History in the Making: Gangster's Funeral Edition

Mary Help of Christian Church pictured in the 1920s (Courtesy NYPL)

Hail Mary:  There's a rally tomorrow evening at 6pm to save Mary Help of Christian Church in the East Village.  This unique building from 1917, once serving the area's Italian immigrant population, has been bought by a developer and is slated for demolition. The rally is in front of the church at East 12th Street and Avenue A. [GVSHP]

And here's a brief history of Mary Help of Christians Church. It's where they had the funeral of a few noted gangster, including that of Giuseppe Masseria in his solid silver coffin.  And Sara Delano Roosevelt, granddaughter of FDR, got married here. But, sure, let's rip it down and put an ordinary condo please.  [Daytonian In Manhattan]

Let the music play: And is Tin Pan Alley in danger too? [Lost City]

What's that ringing?: Riverside Church is in no danger, thank goodness, nor is the musical secret it holds: the 100-ton carillon in the bell tower. [Narratively]

Wild on wheels: And since we're on some creative Narratively content, I think you'll like this interactive tale of Annie Londonderry, the woman who attempted to bike around the world in 1894. [Narratively]

Unconventional: In our latest podcast on the history of the Limelight, I made mention of the number of convents in New York City over the year. Well, Forgotten NY goes one further and does a tour of the street actually named for one -- Convent Avenue -- featuring the beautiful neo-Gothic architecture of City College. [Forgotten New York]

And are you signed up yet for the Bowery Boys weekly newsletter Five Points?  We're recommending out-of-the-way, oddball, historical themed events for your weekend.  Last week was Humphrey Bogart, sheep shearing, a book sale, Miss Subways and a tea party with Aaron Burr's wives. What's happening for Memorial Day weekend? [Sign up here]

Close shave: A century ago, barbers riot through New York, leaving half-shaved men in vacated barber shops

A barber shop at the Hotel de Gink on the Bowery, circa 1910-15 [LOC]

The fight for worker's rights swept through a variety of occupations over a century ago as New York City laborers rebelled against unfair corporate practices and unsafe working conditions.

Garment workers marched the avenues in protest following the tragic Triangle Factory fire of 1911, as did underpaid street cleaners and ashcart men, leaving heaps of un-retrieved rubbish on the street in protest.  The following year, the waiters and staff of dozens of New York's finest hotels took to the streets for better pay. Why, by 1913, even some players on the Brooklyn Dodgers were unionizing!

And one hundred years ago this month, it was the barbers turn to march.

Many of the same leaders from other occupational strikes were at the center of the barber strike, which got its footing in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville.  Soon, barbers across the city had dropped their razors and foaming brushes and left work in consolidation for better hours.

A letter-writer to a wonderfully named 1913 journal called Journeyman Barber, Hairdresser, Cosmetologist and Proprietor wrote, "I will say that on a certain bright morning in the month of May, I found that the entire barber industry was paralyzed.  Nearly 13,000 workingmen were out on strike. Isn't that a miracle?  Thirteen thousand barbers on strike!"

Mayhem reigned upon the craggy, unshaven faces of Brooklyn men.  "From Bushwick to Bay Ridge haggard men go about with the telltale blemish encroaching upon their visages like a noxious fungus.  Half-shaved men slink about the alleys, avoiding the light of day." [source]

Scenes of violence did erupt throughout the city, as strike-breakers were attacked and angry mobs filled the street.  A mob of 5,000 strikers -- "singing socialistic songs," noted the New York Tribune -- clashed with police in Brownsville on May 7th, customers fleeing barber shops in "a shower of vegetables" and the occasional flying rock.

Below: a cheeky editorial cartoon from the May 8th 1913 Evening World

A couple days later, thousands of barbers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to Union Square, gathering up working men along the way, emptying barber shops of employees and leaving stunned customers in their chairs.  In Union Square the strikers heard speeches from organizers including Joseph James Ettor (pictured below), who had helped organize the waiter's strike just a few months before.

