Recently in History Category

Common-place, the online journal of early American history and culture, has a special issue up this quarter on early American politics. Among its features is a joint interview with Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, a prolific historian couple formerly of University of Tulsa and now of Louisiana State. Burstein recently published a biography of Washington Irving, focusing on the political context for the emergence of his career; Isenberg recently published a biography of Aaron Burr. The Common-place interview focuses on ways in which the two men's histories and careers, both based in Manhattan, were entangled. It begins:

How does one speak of Aaron Burr and Washington Irving in the same breath?

Burstein: First of all, they shared the island of Manhattan for a good many years. Washington Irving was the youngest in a large family of merchants with both literary and political ambitions. The brother with whom he was closest, Peter, ran as a Burrite for the New York Assembly and was the editor of the Burrite newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. The oldest Irving brother, William, served two terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican. John Irving, a lawyer and later a judge, hung out his shingle at the Wall Street address that Burr had recently occupied. Washington Irving, trained in the law, briefly worked there, too. Just before his first voyage to Europe, in 1803, twenty-year-old Washington had breakfast with Burr and absorbed his advice on how to profit from his time abroad.

Isenberg: Burr's appeal to the Irvings was the same as his appeal to other young New Yorkers looking to rise in society by attaching themselves to a politician sympathetic to their ambitions. Burr was a patron of the arts--the patron, for instance, of the well-known artist John Vanderlyn; Washington Irving was an incurable theatergoer and theater critic in his New York years and would pal around with painters and poets all his life. His brother William, the congressman, belonged to a literary society and wrote doggerel poems that formed companion pieces to his soon-to-be-famous brother's occasional pieces. In a letter to his daughter Theodosia, who was Irving's age, Burr, when vice president, eagerly praised the young writer's satirical essays about Manhattan society.

For the rest of the interview click here.

The newstands were bare yesterday -- if you were looking for a copy of The New York Times, that is. One of the maintenance guys in our building (which is in Union Square) told us at about 9:30 a.m. that he'd been to six different newstands in the area, and the Times was nowhere to be found.

I confirmed that myself a little while later on the way to Washington Square. The only copy I saw anywhere was in a vending box in a student residence hall -- and I was a quarter short, having off-loaded almost all my change the night before. (By the way, those newspaper vending machines seem to have become very scarce in my neck of the woods. Is that true all over the city?)

The New York Post must have done well yesterday. They seemed to have printed extra copies, and many would-be Times readers (I wasn't the only one searching) were settling for the Post. (I bought two myself.)

Luckily, our copy of the Times had been delivered in the morning, but I wanted two more pristine copies for posterity -- to give to my sons when they turn 21, perhaps. A friend of ours who works for the times told us that employees were lining up at the delivery trucks to buy copies, and he wasn't sure that he'd be able to get one. (He finally managed at the end of the day, apparently, when one truck happened to return with copies.) The Times apparently printed 35% more copies than usual, but there was still a nation-wide shortage. There's an article about the shortage in today's Times.

If you didn't get a copy (or if you live outside of NYC and realize now that you want a copy), the Times online store is offering copies (limited supply!) at an unreasonable mark-up of 1000% (14.95). It does, however, come with a "n a resealable plastic envelope."Go to http://www.nytstore.com.

The popular 33 1/3 series from Continuum has a new call for proposals posted on its blog.

We've mentioned before our affection for the series, especially those volumes that move beyond memoir or criticism to offer something like a cultural history of the time and place a particularly seminal record was created. We even asked our students in Writing New York last year to buy Joe Harvard's volume on The Velvet Underground and Nico, one of the albums (along with Patti Smith's Horses) we include on the course's syllabus. We conceptualize that unit as "From the Beats to the Punks."

I've long had in mind a couple titles I'd propose to 33 1/3 if given the chance -- and now that it's here I'd like to put the question to friends, former students, and whomever else may be reading this (we know have more readers than people who comment). That's right! Consider this a lurker amnesty post: we want to know what albums you think should be recognized as cornerstones or records of important moments or movements in the city's cultural history.

Tip: the series has until now enforced a policy of publishing only one book per band, but given that they're dropping this rule (!), feel free to suggest albums for bands already in the series. The full list of published and planned volumes is here.

Can't think of key NYC albums? Maybe New York Magazine's recent feature on the New New York Canon will prompt you.

Those of you who've heard Cyrus talk about growing up at the nexus of many cultures may also have heard me, on occasion, joke that Cyrus identifies, ethnically, as a Mets fan.

So I had to direct his (and your) attention today to the new Bowery Boys podcast on Shea Stadium.

Who are these Bowery Boys and how do they find the time to come up with such great material?

[/blog envy]

Okay, I guess we're going to be a little political this fall. At least where New York history serves as a convenient backdrop.

