Clifford Browder's Blog, page 48

111. The Slave Trade: How they got away with it, and how it was stopped.

     In a previous post we saw how the illegal slave trade, furnishing African slaves to the Spanish colony of Cuba, was flourishing right up to the outbreak of the Civil War, with New York at the very center of it.  The U.S. and Britain had both declared the trade illegal in 1807, and the U.S. had made it a capital offense by including it in the piracy law of 1820, though as of 1860 no slave trader had ever been executed.  Now we shall see how the traders got away with it, and how that trade was finally stopped.
How they got away with it
     The slave traders devised any number of practices and stratagems to avoid detection.  As for instance:
·      The ship owner chartered his vessel to someone else, who might even charter it to a third party.  If the ship was caught carrying slaves, the real owner and the first charterer could plead ignorance: they had no idea the ship was being used for so nefarious a purpose.
·      A ship might be a slaver one year, and engaged in legitimate trade the next, thus confusing the authorities.  Or take a legal cargo to Havana, change its name and flag there, be refitted as a slaver under a Spanish skipper, and later on the way back, having delivered the slaves to Cuba, resume its legal status and name, change skippers again, and take on a cargo for New York.
·      In New York the judges, customs officials, and U.S. marshals, being notoriously amenable to bribes, could be induced to look the other way, while a ship was preparing for a slave voyage.
·      A ship would carry two sets of papers: one for the port authorities and any U.S. or British warship challenging it, presenting it as engaged in legitimate trade; and another for their confederates in Africa and Cuba.  And lots of flags to fly, depending on what vessel they encountered.
·      Nearing the African coast, the slaver would land an agent at the trading post and then stand out to sea, returning only when the slaves were assembled and an agreed-upon signal said it was safe to approach.  Thus the loading of slaves could begin immediately and proceed quickly, and the ship could then weigh anchor and make for the safety of the open sea.
·      Swift schooners and brigs were preferred for the trade, because they could usually outrun a patrolling warship, if they spotted the warship in time.  If necessary, fleeing slavers would litter the sea with jettisoned casks, spars, hatches, whatever.  The schooner Wanderer, built in 1857 by a wealthy New Yorker as a yacht for racing, had a long, sharp bow and a cutaway stern that let it do 20 knots and win cups in races.  Sold to a Southerner, it then had a second career as a slaver and as such did very well, since warships could do only 8½.
·      Often as not, the New York courts could be “fixed.”  Even if caught and tried, a slave captain was rarely convicted, and if he was, the conviction might be overturned on technical grounds.  Or he might be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and serve a short sentence, and even hope for a pardon from on high.

The fast schooner Wanderer, which had three careers: a racing yacht, a slave ship, and finally,
with the outbreak of the Civil War and its confiscation by federal authorities, a U.S. naval
vessel participating in the blockade of Southern ports.
     Everything, then, seemed to favor the trade, and yet it did finally come to an end.  In fact, it was stopped.  What happened?

How it was finally stopped
     In the November 1860 elections the Republicans triumphed and Abraham Lincoln became President.  In New York this meant the end of Democratic control over federal appointments, and a new emphasis on stamping out the slave trade.  Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith summoned all the U.S. marshals in states along the eastern seaboard to a meeting in New York on August 15, 1861, where measures were agreed upon to suppress the trade, following which the marshals visited captured slave brigs and schooners at the Atlantic Dock in Brooklyn.  That hostilities with the South had broken out by then only heightened the resolve to end the trade. Nathaniel Gordon






   Attention soon focused on the case of Nathaniel Gordon, a young skipper out of Portland, Maine, who in the summer of 1860 had taken his ship Erie to Havana, where it completed preparations for a slave voyage, not Gordon’s first but his fourth.  Proceeding to Africa, it sailed up the Congo River to deliver a cargo of liquor, then returned to the river’s mouth and on August 7 took on a load of 897 slaves, stowed them on deck and below, and set sail for Havana.  The following morning Gordon’s luck gave out; he was spotted by the U.S. sloop of war Mohican, which captured his vessel, landed the freed slaves in Liberia, and brought Gordon and the Erie to New York.  The Erie was promptly condemned and sold, and Gordon was indicted under the 1820 piracy law.  That he should be tried in New York, the very center of the Atlantic slave trade, no doubt seemed fitting.
The capture of the Erie, as reported in the
New York Herald.     Gordon was lodged in the Eldridge Street Jail, notorious for its lax conditions and the carousing of prisoners.  He roamed freely there, received friends and family, wined and dined in comfort.  For a $50 “fee” paid to the jailor, he was even allowed to go into town “on parole,” as long as he returned the next morning.  If he seemed to harbor little fear for the outcome of his trial, there was ample precedent.  Captain James Smith of the brig Julia Moulton had been tied for slavery in 1854.  He was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality, and he was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, got a short sentence and a fine, and was later pardoned by President Buchanan.  This, then, seemed the very worst that Gordon could expect.  And sure enough, when he was tried in June 1861 the jury could not agree.
     But the Lincoln administration was now in charge, and Edward Delafield Smith, the new district attorney, was determined to get a conviction.  Gordon was put on trial again in the circuit court of New York on November 6, 1861, with two attorneys experienced in such cases defending him.  The naval lieutenant who boarded the Erie and took command of it told how crowded the slaves were on deck,   how fearful was the stench from the hold, and how offensive the filth and dirt on the slaves.  In addition, several of the crew testified that Gordon was indeed in charge of the vessel.  There was no denying that the defendant had been apprehended with a full load of slaves, but the defense argued that he was not in charge, having turned the command over to a foreigner.  The case went to the jury on the afternoon of November 8, and they returned twenty minutes later with their verdict: guilty.  Gordon heard it without showing emotion.
     Up until this point the public, being preoccupied with fighting a war, had shown little interest in the case, but when the verdict was reported in the press, the public suddenly realized the full implications of the case.  On November 30, when motions for a new trial had been denied, and the prisoner was instructed to rise and hear the sentence, the courtroom was packed.  The presiding judge stressed the enormity of his crime, the agony and terror of his fellow beings confined below deck, and sentenced him to death by hanging on February 7, 1862: the first such sentence ever  in the U.S. for the crime of trading slaves.
     Gordon’s wife and little son had come from Portland to give him support, and their presence aroused much sympathy in the city, whose merchants had always been more concerned about retaining their trade with the South than with ending slavery.  Petitions for clemency containing thousands of names were sent to Lincoln in the White House, condemning the crime but begging him to commute the sentence to life imprisonment.  Claiming to be loyal supporters of the government, the petitioners expressed indignation at the death penalty imposed for an act involving Africa and Cuba, when it was lawful to take a Negro child born in Virginia to Louisiana and sell it there into perpetual slavery.  Prison doors had been opened to convicted pirates and acknowledged traitors, while a gallows was being erected for Gordon.  In addition, Gordon’s leading defense attorney and the prosecutor both went to Washington to plead in person with the President, who already had a reputation as a "softie" when it came to pardons, and Gordon’s wife obtained an interview with the First Lady.
     Under pressure from all sides, Lincoln, who abhorred slavery and was determined to end it once and for all, only granted a two-week stay of execution, setting a new date of February 21, so Gordon could prepare himself.  Realizing at last the certainty of his doom, Gordon, who had always protested his innocence, on the night before his execution attempted suicide by strychnine poison.  Alarmed at the prisoner’s convulsions, the keepers called the prison physician, and Gordon was resuscitated by means of a stomach pump and brandy.  How he had obtained the poison was unclear; presumably, it was in the cigars he had smoked the night before.  Summoning a U.S. marshal, Gordon requested him to give a lock of his hair and a ring to his wife.
     On the morning of the execution Gordon was given a heavy dose of whisky to overcome the effects of poison, his arms were tied behind him, and he was carried from his cell to a chair in the corridor, where the marshal read the death warrant to him.  Upheld by the marshals present, at noon he walked across the courtyard of the Tombs, where eighty Marines were on hand, bayonets fixed, to quell a rumored attempt by a mob to interfere.  Also present was a throng of invited spectators admitted by ticket – reporters, politicians, and officials – as well as uninvited witnesses watching from every window, balcony, and rooftop affording a view of the scene.   Mounting the scaffold, Gordon announced, “Well, a man can die but once; I’m not afraid.”  A black cap was then put over his head, the noose was put round his neck, an ax stroke severed a rope suspending a system of weights, and his body was hoisted into the air, where it swayed for a few moments and was still.  For the first time ever, a slave trader had been executed in the United States.


     In a letter addressed “To all my friends,” written on the eve of his execution, Nathaniel Gordon declared, “I have no trouble of conscience.  I have never harmed a human being in my life.”  He called the district attorney a murderer and insisted, “I meet a death that is undeserved.”  Unrepentant to the end, he simply could not conceive of his African victims as humans deserving of compassion and respect.
     Gordon’s young wife, who on the eve of his execution, sobbing, had fainted in his cell, returned to Portland, where he was buried.  It is quite possible that his infant son never knew the fate of his father.
     It is sometimes said that Gordon’s execution, taking place not in some distant federal facility but in a city prison in the heart of the city before a host of witnesses, ended U.S. participation in the slave trade, but this is not quite the case.  After his death those involved in the trade left New York City for New London, New Bedford, and Portland, and for a short while, even in wartime, persisted in the trade.  Perhaps they thought that the federal government, being embroiled in a war it showed no sign of winning, could not further enforce its laws against the trade; certainly its navy had more pressing tasks to perform.  But Her Britannic Majesty was not so distracted; between March and October 1862 the British African Squadron captured no less than sixteen American slavers.  A U.S. naval officer who then visited the Congo River – the very site of Gordon’s last trade – found the trading centers depressed and slave prices greatly reduced.  The slave dealers on the west coast of Africa were soon in despair at the lack of vessels looking for slaves.  The Cuba trade declined in 1863 and was eliminated by 1864.  So ended a trade that had flourished for centuries and in its last years brought wealth to many a brownstone in New York City.
Doing what he loved best.
Dan Tappan     A note on Pete Seeger:  Pete Seeger, folk singer and activist, died on January 27 in a hospital in Manhattan, at age 94.  He was an inspiration to all who knew him or heard him sing.  A champion of civil rights, labor unions, and the environment, he reached multitudes with his music and campaigned for what he thought right to the very end, marching with two canes in an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in 2011.   His songs include "Good Night, Irene," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "We Shall Overcome," and countless others.  I shan't begin to celebrate him here, for I hope to include him and his campaign to clean up the Hudson in a future post on the sacredness of water.  The Times gave him two full pages -- almost unheard of, but fitting.  I can be stingy with my praise of public figures, but for Pete Seeger, both the singer and the activist, I pull out all the stops.
     Coming soon:  New York and the Vision Thing.  Can a city as secular and materialistic as New York experience vision, and if so, what kind of vision?  And can a materialistic vision have a spiritual component?  In the works: The Sacredness of Water.  Can it -- should it -- be privatized and sold as a commodity?  Primal peoples the world over see it as a sacred; why don't we?
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder

110. New York and the Slave Trade

     By the mid-nineteenth century the port of New York was the busiest in the hemisphere, doing trade with all the major ports in the world.  That New York City was also the center of the illegal slave trade in the 1850s may surprise many today, but such was the case.  Respectable citizens were hardly aware of the trade, but those on the waterfront, even if uninvolved, could see signs of it.  Any vessel bound for Africa was suspect.  During eighteen months of the years 1859-60, eighty-five slavers were reported to have been fitted out in New York harbor, transporting from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves annually.  This post will have a look at that trade, drawing mostly on primary sources.
Ships used in the slave trade: schooner (left), brig (center), and bark (right).  Small, fast ships that
could outrun British cruisers were preferred.
BPL
     In June of 1860 – on the very eve of the Civil War – a young New Englander named Edward Manning, being short of coin, went to a New York City shipping office and signed up for three years on the Thomas Watson, a whaler being fitted out in New London, Connecticut.  Going to New London, he found a smart-looking vessel of 400 tons, remarkably clean for a whaler, many of whose crew were, like himself, “greenies.”  A fine-looking woman came aboard and conferred with the captain in his cabin; she was said to be one of the owners.  Had he not been a greenhorn, young Manning might have wondered why the ship was taking on so much rice, hard tack, beef, pork, casks of fresh water, and other supplies – far more than was needed for the crew of a whaler – as well as quantities of pine flooring that would be laid over the stores in the hold so as to create a new deck.  He might also have wondered why the ship couldn’t get clearance and sail from New London, but instead went down to New York, accompanied all the way by a U.S. revenue cutter, all of which suggested that the ship was somehow suspect, might have a history.  In New York the Thomas Watson anchored briefly off the Battery, then caught a favorable breeze and sailed from there, presumably bound for waters rich in whales. 
     As the vessel crossed the North Atlantic, it proved to be a smart sailer, hard to overtake.  Nearing the presumed whaling grounds, the captain posted a lookout aloft to look out for “blows,” and even sent out boats in quest of whales, sustaining the image of a whaler all the way to the coast of Africa.  Approaching that coast, it sighted a British man-of-war, at which point the “old man,” as the crew referred to the skipper, ordered the men to remove the pine flooring and store it aft.  As the warship approached, it fired a shot across the whaler’s bow, raising a splash.  “What ship is that?” came the query.  “The Thomas Watson.”  “I’ll board you!”  So spoke the greatest navy in the world, displaying the arrogance typical of a world power.  By now the greenies had long since grasped the fact – not particularly dismaying to most of them – that the Thomas Watson was no whaler but a slaver in disguise, hoping now to outwit the British Navy, which was intent on suppressing the slave trade, illegal in most parts of the world.  A gig came alongside, and the English commander boarded the vessel, conferred with the captain in his cabin, and then inspected the deck and hold.  Though he found no overt signs of a slaver, he was frankly skeptical and promised to have a look at the vessel again in the future.  Once the departing visitors were out of earshot, the captain, an irascible man, exclaimed, “You English sucker!  You’ll see me again, will you?  I’ll show you!”  In point of fact, they never encountered the warship again.
HMS Black Joke firing on the Spanish slaver El Almirante.  The British ship freed 466 slaves.
     If the greenies had any reservations about serving on a slaver, they had little choice, being far from home and near the coast of Africa.  Enhancing their resignation may have been the realization that no trade on the seas was more lucrative than this one, which might mean more pay at the end of the run, if the British Navy -- and the American, though it was typically less in evidence – could be eluded.  In 1860 the trade still flourished, taking slaves from West Africa to Cuba, then a Spanish colony, where the authorities looked the other way while the planters acquired more labor for their sugar plantations and paid well for it.  Of the whole crew, only Manning voiced objections to serving on a slaver, for which he earned the captain’s undying enmity.
     As the Thomas Watson neared the African shore, a small boat with naked black rowers approached, waving a bright red rag.  A Spaniard came on board, embraced the captain, and kissed him.  They conferred, then the Spaniard departed, leaving the crew mystified as to what this was all about.  The Spaniard was allegedly a palm oil merchant, but the mystery remained.
     For two weeks the Thomas Watson cruised about, not too far from the African coast, maintaining the feeble pretense of whaling.  Then they approached an uninhabited stretch of shoreline, where only a long, low shed was visible – a barracoon (slave barracks) -- as he later learned.  The captain, showing signs of nervousness, posted the mate aloft with a spyglass, ordering him to report any ship in sight.  “Sail ho!” the mate finally cried out.  “Where away?” asked the captain.  “Right ahead, and close to the beach.”
     They now made contact with a schooner, and the palm oil merchant reappeared, boarded the ship, and gave the captain another affectionate kiss.  The pine flooring was now quickly laid, creating a deck to receive the oncoming cargo.  Naked blacks – men, women, and children – now issued from the shed and walked in single file to the beach, where their black guards began tossing them into a surf boat that then negotiated the surf safely and transferred its human cargo to a small boat from the ship.  The slaves were then taken to the ship and piled into the hold, the women separately in steerage.  The ship was rolling all this while, so the slaves were seasick, and the foul air and great heat made the hold unbearable.  Five or six were dead by morning, and their bodies were tossed overboard. 

Model of a slave ship.   The slaves are packed in on a deck laid over the stores in the hold,
which include ivory tusks.   This vessel is armed, but most slavers relied on speed to escape
pursuing warships.
Kenneth Lu
     Having secured its cargo, the Thomas Watson immediately weighed anchor and got under way, carrying some eight hundred blacks of all sizes and ages, with the Spanish captain and a crew of eighteen whites.  The Spaniard, a veteran of the trade, was now in charge, whip in hand, and his ferocious manner kept the slaves in check.  Guarded by overbearing guards of their own race, whom Manning identified as Kroomen (an African people living in Liberia and the Ivory Coast), the slaves were brought up on deck and fed rice and sea biscuits, but the stench below was suffocating, until means were found to let air in for ventilation.  The Spaniard was a man of moods and contradictions.  He delighted to let the little girls come up and play on deck, but when a man was caught stealing water, he had him flogged unmercifully.  And yet, having some knowledge of medicine, he improvised a hospital on deck and treated those who were ill, probably saving the lives of several.  Dysentery was the commonest ailment, but there were two fatal cases of smallpox, one of scurvy and one of palsy.  Also, one woman gave birth to twins, but both infants died.

Slaves on deck, being shackled.
     The long transatlantic trip was not pleasant even for the whites on board.  Scared out of the hold, the ship’s rats invaded the forecastle, where the crew slept.  Manning tells how one night he felt sharp claws on his face, and a rat gnawing at his big toe, whose toenail was almost gone; after that he slept on the deck.  When a crewman died of a fever in the dark, dingy hole of the forecastle, he was sewed up in canvas and laid out on a plank on deck; then, with no attempt at a service, the plank was raised at one end, and the body slid into the sea.  Meanwhile the American captain was getting drunk daily on rum and then 1retiring to a spare boat on the poop deck to sleep it off.  The Spanish captain remonstrated with him, protesting that he was setting a bad example for the crew, but to no avail. 
     The condition of the slaves was now of some consequence, as the vessel was approaching Cuba.  They were brought up on deck in batches, and bathed in the spray from a hose.  To fumigate the hold, the crew stuck red-hot irons into tin pots filled with tar, sealed the hold with hatches, and waited two hours; by then the hold was considered cleansed. 
     Having been at sea for six months, the crew were now eager to make land.  The likable second mate expressed the hope that he would make enough money on this voyage to buy a little place ashore and settle down; for him, it was just a job.  They now scraped the ship’s name off the stern, thus making them all outlaws, and the vessel fair game for anyone.  Special precautions had to be taken, for British men-of-war patrolled the Cuban coast as well, and the appearance there of a whaler would arouse suspicion, especially if large numbers of blacks were seen on deck.  In time they rendezvoused successfully with two schooners, one of which came alongside; brought up to the deck, the blacks were made to jump down to the schooner’s deck, the Kroomen going last.  The Spanish captain too left the ship, and the second schooner took on half the blacks from the first one, after which the two schooners made for land.  Their cargo delivered, the crew of the Thomas Watson then removed the telltale pine flooring and threw it overboard. 
     The ship now sailed to Campeche, Yucatan.  Chloride of lime was sprinkled in the hold to eliminate the smell of slaves in confinement, but some hint of the odor remained.  The crew were now paid, and paid well, in Spanish doubloons, and Edward Manning took passage on a Mexican schooner to New Orleans, where he arrived in January 1861.  There, finding Secession in the air and the people feverish, the New Englander got out fast, returning to New York by rail.  When war broke out, he joined the U.S. Navy and served for the duration.  The Thomas Watson became a Confederate blockade runner but while pursued by Northern warships ran aground on a reef off Charleston, South Carolina, and was burned by the Northern ships to the water’s edge.

