, merely stating that the “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy.” (A hurried investigation by a U.S. Naval board of inquiry determined that the Maine had been felled by a Spanish mine; in truth, the cause of explosion will likely never be known, but may have been caused by a spontaneous explosion in the coal boiler.) 

Two days later, Hearst upped the ante by announcing a “National Maine Monument Committee” to raise funds to commemorate the 258 men who’d died in the explosion. With the rallying cry “Remember the Maine!” on everyone’s lips, the United States officially called on Spain to leave Cuba. A month later, Spain declared war on the United States. 

The most famous example of yellow journalism is also probably apocryphal. As tensions in Cuba were mounting, Hearst sent artist Frederic Remington to create illustrations for the Journal. Bored at the lack of action, Remington is said to have telegraphed: “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” Hearst allegedly blasted back: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Though this story was reported as early as 1901, the telegrams in question no longer exist and many scholars believe the incident was created.

Hearst's "National Maine Monument Committee" took 15 years to do its work (even though the war only lasted four months), but in 1913, the Maine monument was unveiled at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park.

The figural group at the front of the statue (pictured above) is called The Antebellum State of Mind: Courage Awaiting the Flight of Peace and Fortitude Supporting the Feeble (we kid you not), and represents America preparing for war. Once upon a time, the young man on the prow of the ship would have clutched a sword; it was stolen years ago.

Around the back of the monument is The Post-Bellum Idea: Justice Receiving Back the Sword Entrusted to War (though, again, the sword is missing).

Atop the monument, covered in gold, is the goddess Columbia emerging triumphant from the sea. Underneath the gold leaf, the statue is made from the munitions from the USS Maine that were dredged from the bottom of Havana harbor.

If you are in the vicinity of Central Park today, stop by and pay tribute to the 258 young men who perished on the Maine 113 years ago today.

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Read more about the USS Maine in
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Feb. 11, 1916: Emma Goldman's Arrest for Promoting Birth Control

One of the best-remembered--and least understood--figures from early 20th-century New York is Emma Goldman. Variously described as a Communist, an anarchist, a freedom fighter, and a criminal, Goldman was one of the leading activists of her time. On February 11, 1916, Goldman was arrested. This, in itself, was not news--Goldman was arrested frequently. But this time she was arrested for distributing "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles." The subject? Birth control.

Goldman was born in Lithuania (then part of Russia) in 1869 and came to New York in 1885. She is perhaps best known for the plot by her friend and lover, Alexander Berkman, to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892; Berkman hoped this act would cause the workers at Carnegie Steel to unite against their oppressive bosses. (Not only did Berkman fail to kill Frick, the Carnegie Steel workers leapt on Berkman, beating him senseless.) After Berkman's arrest and conviction, Goldman became a popular speaker, campaigning during the Panic of 1893 for workers' rights (she served ten months in prison for inciting a riot), founding the journal Mother Earth, and even standing up for the rights of Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley's assassin, who claimed to have been inspired by one of Goldman's speeches.

In 1914, Goldman met Margaret Sanger, who had just coined the term "birth control." During an earlier stint in prison, Goldman had begun studying nursing and midwifery and became convinced that one of the great scourges of a city like New York was unwanted pregnancy. Goldman argued that birth control would not only improve the health of women, it would empower them as well. She launched a cross-country speaking tour in 1915 and though she and Sanger parted ways in 1916 (the same year Sanger founded Planned Parenthood), Goldman continued lecturing on birth control.

What exactly sparked her arrest in New York on February 11, 1916, is unclear. She was held on a violation of the Comstock Law, which forbid the dissemination of information about birth control across state lines. The fine was $100, which Goldman could have paid; instead, she chose to serve out her two weeks sentence in the prison workhouse in order to spend time with those she felt had been dealt a raw deal by the government.

Goldman's birth control arrest was her penultimate run in with the law in New York City. By 1917, Alexander Berkman had been released from prison and had joined her in opposing World War I and the newly instituted draft. Both Berkman and Goldman were arrested for their draft opposition, convicted, and deported to Russia. Though initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, Goldman ultimately fled the new Soviet Union and lived in Canada, dying in Toronto in 1940.

