A Municipal Tragedy

Acupuncture or bail?

My acupuncturist is located on Baxter Street in Chinatown, his office wedged between storefronts that are occupied mostly by bail bondsmen.  They serve the municipal courts, just a few blocks away.  

I take the subway to Canal Street and walk east past the street vendors.  Glancing downtown, I can see the Municipal Building – a wedding cake designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1914.

Even before it was built, the Municipal Building drew controversy.  The landmarks preservation movement in New York City would not fully emerge for another 50 years. But plenty of antiquarians objected to further disrupting a sedate civic center that dated to 1800.  City Hall Park had already been assaulted by a garish Beaux-Arts post office, not to mention the Tweed Courthouse, an enduring symbol of nineteenth-century political corruption.

Municipal Building postcard, 1920s

The antiquarians didn’t stand a chance.  Besides, the 60-story Woolworth Building had just risen nearby, and without a doubt the city was going UP.

By 1984, when I started to work there, the Municipal Building had become shabby with a bit of a roach problem.  Yet fun still could be had since the marriage bureau was located on one of the lower floors and you never knew who would get in the elevator.   

The city’s radio station, WNYC, had called the building home since 1922.  It broadcast from crumbling quarters in the tower at the top.  I came on as an assistant to the director, Mary Perot Nichols, who began her career as a reporter for the Village Voice. 

Mary and her family had moved to Greenwich Village in the early 1950s.  As she became involved in the neighborhood, she kept asking Dan Wolf, then editor of the Voice, why no one was covering Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway through Washington Square Park.*  Finally, Wolf gave her the assignment.

Within a few years, Mary became one of the city’s foremost investigative journalists.  She had dirt on every New York politician and surely that included Mayor Ed Koch, to whom she owed her WNYC appointments in 1978 and 1983.  Mary had resigned in 1979 after Koch ordered the creation of a show nicknamed the “John Hour,” wherein the names of men arrested for patronizing prostitutes would be read on the air. 

The idea, absurdly, was that the men’s embarrassment would lead to a decline in prostitution.

The “John Hour” aired once.  An enraged Mary stormed off.   

Mary Perot Nichols, 1970s
This photo was taken on a balcony of the Municipal Building.

But now it was 1984 and Mary had saved the station by creating the WNYC Foundation and populating its board with movers and shakers.  Formidable and rollicking, she loved her job and thrived on people dropping in and out of her office all day long.  For snacks, she kept a large jar of cherry-flavored chewable Vitamin C tablets on her desk in the same way that my grandmother kept a crystal dish of hard candy on her coffee table.

There was always a crisis, or perhaps Mary’s idiosyncrasies made it seem so.  

One incident was unforgettable.  It involved the city’s Board of Estimate, on which sat the borough presidents, a motley crew representing Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.**

This board mattered a great deal because the city still funded a significant portion of WNYC’s operating expenses, and Mary needed to nail down every vote.  So each year the station prepared a detailed report to convince the borough presidents of WNYC’s worthiness.

The Queens borough president was an affable, beefy Democratic pol named Donald Manes.  He insisted that Mary pay a visit to his house to discuss the vote.  Mary asked me to come along – my one and only ride in a city car. 

We were ushered into the house through the back door.  The air was filled with cigarette smoke.  At the kitchen table, surrounded by men in dark suits, sat Mr. Manes. 

Mary squeezed in next to him.

“Donny,” she said, cutting to the chase. “Have you had a chance to read the report?  We sent it to your office a few weeks ago.”   

“Yes,” he wheezed.  “I got the report.”   

He looked at his palms, then turned them over.  

“I read it,” he said mournfully, and paused.  “But lately I find that I read, but I don’t retain.”   

Everyone stared down at the table.  How shocking to see Donald Manes this way: small, sad, and distracted.

And sure enough, there was a reason.  Within two years, the FBI would implicate Manes in all kinds of payoffs, kickbacks, and patronage.  The web of corruption engulfed several city agencies and many officials.  In March of 1986, facing charges of extortion and bribery, Manes stabbed himself to death with a kitchen knife.

Just seven months later, the Mets won the World Series and Queens sat on top of the world. Alas, too late for Donald Manes, municipal tragedian. 

Donald R. Manes, 1970s

*Robert Moses, an influential developer known as “the master builder,” zealously constructed bridges, parks, beaches, tunnels, and roads during his reign, mid-1920s to early 1960s.  He met his match at Washington Square 

Park, where urban activist Jane Jacobs led the opposition to his proposed highway.