     Such was the account of Edward Manning, which he published with the title Six Months on a Slaver in 1879.  Though opposed to slavery, he tells his story in a sober, matter-of-fact way, expressing sympathy for the slaves, but never inveighing against the evils of slavery.  In short, he lets the story tell itself.  The book is a rare example of a firsthand account of the trade, since those involved usually shunned publicity.  The voyage was routine, with no drama: no pursuit by British cruisers, no slave revolt, no storm, no high death rate among the slaves.  The vessel’s prompt departure from the port of New York, which Manning doesn’t explain, was probably facilitated by prior negotiations with the authorities there and smoothed with a bribe.   Manning doesn’t identify the coast where the slaves were taken on, but it was certainly that part of West Africa where the Atlantic trade flourished: the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), and the Slave Coast, this last being the coastal area of modern-day Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. 
     The first meeting with the palm oil merchant, later identified as the Spanish captain, was to arrange a rendezvous for loading the slaves; this was to make sure that the loading would go quickly, so the vessel could get away fast from the coast without being caught by a British warship.  The Spaniard was evidently a loose packer, meaning that he allowed the slaves ample room and thus kept mortalities to a minimum; tight packers usually had corpses to dispose of, and the corpses, once in the sea, drew sharks that might follow the ship for days: the sure sign of a slaver to the captain of a British cruiser.  But in the vast expanse of the North Atlantic, there was little risk of detection, until the slaver approached the Cuban coast.  The Kroomen guards were probably not destined for slavery, but further employment by the Spaniard on future voyages, it being a sad fact that blacks too participated in the trade and facilitated it.
     “The Slave Trade in New York,” a January 1862 article in The Continental Monthly,a new periodical of the time published in New York and Boston, gives useful background for Manning’s story.  Since by then reform was under way, the conditions described are those prevailing before the 1860 election: exactly the time when Manning was recruited for the Thomas Watson.  According to the article, New York City was the world’s leading port for the slave trade, with Portland and Boston next.  (The author might have added New Orleans.)  Slave dealers, some of them seemingly respectable Knickerbockers, contributed liberally to political organizations and thus influenced elections not only in New York but also in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.  The captains involved in the trade lived in residences and boardinghouses in the eastern wards of the city and formed a secret fraternity with signs, grips, and passwords.  A slave captain planning a voyage would initiate preparations in a first-class hotel like the Astor House, where the risk of detection was less than in a private office.  Runners, provided with the names of men of every nationality who had served on slavers before, would be sent to boardinghouses to recruit a crew; their appraisal of prospective crewmen was reliable, their blunders few.  Rather than equipment for a whaling voyage, as in the case of the Thomas Watson, apparatus for refining pine oil, a common and legitimate import from Africa, was often used as a blind, for a U.S. marshal would inspect in port any vessel suspected of being a slaver.  One yacht owner was quoted as saying that he had paid $10,000 to get clearance.  But getting clearance at the custom house was easy, a transparent disguise being enough.  And should a slaver be captured by a British warship, the New York owners were rarely troubled, having a corps of attorneys on retainer to defend them. 
     As an example of the laxity of the law, the article tells the story of the brig Cora, a slaver captured at sea and brought to New York.  Her skipper, Captain Latham, was lodged in the Eldridge Street Jail, where inmates caroused freely with liquor and champagne.  Securing funds from a Wall Street connection, Latham bribed one of the U.S. marshal’s assistants with $3,000 and so was allowed to leave the premises, buy a suit at Brooks Brothers, and proceed  to the dock just in time to catch a steamer to Havana.  Since then Latham was said to have returned to the city in disguise.



The jail where a slaver awaiting trial could live comfortably, even riotously.  Bars are visible
on one window, though they didn't prevent an inmate with money from leaving on excursions.
     Not all slave voyages were as routine and uneventful as that of the Thomas Watson.  Edward Manning never got ashore to see a caravan of slaves arrive from the interior.  One such caravan of twelve hundred naked slaves, captured and guarded by other blacks, has been described as arriving at the coast to the sound of rifle fire, tom-toms, and drums.  The trading that ensued might involve an exchange of slaves, ivory, gold dust, rice, cattle, skins, beeswax, wood, and honey for cotton cloth, gunpowder, rum, tobacco, cheap muskets, and assorted trinkets.  A strong, healthy male of twenty might fetch three Spanish dollars; women and boys went for less. 



A slave caravan.

     As a slaver weighed anchor laden with “black ivory,” heart-rending scenes might occur.  On one occasion blacks in two canoes and on a raft came alongside a departing brig, begging to be taken also, so they could rejoin relatives now chained under the hatches.  Seeing that they were old, the captain took only three.  The others persisted, till a six-pound shot destroyed the raft.  Some of the crew were troubled by this, but the captain remarked coolly, “Your uncle knows his business.”
    And what became of the elderly and sick slaves that no trader wanted?  On one occasion eight hundred of them were taken out in canoes by other blacks and sunk with stones about their necks.  Here again, the cruelty of blacks on blacks matched that of whites on blacks.  The slave trade corrupted all who were involved in it.
     The worst that could happen at sea was not so much a slave revolt but a fire.  One repentant skipper told of such a horror at night, when all their cargo was locked under hatches.  The crew tried to put out the fire below with buckets of water, but the flames spread amidships and the vessel was doomed.  “Bear away, lads!” ordered the skipper.  “Lashings and spars for a raft, my hearties!”  The crew improvised a raft from the masts and bowsprit, and hoisted out the two  boats, while the fire smoldered between decks and the slaves screamed.  As the crew abandoned ship, a merciful mate lifted the hatch gratings and flung down the shackle keys, so the slaves could escape from the hold.  As the ship’s two boats towed the raft clear of the burning vessel, the slaves gained the deck, only to become enveloped in flames.  Some jumped into the sea and tried to climb aboard the boats and raft; a few succeeded, but the crewmen, fearing that they would be swamped, fought most of them off with handspikes.  As the white survivors distanced themselves from the vessel and the drowning slaves, the sea was illumined for miles by the flaming brig.  Out of  640 slaves, 115 were saved on the raft.  Saved, of course, for slavery.  For the traders, not a very satisfactory voyage.
     Did those who participated in the trade ever repent of it?  Yes, but usually on their deathbed.  Said one: “There is no way to stop the slave trade but by breaking up slaveholding.  Whilst there is a market, there will always be traders.  Men like me do its roughest work, but we are no worse than the Christian merchants whose money finds ships and freight, or the Christian planters who keep up the demand for negroes.  May God forgive me for my crimes, and may my story serve some good purpose in the world I am leaving.”
     And as Edward Manning’s account makes clear, slave trading was an equal opportunity operation.  Even in those Victorian times, when ladies were confined to the parlor, with forays into the nursery and outings for good works, some seemingly respectable women were up to their ears in the trade.  The woman Manning observed was a New London resident, but there were more such women in New York.  They kept a low profile, but occasionally their name crept into print.  A Law Intelligence report in the New York Tribune of September 22, 1862, told how a Mrs. Mary Jane Watson of 38 St. Mark’s Place had operated as a blind for John A. Machado, who skippered the bark Mary Francis on a run from Africa to Cuba.  Machado was arrested in New York, but to my knowledge no woman was ever prosecuted for participation in the trade.
     Why did good Christian men and women – ship owners, ship fitters, insurers, and provisioners, aided by banks extending loans to planters, and by iron merchants providing shackles and manacles – choose to get involved in this shameful web of complicity?  Two reasons: money and immunity.  A healthy young slave costing $50 in Africa could easily bring $350 or even $500 in Havana, and a healthy but inferior slave at least $250.  And the chances of getting caught and prosecuted were minimal.  For some, the temptation was simply too great, especially when you could remain at a safe remove and leave the dirty work to others.
     In the next post we will see the many subterfuges these investors used to escape detection, and how this vile business, widespread but centered in New York, finally, and appropriately in New York, came to an end.

     Bank note:  Virtue is rewarded after all in this cold, callous world, and there is still such a thing as loyalty.  Jamie Dimon, the embattled CEO of my beloved bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, has been given $20 million in compensation for 2013, a year in which the bank paid $13 billion (yes, billion, not million) in a settlement with the Justice Department over some mortgage securities, and endured other undeserved woes.  That's a 74% raise over 2012, which shows the board's loyalty to Mr. Dimon and its confidence in his managerial skills.   And, incidentally, there is still plenty of free candy available at my branch.

     Coming soon:  The Slave Trade: How they got away with it, and how it was finally stopped.  And then: New York and the Vision Thing.  Can a greed-ridden commercial town even have a vision?  We'll see.

     ©  2014  Clifford Browder  
    
     

109. Two Forgotten New York Murders

     New York City has seen its share of murders over the years; this post will describe two of them that have some aspect that makes them of interest.
Helen Jewett, 1836
    Called the Girl in Green because of the clothes she wore, in the 1830s Helen Jewett was the city’s most famous prostitute.  Born in Maine to a working-class family, at the age of about twelve she went to work as a servant girl in the home of a judge, but at the age of eighteen, perhaps because of a seduction, she left there and moved to Portland, where she became a prostitute under an assumed name.  After that, still using fake names, she moved to Boston and finally to that magnet of hustlers and achievers, New York.  There she flourished in a fashionable brothel at 41 Thomas Street, where her beauty attracted numerous clients, including lawyers, merchants, and politicians.
     About 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, April 10, 1836, one of the girls in the house heard a loud noise from Helen’s room, then a moan, and saw a tall figure hurrying away down the hall.  Two hours later Rosina Townsend, the madam, noticed that the door to Helen’s room was partly open.  Entering, she encountered billowing black smoke from a fire near the bed.  Immediately she roused the other girls, opened a window, and cried “Fire!”   Several night watchmen came quickly to put out the fire, though not before several male clients had managed to slip out, some of them half clothed at best.  Only then, as the smoke cleared, did they find Helen Jewett’s body in the bed, her nightclothes burned, her body on one side charred, and her bloodied head caved in from wounds by an ax.
     The murderer had fled through a back door, left his cloak and a bloodied ax outside, and climbed over a whitewashed fence to escape.  Based on the testimony of the other inmates of the house, the police went to the home of 19-year-old Richard Robinson, a clerk in a dry goods store, and arrested him on suspicion of murder.  From a respectable family in Connecticut, Robinson was a “fast” young man and one of Helen’s regular customers; he had visited her that night.  He protested his innocence, insisting that he had been asleep in his bed at the time of the murder, but on his pants were stains of whitewash. When shown the still-warm corpse, he displayed no trace of emotion.  A hastily assembled coroner’s jury heard the testimony of various witnesses and concluded that he had killed her with a hatchet and should be held for trial.
How the press imagined the scene of the murder.  The real scene was bloodier.
     Helen Jewett’s murder became big news in the press.  Up till then American newspapers were devoted mostly to the dry statistics of business and the speeches of politicians.  Doing historical research, I have consulted them and found only masses of fine print devoid of bold headlines, interviews, gossip, cartoons, charts, maps, or other illustrations – nothing, in fact, to entice the eye or entertain the mind.  James Gordon Bennett, founder and editor of the New York Herald, was determined to change this and attract a wider readership. 
     When news of Helen Jewett’s murder first broke, Bennett assumed that Robinson was guilty and managed to be admitted to Helen’s room, where he viewed the body -- “the most remarkable sight I ever beheld” – whose sensual contours, now stiffened by rigor mortis, he described at length in his paper, likening them to sculpted marble.  Bennett then surmised that Robinson had been in love with Helen; jealous of her association with other men, he had decided to break with her, went to her room to extract from her some letters of his and other items that she refused to give up, whereupon he produced a hatchet from beneath his cloak and murdered her, set a fire to cover traces of the crime, and fled.  When Bennett printed all this in lurid detail, the public gobbled it up, the Herald’s circulation soared, its overworked presses broke down several times, and the newspaper had to move to larger quarters.  So began the reign of yellow journalism in this country, a reign that continues to this day.
     Bennett interviewed Rosina Townsend as well and began to suspect the madam herself and the other girls in the house, while reversing his opinion of Robinson’s guilt.  He was soon entangled in a spirited controversy with the Sun and other papers convinced of the young man’s guilt.  (The Times and Tribune were not involved, as they had yet to be launched.)  Meanwhile business fell off sharply at the brothel, the girls started leaving, and Mrs. Townsend was forced to sell some of her furnishings, including the murder bed, which, once sold, was smashed into pieces that were carried off by many as souvenirs.  Before the trial began, young men were rallying to support Robinson, viewing prostitutes as social leeches who, while necessary to satisfy male needs, were themselves of little worth.  But some women came forth in sympathy with the victim; while not defending her life style, they insisted that her killer should be held to account.  The case now was front page news in other cities, and the citizens of New York could talk of nothing else.
     The trial began on June 2, 1836, less than two months after the murder.  (Things moved faster in those days.)  The courtroom was packed, and – unusual for the time -- representatives of out-of-town newspapers were present.  Defending Robinson was no less a legal luminary than Ogden Hoffman, the son of a New York State attorney general and himself a former district attorney.  Many witnesses testified, including Rosina Townsend and a number of prostitutes.  Powerful circumstantial evidence  was skillfully countered by Hoffman: yes, Robinson was known to have a cloak similar to the one found outside the brothel, but so did many other citizens; etc.  When the judge gave the jury its instructions, he ordered them to ignore the testimony of prostitutes, thus demolishing much of the prosecution's case.  In less than half an hour the jury returned with its verdict: not guilty.  Robinson wept, his supporters cheered, and Helen Jewett’s supporters were stunned.  The Herald was satisfied; the Sun insisted that Robinson had used the money and influence of wealthy relatives and his employer to buy an acquittal.
     After the trial some pages from Robinson’s diary were made public, showing him to be callous in his treatment of women.  Public opinion, including even some of his supporters, turned against him, being convinced now of his guilt.  In time he decided to transfer his talents to the Republic of Texas, where he is said to have become a respected citizen of the frontier.  Whether this meant fighting Comanches and Mexicans or just behaving himself, isn’t clear, though he seems to have opened a dry-goods store and other businesses.
     No one else was ever tried for the murder of Helen Jewett, who continued to be viewed as either a victim of society or a scheming seductress who, like all of her profession, took advantage of male vulnerability and its proneness to sexual error.  Nor was Helen’s memory left in peace.  Rumors circulated that resurrectionists exhumed her, stripped her bones, and used her skeleton as a medical exhibit.  What happened for certain was that her wax likeness became part of an East Coast traveling show warning young men and women of the fatal consequences of depraved behavior.
     What is one to make of all this today?  First, the hypocrisy of the double standard: a man who frequents prostitutes is simply yielding to base instincts aroused by female wiles; the prostitutes are far more guilty than he.  This attitude was even pushed so far by some as to declare, “No man should hang for the murder of a whore.”
     Second, the newfound role of sensationalist journalism in publicizing crime, sex, and scandal, even to the point of tainting the proceedings of justice, since potential jurors could not but be aware of the conflicting opinions about a case that would soon be tried.  It’s worth noting, too, that the burgeoning yellow press of the day – Bennett’s Herald and other publications that followed his lead – addressed a primarily male audience, since no respectable lady should read such stuff.  What, then, were respectable nineteenth-century ladies supposed to read?  Godey’s Ladies Book, with its tinted plates showing current female fashions, and The Ladies’ Repository, a Methodist-sponsored monthly whose articles, poetry, fiction, and expositions of sound Methodist doctrine could be safely read by the gentler sex.  Foxy Lady lay a long time in the future.
     Today, opinion inclines strongly to a belief in Robinson’s guilt.  Which makes me wonder why some of us, when provoked, commit crimes of violence, while most of us do not.  Criminologists will have the final say on the matter, but I’ll toss my modest two cents in, for whatever it is worth.  My inmate pen pal in North Carolina – who will soon be released, by the way – once wrote a vignette of prison life entitled “Murderers I Have Known.”  In it he explains that one never asks another prisoner what he is in for, since to do so is to court trouble.  But some inmates, upon getting to know you, will volunteer their stories, and he relates several.  The common denominator, I concluded, was an inability to control anger, and a tendency to yield to impulse without considering the consequences. 
     The most striking account told how a young man, when he failed to get the promised Christmas gift of a motorcycle from his parents, was so angry that he got a gun and killed them both.  Then, panicking, he rushed to the garage to escape -- to where he didn’t know -- in the family car.  And there in the garage he discovered a shiny new motorcycle that his parents intended as a surprise.  Try as I may, I can’t understand the young man’s deed.  I can imagine him raging and ranting against his parents, threatening to run away or doing it, or breaking some object cherished by them.  But I can’t conceive of getting a gun and murdering them.  Are some of us wired differently so that, if provocation arises, we do unlooked-for acts of violence?  I’ll let criminologists explain the matter.  But the very thought of it is scary.
     Finally, I can’t help but wonder who Helen Jewett was.  She was portrayed by contemporaries either as an unfortunate young woman seduced and led astray, or as a wanton seductress taking advantage of her male clientele, but both these views are stereotypes.  Who was she really?  There are those today who see her as a bold sexual adventurer and independent woman – a feminist before her time – but this strikes me as a projection of current attitudes unsupported by the facts of the case.  Who she really was we don’t know and never will.
     The Helen Jewett murder has taken up so much space, and led in so many directions, that I’ll add only one more murder here.  So now we’ll zip forward into the early twentieth century, when the vigorous muscular frame of Teddy Roosevelt, the hero of San Juan Hill, bustled its weight in the White House, and America, the victor in the Spanish American War, was becoming a recognized world power.  But we’ll linger far from the centers of national power, settling down for a moment in Chinatown, New York, where different powers held forth and a different war was raging.

