New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Editorial Staff

Carl Akeley’s Taxidermy History in New York State

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Here is a recent news item regarding the re-installation of what is believed to be “probably the world’s largest mounted fish, maybe the largest piece of taxidermy in the world” – a 73-year-old, 32-foot, mounted whale shark caught off Fire Island in 1935 and believed to have weighed about 8 tons (16,000 pounds).

It has been freshly restored was unveiled at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum in Centerport, where it was damaged by water leakage that closed part of the museum in 1996. [Read more…] about Carl Akeley’s Taxidermy History in New York State

Executed Today Blog: New York’s Electric Chair

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One of the blogs I follow here at New York History is Executed Today, which gives a glimpse of those unfortunates who have found themselves at the wrong end of capital punishment. Unlike the American-only Execution Database of the Death Penalty Information Center, Executed Today travels the world far and wide and includes notable lynchings and other extra-legal violent deaths.

Wednesday’s post “1890: William Kemmler, only in America,” traces the emergence of the electric chair in New York by following the careers of those that have made state death their business. Men like Buffalo dentist (hence the chair and not the gurney) Dr. Alfred Southwick, who watched a drunk guy die after falling into an electrical generator and then worked diligently with New York Governor David B. Hill to make execution by electricity legal. The first execution, despite the War of Currents, was William Kemmler on August 6, 1890. He had been convicted of the hatchet murder of his common-law wife Tillie Ziegler. That’s a sketch of his death at left-above.

Some other recent fascinating posts at Executed Today have included:

1916: Sir Roger Casement
Executed by the British Government for his part in the Easter Rising.

1917: Frank Little of the IWW lynched
Wobbly labor organizer abducted from his hotel and hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte, Montana.

1963: 21 Iraqi Communists
Iraq’s new Ba’ath government executed 21 Shi’a soldiers for participating in a coup attempt.

Oneida Nation Will Remember Battle of Oriskany

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The Oneida Indian Nationhas announced that they will participate in an memorial ceremony to remember the 1777 Battle of Oriskany this evening:

231 years ago, the Oneida Indian Nation became the first ally of the American colonists in their fight for freedom, at the Battle of Oriskany. On Wednesday, August 6, at 7 pm, a solemn remembrance ceremony will be held at the battlefield to remember those who fought and those who died at what history has called the ”bloodiest battle of the American Revolution.” The Oneidas will be represented at this community-wide event by Brian Patterson, Bear Clan Representative for the Nation’s Council, and members of the Nation’s reenactment group, First Allies.

The Battle took place in what is now Oneida County on the south side of the Mohawk River. According to the great wiki:

During his march down the Mohawk Valley from Oswego to Albany, Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger besieged Fort Stanwix, then under the command of Colonel Peter Gansevoort. St. Leger’s force of British regulars of the Royal Artillery, 8th and 34th Regiments, loyalist King’s Royal Yorkers and natives of the Six Nations and Seven Nations of Canada laid siege to the fort.

Upon hearing reports of St. Leger’s advance, Brigadier General Nicholas Herkimer assembled the Tryon County militia at Fort Dayton to proceed to Gansevoort’s aid. On August 4, 1777, Herkimer, with 800 militiamen—mostly poorly trained German-American farmers—and 40 Oneida Indians, began the forty-mile (65 km) trek west from Fort Dayton to Fort Stanwix.

When St. Leger learned through Molly Brant that Herkimer and his relief expedition were on their way, he sent Joseph Brant, a Mohawk chief, with more than 400 natives, and Sir John Johnson, with the light infantry company of his King’s Royal Yorkers to intercept them. Their clash at Oriskany Creek was one of the key episodes of the Campaign of 1777.

On August 6, 1777, [the] American relief force from the Mohawk Valley under General Nicholas Herkimer, numbering around 800 men of the Tryon County militia, was approaching to raise the siege. British commander Barry St. Leger authorized an intercept force consisting of a Hanau Jager detachment, Sir John Johnson’s King’s Royal Regiment of New York, Native allies from the Six Nations, and Indian Department Rangers totaling at least 450 men.

