John and Yoko's Nutopia

Yesterday, it was reported that the townhouse at 1 White Street in Tribeca, which sold three years ago for $3.25 million, is back on the market--gutted--for $4.25 million. The structure's claim to fame is that it was dubbed the "Nutopian Embassy" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on April 1, 1973, when they declared themselves ambassadors of the newly formed "conceptual country" of Nutopia.

A week earlier, on March 23, Lennon had been given an order to leave the United States within 60 days. Though Yoko Ono had a green card from her earlier marriage, the American government refused to grant one to Lennon because of a marijuana conviction in the UK. Due to their "radical" politics, Lennon and Ono were also being hounded by the FBI, who followed them and tapped their phones. In an effort to bring attention to the ridiculousness of their plight, Lennon and Ono created Nutopia, declaring:

We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA.
Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA.
NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.
NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic.
All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country.
As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.

Nutopian Embassy
One White Street
New York, New York 10012
April 1, 1973

Why, exactly, they chose 1 White Street as the fictional Nutopian Embassy is unclear. They had no personal connection to the building. At the time, they were still living on Bank Street in Greenwich Village (they would soon move to the Dakota), about a twenty-five minute from White Street. Perhaps it was just a building they'd walked by. Or maybe they liked the symbolism of the street's name. The flag of Nutopia (pictured above) was simply a white handkerchief, which symbolized surrender.

As Lennon would write in the title track to Mind Games a few months later: "Love is surrender -- you got to let it go." Mind Games would also include the "Nutopian International Anthem" (a few seconds of silence at the end of side one) and the printed "Declaration of Nutopia" in the liner notes.

Yoko Ono noted on last year's anniversary of the birth of Nutopia:

Nutopia is a country that exists in all of us.
John and I created this imaginary world.
We called a press conference and produced a white handkerchief from our pockets
and said "This is a flag to Surrender to Peace."
Not Fight for Peace, but "Surrender" to Peace was the important bit.
All of us represent Nutopia.
On this day of the birth of Nutopia,
Let’s all wave the white flag or handkerchief in our minds
And say "I love all of me" and have lots of fun.
Because we deserve it.
Each one of us.

For many years, the former residents of 1 White Street received mail for Lennon and Ono, though it waned after Lennon's murder in 1980.

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Read more about John Lennon in 

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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

The Bowery as it looked in 1896, three years after the publication of Maggie.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-56731)

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a boldly realistic look at the life of young girl from the Bowery who is ultimately forced into a life of prostitution.

Crane was born in 1871 in Newark, NJ, the youngest of fourteen children. His father, a Methodist Episcopal minister, died when he was just eight years old. Young Stephen bounced between the homes of various relatives before ending up with his brother Townley in Asbury Park. (That house still stands and is open for various literary events.)

After two semesters at two different colleges, Crane dropped out to try his luck as a writer. He continued to live in New Jersey, but spent much of his time on the Bowery, gathering material for freelance articles while also writing about Asbury Park for the New York Tribune. In 1892, Crane relocated to Manhattan and finished work on Maggie. He attempted to sell the work to the Century Magazine for serialization, but they rejected it as "too cruel."

On January 16, 1893, Crane submitted a copyright application for the work--at this point simply called A Girl of the Streets--and sometime in late February he had 1,100 copies privately printed under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. According to Richard Weatherford's Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage, Crane paid 79 cents a copy for the books but attached a cover price of only 50 cents. Crane had little luck getting New York bookstores to carry the title; only twenty-three original copies remain, probably all sent to friends and relatives. What happened to the rest is unknown, but there's a chance Crane burned them to stay warm. After Red Badge of Courage made Crane a literary star two years later, he had only one copy of Maggie left from which to work on revisions for republication.

Though Red Badge of Courage made Crane famous, it didn't make him rich, and he struggled financially the rest of his life. He left New York after an incident where he testified on behalf of a prostitute named Dora Clark in her criminal and civil trials. Clark was exonerated, but it ruined Crane's reputation. He worked as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War and eventually settled in England. In his late twenties, he contracted tuberculosis and he died at a health spa in Germany at age 29.