Here's Eric Rauchway (EOTAW and UC-Davis) on McCain's uncanny channeling of Herbert Hoover:

Responding to the collapse of several major investment banks this week, John McCain reassured us, "I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong." That move comes from an old playbook: On Oct. 25, 1929, Herbert Hoover declared, "The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

The day before Hoover insisted that the fundamentals were strong was the day that came to be known as Black Thursday, when in heavy trading the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 9 percent of its value. And while, in endless stock-footage documentaries showing images of dumbfounded traders over a soundtrack of mournful jazz clarinets, the crash is supposed to begin the Great Depression, it wasn't quite so. The real cause was the collapse of the banking system, which followed the crash in part because Hoover believed strong fundamentals would protect the economy from disaster.

More here.

What I was doing ...

Around my neighborhood, the fall sounds of buzz-saws and hammers on ply-wood herald the coming of the annual San Gennaro Festival. Deep-fried oreos and all-night repetitions of the Godfather theme by amateur brass bands are sure to follow shortly.

Something new this year on Mulberry Street, though: The opening of a relocated and expanded Italian American Museum. The Times reported yesterday that the museum's new digs, at 151-155 Mulberry, corner of Grand, originally housed the Banca Stabile, a neighborhood bank that operated from 1882 to 1932. The museum purchased the buildings from Stabile family descendants for over $9 million. The history of the bank itself will form the core of the inaugural exhibition:

The vault's contents revealed that the neighborhood elite also banked with the Stabiles. A ledger card shows that Antonio Ferrara, who in 1892 founded the pastry shop that is still in business across the street, closed his account on Jan. 31, 1931, taking his $211,131 fortune with him. Before that, a telegraphic receipt from April 3, 1920, shows that Mr. Ferrara wired 75,000 lire from Banca Stabile to the Hotel Londres in Naples to reserve a vacation room there. Two years later, Mr. Ferrara bought two first-class steamship tickets from New York to Naples for a total of $110.

"It was very rare that people traveled first class in those days," said Maria T. Fosco, a member of the museum's board who has been researching the history of Little Italy. "Obviously, Mr. Ferrara was doing quite well."

Ms. Fosco said that at its peak, the neighborhood was a cluster of enclaves within an enclave, with various streets representing various regions of the old country.

"Most people who lived on Mulberry Street were from Naples," she explained. "Those who lived on Elizabeth Street were from Sicily, those from Mott Street were from Calabria, and anyone north of Broome Street was from Bari.

"So if a boy from Mulberry Street married a girl from Elizabeth Street," Ms. Fosco said with a grin, "that was considered a mixed marriage."

Two other additions to immigrant history in the neighborhood to keep an eye out for: The Tenement Museum has just launched a new module focusing on the Moores, an Irish family who occupied the museum's building at 97 Orchard in the 1860s.

Another much-awaited expansion comes in December, when Museum of Chinese in America reopens in its new location at 211-215 Centre Street.

While I was writing yesterday's post about the Women's Strike for Equality, I tried to find out more about what had actually gone on in Duffy Square, the site of the mock ceremony for a future statue of Susan B. Anthony.

The only thing I could come up with was this poem, posted on the website of a group called Veteran Feminists of America, which seemed to offer a few more concrete details about the event. (It's also the page where I found the photo I used in yesterday's post.)

Statues for Women
by Elayne Snyder

What we did, we did
at Duffy Square
on that island in the
middle of
Broadway
between blinking porno
pictures -
a robber's run from
Forty-second Street.

We ...
we did a dastardly thing
a hundred of us -
maybe more than a hundred ...
having marched there -
burdened, but singing
with sparklers in our hands.

We came with purpose
and permit and police.
We walked there from
Seneca Falls
from suffrage
and
from out of the skin
of our private experience
to raise the statue of
a feminist
high above our heads,
A symbol.

We watched silently
as the sculptor,
her arms around the
paper mache skirt,
shimmied up over
old Duffy's bronze body
and gently ... breathlessly
placed
the hollow statue
at the crossroads of
the world.

Triumphantly stepping down,
she was arrested.

Minutes later, the statue ...
Susan B. Anthony
was recklessly toppled to the ground
- stomped, kicked, crushed
and
completely destroyed
by chuckling pigs.

There are, however, four, perhaps five
statues of women
still standing in the city of New York:
Mother Goose
Joan of Arc
Mother Cabrini
Mary Poppins
and Alice in Wonderland.

February 12, 1972

This morning I found an item in the August VFA newsletter that suggests the papier-mâché statue wasn't part of the 1970 event but happened a couple years later in 1972. The article in the newsletter is in the first person but isn't by-lined. It's not individually linked, so I'll just give you the whole below. I'll try to track down the author's identity and report back later. The anecdote's a good one, though:

In 1972, as president of NYC NOW I was planning the Eastern Regional Conference to take place at the old Commodore Hotel near Grand Central. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to have a march after the end of the conference? And we could place a statue of Susan B Anthony near Father Duffy's on Times Square!"

