History

You are currently browsing the archive for the History category.

Get your flash on

February 17, 2010 in History, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and urban pornography. Depending on which Whitman critics you read, he hews closer to high or low. I suggested he wanted to have it both ways: ever a joiner, he wanted to bring together the best of both worlds.

At one point, while talking about the so-called “Flash press,” I did geek out considerably, telling the story of how a bundle of these rare “sporting” men’s periodicals, mildly pornographic and thoroughly anti-authoritarian, made their way from an early-20c sportswriter’s private collection into the American Antiquarian Society. For the last dozen years or so, cultural historians have been poring over them aiming to understand more about 19c New York subcultures of style, sexuality, and reading. Other rare examples of these magazines have turned up in the city’s municipal archives, where they were long ago submitted as evidence in a rash of obscene libel trials in the 1840s, right about the time Whitman was editing his nativist newspaper, The Aurora. I mentioned Donna Dennis’s account of this legal history last week; you can also read key samples of this material in an anthology published a few years ago by some urban historian whose work I admire quite a bit.

If you want to understand why I would geek out about the preservation of this sort of ephemera, let me just offer one example of the fascinating work these materials have allowed cultural historians to undertake. In the on-line quarterly Common-place a few years back, James Cook — a cultural biographer of P. T. Barnum and editor of a thoroughly engrossing Barnum reader — drew on some material from flash weeklies to tease out some new understanding of the mixed-race origins of American popular culture. He starts his piece by recalling Charles Dickens’ famous account of the a dance hall in the Five Points, which featured a black performer who later became famous as “Master Juba.” Later in his essay Cook points out that most people have assumed Dickens catapulted Juba to stardom, but some new evidence from flash weeklies helps us flesh out the story: “We now know a good deal more” about Juba than ever before, Cook writes. We know

that his real name was William Henry Lane, although he generally performed as Juba or Master Juba; that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, during the late 1820s, part of the first generation of African Americans to come of age following emancipation; that soon after Dickens’s visit he became the first black man to break the color line in the minstrel industry; that he participated in a series of “match dances” against Master John Diamond, the leading Irish American minstrel dancer of the day; and that he used his growing fame to forge a more lasting and successful career in Britain, where he eventually performed for Queen Victoria.Most scholars have assumed that American Notes represented the starting point for Lane’s public career. But an anonymous letter to one of the flash papers offers a more complex history. An up-and-coming showman by the name of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, had recently managed a young black dancer known as Juba at New York’s Vauxhall Gardens. The letter also suggests that Barnum deceived the sporting fraternity in two ways. In 1840, he presented Lane as part of a conventional minstrel show, without informing his patrons that the man behind the burnt cork was black. In 1841, he took the deceit a step further, promoting the young African American virtuoso as John Diamond. Barnum even staged bogus “trials of skill” as part of the act, with wagers on Lane-as-Diamond to win!

For evidence of the hopelessly mixed racial origins of U.S. popular culture, this is about as good as it gets.

For cultural historians of 19c NYC, that’s about as good as it gets too. I recommend the rest of Cook’s fascinating essay, which includes topics that have turned up elsewhere in our course, from Five Points and Bowery B’hoys, to city mystery novels (including those by Ned Buntline, a guy I didn’t get a chance to mention, but who, in addition to writing racy novels was a ringleader in the Astor Place riots), to blackface and the Bowery Theatre. It’s a perfect slice of the Bowery world Whitman sometimes wandered into, eager to take his readers with him.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Wooden Turnstiles

February 13, 2010 in Art, Books, History, Lost New York by Cyrus | 2 comments

In my last post, I mentioned that older son loves to read series of books — the longer the better. Before he read the Percy Jackson series, he read all of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books. He’ll still read the latest one for old times’ sake: he read the latest, Magic Tree House #43: Leprechaun in Late Winter and pronounced it “very good.” His little brother the kindergartener loves them too, so we read them aloud to him on the bus to and from school.