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The Fate of Frederick MacMonnies's "Civic Virtue"

Yesterday, the Daily News—in a column titled “The Eyesore Next Door”—examined Frederick MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue, which is slowly disintegrating in Kew Gardens, Queens. Though the article mentions that the work once graced City Hall Park in Manhattan, it didn’t delve into the fascinating details of this work by one of New York’s great Beaux-Arts sculptors.

Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) is best remembered today for his statue of Nathan Hale that still stands in City Hall Park,* but at the end of his own lifetime, he was better known for the controversy surrounding Civic Virtue, which essentially ruined his public career.

The statue’s story begins in 1894 with the death of Angelina Crane, an eccentric, rich widow who lived in the Hotel Brunswick on Madison Square. In her will, Mrs. Crane left $5 to her daughter (who had treated her in “a most undutiful and unnatural manner”), a few thousand dollars to a handful of charities, and the bulk of the money—upward of $50,000—to the City of New York to erect a drinking fountain in her honor.

After a round of lawsuits, in which Mrs. Crane’s daughter was unable to prove that her mother was insane, the city began the process of creating a statue to fulfill Mrs. Crane’s bequest. In 1909, Mayor George “Max” McClellan hand-picked MacMonnies to create the sculpture. (MacMonnies had recently completed a statue of the mayor’s father, Civil War General George B. McClellan, in Washington, DC.) It took MacMonnies five years to create the preliminary designs, which were for a massive work, 57-feet tall, which depicted Virtue (a large male figure) vanquishing Vice (a supine female). The Parks Commissioner and the city’s Art Commission hemmed and hawed over the piece: it was too big; it didn’t take advantage of its proposed location in City Hall Park; it was too architectural for MacMonnies to execute properly. The city told MacMonnies to go back to the drawing board and convinced him to allow architect Thomas Hastings to help him with the new plan. Somewhere along the way, the idea that this be a "drinking fountain" (as stipulated in Angelina Crane's bequest) seems to have been dropped.

In 1919, MacMonnies’s revised (and much smaller) Civic Virtue was approved and the finished work was unveiled in 1922. In the new work, MacMonnies continued to represent Virtue as a club-wielding man, while Vice was now depicted as two female women being trampled beneath Virtue’s feet. New Yorkers were immediately up in arms. Virtue was instantly nicknamed “The Rough Guy” in the press and women complained that MacMonnies was unfairly vilifying their sex. The statue stirred up so much public debate that the city held a public hearing on its propriety. At the hearing, Elizabeth King Black of the National Women’s Party declared: “Men have their feet on women's necks, and the sooner women realize it the better!” Popular Mechanics reported the reactions of passersby: "It ain't art to have a guy stepping on a girl's neck that way"; "Huh, those women represent vice--the man doesn't. That's why the women are kicking about it."

MacMonnies didn't help himself by wading into the fray. "God Almighty made men strong and women beautiful," he told the New York Times. "The female form is used to suggest grace and beauty, being combined with the form of the sea-monster to to suggest treachery and guile....when we wish to symbolize something tempting we use the woman's form." MacMonnies also chided people for misreading the statue, pointing out that Virtue's feet stood on two rocks--not on the two women--and that if women didn't understand their own anatomy that wasn't really his fault.

Despite the bad press and poor public reception, there were no immediate plans to do anything about MacMonnies's work. However, by the early 1930s, the city’s newly elected mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and his Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, had began to publically discuss moving the piece. In 1941, the statue was removed from its original basin (which was destroyed) and relocated to a spot near Queens Borough Hall, where it stands to this day. Though MacMonnies defended the work throughout his life, it was his last major public commission in New York and signaled the beginning of the end of his career.

For good pictures of Civic Virtue as it looks today, visit www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com. And if you are interested in the fate of the statue, there's a Facebook group, "Restore Civic Virtue."