Ah Hoon, 1909
     Ah Hoon was a Chinese American comedian performing in the Chinese Theater on Doyers Street, where Chinese spectators mixed with English-speaking visitors whose interest in exotic Chinatown was not diminished by the occasional whiz of a bullet or the aroma of gunpowder often in the air.  The bullets and gunpowder were the result of a tong war between the dominant On Leongs on the one hand, and the rival Hip Sings, led by a young upstart named Mock Duck, and their ally, the Four Brothers association; at stake was control of the illegal but very lucrative gambling and drug activities in Chinatown.  (The tongs of the time were mutual aid societies that had evolved into murderous gangs.)    Mock Duck was a formidable figure, strutting around Pell Street covered with diamonds, his sinister image enhanced by long, lethal fingernails indicating that he left the dirty work to his lowly associates.  Knowing his life in danger, he wore a chain-mail vest and, if attacked, was said to squat down in the street, shut both eyes, and fire two handguns at his assailants.  Rough on passers-by, but it must have worked since he survived.
Mock Duck, with neither vest nor diamonds
nor weapons visible.
     This sinister figure was not one to trifle with, but Ah Hoon did just that.  Being associated with the On Leongs, during his performances in April 1909 he began making fun of Mock Duck and the Hip Sings and Four Brothers, and in the months that followed, his gibes got fiercer.  Mock Duck and the Hip Sings were not amused; in fact, their appreciation of Ah Hoon’s humor was in such scant supply that they finally sent an emissary to the comedian to inform him he would die on December 30, 1909. 
     This notice must have caused Ah Hoon some anxiety, but the On Leongs rallied to his support.  On December 29 a police sergeant and two patrolmen were assigned to guard Ah Hoon during his performance in a sold-out theater jammed with spectators eager to see a public execution.  After the performance the three policemen escorted Ah Hoon through a tunnel back to his Chatham Square boardinghouse.  There the comedian went upstairs and retired to his room, whose only window faced the wall of the building next door, while a squad of heavily armed On Leongs stood guard outside his locked door, and dozens more kept watch in the street below.  Feeling safe, Ah Hoon went to bed.  The next morning he was found dead with a bullet in his heart.
     In celebration of their victory, the Hip Sings paraded through the streets of Chinatown with the requisite fireworks, music, and dancing dragons.  The police were baffled; how had the Hip Sings managed it?  In time, another police investigation figured it out.  The Hip Sings had entered a nearby tenement and mounted to the roof, then jumped across three roofs to the roof of the building next door to Ah Hoon’s, and before midnight lowered a hit man in a chair by rope; the hit man had then stealthily entered the room through the window, approached the bed, and shot the sleeping comedian with a silencer-equipped gun, after which he regained the chair and was hoisted back up to the roof.  Ah Hoon probably never knew what happened, nor was a suspect ever arrested.   Meanwhile the tong war continued.
     Mock Duck, who must have ordered the murder, won the war against the On Leongs, but was arrested several times in the following years; finally convicted for operating a policy game (an illegal lottery), he served two years in Sing Sing.  In 1932 he helped arrange peace among the Chinatown tongs and retired to Brooklyn, where he died in 1941.
     Ah Hoon’s murder does not prompt me to the many reflections that Helen Jewett’s does, for it was simply a gangland murder, Chinatown style.  Who was Ah Hoon?  Did he have a family?  Why did he risk his life by making fun of a rival tong?  It was like a comedian in Chicago in the 1920s making fun of Al Capone.  The sources say nothing of all this; they simply record the basic facts of an ingenious murder.

     Me and Teddy Roosevelt:  Ah Hoon's murder, like that of Stanford White (post #107), occurred when Teddy Roosevelt was President, which prompts a personal reflection.  Teddy Roosevelt is the only President from before my time whom I have related to personally.  Back in my tender years my father, a great sportsman and lover of the outdoors, often told his younger son, a bookworm with no aptitude for sports, how Teddy Roosevelt had been a puny little pantywaist, easily bullied by other boys, until he went out West, toughened up, and became a muscular, two-fisted specimen whom no bully would mess with: he became a man.  As a result, all through my grade school and junior high school years I nourished an intense desire to mount a picture of T.R. on my bedroom wall, so I could use it as a dartboard and implant a barrage of sharp objects in his beefy, toothy grin.  Intensifying this urge was the fact that T.R.’s favorite exclamation was “Bully!” – which can be interpreted variously. 






     Alas, I never obtained the picture or the dartboard, and in time myself and my views ripened.  Today I have to acknowledge the following:
·      T.R., albeit a racist and imperialist, was also that rarity of today, a progressive Republican.·      He established the National Park system.·      He busted trusts.  (Ah Teddy, in this era of too-big-to-fail banks, where are you when we need you?)·      I myself have been known to say, ”Bully!”  Albeit a bit facetiously.·      I once took an obligatory boxing class in college and survived.  Once, I even merited praise from the instructor, a professional boxer with an impressive build.  But I saw boxing as a game, almost a dance, nothing more.·      Still, I am not a hunter, and think it both ridiculous and repellent that those who are have traditionally mounted on their walls the heads of creatures they have slain.  I have often fantasized seeing the head of the hunter himself mounted there beside them: a delicious thought.

Big man kills big elephant: big deal.
     Me and hunting:  To talk about Teddy Roosevelt is to talk about hunting.  Yes, in this regard I've just tried to have a laugh at his expense, but as a child of the Midwest and son of a hunter I know that it's not that simple.  As my father explained to me long ago, hunting is an instinct, stronger in some than in others.  In him it was strong; in me, practically nonexistent.  I came in time to inherit his love of the outdoors, but had no interest in his fishing poles and shotguns, his most cherished possessions.  But  urban liberals usually fail to grasp how important hunting is to many people in other parts of the country, how it's in their blood.  My own feelings are mixed.  Hunting to obtain a truly necessary supply of food I have no quarrel with, nor hunting to thin out an overabundance of wildlife, since that will actually benefit the wildlife.  As for hunting as a sport -- the kind of hunting most Americans do -- I have no personal interest in it, but wouldn't want to interfere with those who do.  It needs to be regulated, obviously, for the sake of all concerned.  If, as Tennessee Williams's character in The Glass Menagerie insists, man was meant to be a lover, a warrior, and a hunter, maybe being a hunter is the easiest to achieve.  The trouble is, too often there are far more hunters than game; the hunting instinct persists, but the wilderness that accommodates it is much diminished.  Do I believe in gun control?  You bet!  But in control of handguns and automatic weapons, which have nothing to do with hunting.  Leave it to the NRA to try to muddle the issue, so as to enlist hunters against even moderate gun control -- a fight that continues, and that so far the NRA is winning.  

My father loved them, I did not.
Gurpreetsihota
     Coming soon:  New York and the Slave Trade.  And a sequel:  The Slave Trade: How Did They Get Away with It, and How Did It End?  Also:  New York and the China Trade.  (Titles tentative.)

     ©  2014  Clifford Browder

108. Andy Warhol: Genius or Fraud?

     In an auction last November 13 at Sotheby’s here in New York, a grisly Andy Warhol painting, “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster),” showing a body amid the wreckage of a car crash, was sold for $104.5 million, the highest price paid to date for one of the artist’s works.  The sale provoked much comment, some of it harshly negative, and rekindled the perennial debate as to the importance of Warhol as an artist, some seeing him as a genius and some as a fraud. 
     Recently I queried several friends, all knowledgeable New Yorkers, and got a consistently mixed reaction.  “So-so,” said one, adding that he could do without the repetitions, meaning the reduplications of celebrity portraits and other subjects.  My friend John felt that certain works, but not all, merited serious attention, citing in particular a silkscreen painting – just one, not fifty – of Marilyn Monroe, that the artist painted in 1962, soon after her suicide, and then reproduced many times; John found her expression and the vivid background coloring captivating. 
     A third friend, an artist who does landscapes and city views, saw early Warhol as defining a moment in art history but viewed the later work, always witty and entertaining, as lacking the depth of the earlier work.  When I questioned him about the “moment in art history,” he said that early Warhol in a small way recognized and visualized a decade in which American decadence had a defining influence on the course of civilization; by “decadence” he meant a materialistic view of the world, with instant gratification and idol worship (Marilyn, Elvis, Liz Taylor) thrown in.  My partner Bob, who loves abstract expressionism, is frankly scornful of Warhol, whose work he deems simplistic, commercial, and lacking in depth; “I’ve never seen a work of his that I liked,” he explains.  As for me, less knowledgeable about modern American art than any of them, I am inclined to share Bob’s reaction, opining that Warhol was indeed a genius … of self-promotion.  But maybe I’ll be moved to – just a little – change my mind.
Andy with a friend.
Jack Mitchell      No one would deny that Warhol, the Prince of Pop, probably alone of twentieth-century American artists, made his name a household word for his generation and  beyond; people who know little or nothing about art have heard of him and sometimes have opinions.  He surfaced in New York in the 1950s as a successful and very well paid commercial artist and an innovator in silkscreen painting.  In the 1960s his Pop art was widely displayed in exhibitions featuring such attention-getting creations as Campbell’s Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles, and 100 Dollar Bills, plus renderings of vacuum cleaners and hamburgers, and garish portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and Mohammad Ali.  He himself became a celebrity, his youthful features, with long blond hair and  glasses, becoming known to the public through photos and self-portraits. 
Poster for Exploding Plastic
Inevitable, a 1966 multimedia
spectacle by Warhol that featured
The Velvet Undergound.     Warhol’s studio at 231 East 47thStreet, dubbed the Factory (it was in fact an abandoned hat factory), proved a magnet for avant-garde artists, writers, musicians, and assorted drug addicts, weirdos, and crazies, all of them Warhol devotees over whom, even with his gentle demeanor, he is said to have reigned tyrannically.  Out of the Factory came quantities of Pop art, avant-garde films, multimedia happenings, and the music of The Velvet Underground, a rock band managed by him, which enjoyed phenomenal success.  At Factory parties celebrities and socialites rubbed shins with drag queens and hustlers in a unique setting where everything, from the floor to toilet handles, was painted silver, and there were drugs galore.
     Then, in June of the pivotal year 1968, just after Warhol moved to a new studio on the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West, the radical feminist Valerie Solanas, author of a tract advocating the elimination of men, shot him, inflicting a wound that was almost fatal.  I remember how this was big news, until Robert Kennedy’s assassination three days later relegated the Warhol story to the back pages.  Solanas later pleaded guilty to reckless assault, was sentenced to three years in prison and released in 1971, phoned Warhol and threatened him again, then was rearrested and subsequently institutionalized several times before fading into obscurity.  That Solanas, hating men, should pick Warhol as her victim is curious, since he never claimed to be, or wanted to be, a sterling specimen of manhood.  My take on the two of them is simple: she’s a bore; he’s interesting.  In her photos she looks like she's been force-fed on hate.  But she has been hailed – by a few – as a “girl Nietzsche,” Medusa, an anti-patriarchal avant-garde militant, and a feminist/lesbian revolutionary ahead of her time.  For that fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol says we all get, it seems that all you have to do is shoot someone.
     Following the shooting Warhol was out of commission for weeks.  He was released from the hospital in July, and on his first sortie out of his house he went to 42nd Street to see a porno movie and bought, according to a friend who went with him, the dirtiest magazines he could find.  But the Factory, now much more tightly controlled, was never the same again.  It is said that Warhol was so afraid of further attacks by Solanas that he would jump if even a good friend touched him.  He was less scandal-prone and likewise less successful in the 1970s, when critics began criticizing his celebrity portraits as superficial and overtly commercial, but reaped more critical and financial success in the 1980s.  By then his long graying hair, over a gaunt face, looked at times like a fright wig; aging was not kind.  In 1987 he died following gallbladder surgery at 58. 
     I probably first heard of Andy Warhol when his Campbell’s soup cans caused a splash in 1962, but I never met him.  We were exact contemporaries but moved in different worlds; toiling then in the glades of Academe, I would have found his entourage too bizarre, and the drug scene of the Factory repellent.  Besides, the idea of 32 Campbell’s soup cans as art, especially when exhibited in a single line like products on a shelf, turned me off, old fogey that I am, so that right from the start I was suspicious of his antics and his art.  The same goes for 100 Coke bottles, or 100 dollar bills, or however many images of captivating Marilyn Monroe he produced. 
     But my friend John has a different take on both the artist and his art.  John knew him in his early years in the 1950s and has shared his impressions with me.  An editor at Interiors magazine (see post #47), he got to know Andy Warhol when Warhol did cover art for the publication.  John remembers commissioning him for cover art and some drawings to be used inside the magazine for the princely sum of $25.00.  John’s personal impression: the artist was a gentle soul, otherworldly and precious; he describes him as “featherly.”  Easygoing and friendly, Warhol was accessible; one could readily address him as “Andy.”  Though he was beginning to show his serious art, he was not impressed with himself, not at all the ego-driven artist; above all, he was accommodating.  For a feature article by John on music, Warhol did a semiabstract cover showing a speaker with sound waves.  When the publisher saw it, he asked John to have Warhol add a small picture of an interior.  John was fearful that the artist would resent this interference with his creation, but Andy replied, in his soft fey voice, “Oh that’s okay, John.  That’s okay.”  Yes, accommodating in the extreme.
     His sexuality was enigmatic.  Certainly he was gay and on the femme side; blond and “featherly,” he may have had a rough time in high school, though to my knowledge this has not been commented on.  When he first hit the New York art scene, he says that the other gay artists kept him at a distance, deeming him too “swish.”  Homoeroticism permeates much of his work, yet when interviewed in 1980 he claimed he was still a virgin, which confirms the impression that I always had of him.  His doctor has stated that on his scrotum Warhol had prominent blood vessels like a cluster of little rubies, a condition that made him self-conscious and ashamed.  That may well explain why he seems to have preferred voyeurism to full participation.  His interest in porn, and the male nudity exhibited in some of his films, would seem to confirm this.  “Fantasy love,” he once said, “is much better than reality love.  Never doing it is very exciting.”  Furthermore, John has told me how a friend of his attended a gay party where Andy Warhol was present.  During some sort of sadomasochistic exhibition Warhol, standing next to him, kept uttering an emphatic “Wow!” 
     Whitman’s sexuality, like Warhol’s, was enigmatic; some gay lib advocates of today have assumed that every young man he befriended was a lover, but there is no hard evidence of this.  Certainly his Calamus poems are suffused with eroticism.  But a biographer once said of him, “Perhaps for his work to be complete, his life had to be incomplete.”  The same could well have been true of Warhol.
     Well reported on as Andy Warhol is, there are facts about him that many people probably don’t know.  Here are some, culled from the Internet:
·      He was born Andrej Varhola, Jr., in Pittsburgh in 1928, the son of working-class immigrants from Slovakia.  His father worked in a coal mine or did construction work, depending on the source.·      In third grade he had St. Vitus’ Dance (Sydenham’s chorea), a nervous system disease causing involuntary movements of the limbs, and became a hypochondriac, fearing doctors and hospitals.  As a result, he probably delayed having his gallbladder problems treated, leading to his death in 1987.·      A self-proclaimed mama’s boy, he lived with his mother in New York from 1952 to 1971; she died in 1972.·      He praised Coca-Cola as a distinctly American and democratic phenomenon: all Cokes are the same, and everyone drinks them -- the President, Liz Taylor, and the bum on the street.·      He is said to have phoned his press agent every morning.·      He said that, contrary to popular opinion, movies make things look real, whereas real life is like watching television.  When he was shot, he knew that he was watching television; it was unreal.·      He once said: “I love Los Angeles.  I love Hollywood.  They’re so beautiful.  Everything’s plastic, but I love plastic.  I want to be plastic.”·      Another quote: “I am a deeply superficial person.”·      Boys who came to lunch and drank too much wine were amused or even flattered, when he asked them to help him “paint” by emptying their bladder on canvases primed with copper-based paint.·      He was a practicing Ruthenian Catholic and regularly attended Mass at the Roman Catholic church of St. Vincent Ferrer, at Lexington and East 66th Street in Manhattan.·      The IRS audited him every year from 1972 until his death in 1987.·      One critic called him "the Nothingness Himself."  Warhol’s comment: “I’m still obsessed with the idea of looking into the mirror and seeing no one, nothing.”·      He and his friends are said to have bought 2,000 bottles of Dom Pérignon to be consumed at the millennium.  After his death, and long before the millennium,  the bottles disappeared. ·      When he was buried in a suburb of Pittsburg in 1987, a copy of Interview, a gossip magazine founded by him, was dropped into the grave, along with an Interview T-shirt and a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume.·      When Sotheby’s auctioned his estate, it took nine days and grossed more than twenty million dollars. ·      The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, with seven floors and 17 galleries harboring his art, films, and archives, is the biggest museum in the country devoted to a single artist.              There remains my original question: Andy Warhol, genius or fraud?  So where do I come out?  Certainly, as I said earlier, he was a genius at self-promotion.  I find him, perhaps not a great artist, but a fascinating phenomenon.  Indeed, I’m much less drawn to Andy Warhol the artist than to Andy Warhol the person, whose contradictions intrigue me: a virginal voyeur who needed people around him yet seems never to have revealed himself fully to others.   And the very things so many of us deplore in American culture – crass commercialism, the cult of celebrities, the commodification of art, Hollywood, money, Coca-Cola, plastic – he embraced and glorified.  But to label him either genius or fraud is too simplistic; he may have had a bit of both in him but can’t be described so easily.  Somehow he evolved from the gentle, accommodating person my friend John knew in the 1950s into the reigning monarch of the Factory in the 1960s, ruling his court like an autocrat and reveling in the fawning admiration of his courtiers.  Obviously, they needed him, but he needed them as well.  And from the beginning to the end of his career, I think he can be fairly described in his own words: “I am a deeply superficial person.”
     Curiously, the Sizzling Sixties, that era of liberation – gay lib, women’s lib, and campus rebellions nationwide – was also characterized by autocrats: Rudolph Bing at the Met (post #84), Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio (post #41), Robert Moses at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (post #78, though by then he was on his way out), and Andy Warhol at the Factory.  But all these figures, autocrats or not, were immensely creative and produced results.
     When all is said and done, I still am amazed that some anonymous buyer forked over $104.5 million for a Warhol painting.  After all, he was buying the work not of an Old Master but a Young Phenomenon.  But who knows how Andy Warhol’s reputation as an artist will fare in the future?  These things are unpredictable.  As an example I cite the French painter Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898).  What, you never heard of him?  Or his name only rings a faint tinkle in the cave of memory?  Well, his murals and oil paintings were hot stuff back in the Third Republic, when the Impressionists were first getting known.  And today, he rates close to zero or, as my friend John has remarked, as “nineteenth-century kitsch.”   So it goes in the art world, as one taste yields to another, and that one to still another.  Will this be Andy Warhol’s fate?  I wouldn’t presume to say.  But there will be more reminiscences and biographies of him – scores, hundreds – for he is an enigmatic and fascinating subject.
Puvis de Chavannes, L'Espérance (Hope).
     If Andy Warhol still exists in some higher mode of being and is aware that a work of his sold for $104.5 million, I’m sure he’s smiling.  Unless, of course, he’s too busy silkscreening God.
                                                                                                        Allie Caulfield          A sobering thought:  Bourgeois that I am, I can’t help but ask who, at the Factory in its heyday, did the floors and the bathroom.  A maid?  Volunteers?  His mother?  Andy himself??  And who cleaned up after those legendary parties?  Maybe his archives have the answer.
     A note on Judith Malina:  In post #94 I discussed the Living Theater, its propensity for nudity, and why I kept my clothes on.  From a recent article in the New York Times I have now learned that its cofounder and artistic director, Judith Malina, afflicted with emphysema and confined to a wheelchair, is still going strong at age 87.  A year ago she lost the Lower East Side home of the Living, and the commercial space above it where she had lived for six years, because she couldn’t pay the rent.  She has had vast experience in losing leases, but this was different.  “I was crying, screaming,” she says.  “They had to carry me to the car.”  She now lives in an assisted-living residence for theater people in Englewood, New Jersey, where she is writing and making plans to direct new works.  She likes her neighbors and the serenity of the grounds there, but yearns for the creativity of the Lower East Side, her home of many years.  “If there’s going to be a beautiful, nonviolent revolution,” she insists, “it’s going to start there.”  Living Theater actors visit her almost daily, and she gets into Manhattan once a week.  “I feel very exiled, abandoned,” she admits, but she continues to write in her diary, some of which has been published, and next spring hopes to direct a new play of hers in Manhattan.  Though she seems to keep her clothes on now, this woman is unchanged, unreconstructed.  Bravo, Judith!  Keep at it as long as you can.
     Congressional millionaires:  According to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, at least 268 of the 534 members of Congress had a net worth of over $1 million in 2012.  At the top of the list is Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, with $330 million or more.  At the bottom, poor David Valadao, another Republican of California, with debts of about $12.1 million from loans on a family dairy farm.  I confess that I'm surprised, since I thought that all our Congress folk, without exception, were millionaires.  How else to explain their letting unemployment benefits expire for over a million Americans?  Well, if they aren't all millionaires yet, they will be, if they play their cards right.  
     Coming soon:  Four Forgotten New York Murders (the Girl in Green, a society dentist, Old Shakespeare, and Ah Hoon); Maritime New York: the Slave Trade and the China Trade (horrors, then hong merchants, white devils, and the Son of Heaven).
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder    