**The Board of Estimate was disbanded in 1989 after the U. S. Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional.   

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/02/a-municipal-tragedy.html?m=1

Teaching History to Immigrants

One of many tours created by Frank Bergen Kelley

Frank Bergen Kelley’s mother descended from Dutch burghers. They peered from the frames of their oil portraits, clasping silver goblets while hunting dogs lurked in the background. 

His father emigrated from Dublin to New York City when he was a young boy and grew up to become a Methodist minister. 

The family lived all over New York State, wherever the minister had an appointment: Kingsbridge, Yonkers, Franklin, Pleasantville, Hartsdale and many more towns.  

But the passion of Frank Bergen Kelley always lay in one place. It was the history of New York City. 

Frank couldn’t wait to get to a place where he could influence how new immigrants, in particular, would learn the history of their nation.  Planning to become a teacher, he earned three degrees from City University of New York, emerging with a doctorate in 1895.

Then he set off to teach at several military academies before landing, in 1899, at DeWitt Clinton, one of the city’s preeminent public high schools which drew boys from across the socio-economic and ethnic spectrum.    

For the next 34 years, this would be the perch from which Frank sparked the connection between citizenship and education.  He did not frown on flag-waving; rather, he believed that a deep understanding of history would nurture the most meaningful, enduring patriotism. 

He also believed that learning history demanded full engagement: eyes and ears, thinking, exploring.

In one of Kelley's guides, he juxtaposed 1909 and 1609 (inset) views
 of Manhattan, probably to commemorate the tricentennial of
Henry Hudson's voyage up the "North River."

Soon enough, Kelley came to the attention of the leaders of the City History Club of New York.  Established in 1896, the club was run by a mix of Gilded Age millionaires, the heirs of Knickerbockers, and socialites, with a sprinkling of antiquarians and genealogists.

The club “exists for Americanization,” its founders stated.  “To develop a better and more intelligent citizenship by means of the study of the history and traditions of the city, and the lives and deeds of the men who have made this city great . . .”

The trustees invited Frank Kelley to become superintendent of the club.  He accepted with delight.  What a perfect fit:  while the board raised money by hosting balls and auctions, Kelley created an educational program comprised of lectures, self-guided tours, and exhibitions.  It was publicized widely.  Recent immigrants especially were encouraged to enroll.

In rapid order, Frank produced at least 12 pocket brochures, including:  A Guide to Greenwich Village, A Guide to Fraunces Tavern (where General George Washington, in 1783, bid farewell to the officers of the Continental Army).  The board of education distributed these free of charge. 

And he lectured all the time, all over the city, in libraries and halls and schools.  Each year he would deliver several series of ten talks, open to the public at no charge, on “The History and Government of New York City.”  Five Sunday afternoon excursions were part of each series.  

Often Kelley lectured as part of a group.  Guest speakers included college presidents, diplomats, and professional historians.

In 1903, more than one million New Yorkers attended public lectures. 

From one of Kelley's reports: singing the 
National Anthem prior to a lecture about government

By 1906, when the City History Club celebrated its tenth anniversary, its programs were thoroughly entwined with the work of the public schools.  This meant that the club’s officers, trustees, vice presidents, and advisers had a stake in the education of all children who lived in New York City. 

Supporters included the descendants of New York's founding families:  Virginia Gildersleeve (Dean of Barnard College), George W. Wickersham (U. S. Attorney General and internationalist), Mariana Van Rensselaer (historian and reformer), Robert De Forest (longtime trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Frank A. Vanderlip (journalist and founder of the first Montessori School in the U. S.).

Lovingly guided by Frank Bergen Kelley.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/02/teaching-history-to-immigrants.html?m=1

Of Time and the Blizzard

Snowy day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The day before my father died last March, I moved in close to his right ear and asked him a few questions. 

“Do you remember Primrose Avenue?” I said.

That’s the name of a street near the house where we lived when my brother and I were growing up in Mt. Vernon, N. Y. 

Primroses are small colorful old-fashioned flowers. Primrose the street was pretty, too. It began in a vale (an appropriately antiquated word) near the business district, then meandered along, past a small park with lilac bushes and a few benches.  As it climbed a hill, the street widened with grand houses on either side, some with marble steps at the curb.  These had been used for carriages in the 1890s.  

Primrose Avenue postcard, around 1905

Now it is 2018 and a big storm has swirled into New York City.  Down on the street, you can hear the snow crashing into the wind.  I remember this sound from my childhood when snowstorms occurred routinely from November to March.  We trudged to school through banks, drifts and slush.  Sometimes the driving snow stung our eyes.