Crane made significant changes between his 1893 private printing and the edition published in 1896 after the success of Red Badge of Courage. The most significant change was making the end of the novel--and thus Maggie's fate--more ambiguous. Though the 1893 edition can be found in various facsimile editions, if you're a real Stephen Crane fan and want to own a piece of literary history, there's an original on the market right now for $8500.

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The Fate of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol

images courtesy of The Lo-Down

If you don't regularly follow the news on the Lower East Side, you might not have seen that Congregation Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, who own the synagogue on Norfolk Street that we visit on tours and talk about in Inside the Apple, has formally requested that its landmark designation be revoked so that it can be torn down and replaced by a 45,000-square foot condo tower that would also include a small shul for the congregation.

The complete story is available at The Lo-Down (your best source for ongoing Lower East Side news), but it doesn't really talk about the factors that made this synagogue so important in the first place. Built in 1850, as the Norfolk Street Baptist Church, a plain-front Gothic Revival structure, this was one of the last vestiges of the area as an upper-middle-class, mostly Protestant neighborhood.

After the American Revolution, most of this land--which had been owned by the Delancey family, who were Tories--was seized by the government and sold off in lots. Because the Delanceys had already improved the area, it was ripe to become a suburban (when the city really stopped at Chambers Street) enclave. A few houses from this period still linger in the area, especially along East Broadway and Henry Street.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

Within ten years, the middle-class Baptists had moved uptown (eventually becoming the basis for Riverside Church), and the building became a Methodist Episcopal parish before being sold to Beth Hamedrash in 1885. The new owners added a Jewish star to the roof and reconfigured the altar area to become a bima, but otherwise left the plain Gothic church intact.

The congregation’s controversial rabbi, Abraham Ash, died a couple of years after the move, prompting the search not only for a replacement, but for a man who might serve as Chief Rabbi for the Orthodox in New York. A Union of Congregations was formed to search for someone who could oversee kosher supervision, help enforce stricter observation of the Sabbath, and—perhaps most importantly—help organize a more permanent beth din (a rabbinical court) to adjudicate on religious matters. In 1888, the congregation hired Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Vilnius, Lithuania—apparently the only candidate who was interested in the job. Thousands showed up for his first sermon at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, only to be disappointed when it was preached in Lithuanian, which many of them could not understand. Things only grew worse when the Union of Congregations agreed to a one-cent tax on kosher meat. (It turns out this was because the Union had promised to pay off the rabbi’s outstanding debts in Vilnius.) Within two years, Joseph had so thoroughly disappointed people that a handful of congregations independently selected a competing Chief Rabbi. Soon after, Rabbi Joseph had a stroke and while he was still able to perform his duties at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, he withdrew from public view.

However, when Rabbi Joseph died in July 1902, thousands of mourners poured into the streets to lament his passing and a heated argument broke out as to which congregation would have the honor of burying him. Ultimately, Beth Hamedrash Hagadol prevailed, and his funeral procession was followed by as many as 30,000 mourners. (Finding so many Eastern European Jews in one place was too tempting for some hotheaded Irish New Yorkers, causing riots to break out along the route.)

As The Lo-Down notes, there have only been 18 hardship applications to the Landmarks Preservation Commission since 1965, but thirteen of those have resulted in demolitions, most recently St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. Could Beth Hamedrash be next? If you are interested in it and its history, you'd best check it out while you can. The building has been vacant for years and you can't get inside, but it is well worth seeing the exterior if you are in the area.

UPDATE: You can also read more about the fate of the synagogue--and efforts to prevent its demolition--in Allison Siegel's excellent post at Bowery Boogie.

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Circus and the City at the Bard Graduate Center

All images courtesy of the Bard Graduate Center

You only have a few more weeks to catch the excellent show "Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010" at the Bard Graduate Center.

Using over 200 objects, the exhibition tells the story of the evolution of the modern circus from John Bill Ricketts's equestrian theater on Greenwich Street to the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey spectaculars of today. Because so much of that evolution took place in New York, the show is filled with wonderful posters, paintings, and photographs of New York through the ages. Of particular interest are the sections dealing with P.T. Barnum. Today, Barnum's name is best known through the circus, but he was an impresario long before the modern circus was born and his American Museum near City Hall was one of the city's top attractions.