The Loyalist and Native force ambushed Herkimer’s force in a small valley about six miles east of Fort Stanwix. During the battle, Herkimer was mortally wounded. The battle cost the Patriots approximately 450 casualties, while the Loyalists and Natives lost approximately 150 dead and wounded. It was a clear victory for the loyalists over the rebels.

But the Loyalist victory was tarnished when a sortie from Fort Stanwix sacked the Crown camp, spoiling morale among the Native Americans.

The Oriskany Battlefield is located on Route 69, two miles west of the Village of Oriskany.

State Library Thief Expected to Plead Guilty

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Capital News 9 is reporting that former state employee Daniel Lorello is expected to plead guilty today in Albany County Court. He was arrested for stealing hundreds of documents from the New York State Library and selling them on eBay.

Lorello was an archivist in the Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education. He was arrested in January after an investigation led by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo found about 200 state documents [sic: actually it was a lot more than that, read on] had been stolen for profit.

Among the items Lorello is accused of stealing is a letter written in 1823 by Vice President John Calhoun.

Officials said history buff Joseph Romito, a lawyer from Virginia, alerted state authorities after seeing some of the historic documents being sold on eBay.

A piece from earlier this year in the Albany Times Union fills-in more of the picture:

Lorello admitted selling “Davy Crockett’s Almanack” from 1835 for around $3,200 and an 1837 almanac of the frontier hero for $2,000, both to a Colorado collector late last year. Around the same time he sold a copy of “Poor Richard’s Almanac” for $1,001, authorities said.

He was thwarted after he tried to sell an 1823 letter from Vice President John C. Calhoun to a New York general on eBay, posting it as a historical document, authorities said.

Lorello, an expert on Civil War history, coordinated a three-year plan to renovate the storage of state historical records on the 11th floor of the State Library. His duties also included acquiring new artifacts and working with researchers, said State Education spokesman Alan Ray. Ray noted that Lorello is accused of stealing items from the State Library — not the State Archives, where he was employed. The State Archives and Library, along with the State Museum, are part of New York’s Office of Cultural Education. The library alone contains more than 20 million items.

Staffers have so far recovered 263 items, Ray said.

In his statement, Lorello estimated stealing 300 to 400 items in 2007 alone. He told the attorney general’s office he delivered the artifacts by way of FedEx, United Parcel Service and other shippers. Lorello accepted money orders and bank checks for the items, according to the court papers.

“I particularly liked items associated with the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Mexican War, Black Americana, WWI, anything related to the Roosevelts, Jewish items,” he told investigators.

UPDATE: From the Schenectady Gazette this afternoon:

In Albany County Court, 54-year-old Daniel Lorello of Rensselaer admitted stealing artifacts since 1997. He faces two to six years in prison at sentencing Oct. 1. He must also pay $73,000 in restitution to buyers who later returned stolen property and forfeit seized items and his private book collection.

A Week of New York Disasters

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This past week marks the anniversaries of quite a series of transportation disasters in New York History. Three of them have reached the media: the 1893 sinking of the Rachel in Lake George; the 1945 crash of a B-25 Mitchell bomber into the Empire State Building; and the crash of American Airlines Flight 1 into New York City’s Jamaica Bay in 1962.

The Schenectady Gazette has the story of the Rachel, which sank on Lake George killing ten (coincidently, the week also marks the anniversary of another Lake George sinking, that of the John Jay on July 30, 1856). On the night of August 3, 1893 the steamer Rachel was chartered by twenty nine guests of the Fourteen Mile Island Hotel to take them to a dance at the Hundred Island House.

