Inside the Apple

Captain Kidd

2012-05-23T17:18:00.004-04:00

On this date--May 23, 1701--Captain William Kidd was hanged for murder and piracy at the so-called "Execution Dock" in London. Though born in Scotland and hanged in England, Kidd is most associated with New York City, where he lived at the peak of his career.

Today, historians disagree as to the extent of Kidd's outright piracy. Most often, he sailed a privateer with a letter of marque, with the explicit permission to attack enemy ships. A prosperous member of New York's mercantile class, Kidd was friendly with a succession of New York's colonial governors, including Benjamin Fletcher. Under Fletcher, "piracy was a leading economic development tool in the city’s competition with the ports of Boston and Philadelphia."

In 1691, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, an wealthy widow, and they lived on Pearl Street. (Sarah's story is a tangled one for another time; Kidd was her third husband, and they applied for a marriage license only two days after her second husband, John Oort died. Did Kidd have something to do with that?)

Kidd was an active contributor a few years later to the building of the first Trinity Church, Wall Street, lending block and tackle for the hauling of stone and contributing money in pew rent. Kidd never sat in a pew, however; he left New York in 1696 before the church was finished, and was arrested in 1699, having never returned to the city.

One of Kidd's greatest prizes, the Quedagh Merchant, was found a few years ago in shallow waters off the Dominican Republic. Kidd had seized the French East India Company vessel on the grounds that it was a French ship and therefore an enemy of the British. That it was actually an Armenian vessel captained by an Englishman didn't seem to matter. The capture of the vessel branded Kidd a pirate and in a vain attempt to clear his name, Kidd ditched the boat in Caribbean and headed back to New York. He ended up in Boston, was arrested, and sent to England where he was convicted and hanged.

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For more about New York in the English Colonial era read

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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News PAPER Spires at the Skyscraper Museum

2012-05-18T10:20:00.000-04:00

At the end of the nineteenth century, when newspapers were at their peak, there were 43 daily papers in New York City. Most were published from "Newspaper Row"--the blocks of Park Row near City Hall--from grand skyscrapers that were among some of the first truly notable high-rise buildings in the city.

While most of these newspapers are gone and their headquarters have been torn down, the Skyscraper Museum has brought them back to life in their new exhibition "News PAPER Spires," running through July 15th. The small exhibition makes good use of archival drawings, blueprints, photographs, and newspapers themselves to tell the story of some of the city's most famous skyscrapers, including the World, Tribune, and Times buildings. (Of those three, only the Times building still stands--it's the building from which the ball drops on New Year's Eve.)

Of particular interest in Joseph Pulitzer's World tower, which was the first skyscraper to proclaim itself the tallest in the world. Designed by George B. Post (who also built the New York Stock Exchange and City College), the building reached to 309 feet to the top of the dome. It was a "giant among giants" to use the paper's PR terminology, and soon the Times and Tribune were racing to expand their buildings as they increased their circulation. Alas, the World tower came down when the approach ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge were expanded.

The show also focuses on the improvements in technology--from the use of rag paper to the invention of the linotype machine--that kept millions of papers circulating every day.

The Skyscraper Museum is located at 39 Battery Place (next to the Ritz Carlton) and is open Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm. If you can't make it in person, there's a virtual exhibition on the museum's website.

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To read more about the race to build skyscrapers in New York

check out

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Will the World Trade Center be America's Tallest?

2012-05-11T11:31:00.000-04:00

As you may have read, there is controversy brewing as to whether the new World Trade Center building (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), will be America's tallest building upon its completion.

At issue is the building's spire, which was designed to reach a final height of 1,776 feet, thus marking the year of the Declaration of Independence. This piece of symbolism has stayed with the building from Daniel Liebskind's original master plan through architect David Childs's architectural redrafts. However, back in January, the Durst Organization (co-developers of the building) made the decision to strip the spire of its $20 million cladding, leaving it a bare--and functional--antenna. And there's the rub: according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, decorative spires count in a building's final height; solely functional antennae do not.

This controversy between functional vs. decorative height can be traced back to the construction of the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and Empire State Building in the late 1920s.

As we write in Inside the Apple, the contest between 40 Wall and the Chrysler Building to be the world's tallest building was stiff:

In March 1929, the announced height of the Chrysler Building was 809 feet, to be topped with a dome. The Manhattan Company [aka 40 Wall Street] rejoined by announcing it was to be 840 feet. By October, Chrysler’s estimated final height had risen to 905 feet and—after a few last-minute drafting sessions by Severance and partner Yasuo Matsui—the Manhattan Company was revised upward to 925 feet.

But no one knew of the “vertex,” a secret spire that Van Allen’s crew had been assembling inside the steel dome since September. On October 23, 1929, it was set in place. No newspapers carried the story the next day; no newsreel cameras were on hand to record the momentous occasion. Chrysler and Van Allen were happy to keep their secret—if you can call a 185-foot spire crowning a 1,046-foot building a secret—until the time was right.

As Van Allen succinctly put it: “We’ll lift the thing up and we won’t tell ‘em anything about it. And when it’s up we’ll just be higher, that’s all.”

This stunt caused many to cry foul--could the Chrysler Building really be the world's tallest with the simple addition of a decorative spire? The Empire State Building wasn't going to wait to find out.

After William Van Allen revealed the Chrysler Building’s vertex, it became imperative to make the Empire State Building taller without adding a “useless” spire. To that end, Smith announced in December 1929 that the top of the Empire State would house a mooring mast, 1,300 feet from the ground, for transatlantic dirigibles.

This was utter folly. Not only does a dirigible need to be anchored by both the nose and the tail (which is why they landed at air fields in New Jersey in the first place), the updrafts in Midtown were so strong that a zeppelin the length of two city blocks would have whipped around in the wind like a child’s toy. More to the point, a dirigible’s gondola was in the ship’s center; people would never have been able to (as pictured here in an early publicity drawing) exit from the helium-filled balloon straight into the 102nd-story waiting room.

In late September 1931, the New York Evening Journal completed the only successful dirigible mooring. At great danger to life and limb, it delivered a package of newspapers from the Financial District to the Empire State Building’s roof. It looked great on the newsreel cameras, but would be the closest the mooring mast ever saw to real use.

It's ironic that the Empire State Building worked to make its spire functional (even if it never would be), when today having a solely functional spire doesn't count toward a building's final height. Of course, to many people the most important measurable statistic is highest occupied floor, which will continue to be held by the Willis Tower in Chicago, whether or not the Council on Tall Buildings decides to count the World Trade Center's spire or not.

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Read more about the race to the be world's tallest building in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Wall Street, 1820, at the Duncan Phyfe Show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2012-05-05T19:15:00.000-04:00

We're a little late to the game on this post -- in fact, you only have one more day to see the Duncan Phyfe exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show closes May 6, 2012 (i.e., tomorrow), but if you are looking for something to do tomorrow, it is well worth a visit. Not only does it showcase the work of a great New York cabinetmaker, it is also your opportunity to examine a little-seen painting of the city, Wall Street 1820 by Johann Heinrich Jenny.

The painting (on loan to the museum from a private collection) is an amazing view of the city nearly 200 years ago. The above black-and-white reproduction does no justice at all to the vibrant colors of the original, which looks like it could have been painted yesterday.

Views of Wall Street were common in the nineteenth century, as it was not just the financial center of the city, but--prior to the move by the wealthy to Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights--its residential heart as well.

(The second view, below, shows the street in 1847, as more and more Greek Revivial banks came to dominate the area.)

If you do go see the show, there's a gallery talk at 10:00AM on May 6.

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For more about New York in 1820s, pick up a copy of
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City,available from the Metropolitan Museum's gift shop, and fine booksellers everywhere.

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

2012-04-27T16:28:00.001-04:00

We were touring through Greenwich Village, showcasing places of literary significance, when we remembered that today marks the 80th anniversary of the death of poet Hart Crane.

Best known for his long-form poem The Bridge--a celebration of America using as its central symbol the Brooklyn Bridge--Crane was one of the greatest modernist poets of his generation. Plagued by alcohol problems and the perils of being a gay man in a closeted society, Crane cut short his own life on April 27, 1932, when he jumped from a steamship in the Gulf of Mexico.

Crane lived a number of places in New York, including 45 Grove Street, 54 West 10th Street, and 79 Charles Street in the Village, and 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, where he wrote the bulk of The Bridge. Only later did he discover that the bridge's co-designer and chief engineer, Washington Roebling, had once lived in the same apartment building overlooking the East River.

James Franco's film, The Broken Tower, which is a biography of Crane, opened in limited release today.

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Interested in a literary walk of Greenwich Village? We lead private tours for groups large and small; contact us at walknyc@gmail.com or events@insidetheapple.net for more information.

Reminder: "The House of Mirth" at Metropolitan Playhouse on Sunday at 3pm

2012-04-27T16:12:00.000-04:00

We hope everyone has a great weekend, and we just wanted to remind you that tickets are still available for Sunday's 3pm performance of The House of Mirth at the Metropolitan Playhouse. After the show, we'll be talking about Edith Wharton's New York and how the mores and customs of the times are reflected in the play and her other writings. It should be a lot of fun and we hope to see you there!

This version of the novel was written by Wharton herself and is seldom revived, so if you are a Wharton fan you won't want to pass up this opportunity. The play opens tonight and runs through May 20.

Tickets are available at http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/houseofmirth.

Regards,
Michelle & James Nevius

www.insidetheapple.net

Titanic at 100: Myth and Memory

2012-04-26T16:16:00.000-04:00

There's been much fanfare in commemoration of the sinking of RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, en route to New York on its maiden voyage--a new miniseries, the re-release of James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic in 3D, and a host of articles, documentaries, and museum exhibitions.

We recommend the exhibition at the South Street Seaport Museum entitled Titanic at 100: Myth and Memory, which is running through May 16. The exhibition features a host of Titanic ephemera, from the china commissioned for the ship (the examples on view were extras not taken on that first voyage) to advertisements in New York for the April 20 return voyage to Europe that never happened. The most fascinating part of show is its centerpiece--the dispatches sent and received from the Titanic, Olympic, Carpathia, and other ships by marconi wireless operators that document the sinking in real-time.

Just outside the gallery is one of New York's permanent Titanic memorials, the old lighthouse that once stood atop the Seaman's Church Institute at Coenties Slip. When that building was demolished in the late 1960s, the lighthouse was moved to South Street Seaport. (You can see advertisements for the public subscription for the memorial--launched just after the sinking in 1912--in the exhibition.)

If you want to make a self-guided tour of Titanic sites in the city, the New York Daily News published this handy map a couple of weeks ago as part of their coverage of the disaster. (Full disclosure: we helped.)

More information about New York at the end of the Gilded Age can be found in our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, available from Amazon.com and fine booksellers everywhere.

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"House of Mirth" and Edith Wharton's New York

2012-04-24T10:06:00.000-04:00

We saw a preview performance last night of Edith Wharton's adaptation of her best-selling novel House of Mirth at the Metropolitan Playhouse and we urge you to go. Wharton was the most adept chronicler of New York's social set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and she and playwright Clyde Fitch did a masterful job of taking the varied settings and situations of the novel and figuring out how to make them work on stage. As always, the cast and direction at the Metropolitan Playhouse are top notch, especially Amanda Jones as Lily Bart.

Of course, we'd love it if the performance you came to see is this Sunday, April 29, at 3:00pm. Following that matinee, we'll be joining director Alex Roe for a talk back with the audience where we'll be discussing the world of the play and the New York in which Edith Wharton lived and worked.

You can buy tickets for that performance at this link: http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/HOM8. The show officially opens on Friday and runs through May 20.

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You can also read more about Edith Wharton's New York in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Theater Talk Back: "House of Mirth" at the Metropolitan Playhouse on Sunday, April 29, at 3:00pm

2012-04-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

Photo by Jacob J. Goldberg

On Sunday, April 29, we will be appearing at the Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village to do a post-show talk-back following the 3:00pm performance of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.

Wharton published the novel The House of Mirth in 1905 to great acclaim and it launched her into the top ranks of American writers, selling 140,000 copies in just three months. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a socially conscious young woman looking for love in Gilded Age New York. In 1906, Wharton joined with prolific playwright Clive Fitch to create a stage adaptation of the work, which premiered at the Knickerbocker Theatre in October of that year. (The Knickerbocker is long gone, but it was the first Broadway house to have an illuminated, rotating electric sign.)

After the Metropolitan's performance, we will be talking about Edith Wharton's New York and the role it played in shaping her writing; her New York works include classics such as House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, as well as lesser-known titles such as The Custom of the Country and Old New York.

We'll being copies of our own book, Inside the Apple, for sale and signing.

To purchase tickets to House of Mirth, please go to the Metropolitan Playhouse's website at http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/houseofmirth

REMINDER: Walking Tour of Gilded Age Lower Manhattan on Sunday, April 22

2012-04-15T15:34:00.000-04:00

REMINDER: Today's the last day to reserve at the $10 discount for our 4/22 tour of Gilded Age Lower Manhattan.

All the details can be found on our previous blog post at

http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2012/04/walking-tour-of-gilded-age-lower.html

Hope to see you there!

Michelle & James
www.insidetheapple.net

Walking tour of Gilded Age Lower Manhattan -- Sunday, April 22, at 10:00AM

2012-04-09T12:57:00.001-04:00

On Sunday, April 22, 2012, at 10:00AM, we will be offering our next public walking tour:

Exploring the Gilded Age in Lower Manhattan

Reservations taken 4/15 or earlier: $10 per person
Reservations taken 4/16 or later: $15 per person
RESERVATIONS TAKEN ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED BASIS
events@insidetheapple.net

Join James Nevius, co-author of Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, on Sunday, April 22, to explore Beaux Arts architecture in Lower Manhattan. This is the era of JP Morgan, and we’ll see a number of sites associated with him, including the House of Morgan and International Mercantile Marine (IMM) ticket office. IMM owned, among other ships, White Star’s Titanic; since the centennial of that boat’s sinking is just one week earlier, we’ll also talk about the golden age of New York as a port for both goods (as evidenced in Cass Gilbert’s triumphant US Custom House) and people. The tour will last between 1.5 and 2 hours.

Copies of Inside the Apple will be available for purchase at the tour.

To reserve, send an email to events@insidetheapple.net with

· Your name

· The number in your party

· A contact cell phone number

· A good email address where we can send you information about where the tour will start.

PLEASE NOTE that if you reserve no later than Sunday, April 15, the cost is just $10 per person. All reservations received starting Monday, April 16, will be $15 per person.

This tour will have only a limited number of spaces, so please reserve early to avoid disappointment.

Payment will be taken at the start of the tour by cash only. Directions to the tour’s starting point will be sent out after your reservation is confirmed.

Hope to see you there!

Edgar Allan Poe's New York

2012-04-06T11:34:00.000-04:00

On April 6, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe arrived in the city for his second and final stint as a New Yorker.

Poe had lived briefly in New York in 1837-8; he arrived in January 1837 with his brand-new, 14-year-old wife Virginia Clemm. They lived first at a boarding house at Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place* and then on Carmine Street near Varick before leaving for Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, he would publish some of his most enduring stories, including The Murders at the Rue Morgue, The Gold Bug, and The Pit and the Pendulum.

Despite occasional spikes in income--The Gold Bug won a $100 prize--the Poes were desperately poor and they returned to New York so that Edgar could look for steadier income. By this time, Virginia had also contracted tuberculosis ("consumption," in the parlance of the day), and the Poes nomadic existence when they returned to the city--they lived eight places in less than five years--was often because they were in search of healthier climes.

Virginia and Edgar first moved into a boarding house on Greenwich Street near Cedar, near the city's publishing houses on Nassau Street and Park Row. Poe described the place as "old... and buggy. . . The landlady a nice, chatty old soul—gave us the back room on the third floor—night & day attendance—for $7—the cheapest board I ever knew."

The Poes had soon moved to Ann Street, right in the hub of downtown commerce, before decamping for the Brennan farmhouse on the Upper West Side on 84th Street. The Brennan house (above) was near what today is Riverside Park, and Poe spent time atop Mount Tom, an outcrop of rock there with sweeping vistas of the Hudson River.

But soon the Poes were on the move again: in 1845 they lived back on Greenwich Street, on East Broadway, and on Amity Street (now Third Street) in the Village. In 1846, they moved to Turtle Bay, near the present site of the United Nations, before finally moving out of the city altogether and settling in what was then known as the town of Fordham in the Bronx.

Poe's home in the Bronx still stands, preserved as Poe would have known it, and open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays. While most of the furniture inside is authentic to the period, only two pieces were known to have been owned by the Poes: a rocking chair and the bed in which Virginia finally succumbed to her illness in 1847. Poe continued to live in the cottage until his own death--under mysterious circumstances--in 1849 in Baltimore.

As the docent at the house mentioned to us on a recent tour, Poe's home is the only house museum of its period (it dates back to 1812) in the city that really shows how a poor family would have lived. Right before the Poes moved in, he'd published "The Raven"--the only work that brought him a measure of celebrity--for which he was paid just $9. The rent on the cottage was $100 year--publishing his most famous poem barely netted Poe enough to cover a month's rent, leaving little to put food on the table or buy medicine for the ailing Virginia.

* In recent years, Poe's first home has been identified as 137 Waverly Place, but this appears to be wishful thinking and not rooted in fact. It's more likely that boarding house was on Sixth Avenue proper and is now gone, as are all of Poe's New York homes except Poe Cottage in the Bronx.

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For more on Poe's New York be sure to check out

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Torn in Two: The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War at the Grolier Club

2012-03-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

The Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street) is currently hosting Torn in Two: The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, an exhibition of contemporary maps, broadsides, photographs, and documents organized by the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center of the Boston Public Library. The exhibit is small--it takes up just one room on the club's ground floor--but provides a fascinating glimpse into the attitudes and reportage of the time.

The exhibition pulls the viewer in immediately: the first case shows the first American demographic map (based on the 1860 census), which records the percentage of slaves relative to the population in each slave-holding county. In some counties near the Mason-Dixon line, that percentage was close to zero; in other counties in the Deep South and Texas, it reached nearly 90%. Lincoln evidently spent a great deal of time studying the map, and in a later portrait of him signing the Emancipation Proclamation, a copy of the map can be seen in the background.

Other displays include railroad maps, political cartoons, photographs, and commemorative diagrams--produced by the daily newspapers--of famous battle sites.

For anyone interested in the Civil War, which the exhibition notes is still the most important moment in our nation's history, this jewel of an exhibition is a must-see.

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For more on the Civil War--and New York's role in it--be sure to check out

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

New York's First Bank Robbery

2012-03-20T11:30:00.000-04:00

When workers arrived at the City Bank at 52 Wall Street* on Monday, March 21, 1831, they were in for a rude shock. Sometime over the weekend—probably the evening of March 19 or the early morning hours of March 20—the bank had been robbed of $245,000 in bank notes and Spanish doubloons. This was New York’s first-ever bank heist.

Though suspicion immediately fell on workers at the bank, the police had little time to investigate the employees before they received a tip from Mr. Bangs, the proprietor of a “respectable private boarding house” (according to the New-York Evening Post) who was leery of his newest tenant.

On the Monday following the robbery, a man calling himself Mr. Jones had arrived at Mr. Bangs's boarding house on Elm Street** with three small trunks, asking for a private room in which to write. He paid for the room in advance. After a few days, the landlord became suspicious over Mr. Jones’s apparent anxiety, especially concerning the contents of his trunks. When one of the trunks disappeared, Mr. Bangs contacted the police. The police—seemingly without probable cause or a warrant—picked the locks of the two remaining trunks and found bank notes they could positively identify as being from the City Bank robbery.

When Mr. Jones returned to the boarding house, he was promptly arrested. The robber was soon discovered to be Edward Smith, who lived on Division Street with his wife and two children and ran a shoe store. He was well-known to police, having been arrested for a store robbery in Brooklyn but not convicted due to lack of evidence. Stories soon began to swirl of other robberies Smith was allegedly connected to, including the attempted theft of cash from the steamer Chancellor Livingston and a daring mail coach heist in England.

Of the $245, 000, only about $176,000 was recovered from Smith. The bank soon began advertising for people to keep an eye out for the other bank notes (and the Spanish doubloons). One apparent accomplice was arrested in Philadelphia in April when some of the missing bank notes were identified on his person. But it is unclear if the remainder of the money was ever recovered or if that man was, indeed, part of the robbery.

A jury found Edward Smith guilty in a one-day trial (that one day included jury selection, testimony, and deliberations) and he was sentenced to five years hard labor in Sing-Sing prison.

* City Bank (aka The National City Bank) had been founded on this spot in 1812. At the turn of the 20th-century it would move across the street into the old Merchant's Exchange building at 55 Wall Street, now Cipriani. City Bank is today Citibank.

** Elm Street is now Lafayette Street.

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Read more about Wall Street banks--including the deadly Morgan Bank bombing--in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
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The Greatest Grid

2012-03-13T12:35:00.000-04:00

We were recently sent a copy of The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011, the companion book to the exhibit of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York.

The book is richly illustrated with images from the show, including a fold-out copy of the original Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which gridded Manhattan into streets and avenues up to 155th Street. Like the exhibition, the book tells the story of New York’s development from the era before the grid, through the city’s explosive growth in the mid-19th century and the development of the Upper East and Upper West Sides, and on to today. The material is at its strongest in the era between 1811 and 1900. The Greatest Grid features many detail maps, including some of the Randel Farm Maps, which remain among the most valuable insights into early 19th-century New York. Created by John Randel, the key surveyor of the Commissioners’ Plan, the farm maps show property lines, topographical features, and other key details at a scale of 100 feet to the inch. Noted Manhattan chronicler I.N. Phelps Stokes called them "the most complete and valuable topographical record of the period that exists."

Also revealing are photographs from later in the century that show just how long it took the city to expand into the grid that Randel had laid out. The photo above is the view looking north from the Dakota apartments, ca. 1890. The only major structure visible is the American Museum of Natural History, which had opened a few years earlier.

The Greatest Grid, skillfully edited by NYU Urban Studies professor Hilary Ballon, is packed with nuggets of information—what spurred the development of a grid plan; why Broadway works against the grid; how the area north of 155th Street faced unique topographical information. Some things are given short shrift—we would have liked more information on the Flatiron Building, for instance, or the development of Times Square—but these are minor quibbles. This is a title well worth owning for anyone who appreciates Manhattan’s past and wants to explore it in greater depth.

(And to plug our own book for a minute—it really does make an excellent companion to Inside the Apple, amplifying and illustrating many of the points we make.)

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Curious and Unusual Deaths: "Death in New York"

2012-03-08T11:33:00.001-05:00

This past summer, we were invited to Toronto by the Discovery Channel to participate as New York City history experts in the program Curious and Unusual Deaths. Our episode, "Death in New York," will premiere in the United States on Discovery's Fit and Health channel on March 16 at 10:00PM ET/7:00PM PT. (In New York, Discovery Fit and Health is channel 116 if you have Time Warner Cable; otherwise check your local listings)

Each episode of the show explores the circumstances of three people who died in strange ways. The show combines reenactment with interviews with scientists, historians, and engineers who examine these accidents to try to figure out not only how they happened, but how we can learn from these tragedies.

In "Death in New York," the three tales concern a city worker who was sucked into a drainage pipe at the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx, a woman killed by a steam explosion while taking a nap near Gramercy Park, and a sidewalk electrocution in the East Village.

The program has been very well-received; for recent reviews of the show, please see the New York Times and Huffington Post.

In Canada, the show airs on Discovery Canada, and our episode will premiere on Friday, March 23, at 10:30PM ET. The show is also shown in other markets around the world, so do keep an eye out for it.

We haven't actually seen our episode yet, but are eager to find out how we did (and how much was left on the cutting room floor). Hope you have a chance to tune in, too!

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For more about death in New York (most of it not very curious or unusual),
you can turn to Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

The 100th Birthday of the Oreo

2012-03-06T12:03:00.000-05:00

Today marks the centennial of one of the greatest confectionery successes of all time: the Oreo cookie, which was invented in New York City in 1912.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

The year 1898 saw two mergers that shaped the rest of the 20th century: the unification of the five boroughs of New York City, and the merger of the American Biscuit & Manufacturing Company and the New York Biscuit Company into the National Biscuit Company—Nabisco. In 1906, the company moved its national headquarters to the New York Biscuit company’s factory between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in West Chelsea, having recently introduced two bestsellers: the Uneeda Biscuit and Barnum’s Animal Crackers, which were not endorsed or authorized by the circus. In 1912, the factory created its most famous confection, a disc-shaped, cream-filled cookie dubbed the Oreo. No one at Nabisco knows where the name came from, though etymologists have suggested everything from or (French for gold, and perhaps a reference to the fact that the cookie originally also came in a lemon meringue flavor) to the Greek oreos for mountain (because early cookies had a mound of filling). Some have even suggested that the “re” in the middle is the cREam and the “o” on either side is the chOcolate, but that seems like wishful thinking. Perhaps the simplest explanation is correct: Oreo just sounded like a good name for a cookie. To date, close to 500 million Oreos have been sold, making it the most popular cookie in the U.S.

The Nabisco factory where the Oreo was born is now Chelsea Market, which features food stores, boutiques, and our favorite TV station, NY1. Soon after the Oreo's introduction, Nabisco expanded its bakery across Tenth Avenue, using the freight railroad there to ship millions of cookies. That freight line is now the High Line, one of New York's most celebrated outdoor green spaces.

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Read more about Nabisco, the Oreo,
and Chelsea in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

Mathew Brady's Lincoln Portrait

2012-02-27T13:36:00.001-05:00

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous "Right Makes Might" speech at Cooper Union. That same day, he went over to famed photographer Mathew Brady's studio at Broadway and Bleecker Street where he sat for an official campaign portrait. Lincoln would later credit the speech and the photo with making him president.

One of the skills that made Brady such an acclaimed photographer was his ability to retouch in the darkroom. In this Lincoln portrait, lines are erased from the candidate's face and his wandering left eye is straightened.

While Brady's Tenth Street studio is gone, the building that housed his downtown studio still exists at 359 Broadway, an area that is rich with Civil War-era architecture.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misstated at which of Brady Studios Lincoln sat for his portrait. It could not have been the studio at Broadway and Tenth Street (despite what you may read in various reputable sources), since that studio did not open until later in 1860.

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Read more on Lincoln and New York in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

Happy Presidents' Day

2012-02-20T11:54:00.000-05:00

Here's a fun fact: the holiday we are celebrating today is commonly known as Presidents' Day, but according to Uniform Monday Holiday Act, passed in 1968, the name of the federal holiday is still officially Washington's Birthday. (And, many states and employee's unions still celebrate Lincoln's Birthday as a separate holiday.)

Quite a number of U.S. Presidents have had connections to New York City, from George Washington--who was inaugurated on Wall Street--to Barack Obama, who graduated from Columbia and lived in Morningside Heights.

Here are a few past blog posts about the presidency in NYC:

A run-down of the connections to New York of various presidents: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/02/happy-presidents-day.html
Chester Arthur was inaugurated in Murray Hill: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/01/chester-arthur-president-from-murray.html
Teddy Roosevelt was born on Twentieth Street: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2010/10/happy-birthday-teddy-roosevelt.html
And... next week marks the anniversary of Lincoln's famous Cooper Union speech: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/02/february-27-1860-lincoln-at-cooper.html

Have a great holiday!

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You can read more about New York and the presidency
in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Charles Dickens's 200th Birthday

2012-02-07T05:52:00.000-05:00

Today marks the two-hundredth birthday of Charles Dickens, the greatest Victorian novelist and one of his era's keenest social observers. While he is best known for his descriptions of 19th-century London, Dickens also wrote a famous travelogue of his 1842 trip to the United States, which included a stop in New York and a visit to the notorious Five Points.

You can read more about Dickens and the Five Points at this earlier blog post (as well as in Inside the Apple).

And if you can't get to Westminster Abbey today to visit the author's grave (where Prince Charles will be laying a wreath), you can visit the Morgan Library, where the "Charles Dickens at 200" exhibit is running for one more week.

Is it too early to talk about a ticker tape parade?

2012-02-05T22:31:00.001-05:00

Now that the Giants have edged the Patriots in the Super Bowl 21-17, it's time to start planning the ticker tape parade on lower Broadway (no matter what Chris Christie says).

Some of our previous thoughts about ticker tape parades:

A history of the ticker tape parade: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2008/10/ticker-tape-parade.html
For the Yankees: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/11/history-of-yankee-ticker-tape-parades.html
For the Apollo 11 astronauts: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/08/apollo-11-ticker-tape-parade.html

More information to follow -- and, you can read about the history of the ticker tape in depth in Inside the Apple.

UPDATE: It's not too early. The parade will be on Tuesday, February 7, at 11:00 a.m. Read the city's official press release at http://on.nyc.gov/w5s6mv.

The USS Monitor

2012-01-31T13:12:00.001-05:00

One of the biggest roles New York City has played in the history of American warfare is as home to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It just came across our desk that yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the launch of the USS Monitor from Brooklyn's famed shipyard. The first iron-clad warship to be built in New York during the Civil War, the Monitor was rushed into production in October 1861 and built in just 118 days.

The Monitor is most famous for the Battle of Hampton Roads, where she met the CSS Virginia (also known by its original name, the Merrimack). When Virginia seceded from the Union, the ships in the navy yard in Norfolk were scuttled to keep them from being seized by the Confederacy. Though the Merrimack was burned to the waterline, it was salvageable and the Confederates converted it into the iron-clad Virginia. When the North caught wind of this, the Monitor was hastily commissioned. Designed by John Ericsson, the bulk of the Monitor sat below the waterline to shield it from enemy fire. One of Ericsson's innovations was to have a fully armored gun turret atop the ship that could fire in every direction.

The Monitor and the Virginia met on March 9, 1862, during the Battle of Hampton Roads. The Confederates were attempting to destroy the Union blockade of Norfolk and Richmond. The previous day, the Virginia had inflicted serious damage on the Union navy, but when the Monitor arrived, she was able to hold the Virginia off and defend the Union ship Minnesota, which had run aground during the previous day's conflict. Though neither the Monitor nor the Virginia suffered serious damage, by the end of the second day's fighting, the Confederates decided to withdraw to Norfolk for repairs. The Virginia was scuttled just two months later when the Confederates abandoned Norfolk.

The Monitor didn't fare much better--on December 31, 1862, she ran into bad weather off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and sank. The wreck was discovered in 1973 and is now the centerpiece of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.

You can read more about efforts to preserve the decaying ship at http://www.marinersmuseum.org/uss-monitor-center/uss-monitor-center.

Though the Brooklyn Navy Yard is now closed (and its famed Admiral's Row on the verge of destruction), you can go down to Battery Park, where a handsome statue stands to John Ericsson. In his hand, he clutches a model of the Monitor.

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Read more about New York during the Civil War in Inside the Apple

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John Sloan's "McSorley's Bar"

2012-01-25T13:02:00.001-05:00

McSorley's Bar courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts

A century ago, John Sloan--a member of The Eight, perhaps New York's most famous group of early 20th-century artists--painted McSorley's Bar, the best-known of the many paintings and drawings he would create of New York's oldest bar. As we've noted in previous blog posts, McSorley's was founded in 1854. Not only had little changed when Sloan painted his interior in 1912, but little has changed today. The saloon continues to serve only one thing, its own ale, in two varieties: light and dark. The walls are still crammed with memorabilia stretching back to the saloon's founding.

John Sloan arrived in New York in 1904, and seems to have discovered McSorley's in 1912. After two visits in the space of a week, he began painting McSorley's Back Room, which Sloan reverently described as being "like a sacristy." Soon, Sloan returned to paint what would be his most notable depiction of the saloon, McSorley's Bar, which the artist selected as his entry in 1913 Armory Show. (By the way, the man behind the bar drawing a glass of beer is Bill McSorley, son of founder John McSorley.)

In 1928, Sloan returned to the saloon as the subject of a pair of paintings, McSorley's at Home, and McSorley's Cats. While the bar was famous in the 1920s for having well over a dozen cats in residence, the cat painting was actually based on a lithograph Sloan had made in 1913, which had already been widely reproduced. Sloan's final painting of the saloon was McSorley's Saturday Night, completed in 1930. It's interesting to note that these final paintings--which show a crowded, popular bar--were made during Prohibition, a law that McSorley's openly ignored.

As Grant Holcomb notes in his article, "John Sloan and 'McSorley's Wonderful Saloon'" (paywalled, I'm sorry to say):

In 1941 McSorley's requested an autographed picture of the artist as many visitors "learned of the old place through your famous paintings of it and always ask if we have a photograph of you."

If anyone is the neighborhood, please stop by and see if John Sloan's photo is still hanging on the wall.

Many things have remained unchanged about McSorley's in the last century, but one major change was the admission, in 1970, of women, who had been banned up to that point. Twenty-five years ago, in 1987, the bar finally added a women's restroom to accommodate female patrons.

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Discover more of New York's past in Inside the Apple

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Knickerbocker Hotel

2012-01-19T11:36:00.000-05:00

The other day, the New York Post reported that work is finally underway on the old Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street. According to the article, the Knickerbocker, which was turned into office space years ago, will once again become a luxury hotel.

The Knickerbocker was built by John Jacob Astor IV in 1906, and soon became a hot spot in the city. The bar, known as the Forty-Second Street Country Club, not only featured a free lunch, but also one of the most talked-about paintings in the city, Maxfield Parrish's Old King Cole. The massive mural depicts John Jacob Astor IV as Old King Cole. Taking a look at the painting, you can see that the king and his attendants are all making odd faces. According to lore, this is because Parrish was in a contest with other painters to see who could be the first to depict the act of someone passing gas. Evidently, Parrish won.

Also according to legend, the bartender at the Forty-Second Street Country Club, Martini di Arma di Taggia, invented the Martini at the Knickerbocker for John D. Rockefeller. When Rockefeller found the gin in the drink too harsh, he allegedly took an olive from a dish on the bar and plopped it in the drink. (In order for this story to be true, we must forget that the recipe for the martini prototype, the Martinez, was published in a bartender's guide twenty years before the hotel opened.)

The Knickerbocker opened just two years after the completion of the first line of the IRT subway, and as one of its amenities, there was a private entrance to the hotel from the 42nd Street subway station. This entrance is still there--if you go down to the shuttle stop--which is the only part of the Times Square station that is original--you'll see the sign for the Knickerbocker emblazoned above a door in the corner. You don't suppose they'll reopen this when the new hotel is finished, do you?

By the way, the Old King Cole mural left the Knickerbocker when the hotel was converted to offices, bouncing around New York until it found a home at the St. Regis, where it can be seen today.

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Read more about the birth of Times Square/42nd Street in

Inside the Apple

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Happy Birthday, Alexander Hamilton

2012-01-11T11:38:00.001-05:00

Today marks the birthday of Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury Secretary, and the man who hoped that his adopted hometown, New York, would be the capital of the United States.

Hamilton was born on January 11, 1757 (though some sources argue for 1755), on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. In 1773, Hamilton began attending classes at King's College in New York (which would change its name after the American Revolution to Columbia College). When the Revolution began two years later, Hamilton joined the New York militia and soon rose to become one of George Washington's most trusted aides.

During the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, Hamilton saw the value of moving the fledgling country's seat of government to New York, which was fast becoming its largest city and biggest port. As we write in Inside the Apple:

In May 1787, the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia, which...had long served as America’s political center. But congress itself had not been meeting in Philadelphia since June 20, 1783, when the State House had been surrounded by mutinous Pennsylvania soldiers looking for their Revolutionary War back pay. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government lacked the power to disburse the mob—and Pennsylvania’s executive committee refused to do so—forcing congress to flee to Princeton, New Jersey. Over the next two years, the seat of congress moved a few times until finding a home in New York City.

As part of the new Constitution, the states agreed to have a capital city that was not governed by a state, thus heading off another Pennsylvania debacle, and Alexander Hamilton’s preference was for that city to be his own. Pierre L’Enfant, who would achieve great fame as the master planner of Washington, D.C., remodeled the old British City Hall on Wall Street to serve not only as the meeting place for congress and the new chief executive but also continue to house New York City’s government office....

Washington initially made only three cabinet appointments: General Henry Knox became Secretary of War, Thomas Jefferson—still serving in France as America’s foreign minister—became Secretary of State, and Hamilton was appointed Secretary of the Treasury and de facto Prime Minister. When Jefferson returned to America in 1790, he hurried to New York to assume his post—and to see what damage of Hamilton’s he could undo. He vehemently opposed Hamilton’s ideas regarding a central United States bank and a federal assumption of the debts the states had incurred during the war. But, it seems, he opposed locating the nation’s capital in New York even more.

On June 20, 1790—exactly seven years after the Pennsylvania militia had forced the Continental Congress to flee Philadelphia—the capital was forced to move again, this time at a dinner party. At the dinner, which was hosted by Jefferson and James Madison at Jefferson’s home on Maiden Lane, the two Virginians told Hamilton that they wielded such sway in Congress that they could block Hamilton’s controversial banking measures. Conversely, they promised to ensure Hamilton’s bills went through as long as he didn’t oppose their quest to move the federal capital to the South. Hamilton, realizing that the needs of the Treasury Department outweighed his New York City pride, acquiesced. In August 1790, congress met for the last time on Wall Street.

What most people remember about Hamilton today is not how he lived but rather how he died, slain in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. If you want to pay your respects to this New York founding father, you can head downtown to Trinity Church, Wall Street, where he is buried, or head uptown to Harlem, where his home, Hamilton Grange, is open for visitation.

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Read more about Alexander Hamilton in
Inside the Apple

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