As the show's press release also notes, the "exhibition also features a series of thematic displays about parades, music, toys, elephants, posters, and other aspects of the circus business. These displays include wonderful prints and photographs of circuses parading through the city in different eras, as well as impressive wooden carvings by Samuel A. Robb, New York’s preeminent manufacturer of show and shop figures."

The exhibition runs through February 3, 2013, Tuesday-Sunday. Thursday nights the gallery stays open late and is free after 5pm.

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Happy New Year!

Thank you for another year of great blogging. We wouldn't do this without you--our readers--and we appreciate all the feedback throughout the year.

If you haven't already started following us on Facebook or Twitter, there's no time like the present! We will have a bigger presence on social media in 2013, so be sure to sign up.

Since a question we get asked a lot is "Why does the ball drop on New Year's Eve?" we are running below our previous post on the subject. Enjoy!

Michelle & James Nevius
www.insidetheapple.net

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Tonight, an estimated billion people around the world will watch the illuminated ball drop in Times Square to ring in the new year. This New Year’s tradition dates back 102 years—the dropping ball replaced an earlier fireworks display—but the notion of dropping a ball as a way of keeping time is an older tradition.

In 1877, a ball was added to the top of the Western Union Building on Lower Broadway. Each day at noon, a telegraph signal from Western Union’s main office in Washington, DC, would trip a switch in New York and the ball would descend from the flagpole. Visible throughout the Financial District—and, more importantly, from all the ships in the harbor—it allowed people to reset their watches and ship chronometers. For the first time, New York ran on a standard time.

As the New York Times noted in 1877, this idea of a ball dropping to keep the time wasn’t new. For many years prior to the Civil War, the New York custom house had signaled the time with a ball drop and in the 1870s it was common to find time balls in major European ports. However, when it began operation in April 1877, the Western Union ball was the only one in a North American port and quickly became a fixture of the Manhattan skyline.

(Western Union, afraid that it wasn’t always going to work, set up a system whereby a red flag would be flown from 12:01 to 12:10 p.m. on days that the ball refused to drop. Further, information would be sent to the press each day informing them whether the ball actually dropped at noon or had fallen at the wrong time!)


In 1907, the New York Times—then owners of the skyscraper from which the ball drops on New Year’s Eve—adopted the time ball as their symbol for ushering in the new year. That original Times Square ball, made of iron and wood and lit by 25 incandescent lights, weighed 700 pounds!

In 1911, the original Western Union Building was demolished by the company’s new owners, AT&T, so they could erect a larger structure. (That impressive marble building, known as 195 Broadway, still stands.) Plans called for a new time ball, but by the time the new AT&T headquarters was finished, the ball had been replaced by a giant, gilded statue by Evelyn Beatrice Longman called The Genius of Electricity. (The statue remained on the building until 1980, when it was removed, restored, and installed in lobby of the AT&T headquarters in Midtown. It now resides in Dallas, Texas.)

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Read more about the history of Times Square in
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Dirigibles atop the Empire State Building

If you've read Inside the Apple (and if you haven't, there's no reason not to start today), you know that the Inside the Apple archives are chock full of old postcards of New York City. One recent addition to that collection was this wonderful shot of a dirigible moored to the top of the Empire State Building.

Despite the fact that this did not -- and could not -- happen, the image of an airship floating above the skyline has become a remarkably durable image of New York.

As we write in the book, the Empire State Building was in competition with the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street to claim the title of world's tallest building. Famously, the Chrysler Building had beaten 40 Wall by constructing a secret spire, or "vertex," that was put into place in October 1929.

After William Van Allen revealed the Chrysler Building’s vertex, it became imperative to make the Empire State Building taller without adding a “useless” spire. To that end, Smith announced in December 1929 that the top of the Empire State would house a mooring mast, 1,300 feet from the ground, for transatlantic dirigibles. 