The usual captain fell ill and went home early leaving the boat in the hands of a less experienced pilot. Under little or no moon light as the pilot steered unknowingly out of the channel and struck an old dock south of the hotel tearing a large hole in the side of the boat below the water line. Some of the passengers were caught on the shade deck and died quickly as the boat listed and almost immediately sank in 18 feet of water. “The shrieking, struggling passengers battled for life in the darkness,” one newspaper reported. With only her smokestack left above water, a number of men from shore had rowed boats from the two nearby hotels to the scene to rescue the survivors. A young man named Benedict, an excellent swimmer, dove for his sister Bertha but couldn’t find her. Nineteen-year-old Frank C. Mitchell, of Burlington, drowned while trying to save his mother who also drowned. Eight other women also drowned.

The 1962 American Airlines Flight 1 into Jamaica Bay was featured on last night episode of “Mad Men.” The series follows the lives of early 1960s Madison Avenue ad executives. If you haven’t seen it, you should, it’s an interesting portrayal of 1950s / 1960s consumerism – a time when people still smoked on TV. The storyline involves the ad guys dropping the small New York based regional airline Mohawk Airlines in an attempt to lure American Airlines in the aftermath of the crash. Mohawk had it’s own aviation disaster in 1969 when its Flight 411, a twin prop-jet commuter plane (a Fairchild-Hiller 227, a.k.a. Fokker F-27) flying from La Guardia Airport to Glens Falls in Warren County crashes at Lake George killing all 14 onboard.

The New York Times “City Room” has blogged the Flight 1 story extensively:

The real-life crash, which took place only five years after Pan Am became the first carrier to fly the 707, claimed the largest number of lives of any commercial aviation accident in the United States at that time [95]. (In the worst-ever plane crash on American soil, an American Airlines DC-10 crashed shortly after takeoff at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on May 25, 1979, killing 273.)

The third New York disaster in the media this week comes from National Public Radio (NPR) which reported last week on the crash of a B-25 Mitchell bomber into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building (it swerved to just miss the Chrysler Building). The plane had been trying to make LaGuardia Airport in a very heavy fog. According to the blog History’s Mysteries:

Upon impact, the plane’s jet fuel exploded, filling the interior of the building with flames all the way down to the 75th floor and sending flames out of the hole the plane had ripped open in the building’s side. One engine from the plane went straight through the building and landed in a penthouse apartment across the street. Other plane parts ended up embedded in and on top of nearby buildings. The other engine snapped an elevator cable while at least one woman was riding in the elevator car. The emergency auto brake saved the woman from crashing to the bottom, but the engine fell down the shaft and landed on top of it. Quick-thinking rescuers pulled the woman from the elevator, saving her life.

NPR’s report (they also featured the Empire State building in their “Present at The Creation” series) includes audio of the actual crash and interviews with some of the survivors.

What a week – I’ve blogged before about disasters in the Adirondacks here.

New Book On The Woolworth Building

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The New York Times is reporting on a new book by Gail Fenske, a professor of architecture at Roger Williams University: The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York.

On the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a tiny button inside the White House, lighting up the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. It was “the tallest structure in the world, with the one exception of the Eiffel Tower in Paris,” The New York Times reported, and it was a marvel of architecture and engineering.

Of course, the Woolworth Building has been surpassed in height — by the Chrysler Building in 1930 and by the Empire State Building in 1931 — and it has at times seemed to recede into the fabric of Lower Manhattan. The building’s owners at one point considered converting the building into luxury apartments, but now the structure is being refurbished as top-end offices.

The book places the Woolworth Building in the context of its time and place: the booming commercial culture of early 20th century New York; the often unsettling experience of modernization; advances in technology and communications; and a new phenomenon of “urban spectatorship” that made skyscrapers sources of public wonder and admiration.

Many innovations set the Woolworth Building apart. It contained a shopping arcade, health club, barber shop, restaurant, social club and even an observatory. Its use of technology — including an innovative water supply system, a electrical generating plan, high-speed electric elevators providing both local and express service and what Professor Fenske calls “the first prominent use of architectural floodlighting in the world” — also set it apart. So did the construction process, run by the builder Louis Horowitz of the Thompson-Starrett Company, who managed to avoid labor conflict, rationalize the building process and set a record for speed — paving the way for the famously rapid completion of the Empire State Building nearly 20 years later.