Appropriately enough given this week’s snowy weather on the East Coast, we’ve been reading book #36 in the series, Blizzard of the Blue Moon, which is set in New York in 1938 during the Great Depression. For those of you who don’t know the series, the premise is that eight-year-old Jack and seven-year-old Annie, two kids who live in “Frog Creek, Pennsylvania,” discover a magic tree house in the woods near their house: the tree house is full of books and when you point to one and say, “I want to go there,” well, you go there, wherever “there” is. Their first four adventures take them to the time of the dinosaurs, to the middle ages, and to ancient Egypt. They learn that the tree house belongs to Morgan le Fay, who is portrayed as the magical librarian of King Arthur’s Camelot. (She’s much friendlier than any other version of Morgan le Fay I’ve ever encountered: remember Helen Mirren’s characterization in John Boorman’s Excalibur?!)

The books are very formulaic, as Morgan sends them on various missions that last about 10 chapters. The description of the tree house embarking on its journey is always the same, and my son can now recite it by heart. He’s learning about genre, which is fine by me. But in book 29 Christmas in Camelot, Osborne varies her formula: it is Merlin who sends Jack and Annie on their missions, four of them to mythical places like Camelot, and four to real-life places like Paris at the time of the Exposition Universelle (for which the Eiffel Tower was built).

Blizzard of a Blue Moon is one of these Merlin missions, and my son is enjoying hearing about places he knows: like Central Park and the IRT subway, which costs a nickel in 1938. Reading the book made me remember those old cross-shaped wooden turnstiles that were still installed in a few subway stations when I was growing up. Here’s a picture from the New York Transit Museum:

Note the fare: 5 cents! (Click here for more information about this particular photo, which comes from a wonderful collection of photos and images at nycsubway.org. The site is a treasure trove for subway buffs; in addition to the pictures, there is a wonderful collection of map PDFs.)

By the way, Jack and Annie’s mission in 1938 New York involves rescuing a unicorn that has been enchanted. Where do you suppose they end up?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,

Speed on the Grid

February 2, 2010 in History by Cyrus | No comments

Last week in Writing New York, we started talking about the grid plan and the effects that it had both on the material existence of the city and on its symbolic life. A grid plan for New York City was first proposed by a three-member commission consisting of the the surveyor Simeon De Witt, the politician Gouverneur Morris, and the lawyer John Rutherfurd. They were given the “exclusive power to lay out streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out… [but] not accepted by the Common Council.”

In the notes that accompanied their proposed map of the city, the commissioners declared

That one of the first objects which claimed their attention was the form and manner in which the business should be conducted; that is to say, whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets, or whether they should adopt some of those supposed improvements by circles, ovals, and stars, which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effect as to convenience and utility. In considering that subject they could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive.

Their plan was accepted by the state legislature in 1811. You can read the text of the report on this page from the website of the Cornell University Library.

One of our favorite commentaries on the effects of the grid is offered by Speed Levitch in the film The Cruise (1998). Click here to see what he has to say on YouTube.

A cautionary note on “tolerance” in New Amsterdam

January 27, 2010 in History, Writing New York by Bryan | 5 comments

In this morning’s lecture about the “problem” of Dutch New York, Cyrus showed a clip from Ric Burns’ New York that recounted the story of 23 Sephardic Jews who came from Brazil to New Amsterdam seeking asylum from the Spanish Inquisition. At the close of the clip he warned students to pay attention to the triumphalist music (he called it “manipulative”) that had accompanied the anecdote’s conclusion, in which the anti-Semitic Stuyvesant is overruled by the Dutch West India Company and told to uphold freedom of religion and what would become New York’s general celebration of cultural diversity.

Here’s how the popular historian Russell Shorto glosses this incident in his The Island at the Center of the World:

In 1654 twenthy-three Jews, some of whom had fled the fall of Dutch Brazil, showed up seeking asylum. You can almost see Stuyvesant shaking his head at being told that, on top of the usual heap of issues he had to deal with, he now had a Jewish population. His reaction was matter-of-fact, and perfectly in character: the Jews were “a deceitful race” that would “infect” the colony if he didn’t stop them. He barred one from buying land, “for important reasons.” He even refused to allow them to take turns standing guard with the citizens’ militia citing “the aversion and disaffection of this militia to be fellow soldiers of the aforesaid [Jewish] nation.” If they didn’t like it, he told Jacob Barsimon and Asser Levy, “consent is hereby given to them to depart whenever and wherever it may please them.” But Abraham de Lucena and Salvador Dandrada, leaders of the Jews, knew their rights in the Dutch system, and appealed to the Dutch Republic. The Jewish community of Amsterdam applied pressure in the time-honored tradition of politics, and won. Stuyvesant’s superiors reminded him loftily of the “each person shall remain free in his religion” law (and added that certain influential Jews had invested a “large amount of capital” in the West India Company), and ordered him to back off.