During the winter of 1970, a blizzard socked the New York metropolitan area. It lasted a few days.  I can still conjure that wonderful sense of being stuck inside.  Even if one had an appointment, it would be impossible to get there.  Everything was closed; only our homes were open for business. 

One night, the snow finally stopped.  Looking out the window, we saw a few flakes trickling down.  My father and I decided to take a walk.  In boots and layers of sweaters coats scarves hats gloves, we stepped outside.

We started around the block and came to Primrose Avenue.  The last foot of snow had not been plowed and we couldn’t find the sidewalk, so we walked up the middle of the street. 

I remember a pink glow, which must have been the snow reflecting the streetlight.  Also the crunch, crunch of our boots.  I also recall, dimly, our conversation.

My father reading to me (left) and my brother (right), early 1960s

My father was a talented writer and editor who worked largely with dry bureaucratic prose.  At heart, though, he had a true literary sensibility.  Because of him, there were volumes of Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Housman, and Keats in the house; also such novels as The Naked and the Dead, Of Human Bondage, and Johnny Got His Gun.  My mother recommended King’s Row and anything by John O’Hara, but he urged on me Lolita and You Can’t Go Home Again.

After his death, I found notes for the book reviews that he wrote during his years as a newspaper reporter.  It was a good way to make extra money and get free books. In 1947, for example, his reviews included All the King's Men and a thriller called The Big Clock.

Who knows why he also was reviewing Boswell’s Life of Johnson (published in 1791), but of it he noted simply: “Had to choke this one down.”

Back to Primrose Avenue. 

As we walked through the pink light and dwindling snowflakes, he imparted something magical to me.  I believe it involved the exhilarating connection between literature and experience.  The scene, the shadow, the words and characters – you could always return to them, or call them up.  And of course, what he said turned out to be true.

That’s why I’m glad that New York is finally getting a snowstorm, this snowstorm, the first one since his death.  It feels like I’ve crossed a continent to get back to Primrose Avenue and he’s there with me, talking and walking in the unplowed world.

Throughout his life, my father jotted down the titles
and authors of books he wanted to read.

Met photo by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/01/of-time-and-blizzard.html?m=1

Snow and Ice

"It was a lithographer's dream of winter"
(from Letting Go by Philip Roth, 1962)

Photo by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/01/blog-post.html?m=1

The Laugh Died on Her Lips

Socializing in the Tenderloin District, 1900s
(still from a film by Thomas A. Edison)

At dawn they spilled onto the narrow sidewalk outside an opium den.  It was the winter of 1908.  The three women and their younger male companions had begun the evening carousing in Manhattan’s Tenderloin district, a treacherous neighborhood filled with thieves and slummers drawn like moths to saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors.

Now, as the clock struck 5:30, drunk and stoned out of their heads, they staggered along Bayard Street in Chinatown, clinging to each other and veering away from the alleys where hooligans lurked.  They made their way toward the elevated train, heading uptown.

No one was looking out for anyone else. 

The women were Annie Conning, who worked as a maid at the Chelsea Hotel, Rose McGuire, and Mabel Cuzzie.  The three men would remain unidentified.    

Convergence of elevated lines, Chatham Square, 1900s

Once on the train, they passed around an open bottle of champagne while yelling, laughing and taunting the other passengers, who were laborers trying to grab some sleep on the way to work.

One of the group, a man who sported a gray coat, dozed off.  While he was sleeping, the others took his watch, chain and tie pin. When he awoke and realized his watch was gone, he leaped toward Mabel and grabbed at the muff she wore on her hands. 

Then a gun went off and Annie, who had risen from her seat, dropped dead on the floor, shot through the heart.

A pistol fell from the muff.  The man in the gray coat picked it up, slipped it into his pocket, and swiftly left the train with the other two men.

Meanwhile, the motorman and conductor seized Rose and Mabel.  The police booked them and learned that Annie Conning went by the name “Queenie.”  Of the three women, the cops reported, Queenie was the “oldest and the handsomest.”  

Mabel had met Queenie and the man in the gray coat, whose name was Ed, the previous night in a bar on 26^th Street.

The next day, the denizens of the Tenderloin flocked downtown to the morgue.  Queenie’s employer, Mrs. Callahan of the Chelsea Hotel, identified Annie Conning and explained that she came from a wealthy Delaware family and had a husband out there somewhere.

