Now and Then

 

Why We Celebrate Our Holidays 
by Mary I. Curtis (1924)

In the chilly spring of 1888, James Russell Lowell was invited to give an address at the newly established Reform Club of New York. 

A well-known political and social observer, the bushy-bearded Lowell had honed his intellect since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1842. Poet and essayist, diplomat and abolitionist; a linguistics scholar who became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell moved in distinguished literary circles.

Lowell also drew contempt. Some of his peers dismissed him as a moody lightweight who espoused convenient, inconsistent arguments. He and the Transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller detested each other. “Posterity will not remember him,” she once wrote.   

However, in his remarks at the Reform Club, just a few years before his death at age 72, Lowell identified an interesting twist in American culture. It seems especially intriguing now, when we face controversial interpretations of patriotism and American history.

Up until the start of the Civil War, Lowell told the elite audience, Americans were filled with optimism, “seeing the future in rose-color.”  

He had an explanation for this antebellum anticipation of endless American glory. 

“The hues of our dawn had scarcely faded from the sky. Men were still living who had seen the face and heard the voice of the most august personage in our history.”

Did he mean George Washington? I believe so. 

“This was what may be called the Fourth of July period of our history,” Lowell said.

During that time, he explained, Americans were still close to the epochal events of the past. Inevitably, many traditions had fallen by the wayside. A few old holidays—once momentous celebrations—had lost their meaning, and industrialization chipped away at community cohesion.

Yet thousands of Americans still remembered the big events or held onto the 18^th- and 19^th-century stories recounted by people who were there in the moment. For many years, those memories drove profound feelings of citizenship. 

Of course we could not live perpetually in the Fourth of July period, but it continued to glimmer.

During the Bicentennial in 1976, the writer Brendan Gill mused aloud that we possess founding documents but no recordings of founding voices. After a pause, his friend Ned announced: “I have heard an eighteenth-century voice.”

 

“We pressed him to tell us how that was possible,” Gill recalled. ‘I was born in 1883,’ Ned said, ‘and I was brought up in part by my great-grandmother, who as a little girl was taken down to the new Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to observe Washington being sworn in as the first President of the United States. That was in 1790.’”

Statue of George Washington
Federal Hall, New York City
(National Park Service)

Through these remarkable leaps, 20^th century Americans could touch the deep past. My mother liked to recall a parade in the 1930s where she watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march by.

Really? I’d ask, dubiously.  

Yes, really. In fact, there is a newsreel of the parade. On Memorial Day 1935, Civil War veterans were among the soldiers who marched up Broadway toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park.  

Universal Newspaper Newsreel, May 1935

G.A.R. veterans at the 1935 parade

Even today, the past may resonate unexpectedly, unprompted by a monument, fireworks or a battle reenactment. You might be driving on Interstate 435, a beltway that surrounds the Kansas City metropolitan area. Along the way, the road slopes down to a marsh. The land is undeveloped although not primeval. A low bridge carries you across the Missouri River. 

You might recall “Shenandoah,” a popular 19^th-century American folksong.

 

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, you rolling river

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, I’m bound away, ’cross the wide Missouri.

             

“Shenandoah” is a lilting river ballad filled with love and longing. Any online search will tell you that. Shenandoah was an Indian chief whose daughter the riverboat captain wished to marry but had to leave behind. 

And there you are, back in time and place, brushing up against the Fourth of July period of our history. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/07/now-and-then.html

The Girl in the Pictures

 

Inwood neighborhood, northern Manhattan, 1930s. 

https://myinwood.net/map-oval/ 

On the day before my mother died, she lay fully dressed and propped against pillows atop her neatly made bed. As always, she wore a silk scarf around her neck.

By the time I arrived in the early afternoon, she felt very sick. In a few weeks she would be 96 years old and something was catching up with her. 

Though pleased to have a visitor, she spoke little and spent much of our time together looking at a wall by the bed where hung two portraits of herself at a very young age.

Once, breaking the silence, she gestured toward the pictures and said that she liked looking at them.

They had hung on that wall since she moved into the apartment seven years earlier. I’m now certain that they were there by some grand design:  for the moments she still inhabited and those that followed the next morning until she was gone. 

My mother shared very few memories of growing up as an only child in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City with her grandmother and parents.  

Yet it happens that she shared the stories of the portraits.

One weekend in September 1929, perhaps a month before the stock market crashed, my 1-1/2 year old mother toddled happily along Dyckman Street, a busy shopping street in her northern Manhattan neighborhood, Inwood.  

Her delight was captured in a photo snapped by her father (most likely), but it was her mother who decided to have it enlarged and colorized. She must have hung it on the living room wall.

The second picture came to be in 1932, the worst year of the Depression. My mother’s parents operated a luncheonette on East 20^th Street in what is now called the Flatiron District. 

In the luncheonette, my grandmother worked the cash register and my grandfather cooked. Their four-year old daughter, my mother, accompanied them downtown when no one could watch her at home. 