It’s a story of cosmopolitanism and capitalism working hand in hand, consistent with Shorto’s line on New Amsterdam and with Burns’ throughout his documentary. New York, they tell us repeatedly, is an experiment in which all the peoples of the world come together in the name of making money.

Sort of. The rosy tone of these histories is belied by the very geography of Manhattan’s oldest Jewish historical sites, especially the cemetery of the Congregation Shearith Israel, featured in the Burns clip.

The cemetery, located on St. James Place in lower Manhattan, north of the Brooklyn Bridge and just off Chatham Square in Chinatown, is the oldest remaining Jewish cemetery in the city. There seems to have been one older, now lost: this cemetery dates to the 1680s, but the first extant mention of a Jewish burial place in the city dates to 1656, describing the plot as “a little hook of land situated outside of this city.” The latter part of the phrase is telling, as is the site of the burial ground on St. James Place. These cemeteries were, in fact, out of town.

The Shearith Israel Cemetery on St. James Place would have been well outside the boundaries of the city when it was established. It’s well outside the actual wall on Wall Street. (By contrast, think of the location of Trinity Church and its cemetery.) It’s closer to what was known as the Collect Pond, a swamp in the area that eventually became the Five Points. The Pond was notorious as a place of public execution, including the burning of several blacks and whites accused of fomenting a slave rebellion in 1741, the event that the historian Jill Lepore writes about in her terrific book New York Burning. In other words, Dutch tolerance only went so far, or perhaps we should say it kept its distance.

You’ll find a nice account of Congregation Shearith Israel and subsequent Jewish burial places here. Kevin Walsh’s treasure-trove of a website, Forgotten New York, has a good page, too, which includes a terrific tidbit about a building abutting the cemetery on St. James, related to the origin of the phrase “I heard it through the Grapevine.” (Check it out!) Finally, I love the account provided on the blog Knickerbocker Village, which abounds with local knowledge about the neighborhood surrounding the old cemetery. David Bellel, KV’s author, contextualizes the cemetery’s story in an account of nineteenth-century corpses on the move, as New York’s governmental officials reduced the sizes of — or eliminated entirely — several graveyards in lower Manhattan by exporting bodies uptown or to outer boroughs. The “First Cemetery,” as the Jewish burial ground was known, originally covered several acres, extending from the Bowery to the East River. Jewish leaders refused to remove it entirely, hence preserving the little plot still on St. James, where eighteen Jewish veterans of the Revolutionary War still remain buried. Find the rest of his account here and check out his other posts on the burial ground here.

First Cemetery photos via Flickr user wallyg.

Tags: , , ,

A little history with your holidays

December 1, 2009 in Books, Events, History, Neighborhood Scenes, Odds and Ends by Bryan | 5 comments

We’re pleased to join with a group of other NYC blogs in a collaboratively produced 2009 holiday guide. See the bottom of this entry for links to participating sites.

nissenbaum.jpgHow about putting a little history in your holiday basket? Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas is a perennial favorite around these parts.

Nissenbaum, in a highly entertaining narrative, shows not only that the American version of the holiday has been commercial from the start (the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was a late arrival on that front), but also that it’s what you’d call an “invented tradition.” All the bits about Dutch origins were part of an effort among nineteenth-century New York gentry — the self-anointed Knickerbocker set — to create a colonial cultural heritage for themselves by establishing the social preeminence of their Dutch lineage, real or imagined. A byproduct: Santa Claus was able to sidestep an earlier Puritan bias against celebrating Christmas in the American colonies. Cyrus has summarized Nissenbaum’s argument here before, but Santa Claus was smuggled into New York by the group of patricians also responsible for the New-York Historical Society (especially John PIntard) and writer-friends such as Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore.

Irving doesn’t need so much introduction, but many readers may not have heard of Moore, or if they have they know him only for his poem “A Visit from St. Nicolas,” more familiarly known by its first line: “Twas the night before Christmas.” But Moore left his imprint all over the city, especially in Chelsea, the neighborhood named after his family estate. (His father was both the president of Columbia College and New York’s Protestant Episcopal Bishop; his grandfather, a British officer, had purchased farmland in Chelsea in the 1750s, but the Moores had owned land in Queens since the 1650s.) After graduating Columbia as valedictorian in 1798, Moore dabbled in belles lettres and anti-Jeffersonian pamphleteering, compiled a two-volume English-Hebrew lexicon, and donated the land for the General Theological Seminary, where he was a professor of classical languages for three decades. (The seminary still stands, filling the entire block from Ninth to Tenth Avenues between West 20th and 21st Streets.)

Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas is especially good on making Moore’s famous “A Visit from St. Nicolas,” written in 1822, come alive in new ways. Ever wonder why the poem’s narrator was so quick to spring from his bed to see what was the matter (rhymes with “clatter”)? He probably thought a house-break was in progress. Christmas in early nineteenth-century New York, Nissenbaum suggests, had started to take on some of the elements of English seasonal misrule. But what had traditionally served as an escape valve — allowing laborers to let off some steam but ultimately keeping social order in check — was turning increasingly violent as a new industrial order demanded more of workers without giving much back. The mobs of working-class carolers who had traditionally demanded that rich folk bring them some figgy pudding — insisting that they wouldn’t leave until they get some — were evolving into “Callithumpian bands” parading in the street making noise and committing acts of petty larceny. (One contemporary described these roving bands as made up of “Negroes, servants, boys, and other disorderly persons.”)

I won’t give much more away, but Nissenbaum argues that the significance of Moore’s poem was to silence a little of that seasonal clatter, tame it to protect polite audiences. Santa Claus is a housebreaker, sure, but he’s bringing gifts for the kiddies. The “patron-client exchange” that had defined seasonal misrule (“We won’t go until we get some!”) shifted to a parent-child exchange that made Christmas a domestic holiday rivaled only by the invented tradition of American Thanksgiving, taking shape around the same time. Moore’s poem helped make Christmas “a practical simple ritual that almost any household could perform.” The upshot: we have nineteenth-century New Yorkers, not seventeenth-century New Amsterdammers or their Old World parents, to thank for the cult of St. Nick and for Christmas trees. (Speaking of Christmas trees …)

How to thank Mr. Moore? You might, like Cyrus’s family, make his poem part of your own holiday ritual. (He recommends the pop-up edition by Robert Sabuda.) Or try one of these annual Moore Advent events:

Chelsea Community Church (346 W. 20th St.) holds an annual candlelight service and reading of Moore’s poem. This year’s event happens on December 13 at 6 pm. According to the NYC Parks & Rec website, at the nearby Clement Clarke Moore Park (W 22nd St. at 10th Ave.), neighborhood folk gather on the Sunday before Christmas for a reading of his poem. A similar event takes place uptown, in Washington Heights, at the Church of the Intercession (155th St. and Broadway), where people gather for carols, a reading of Moore’s poem, and a candlelight march to Moore’s grave site, in the Trinity Cemetery on 155th Street. This celebration has apparently been going on since 1911; this year it takes place December 20 at 4 pm.

A few other historically oriented seasonal suggestions:

If you’d like to seek out a patrician New York Christmas that predates Moore’s poem (and hence is decidedly not Santa-centered), check the seasonal calendar for the eighteenth-century Van Cortlandt House Museum in the Bronx.

Jewish historians of Christmas, Episcopalian compilers of Hebrew lexicons, and Tin Pan Alley’s Jewish Christmas Broadway musicals notwithstanding, maybe Christmas just isn’t your thing? Then you probably already know the traditional alternative for December 25 is dim sum. We’re not exactly sure when this practice started, but the big decision, these days, is whether to go with Jing Fong or Golden Unicorn. When you’re finished eating, work off some calories on Big Onion’s 19th Annual Dec. 25 walking tour of the old Jewish Lower East Side.

George Balanchine’s Nutcracker has been a tradition in New York City since 1954. The very thought may make you yawn. If so, did you know that Uptown Dance Academy has been performing Black Nutcracker since 1995? Catch it at the Apollo Theater on December 22nd; proceeds go toward a new studio for the kids.

If you’d like to revive a non-commercial historic NYC holiday tradition, try “calling on” (visiting) as many friends as possible on New Year’s Day. You’ll need to bring the equivalent of a photographic calling card to leave behind. I suppose you could do something like this on Facebook, but we’re fans of the slow media version that requires actual travel from house to house. We wrote about it last holiday season, as did our friend Esther at Ephemeral New York.