So I called artist Suzanne Benton and asked her to make us a papier maché of Susan B for the event, but Suzanne was in midst of planning an exhibition so couldn't do it. However, she was so inspired that she later sculpted a beautiful cast bronze statue of our foremother which she brought along to feminist events for years. Later, the original welded steel Susan B. from which the cast was made was sold to David Miskin, who later moved to Paris and recently donated it to the American Embassy there. Vivien Leone bought the second cast and it is now at the Susan B. Anthony house in Rochester, NY.

Meanwhile Kate Millett, whom I'd also asked to make us a statue, got young architect Lorna McNeur in on it. Lorna not only made a huge one of the great Susan B, but at the demonstration suddenly scuffled up Father Duffy and placed our statue on his head. The policemen who were "protecting" our demonstration watched her, and when she slid down they arrested her. JoAnn Evansgardner, in from Pittsburgh, rushed up. Stretching her 5-foot 2-inch frame, addressed the officers, "What's wrong here? I'm Dr JoAnn Evansgardner. May I help?" But they ordered her into the patrol car to take her to the station with Lorna. By this time JoAnn's husband Gerry rushed up to help her, and he too was carted along.

Among the witnesses to this brouhaha was 90-something Jeannette Rankin and our own Emily Goodman, a deceptively quiet young pioneer feminist lawyer.

A few weeks later we met at the courthouse downtown, Emily, JoAnn, Lorna (shaking with fear) and me. I'll always remember tiny Emily standing before the judge seated several feet above her. He listened to the story and talked to her in a gently patronizing manner. When he set a date. Emily said, "We want the hearing on August 26, your Honor." "OK, August 26," he agreed."And we'd like a woman judge, your Honor," Emily continued. "What!" came the thundered angry reply, "I'll tell you, young woman, you'd have a better chance with me!" (There was only one woman judge then, and a rather unsympathetic one, as were most successful women in the man's world as it was then). Quietly and firmly, Emily said, "You've just disqualified yourself, your honor." The judge rose in fury and stalked out and the case was dismissed. (In that wonderful era of feminist activism, our mayor John V. Lindsey and most New Yorkers were sympathetic to almost anything feminists did.)

And, by the way, this was just one of the cases young Emily, now Judge Emily Jane Goodman, handled so beautifully and so successfully for feminists.

According to the newsletter, which credits Bettye Lane with the photo, Lorna McNeur is now an affiliated lecturer on architecture at Cambridge University.

I'm kind of becoming obsessed by this Susan B. Anthony story. Wouldn't it be cool if an actual statue were placed there? Next time I'm near Times Square (who goes there on purpose? zoiks!) I want to try to find the statue of Father Duffy.

Jane Kamensky's The Exchange Artist: A Tale ofHigh-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse may be a Boston book, but it contains a few fun nuggets relevant to what we do here, too.

First, Kamensky frames the story -- a microhistory of the Exchange Coffee House, Boston's tallest building for just over a decade in the early nineteenth century and one of America's first semi-skyscrapers -- in such a way that the disaster of its fiery collapse in 1819 resonates with images from our own time, particularly the WTC's fall. From the prologue:

After fire consumed the building's wooden vitals, its brick carcass imploded, wall by massive wall. The entire city -- some of it built on land only recently reclaimed from the harbor floor -- shook with the impact. By midnight, when the crowds began to disperse, only the Exchange's eastern elevation stood, an unsupported facade  more than one hundred square feet. The next day, the trembling curtain of warped brick and blackened marble came down, too. ... A week later, all that remained was a yawning rubble-choked pit that would smoke for months and linger in ruins for nearly three years. ... In a matter of hours the city looked different, as if a hole had opened in the skyline.

The book's larger morality tale -- about inflated paper money, crooked celebrity speculators, real estate bubbles and the banks that build them -- resonates with contemporary New York culture as well. But the best such nugget (and the one that really allows me to squeeze a post out of one of my favorite non-NYC summer reads) is a passing observation Kamensky makes while discussing contemporary comparisons between the Exchange and the biblical Tower of Babel. Noting the popularity of Babel imagery among medieval and Renaissance painters, Kamensky notes that Athanasius Kircher's 1679 Turris Babel, when scaled to the human figures in the scene, is roughly the height of the Empire State Building. And indeed, the similarities are striking:





While digging around for other comparisons between the ESB and the ToB, I found a Christian stock analyst (I'll spare you the link) who claims that economic calamity has followed every modern announcement of "the world's tallest building," part of God's long pattern of punishing human presumption. That's right, the ESB caused the Great Depression.

Turns out at least one early critic made the Babel comparison in the Times, though, calling the building "soulless." (Sorry, the linked article is pay-only.) And there appears to be a history of comparing the confusion of languages one hears in the ESB elevators to post-Babel jibber-jabber as well. Such comparisons are particularly common in foreign guidebooks to the city.

Comparisons between Babel and the WTC were also abundant both before and after 9/11. Reading them can be, as you'd imagine, both annoying and poignant.