The Evening World makes curious note of one exception to this striking throng. "ONLY LADY BARBERS WORK IN BROOKLYN WHILE MEN STRIKE" went the headline.  "Such a business as the feminine barber shops did!"

Manhattan barbers joined their Brooklyn brothers by mid-month, setting up a Manhattan strike headquarters at 140 Second Avenue.  (Today, that the address of the Ukrainian East Village restaurant.)  Arlington Hall at nearby St. Mark's Place was the scene of several union gatherings for striking barbers.

Descriptions of rioting barbers sound a bit like scenes from the Civil War draft riots, although much of that description was the newspaper flourish of the day.

Below: Thousands of barber shop workers and their supporters gather in Union Square in 1913. I believe this is the northwest corner of the park. (LOC)

But it does sound like a violent few days in Manhattan.  Shop windows were smashed by rioters in the Ladies Mile shopping district, and altercations with store owners put many in the hospital.  The Sun noted: "Window smashing and attacks on workers, common all day, culminated in dozens of small riots all over the city, so many and so rapid that police headquarters heard of them in bunches."

Eventually, the strike proved a success, as barbershop owners agreed to worker's demands.  According to one source, instead of working up to 92 hours a week, employers now agreed to the relatively mild 62 hours a week for their workers, with one entire day off on Sunday! [source]

"2,300 Boss Barbers Capitulate," declared the Evening World on May 30th. "Brooklyn Strike Over." By the first of June, it was safe again to go to a barber shop.

Green-Wood Cemetery, Katz's Deli and The Cloisters: Three great New York institutions, three big anniversaries

Green-Wood Cemetery celebrates its 175th year as Brooklyn's oldest greenspace, populated with deceased politicians, writers and actors.  It's the final resting place for some of New York's most famous and notorious characters -- Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, DeWitt Clinton and Boss Tweed among them.

The Museum of the City of New York debuts its new exhibit "A Beautiful Way To Go: New York's Green-wood Cemetery" this week, while the cemetery itself is planning a host of events, including trolley tours, concerts and their popular twilight tours. (The nighttime tour this weekend is sold out, but you can visit their website for future events.)



It's a good time to chow down at Katz's Delicatessen again on the occasion of its 125th birthday.  It was in the year 1888 that a deli officially opened at the southeast corner of Ludlow and Houston, serving the neighborhood's immigrant community.  It was sold to the Katzs in 1910s, renamed and moved to its present location.

They're throwing a big birthday bash on May 31 with all proceeds going to another great Lower East Side institution, the Henry Street Settlement.  But if you can't make that, you can always go online and buy anniversary souvenirs.

And finally, the Cloisters Museum, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Fort Tryon Park, is celebrating its 75th birthday this month.  This unusual collection of European buildings were shipped over and reassembled upon a famous Revolutionary War site by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and they house one of America's most beautiful collections of medieval artworks, including, of course, the Unicorn Tapestries (another gift from Rockefeller).

Opening this week is 'Search for the Unicorn: An Exhibition in Honor of The Cloisters' 75th Anniversary', a perfect time to revisit these strange, fantastical pieces of art.

If the weather's nice, why not visit all three? There just happen to be Bowery Boys podcasts on all three places! You can find them all for free on iTunes and other podcast aggregates. Or download them from these links:

-- Green-Wood Cemetery
-- Katz Delicatessen
-- The Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park

Green-Wood pic courtesy NYPL; Cloisters courtesy Met Museum

Sign up for "Five Points Weekend," the new Bowery Boys newsletter!

"Five Points" by George Catlin, painted in 1827, when it was Paradise Square and not yet the ramshackle slum of yore.

The Bowery Boys are excited to be embarking on an exciting new project that will bring New York City history closer to you than ever before -- with our "Five Points Weekend" newsletter.

What's in a "Five Points Weekend"?