A final suggestion for those who’d prefer to bring a little misrule back to your yule: you might consider joining in the annual Parade of Santas in Santacon NYC 2009, on December 12. Be warned: though some participants will be decked out in period costumes, you may also encounter pub crawlers with puke in their beards. (Putting the ho back in ho! ho! ho! since 1994. A little Santacon history here.) We suggest it in the spirit of the nineteenth-century Callithumpian bands, mentioned above.

Discover lots more in the 2009 “NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays” Guide:

Brooklyn Based:
Home for the Holidays

Give and Get:
Tis The Season to Volunteer

the improvised life:
unwrapping the holidays

Manhattan User’s Guide:
The Gift Guide

Mommy Poppins:
Offbeat and Multicultural Family Holiday Events

NY Barfly:
It’s the Holidays, Time to Drink

NewYorkology:
Big-ticket holiday shows: Nutcracker, Rockettes, Wintuk

offManhattan:
Ten Holiday Getaways Near NYC

the skint:
30 days of skintmas – a cheap (or free!) holidays-in-nyc-treat for every day of the season

The Strong Buzz:
Holiday Eats Old and New

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Happy Freakin’ Holidays Playlist
Walking Off the Big Apple:
The Thin Man Walk: A New York Holiday Adventure with Nick and Nora Charles

If you write a NYC-oriented blog and would like to contribute to a future group post, please let us know!

Tags: , ,

Public historian

September 22, 2009 in Books, History by Bryan | 1 comment

JillLepore.jpgThe NEH’s magazine, Humanities, has a terrific interview this month with one of my favorite historians — and favorite people — Jill Lepore. A Harvard prof (and chair of the school’s History and Literature program) and award-winning author, Lepore also, along with our friend Caleb Crain, has become a key writer on American history and culture for the New Yorker. And she’s an active parent of small children. And she’s only a few years on the other side of 40. As Ari over at Edge of the American West asked, “Jealous?”

The whole interview is worth reading, but especially relevant to this site is the bit about her book New York Burning, a gripping read about the city’s purported slave revolt of 1741:

HUMANITIES: In New York Burning, you wrote about … the fires that swept through Manhattan in 1741.

LEPORE: … Another long-forgotten
episode in early American history. It’s a little like Salem witchcraft,
which everyone knows about, the 1692 witchcraft trials in which twenty
people died, except that what happened in New York was a lot worse.
Thirteen black men were burned at the stake; seventeen more were
hanged. No one was burned at the stake in Salem. That’s just a figment
of our collective imagination. What happened in New York was also,
historically, far more significant. It played a role in how slavery
evolved in the North. And it played a role, I think, in how American
politics evolved and how Americans came to tolerate partisanship and
the two-party system.

I had wanted to write about this episode for my dissertation but
decided against it because, while the prosecutors left behind a rich
documentary trail (nearly two hundred black men were arrested and
interrogated and many of them were brought to trial), the confessions
aren’t admissible as historical evidence, since they were confessing to
avoid being burned to death and, under those circumstances, who
wouldn’t lie? I couldn’t quite figure out how to deal with that
evidentiary problem.

Then, in 1991, workers excavating the foundation for a new federal
office building in Manhattan came across the African burial ground from
the colonial period. And I thought, ‘Oh, this will be incredibly loud,
noisy, great historical evidence.’ Except it wasn’t. The burials and
the remains were highly controversial, and the reports were not
altogether forthcoming about what scholars ought to conclude from the
analysis of those remains. But I wrote the book anyway.

HUMANITIES: In The Name of War
[her first book, about "King Philip's War"] you showed how New Englanders described their humiliation and their
suffering in language identical to how they described the Indians. In
this book you showed pre-Revolutionary Americans describing the
restraints on their political liberties in terms so drastic that they
actually better describe the bondage in which they keep African slaves
and the slaves then referred to as Spanish Negroes. There seems to be
this kind of very careful, subtle argument about how we take our
enemy’s attributes and apply them to ourselves when we think we’re in a
really bad place.

LEPORE: I’m interested in our
capacity to justify acts of tremendous, unspeakable cruelty. It’s not
obvious, at least not to me. And the way I have always tried to puzzle
it out is by thinking mainly about language. What, literally, is the
vocabulary of justification?