This was utter folly. Not only does a dirigible need to be anchored by both the nose and the tail (which is why they landed at air fields in New Jersey in the first place), the updrafts in Midtown were so strong that a zeppelin the length of two city blocks would have whipped around in the wind like a child’s toy. More to the point, a dirigible’s gondola was in the ship’s center; people would never have been able to (as pictured here in an early publicity drawing) exit from the helium-filled balloon straight into the 102nd-story waiting room.

In late September 1931, the New York Evening Journal completed the only successful dirigible mooring. At great danger to life and limb, it delivered a package of newspapers from the Financial District to the Empire State Building’s roof. It looked great on the newsreel cameras, but would be the closest the mooring mast ever saw to real use.

Six years later, the Hindenburg would explode in New Jersey putting an end to any thoughts -- real or imagined -- of dirigibles mooring in Manhattan.

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Read more about the history of the Empire State Building in 

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The Happiest Place in New York City

image courtesy of the Central Park Conservancy

Doing research on a completely different topic, we stumbled upon the blog Computational Story Lab ++;, a collection of musings from a "group of applied mathematicians working on large-scale, system-level problems" at the University of Vermont.

The article we found posed the beguiling question, "What's the happiest place in New York City?" You can read the full post here, but the gist of their admittedly non-scientific inquiry was to use a list of words that had previously been ranked as indicators of happiness and connect them to geotagged Twitter posts throughout the city. (Note: from the blog, it appears that their research focused only on Manhattan, but it could be that the outer boroughs simply did not have as much data.)

So, what's the answer? Not surprisingly, the highest number of positive tweets come from within Central Park, and in the park the highest ranked place seems to be somewhere near the hypothetical intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 77th Street. This is on the Ramble side of the lake and is full of serene and picturesque spots. Nearby highlights include the Ramble Stone Arch (pictured above) and the recently rebuilt Oak Bridge.

What's your happiest place in the city? Let us know and maybe we can include it in a future post.

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Read more about the history of Central Park in New York in 

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George Bellows at the Metropolitan Museum

George Bellows (American, Columbus, Ohio 1882–1925 New York City). Forty-two Kids, 1907. Oil on canvas. 42 x 60 in. (106.7 x 152.4 cm). Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund

From now until February 18, 2013, you have the opportunity to see a remarkable exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "George Bellows." This retrospective of the artist's short career is filled with wonderful paintings of New York City, where Bellows lived and worked from 1904 to his death in 1925.

Bellows came to New York at the age of 22 to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. He studied at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri and was pushed -- along with classmate Edward Hopper -- to capture New York in its gritty realism.

George Bellows (American, Columbus, Ohio 1882–1925 New York City). Why Don't They Go to the Country for Vacation?, 1913. Transfer drawing, reworked with lithographic crayon, ink, and scraping, 25 x 22 1/2 in. (63.5 x 57.2 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund

Among Bellows favorite subjects were the immigrants of the Lower East Side; one section of the exhibit chronicles the development of his image "The Cliff Dwellers," -- a chaotic Lower East Side street scene -- as a painting, watercolor, and lithograph. Bellows was also drawn to the edges of the island, and the show features many scenes of the East River, Hudson River, Battery Park, and Riverside Park, a locale the artist would return to again and again.

George Bellows (American, Columbus, Ohio 1882–1925 New York City). Blue Snow, The Battery, 1910. Oil on canvas, 34 x 44 in. (86.4 x 111.8 cm). Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Museum Purchase, Howald Fund

Seeing these images reproduced in two dimensions on a computer screen doesn't do them justice. If you are going to the Met this holiday season, do stop by the Bellows show. It's a compact exhibit and well worth your time.

George Bellows (American, Columbus, Ohio 1882–1925 New York City). Rain on the River, 1908. Oil on canvas, 32 x 38 in. (81.3 x 96.5 cm). Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Jesse Metcalf Fund

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Jimi Hendrix and Cafe Wha?

Jimi Hendrix when he was still known as Maurice James.