One day a penniless artist came by. He offered to draw my mother in return for a meal. Afterward, my grandmother folded the drawing and stuck it in a drawer, surely under some handkerchiefs. She had many. It was retrieved and framed after her death in 1968. 

The two pictures are my closest point of reference for understanding my mother. Gazing at them evoked something inside her—not so much a jolly childhood as the city where she was born in 1928, which she adored throughout her life.

“I was in love with New York,” wrote Joan Didion.

 

I do not mean love in any “colloquial” way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you, and you never love anyone quite that way again. 

My mother told me that she never asked her parents and grandmother about their escape from Ukraine during the first decade of the twentieth century. The bleakness and horror that once filled their eyes and ears became deep wounds that one would not share with a child, even if she were to inquire.   

For the little girl, however, there was New York City. It stretched as far as she could see in every direction, hers to discover:  first, with the three adults; then on her own.

Her neighborhood at the top of the island, its old-growth forest crowned with schist and marble formations, ran down to meet the Hudson River.

The George Washington Bridge rose 40-odd blocks south.

The “A” train’s last stop was 207^th Street, whose steps she flounced down or ran up thousands of times.

It’s an old story. The daughter of immigrants who have the great fortune to come to America, she finds herself at home in the city. The two pictures were the beginning.  

George Washington Bridge, 1931

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/05/the-girl-in-pictures.html

Bad Guy Vignettes

 

"Manhattan: Central Park - The Majestic Apartments"
(New York Public Library Digital Collections)

When my mother was a student at Hunter College during the late 1940s, she routinely traveled south on the A train from her family’s apartment in Inwood, a neighborhood at the tip of northern Manhattan.

She’d get on at 207^th Street and ride until 72^nd Street. Then she would transfer to a crosstown bus to the East Side, where Hunter is located.

Walking by the luxurious Majestic, one of several Art Deco apartment buildings that had been built along Central Park West around 1930, my mother often spied a violet-colored Cadillac waiting at the curb. One day she asked the doorman to whom it belonged and he told her “Mr. Costello.” That was Frank Costello, the mobster who lived upstairs.

Ten years later, in May 1957, Costello would survive an assassination attempt in the Majestic’s lobby. A few months went by before the FBI and the New York City police homed in on the shooter: an “ex-pug”—pugilist—known as “the Chin.” He was Vincent Gigante, acting on behalf of the Genovese family.

The 25-year old Gigante wore a size 50 suit and waddled when he walked. Some newspaper accounts referred to him as “the Waddler” rather than “the Chin.”

Gigante, his wife, and four children lived downtown on Bleecker Street. The detectives staked out his house around the clock. Yet Gigante eluded them until one August afternoon when he showed up at the West 54^th Street police station (accompanied by his lawyer). “Do you want me in the Costello case?” he asked.

“We sure do,” said Deputy Inspector Fred Lussen. But Gigante would not cooperate, refusing to answer questions.

I explained this to my mother and she smiled and nodded. She wouldn’t have been paying attention in the spring of 1957 because she had a brand-new bouncing baby boy, my older brother.

1931 Dyckman Street shooting

Then I told her that she’d had a closer brush with gangsters up there in Inwood in 1931 when she was three years old. It turns out that another three-year old girl, also named Gloria, was shot to death at the end of a 90-minute gun battle between the police and two robbers.

Advertisement for Mendoza
Fur Trade Review, 1931

Just before 5 o’clock on a warm Friday afternoon, a policeman escorted the paymaster of the Mendoza Fur Dyeing Company, who carried a payroll of $4,619 from a bank, through the plant’s parking lot. Two robbers approached the car and shot the policeman and threw the paymaster on the ground.

Then they led a chase that ranged along twelve miles of streets in upper Manhattan and The Bronx. Six people would die, both patrolmen and bystanders who were starting the weekend a few minutes early as the season wound down toward Labor Day. The youngest victim was little Gloria Lopez, whose mother Matilda told reporters that she and her husband, a fireman, had tried for a decade to have a baby.

The story made it into the Great Falls, Montana newspaper.

The chase finally ended near the corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway in Inwood, an intersection that remains a touchstone of my mother’s childhood memories.

She was too young to remember playboy Mayor Jimmy Walker, who presided over the city. At the time of the shootings, Walker was traveling in Europe because New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed a commission which threatened to investigate the Tammany Hall corruption that Walker enabled.

Meantime, Mayor Jimmy Walker was in
Germany "for his health."

In this way Walker resembled previous mayors beholden to Tammany. But his indifference to the robbery and deaths—which inspired the American Legion to offer to mobilize 30,000 members to patrol the city with bayonetted rifles—was exceptionally offensive.    

“Being 3,000 miles from New York,” Walker told reporters, “I am ignorant of the circumstances of the shooting. I cannot give any opinion.” Then he was off to a brewery in Pilsen, whose mayor announced that Pilsen beer was not only an excellent but sanitary drink.

Jimmy Walker quaffed a stein and commented that none of the cathedrals or museums he had visited in Europe gave him greater pleasure than the beer. He hoped that the Pilsener sign would soon return to New York, he said.