107. Two Famous New York Murders

     New York City is not the murder capital of the nation or the world, an honor that other municipalities here and abroad can contend for; currently its homicide rate is in fact declining and has reached a 45-year low.  But given its large population and abundance of newspapers, it has witnessed and recorded a fair number of murders over the years, famous and well reported in their time, if often forgotten today.  This post will recount two of them, starting with a spectacular one involving many witnesses and therefore recorded in detail, unlike so many murders that occur clandestinely, obliging us to only conjecture about what happened.  So let’s go back to the early 1900s and the Gilded Age, when crusty old J.P. Morgan ruled financially, the scandal-hungry tabloid press was rampant, and Teddy Roosevelt, who had reaped glory by charging up San Juan Hill, was president. 
Stanford White, 1906
     On the evening of June 25, 1906, a fashionable audience was assembled on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, a vast Beaux-Arts structure with a soaring minaret-like tower at 26thStreet and Madison Avenue, for the premiere of the frothy musical comedy Mamzelle Champagne.  At 10:55 p.m., while the performance was nearing its conclusion, a burly redheaded gentleman of fifty with an abundant red mustache entered alone and sat at the table customarily reserved for him, five rows from the stage.  Resting his chin in his right hand, he seemed lost in thought, perhaps eyeing the young female performers onstage, as was his custom, since he was a practiced connoisseur of teen-age girls. 
Stanford White.  The cleanshaven look
was coming in with the new century,
but the older set remained hirsute.     The redheaded gentleman was none other than Stanford White, the most renowned architect in the nation, whose firm had designed the very structure  he was then in, as well as countless others, including the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square and the Washington Square Arch, located in that square at the foot of Fifth Avenue.  Unknown to his wife and family, his separate apartment on 24th Street, supposedly a place where he could work uninterrupted, provided a sumptuous setting for his numerous teen-age conquests, including one room with a red-velvet swing suspended from the ceiling with ivy-twined ropes, where his young mistresses often disported.  White’s presence at the rooftop garden theater resulted from a last-minute decision when he postponed a planned trip to Philadelphia because his nineteen-year-old son had arrived unexpectedly in the city for a visit; they had dined together, and White had come on to the Garden alone.
     Some ten minutes after White’s arrival a handsome younger man left his own table, walked about nervously while muttering to himself, then approached White’s table.  As a performer onstage began the song “I Could Love a Million Girls,” the younger man took out a revolver from beneath his coat and fired three shots at point-blank range into White, one bullet hitting his left eye and killing him, while the other two grazed his shoulder.  White’s lifeless body fell to the floor, and the table overturned with a clatter.
     A stunned silence gripped performers and audience alike.  Spectators thought at first that this was part of the performance or another of the party tricks common in fashionable circles at the time.  But then, grasping what had happened, people screamed, leaped to their feet, and began a panicky flight toward the exits.  At the theater manager’s insistence, the orchestra made a feeble attempt to go on playing, but the performers were frozen in horror and the panic continued.  Someone put a  tablecloth over the body and, when blood soaked through it, added a second one as well.
Harry Thaw.  Baby-faced?
Yes, just a bit.     The murderer had left holding his weapon aloft to indicate that he was done shooting.  When he reached the elevators, a bystander took the revolver away from him, and a policeman arrested him.  “That man ruined my wife,” said the murderer.  Just before the policeman took his prisoner down in an elevator, a woman rushed up and embraced him; witnesses said they believed it was the murderer’s wife.   The policeman then escorted the man out of the building on the way to a police station in the Tenderloin; the man did not resist, seemed dazed.  Garden employees recognized him as Harry Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire and man about town whose wife was Evelyn Nesbit, a beauty with a bit of a past.
     The story that came out in Thaw’s subsequent trial for murder has different versions, depending on who told it and why.  It is clear that Evelyn Nesbit came to Stanford White’s attention when, at age sixteen and already a successful model, she performed in the musical Floradora, an import from London that had opened on Broadway in 1900 and proved an astonishing success.  Prominent in the show was a luscious sextet of young women, dubbed the Floradora girls, who attracted scores of admirers; all of the original six, it is said, ended up marrying millionaires.   
The luscious sextet.  With male escorts, but who noticed them?
     The eyes are the scouts of the heart.  It was as a Floradora girl with long, dark hair that hauntingly beautiful young Evelyn caught the eye of Stanford White, who impressed her with his wealth and winning ways.  (Does “hauntingly beautiful” sound overdone?  Just look at the photos of her at that time.)  According to one version told by her, he drugged her with champagne and deflowered her, following which she professed to hate him.  But in another version she described herself, a young innocent from Pittsburgh, as dazzled by his attentions and a somewhat willing victim.  In any event, she became his mistress for a while, swinging on the red velvet swing, until, as she matured, he lost interest in her and moved on to other conquests, though not without maintaining a rather fatherly interest in her and on occasion providing her with funds.
Evelyn at sweet sixteen.  If this one
doesn't grab you...  ... how about this one?  Beauty that men would
die for, and at least one did.
     But Evelyn had another admirer, Harry Thaw, a mentally unstable playboy (the word first appeared about now, possibly in reference to him) who also plied her with gifts and attention, slowly overcoming her resistance with his declared ardor and repeated proposals of marriage, which she finally accepted.  Even before they married, he had pressed her repeatedly for details of her relationship with White, exhibiting a jealousy that amounted to an obsession.
     White was aware of Thaw, though perhaps not of Thaw’s mounting hatred of his wife’s onetime seducer.  For the New York upper crust the term “Pittsburgh millionaire” suggested nouveau riche, unmannerly, brash, and this was certainly White’s opinion of Thaw, whom he dismissed as a clown,  calling the baby-faced younger man the “Pennsylvania pug.”  For his part Thaw hated White and blamed him for his exclusion from the city’s elite men’s clubs and other perceived slights, but envied White’s social position and freewheeling life style.  All of which led up to the events of June 25, 1906.

Harry Thaw in the Tombs, dining on food catered
by Delmonico's.
     The news of the murder was blazoned in the press, and especially in the sensationalist tabloids of the day, who branded White a “sybarite of debauchery” and worse, while friends of his defended him and praised his accomplishments as an architect.  Meanwhile, lodged in the Tombs pending what promised to be “the trial of the century,” Thaw wore his usual custom-tailored clothes, dined on meals catered by Delmonico’s, and enjoyed a daily ration of wine and champagne.  He expected the jury to see him as a chivalrous man defending innocent womanhood against a villainous predator.
     The prosecution tried Thaw in 1907 for premeditated murder, and Thaw’s lawyers mounted a defense of temporary insanity; the result was a hung jury.  His second trial in 1908 found him not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced him to incarceration for life in a state hospital for the criminally insane.  There he lived comfortably, but when a legal attempt to free him failed, he escaped to Canada in 1913, only to be brought back to the U.S.  But he then obtained a new trial in which the jury found him not guilty and no longer insane and therefore set him free.  In later years he wrote a memoir defending his murder of White.  After further misadventures he died in 1947 at the age of 76, leaving Evelyn Nesbit a bequest of ten thousand dollars out of an estate valued at over one million.
Evelyn with her son, 1913.     Harry Thaw, irrational, wrath-prone, and a user of cocaine and morphine, was hardly the ideal husband, and Evelyn Nesbit wanted to divorce him.  Subsidized by Thaw’s family, she agreed to testify on his behalf as a loyal wife and did so, reinforcing the defense’s portrayal of White as a sexual predator.  In 1910 she gave birth to a son whom she claimed was Thaw’s, conceived during a conjugal visit to Thaw in the state prison, but all his life he vigorously denied paternity.  She divorced Thaw in 1915. 
     For ears afterward Evelyn Nesbit was plagued by her reputation as “the lethal beauty.”  In 1916 she married an actor, but his wife’s notoriety caused him to leave her, and she finally divorced him in 1933.  She seems to have run a speakeasy in Manhattan during the 1920s, and struggled with alcoholism and morphine addiction well into the 1930s.  She in turn published not one but two memoirs, and later taught ceramics and sculpture in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s.  She died in a nursing home in California in 1967 at age 82.
     As a grade-school history buff in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, from an early age I was well aware of two famous murders in distant New York City: Stanford White and Jim Fisk.  Fisk’s death and its aftermath I have recounted in post #69, “Jim Fisk, part 5: Such a Good Boy,” so it requires no repetition here.  As for White’s, I recall the 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, telling Evelyn Nesbit’s story, but had no idea that she was still alive at the time.  Indeed, she was hired by the studio as an adviser, though her advice seems not to have been taken since, in true Hollywood fashion,  the film’s version of her story is highly fictionalized. 
     Now, in researching this post online, I came across a 1954 interview with her in her small Los Angeles studio, where she was teaching sculpture and ceramics.  An accompanying photo showed her, tools in hand, beside an unfinished piece of sculpture: a woman of 69 in slacks with looks appropriate for her age but, inevitably, lacking the haunting beauty responsible for her earlier adventures and misadventures.  Her younger students were totally unaware of her past, but their grandmothers, she said, sometimes chatted with her about it.  Ah, once again the wonders of the Internet!  There she was, years later, a modest teacher in distant Los Angeles.  That this woman who years before, through no fault of her own, caused a famous murder should still be alive, however modestly, seemed inappropriate. 
     This is the same feeling I experienced on learning that Josie Mansfield, Jim Fisk’s inamorata and the cause of his murder in 1872, died in Boston forty years later, in 1912.  I almost want to shout at these aged survivors, “How dare you live on so many years after the peak experience of your life?  What meaning can all those surplus later years have, overshadowed as they must be by the turbulent events of your youth?  Don’t you know when to bow out?” 
     But that’s not how these things work; like it or not, there are usually survivors, shorn of beauty, drama, and glamour.  History, alas, is messy and leaves lots of loose ends dangling.
     The story of Stanford White’s murder, and the murderer and the woman involved, have taken up so much space that there is room for only one more homicide, if homicide it was.  So now let’s go back even further to 1841, when the eminently forgettable John Tyler was president, and the city was still recovering from the Panic of 1837, but importing tea and cutlery and textiles and fancy lace, and exporting grain and cotton.  And smoking.  Just the men, of course, not the ladies – perish the thought!  (You’ve come a long way, baby.)  And not cigarettes (those spindly things had yet to appear) – but big, fat, thick cigars.  And the men – some of them, at least, since others knew better – chewed.  Yes, in spite of Mrs. Trollope’s diatribes (see post #24).  Which is why the pothouses of the day (known later as saloons) had sawdust on the floor.  Enough said.
Mary Rogers, 1841
     She was known as the Beautiful Cigar Girl, the young woman working at John Anderson’s tobacco shop at 319 Broadway.  Her unusual good looks drew multitudes of males to the shop, some of whom lingered to exchange teasing glances with her, and one to feel such inspiration as to write a poem, later published in the New York Herald, extolling her heavenlike smile and starlike eyes.   Among the customers were such literary figures of the day as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck.  No wonder Anderson paid her well; his business was thriving.
     On the afternoon of Sunday, July 25, 1841, Mary, then twenty-one, told her fiancé, Daniel Payne, that she would be visiting relatives.  She lived at her mother’s boardinghouse on Nassau Street, and when a severe thunderstorm developed and Mary didn’t return, the mother assumed that she was staying over with relatives.  But Mary did not return the following Monday; she had disappeared. 

     The news shocked the city, and it was shocked even more when, three days later, her body was found floating in the Hudson near Hoboken.  The coroner found finger marks on her throat, suggesting strangulation.  Now the press sensationalized the case even more, proposing suspects – Payne among them – and speculating as to what had happened.  The street gangs of the day were also accused, as well as the abortionist Madame Restell, who might have dumped her body in the river after a fatal abortion.  Then, weeks later, some articles of women’s clothing, including a handkerchief with the initials “M.R.,” were found near where the body had been discovered.  Frederica Loss, who ran a nearby tavern, recalled seeing a young woman there with a man on July 25; they dined in the tavern and left.  Later that evening she heard a scream outside.
     Daniel Payne had an alibi proving his innocence, but was suspected nonetheless.  He began drinking heavily and claimed to have seen Mary’s ghost.  On October 7, 1841, he took a ferry to Hoboken, drank heavily at Mrs. Loss’s tavern, then went outside and drank a fatal dose of laudanum.  Dying on the spot where Mary may have died, he left a note: “To the World – here I am on the very spot.  May God forgive me for my misspent life.”  Some took this as an admission of guilt, but most believed that despair at her death had led him to suicide.
     In November 1842 Frederica Loss, shot accidentally by her son, made a deathbed statement that Mary had come to her tavern on the fatal night with a doctor who performed an abortion.  Mary, she said, had died of complications, and Mrs. Loss’s son had dumped her body in the river.  This contradicted the coroner’s report of marks of strangulation, and his assertion that she had been a person of chastity, but the story was widely accepted.  The police evinced skepticism, however, and no arrest was ever made.
     Some sources assert that the newspapers, soon preoccupied with other crimes, lost interest in the Mary Rogers mystery, but this is not altogether the case.  In the November 8, 1845, issue of the fledgling National Police Gazette, a sensationalist publication whose coverage of crime and scandal soon brought it a large circulation nationwide, an anonymous letter to the editors suggested that Mary Rogers had indeed died a victim of abortion, and decried the three abortionists then known to be practicing in New York City, among them Madame Restell.  (For Restell, see post #32.)  And when a mob, worked up by a street agitator, marched on Madame Restell’s residence at 148 Greenwich Street on February 23, 1846, among their shouts was the cry, “Who murdered Mary Rogers?”  Only a police presence kept them from storming the house.
     In addition, the story of the Beautiful Cigar Girl had been enshrined in literature, for in 1842 Edgar Allen Poe published “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” based closely on the Mary Rogers story but set in Paris, a city he had never visited.  In Poe’s story the body is found in the Seine, and C. Auguste Dupin, a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, unravels the mystery of the young woman’s death by studying accounts of her story in the press.  Dupin’s conclusion, reached by careful logical analysis: Marie was murdered by a naval officer with whom she had arranged a secret rendezvous; following this fatal lovers’ quarrel the guilt-ridden murderer dumped her body in the river and disappeared.  Frederica Loss’s deathbed statement regarding a botched abortion does not appear in Poe’s account.  That account leaves something to be desired.  One critic has called it “an able if tedious exercise in reasoning.”  Yes, lacking the blood and sinews of vividly described characters, it might strike many readers as tedious.
     At the end of his story Poe insists that his fictional solution of Marie Rogêt’s murder was not meant to solve the problem of Mary Rogers’s death.  That death, whether resulting from strangulation or abortion, remains one of New York City’s most noteworthy unsolved mysteries.  In the annals of the city’s homicides, there are  too many such mysteries, and no literary sequel to preserve them in our memory.
     For auld lang syne:  Many of us sing it on New Year’s Eve, as midnight approaches – often loudly and boozily – but few of us know what it means.  It’s a Scottish-dialect poem by Robert Burns set to music, and the repeated phrase “for auld lang syne” can be rendered as “for days long gone” or something similar; substitute this and it will all make sense.  The song is a reaffirmation of a friendship of long standing.  There are many verses, but few of us can manage more than the first, followed by the chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear,For auld lang syne,We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yetFor auld lang syne.
It must be known internationally, for when I sang it to myself ineptly – as only I can do – on New Year’s Eve, our Haitian home care aide surprised Bob and me by announcing that he knew the song and could sing it in either French or Creole.
     Here now is an e-mail I received on New Year’s Day from a friend who once served in the State Department:
Happy New Year
It is strange the things you remember as time goes by.  Thinking about the 88 New Year’s Eves that I remember, one in particular returns to me year after year.   It was the late Fifties and I was living in Antwerp.   I was duty officer and so confined to quarters next to the telephone with the radio for company.  I sat in the silence in front of a log fire in my living room,  And then, at the stroke of midnight came a wonderful sound.  All the many, many ships in Europe’s largest port began to sound their steam whistles.  And then on the BBC, a deep -voiced Scot., with his lovely accent,  quoted the last verse of Robbie Burns’ poem “For A’That”; it was a warm emotional and lovely moment.  And I pass the lines of the poem on to you with my fervent hope that Burns’ wish will be granted.
“Then let us pray that come it may,(As come it will for a”that,)That Sense and Worth, o’er a’;The earth,Shall bear the gree, an’a’that.For a’that, an’a’that,Its coming yet for a’thatThat Man to Man, the worldO’er,Shall brothers be for a’that.”

And I, Cliff Browder, summoning all the Scots' blood in me, wish the same to everyone.
     Coming soon:  Andy Warhol: Genius or Fraud?  And after that: Four Forgotten New York Murders.

