Entries tagged with “Greenwich Village” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
About James Jackson, whose stone this is:
In just under a week the unearthed tombstone has been dusted off and, the NY Times reports, belongs to one James Jackson who died in September of 1799.The New-York Historical Society believes that he resided at 19 East George Street (the former name of Market Street), and was a watchman and grocer. They say, "There are many fewer Jacksons than I would have expected in the directory. Chances are this is him." It's suspected he may have died from yellow fever, which was rampant in the city at the time.
The inscription on the stone, which was just 2 1/2 feet underground, reads: "Here lies the body of James Jackson, who departed this life the 22nd day of September 1799 aged 28 years native of the county of Kildare Ireland." And while the body hasn't been found yet (it may have been moved when the area was developed), parks commissioner Adrian Benepe declares: "They're going to try to unravel the mystery of James Jackson and how the headstone came to be there," as well as find his body.
Yes, it certainly sounds like yellow fever to me. Someone should have published a necrology, though, so it shouldn't be too hard to find him there. Young, poor, Irish immigrants were disproportionately represented among the dead during the yellow fever epidemics of the turn of the nineteenth century. Some thought it resulted from intemperance and a heavy meat diet, but it had more to do with living in damp, unsanitary conditions or in the marshy east side, where the mosquitoes that carried the disease were more likely to breed. (It would be another century before people understood that was the case, however.)
It does seem odd for a tombstone to turn up in a potter's field -- especially one this wordy.
A passage from Anna Alice Chapin's apocrypha-laden Greenwich Village comes to mind:
In 1795 came one of those constantly epidemics of yellow fever which used to devastate early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a worse one. Many bodies were brought from other grounds, and when the scourge of smallpox killed off two thousand persons in one short space, six hundred and sixty seven of them were laid this particular public cemetery. During one bad time the rich as well as the poor brought there, and there were nearly two thousand bodies sleeping in the Potter's Field.
People who had died from yellow fever were wrapped in great yellow sheets before they were buried,-- a curious touch of symbolism in keeping with the fantastic habit of mind which we find everywhere in the early annals of America. Mr E.N. Tailer among others can recall years later seeing the crumbling yellow folds of shrouds uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when the heavy guns placed in the Square sank weightily into the ground and crushed the trench vaults.
It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, those lost and sometimes non-existent headstones of the Field,-- that is, to try to tell a few of the tales that cling about those who were buried there. But the task is difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless reading. That the sleepers in the Potter's Field very often had not even that shelter of tombstones makes their stories the more elusive and the more melancholy.
She does go on to offer anecdotes about a few of the tombstones that were known to populate the Potter's Field before Washington Square gentrified in the 1830s.
For more on yellow fever in 1790s New York, you could do a lot worse than read the fifth chapter of this book. (Ahem.) There's some great stuff on page 204, for instance, which references both the death of large numbers of young Irish in 1795 and later epidemics (the worst that decade being 1798, when 2,000 died; around 500 died along with James Jackson in 1799), as well as the medical rationale for burying yellow fever victims out of town. One physician even lobbied hard to end the practice of Christian burial in the city, especially the vault-style burials at Trinity Church, which he believed were polluting the atmosphere above ground with pestilential miasma and generating the almost annual epidemics.
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Cat over at WSP Blog got the scoop on a tombstone unearthed last Friday during the newest phase of park renovations. Boldface and links are Cat's:
Matt Kovary grew up in Greenwich Village, is working nearby and passes by the location every day. He contacted WSP Blog on Friday after walking by the Park that afternoon when he noticed that there was a large hole dug about 6 feet below the surface in the fenced-off construction area, right at the perimeter of the chain-link fence on the southern edge at Washington Square South and Sullivan Street.
According to Mr. Kovary, there were two people inside the fence, a man and a woman, poring over and dusting off what appeared to be a tombstone which he believed had been recovered from the hole. They were taking pictures of it, and, when he asked whether it was indeed a tombstone, the woman would only state that it was "sandstone," admitting she was not authorized to talk about it.
Mr. Kovary said that the artifact looked like "a tombstone, not unlike those you'd see at Trinity Church - but in much better condition." He wondered if it could have been "related to the original land owner" and questioned whether this came from a "family cemetery" from 200 years ago or more.
Although skeletons and human bones from the Park's time period as a "potter's field" (1797-1825) have been discovered as recently as last year (see WSP blog entry "The Skeletons of Washington Square Park"), there seems to be less information about - and discovery related to - private cemetery usage before the area was a New York City park.