The police detained Rose McGuire and sent Mabel Cuzzie to the Tombs, Manhattan’s notoriously grim prison.

Postcard of the horrible Tombs, 1900s

A letter carrier named Samuel Lipschitz who had been a passenger on the train and observed the “antics of the party” (in the words of the police) swore that the killing was unintentional.  Still, while the inquest may have vindicated both women, Rose and Mabel paid a price whereas the three men just disappeared into the workday.    

The conduct of the group typifies antisocial behavior among working-class New Yorkers during the early twentieth century, with the Tenderloin playing a big part.  After the 1863 draft riots, the areas populated by immigrants stabilized, if uneasily.  But the Tenderloin never quite returned to a neighborhood of peaceable Irish Catholics.  In 1900, it saw another race riot while crime and prostitution increased.*

It’s not surprising that the group of six began their evening in the Tenderloin.  Nothing good could ever come of it.  

An opium den in Chinatown, New York City,
early twentieth century (possibly staged)

*The diarist George Templeton Strong called the Tenderloin a “noctivagous strumpetocracy.” It’s an odd phrase, evocative of Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism,” which means night-walking (noctivagous) prostitutes (strumpets) in control of the government. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/01/the-laugh-died-on-her-lips.html?m=1

Father Knickerbocker's Ball

The old-timers never forgot the winter of 1917.  At night the rivers froze like Colonial times, and during the day the frosty air held up a brilliant blue sky.  Brutal cold would not interfere with a gala evening, however.  On February 5 at 9 o’clock, the carriages started rolling up to the sumptuous Manhattan restaurant, Sherry’s.  It was time for Father Knickerbocker’s Ball, with a special treat in store for the guests who alighted. 

It all went back to the administration of President Washington.  After his inauguration in New York City, he and Martha moved to Philadelphia.  There she gave a series of receptions, entertaining fashionable women in a manner that some thought too regal, even anti-Republican.  But the chosen who attended never got over it.

Lady Washington's Reception
Line engraving after Daniel F. Huntington's painting (1865)

One hundred and twenty-eight years later, the descendants of those ladies weren’t over it, either.  For this reason, in honor of Father Knickerbocker’s Ball, they decided to dress up in period costume and recreate one of Mrs. Washington’s receptions.  

Their purpose was one that their ancestors never could have imagined:  to raise money for an organization that had been aiding immigrants since 1896 – the City History Club of New York.

Starting with the arrival of the Irish and Germans well before the Civil War, charitable, religious, and social service organizations had supported immigrants at home and at work, largely with the goal of assimilation.

Toward the turn of the twentieth century, as millions continued to arrive at American shores, progressivism began to influence the thinking of leading New Yorkers.  The City History Club, founded by a group of patricians, newly minted millionaires, and the descendants of colonists, embraced the ideals of the progressive movement.

A surgeon named Robert Abbe initiated the idea.  His ancestors emigrated from England during the seventeenth century, bequeathing to him an impeccable pedigree.  Abbe’s father, a philanthropist and businessman deeply committed to the Baptist Church, and his mother, the daughter of the founder of the Colgate Soap Company, encouraged their son to become a physician.   

Dr. Abbe’s work in radiology and plastic surgery was pioneering.  He visited Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris in 1904, and subsequently introduced radiation therapy to the U. S.

He told friends that the club was for his wife, really.  Catherine Abbe loved learning about the history of the city.  A fierce suffragist, she happily participated in the D.A.R., Colonial Dames of America, and other exclusive organizations which had been around for decades. 

Mrs. Robert Abbe
Cecilia Beaux, 1898
(Brooklyn Museum)

But this organization would be different. 

While Abbe and his colleagues stated that “the club exists for Americanization,” they enunciated a deeper idea, that reflexive patriotism is meaningless.  Informed citizenship is a product of historical understanding.  And that can only come through education and exploration.

The City History Club planned to use the city of New York as a laboratory to help immigrants reach that understanding.

In the words of the club’s superintendent, Frank Bergen Kelley:  

The city becomes more than a mere collection of buildings, a despised place in which one must live, but for which there is no admiration, no love, no regard.  Instead it becomes a living organism with an interesting and honored past . . . 

The City History Club sponsored public
lectures, exhibitions, and tours.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/12/father-knickerbockers-ball.html?m=1

Joan of Stones

Ready to charge across the Hudson River, an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc overlooks Riverside Park on the west side of Manhattan.  It arose in December 1915, six years after two energetic men – a distinguished mineralogist and jewelry company executive and a patron of the arts – set out to honor the French saint in New York City.

The 20-foot high bronze statue, atop a granite pedestal, has never been a major attraction.  Admirers always note, however, that it is the work of a woman sculptor, Anna Vaughan Hyatt.  Her sculptures also show up at the Bronx Zoo and Columbia University, among other places.

Anna Hyatt 
(Columbia University)

Anna studied at the Art Students League under Gutzon Borglum, who created Mount Rushmore.  In 1909, she entered a plaster cast of a statue of Joan of Arc in the 1910 Paris Salon, where it received an honorable mention.  Subsequently, Hyatt would sculpt Joan in bronze for the New York City memorial.

As a child, the martyr Jeanne d’Arc experienced visions that called her to drive the English from France and restore the Roman Catholic King Charles VII to the throne.  She survived the battlefield and court and church intrigue only to be captured and burned at the stake by the English, at the age of 19 in 1431.*

Joan of Arc had been gone for several centuries when she came back into vogue.  During the late nineteenth century, thousands of French citizens began to make pilgrimages to her birthplace and new statues of her were erected in towns across France.

The reason for the excitement was the Church’s decision to beatify her in a series of ceremonies at St. Peter’s in Rome in April 1909.  More than 30,000 French pilgrims, dozens of French cardinals and bishops, and all kinds of “notables” attended. 

In the U. S., George Frederick Kunz, a mineralogist and former vice president of Tiffany & Co., and J. Sanford Saltus, a philanthropist and the heir to a steel fortune, decided that New York City should honor the new saint.  Both men revered French painting and sculpture, were recipients of the Legion of Honor, and felt a strong affinity with the people of France.

George Frederick Kunz

They co-founded the Joan of Arc Statue Committee in 1910. Within three years, Kunz – who was the real driver – had raised $20,000 for the construction of a statue. 

"In working for a statue to honor Joan of Arc here in New York,” Kunz told the New York Times, “we are not thinking of anything having to do either with religion or woman suffrage.  She represents, I think, the best type of true womanhood.”

He continued chauvinistically:

We are beginning to realize more and more that New York is the most wonderful city in the world and the monument must be an ornament to it.  As long as it is what it should be we do not care who makes it, a Russian, an Italian, an American, or a Hottentot.

Meanwhile, Anna Hyatt had already started to work on the statue, using her niece as a model for the figure.   

Kunz turned his attention to the pedestal.  The man had traveled the world in search of rocks, gems, opalized wood, meteoric iron and the like.  In 1900 he had procured the Star of India for J. P. Morgan, who later donated it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.


Kunz was passionate about stone and hoped to use it to infuse the monument with meaning.     

For this reason, the granite pedestal contains stones from the castle at Rouen where Joan of Arc was imprisoned; from the cathedral at Reims where Joan watched the coronation of Charles VII in 1429; from Domremy, the village where Joan was born; and from the city of Orleans, where Joan led French forces to victory during the Hundred Years’ War. 

Statue unveiling, December 1915;
Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in left distance. 

It was Kunz’s idea, as well, to bury a copper box inside the pedestal.  The box contained mementoes of the era, including American and French currency, commemorative medals, and more than a dozen letters and speeches including salutations from President Wilson.

Lastly, a specimen of Staurolite, also known as “fairy stone,” went into the box.  The crystal symbolized the tears shed for Joan of Arc, Kunz explained.

In December 1915, Jean J. Jusserand, French ambassador to the U.S., dedicated the statue.  By this time, of course, the Great War had started and Jusserand’s message of fighting to the death held both poignancy and urgency.

Jean J. Jusserand
delivered remarks at the dedication

Through the war and for some years after, ceremonies were held regularly at the Joan of Arc memorial.  Kunz often participated.  On November 2, 1918 – nine days before the Armistice – he joined a French bishop to place a wreath on the pedestal.  The bishop noted that American soldiers in France were pressing to victory “like the men led by Joan of Arc.” 

Dr. Kunz (as he liked to be called) had launched his career in 1876 when he sold a spectacular tourmaline to Charles Lewis Tiffany.  Kunz would serve as Tiffany’s chief gemologist for the rest of his life, discovering and analyzing gorgeous, exotic stones.  The crystal known as Kunzite was named in his honor after he identified it in the Connecticut countryside in 1902.   

After the death of Kunz’s first wife, he waited ten years before remarrying a young woman aviator.

It’s kind of funny that her name was Opal.

Kunzite

*A highly abbreviated account. She also was charged as a cross-dresser.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/11/joan-of-stones.html?m=1