The building has survived the Woolworth Corporation itself. The company announced in 1997 that it would close its remaining discount stores. The company was renamed the Venator Group, began focusing on athletic wear, and since 2001 has done business under the Foot Locker name. Although there are no longer Woolworth’s stores in the United States, the Woolworths Group, a former subsidiary of the American company, continues to operate hundreds of retail stores in Britain.

FDR Library ‘literally falling apart’

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From the New York Times, via the History News Network:

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, N.Y., the nation’s first presidential library, is literally falling apart. The roof leaks, the basement floods, asbestos is flaking from old steam pipes, an ancient electrical system could send the whole place up in smoke. This sorry situation is an insult to the person the library and museum honor: the founder of the New Deal, the greatest investment in our nation’s modern development….

While the library sits high above the river, its basement lies below the water table. Sump pumps installed in 1939 are supposed to keep it dry, but don’t. Storms have caused flooding in the basement where collections are stored and in restrooms and public areas. What’s worse, storm and sewer drainage run together, which means they mingle if there’s a backup in the basement.

The electrical system, which was also installed in 1939, has outlived the suppliers of replacement parts. Archivists turn the lights on and off using the original circuit breakers. And with the electrical vault in the flood-prone basement, the library’s director, Cynthia Koch, fears that a short in the system could set the place on fire and destroy the entire collection.

Fort Ticonderoga Facing Financial Ruin

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Fort Ticonderoga President Peter S. Paine Jr. has suggested in a memo forwarded to the Plattsburgh Press Republican that the historic site (a veteran of the French and Indian and American Revolutionary wars as well as the War of 1812) has seven options to avoid permanent closure, none of them good.

Paine wrote in the memo that “the fort is running through its available endowment funds to pay the Mars Education Center bills, and, in the absence of a major infusion of funds, the fort will be essentially broke by the end of 2008.”


His options include applying for new short-term loans (perhaps from the Essex County Industrial Development Agency), banking on a new capital campaign to raise $3 million to $5 million (Paine had said the Fort needed 2.5 million), asking the state for a bailout or to take over ownership of the fort, selling some of the fort’s property or collections (it holds paintings worth millions, including Thomas Cole’s 1831 “Ruins of Fort Ticonderoga,” but its ownership is in dispute) or closing for an indefinite period until the finances are sorted out.

Paine’s proposals come after a year of chaos at the fort began when Deborah Mars, a Ticonderoga native married to the billionaire co-owner of the Mars candy company Forrest Mars Jr., bailed on their long-time support for the fort just before completion of the new $23 million Deborah Clarke Mars Education Center. The Mars paid for nearly all of the new building’s construction but left before it was finished leaving Fort Ti about a million dollars in debt. When the building bearing their name opened this month, they didn’t show. Mr. Mars said disagreements with fort’s Executive Director Nicholas Westbrook were the reason why. Paine replaced Deborah Mars as the fort’s president.

A newly released study of Revolution War and War of 1812 sites by the National Park Service [pdf] points to the problem of private ownership of some America’s most important heritage sites:

Nonprofit organizations dedicated to preserving, maintaining, and interpreting their historic properties own all or portions of 100 Principal Sites [identified by the report]. Ownership of four Principal Sites is unknown currently. Private owners still control most of the Principal Sites, especially the battlefields and associated properties made up of large land areas. Privately owned sites or portions of sites are without any known form of enforceable legal protection. Many private owners maintain and care for their historic properties, but without legally mandated protection, the properties could be damaged or destroyed at any time.

Fort Ticonderoga had already been identified in the report as a Priority I (“these sites need immediate preservation or may be lost by 2017”) facing a “medium” level of threat. The threat is real for the already economically depressed Adirondack region of New York State, and the locals are restless.