UPDATE
Inside the Apple adds this insight:
So do we. What a fun Halloween gift!It is well-known that the park was once a potter's field and by some estimates up to 20,000 people were buried there. (We write about the park's early history in depth in Inside the Apple.) However, what has people scratching their heads is the fact that you don't normally find a tombstone in a potter's field.The tombstone isn't so mysterious, however. Only a portion of today's park was the potter's field. As Luther Harris writes in his wonderful book, Around Washington Square:The land area [of the original square]...was about 6-1/4 acres, a respectable public space, but not a grand one. Much narrower than today's square, the potter's field was limited on the east by a strip of church cemeteries, and on the west by Minetta Creek, which ran southwest from the foot of Fifth Avenue to the corner of MacDougal and West Fourth Street. (italics added)Thus, it seems likely considering where the current excavations are happening that what's been unearthed is a tombstone from one of these church graveyards. The Scotch Presbyterian Church owned the largest cemetery and vehemently opposed the park's usurpation of their land. Perhaps this is one of their brethren? We await a full report.
Previously on AHNY.
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Converse lived in the Village in the 50s and performed mostly for her friends. She never released a record and, apparently frustrated by that fact, left the city around 1960 for Michigan, where she spent the next years editing academic journals. In 1974, at age 50, she packed her belongings in an old Volkswagon bus, left good-bye letters for family, locked up a filing cabinet of poems and type-script journal entries, and then drove away, never to be heard from again. I heard the song "Father Neptune" on the WFMU show Inner Ear Detour with David last Friday. It stopped me cold by the third line. Before the song was over I'd purchased a download of the album and shut off the radio. Before long I was scouring the Web to find out what I could about this enigmatic singer.
The best way to hear her story is to listen to the episode of WNYC's "Spinning on Air" David Garland devoted to her earlier this year. Garland had unwittingly been part of a fifty-year quest to find Converse an audience when, a few years ago, the cartoonist and animator Gene Deitch played a home recording of Converse on Garland's show. He had been friends with her in the Village in the 50s and had recorded a handful of her original compositions. Converse had moved to the city after dropping out of Mount Holyoke, hoping to make her way as a songwriter and performer. Her songs -- somewhere between the American songbook of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway showtunes, and what would later be termed singer-songwriter -- were apparently too hard to pin down for mainstream record companies. Listening to these recordings, made by Deitch fifty years ago, you can hear the progenitor of Joanna Newsom, Larkin Grimm, and Leslie Feist, but you also hear some of her contemporaries -- Shirley Collins, say, or a few years later Vashti Bunyan -- and wonder how these songs have remained hidden for so long.
When Deitch played Converse on Garland's show, they inspired listeners Daniel Dzula and David Herman to launch Lau derette Records simply to put out a CD of those old tape recordings. Lau derette is currently working on an album of other artists covering Converse's songs. (Wish list, wish list! One can only hope Sam Amidon, Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, and Angel Deradoorian may be on there.) They've also planned a tribute show at Joe's Pub for September 5, what would have been Converse's 85th birthday. I'd like to write more about these songs once I've had more than a week for them to settle into my brain. It's a serious body of work that deserves thoughtful consideration and a much, much larger audience than she's yet enjoyed. Maybe you'll be part of it.
Stream some of Connie Converse's songs here.
Most of lecture today was devoted to the idea of Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century -- and to the group of people the historian Christine Stansell has termed "American Moderns."I did mention during lecture some earlier stirrings of New York's bohemian subculture, strong enough that they received commentary from outsiders. W.D. Howells pokes fun at middle-class slumming -- young writers and artists who want to make a romantic escape from their parents' stifling genteel culture -- in The Coast of Bohemia (1893). In the 1870s the journalist James D. McCabe, in Lights and Shadows of New York Life, has this portrait of "Bleecker Street":
In many respects Bleecker Street is more characteristic of Paris than of New York. It reminds one strongly of the Latin Quarter. ... It is one of the headquarters of Bohemianism, and Mrs. Grundy [a code word for the epitome of genteel propriety] now shivers with holy horror when she thinks it was once her home. The street has not entirely lost its reputation. No one is prepared to say it is a vile neighborhood; no one would care to class it with Houston, Mercer, Greene, or Water Streets; but people shake their heads, look mysterious, and sigh ominously when you ask them about it. It is a suspicious neighborhood, to say the least, and he who frequents it must be prepared for the gossip and surmises of his friends. ... Walk down it at almost any hour of the day or night, and you will see many things that are new to you. Strange characters meet you at every step; even the shops have a Bohemian aspect, for trade is nowhere so much the victim of chance as here.Who are these strange characters? He goes on to say they're quite a different crowd than you'll find walking on Broadway, so close by:
That long-haired, queerly dressed young man, with a parcel under his arm, who passed you just then, is an artist, and his home is in the attic of that tall house from which you saw him pass out. ... If you look up to the second floor, you may see a pretty, but not over fresh looking young woman [an actress], gazing down into the street. ... She is used to looking at men, and to having them look at her, and she is not averse to their admiration. On the floor above her dwells Betty Mulligan, a pretty little butterfly well known to the lovers of the ballet as Mademoiselle Alexandrine. No one pretends to know her history. In the same house is a fine-looking woman, not young, but not old. Her 'husband' has taken lodgings here for her, but he comes to see her only at intervals. ... Women come here to meet other men besides their husbands, and men bring women here who are not their wives. Bleecker Street asks no questions, but it has come to suspect the men and women who are seen in it. [Excerpted in Sawyers, ed., The Greenwich Village Reader]
The intersection of Broadway and Bleecker had, even earlier, been home to a bohemian literary scene that met at a cellar pub called Pfaff's. The characters affiliated with the Pfaff's scene fit some of McCabe's character types: artists, actresses, dancers, writers, the most famous of whom was Walt Whitman. (He took a visiting Emerson to Pfaff's for dinner.) A terrific website hosted by Lehigh University and created by Ed Whitley and Rob Weidman offers biographies of over 150 key figures who made their way through Pfaff's, including Howells, Horatio Alger, the famous actress Adah Isaacs Menken, and the actor Joseph Jefferson. The site, The Vault at Pfaff's, also contains searchable digital reproductions of The Saturday Press, the short-lived newspaper edited by Henry Clapp, Jr., a key publication for the Pfaff's crowd. There's enough there to lose yourself in for several hours, to be sure.[Whitman at Pfaff's, image taken from The Vault at Pfaff's]
O'Neill, in fact, is a little late for these guys, whose previous productions include nineteenth-century works such as Mowatt's Fashion, Dunlap's Andre, Boucicault's The Octoroon, Stone's Metamora, Herne's Margaret Fleming, or turn-of-the-century plays like Zangwill's The Melting Pot and Fitch's The City. The Metropolitan folks have long prided themselves on showcasing American theater before O'Neill. Last night what we saw was a bit like O'Neill before O'Neill.
The pieces we saw were "Before Breakfast" (1916), a one-woman monologue set in the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia; a Melvillean/Conradian sea-piece called "Ile" (1917), in which a monomaniacal whaleship captain pushes his men -- and his wife, who's along for the voyage -- to the edge in his mad dash for 400 barrels; "The Movie Man" (1914), a satire on Hollywood's investment in foreign war -- in this case the Mexican revolution -- in which a couple American filmmakers head south as embedded journalists of sorts in search of the perfect war footage (and a little sex on the side); "The Web" (1913), a tragicomic prostitute/gangster sketch set, presumably, on the Lower East Side, not far from where Stephen Crane's Maggie would have lived; and "The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill" (1940), a humorous and moving monologue on mortality spoken posthumously by O'Neill's dog.
The texts for all of these and more are available online from the O'Neill eText Archive. Alex Roe, the Metropolitan's Artistic Director (who pulled off a fantastic performance as "Blemie," the dog, in the final monologue), wonders whether some of this material belonged to the trunk of plays O'Neill supposedly had with him when he first showed up in Provincetown.
The promotional material for the show had pegged "The Web" as the most "New York" of these plays, and it was easily the most energetic and rewarding. (Keri Serato, who played female roles in two of the other pieces as well, only fully came to life here, and delivered fantastically as the consumptive dame, and David Patrick Ford as a gangster on the run helped her push the role to its potential.) But I was pleasantly surprised by all the sideways glances at Village bohemia in "Before Breakfast." As "Mrs. Rowland," Sidney Forter gave a riveting performance -- over half an hour spent talking to her husband, who's supposedly shaving off stage, while she prepares his breakfast. He never answers, in spite of the fact that she moves from idle early morning chit-chat (between sneaking sips from a flask she keeps hidden) to a withering tongue-lashing for his failure to hold a job (a Harvard grad who's knocked up the daughter of an Irish grocer, he's slumming in the Village as a poet) and for his affair with a rich-girl fellow slummer who's been duped by his poetic talk. In this sketch and in "The Web," O'Neill takes potshots at wealthy New Yorkers with benevolent intentions, reformers who depend on vice for a sense of their own morality. Here the noble Harvard grad who's heroically married the lower-class girl he impregnated lives a bohemian dream that begins to crumble on itself long before the action's through.
I've seen half a dozen or so plays at the Metropolitan and always feel rewarded for having made it out. No one else does this kind of work. But last night was unique in at least one way: Usually I'm aware that the plays I'm watching -- Stone's Metamora, for instance -- were designed for enormous nineteenth-century theater spaces, not the intimate 60-or-so seater you find at the Metropolitan. Last night's material, though, was clearly written for the "little" theaters of the early twentieth century downtown scene. They seemed perfectly suited to the space, which in several of the pieces came to feel as claustrophobic as a captain's quarters in an ice-bound whaler or an LES tenement filled with TB, crying babies, and shouting neighbors. It's unusual to feel transported to another age's production plan -- the sort of space where you set up a few tables and chairs, gather some like-minded folks together, and put on a play you've written for all your smartest friends.
"The Pioneer" (the name they've assigned to the five pieces together) plays at Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 East 4th Street (between A and B) until December 9. For more information click here.
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