Michelle Nevius's Blog, page 17

Postcard Thursday: Joe DiMaggio's Hitting Streak

On July 16, 1941, New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio hit safely in his 56th consecutive game, setting a Major League record that has never been broken.

DiMaggio, the son of an immigrant from Sicily, hailed from San Francisco, and grew up near Fisherman's Wharf, where his father worked. As he recalled in his memoir:

Baseball to me in those days was merely an excuse to get away from the house and away from the chores of fishing. When Pop gave up trying to make me work on the boat, I gave up playing baseball in the sand patch by the Wharf, and tried my hand at selling newspapers, a job my father declared suited me perfectly since it consisted mostly of standing still and shouting. 

Vince, who had been far more successful than I in baseball, had quit high school to help support the family, although my mother’s advice was to continue his education. Two years later, I followed Vince. Up to the time my baseball playing had been sketchy. In fact, I almost stopped playing when I was 14. Our home was by Fisherman’s Wharf, close to the old North Beach playground, where I had my first baseball experience at the age of ten. I was third baseman in those days and played well enough to be on the usual teams with the kids around my block. 

Pop, having despaired of my ever becoming a fisherman, urged me to study bookkeeping. ‘It’s a job you can do sitting down,’ said Pop significantly, for he was convinced I was lazy.

After Joe became a superstar, he and his brothers Vince and Dom opened up the restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf shown in today's postcard, mostly as a way to get their father to retire. It's interesting that while DiMaggio spelled his name with no space between the "Di" and the "Maggio," there's not only a space on the marquee of the restaurant but on most of his baseball cards. It's also interesting that on his earliest cards it's "De Maggio" and that, on some, the manufacturers felt the need to put Joe in quotation marks since it was a nickname.


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Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) orfrom independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: The Beginning of the Canyon of Heroes

Since tomorrow the U.S. women's soccer team is being feted with a ticker tape parade, we searched our archives high and low for a postcard of a parade up Broadway, but came up short. (An internet search revealed that few, if any, commemorative postcards of parades have been issued.)


Here, instead, is the image of the building that marks the beginning of the so-called "Canyon of Heroes": the Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House on Bowling Green, which sits at the foot of Broadway in the Financial District. Designed by Cass Gilbert and built between 1899 and 1907, the building is a remarkable expression of Beaux-Arts design, and we'll write more about it in a future blog post.

For now, here's our previous write-up of the history of the ticker tape parade:

[In 1886], the official grand opening [of the Statue of Liberty] in the harbor was followed by a parade up Broadway from Battery Park. It was during that parade that some enterprising office worker in one of the brokerage houses on Broadway decided to turn his company’s used ticker tape into confetti. Thus was born the ticker tape parade, an enduring New York tradition.

The parades took a while to catch on. The next one was for Admiral Dewey, hero of the Spanish-American War, following his return from Manila. Then ten years went by before the next parade, for Jack Binns, the radio operator of the RMS Republic. (The Republic had struck the SS Florida in January; because the ship was equipped with wireless radio, Binns was able to send a Mayday signal and the passengers and crew were rescued.) 

In the 1920s ticker tape parades really started to take off. The parades, under the purview of the mayor’s office, were mostly given to arriving dignitaries, sports heroes, or pioneers in flight. The two busiest years were 1951 and 1962, which each had 9 parades. In 1962, honorees were as diverse as John Glenn, the New York Yankees, and Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus.
The Yankees hold the record for most parades at eight. While a handful of individuals have been feted twice (including Glenn), only one person has been honored three times—Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the polar aviator and explorer. 

If you find yourself in Lower Manhattan, take a stroll up Broadway from Battery Park. All the recipients of ticker tape parades are commemorated in plaques in the sidewalk.

* * * *
Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) orfrom independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: Sightseeing and the Times Tower, July 2, 1908

Happy Actual Independence Day!


Today's postcard was mailed exactly ninety-seven years ago on July 2, 1908. It depicts what was then one of New York's most noted skyscrapers, the Times Tower, which had been erected a few years earlier in Times Square. Today, that building's been so altered that it is virtually unrecognizable, but billions of people around the world know it well: it's the spot where the ball drops on New Year's Eve. (You can just see the pole sticking out of the frame at the top of the image.)

This image, however, isn't about the Times Tower -- it shows the fleet of sightseeing cars that left from Times Square to take tourists around the city.



It's hard the read the reverse, but underneath the personal message, it offers an Uptown trip for $1 leaving four times a day or a Chinatown trip twice each evening for $2, including "all expenses." Chinatown tours became very popular at the turn of the 20th century, with visitors being taken to Chinese temples ("joss houses"), restaurants, and sometimes opium dens, almost all of which had been set up exclusively for the tourist trade. These tourist visits upset the police a great deal -- and all of New York's xenophobes, who were trying to force Chinese immigrants to go back to China. Two years later, the police summoned the five sightseeing companies that sold evening trips to Chinatown and told them to cut it out. As The New York Times reported, the police were attempting to make Chinatown a "clean colony," and the tourist excursions were sending the wrong signal. Moreover, the paper of record noted that "the Chinaman is a mysterious being, and there is no telling when he may start a rumpus."