Starting in next week's debut newsletter, the two of us will recommend five free (or almost free) activities in the city that relate to history happenings that weekend -- from special tours and museum exhibits to commemorations and parties.

Our five choices will be sent to your inbox every Wednesday morning, just in time for the weekend.

We hope to bring a mix of the fascinating, the informative and the zany, from across all five boroughs. What might we choose to include?

• Ghost tours of a famous cemetery? Check. 
• An interesting (and overlooked) exhibit in a small museum in the Village? Absolutely. 
• Actors in period dress? We're there!

Sign up! 

To receive the Bowery Boys "Five Points Weekend" email, please sign up here.

We'll see you there!

Thanks in advance for subscribing. We're so excited to give a little extra love to those New York history events and exhibits that make this city, and its story, so special. We look forward to seeing you there!

Submit an event

Do you have a New York City history-themed event you'd like us to consider for inclusion in the newsletter? Please email Tom about the event. Be sure to include details about location, hours, admission charges and a link for more information. Many thanks!

The Corona Ash Dump: Brooklyn's burden on Queens, a vivid literary inspiration and bleak, rat-filled landscape

Ah, take in the horrid reality of the Corona marshes with their ashes, manure and garbage! (Courtesy CUNY)

Outside of probably Hell, there is no literary landscape as forlorn and soul-crushing as the ash dumps of Corona, Queens.

"This is the valley of ashes," writes Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, "a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."

The Corona ash dump was a stain on Queens every bit as real as Fresh Kills landfill would later be on Staten Island, a repository for the detritus from Brooklyn coal furnace that created crud-caked mountains amid a salty marsh.

The salt marshes sat relatively untouched, along with other large stretches of the newly formed borough. The Brooklyn Ash Removal Company moved here in 1909 after it outgrew its dumping grounds on a small island in Jamaica Bay named Barren Island.  (The island no longer exists per se; landfill connected it to the mainland and Floyd Bennett Field was built there in 1930)

Below: A sanitation worker carting carting away a full barrel of ash. The open cart would be filled, taken to barges, then sent to far-away dumps. In the 1910s, Brooklyn ash went to Corona. {NYPL}

With the increase of coal-burning furnaces in the late 19th century, the city had yet another sanitation crisis sullying the streets.  Even by 1910s, New York was trying to clamp down on the situation -- literally -- attempting to get residents and private businesses to cover their ash carts and containers "as to protect pedestrians from the annoyance of flying ash dust." [source]

In Queens, mountains of choking, awful ash made for poor living conditions for neighboring Corona on one side, Flushing on the other.  It was a constant eyesore for early commuters, as the Long Island Railroad went right past it, as did the main thoroughfares of northern Long Island -- roads taken by many of the wealthy 'Gold Coast' families.

One ash pile was so large -- almost 100 feet -- that it was christened Mount Corona.  And of course it wasn't just ash; barges filled with animal manure docked here as well, awaiting local farmers who used the waste as fertilizer.

And new menace was introduced in 1920  -- an infestation of rats. "War Declared Upon Rats," declared the New York Times. An army of exterminators were sent to wipe out the colony of rats that lived among the ashen meadow dumps.

Below: From 1897, loading a scow full of ash to be taken to the local dump (NYPL)

Believe it or not, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company tried to convince residents that presence of the grim, brimstone terrain next to their homes was getting rid of pests. When they were taken to court in 1923, "charged with permitting dense smoke to issue from the dumps," they claimed the dumping grounds were good for the salt marshes, as they helped rid the neighborhood of mosquitoes!

With the population of Queens almost doubling during the 1920s, it seemed the days of the Corona Ash Dump were numbered. Enter Robert Moses, with his dreams of a large and spectacular park for the growing borough.  He swiftly moved in, bought all the marshland, all the mountains of ash, and filled in wetlands and the dark hills to create Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.  If you've been to Citi Field or the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, then you have sat upon land that was once the Corona ash dumps.