In eighteenth-century New York, a lot of people want to depose the
governor. He is a tyrant. What they write about him, what they write
about their right to get rid of him, is, to me, as a citizen, quite
moving and inspiring. And yet those same people deploy that very same
rhetoric to justify enslaving Africans. How do they manage that? How,
honestly, is that possible? I don’t know that we have ever really
reckoned with that, with what Edmund Morgan called the “American
paradox,” that our democracy rests, at some level, on the idea of
enslavement. It doesn’t anymore. But that history matters. And I think
we’d be stronger for seeing it more clearly.


HUMANITIES: You also make the argument that slavery is
somehow crucial to understanding the development of political parties
in America. How does slavery help illuminate the development of
political parties?

LEPORE: I tried to make that argument, but I’m not sure it worked. The day that New York Burning
was published, Hurricane Katrina touched down in New Orleans. I had a
new baby, and I was home with him, and found myself glued to the
television. Talking heads would come on–news anchors, commentators–and
say, while looking at the footage of nobody but black people on the
roofs of those houses, as if shocked, as if this had never occurred to
them, ‘Oh, my God. Race still exists in this country. There still is
racism. Oh, my God. New Orleans is segregated!’

I’m trying to convince people that it matters that black men were
burned at the stake in New York City in 1741, and people are surprised
that black people are marooned on the roofs of New Orleans in 2005?
Here I am, trying to make an argument about eighteenth-century
politics, attempting to illustrate, with all manner of exhaustive
archival research–charts about the census and the tax lists–and close
readings of Blackstone’s Commentaries
and Restoration drama, trying to argue that the constant, ever-present
threat of black conspiracy made white political pluralism possible.
Because compared to that, having a two-party system was a piece of
cake. And I had to go give some goofy book talks, and I’m thinking, at
these bookstores, Sheesh, there’s just this huge gap between what I’m
trying to say and what people kind of need to know or where we can
enter the conversation together, and that’s my fault, all mine. What am
I doing here in 1741? At the level of imagining our national past and
wrestling with the consequences of slavery, the wages of slavery, well,
that didn’t even begin to happen until the last election where there
was a genuine national conversation about what slavery has done to
American politics.


HUMANITIES: To go back to the eighteenth century for just
a second: So the threat or the partly imagined threat of a slave
rebellion, it encouraged people to find a more friendly system of
opposition, which was the beginnings of the party system?

LEPORE: History doesn’t always
work that way, neatly. And when it seems like it works that way,
usually someone is being facile. But here’s what I argued: In New York
in the 1730s there was an extraordinary and unprecedented amount of
political opposition, including the founding of an opposition political
party. In 1735, a printer named John Peter Zenger was tried for
sedition, for publishing a newspaper that opposed the policies of the
royally appointed governor. Zenger’s trial is one of the most thrilling
episodes in early American political history, and it nearly tears the
colony apart.

Six years later, an alleged slave conspiracy brings together these
two political parties, who, I argue, heal the political divisions
between them by burning black men at the stake. And, I think, like
decapitating Philip and putting his head on a pike, this is a
constitutive moment for a pluralistic politics. It’s as if those
executions say, ‘You and I, we can disagree. We can disagree–a
lot–because we are not beyond the limits of our own politics, we are
not Indians on the warpath, we are not black men talking about burning
the city down.’ It’s a dark story, I don’t like that story, I sometimes
wish the past were prettier, but it’s how I read the evidence.

More on the African Burial Ground here.

Previously.

Tags: , , , ,

Today in NYC History

August 26, 2009 in History by Bryan | No comments

EVHP-LOGO_sm.jpgThe East Village History Project has launched a new blog, Today in NYC History, which is well worth checking out. (Their main blog continues to post new material as well.)

Today’s post on TNYCH has to do with the 1970 Women’s Equality Strike, which happened to take place the day I was born. I wrote about that event here and on Edge of the American West last year. Next August we should make a big deal about the 40th anniversary, which will be one way to distract me from the fact that I’ll be turning 40. Ouch.