My mother, Gloria (left), with an Inwood playmate, 1931

It would be two more years before the repeal of Prohibition. In the meantime, Governor Roosevelt forced Walker to resign and my mother continued to toddle around up and down Dyckman Street, holding her mother’s hand. It could have been her caught in the crosshairs, but then I wouldn’t be telling this story.

*In 1933, Mr. and Mrs. Lopez became the parents of John. Jr. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2022/03/bad-guy-vignettes.html

Untangling the Life of Xesia Y. Z.

Newspaper story about Xesia (1891) 

As a young journalist who covered the theater, Allan Forman hung around eavesdropping and hoping for a glimpse of the leading ladies.  

In 1886, Allan’s long edgy article, “Around the Stage Door, Men Who Haunt It and Girls Who Pass through It,” was syndicated widely in the U.S.

Surely he spoke from experience in describing the many ways that men made fools of themselves by fancying actresses and singers, married and unmarried.

 One that "knew" an actress --
sketch used in Allan's article

In 1900, he met and married his own actress, Xesia Yrsa Zephania Carlstedt. 

Really? you say.

Do you mean the Swedish-born Xesia Yrsa Zephania whose career never quite took off even though she acted in such memorable plays as “The Noble Son,” “The Pearl of Pekin,” and “The Corsair”? 

Do you mean Xesia Yrsa Zephania who inherited thousands of dollars from her former lover, a Swedish baron named Falkenberg to whom she was promised in marriage by her father, a consul general whose home was located next door to the baron’s castle?

The papers reported that she ran away to America to be free of entanglements. 

Cut to 1891.

“A Man About Town,” starring Xesia, has just flopped in out-of-town tryouts. The cast practically walked back to New York, critics say. Arriving home, the hapless Xesia received a thick envelope from a lawyer detailing the bequest of “the man who loved her so well and so unsuccessfully.” 

It was the baron. He left her $50,000!

She probably did receive the money, although some whispered that in fact the baron had rejected Xesia because she lacked aristocratic lineage.  

It’s not as if her family was undistinguished, however. Xesia’s father, Axel B. C. Carlstedt, descended from a long line of musicians and composers. The position of organist in the churches of Sodra Villie and Orsjo had been held by a member of the Carlstedt family for more than 130 years.

Axel emigrated from Sweden to the U. S. in 1872. 

Upon arriving, he moved to Massachusetts, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, earned a doctorate, married an American woman, and eventually founded the South Side College of Music in Chicago.

Axel fathered 11 children. Some were born in Sweden during his first marriage but the details are hard to figure out.

What matters is that he went about naming them “in the most delightful way,” to quote Mary Poppins.

Since his own name began with the initials ABC, Axel continued the pattern with his children.

Thus:

Axel Bernhard Conrad, Jr.

Dagobert Edvard Fritiof

                            Gustaf Harald Julius

Knut Leonard Maltidius

                             Nellie Olivia Pauline

                                           Quelie Rosalie Sophie

Theresa Urania Vilhelmina

                             and Xesia Yrsa Zephania.

The names of the last three children did not fit the alphabetical pattern but exceeded expectations for ingenuity. They were: 

              Aberta Agir Ostgota, Detolfta Johanna Marie, and Bror Tretton Methodius.                    

While Axel taught music and became a papa repeatedly, several of his children, including Xesia, gravitated toward music and theater. She toured the country drawing slight attention for her performances, for no Lillie Langtry was she.

Meanwhile, Allan ran his magazine, The Journalist, and wrote about everything. During the 1890s, he addressed “The Cigarette Question,” “The Ways of Blackmailers, a risky business that doesn’t always pay,” and “The Typewriter Question.”  

He also complained about “Eating to Honor Somebody”:

It always seems a trifle absurd to me, to call together a lot of men to eat in honor of somebody. The respect expressed by inducing dyspepsia may be genuine. Ovations and oysters, sympathy and soup, releves and roasts, enthusiasm and entrees, homage and hominy, compliments and champagne, may all go very well together but . . . I should prefer a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a quiet corner.

Allan did not hesitate to be honored with a
Chop Suey dinner, given by the Blue Pencil Club 
(1901)

After their marriage, Xesia and Allan lived in Brooklyn until Allan’s father died in 1908. Then Allan retired and began a renovation and expansion of Nabichaugue, the family’s Long Island estate. He and Xesia lived there for the rest of their lives.

When Allan and Xesia renovated Nabichaugue before
World War I, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a long story about it.

After Allan’s death in 1914 the Baroness, as she now started to call herself, drew quite a bit of publicity when she started farming at Nabichaugue to help the war effort.  

It may be a far cry from singing grand opera in the presence of cheering thousands to growing seed corn . . .  but it is understood that Mrs. Allan Forman of this place agrees that producing seed corn, when you hit it right, is fully as pleasant and almost as remunerative as appearing nightly in the footlights.

She was an acclaimed opera singer all along.

Xesia Y. Z. Carlstedt Forman;
passport photo, 1930s

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/04/xesia.html