The Great Gatsby's New York City, in ten different scenes, from the Queensboro Bridge to the Plaza Hotel

Times Square at night, 1921 (NYPL)

BOWERY BOYS BOOK OF THE MONTH Each month I'll pick a book -- either brand new or old, fiction or non-fiction -- that offers an intriguing take on New York City history, something that uses history in a way that's uniquely unconventional or exposes a previously unseen corner of our city's complicated past.  Then over the next month, I'll run an article or two about some of historical themes that are brought up in the selection. 

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I re-read The Great Gatsby a few weeks ago on purpose, not because I had a school assignment. Unlike my first experience with Gatsby at age 14, I actually read it, without the signposts of a Cliff's Notes to tell me what I was supposed to be getting from it.

Of course the impetus for re-discovering F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece is the flashy new Baz Luhrmann film coming out this weekend, which uses the text as an excuse to throw an expensive 3-D party, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Beyonce, large champagne bottles, fifty shades of pink, the ghost of Mae West and a whole host of other drunk guests.

Few works of American literature have been as comprehensively analyzed as The Great Gatsby, by which I mean, of course, over-analyzed.  One reason I'm excited about the film, with all its superficial decadence on display, is that it seems to discard several decades of nine-dimensional analyses that have settled upon the book like a thick shroud of dust.  Maybe that's wearing white to a funeral, so to speak, but true masterpieces can weather an occasional glare.

The Great Gatsby deserves to be savored for many reasons that I had forgotten or never noticed through the filter of creating a B+ term paper in my teenage years.  It's one of the most economic stories of the 20th century, an exercise of graceful control, an epic with powerful restraint.  In comparison, try reading Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned -- an embittered New York book twice as long with half as much to say-- to appreciate the brevity of Gatsby.

Fitzgerald uses the locales of 1922 New York City so precisely -- jetting around Long Island and over the bridge to Manhattan -- that it seems almost possible to map the characters' every move.

There are three principal types of locations in The Great Gatsby.  About half the novel's actions take place on either East Egg or West Egg, fictional northern Long Island villages still graced with the mansions of Gilded Age millionaires.  Characters escape to Manhattan, big and glittering, either to entertain their mistresses or to dine with gentlemen of suspicious occupation.  And then, of course, there's the wasteland in between, where secrets are laid bare and burnt to ash.  Welcome to Queens!

Fitzgerald paints a very lush, cockeyed view of New York City in the early 1920s.  Here's some of the more interesting city locations you'll visit as you read along, and some of the words he used to describe them:

Queensboro Bridge
"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world."

'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge,' I thought; 'anything at all....'  

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder."

The 1920s were more than just a decade of speakeasies and spendthrifts. It was the decade of immense growth for Manhattan's outer boroughs, none more so than Queens, thanks mostly to the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909 and a connection to New York's new subway system.

The IRT Astoria line
"[W]e sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easy-going blue coupe."

Astoria's elevated train opened in 1917, at the time servicing only trains of the IRT. (The trains of the BMT a little too wide to use the stations.)  So as Gatsby, Nick Carraway and the gang race underneath it to get onto the Queensboro, they're really experiencing something quite new, a symbol of New York's expansion into Queens.

Corona Ash Dumps
"We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserved saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds.  Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us."

Once the place where New York and Brooklyn dumped their ash from coal-burning furnaces, the old ash dumps of Corona turned a bit of Queens into a gloomy and unpleasant landscape.  It would take Robert Moses and dreams of a World's Fair to transform the ashen landscape into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in the 1930s. (Picture courtesy the Queens Museum)

Fifth Avenue at 66th Street, approx. 1900, from the Albertype Co. (Courtesy LOC)

Upper Fifth Avenue
"We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner."

This was not as bizarre as it sounds, for nearby Central Park actually had sheep grazing in it until 1934.  Granted, they would have been on the other side of the park, in today's aptly named Sheep Meadow, of course.

Above 158th Street and Riverside Drive, 1921 (NYPL)

Washington Heights
"We went on, cutting back again over the Park towards the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses.  Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and went haughtily in."

Once the respite of wealthy manors in the 19th century, the upper reaches of Manhattan gave way to middle class housing at the start of the new century.  Myrtle's perch here in Washington Heights would have been appropriately out of the way in the 1920s.

The Murray Hill Hotel
"After that, if the night was mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over 33d Street to the Pennsylvania Station....I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove."

Opening in 1884 to serve the needs of those arriving from Grand Central Depot, the Murray Hill Hotel kept its halls fully occupied until its demolition in 1946.  The Daytonian In Manhattan blog has a wonderful tale of the hotel's colorful history.

Above: 42nd Street in 1926 (Courtesy Kings Academy)

Forty-Second Street

"Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby for lunch.  Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man."

From the July 16, 1912 edition of the New York Evening World

Hotel Metropole
"The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfsheim gloomily.  "Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there."

The Hotel Metropole was a swanky Times Square hotspot located at 147 W. 43rd Street.  Mr. Wolfsheim (himself a stand-in for gangster Arnold Rothstein) spends a moment recounting the assassination of Herman Rosenthal, gunned down by the mob.  Charles Becker, who was accused of orchestrating the murder, became the first police officer to ever be given the death penalty.

We talk about the Rosenthal assassination in our podcast Case Files of the New York Police Department.

Above: The southwest corner of Central Park, photo by the Wurts Brothers (NYPL)

Central Park
"When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park.  The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of little girls, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.

We passed a barrier of dark treets, and then the facade of Fifth-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park."

The Plaza, photo by the Wurts Brothers (NYPL)

"And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park."

The Plaza Hotel
The beginning of a string of violent acts in the book begins here at The Plaza, at perhaps the epitome of class in the early 1920s. It was only open about 15 years when the events of the book take place here.

Check out our podcast history of the Plaza Hotel and some more glamorous pictures of the hotel here.

The many lives of the Limelight, aka the facade formerly known as the Church of the Holy Communion

Above: The Church of the Holy Communion -- and once the quite infamous nightclub Limelight -- as the less lauded follow-up, called Avalon.  Within a couple years, the club would be transformed again -- into a high-end retail experience.  Below: Michael Alig, one of its more notorious nightly residents. (source)

PODCAST If you had told 1840s religious leader William Augustus Muhlenberg that his innovative new Church of the Holy Communion, designed by renown architect Richard Upjohn, would become the glittering seat of drugs and debauchery 150 years later, he might have burned it down then and there.

But thankfully, this lovely building is still with us, proving to be one of the most flexible examples of building use in New York City history. 

This unusual tale begins with the captivating relationship between Muhlenberg (the grandson of America's first Speaker of the House) and Anne Ayres, the First Sister in charge of the Sisterhood of the Holy Communion. The two of them helped create one of New York's great hospital centers. But was something else going on between them? 

The Church of the Holy Communion survives the elevated railroad and the fashionable stores of Ladies Mile, and weathers the various fortunes of the neighborhood.  When it is finally sold and deconsecrated, it briefly houses an intellectual collective and a drug rehabilitation center before being bought by Canadian club impresario Peter Gatien, who turns it into the Limelight, an iconic and sacrilegious symbol of New York nightlife.  And in recent years, the old church has morphed into a rather unique retail experience -- shopping mall and department store!

To get this week's episode, simply download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, subscribe to our RSS feed or get it straight from our satellite site.

You can also listen to the show on Stitcher streaming radio and Player FM from your mobile devices.