A Short History of Fort Carillon / Fort Ticonderoga

The fort located at the north-south choke-point between Lake George and Lake Champlain was ordered built by French Governor-General Vaudreuil (the French Governor of Canada) as the southernmost fort of the French Empire in the New World as a bulwark in anticipation of attacks on Fort St. Frederic and the French settlements at today’s Crown Point, New York (currently being excavated) and Chimney Point, Vermont. Named Fort Carillon, it was built by soldiers and settlers in 1755-56. The following year French General Montcalm used Carillon as a base to attack British Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George. In 1758, British General Abercromby led an overwhelming British and Colonial Army in a attack on the fort that ended disastrously. American colonial forces under Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen took the poorly manned fort in the opening engagements of the American Revolution without a fight in 1775. It was retaken by Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne in 1777. Native Americans from the Algonquin, French Mohawk, Huron, and Nippissings are among those associated with the history of the fort.

It is considered one of America’s oldest heritage tourism sites with tourists arriving in numbers in the 1830s (by way of comparison, the Hasbrouck House, George Washington’s headquarters at Newburgh, NY, became the first historic house museum in the United States in 1850). In 1783, George Washington visited the Fort with New York’s Governor Clinton. Following the Revolution New York State granted the Fort and its surrounding grounds to Columbia and Union Colleges. In 1791 future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both visited the fort.

William Ferris Pell purchased 546 acres containing the ruined fort in 1820, but it wasn’t opened to the public until 1908. The non-profit Fort Ticonderoga Association took control in the 1930s and members of the Pell family formally loaned many of the paintings and artifacts to the fort in the 1940s. Mount Independence, the high ground on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain where many colonial troops were encamped during occupation of the fort is under the care of the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. The ruins at nearby Crown Point are a New York State Historic Site.

This post also appeared at Adirondack Almanack, the premiere blog of the culture, politics, history, and environment of the Adirondacks.

Historic Central Park Concert Numbers Questioned

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The historical memory of recent Central Park concerts has been called into question in a recent New York Times article. Apparently the great concerts of central park weren’t so great after all, at least in terms of attendence numbers.

Here is an official history of attendance at great public gatherings in Central Park: James Taylor played in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow in the summer of 1979, and officials announced that 250,000 people came. A year later, Elton John performed on the Great Lawn, and the authorities said he drew 300,000 people. Then Simon and Garfunkel performed in September 1981, and city officials and organizers reported that 400,000 people had packed into the park. Ten years later, it was announced that Paul Simon drew 600,000. The biggest concert of all, it seems, was by Garth Brooks, on Aug. 7, 1997, at the North Meadow, with a reported attendance of 750,000 people.

This month’s Bon Jovi concert was actually counted and seems to have put serious doubt in these numbers.

Bon Jovi played on the Great Lawn, and the city’s official head count came to 48,538 people — a number tallied by parks workers with clickers at the entryways to the lawn. This total includes only the people admitted to the 13-acre oval that makes up the Great Lawn, and not any of those gathered in the walkways and swaths of ground to the east and west of the lawn.

Still, the Bon Jovi crowd was a fraction of the colossal throngs that are part of the city’s collective mythic memory. If fewer than 50,000 people were able to fill the oval, how could a half million more people get anywhere near the Paul Simon concert held in the same space?

Apparently, they didn’t. Former city parks administrator Doug Blonsky explained the previous numbers like this: “You would get in a room with the producer, with a police official, and a person from parks, and someone would say, ‘What does it look like to you?’ The producer would say, ‘I need it to be higher than the last one.’ That’s the kind of science that went into it.”

The record corrected?

Women’s Rights History Trail Bill In Congress

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The Hudson Valley Press Online is reporting that a bill is making it’s way through Congress to establish an Women’s Rights History Trail linking New York State sites, expand the National Register of Historic Places’ online database, and “Require the Department of Interior to establish a partnership-based network to offer financial and technical assistance for the development of educational programs focused on national women’s rights history.”

New York Senator Hillary Clinton will testify at a hearing in on July 30, 2008 in support of the National Women’s Rights History Project Act (S.1816), now before the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks.

The full story is here.