* The Nathan Hale statue was put in the park to commemorate the spot
where he supposedly regretted having but one life to give for his country.
Historians now agree that Hale was hanged elsewhere.

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Read more about City Hall Park
(and take a self-guided walking tour of the area) in

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Happy Birthday, Poe!

Today is Edgar Allan Poe's 202nd birthday; are you doing anything to celebrate?

Here's the story we ran two years ago on the bicentennial of his birth, and here are some photos detailing the progress of restoring Poe Cottage in the Bronx.

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Read more about Edgar Allan Poe in

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Cleopatra's Needle: Is NYC Pollution to Blame?

As you may have seen reported in the Wall Street Journal, TIME, and many other news outlets, there's a bit of an archaeological dust-up happening in Central Park. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, wrote a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg complaining about the condition of Cleopatra's Needle, the 71-foot tall obelisk that resides in Central Park directly behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The obelisk, a gift from the Khedive of Egypt, has been in the park since 1881, when William Henry Vanderbilt paid over $100,000 to have it transported from Alexandria to the United States. The needle--one of a pair--was constructed ca. 1475 B.C. and originally stood up the Nile in Heliopolis. Both obelisks were moved to Alexandria ca. 13 B.C., perhaps in honor of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. In antiquity, one of the needles fell in an earthquake, and that one was transported in 1877 to London, where it still stands on the banks of the Thames. Four years later, New York's obelisk arrived; weighing over 220 tons, the needle had to be inched along a special railway from its West Side dock at 96th Street to Central Park--just getting it across the island took 112 days!

For years, visitors to the park have complained about the weathering of the granite and the loss of its hieroglyphics. Many--including Zahi Hawass--have come to the conclusion that New York is to blame. As Hawass wrote in his letter to Mayor Bloomberg, "I am glad that this monument has become such an integral part of New York City, but I am dismayed at the lack of care and attention that it has been given. Recent photographs that I have received show the severe damage that has been done to the obelisk, particularly to the hieroglyphic text, which in places has been completely worn away."

But is that "severe damage" New York's fault? In his insightful archaeological blog, Per Storemyr examines the obelisk in old photos and comes to the conclusion that the obelisk was already weathered by the time it reached America. In particular, his points to the photo (above) from the Library of Congress taken ca. 1856-60, which shows that twenty years before it came to New York, the needle was "only in marginally better condition than today. The weathering continues along part of the south face, whereas other photos taken before the transfer to New York show that the east face is in good repair, just as today."

Will this photographic evidence be enough to convince Egypt that we are good custodians of this monument? Or should objects like Cleopatra's Needle be repatriated for deeper reasons of cultural patrimony?

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Read more about the creation of Central Park in

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Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

Today marks both the feast day and the anniversary of the death (in 1821) of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Not only is Mother Seton the first American-born Saint,* she is also a born-and-bred New Yorker.

Born Elizabeth Ann Bayley, she married merchant William Seton in 1794; however, her husband soon grew ill, and, in 1803, they sailed to Italy to improve his health. William died in Pisa shortly after their arrival. In Italy, Seton discovered Catholicism--a denomination virtually unknown in New York's wealthy Protestant circles--and upon her return to New York, Seton was received into the Catholic faith, which enraged her friends and relatives.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

"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."

A shrine to St. Seton now occupies the building at 7 State Street. It takes up two lots, the southern portion of which (6 State Street) is the only 18th-century home left in the area. Because the home is a shrine, most people make the obvious assumption that this is where the Setons lived from 1801-03. However, they actually lived next door at number 8. That home, which stood until 1963, the year of Elizabeth Seton’s beatification, was torn down in order that a chapel in her honor could be built in its place.

Mother Seton is the patron saint of widows, people who have lost their parents, those whose children have died, and people having trouble with their in-laws (!).

* This is an important semantic distinction. Seton is not the first American saint--
that honor goes to another New Yorker, Mother Cabrini, who was sainted in 1946.
However, Cabrini was born in Italy.