Or listen to straight from here:
The Bowery Boys: The Limelight -- Church, Nightclub and Mall

________________________________________________________________
The Church of the Holy Communion in 1846, from an illustration by TD Booth.  The asymmetrical shape of the church was innovative for the time, as was the irregular position of the brownstone bricks along its walls. It had every indication of being a medieval country church, but for the fact of it being on a street corner at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street! (NYPL)

William Augustus Muhlenberg, grandson of Frederick Muhlenberg (America's first Speaker of the House), was a visionary religious leader.  He opened Church of the Holy Communion as a way to further his progressive religious views.  Pictured below in a carte de visite, probably in the 1860s. (Courtesy NYPL)

Muhlenberg's reputation was greatly bolstered by Anne Ayres, who became the leading sister as the Reverend's  Sisterhood of the Holy Communion, the first Anglican convent of its kind in America.  Ayres helped Muhlenberg with most of the church's major projects and penned an ecstatic biography after his death.  You can read Ayres' biography of Muhlenberg here.

Muhlenberg and Ayres founded a small infirmary near the church, then later expanded it at Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, becoming the first location of St. Luke's Hospital.  As you can tell from the original hospital building, it seems to reflect a bit of the architecture of the Church of the Holy Communion. (Pic courtesy NYPL)

A view from 1895, possibly of a Sunday crowd leaving the church. Vendors like this pretzel seller gathered on the street below, selling treats to shoppers of Ladies Mile.  The church would have been in the heart of New York's major shopping district during the Gilded Age, with grand department stores stretching on either  side of the street. (Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York)

The Church of the Holy Communion, enveloped in thick ivy, as it looked in September 1907.  It also appears this photo was taken in the early afternoon, as the shadow of the elevated railroad begins to creep across the street. (Courtesy Museum of the City of New York)

Peter Gatien, pictured here in a 1993 issue of New York Magazine. The Canadian club owner bought the old church and transformed it into a nightclub in 1983.

The Limelight was a celebrity hotspot from the very opening in 1983.  When William Burroughs had his 70th birthday at the club in 1984, the young new superstar Madonna came by to wish him well. (Photo by Wolfgang Wesener, courtesy here)



But why conjure real celebrities when you could make some yourself!  By the early 1990s, the club kid set the tone for the Limelight, further turning the old church of Muhlenberg into a surreal playground of music and drugs.

Jane's Walk this weekend! Better than a Moses Walk

If you see large clusters of people walking around historic neighborhoods this weekend, drop what you're doing and join them.  The Municipal Art Society celebrates the May 4th birthday of urban planner Jane Jacobs with dozens of free walking tours this weekend, led by volunteers through a great many corners of New York City.  

From the Municipal Art Society website:

"On Saturday, May 4 and Sunday, May 5, thousands of New Yorkers will come together for Jane’s Walk NYC – an annual series of 100+ FREE guided walks (and bike rides!) throughout New York’s five boroughs. Registration is NOT required. Whether you choose to stroll through neighborhoods you love or discover new neigborhoods you’ve never visited, you’ll enjoy this international program created to commemorate the life and legacy of urbanist Jane Jacobs."

Visit the Municipal Art Society's website for a complete listing of tours.

The five tours that personally looks the most intreguing to me:

-- Manhattan: The Lake That Shaped Manhattan: Collect Pond and the Five Points (May 4 at 3pm)
-- Manhattan: 1000 Steps: Walk Broadway from the Battery to the Bronx (May 4 at 10am and May 5 at noon)
-- Brooklyn: Red Hook: Past and Post Sandy (May 4 and May 5, starting at 9am)
-- Roosevelt Island: FDR Four Freedoms Park (May 4, starting at noon)
-- Staten Island: A Ramble from Bentley Street to Billopp Manor in Staten Island (May 5, starting at noon)

However, if you're a contrarian and would prefer staking out on your very own Robert Moses walk, here's a map of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Watch out for traffic!

May 1st is Moving Day (or at least it used to be)

May 1st used to be the day that yearly apartment leases ended, resulting in a fury of chaotic furniture relocation known as Moving Day.   The April 25, 1897 New York Tribune insert below gently lampoons the event.

This was really the worst traffic day in New York each year, as thousands of people shuffled around with their possessions.  The first moving services for hire were essentially Long Island farmers with wagons to rent.

"High rents, incommodious dwellings, & necessity combine to crowd our streets with carts overloaded with furniture & hand barrows with sofas, chairs, sideboards, looking glasses & pictures, so as to render the sidewalks almost impassable," said John Pintard in 1833.

So what happened to Moving Day?  The subway changes everything, basically, as did the construction of new homes in boroughs outside of Manhattan.   By 1913, the Evening World discovered: "[t]he rapid transit facilities have enabled hundreds to move further out, and east side landlords say they have more vacant apartments than ever before. Hence rents are cheaper and fewer are unable to pay up."

Somebody should tell JL Kesner's Department Store on Sixth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets. Their 1913 advertisement in that same issue featured the following:

 

In Central Park, heated reactions to the assassination of Martin Luther King, while business booms at movie theaters

WARNING The article contains a couple light spoilers about last night's 'Mad Men' on AMC.  If you're a fan of the show, come back once you're watched the episode.  But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don't watch the show at all.  You can find other articles in this series here. 

The 1960s were obviously momentous for American culture and for New York specifically. But that decade was especially strange for Central Park.

Olmsted and Vaux's urban oasis was a well-trodden destination for protest in the 1960s, a haven for "be-ins" and demonstration (with a little free love thrown in, I imagine).  In December 1967, agitated anti-war protesters even burned a Christmas tree.  Two years later, the first gay pride parade would also culminate here. (Here's some video of the second pride celebration in Central Park the following year.)

Almost 24 hours after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, angered New Yorkers -- mostly students -- gathered for a rally in Central Park at the Naumberg Bandshell to honor the man's extraordinary life and to cope with the sudden, inconceivable loss.

At right: The unusual headline from the New York Daily News. This particular front page popped up on last night's show. Did you catch it?

The city was in a veritable lock down throughout the day, with many businesses and schools closing early on April 5.  In case you couldn't make it into the city that evening -- and given reports of rioting, many chose to stay home -- the ceremonies were actually broadcast by WBAI.  (You can download a recording of the broadcast here, courtesy Pacifica Radio Archives.)

Those invited to speak at the gathering were friends and admirers from a variety of fields.  Looking at the list of speakers, perhaps the most unusual one that jumps out is Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famed pediatrician and best-selling novelist. Spock was an ardent, high-profile protester of the Vietnam War and a friend of Dr. King's, frequently seen at his side in 1967 at war protest events.

Others who spoke at the rally included actor Ossie Davis and activists Florynce Kennedy and James Forman.  Perhaps the most damning words were spoken by Jarvis Tyner, chairman of the DeBois Clubs of America, who declared that Mayor John Lindsay was poised to send armored tanks to Harlem.

Below: Crowds cross 23rd Street on their way to City Hall. Picture courtesy NYT

Things got rather out of hand once the rally turned into a march down Broadway to City Hall.  According to the New York Times, throngs of students filtered down the streets, occasionally breaking windows along the way.  Trying to stem the violence among their number, others were heard shouting. "Let's keep order for Martin Luther King."

The following day, mourners marched from Harlem to an all-faith rally held by local religious leaders in the park.. (It seems likelier that this was the event attended by Megan and her step-children!)

On last night's episode of 'Mad Men', we see Don's own reaction to the tragedy -- going to see 'Planet of the Apes' with his son!  According to the same article, this was not an unusual reaction after the tragedy.  While other forms of entertainment saw a notable decrease in attendance, movie theaters saw no such effect, even with fears of a possible riot awaiting moviegoers when they left the theater.  "Times Square movie theaters reported either normal or better than usual crowds and both the Baronet and Coronet Theaters on Third Avenue at 59th Street said they had long lines of people waiting to buy tickets for the early evening shows."

The April 5th rally for Martin Luther King wasn't even the most unusual thing to happen in Central Park that day.  That distinction would go President Lyndon B. Johnson, who planned a surprise trip to the United Nations that day and touched down his helicopter in the park!