     ©  2014  Clifford Browder   

106. Inanities of the 1960s and Now

      This post is about inanities.  I am drawing its content from my Inanities File, which I began in the 1960s and continued into the mid-1980s, at which point I lost interest in it.  Maybe the world’s inanities so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t keep up.  At any rate, I stopped collecting inanities, though every three years or so I would get out the file, peruse its contents, and chuckle, or shake my head in disbelief, or get indignant or angry.  And now I am publishing a selection of the file’s contents, for viewers to react as they wish.  They may find these items inane, or they may not; it’s a matter of personal perspective.  And one’s reaction to an inanity can vary widely, from laughter to scorn to indignation to fury to bafflement.
     But what is an inanity?  Obviously, something that is inane.  But what does “inane” mean?  Off the top of my head, I would say “supremely silly.”  But to firm up my own definition, I have consulted that authority of authorities, Webster’s International Dictionary, 2nded., a ponderous tome that sits on my desk gathering dust, since it requires such an effort to access it.  Its definition of inane: “Without contents; empty; esp., void of sense or intelligence; silly; characterless.”  I have no quarrel with this, but I especially emphasize “silly.”
Inanities from my file
     So here are some items from my Inanities File, taken from newspapers and magazines of the time, items in my mail, a concert program, a wrapping from airline food, whatever.  Some are peculiar to the 1960s or a bit thereafter, others could be of any age. 
·      From the East Village Other of Nov. 15-21, 1968, a statement by poet and ex-convict John Sinclair, manager of a guerrilla rock band and founder of Trans Love Energies, an artists’ commune:  “… Our program is cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on….  We are free mother country madmen in charge of our own lives and we are taking this freedom to the kids of America … and … these kids are READY! …  BE FREE, goddammit, and fuck all them old dudes, is what we tell them, and they see that we mean it. …  We demand total freedom for everybody!  And we will not be stopped until we get it.  We are bad….  WE ARE THE SOLUTION.” Following this long tirade comes a program that includes the end of money; free food, clothes, housing, dope, music, bodies, medical care – free everything; and finally, since leaders suck, all power to the people!
·      From the New York Times of October 22, 1970:  “The ordinary white bread that most Americans eat every day was described by a scientist here as being so low in nutritional value that laboratory rats living on it for 90 days died of malnutrition.”

If it can starve rats, what will it do to you?ElinorD
·      From the New York Times of May 29, 1976, accompanying a photo of a hefty senior manipulating a hula hoop:  “Young at heart: Belle Sommers competing in the Hula Hoop competition during the Senior Citizens Olympics at Piedmont Park in Atlanta Thursday.  Other events included an ugly-face-making contest and a balloon race.”
·      From The Village Voice of January 3, 1977, citing reviews of a new album of the Ramones, four leather-jacketed youths looking very macho and very tough in the accompanying photo:  “Ramones is a classic” – Rutgers Daily Targum; “El Stinko garbage of the worst kind” – Dayton Journal Herald; “The last time I was insulted by something as bad as the Ramones was when Mary Hartman shot her husband in the crotch with a bow and arrow” – The Drummer, Philadelphia; “Indeed awesome.” – Performance Magazine; “The worst of New York punk bands.” – Washington Post; “Music to sniff glue by.” – Marty Packin, Asbury Park Press; and many more.
·      From a book review in the New York Times Book Review of March 14, 1976, quoting from the work in question: “his cadaverous – but not unhandsome – visage.”
·      An ad in I don’t know which New York City newspaper, date uncertain: WE HAVE 560,000 INDIVIDUAL NAMES WITH COATS OF ARMS…. IS YOUR NAME LISTED HERE?  THE CHANCES ARE 98% IN YOUR FAVOR THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO RESEARCH AND FIND A COAT OF ARMS BEARING YOUR NAME….  GET A DOCUMENTED COAT OF ARMS ON YOUR CHECKS….  AVAILABLE ONLY AT FRANKLIN NATIONAL BANK.

Yours?
Erlenmeyer· 

       From the New York Times of March 3, 1969, dateline Philadelphia, March 22:  “Bubble gum has blown up into big business in the United States.  Americans are chewing about $100-million worth of it each year, according to Edward L. Fenimore, president of the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corporation of nearby Havertown.  Sales and consumption have more than quintupled in the last 10 years, and there is no sign of a let-up, Mr. Fenimore says.”
·      The list of ingredients on a 1-ounce package of Rachel’s Cookies, presumably acquired during air travel, date uncertain: “Bleached and unbleached wheat flour, chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, dextrose, lecithin), high fructose corn syrup, vegetable shortening (partially hydrogenated) soybean and cottonseed oils with mono- and diglycerides added), sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, soybean oil, molasses, natural and artificial flavors, whey, dried whole eggs, food starch-modified, baking soda, salt, lecithin, baking powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, corn starch, monocalcium phosphate), enzymes.”
·      From an article on the Committee on Public Doublespeak’s awards in The New York Times of November 28, 1974: the award for Educationese, given to Donald Jay Willower, professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, for the following: “Yet, the most basic problems that arise in connection with knowledge utilization may be those that stem from the social and organizational character of educational institutions.  A few university adaptations already have been highlighted.  Public schools display a myriad of normative and other regulatory structures that promote predictability, as well as a host of adaptive mechanisms that reduce external uncertainties.”
·      From the same source, a doublespeak award to Colonel David E. Opfer, former air attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Pnom Penh, Cambodia, for his complaint to reporters: “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing.  It’s not bombing.  It’s air support.”
·      From a Pete Hamill column about New York State Senator Seymour  Thaler, inspecting Knickerbocker Hospital with an NBC TV film crew in tow, in the New York Post of May 13, 1967:   “We ended up visiting the ward, and with the TV crews gone, Thaler’s indignation was waning.  He went into a room and stared at a strange totem-like device that resembled a large parking meter.  It was used for washing bedpans.  ‘Does this thing work?’ Thaler asked, pulling the handle.  It flushed all over the front of his suit.”
·      From a letter signed by Timothy Leary and delivered to the Los Angeles Free Press, reprinted in The Phoenix, a Boston weekly, of September 26, 1970:  “Brothers and sisters, this is a war for survival…. Ask the wild free animals, they know it…. You are either part of the death apparatus, or you belong to the network of free life…. Listen, Americans, your government is an instrument of total lethal evil.  Remember the buffalo and the Iroquois!... Resist privately; guerilla invisibility…. Resist biologically; be healthy … breed.  Arm yourself and shoot to live…. To shoot a robot genocidal policeman is a sacred act….  Total war is upon us.  Fight to live or you will die.  Freedom will live.  Timothy Leary.  WARNING: I am armed and should be considered dangerous to anyone who threatens my life and freedom.”
·      From an article about a Frenchman who won the lottery in France and was beset by a horde of money-seekers, in The New York Times Magazine of May 7, 1967:  “The prizewinner for sheer inventiveness or bizarre misfortune … was an elderly fellow who asked for a loan to pay his legal fees, for he had fired a joyous shotgun blast in the air during a wedding celebration and unfortunately had slain one of the bride’s relatives.”
·      From a summary of the plot of Mascagni’s opera Iris, in a program for I don’t know what concert by Licia Albanese:  “The action … takes place in Japan.  Iris, the beautiful young daughter of the blind Cieco, is abducted to a place of pleasure by Kyoto, a procurer, and Osaka, a wealthy rake.  She is driven mad by the experience and throws herself from the window into a sewer.  Halfway between life and death, she bemoans her own sad destiny, asking why … why?  … The rising Sun greets the dying Iris, and she hails her only salvation, the God of Day.  She sinks into a field of blossoms and becomes one with the flowers.”
·      From a 1985 brochure that came in the mail:  “Once again the Mystery School calls us to take the Journey of Transformation in which we leave behind our little local life for a time and pursue Great Life and Great Time.  We train to become stewards of the process by  which evolution enters into time and the wasteland is greened…. I welcome you to the Once and Future School.   Jean Houston”
·      From an article, dateline Rajneeshpuram, Ore., Sept. 21, in the New York Times of September 22, 1985: “The desert commune here that recruited homeless people from around the country last year, in what some local residents said was an effort to stack the voting in local elections, is once again in turmoil.  A key leader has departed, and a string of allegations against her is being investigated by six law-enforcement agencies.  Indicative of the tremors that have rocked the community was an offer last night by its spiritual leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, to give all but one of his 90 Rolls-Royces to his 5,000 disciples as a gesture of appreciation.”

Commentary
Timothy Leary, arrested in 1972.
Not armed enough, it would seem.     Some of the above items require no comment; others do.  Sometimes the writer is aware of the inanity, and sometimes not.  The first one by John Sinclair and the letter by Timothy Leary are examples of the raw, violent edge of the late 1960s and early 1970s:  We are wild, we are free, we are bad, we are good, we are the solution, join us or you are part of the problem, and down with everything and everyone one else!  This attitude, characteristic of fiery twentysomethings, lacks compassion and understanding, and above all it lacks any appreciation of ambiguity.  If you don’t grasp at least a little bit the significance of ambiguity, you will never understand the world we live in, its complexities, its inconsistencies.  As for Leary (1920-1996), his advocacy of psychedelic drugs earned him repeated confrontations with U.S. authorities and landed him in jail more than once.  His life was too complicated, too turbulent, to summarize here.
     At the time of the statement I knew nothing of John Sinclair and Trans Love Energies.  I now learn that he had been serving a 9½ to 10-year sentence in Michigan for possession of two joints of marijuana (his third offense), but was released by a court ruling in 1971, coincidentally just after a gigantic concert on his behalf that included speeches by such stellar activists as Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono.  The statement itself expressed the credo of Sinclair’s White Panther Party, an imitation of the Black Panther Party. 
                                                            Wayne Dabney     And today?  John Sinclair is now an old dude himself and looks like someone’s grandpa.  He is still affiliated with Trans Love Energies, now a medical marijuana dispensary in Detroit, one of many such outlets open in Michigan despite a legal challenge to their operations.  I suspect that he has softened and found ways to work within the system, which, for better or for worse, persists in spite of his and others’ youthful ravings.  As proof of my surmise, I note that as far back as 1979 he donated his papers to the Michigan Historical Collections of the University of Michigan, where they are available for research, which is a kind of consecration. 
     In perusing the ingredients of Rachel’s Cookies, I find no less than seven mentions of sugar in one form or another.  But I’m no nutritionist.  How many do you find?  Also four chemicals that I know nothing about.  Which is why, after reading enough of these labels, I stopped eating airline food.
     The Educationese example of Public Doublespeak reminds me of an education manuscript I once edited that referred to “the young verbal beings”; I changed this to “the kids.” 
     The last two items are examples of the soft, gooey edge of the 1960s and later – the New Age side of it.  The program of the first involved nine sessions and a tuition of $2,000.  Jean Houston, Ph.D., is a New Age high priestess, a “pioneer in work as a behavioral scientist emphasizing latent human capacities.”  A photo shows a woman in her forties with long dark straggly hair wearing a tunic with a sash, her arms extended, her head bent, with a very intense look.  I had heard her on station WBAI and was struck by her remark, “We’ve got to make peace sexy.”  Like it or not, war, with all its horrors, is sexy, so she made sense to me.  Result: a poem entitled “Peace” that I sent to her.  She liked it, read it to her followers, and invited me to come do the same at one of her lectures.  Since I would have had to pay a hefty admission fee, I chose not to.  As for Transformation in nine sessions at $2,000, that too I declined to undertake.  But cursory online research shows that she’s a native of Brooklyn, still alive and active, with many books to her credit.
     The last item, on the commune in Oregon, is a reminder that lofty ideals don’t always work out (ambiguities again).  The commune, by the way, was located on a 64,000-acre property, and its disciples enjoyed a 12-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week work pace, for which they got $10 a week plus room and board.  To reduce the threat of AIDS, kissing was forbidden among members, though they could dance in the disco into the wee hours.  The guru accused the departed leader of trying to poison him and his doctor, dentist, and housekeeper (that’s a lot of poison!).  Flanked by two machine gun-toting guards, he was reported to be sharing his revelations with followers, and later took a spin in one of his Rolls-Royces, while a security helicopter hovered overhead. 
His red-robed followers greet the guru as he drives by in the ashram.
Samvado Gunnar Kossatz
The guru's mug shot, 1985.
Oregon Department of Corrections     The preceding was all I knew about the guru and his ashram when I read the news item; it hardly suggested life in an idyllic setting, and made me marvel at what seekers of truth and enlightenment will put up with.  Now, preparing this post, I learn that soon afterward the commune collapsed, allegations of serious crimes by the guru and his followers surfaced, and Rajneesh fled.  When his jet refueled in North Carolina, he was arrested and tried back in Portland on charges of immigration fraud, which resulted in his deportation.  What became of his 90 (some say 93) Rolls-Royces I have yet to ascertain.
Inanities today
     They abound.  For Doublespeak, how about these:
·      the Patriot Act·      collateral damage (unintended civilian casualties caused by military action)·      Operation Just Cause (our 1989 invasion of Panama)·      Operation Enduring Freedom (our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan)·      Operation Iraqi Freedom (our 2004 invasion of Iraq)
Admittedly, the word “patriot” turns me off, not because of its meaning but because of the way it is used or misused, and because of those who use it.  And what a lot of operations we have launched, presumably for self-protection!  But why labor the obvious?
Operation Iraqi Freedom
     For me, the supreme inanity of recent memory occurred off San Diego on May 1, 2003, when our forty-third president landed in a jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which had just returned from combat operations in the Persian Gulf.  With TV cameras rolling, he emerged in a flight suit and posed for photos with the ship’s crew.  Later, having doffed the flight suit to appear in presidential garb, he addressed the crew and announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, with a sign MISSION ACCOMPLISHED clearly visible.  All of which was too stagy, not to say premature, since years of guerrilla warfare lay ahead. 
No. 43 in a flight suit.  Contrary to the belief of
some, he didn't pilot the plane.
     Another recent inanity: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s  comment on the wave of looting that erupted in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, looting that U.S. troops did nothing to stop: “Stuff happens.”  In war, indeed it does.
     On a more modest note, I must state that the inanity of Rachel’s Cookies – if “inanity” is the right word – is repeated endlessly in processed foods today.  This becomes a problem for me in the holiday season, since Bob and I get gifts of chocolates and other goodies that have a long paragraph in tiny print of ingredients that include the same toxic mix of sugar under various names and numerous chemicals with long, unpronounceable names – the very stuff that I emphatically don’t want in my body.  And these are well-meant gifts from the nicest people.  What to do?  Once, not without a few pangs of guilt, we simply discarded a box of high-quality chocolates without devouring a single one.  More often we compromise, eating only one or two of the delicious but suspect items a day.  But this year we have received a rare bounty of these goodies and have yet to decide how to cope.  Will strength of will win out, or will we succumb to temptation?  All of which brings us far from inanities, I confess.  But maybe the ingredients in chocolates and other delicacies don’t really constitute inanities at all.  Maybe today I wouldn’t classify them as such.  Temptation, yes, and a risk to one’s health and well-being, but maybe not inanities at all.
Temptation.
Sujit kumar
     And how about gurus and ashrams today?  At my health food store I found a glossy brochure advertising courses by various persons under the auspices of the Integral Yoga Institutes, founded by His Holiness Sri Swami Satchidanandaji Maharaj, whose photo shows a benign-looking white-bearded guru reminiscent, alas, of Rajneesh.  And, to heighten the parallel, he has a “dynamic Yoga community” named Yogaville in Virginia.  Is this a replay of the Rajneesh misadventure?  Well, the courses offered range in price from $25 to $80, which seems reasonable.  And I can’t dismiss cavalierly their content: Yoga (I do it myself), health, nutrition, laughter meditation, detoxification, and the like.  So I’ve looked into the matter a bit.
     Online research tells me that Satchidananda (1914-2002) was an Indian spiritual master who gained fame and followers in the West during his time here in New York, where he settled and became a U.S. citizen.  He was the opening speaker at the famous Woodstock festival of 1969 and included Allen Ginsberg among his disciples.  He believed that we all should realize our spiritual unity and live together harmoniously through optimal health, disciplined mind and senses, a sharp intellect, a strong will (so useful in resisting chocolates), a heart full of love, and a life of peace, joy, and bliss.  So who could argue with that?  No inanity here.  And there’s no mention of Rolls-Royces, not even one.  Yes, my health food store, which breathes the spirit of his teachings, is out to net some coin, but I don’t begrudge them that, no, not even if pies that I could get for $15 in the greenmarket were going there, on Christmas Eve, for $19.  (They were on sale at half price the day after Christmas.)  After all, the West Village is a high-rent district.  So I’ll continue to shop there, though the courses and the promised delights of Yogaville don’t tempt me.
     Coming soon:  Famous New York Murders; Andy Warhol: Genius or Fraud?; the hierarchy of thieves in nineteenth-century New York.  Sounds a bit lurid, doesn’t it?  Not intended.

     Happy New Year to all!  May 2014 bring you joy and fulfillment, with or without gurus, with or without inanities, and with or without chocolates.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

105. New York Mosaic: The Neighborhoods

     This post is about neighborhoods in New York City, some big and some small, some ethnic, some commercial, some residential, and many often a mix of two of these or all three.  I couldn’t begin to mention all these neighborhoods, which abound in every borough, so I’ll focus on a few in Manhattan that I have encountered personally.  They are well worth looking at, as they give color and verve and to the city.
The Diamond District
WE  BUY  GOLDDIAMONDSJEWELRY
So read the signs in the store windows or hanging around the necks of solicitors in the street (though posted signs warn consumers not to deal with the latter).  In the windows are lavish displays of scores, if not hundreds, of twinkling diamonds.  In the stores and on the street are numerous Orthodox Jews, all black hatted with black suits and shoes, and white shirts devoid of a tie, all but the young ones bearded, with ample sideburns or long side curls in front of the ears. 

     A shopkeeper, seeing a woman eyeing a gold necklace in his window, darts out to address her, “If you like something, ask me, gorgeous.”  Other salesmen accost other passersby, waving them in and promising a superlative deal. 