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Read more about the life of Elizabeth Ann Seton in

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Blizzard of 1888

We hope that everyone is enjoying their blizzard safely and warmly! Twenty inches of snow were reported in Central Park--which is half of what came down in the famous blizzard of 1888.

Here's our recap of that famous 19th-century blizzard:

http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/03/blizzard-of-1888.html.

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Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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World Trade Center Tops Out (and messes with everyone's TV)

Forty years ago today, at 11:30 a.m. on December 23, 1970, the north tower of the original World Trade Center "topped out" when its highest piece of structural steel was hauled into place. At 1,370 feet, this made the World Trade Center the world's tallest building -- a title it would hold until the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) in Chicago topped out until May 1973.

map courtesy of New York magazine.

As the Twin Towers reached their final height, people in the Bronx and Westchester began to notice a problem: their television signals were becoming blurred or full of static. Late in the design phase of the World Trade Center, engineers had realized that VHF television signals beamed from the top of the Empire State Building would hit the Twin Towers and bounce back 35 millionths of second later; this may not seem like much, but it was enough of a delay that people in the path of the second signal -- see map, left -- ended up with interference. The problem was going to last until new television antennas could be affixed to the top of the World Trade Center; in the meantime, broadcasters came up with a stop-gap measure of broadcasting on a separate UHF frequency. The only problem? Many televisions in 1970 didn't have UHF built in, and a converter cost $25.

In September 1970, New York magazine ran a long story entitled "Is the World Trade Center Worth All the Problems It's Causing New York," detailing the television broadcasting woes, along with other complaints that were commonly leveled against the complex: it's too big; the Port Authority is wasting money on real estate; there will be too many people flooding into Lower Manhattan for the the subways to handle. Other interesting information from the piece (which you can read here):

• There was talk of extending the soon-to-be-built Second Avenue subway south of 34th Street to accommodate the added Wall Street traffic.
• Another subway proposal: build "people movers" from the WTC to the Lexington Avenue and Second Avenue lines.
• It was estimated that only 2,000 people out of 150,000 a day were going to use the Hudson Tubes (aka the PATH train) to commute to the World Trade Center.
• The Port Authority was asking WTC tenants to stagger their work schedules so as to ease the burden on the subways.

A portable Sony color TV in 1970 runs you $309.95

The money quote comes from then-Congressman Ed Koch: "Public funds ought to be used for better purposes, such as mass transit. This is antiseptic.... [David] Rockefeller is leveling everything and putting up clean towers that match the Chase Manhattan Bank. I place the blame for this on him."

Were you around in 1970 when the television signals went haywire? If so, let us know in the comments.

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Read more about the rise and fall of the World Trade Center in

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The Birth of the Crossword (or "Word Cross")

Today marks the anniversary of the first modern crossword puzzle, published in the New York World on Sunday, December 21, 1913.


By 1913, the World was one of the most famous newspapers in, well, the world. Joseph Pulitzer had purchased the paper in 1883 and raised its circulation through sensational news coverage (so-called "Yellow Journalism"), stunt reporting, like that of Nellie Bly, and a focus on distractions and pastimes. The World was beloved for its comic strips and Sunday Fun section.

The crossword (then called a "word cross") was added to the Sunday Fun section by Arthur Wynne, an English emigrant who worked for the World and had been asked to create a new puzzle for the paper. Remembering a game called magic square that he'd learned as a child, Wynne created a simple, diamond-shaped grid and wrote short clues. The puzzles became an overnight sensation, copied by newspapers throughout the city, and--eventually--the world. (Notably, the New York Times was slow to join the party. A Times editorial called crosswords "a primitive form of mental exercise" in 1924, and the paper did not publish the first of its famous puzzles until 1942.)

We've included Wynne's first crossword at left; if you can't read the clues, a clearer version is here. Notice that the clues are written to let you know which space the word starts and ends on; e.g., "1-32 To govern" is the 4-letter word that stretches from cell #1 to cell #32. Have fun!

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Read more about Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World in

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