Tags:

The Adams family in New York

July 9, 2009 in History by Bryan | No comments

With July 4 recently behind us, I’ve been thinking a little about the history of Independence Day celebrations in the city (and elsewhere). As my friend Farrell pointed out last week, we came pretty close, as a nation, to celebrating July 2. John Adams would have had it that way, and waxed prophetic in a letter to his wife, Abigail, about what he foresaw as a great national holiday:

The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha,
in the History of America. . . . It ought to be solemnized with Pomp
and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and
Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this
Time forward forever more.

charles adams.jpgMaybe it was Farrell’s quoting that letter, or maybe it was the fact that I finally had a chance to see the John Adams HBO miniseries, or perhaps it’s that, in the wake of the film, I’ve been reading an old biography of Abigail I’ve had sitting around forever, but I’ve had the Adamses on the brain in the last week, and it has me thinking about their poor kid Charles, who came to New York in the 1790s to be a lawyer and died a drunk in the gutter in 1800, only 30 years old.

“Let silence reign over his tomb,” his younger brother Thomas wrote. John seemed to concur: “There is nothing more to be said,” he wrote.

Poor Charles, the only New Yorker Adams. Did the city kill him? His story would seem to be the template for a temperance melodrama, the kind that P. T. Barnum made popular half a century later. I first ran into Charles’s story because he had, early on his arrival in the city, become a member of the literary circle I wrote about in Republic of Intellect. He appears to have been a rather lackluster member, though, irregular in attendance, and only really considered part of the club for a year or two. I wish I’d had time to do a little more with his story, but books having deadlines and all I let it drop. This book has a bit more, and there’s a website or two out there with various speculations on the cause of his depression and alcoholism, including the possibility that he was gay. The HBO series makes him a victim of his dad’s devotion to politics; in real life, but not on TV, he made a major journey to Europe as a child with his dad and older brother JQA, then returned in the company of some friends — crossing the Atlantic without parents at age 10 or so — and was diverted and delayed by several months. At one point his poor mother thought him shipwrecked.

If Charles’s friends, once he’d settled in New York in his twenties, knew about his problems with booze, they were pretty circumspect in their diaries and correspondence. One close friend and fellow club member, Elihu Smith, mentions Charles frequently in his voluminous diary and provided medical attention to Charles’s family on occasion. He never mentions Adams’s personal problems and may not have been aware of them. In any case, Smith died two years before Charles did, a victim of the city’s recurring yellow fever epidemics, so he clearly missed the worst of Charles’s decline.

Smith does include in his diary, however, a few descriptions of early July 4 celebrations in New York, and I found myself thinking about these too last week. In 1796 Smith wrote in his diary: “It being the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the day was observed as a festival–& I devoted it to visiting [friends]. Called at [James] Kent’s–[William] Dunlap’s–[William] Woolsey’s–[Isaac] Riley’s–[William] Boyd’s–[Amasa] Dingley’s–: [Richard] Alsop [was] here–He, Wm. [Johnson] & myself drank tea at S[eth] Johnson’s. S[eth], Wm. & I went into the [public] Bath–after which we spent the evening at S[eth] Johnson’s.” The names he mention form a little catalog of literary, legal, and medical professionals his own age, many of them, like himself, Connecticut expats. Several of them would become quite famous in their own time.

The following year Smith was less social in his celebrations and even seemed a little annoyed by the holiday: “The anniversary of American Independence–celebrated with increasing parade & noise,” he noted in his diary.

Smith’s friendship with Adams allowed him one unusual experience related to the history of Independence — in particular the question of how that history would be written and remembered. On 30 November 1796, four years to the night before Charles would die on the eve of John Adams’s failed bid for re-election, Elihu met the President at Charles’s home in New York. His description of the encounter may be interesting to people who’ve cultivated some familiarity with the Adams story:

This, tho’ not the first time of my seeing him, was the first time of my being in his company; & till now I had a very imperfect idea of his countenance. The opportunity was good, & I spent near two hours with him. Some interruptions broke the chain of a conversation, concerning the origin of the American Revolution, which promised to be very interesting. Mr. Adams considers James Otis as “the father of the Revolution.” Mr. Otis’s publications have never been collected. Mr. Adams exprest a fear lest there should never be any good history of the Revolution written. The ground of this apprehension was, that the material facts have never been published; that they were in the memories of individuals, who were dying, one after another; & that no person qualified for the purpose, was employed in collecting the anecdotes which these individuals might afford. He remarked that, could their papers be published, the most authentic history, or the best materials for such a history, would be found in those of the Tories. He particularized Hutchinson, Oliver, & Sewall, who died a short time since, in Nova Scotia. These men, he knew, preserved notes of all the events, & had the originals of the principal papers; but, events having happened so contrary to their wishes, expectations, & endeavour, it was to be feared that their executors & friends would suppress or destroy them, from a regard to the honor, or reputation, of their authors & possessors. In the course of some remarks on Pennsylvania, Mr. Adams said that “William Penn was the greatest land-jobber, that ever existed; & that his successors in the administration of that government, had continued the same policy.” The remainder of the conversation was on the topics of the day; & the state of parties in this State. Mr. Adams’s manners are more agreeable than I supposed them to be. There is no affectation, or pride observable in him; yet he can hardly be called a sociable man. It is not proper to judge from one interview only but such is the impression left by having been once in his company; &, for at least an hour, alone in his company.

Tags: , , ,

Stonewall @ 40

June 29, 2009 in History by Bryan | No comments

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which most people cite as the starting point of the modern gay rights movement. Here’s a terrific piece from Democracy Now! to mark the occasion. It includes comments from historians, as well as a terrific radio documentary that features several “Stonewall vets” who recall gay life in NYC before the riots and offer memories of the uprising itself.


As a bonus, here’s the Bowery Boys’ podcast on Stonewall; this year they added a profile on a pre-Stonewall gay bar called Julius’. 

Tags: , , ,

NYC Types and Voices

June 11, 2009 in Film, History by Bryan | 2 comments

123.jpgThe posters all over town for the upcoming Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (note the 2009 version uses the numerals rather than the orignal’s spelled-out numbers) had Stephanie and me itching to watch the original, which we did the other night. Well worth returning to, though we hope it doesn’t deflate the remake too much.

So much of the film seemed like a time capsule from the mid-70s, even though (as NYMag notes this week) the mayor’s office mandated that the train used in the original be free of the era’s ubiquitous subway graffiti. The contents of the time capsule, then? It would include the characters’ obsessions with things like women joining the police force or transit union, the now-defunct names of transit companies, the assumption by Matthau’s character that visiting Japanese transit officials wouldn’t speak a word of English, and above all the array of New York accents.

Whatever happened to the New York accent — or even to New York accents in the plural? It’s possible to live in downtown Manhattan and go for days without talking to someone who speaks like a native New Yorker. You’ll hear them in mom and pop shops, or in places like post offices or public schools. But it’s not too much a stretch to imagine the old New York accents — which began to be noticed by observers and represented in print in the late 19th century — will soon be a thing of the past, thanks mostly to the homogenizing force of global capitalism.

Clearly, the filmmakers in 1974 aimed to make the train hostages a cross-section of New York types, one or two of each, almost like animals chosen for salvation on Noah’s Ark.
When the film ended and the credits rolled, we saw that the characters had, in fact, been named for the types they were supposed to represent. The list, in part, taken from IMDB:

Anna Berger … The Mother
Gary Bolling … The Homosexual
Carol Cole … The Secretary
Alex Colon … The Delivery Boy
Joe Fields … The Salesman
Mari Gorman … The Hooker
Michael Gorrin … The Old Man
Thomas La Fleur … The Older Son
María Landa … The Spanish Woman (as Maria Landa)
Louise Larabee … The Alcoholic
George Lee Miles … The Pimp
Carolyn Nelson … Coed #1
Eric O’Hanian … The Younger Son
Lucy Saroyan … Coed #2
William Snickowski … The Hippie
Barry Snyder … The W.A.S.P.

A collection of social types, professions, ethnic stereotypes. The old man was an old Jewish man, I think, though he’s not listed this way. The Pimp, who was black, might have been listed as the Veteran, since he mentions his service record, and at one point one of the hijackers calls him by the N-word before cracking him across the face with a machine gun, but I suppose they didn’t want to type him by the N-word in the credits. It took me a second to figure out what one of the passengers had been The Homosexual. I’ll be interested to see what comparable types turn up in the new version. Will the 6 train in 2009 be similarly depicted as a cross-section of the city? If so, how will the writers and directors imagine our social divisions?

Yesterday on The Great Whatsit my friend Tim mentioned a George Carlin record, Occupation: Foole!, which he picked up in a dollar bin. It was recorded in California in 1973, making it roughly the film’s contemporary. One of the tracks is called “New York Voices.” Who would have thought, at the time, that either it or the original Pelham would wind up serving a documenta
ry function?

Tags: ,

« Older entries