      This is the Diamond District on West 47thStreet between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, a busy little strip of Manhattan avoided by some because of the never ending hustle, but savored by others more tolerant of the hustle or simply in search of a necklace or ring at a reasonable price.  The district came into being from 1941 on, when dealers began moving uptown from an old district, still in existence, near Canal Street and the Bowery, close by Chinatown.  With the threat of Nazi Germany looming over them, thousands of Orthodox Jews had already fled the diamond centers of Amsterdam and Antwerp to find shelter here, and most of them remained here after the end of World War II.          I have often passed through this district, usually going to or rom the now deceased and much lamented Gotham Book Mart, a legendary bookstore that happened also to be on this block.  I was never hassled by salesmen, but always encountered black-garbed Orthodox Jews talking excitedly or striding down the street.  Though not all the shopkeepers are Orthodox, most if not all are Jewish, and the Orthodox impart a distinct and dominant flavor to the street.  I have also seen them waiting at the curb along Fifth Avenue and wondered why, until late one afternoon I saw a bus full of Orthodox Jews pull up to the curb and take on the waiting passengers, who were then whisked off to some Orthodox enclave elsewhere, probably Crown Heights or Borough Park in Brooklyn. 
Bleecker Street
     Here is an example of how neighborhoods change.  Bleecker Street in the West Village, which I can see from my windows, living as I do at the corner of West 11thand Bleecker, used to have restaurants, antique stores, and bookshops.  But all that began to change when the upscale clothing designer Marc Jacobs opened a store across the street from us, its windows featuring fancy with-it clothing draped on faceless, soulless female manikins in odd postures.   That was the beginning.  Soon other designer clothing stores appeared, rents soared, and the restaurants and antique stores, faced with a tripling of their rent, moved out.  Now the street is all upscale clothing stores from Bank Street to West 10th Street, though not beyond.  People flock and look in the windows, and I suppose that some of them buy.  But these displays don’t interest me, whereas I could always feast my eyes on the antique store displays, and Bob and I loved a Thai restaurant that has long vanished from our neighborhood. 
The Marc Jacobs store at Bleecker and West 11th Street.












     Yes, Jacobs has opened a bookstore, Bookmarc, across the street from us, diagonally opposite the clothing store, but when I ventured inside once, I found not a single title that interested me; the books too are all very “with-it,” very “in,” very upscale – whatever all that means.  I’ve just checked a few reviews of the store online.  One raves about the “cute little knickknacks” available there; another mentions “hip and cool titles that fashion types might read”; another, “a mix of (overpriced) humorous, kitschy items”; another, “fun stuff,” including books that are “pretty modern and chic.”  But here’s the one that really got my attention: “This is the type of place I like to visit when I’m in the mood to have twenty people pressed against me, elbowing my back, blocking my path, and whacking me with their purses.  Which is never.”  All of which confirms my initial reaction: too upscale, too trendy, too “fun stuff” for a confirmed fuddy-duddy like me.

     There was once an interesting biography bookstore on that corner, but it too, alas, is gone.  New York is constantly in flux, not always for the better.  At least the Magnolia Bakery is still downstairs from our apartment.  I don’t buy their sugary concoctions, and yes, they too are trendy and crowded, but I like their still being there, and those cupcakes in the window – real works of art – don’t turn me off.

 The stairs in the lower right are well known to me, as I have descended there a number of times, usually banging my forehead on the way, to clear out the Magnolia's clutter of cartons, so Con Ed could read our meter.                 
WestportWiki
People have sold their soul for these.
WestportWiki
SoHo
     SoHo (from South of Houston) is a neighborhood bounded by Houston Street on the north, Canal Street on the south, Lafayette and Centre Streets on the east, and West Broadway on the west.  Today it is known for artists’ lofts, art galleries, and boutiques – another “trendy” location, but this is only the latest phase of its development.  In the nineteenth century the district housed residences, theaters, and fancy stores, not to mention brothels on the side streets off Broadway, but the growing commercial tone of the area drove middle-class citizens farther uptown, and small factories, lumberyards, locksmiths, and book publishers moved in, often into buildings with cast-iron façades.  By the 1880s and 1890s large manufacturers came there, and SoHo became the wholesale dry-goods trade center of New York. 
     After World War II the textile industry decamped for the South, drawn there by lower wages and the lack of strong unions.  The large cast-iron buildings they abandoned became small factories, sweatshops, warehouses, and printing plants, or were demolished to make way for filling stations, auto repair shops, parking lots, and garages.  Firefighters christened the district “Hell’s Hundred Acres” because of the frequent fires in half-abandoned warehouses, perhaps not unrelated to insurance claims. 

Cast-iron buildings on Greene Street, SoHo.
Andreas Praefcke
     Then, in the 1960s, artists began discovering these empty buildings with low-rent lofts offering large spaces, high ceilings, and large windows admitting natural light, and saw their possibilities as a combined residence and studio.  Even though the lofts were not zoned for residential use, they moved in and began adapting them.  The city tried to stop the movement, but under pressure yielded, amending the zoning regulations in 1971 to allow artists to reside and work in the lofts.  Two years later SoHo was made a historical district, further enhancing its status.  Already, in 1968, the name “SoHo” had been coined.
     I witnessed this development when two friends of mine, an artist and his banker partner residing in Brooklyn Heights, bought and moved into a loft occupying two-thirds of the fourth floor of an old building on Wooster Street.  For a New Yorker like myself, used to cramped studio apartments, the loft was magnificent: wide spaces, lofty ceilings, and huge windows looking out on the street.  Urban homesteaders of the twentieth century, my friends had to hire electricians and plumbers and carpenters to make the place livable, but the result was impressive: a bedroom, two bathrooms, an ample kitchen, a living area adorned with chinoiserie from the banker’s childhood abroad, a spacious indoor garden, and a vast area for the artist’s studio.  All this occurred before the city relaxed its zoning regulations, but they were confident that the city would not expel “squatters” who were doing such positive work to upgrade a neglected district – an assumption that proved correct.  So a desolate industrial area was transformed into an artists’ residential area -- further proof that the city’s neighborhoods are in constant flux.
     But that wasn’t the end of the transformation of SoHo.  From the 1980s on the district was enhanced or afflicted – depending on your point of view --  by a phenomenon known as gentrification.  More affluent residents began moving in, attracted by the area’s spacious lofts, interesting architecture, and “hip” reputation.  Lots of the artists remained, including my friends, but many galleries moved to Chelsea, just north of the West Village.  Trendy boutiques, restaurants, and fashionable clothing stores became the norm, tourists flocked, and real estate values soared.  Vibrant it certainly is, but trendy vibrant, money-driven, posh with a few rough edges.

A SoHo boutique.
BLI-DBP
Chinatown
     Chinatown stretches from Delancey Street on the north, where it rubs elbows with Little Italy, to Chambers Street on the south, and from Broadway on the west to East Broadway on the east.  For most visitors, it means an array of signs in a strange language; groceries exhibiting exotic foodstuffs such as jasmine rice, oolong tea, lotus root, lichee nuts, shark fins, bamboo shoots, black duck eggs, and water chestnuts, few of which I could recognize or identify; souvenir shops with gaudy junk, fine chinaware and jade, and benign little Buddhas; and above all, restaurants. 

Derek Jensen
Martin Dürrschnabel
   It was always for the restaurants that my partner Bob and I went there.  We had a fixed routine.  First we would stop at Esther Eng’s Restaurant on Pell Street and settle in to a front table in a nook beside the entrance, have a drink there, and watch people pass by on the street.  We knew that she was a successful businesswoman and, rare for Chinatown, an avowed lesbian, but only now, researching this post a bit, have I learned that in the 1930s, before she went into the restaurant business, she had a distinguished career directing and producing Chinese-language films – another first for a Chinese American woman – in both Hollywood and Hong Kong.  She died in 1970.
     Leaving Esther Eng’s, we would go to the Port Arthur, a venerable Chinese restaurant founded in 1897 occupying the second and third floors of 7-9 Mott Street.  We dined on the second floor, at mahogany tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, on a white-tile floor under red lanterns, in a room adorned with ornate carved wood panels and ivory-colored silk screens embroidered with blue peacocks and other birds.  The food was Cantonese, not superb but reliably good, and reasonably priced.  On warm summer nights the French doors leading to a balcony with tables overlooking the street were opened, and all the sounds of Mott Street – bells and the babble of people passing on the street -- flowed into the restaurant.  We never dined on the third floor, which was reserved for private parties and banquets, but once we were shown its even more sumptuous setting, with many more ornate carved panels as well as screens, lanterns, chandeliers, inlaid tables, and teakwood chairs.  I doubt if any restaurant in Chinatown had more elaborate and dazzling furnishings.  Today, alas, it is no more, its site occupied by a supermarket.  Dining in the restaurant next door, through a window Bob once saw the Port Arthur’s ornate carved panels and other décor being taken out and loaded on a truck, bound for what destination we never learned: a sad farewell to a very special restaurant, unique, irreplaceable.  We still have one of its menus with a red cover adorned with a handsome peacock in blue.
The Port Arthur restaurant (seen in the center), in a postcard from the 1940s.
     Of course there are still many fine restaurants – and many not so fine – in Chinatown, but if we’ve gone there less and less over the years, it’s because Chinatown has come to us; there are good and not-so-good Chinese restaurants all over town.  But not long ago Bob’s brother Bill, on a visit from Maine, went to Chinatown with his daughter and dined in a restaurant recommended by a friend of hers.  For most of the time they were lunching there, they were the only Caucasians present.  Dining among the chopstick-wielding Chinese, Bill says he enjoyed some of the best Chinese food he’s ever had.  They started with soup dumplings, eating which is evidently something of a ritual.  You put one on a soup spoon, pinch a small hole in it, thus releasing soup into the spoon, after which you eat the dumpling and then the soup.  Sounds complicated.  Good luck!
The restaurant Bill Lagerstrom discovered.
Bill Lagerstrom
      Chinatown has a long and colorful history; I can only touch on it here.  Perhaps the first Chinaman to come to the New York City area was Ah Ken, a Cantonese merchant who claimed to have arrived in the 1840s, and who came to the city around 1858 and opened a cigar store on Park Row.  The discovery of gold in California in 1849 brought an influx of Chinese immigrants, lured like countless Americans by dreams of elusive wealth, and many of them were later hired to work on the Central Pacific Railroad, dynamiting obstructions in the Sierra Nevada Mountains so the railroad could be pushed east onto the flats of Nevada and meet up with the Union Pacific in Utah in 1869.  Faced with growing discrimination in California, many of them came east via the new transcontinental railroad and settled in New York.  When the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers, there were some 2,000 residents in Chinatown. 
     At first these early Chinatown residents were mostly men, since only the most prosperous merchants could afford to go back to China, find a suitable bride, pay her family the bride price, and bring her back to New York.  These few wives were rarely seen; when they did go out, it was in a carriage with drawn blinds, depriving the frustrated bachelors of Chinatown of even the briefest glimpse of a woman of their race.  The solution of some of these lonely males was to marry Irish girls, though others found solace in brothels whose inmates were Caucasian, some of them under age; in gambling parlors where losers, having bet all they had and lost, departed clothed only in a barrel; and in opium dens where shadowy figures reclined in bunks, sucking on long bamboo pipes held over the tiny flame of a lamp. 
     In New York too the early Chinese immigrants faced discrimination.  Dressed in broad-sleeved jackets and baggy pants, and wearing cork-soled shoes and the long  queue that the Emperor required as a sign of loyalty, they stood out, provoking curiosity and sometimes suspicion and hostility, even though they were for the most part decent, hard-working, and quiet.  Indeed, vastly outnumbered and surrounded by those whom they sometimes referred to as Big Noses or Round Eyes, they might well ask, when insulted and attacked by thugs in the street, who were the barbarians and who the truly civilized. 
     Slowly the number of women in Chinatown increased, as did the population, though even in the twentieth century many of the women rarely, if ever, strayed beyond the bounds of Chinatown.  In time Chinatown became a tourist attraction offering innumerable restaurants, and souvenir shops with wares ranging from the cheapest gimcracks to the finest chinaware and jade.  As for the 1882 exclusion law, it was not repealed until 1943, when China was our ally in the war against Japan.  Today the population of Chinatown is estimated at from 90,000 to 100,000, and Chinatown itself has long since spread north of Canal Street into what was once Little Italy.

Canal Street today, traditionally the border between Chinatown and Little Italy.  But as the Chinese
signs indicate, Chinatown is creeping north into the Italian district.
Derek Jensen
      My war with the creepies:  Yes, I am at war -- at violent, unremitting war -- with the creepies, my name for the bugs, ranging in size from infinitesimal specks to creatures about a third of an inch long, that have invaded my apartment.  They crawl over my toothbrush, creep into my empty coffee mug (used for tea), crawl into the straws we use to sip beverages, and have even been found in a large box containing Bob's medical supplies in the living room.  These aren't bedbugs or roaches, but their presence is reprehensible, since they don't pay rent.  They approach my food even while I'm eating (and often pay the price), and flee of the oven, one of their favorite nests, if I'm baking or roasting.  But mostly they are night feeders, and I discover them when, heeding the bladder imperative, I get up at night and suddenly turn on the light in the bathroom, and after that in the kitchen, which sends them scurrying in all directions.

     To keep these invaders in check, I have various stratagems.  I have cleaned them out of a nest in Bob's medicines, emptying the box and then dumping them out on the kitchen table, where I could massacre half of them -- about forty -- while the other half escaped.  My weapon: an empty pill bottle, held upside down, so that the cap, when slammed down on a flat surface, mashes anything organic underneath.  I also leave glue traps about in strategic locations in the kitchen, where they slowly accumulate dozens of victims.  One trap has now enticed some forty of the bigger ones, and so many little ones that I couldn't count them.  Also, since they seem to have a predilection for my coffee mug, I heave it half full of water and in the morning often find one or more floating on the surface, drowned.  R.I.P.

     But the real confrontation -- the true battle of battles -- occurs when I turn on a light at night and find a slew of them ranging about the bathroom or kitchen.  For best results, I leave most of the kitchen table free of objects, so as to create a broad killing field where I have a better chance of mashing them; other killing fields include the sink and stove top, and the wash basin and bathtub in the bathroom.  Against these white, smooth surfaces their dark bodies appear in sharp contrast, which gives me a further advantage.  Not that I massacre all the wee beasties so discovered; since they scurry in different directions and there's only one of me, half of them, and sometimes more,  escape.  Escape to where?  Any crack or crevice within reach, the undersurface of the table and sink, the dark, infernal depths of our ancient (circa 1930) stove, or any bit of clutter where they hide.  The little ones -- the specks -- can't run fast, so I get most of them, but the big ones are very quick indeed.  If, out of three of these, I slaughter two or (rarely) three, I feel great satisfaction and  deep glee.

     Browder a hunter?  Those who know me well would scoff at the very thought.  Long ago my father, a true hunter and fisherman, told me that hunting is an instinct, stronger in some people than in others.  And his younger son, a bookworm, possessed this instinct not at all.  I hated the recoil of a discharged shotgun, which made my shoulder ache, and had no desire to slaughter rabbits or blackbirds, the intended targets of my father's forays.  As for lake fishing -- the only fishing available in our midwestern setting --  I hated the long, hot hours in a boat waiting for something to happen; hated the sight of our bait, a squirming worm transfixed by a hook; and hated the rare spectacle of a fish thrashing about the floor of the boat in a frenzied panic.  So if I derive satisfaction from slaughtering the invaders of my apartment, it is much less the thrill of a hunter than the vigilance of a human defending his hearth against dark forces conspiring against it, invading it, polluting it by their very presence. 

     As I fight the good fight, a literary quotation comes to mind.  No, not Blake's line, "For everything that lives is holy," since I deny holiness to cockroaches, mosquitoes, and creepies.  No, it is a line from King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport" (iv.1.37-38).  This line is spoken by Gloucester as he wanders the heath, blinded, questioning if there is justice in the universe.  Is this how I appear to the wee beasties, assuming they have a modicum of intelligence?  "Why does this looming monster hate us so?" they may well ask, "when all we're doing is finding a little sustenance?  He has plenty; why not share it?  Isn't there enough for all?"  And if they wax philosophic, they might ponder the arbitrariness of doom.  When the towering monster strikes, some are pounded to a mash, while others escape.  Is this all simply a game of chance, or is there some underlying principle, some cosmic law that escapes their finite minds, but may be clear to a higher, perhaps divine, intelligence?  Ah, deep thoughts provoked by my slaughter of the beasties, but thoughts to be pursued with caution, if pursued at all.  For are we humans to higher beings as the creepies are to us, or as flies to wanton boys?  I dare not push this further; it's too unsettling, or maybe too ridiculous.  I kill the creepies to keep them out of my toothbrush, my mug, my meals.  Enough said; I conclude.

     Coming soon: Inanities of the 1960s, as recorded by me in an Inanities File, with thoughts about the inanities of today.  Another deep probing, leading I'm not sure where.

    ©  2013  Clifford Browder

104. The Beauty and Danger of the Palisades

     Just across the Hudson from New York City, cliffs of dark gray rock rise almost vertically some 500 feet above the river, sometimes clothed with vegetation and sometimes just bare rock.  This is the New Jersey Palisades, a solid wall of rock stretching from Fort Lee northward as far as the eye can see, all the way to the New York State boundary some twelve miles to the north.  Huge signs advertising patent medicines and other worthy products once blazoned forth their message from the cliffs for the benefit of steamboat passengers in the years following the Civil War (“Obscenery!” proclaimed Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune), and the rock itself was once quarried for railroad ballast.  And when, in the late 1890s, a movement developed to preserve the Palisades, the quarry operators used dynamite to speed up their work before conservation efforts put an end to it.  Fortunately, those efforts soon paid off; quarrying ended in 1900 with the creation of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission by the governors of New York and New Jersey.  In time, the Park Commission would undertake to acquire for the park all the private property both below the cliffs and on top of them.  In 1933 John D. Rockefeller, the robber baron turned philanthropist, donated to the Park Commission all the land he had acquired along the cliffs, on condition that the Commission acquire all the estates not owned by him and demolish their mansions, so as to restore unobstructed views of the river.