Had he lived, today would have been rocker Jimi Hendrix's 70th birthday (he died in 1970). Though his recording career was very short -- he released just four albums between 1967 and 1970 -- he had an incredible impact on popular music.

Hendrix arrived in New York in 1966 to try his hand at the Greenwich Village music scene. He had been performing under the name Maurice James, which he soon changed to Jimmy James. After busking on the sidewalks of the Village -- wouldn't that have been a thing to see? -- Hendrix formed the Blue Flame, which served as the house band at Cafe Wha? on Macdougal Street. This was the same cafe where Bob Dylan had first performed when he'd arrived in New York in January 1961.

Chas Chandler, the bassist for the Animals, came to see the Blue Flame perform at Cafe Wha?. Impressed with the guitarist and the song "Hey Joe," Chandler invited Hendrix to come to London. The Blue Flame broke up, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was formed, and Hendrix's meteoric career took off.

So, if you find yourself in the Village today, stop by Cafe Wha? to pay tribute to its place in rock and roll history.

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1863: The Year of Two Thanksgivings

Even if your knowledge of the history of Thanksgiving is a little shaky, you probably know that it became a national holiday when Abraham Lincoln declared it one in 1863. In the words of the original proclamation, issued in October 1863 and actually written by Secretary of State William Seward, the former senator from and governor of New York:

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

However, this was actually Lincoln's second Thanksgiving proclamation of the year. On July 16, he had issued the following proclamation (again, likely by Seward):

It has pleased Almighty God to hearken to the supplications and prayers of an afflicted people, and to vouchase to the army and the navy of the United States, on the land and on the sea, so signal and so effective as to furnish reasonable grounds for augmented confidence that the Union of these States will be maintained, their Constitution preserved, and their peace and prosperity permanently preserved; but these victories have been accorded not without sacrifice of life, limb and liberty, incurred by brave, patriotic and loyal citizens. Domestic affliction in every part of the country follows in the train of these fearful bereavements. It is meet and right to recognize and confess the presence of the Almighty Father, and the power of His hand equally in these triumphs and these sorrows.

Now, therefore, be it known that I do set apart Thursday, the sixth day of August next, to be observed as a day for National Thanksgiving, praise and prayer, and I invite the people of the United States to assemble on that occasion in their customary places of worship, and in the form approved by their own conscience, render the homage due to the Divine Majesty for the wonderful things He has done in the Nation's behalf, and invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit, to subdue the anger which has produced, and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion; to change the hearts of the insurgents; to guide the counsels of the Government with wisdom adequate to so great a National emergency, and to visit with tender care, and consolation throughout the length and breadth of our land, all those who, through the vicissitudes of marches, voyages, battles and sieges, have been brought to suffer in mind, body or estate, and finally to lead the whole nation through paths of repentance and submission to the Divine will, back to the perfect enjoyment of union and fraternal peace.

(FYI: That second paragraph is one sentence.)

The first Thanksgiving of 1863, August 6, was celebrated with proper solemnity. As the New York Times noted the next day, "The National Thanksgiving was observed throughout the City yesterday by an almost entire abstaining from secular pursuits. The stores throughout were closed, and there appeared to be a very general desire to unite in the purposes of the day -- Thanksgiving and Praise. Very many of the churches were open, where proper observances were had, and each was crowded to overflowing." What they were praising and/or hoping for was continued Union success; with the Union victory at Gettysburg in July, many hoped that tide of the war had finally turned in favor of the North.

Of course, on the minds of New Yorkers would have been the fighting closer to home -- the Civil War draft riots -- which had waged on the streets less than a month earlier. However, it is unclear if the riots played any role in the Thanksgiving commemorations.

Having celebrated Thanksgiving in August, why did Lincoln then proclaim another one in November? The declaration for this second Thanksgiving seems little different from the first; there had been no major Union victories in the meantime for which the nation could express thanks; and Lincoln's proclamation doesn't make any ties to harvest festivals, the Pilgrims, or any of the things we now firmly associate with the holiday. Had Lincoln not issued a second Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, do you think we'd be celebrating the national holiday in August? Any thoughts are welcome in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Michelle & James Nevius

www.insidetheapple.net