March 25, 2007
"THEN SHE DROPPED INTO SPACE"
Looking at the image to the right, it is not hard to think of bystanders watching the World Trade Center towers burning: heads tilted upwards in dumb disbelieving shock, even as bodies began to pile at their feet. This was March 25, 1911 though, and the bodies were those of the women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) at 23-29 Washington Place. A fire broke out on the factory floor at 4:45 p.m. that day and quickly spread. Finding that they were locked in to the factory (a move to improve productivity by management), women fled to the fire escapes to make their way down from the 7th and 8th floors. Although the Asch Building was only ten years old, the fire escapes gave way under the combined weight of too many women and collapsed. 146 women died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, many choosing to leap to their deaths instead of burning.
Cornell University has a superb site with information and resources concerning many aspects of the fire and its aftermath. Matthew Shepherd was a United Press reporter who phoned in his account from the scene. Here is part of it:
I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.
Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two thud—deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.
The first ten thud—deads shocked me. I looked up—saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me—something that I didn't know was there—steeled me.
I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.
The fire occurred a little less than a year and a half after an address given by Clara Lemlich to hundreds of assembled workers at Cooper Union. She passionately proposed a general strike for better and safer working conditions for shirtwaist workers, and nearly two out of every three of the 32,000 workers followed her. The strike of 20,000 women was eventually ended in February 1910 with concessions on wages and working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not an adherent to the settlement. It was only until after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that workers' conditions began to improve on a larger scale. Assemblyman Al Smith, representative of the Lower East Side in Albany, was part of the commission that investigated working conditions in the aftermath of the fire. He began a crusade for improved working conditions and with the support of Tammany Hall was eventually swept into the Governor's office.
Standing on the corner of Washington Place and Greene St. today, there is little to indicate it was the site of a castrophe that left firehoses washing a river of blood down the street's gutters. But on a spring evening not that unlike today's, 96 years ago, onlookers witnessed sights so horrible, that it changed the course of New York history.
NB: Concidentally, today is also the 17th anniversary of the Happy Land Social Club Fire in the Bronx. 87 people died in a fire that swept through a crowded club. It was set by a man after he argued with his girlfriend.
Tagged: al smith, clara lemlich, triangle shirtwaist firePosted by Lexiphane at 1:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2007
CALVERT DEFOREST, RIP
It's the rare bit of comedy that holds its potency after a shelf life of 25 years. Topical turns to dated. Boundary-pushing turns to prosaic. Slapstick turns to childish. Even the acts of the most beloved comedy figures of the past 50 years find it difficult to muster more than an appreciative smile and a chuckle from me. This is especially so when the comedy originates from one's youth.
I started watching "Late Night With David Letterman" on NBC during the summer vacation between my 6th and 7th Grades. For some reason, my older brother and I would stay up late enough to catch Letterman turn the late-night format upside down. One of his recurring character/guests was an old vaudeville performer named Calvert DeForest, who went by the name Larry Bud Melman on Letterman and one of my most enduring memories is howling in laughter 'til it hurt at his bits on Letterman's show. One will have to watch the video above to get a sense of who DeForest was playing, or was. As an old vaudevillean, it's hard to believe that DeForest was not playing a character, or inhabitating it. Regardless, my brother sent me a link to the video above this morning and as I watched it I laughed as hard as did more than 20-odd years ago.
The New York Times has a nice autobiography for Calvert DeForest here. I can only, but strongly, disagree with its opening paragraph:
Calvert G. DeForest, the dweebish man who gained cult status on David Letterman’s late-night shows as the comic figure Larry (Bud) Melman precisely because he was not funny, died Monday in Babylon, Long Island. He was 85.
Calvert DeForest was funny; and the man and his act has weathered far better than most and will continue to do so for as long as I'm around.
Tagged: larry bud melman, late night, letterman, tvPosted by Lexiphane at 10:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 20, 2007
IF YOU CAN'T SAVE IT, AT LEAST DOCUMENT IT
This week's feature at Gotham Gazette (put out by the Citzens Union Foundation) is an transcript of a recent Gotham Gazette Readiny NYC Book Club meeting. Featured guests were Kevin Walsh of ForgottenNY and Roberta Gratz, the author of two books about urban development. Walsh recently published a book version of his site and I was reading it in the Grand Central Terminal bookstore the other day [if Kevin is reading this, rest assured I intend to actually buy a copy soon] and it is fantastic. Forgotten New York: Views of Lost Metropolis is an everyman's guide to discovering the little-known about the city, as well as documenting and sharing the bits of NYC that are disappearing without most of us even knowing they were there. The Gotham Gazette transcript comes with some great photos illustrating essential NYC items lost to the ages. Here's some of the transcript:
In 1963, they also eliminated all the cast iron lampposts on 6th avenue. These lampposts dated back to 1910. Overnight, they were wiped out. Even at that young age, I had been filling notebooks with drawings of these cast iron lampposts, in all their different designs.
Those two events put a kernel in my head: you better get stuff on camera before they destroy it. Much to my regret, I didn't do anything about it until 1998. Imagine if I had done that all those years.
With the onset of the Internet, I got the idea of doing a Web site called Forgotten New York about all the things that you see in the street that are unusual, unnoted, that people don't look at or don't see.
In New York everybody's rushing around. They're not looking up, they're not looking down. They just want to get where they're going. But I took a slow walk around, and took a bicycle, and looked at the painted ads on the side of buildings. Some of these things go back to the 1880s. There's one on 17th street and 6th avenue that talks about Victorian carriages and trotters for horses. We call them Wall Dogs ads, because the guys who used to paint them were called wall dogs.
I took photographs of all this ephemera – all these things that people had not noticed. I got a critical mass of 50 pages together, and I set up the Web site. We have been around for eight years, and we've got four million hits so far. So it's been moderately popular.
Read the whole transcript.
Tagged: architecture, books, forgotten ny, gotham gazette, kevin walshPosted by Lexiphane at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 18, 2007
TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS, BUT IT REALLY FADES ALL
The New York Times gets off on the right foot this Sunday, but perhaps should have bounced some ideas off an editor over the age of fourty. The concept is a great one: what are the lasting memorials to our urban tragedies, e.g., the death of 20 people in a house fire in the Bronx last week, the murder of three innocents in the West Village the other day. These things fill our airwaves and splash gallons of ink on our frontpages for a few days, but is there any withered or hallowed ground following the media's usual scorched earth practices? The Times checks it out:
Still, time’s erosions are formidable. A million people drain into and out of New York City each decade, and for those who live in many neighborhoods, four decades are no different than four centuries. You walk a line of Tudor-style town houses along Austin Street in Kew Gardens, Queens, where Ms. Genovese spent her last frantic minutes, and talk with a dozen people under the age of 40. No one has heard of her.
The Times highlights some places that are remembered and municipally sanctified. What they leave out is all the more telling. It's one thing to commemorate the killing of John Lennon outside The Dakota. A great deal fewer people commemorate the deaths of more than a 1,000 people from the LES when the General Slocum steamship caught fire in 1904. That was not only the largest loss of life in a single day in NYC's history (pre-9/11), but it shattered an entire ethnic neighborhood and initiated an exodus from the LES all the way to Yorkville, where some of its descendants remain. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is rightly noted in the article, as it is in most history books, but the 1918 BRT subway disaster wasn't. That's when an out-of-control Brooklyn subway car helmed by a strike-breaking driver jumped the rails. 102 people were killed. If you live in NYC and have heard of neither the General Slocum nor the BRT disaster, don't feel bad, most people haven't.
Frances Morrone acknowledges that most people are shocked to know of the tragic antecedents to their residency:
Mr. Morrone speaks from experience. He has taught classes inside the old Triangle Shirtwaist building at New York University in Greenwich Village, where more than nine decades ago a fire raged and factory doors were locked, and 146 female garment workers burned or plunged nine stories to their deaths. Their deaths would give muscle to the progressive era in New York, as legislators passed a raft of laws protecting the rights of workers.
“When I tell students that they are sitting in a building with that history, I’ve heard their gasps,” Mr. Morrone said. “And that’s a sensible response.”
If Prof. Morrone was in a great and expansive mood, he might share how a crowd of unruly opera fans were cut down by a U.S. militia back in the 19th Century, leaving dozens dead in the street a few blocks from NYU's campus. I think we could all do with some first-hand geographical brushing-up on the history that literally surrounds us every day.
Tagged: history, nyc, nyu, slocum, triangle shirtwaist firePosted by Lexiphane at 4:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
NAME THAT STREET, BUILDING , SLIP, AND/OR MONUMENT, NO MATTER HOW LONG AGO IT VANISHED
Almost exactly a year ago––perhaps a few days before––I went to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY. Hop on a MetroNorth train and get off one stop after Marble Hill and you're there. Cars are for suckers: just walk across the platform and some playing fields and you find yourself at the Hudson River Museum front door.
Inside the museum, one will find an interesting (alright, it depends on what your threshold for interesting is) overview of the entire course of the Hudson River. Other floors of the museum have some great displays on advertising and sublime 1950's marketing trends, including kitchen hardware. One of the best things about the Hudson River Museum is its planetarium. If you feel the computer-generated effects and real-time synchronized movement of the heavens was too overwhelming when you were at the Rose Center on CPW and 85th St., only the Andrus Planetarium can manage to pass off a filmstrip projected on the ceiling while simultaneously begging for funding and pitching b-day parties at the planetarium. It might have been the most interesting planetarium experience I've had in a while.
Anchoring the Hudson River Museum is the Glenview Mansion, one of dozens of family Hudson River manses surrendered to the State when the age of Robber Barons drew to a close. For as many of these examples I've been in, The Glenview Mansion is one of the better ones: full access, a working pool table, accessible art galleries upstairs, and some kickass curatorial commentary posted along the way.
One of the more interesting parts was the annex between the Hudson River Museum and the Glenview Mansion. It included a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Manhattan waterfront that I took a picture of in stages. Just yesterday, I stitched those pictures together; the above image is an excerpt. 19th Century photographers loved to architecturally conflate their images by cutting and pasting. I thought I was relatively familiar with NYC's architectural history, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting a bead on many of these larger late-19th Century buildings.
Drop a note if you can ID some landmarks. Check Flickr here for the largest versions available of the composite picture.
Super Bonus Points: What is that obelisk to the southwest of the Manhattan-side Brooklyn Bridge Tower? It looks like it has windows. Perspective would seem to place it further south than City Hall Park. What the hell is that thing?
Posted by Lexiphane at 3:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2007
THERMOPYLAE IN THEATERS
I found this surprising, although maybe I shouldn't have. The Greek battle pic 300 is set for a huge opening weekend.
Imax, the giant-screen movie chain, reported that all 57 of its 12:01 a.m. Friday screenings of the Warner Bros. film had sold out as its advance ticket sales for the weekend hit a new record for the month of March.
"We had the most amazing night," said Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, adding that many Imax theaters arranged 2:30 a.m. shows at the last minute to accommodate fans who failed to get into the midnight showings.
Many of the rest of the nation's 600 theaters with early morning shows also played to capacity crowds, said Dan Fellman, domestic distribution president for the Time Warner Inc.-owned studio.
"They were flocking everywhere, not just to Imax," he told Reuters.
300 is based on graphic novelist Frank Miller's (Batman) take on the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan warriors stood at a wall on a narrow pass between a mountain and the sea in 480 B.C. With the rest of Greece's city states unwilling or unable to offer timely or effective assistance, it fell to the Spartans under King Leonidas to stand against an advancing Persian army of one million under the command of King Xerxes. Leonidas recognized that the most defensible position was the narrow pass at Thermopylae, where his highly trained citizen warriors could match up equally gainst overwhelming numbers.
Neither Leonidas nor his men were under the illusion that they would survive the battle victorious. They knew they were fighting a rearguard action whose purpose was to both deplete Xerxes' forces while giving the other Greek states time to evacuate so they could fight another day. For their role in the battle that eventually served to stem the tide of the advancing Persian Empire westward and into Europe, the Spartans at Thermopylae are generally credited with sacrificing themselves in order to preserve the birthplace of democracy in the Western world.
Hardly humanitarians, Sparta was the epitome of a warrior culture in the ancient world. Mothers would give up their sons at the age of seven so that they could begin their training to eventually become part of Sparta's highly disciplined and effective army, admonishing them to either come home carrying their shields or borne upon them. While other Greeks were writing plays, figuring mathematical principles, and dabbling with political democracy, the Spartans were the tip of the Hellenist spear.
Like Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow, 300's live actors were filmed entirely in front of green screens and their mise en scene is completly computer generated. I'd like to see it on an IMAX screen.
I can highly recommend Steven Pressfield's novelization of the Battle of Thermopylae, Gates of Fire. Not only is it an exciting story, but Pressfield does an excellent job describing the training of Spartan warriors and the city state's ethos of honor in war before all else.
Tagged: 300, film, greeks, persians, spartans, thermopylae, warriorsPosted by Lexiphane at 1:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 5, 2007
WHOSE TRAIL OF TEARS?
There is no arguing that Native Americans' treatment at the hands of colonial settlers in North and South America is a national historic shame that the U.S. will have to bear in perpetuity. Characterizations of original tribes that populated what is now the United States have garnered hagiographic qualities over passing years. They are now viewed as sinless noble savages, whose peaceful co-existence with the environment stands as a damning counter-example to our current modern society that despoils everything it comes in contact with. Native Americans are the romantic residents of our paradise lost.
I personally find such notions rather condescending. When appreciating Native Americans' cultures, there is often a fine line between describing their "wisdom" and characterizing their populations as child-like simpletons. It also overlooks the fact that Native American societies suffered from most of the ills that every community has from the dawn of man: starvation, hardship, war, and occasional disappearance.
This is something I did not know, however: some Native American tribes were enthusiastic slave owners. The Seattle Times reports on slaves owned by the Cherokee Nation:
Many of the Cherokees' slaves accompanied the tribe when it was expelled from its traditional lands in North Carolina and Georgia and forced to migrate in 1838 and 1839 to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.
Thousands of Cherokees died during the trip, which became known as the "Trail of Tears." It is not known how many of their slaves also died.
The tribe fought for the Confederacy. In defeat, it signed a federal treaty in 1866 committing that its slaves, who had been freed by tribal decree during the war, would be absorbed as citizens of the Cherokee Nation.
What brings this historical blot to light is some ex post facto insult to injury. Members of the present-day Cherokee Nation are holding a vote to expel descendants of the slaves the tribe once held who became nation members after their emancipation. Unsurprisingly, the move to disavow the nation's slave-owning past has to do with money.
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year.
The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.
If the descendants of some persecuted Native Americans now get to live in tax free zones and operate multi-billion-dollar casino operations, what should the descendants of that population's slaves get? Printing presses to mint as much legal money as they want?
Tagged: cherokee, descendants, indians, native americans, slavery, votePosted by Lexiphane at 9:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 3, 2007
ARCHITECTURAL ORPHAN
Not every block featuring notable buildings can be landmarked an entire historic areas. Sometimes buildings have to fend for themselves when developers come knocking down. Occasionally this will result in a single building weathering the storm; then it must stand alone, simultaneously out of place and remarkable. Pictured to the right is an example. On the southern border of Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood, at 207 East 32nd St., is a building worth stopping and examining for a few minutes.
It's hard to miss because it's an incredible Beaux Arts rowhouse rich in architectural detail that has lost its row-neighbors. According to the AIA Guide to New York City, the building was built ca. 1910 with no known architect listed. Its original purpose was to serve as The Tammany Central Association Clubhouse. Even 30 years after Boss Tweed's death, Tammany Hall was still a powerful political machine. Under the leadership of 'Silent' Charlie Murphy, Al Smith--a man who grew up watching the Brooklyn Bridge being constructed outside his childhood home near the Fulton Fish Market--would be elected Governor of New York in 1918. Tammany Hall's power began to wane significantly with the election of FDR to the Presidency and the New Dealer's funneling of patronage money away from the organization. I could not identify when 207 E32nd St. left Tammany hands.
The building features three rows of identical-sized windows that are nonetheless widely divergent in styles and ornamentation. There's a mansard roof crowned with twin chimneys and two lion heads appear to serve as rain spouts at the top of the facade. More details about the building's features can be found here.
Somewhere along the line, 207's neighboring row houses were razed and it now has no abutting neighbors, but rather stands alone as an ornate architectural sliver of 32nd Street's past. To its west on the corner of 32nd St. and 3rd Ave. now stands an enormous and charmless highrise, whose only salient feature is a column of identical balconies, the likes of which I would probably have to jump from if I ever found myself living in such a building. To 207's east, is an asphalt playground for a neighboring school. The flatness of the lots to the east only accentuate the crushing overshadowing to the west. It's an interesting sight.
Currently, 207 East 32nd is the home of Milton Glaser's design studio. "Art Is Work" is painted on the transom above the building's main entrance. New York is nothing if not continuous history. Glaser is the man who designed the "I ♥ NY" logo in 1977.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at 4:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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- "THEN SHE DROPPED INTO SPACE"
- CALVERT DEFOREST, RIP
- IF YOU CAN'T SAVE IT, AT LEAST DOCUMENT IT
- TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS, BUT IT REALLY FADES ALL
- NAME THAT STREET, BUILDING , SLIP, AND/OR MONUMENT, NO MATTER HOW LONG AGO IT VANISHED
- THERMOPYLAE IN THEATERS
- WHOSE TRAIL OF TEARS?
- ARCHITECTURAL ORPHAN
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