                                                                                                                                                                                  Beyond My Ken
     This park is a long, skinny stretch of green squeezed in between the Palisades Parkway and the cliff edge, often only an eighth of a mile wide, so that you can’t possibly get lost in it, but you are constantly serenaded by the sound of zooming traffic.  I have often hiked the length of it, though not all at once but in segments.  Two paths traverse it: the Long Path along the top of the cliffs and, far below, the Shore Path along the edge of the river; each has offered me a climactic experience, unique, at the end of my hike.  There are three real dangers in the park, two of which I have encountered; I shall deal with them all in time.  Let me now relate a hike on the Long Path, which is easily accessed just over the George Washington Bridge (which I have usually walked) in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
The Long Path
                                                                                       Famartin     Starting north from the bridge, I would pass through a shady, dank wooded area and turn onto a side path that took me to right up to the approaches to the bridge.  There, in late spring and early summer, in a dry, sunny spot I always found a stand of common milkweed, my favorite summer flower, thrusting domed clusters of tiny intricate flowers, dusty rose or lavender or dull brownish purple in color, and emitting an intoxicating fragrance.  That the plant is also toxic seems irrelevant, since one is tempted only to sniff it, not at all to eat it.  A nice beginning for the hike, in spite of the unending traffic sounds from the bridge.
     Pressing on along the trail, which is marked with turquoise blazes, I passed the remnants of foundations of former mansions that always puzzled me, until, researching this post, I learned how, at Rockefeller’s insistence, the Park Commission acquired and  demolished them.  At times I would go to the cliff edge and look back at the bridge, measuring my progress by how much it had retreated into the distance.  Its sounds faded, but those of the nearby parkway persisted, and my quest of solitude in nature was further frustrated by the presence of a roadside gas station.  Just beyond it, however, I would come to Allison Park, a small, well maintained bit of greenery offering a nice view out over the Hudson, benches for picnic lunches, and water fountains and rest rooms.  It is named for the first mayor of Englewood Cliffs who once had an estate here and was a leader in the movement to preserve the Palisades.
     Continuing north through the oak forest that prevails here, I would come to High Tom, a rock promontory offering fine views north and south, and then to Rockefeller Lookout, another spot for good views, a mile north of the bridge and just across from the northern tip of Manhattan, where the Harlem River flows into the Hudson.  Here once, finding a bit of cliff just beyond the fence that offered an unusually fine view, I stepped out onto it, settled down, and enjoyed the vistas.  At this point another hiker happened by, saw me, and warned that in going beyond the fence I risked arrest for reckless endangerment.  He himself had been arrested on that very spot and had been obliged to go to court and pay a hefty fine.  Thus warned, I stepped back over the fence and never transgressed again.  It’s just as well, since in the summer of 2012 alone three deaths occurred here, two accidents and a suicide whose body was found 225 feet below the edge.  Yes, the cliffs are dangerous, and if Big Brother is out to keep you safe, however annoying he can be, his intentions are the best.  So much for the first of the three dangers to be encountered in the park, though we’ll return to it later.
                                                                                        Malcolm     Continuing to the north, I would pass the fenced enclave of Greenbrook Sanctuary, a large nature preserve created to protect native species.  Only members are allowed inside, but for a season or two I became a member, so as to have a look at whatever treasures lay inside.  Near the entrance was a feeding station where the sanctuary naturalist put out quantities of seed to attract seed-eating birds, and there, along with sparrows and pushy blue jays, I had my first sighting of wild turkeys, who were scooping up the seed ravenously.  I had always wondered how so big and bulky a bird could survive in the wild, with hunters all about, but when I saw them run into the brush, I understood: their plumage was such that they instantly vanished among the weeds and bushes.  This was the bird that Benjamin Franklin thought should be our national bird, and not the bald eagle, whom he censured for grabbing fish out of the mouths of osprey – a spectacle that I once had while hiking this very trail in late autumn; it happened so fast I hardly realized what I had seen, but the fish-deprived osprey, and the triumphant eagle, fish in beak, convinced me.  But I still prefer the bald eagle as a national symbol, and not these bulky earth-bound gobblers, who can only fly short distances and have nothing majestic or inspiring about them.  Still, I’m grateful to the Sanctuary for affording me a glimpse of the creatures.



The concrete bridge to Grey Crag.
Famartin    Passing the Park Administration Building, a former estate mansion that escaped demolition, I would come to Grey Crag, a detached bit of cliff only ten to twenty feet wide, accessed by a narrow concrete bridge without a railing.  I always crossed that bridge quickly, without looking down.  I’m surprised that the crag is even open to visitors; Big Brother isn’t always on the job.  And what do you find, once you’ve mustered up your courage to cross the bridge and reach Grey Crag?  Poison ivy!
View north from Ruckman Point, north of Grey Crag.
Famartin
                                                            Famartin    Still farther to the north I would come to the Women’s Federation Monument, a little stone castle where you can climb up to a sort of battlement, though it doesn’t provide a spectacular view.  When I first encountered it, I wondered why it was there, seemingly so out of step with nature, so pointless, so useless, but later I learned better.  Dedicated in 1929, it honored the role of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs, who from the late 1890s on played a major role in preserving the Palisades.  God bless those girls; while their wealthy spouses were out making money, these wives put their leisure time to good use, helping to reclaim these magnificent cliffs from the quarrymen who were blasting them to pieces.  And God bless this pint-sized castle, even if it provides no rest rooms and, alas, reeks at times of urine.
Can you make out the Indian Head?
Erhudy     Beyond the monument I would come to State Line Lookout, a park with a snack stand, picnic tables, and good views out over the Hudson.  Looking south, you can see a rock formation called the Indian Head, since that is what it looks like in silhouette.  I have often lunched in this park and found summer flowers, including catnip, from which I harvested a few leaves to offer a neighbor with a cat, so her pet could get high and roll about in ecstasy.  From here the trail crosses the state line, marked by a chain link fence, into New York State and advances along the cliff edge, but I would rather describe this section the way I have usually traversed it, coming from the state line bus stop on route 9W, near the entrance to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.  From that point the Long Path continues to the north as far as the Catskills and beyond.  I have done segments of that trail and have dreamed of doing the whole trail in another life, but that takes us far beyond New York City and its environs. 
     Coming from the bus stop, I would pass through a dank, shady stretch of forest, approach the cliffs, and climb up, up, up a staircase, huffing and puffing, to reach a point almost at the top of the cliffs, where I would emerge into morning sunlight and experience, once a year, the climax of the trail, the goal of my annual pilgrimage.  Here the path passes between the cliff edge on one side and a sloping wall of rock on the other, and here, and here only, I would find two spring flowers that thrive in rocky soil. 
     At the cliff edge, and even on ledges on the face of the cliffs, grow clusters of wild pink, a flower with wedge-shaped pink petals and a sticky stem: beautiful, but not to be approached too closely, given its preference for the edge of the cliffs.  


Other rock-loving spring flowers bloom there as well, mostly inconspicuous little mustards, but one flower growing singly here and there on the rocky wall opposite upstages even wild pink.  This is columbine, whose yellow-centered nodding red petals with long curved spurs have always fascinated me and drawn me year after year to this very special spot.  


The flower points down, but the spurs of the red petals point up.
Alan VernonI always lingered there for at least fifteen minutes, usually having the path to myself, bathed in the bright morning light, with the river scintillating in the sun far below, and overhead a blue arch of sky, with one or several turkey vultures gliding on unseen currents of air.  A magical moment, unique, not to be repeated for a year.
The Shore Path
You don't want him on you.
Jerry Kirkhart     The path along the river, marked with white blazes, is a totally different experience, offering not breathtaking views out over the river, but, at intervals, impressive views of the cliffs rising from the riverbank.  The path is accessed by side paths leading off from the Long Path and involving a long descent to the river.  Taking the first of these paths, one goes down to the Ross Dock Picnic Area, where I have rarely lingered.  The first stretch of the Shore Path, between that area and the Englewood Boat Basin, is easy walking, but dull.  Then, beyond the Englewood Picnic Area and Boat Basin, the path proceeds narrowly between the wooded cliffs and the river and passes an abandoned bathhouse, a reminder that this area was once a popular bathing resort.  Along this stretch of the path, one spring I encountered the second danger of the Palisades paths: the wood tick (Dermacentor variabilis), which in May and June of every year swarms all over this stretch of the Shore Path.  I and a friend were so misguided as to hike this section of the path one May of a wet spring and spent all our time, not gazing out over the river or up at the towering cliffs, but flicking ticks off our pant legs, which made for a fiasco of a hike. Their bite can be harmless or infectious, so they are to be avoided at all costs.  Never again have I attempted the Shore Trail in spring.
     I am informed that this area once had a settlement called Under the Mountain, and a mix of small farms and quarries, fishing shacks, and manure and bone factories, of which the only remnant today is a small cemetery somewhere on an upper level that I have never seen.  At intervals the remains of a dock, usually masked by vegetation, jut out into the river; going out on them, I would get a better view of the cliffs to the north and the south.  Passing under Greenbrook Sanctuary, you come to Greenbrook Falls, a trickle in late July and August, when I often came this way to harvest raspberries, but an ice mass in winter and, in spring after rain, a gushing waterfall – sights I have never seen, since I avoid the Shore Path in winter, fearing ice on the paths leading down, and likewise avoid it in spring, not wishing to renew my acquaintance with the ticks.
     Approaching Alpine Boat Basin and its picnic area, you come upon the Blackledge-Kearney house, dating from about 1750 and now a museum, where Cornwallis, landing his troops here in November 1776 in pursuit of Washington across New Jersey, is said to have spent the night.  His troops marched up to the top of the cliffs by the very same switchback trail that I have often used to access the Shore Path here.  Beyond, one comes to a place where the Indian Head already viewed from State Line Lookout is seen from below; here, it isn’t the Indian or the patroon that is seen, but the Yankee pioneer.   


Blackledge-Kearney house.
KForce
     Now, 11.5 miles north of Fort Lee, comes the climax of the hike, the so-called Giant Stairs, a vast jumble of boulders that over the centuries have tumbled down to the foot of the cliffs, creating a lunar landscape such as I have never experienced elsewhere in the East.  The caves and cavities under these masses of rocks harbor raccoons, foxes, small rodents, lizards, and snakes, including the third danger of the park, the venomous copperhead.  I have never encountered any of these creatures except a harmless little green lizard, and least of all the copperhead, since in following the path over the boulders I make too much noise; he doesn’t want to face me, slithers down into the dark cavities under the rocks at the least hint of a human approaching. 

A copperhead.  Look close or you won't see him.     I have traversed the Giant Stairs a number of times, following the white blazes of the Shore Path as they led me up, down, over the boulders or around them, in a zigzag path that took forty-five minutes to cover a mere quarter of a mile.  As you scramble over or around them, the boulders have a way of wobbling, which doesn’t make the hike any easier; in fact, you have to focus so on where you’re stepping next, you can easily forget to survey the unique landscape all around you, and the cliffs that tower above.
     A sign used to warn hikers that the going from this point on was difficult, and advised them to take a path blazed blue and white back up to the Long Path above.  It’s not just the Giant Stairs that pose problems, since beyond it the Shore Path is impaired by erosion; once, having survived the Stairs, I pressed on, only to find a short section of the path completely worn away, obliging me to drop down a few feet and continue that way, before climbing back up to the path.  So once the sign appeared warning of the problems ahead, I would go only so far as to view the beginning of the Stairs, then retreat to the path leading upward and return that way – an arduous climb, even so – to the Long Path far above.  Today, however, a sign simply warns hikers that the going ahead is difficult.
     That’s not quite the end of the story.  On May 12, 2012, a 500-foot rock face came crashing down from the cliffs, shaking the ground and dumping a fresh layer of boulders onto the Giant Stairs right down to the edge of the river, and sweeping a whole stand of trees – oak, birch, and paulownia --  into the water.  Witnesses on the New York side of the river reported hearing a sound like jet planes overhead, and seeing what looked like a big cloud of smoke as the rocks tumbled down.  Fortunately, because the slide occurred in the evening, no one was injured, but the path over the Stairs was closed until further notice, so heavy machinery could be used to stabilize the boulders and make the path safe again for hikers.  So nature’s raw power can be exerted at any moment, without warning.  I have often hiked that very stretch of the Shore Path where the rock slide occurred, which gives food – a whole feast – for thought.  Yes, the Palisades can on occasion be dangerous, and in those cases no amount of precautions can guarantee your safety. 


Taken by the photographer while kayaking on the river one week after the slide.
Michael J. Passow

     Another note on WBAI:  The financially beleaguered station continues to spiral downward.  One fund drive succeeds another, with ever more desperate pleas for donations.  I thought the award-winning evening newscast would be sacrosanct, but even that has disappeared.  I now listen to Gary Null at noon, but little else.  The Thom Hartmann program, replacing an informative program that I liked, doesn't hold me, when the host repeats his fund drive plea again and again in exactly the same words as before -- obviously a recording (maybe he's taking a rest break).  Hartmann is knowledgeable, but his self-promotion annoys me.  For the minimal donation he will give you a bumper sticker, "Graduate of the Thom Hartmann University."  I usually flee to WNYC.  

     Coming soon:  New York Mosaic: The Neighborhoods (the Diamond District, Chinatown, Soho, and much more).  In the offing: items from my Inanities File of the 1960s, ranging from hilarious to sinister, but always inane.

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder
    

103. Lighting the City: Pushing Back the Night

Gustave Doré: Let there be light.
     “Let there be light,” said God in Genesis 1:3, “and there was light.”  In myths worldwide, light is associated with life and good, whereas darkness is associated with death and evil.  Lucifer, the Light Bearer, rebelled against God and was cast down into hell to become the Prince of Darkness.  In many cosmic myths the forces of light and darkness are at war, nor is the victory of light guaranteed.  Prehistoric humans huddled around their fire at night, or used fire as a barrier at the entrance to their cave.  For them, darkness meant risk and danger and prowling wild beasts, whereas light brought at least relative security.  And without light there could be no life, so they worshiped the sun, the source of life and light.  (For more of my take on darkness and night, see post #64, A West Village Murder and the Fear of Night.)
     The story of lighting in the city of New York, like that of all cities, replicates these cosmic myths and beliefs, for it is the story of light versus darkness, of pushing back the frontier of night.  In our well-lit cities today, we have little experience of the night sky, the starry infinitudes of space – an experience both humbling and inspiring.  But back in the eighteenth century, before the coming of gaslight and electricity in the nineteenth, darkness was a part of people’s lives, something to wonder at, yet also something to be reckoned with, something to be fought.  And what means of illumination could they use, to fight back the darkness of night?  Outside, torches; in their homes, the fire on the hearth, candles, and lamps.
What we have gained.
lecates
What we have lost.
Michael J. Bennett
     The torch, dating from prehistoric times, has been called the first portable lamp.  The fabled lighthouse of Alexandria, one of Herodotus’s Seven Wonders of the World, was simply a soaring tower with a torchlike fire at the top, visible for miles at sea.  In this country, well into the nineteenth century torchlight parades honored visiting dignitaries like the Prince of Wales in 1860, and rallied supporters during political campaigns.
A Byzantine oil lamp.     Inside homes, the wood fire on the hearth was a source of light and warmth and, in the kitchen, the means for cooking meals.  Lamps too existed from prehistoric times: a small open or covered bowl containing some kind of inflammable liquid, and a porous wick that sucked up the liquid and could be lighted.  At first the bowls were improvised from rocks, shells, and horns; later they were fabricated.  The oil might be fish oil, nut oil, sesame oil, or any number of other plant oils, olive oil being the commonest in the Mediterranean countries.  These are the lamps mentioned in both the Old and New Testament of the Bible. 
A whale oil lamp.
Bullenwächter     In the 1700s, however, the American colonists discovered that spermaceti, a semiliquid, waxy substance obtained from the head of the sperm whale, burned with a bright glow without any disagreeable odor.  It was therefore used more and more in both lamps and candles, and in street lamps as well, creating a profitable market that sent whalers out in great numbers to search the North Atlantic and later, in the nineteenth century, as the sperm whale population in the Atlantic declined, on voyages of several years into the far Pacific, as described in Melville’s Moby Dick.

     The candle is a relatively recent invention.  It was known in China and India before it was created in the West, where it was used by nomadic tribes in Europe in the late Roman period.  Beeswax candles were used in medieval church rituals, but since beeswax was expensive, ordinary people used tallow candles, which were smelly and smoky, dripped, and gave a feeble light.  (Tallow: a mixture of refined animal fats.)  Starting in the eighteenth century, for Americans who could afford them, candles using sperm oil were far superior.
An English Restoration theater, with
candle chandeliers and oil lamp
footlights.    But what about the interiors of large buildings like theaters?  The theaters of ancient Greece and Rome relied on daylight; night performances were unheard of.  But during the Renaissance, theater moved indoors into the great halls of the nobles, and then into theaters as such, which were lit from overhead by chandeliers with candles – not the ideal lighting, since they dripped hot grease indiscriminately on actors and audience alike, but the best that the times could do.  So let's count our blessings today; in our theater seats we're quite safe from drippy candles, and risk only a crashing chandelier, if a Phantom of the Opera is lurking overhead.
    So eighteenth-century New Yorkers fought the night with means of illumination that had been used for centuries, even millennia: torches, hearth fires, lamps, and candles.  All these involved flame and, when used inside,  had serious drawbacks: they had to burn right side up, be supplied with air, be distanced from inflammable objects, and be protected from drafts. 
     Another problem: these fires were hard to start.  What, no matches?  Not until 1827, when the first friction matches, called lucifers (that name again!), were invented in England; they soon appeared in New York.  But before that, how did people light candles and lamps?  From other candles and lamps, if available, otherwise from fire struck with flint and steel.  And yes, there’s the old joke about doing it by rubbing two Boy Scouts together, inspired by the Scouts’ practice of rubbing two dry sticks together to produce the friction that creates a flame.  But however it was done, it was a lot of work.
     The nineteenth century brought changes that revolutionized lighting.  Candle making by machine made mass production of candles possible, so that cheap candles became available to everyone, and with the introduction of paraffin wax in the mid-1850s, candles were made that burned cleanly without the smell of tallow candles.  But by the second half of the century candles were on their way out, replaced by competing illuminants.  First  introduced in London in 1814, gaslight came soon afterward to New York, where the Common Council granted charters to competing companies to lay pipes in different sections of the city, replacing the whale oil lamps then in use.  In 1824 a banker’s residence in Cherry Street became the first house in the city to receive gaslight.  (Bankers and their friends have a way of getting the latest improvements first.)  In the 1820s and 1830s gaslight lit more and more of the streets, with lamp lighters lighting the polished glass boxes of the lamps at dusk and snuffing them at dawn. 
     But gaslight was not for every community, as it had several requirements.  A plentiful supply of coal, from which the gas was manufactured, was needed, and the means of transporting it.  New York City’s coal was mined in the mountains of Pennsylvania and shipped by barge via the Delaware and Hudson Canal to the Hudson River and then on to the city.  Gas works were also needed: clusters of red-hot retorts, where the coal was burned to create gas, and of gas containers, big bulblike structures of iron where the gas was held, before being sent by underground pipes to the streetlamps, fancy hotels and stores, and well-appointed homes of the affluent.  Gas works were ugly and smelly, and therefore confined to the Hudson and East River waterfronts, well out of sight – and smell – of the fashionable sections of the city. 


Inside a nineteenth-century gas retort.  Not something you would want next door.

     Gaslight needed big money and a lot of effort to put up all those smelly gas works, so it was confined to the big cities; small towns and rural communities were not accommodated.  But it transformed New York, providing lighting such as had never before been possible.  Hotel lobbies glowed, and the front windows of Fifth Avenue brownstones blazed with light as arriving guests mounted the steep front stoops, while theaters offered Spanish dancers, waterfalls, and naughty cancans in a stellar glare, and pickpockets worked overtime in the evening, though second-story men lamented the illumination, so inimical to their furtive operations.  (We'll learn more about second-story men in a future post about the so-called ladder of thieves; they were on a middle rung, far from the top or the bottom.)