To the best of our knowledge, any police admonition to the sightseeing companies was short lived, and Chinatown remained a key destination for out-of-towners, many of whom had probably never experienced Chinese cuisine or culture before.





* * * *Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) orfrom independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: The Cyclone

Yikes! Another Postcard Thursday on Friday? We won't make a habit of it, we promise.

Nor will we make habit out of recycling material, but today is the birthday of Coney Island's famous Cyclone roller coaster, so below is the PT post we put up a year ago.
However, while we have your attention -- there are still a few slots left for our Upper Central Park walking tour this Sunday, June 28, at 1pm. Follow this link for all the details and registration information: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2015/06/public-walking-tour-exploring-upper.html

Fans of wooden roller coasters probably already know that today is the 88th birthday of the Cyclone, which opened on June 26, 1927, and is still going strong.
However, the history of roller coasters at Coney Island is much older than the Cyclone; in fact, America's first roller coaster, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway, opened on June 6, 1884, at an amusement park just off the boardwalk.

The switchback was the brainchild of LaMarcus A. Thompson. Visitors would climb to the top of a tower and board a car that then dropped six hundred feet over an undulating track. At the far end the car would be "switched back" to another track and returned to the tower. Thompson envisioned his ride as wholesome family entertainment -- in a period when amusement parks were often seen as dens of sin and iniquity -- and the cars, traveling at an "invigorating" six miles per hour, provided great views of the Coney Island beach and boardwalk. He charged 5 cents a ride and made back the $1600 he'd invested in the roller coaster in less than three weeks.

It is unclear how long the Switchback Railway lasted at Coney Island (or even precisely where it stood). Despite its early success, Thompson soon faced a host of competitors and his original coaster may only have stood for three years.

By the 1920s, roller coasters were all the rage at Coney Island, and the Cyclone was just one among a number of rides with names like the Tornado and the Thunderbolt.

Of course, when we think of Coney Island roller coasters, we think of this:

* * * *Read more about Coney Island in
Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet, you can order it from  independent bookstores across the country

Postcard Thursday: The Ferris Wheel at the 1964 World's Fair

While the movie Tomorrowland hasn't lived up to box office expectations, it does feature a wonderful sequence at the beginning at the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The scenes -- a mix of on location and CGI -- feature a number of real locations from the fair (including Disney's Carousel of Progress and "It's a Small World"), but alas, not one of our personal favorites: The Uniroyal Ferris Wheel.

The first Ferris wheel at the 1893 World's Fair.Ferris wheels were first introduced at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago, the so-called "White City" World's Fair, and soon became a staple of amusement parks. To showcase its products outside the Travel and Transportation pavilion (where the Queens Zoo is now located), the Uniroyal Tire Company erected an 86-foot-tall Ferris wheel emblazoned with its logo and then-name "US ROYAL." As at many carnivals and fairs, the Ferris wheel was a hit in that it gave fair-goers a great view of the fairgrounds from the top. According to a 1997 article in the  Detroit News , dignitaries such as the Shah of Iran and Jackie Kennedy rode the wheel on their trips to the fair.

After the fair's closing in 1965, the wheel was dismantled and shipped back to Michigan, where it was reassembled (sans gondolas) next Uniroyal's sales office. Though that office later moved, the wheel remains. We snapped this picture last year:


While the wheel is today just a roadside oddity, it also serves as a reminder of the far-reaching marketing potential of these fairs. How many of the 51 million people who visited Flushing Meadows chose Uniroyal Tires after seeing this?

* * * *ICYMI: We're giving a tour of Upper Central Park on Sunday, June 28th. Details are at http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2015/06/public-walking-tour-exploring-upper.html
* * * *
Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

Public Walking Tour | Upper Central Park | June 28 at 1PM

Exploring Upper Central ParkA Walking Tour with Michelle and James Neviusauthors of Inside the Apple and Footprints in New YorkSUNDAY, JUNE 28, 1:00 - 3:00PM

Kick off your summer by joining us on a ramble through the parts of Central Park that are often left off the itineraries of visitors and New Yorkers alike. We'll stroll the picturesque North Woods, climb the Great Hill, see the oldest building in the park, which was built for the War of 1812, visit the Harlem Meer and Conservatory Gardens, and even track down the memorial to the "Founder of Greater New York City," Andrew Haswell Green.

$20 per person or $30 if you'd also like a copy of "Footprints in New York" (a great deal!)

TO RESERVE:
email footprintsinnewyork@gmail.com
with yournamenumber in your partyhow many people are $20 (no book) and how many are $30 (with book)a cell number where we can reach in case anything changesTHE MEETING PLACE WILL BE EMAILED TO YOU WHEN YOU RESERVE.

 PS: If you missed the Alexander Hamilton walk last month, it is available as a private booking. Visit www.walknyc.com/lm.html to read about the area and just mention Alexander Hamilton when you make your reservation!

Postcard Thursday: Happy Birthday, George III

On June 4, 1738, the future King George III was born at Norfolk House in London. He became king in 1760 on the death of his grandfather, George II (his father had already passed away, putting him next in the line for the throne) and ruled for 60 years, making him at the time the longest reigning monarch. Of course, in America his reign ended much earlier--in New York City on July 9, 1776, when New York became the thirteenth and final colony to ratify the Declaration of Independence.

The above postcard was issued in 1909 as part of the massive Hudson-Fulton Celebration that year. One of the largest parties New York has ever thrown, the festival marked three centuries since Henry Hudson's arrival in New York Harbor and a hundred years since Robert Fulton's successful launch of the steamship Claremont.

One part of the celebration was a parade with floats depicting key scenes from New York history. In the image above, angry colonists are shown tearing down George III's statue in Bowling Green Park on the evening of July 9, 1776, having just heard the Declaration of Independence for the first time. The image is remarkably accurate considering how many depictions of the event are fanciful:



Interested in seeing this spot in person? Check out our Lower Manhattan tour, which can be customized to focus on colonial/Revolutionary War history.
* * * *Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: Trinity Church Redux

Sure. we've done this postcard already -- you can read all about it here.
We posted it today to point you to yesterday's post, in case you missed it on our Inside the Apple blog, which is our review of the new One World Observatory at the World Trade Center. Scroll halfway down the post to the video of the elevator ride to the 102nd floor. At approximately the 16-second mark, look for Trinity Church to appear in the center of the screen. The ride is awesome, but you might not find it worth $32 (or just less than $1 a second).
* * * *Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: Lindbergh Air Mail Stamp

Instead of a postcard today, a stamp -- and a remarkable one at that. On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. To honor that achievement, the U.S. Postal Service issued the above airmail (or "air mail") stamp on June 11, just three weeks after the historic landing. That was the same day Lindbergh received the Distinguished Flying Cross, but five days before he collected his $25,000 prize from Raymond Orteig for making the flight.


The competition to be first to fly across the atlantic, known as the Orteig Prize, was sponsored by hotelier Raymond Orteig who owned the Lafayette and Brevoort Hotels in Manhattan. Orteig, hoping to boost Franco-American relations, first offered the prize to complete a transatlantic flight in 1919. When no one had made an attempt in five years, Orteig extended the competition and by 1926 it had begun drawing serious competitors. However, the hazards of aviation meant that by the time Lindbergh began his historic flight, six of his fellow competitors had died.

Lindbergh's flight in the Spirit of St. Louis began on May 20 at 7:52 a.m. with his ground crew pushing the heavy plane down the muddy runway. The plane carried 450 gallons of fuel but Lindbergh had removed as much as possible from the plane, including his sextant -- meaning that Lindbergh would have to fly by the stars (if they were visible) or dead reckoning. Lindbergh dodged bad weather across the Atlantic (sometimes flying as low as twelve feet above the waves) and reached Le Bourget, France, at 10:22 p.m. on May 21st where he was mobbed by a crowd of eager well-wishers.

Upon his return (by steamship) to America, Lindbergh was feted in Washington, D.C., before heading to New York. On June 13th, the aviator was honored with a tickertape parade on Lower Broadway.

Three days later, he collected the Orteig Prize at a breakfast at the Breevort Hotel with Orville Wright in attendance. (The Breevort Hotel was demolished in 1953 to be replaced by the Brevoort apartments.)
The successful flight spurred tremendous interest in aviation and Lindbergh became America's most visible spokesman for commerical flight.

Alas, the stamp is not very valuable today. A mint condition single stamp is only $13.50.

[This post was adapted from an earlier entry.]


* * * *Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

Postcard Thursday: Chelsea Piers

Last week was the centennial of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, one of the events that pulled America into World War I. The ship had left on its final voyage from Cunard's Pier 54 on what was then still widely called the North River by mariners, even if the general public knew it as the Hudson. In the postcard above, Pier 54 is just off the frame of the postcard to the left. This image, ca. 1910, instead features is Pier 61, where White Star's Titanic was slated to dock; the survivors were ultimately brought to Pier 54.

When commerce left the Hudson River in the latter half of the 20th century, the piers fell into disrepair. Most of Pier 54 was demolished in the early 1990s and the northerly piers in this postcard were rebuilt as the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex.

The remnants of Pier 54 today. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)Anyone interested in exploring this neighborhood more should check out our Chelsea walking tour.


* * * *Explore more NYC history inFootprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.