     Another significant development came in 1859 with the discovery of oil in a farming district of northwestern Pennsylvania, which ended abruptly that region’s rural tranquility.  Oil rigs began drilling intensively, and kerosene, a petroleum derivative, became readily available and cheap enough to be widely used in lamps.  As an illuminant it quickly replaced whale oil, which could only be obtained in far distant oceans.  Characteristic of the kerosene lamp was a glass chimney that protected the flame and controlled the flow of air to it, and a knob that adjusted the size of the wick, and thus the size and brightness of the flame.  Kerosene lamps didn’t require the infrastructure of gaslight and so could be used anywhere.  My first awareness of these lamps came in the bad Westerns, often Saturday afternoon serials, that afflicted my childhood.  These were the “Meanwhile back at the ranch …” species, humdrum black-and-whites meant to lure their young victims back a week later for the next installment, which they rarely did.  Viewing them, I always knew that at some point a fight would erupt in the ranch house, a kerosene lamp would be knocked over, curtains would catch fire, and the whole place go up in flames; I was rarely disappointed. 
     Later I encountered the lamps in real life.  In the 1960s, when I first went to Monhegan Island off midcoast Maine, kerosene lamps were still in use there; I learned such niceties as how to refill them, how to light them, and how to trim the wicks of these rather cumbersome contraptions.  Schooled by those dreary old Westerns, I was careful to keep them away from curtains.  Only with the creation some years later of a local company to supply electricity to the island – first for only a few hours, then for more, and finally all day and night – were the kerosene lamps supplanted, thus repeating the progress of mid-nineteenth-century New York.  Progress may be long in coming, but come it does … finally.
     By the late 1870s gaslight, so wondrous at first, and hailed as a clean source of light, had worn out its welcome in the city.  Gas jets emitted headache-inducing fumes of ammonia, sulfur, and carbon dioxide, turned ceilings black, and defiled the parlor, that sanctuary of middle-class gentility, with, alas, soot.  In the land of Go Ahead, in this progress-giddy age, surely something better could be devised.
     It was.  On December 20, 1880, all of Broadway between Union and Madison Square was suddenly bathed in light.  New Yorkers were dazzled, amazed.  Projecting the light were a series of twenty-foot-tall cast-iron posts, one per block, each with an arc light that cast a brilliant glow.  Arc lights, powered by steam engines and electric generators, were cheaper to install than hundreds of lampposts, and were soon spreading illumination along the avenues and over markets, factories, railroad stations, and wharves.  But arc lights were too intense for use in homes, and they too gave off noxious fumes, and created power failures when assailed by storms.  (Sound familiar?)  Something still better was needed.


Arc lights along Broadway in 1880.
     In 1878 Thomas Edison, a young inventor already known for numerous inventions that included the phonograph, informed the press that was he going to develop an incandescent lamp suitable for homes.  Canny investors on both sides of the Atlantic perked up their ears, opened their wallets, and helped create the Edison Electric Light Company, of which Edison himself, wise now in the ways of Wall Street, retained significant control.  Vast sums and great hopes were invested in this ingenious experimenter, who in this matter so far had produced only promises – brash, glowing promises, but promises only, mere words.  Supremely confident, he got to work in his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. 


A portrait of the young Edison.
     Months passed, progress was made.  Aldermen and councilmen were invited to Menlo Park for a gala demonstration of the new lights.  Edison established his power station on Pearl Street, had armies of workmen dig trenches to lay subterranean wires in massive insulated power mains, and installed powerful generators in the power station.  Then, on September 4, 1882, fifty square downtown blocks housing the city’s key financial, commercial, and manufacturing establishments were suddenly illuminated.  If gaslight had been a wonder, and arc lights magic, this was a miracle.  

     J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts (those bankers and their friends again!) immediately installed incandescent lights in their mansions, and within a year over five hundred wealthy homes were electrified.  The Stock Exchange followed, then office buildings, machine shops, piano factories, sugar refineries, department stores, and theaters, and middle-class homes as well, though tallow candles were still used in tenements.  People in New York, and then the world over, marveled: with a flick of a switch, there was light.  No lamp to fill, no wick to trim, no fumes, no flickering, just bright, steady light.
     Night life intensified, as hotels, restaurants, and shops, and brothels and gambling parlors too, turned radiant with light, and customers flocked.  By the mid-1890s people were beginning to call a stretch of Broadway blazing with illuminated signs the “Great White Way.”  The New York of today was coming into being, to be further enhanced in the 1920s and 1930s by the advent of neon lights, first developed commercially by the French engineer and inventor Georges Claude.  Today, if in our cities awareness of the night sky has all but vanished, no one seems to care, since there is so much to do at night down here.  Yes, darkness has been vanquished.


Times Square at night, the ultimate in neon lights.
Boris Dzhingarov     
Witch hazel in Central Park.
Downtowngal An eighteenth-century dowser.
     A note on witch hazel:  A short article in last Sunday's Times reminds me that even this late in the autumn, with snow predicted, this strangest of plants is blooming.  I have seen it on Monhegan Island in Maine, and down here in Central Park, though you can easily pass by this ribbon-petaled, spidery yellow flower and not even realize it's a flower.  Yes, this is the source of the astringent sold in pharmacies as a remedy for itching (it works!), bleeding, inflammation, acne, bruises, and other skin conditions.  And yes, it was once used for "water witching": a dowser or water witch would hold a forked branch of the plant and traipse an area where underground water might be found, until the stick was tugged or bent downward, indicating the source of water; a well would then be dug.  Skeptical?  Well, I haven't tried it myself, but there are those who insist that it works.  Try it for yourself and report back to me.


     Coming soon:  The Beauty and Danger of the Palisades.


    ©  2013  Clifford Browder

102. The Dynamo Mayor: La Guardia

The Little Flower
     In the 1920s New Yorkers were surprised to encounter, at election time, a short, pudgy man in rumpled clothes and topped by an outsized hat, a black wide-brimmed Stetson, who, sometimes from the top of an abandoned car, shouted and spieled in a loud, high-pitched voice, while flailing his arms and jabbing a finger to emphasize a point.  He was almost comical, but something about him always drew a crowd.  Maybe it was his nervous energy, or his passionate conviction, or his ability to communicate with them in Italian, German, Hungarian, Croatian, and Yiddish.  But whatever it was, he got and held their attention, and often their vote as well.
     This was Fiorello La Guardia, a peppery firebrand campaigning for a seat in the House, where he served seven terms as a Progressive Republican, his antics provoking both laughter and indignation but always getting him attention, as he fought for the “little people” against “the Interests,” on the side of the Forces of Light against the Forces of Darkness.  (Nuances were alien to him; he was always crusading for the Good, against enemies who were blatantly corrupt, reactionary, selfish, and evil.)  Then, in 1929, he was the Republican candidate for mayor against Jimmy Walker, who was running for a second term.  But the mayor was too popular, and the times too lighthearted and frothy, for an impetuous little reform-minded crusader; he got only 26% of the vote, the lowest figure on record since 1898.  But nothing could stop him; he bounced back to campaign for mayor in 1933.
     Fiorello La Guardia, a son of Italian immigrants, had not grown up in New York.  His father was a bandmaster with the U.S. Army who was stationed at various posts in Arizona, so his dynamo of a son grew up in the wastelands of the West, far removed from the city where he would make his career.  As a young man his knowledge of Italian got him jobs in U.S. consulates in Europe, where he picked up his other foreign languages, but he returned to America and plunked down in New York.  There he worked as an interpreter on Ellis Island and then in Night Court, studied law and passed the bar, and began representing impoverished immigrants in court.  In the course of these occupations he witnessed firsthand the corruption and incompetence of Tammany and went into politics to work for reform, becoming a Progressive Republican.  (Yes, miracle of miracles, in those days there was such a thing as a Progressive Republican, the most famous example being Teddy Roosevelt.) 
     From 1916 to 1932 he was in the House of Representatives for the 14th Congressional District, which extended from 14th Street south to 3rd Street, and from the East River west to the Hudson: a hodgepodge of ethnic groups that included slum-dwelling Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs, and Romanians, and a contingent of well-scrubbed WASPS in mansions around Washington Square and just north of it.  That a Republican could win repeatedly in this district impressed the party leaders; they marked him as a comer, but soon realized that this explosive little guy simply could not be controlled.
The first New York City mayor to make ample use
of the radio.     By 1933 the times and the city had changed.  The stock market had crashed, the Roaring Twenties had died with a whimper, Mayor Jimmy had resigned under suspicion of corruption and decamped for Europe, and the city and nation were in the depths of the Depression.  With a sixth of the population on some form of relief, New York City was devastated by the economic crisis, but also by years of Tammany corruption and incompetence.  Clearly, voters were in a mood for change, for someone who could lead them out of this morass, and Fiorello La Guardia never doubted for a minute that he was the man.  Overcoming much resistance, he became the candidate of the City Fusion Party, comprising anti-Tammany Democrats, Old Guard Republicans, and various other segments of the electorate.  He campaigned frenetically, waving his arm, stomping his foot, and trading insults with hecklers, while proclaiming that the city was dying of “Tammanyitis.”  To all of which Tammany did not take kindly.  On election day, November 7, shots were fired, fist fights erupted, skulls were cracked, and the police made numerous arrests.  No matter; the little man with the big mouth was swept decisively into office.  New York would never be the same again.
     On his first day in office the new mayor dashed about the city in his official limousine swearing in commissioners, whom he warned to get results or get out.  By afternoon he was in his office tossing letters at his secretary: “Say yes! … Say no! … Throw it away! … Tell him to go to hell!”  At the same time, he was dictating letters to three stenographers: “Nuts! … Regrets! … Thanks!”  This was a frenzied workaholic the like of which the city had never seen.
     The days that followed only intensified his image.  En route to city hall in the morning, he would have his driver change course so he could check the progress at a housing construction site, supervise traffic flow or snow removal, or query a patrolman about his beat.  No city worker or garbage collector was spared.  On any given day New Yorkers swore that they had seen him on whirlwind visits to dozens of sites in all five boroughs – simultaneously! 
     It wasn’t easy working for such a boss; he was demanding, even a bully.  He expected city employees at all levels to arrive on time and put in a full day’s work; if they didn’t, they were fired.  And no one, under any circumstances, was to take a bribe.  Scrupulously honest, he expected others to be the same.  Gone were the days of Tammany slackness, of cronyism and corruption.  When angry, he was quite capable of knocking an employee’s hat off – “Be respectful when talking to a citizen!” – and of dashing a cigarette from a worker’s lips.  Those who couldn’t take it quit or got fired, but those who could stuck it out, came to respect him and even, in time, to love him.  He gave them pride in their work: they were serving the people in the greatest city in the world.  He really believed that, and they came to believe it, too.  Morale among city workers soared.
     And he got results.  In the first six months of his tenure bankers reduced the interest rates on the city’s borrowing; 1700 recreational renovation projects were completed by Robert Moses, his Parks Commissioner, who completed transformed the city’s parks; free street shows were staged by hired musicians and dancers; and dancing was encouraged on the Central Park Mall.  And this was just the beginning.  The new mayor was praised by the press, cheered by residents; in the very depths of the Depression, there was hope after all for the city.
     Determined to get federal money for further projects and reforms, the indefatigable mayor went to Washington, developed contacts there, and presented the Department of the Interior with specific plans that Moses had worked out in detail.  Other cities went to the same source of funding with vague, well-meaning plans, but La Guardia could show in detail what the federal money would do for New York.  Result: he got more for his city than any other mayor, and New York became a testing ground and showcase for the New Deal.  While publicly professing neutrality, President Roosevelt had secretly worked against La Guardia’s election, hoping to keep the city Democratic, but he came to like the new mayor, however irksome he might at times be; they both believed in Big Government and what it could do for the cities. 
With the foxy President, who came to like him.  La Guardia's suit is less rumpled than usual.
     Less tranquil was the mayor’s relationship with his Parks Commissioner.   Two strong-willed men used to getting their own way, they argued and shouted and almost came to blows, but for all that worked together successfully.  The fiercely demanding mayor could not do without a commissioner who turned mud pits and slums into parks, and run-down tenements into housing projects, while creating a network of highways and bridges that gave the sprawling city a cohesion it had never had before.  (For more on Moses, see post #78.)
     Over the years that followed Fiorello La Guardia broke the grip of Tammany to create a nonpolitical Civil Service Commission; expanded relief and social service programs; cleared slums and created parks and public housing; unified and updated the city’s mass transit system; expanded education; developed public health programs; reformed the police; opened the city bureaucracy to Jews, Italians, and blacks; appointed more women to important positions than any previous mayor; and sponsored a 1939 World’s Fair. 
     Not one for subtlety and tact, he denounced anyone and anything he deemed corrupt, unjust, or injurious: taxi owners unfairly exploiting the drivers, the New York Bar Association, profit-hungry doctors, drunk drivers, high city insurance rates, inefficient sanitation disposal, racketeers and crooked politicians, urban noise.  Which should have made him a host of powerful enemies, but always he had the people with him; in 1937 he was easily reelected on the Fusion ticket.
     Amazingly, he still found time – a little time – for his wife Marie (yes, he had a wife), who preferred to keep out of the spotlight while she looked after the house and their adopted son and daughter.  His former secretary, Marie knew what she was getting into when she married him and approved of his demanding career.  Amazingly too, he liked to cook and was good with the children.
On a police boat, smashing slot machines.

     A hands-on mayor, the Little Flower loved to swing into action, usually with the press on hand to record it.  In 1934 he went at mobster Frank Costello’s slot machines, smashing them with a sledge hammer and dumping them from a police boat into Long Island Sound while reporters looked on.  If a tenement roof collapsed, a train wreck occurred, or a fire broke out, he would pop up out of nowhere to scream advice and lend a helping hand.  Once, settling into his seat for a performance at Radio City Music Hall, he was informed of a fire nearby, rushed out of the theater, hurried to where smoke was pouring out of a restaurant, and disappeared into the building.  Hours later the firemen, having extinguished the blaze, came out.  “Will someone get the mayor out of there!” yelled a fireman.  With the mayor nowhere in sight, consternation spread.  Finally he appeared, soot-covered, and explained that he had been inspecting the refrigerator system to see if the building code had been violated.
     On a more tranquil occasion, during a lengthy newspaper strike he read the funnies over the radio, so the “kiddies” could keep up with their favorite comic strip characters.  He was said to be charmingly expressive, with appropriate intonation, a careful building of suspense, and an emphasis on the moral lessons to be derived. 
     Alas, he had a puritanical streak in him, as became apparent in 1937, when he refused to renew the theater licenses of the famous Minsky brothers’ burlesque houses, which featured such stellar performers as the comedians Abbott and Costello and the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee.  Burlesque then left the city but flourished just across the river in Union City, imposing on its New York devotees an irksome trans-Hudson expedition to the nearer wilds of New Jersey.
     In 1941 he ran for a third term, again as the Fusion candidate, and won, becoming the first New York mayor in modern times to serve three consecutive terms.  When war came he hoped to get a leave of absence as mayor so he could serve in the Army, but, to his great disappointment, the Army wasn’t interested.  He became increasingly irritable, arbitrary in his actions, and arrogant; he was tired, and the voters sensed it.  Criticism of his policies multiplied, and it was evident that, with federal money now going to the war effort and not to the cities, he was much less successful as mayor and losing touch with the people. 
     In 1945 La Guardia chose not to run for a fourth term and left office at the end of the year.  In 1946 he directed UNRRA, a U.N. organization fighting famine in postwar Europe, but resigned when the U.S. and Great Britain declined to support the organization further.  The question of what this most dynamic little man would do next in retirement was tragically cut short when, having long suffered from ill health, he succumbed to cancer and died in 1947.  Fire houses sounded a signal honoring the death of a fireman, City Hall and other city buildings were draped in black, and Mayor William O’Dwyer, his successor, proclaimed a day of mourning; all public buildings flew flags at half mast for thirty days.  More significant still, some 45,000 citizens of all ages and ethnic groups and all walks of life stood patiently in line to pay their last respects to the Little Flower, as he lay in state in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  It is hard to imagine someone so fiercely dynamic stilled at last.  One wonders too if his frenetic life style contributed in some way to his demise.
  Now hailed as New York’s best and greatest mayor, he has had a high school, a community college, an airport, and a stretch of West Broadway in Greenwich Village named for him; a statue of him, rumpled suit and all, now adorns this last, La Guardia Place.  He also achieved the ultimate in commemoration when he inspired the hit Broadway musical Fiorello, which ran from 1959 to 1961.  But whether the city would want another mayor so domineering and possessed of such ruthless energy is doubtful.  Who would want to experience a whirlwind twice?  But he will always be remembered and, at a safe distance, fondly.


Bloomberg and de Blasio
    And what of our outgoing and incoming mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio?  Bloomberg, our 108th mayor (2002-13), is not easily classified.  A lifelong Democrat, in 2001 he chose to run as a Republican and got elected, then in 2007 became an Independent.  As the founder of Bloomberg L.P., a vastly successful financial news service, he is certainly the richest mayor New York City has ever had, being appraised by Forbes magazine in September 2013 as the 13th richest person in the world, with $31 billion in wealth.  That he longed for more than wealth and success in business explains his entrance into the murky and often perilous world of politics.  There are those who decry the participation of the rich in politics, feeling that their money gives them an unfair advantage, but it can also be argued that their wealth renders them less susceptible to greed; if you already have, say, $31 billion, why would you need to get more?


To my eye he looks benign. 
 And, yes, tastefully elegant.
Rubinstein    As mayor, Bloomberg has supported abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and legalization for illegal immigrants; opposed the death penalty; expanded the city’s ban on smoking; and attempted to restrict soft drink sales – policies that many liberals would endorse.  Yet he calls himself a fiscal conservative and is proud of having turned the city’s $6 billion deficit into a $3 billion surplus.  New Yorkers have applauded many of his initiatives, but not his support of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, which targets minorities, or his getting the City Council to amend the city’s term limits law to allow him to serve a third consecutive term. 
     As for de Blasio, now that he’s won, the honeymoon is over.  Recently, right after he praised our 106th mayor David Dinkins, Dinkins, who was present, suggested that the new mayor’s plan to finance prekindergarten programs by a tax on the rich, which would require approval by the State Legislature, was a mistake; he would do better to tax suburban commuters.  This surprised de Blasio, who in any case will now have to find ways to implement his campaign promises.  Yes, the honeymoon is over.

     Source note:  In addition to the usual online sources, I have drawn on Alyn Brodsky’s excellent biography, The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York (2003).  It is meticulously researched and documented, and very readable.  Not for someone who wants a quick take on the subject, however, since it treats its subject in depth.

     Coming soon:  Lighting the City: Pushing Back the Night (from candles and hearthside fires to gaslight, arc lights, and the miracles wrought by Thomas A. Edison, as New Yorkers fought to conquer darkness).  In the works: The Ladder of Thieves (from lowly hog snatchers to the most sophisticated bank robbers, circa 1870).  And other possibilities.

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder