New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

NY Oysters: Urban History and The Environment

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I just finished reading Mark Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. It’s basically a short history of New York City told through the city’s natural environment and one of its most significant natural resources (possibly second only to its natural harbor) – the oyster.

I’ve also read, and can highly recommend, three of Kurlansky’s previous books.

Cod: A Biography of The Fish The Changed the World

The Basque History of the World

Salt A World History

All have implications for New York History – according to esteemed Iroquoisian Dean Snow, the word Iroquois is derived from a Basque word, a demonstration of their subtle impact in our region during their search for Cod off the Grand Banks, Cod they then salted to preserve. Throughout all three books Kurlansky includes historic recipes and other culinary history.

The Big Oyster is a must read for those interested in natural history, marine history, the Atlantic World, and food history as well as those with a taste for urban history and the New York City underworld of oyster cellars, cartmen, and seedy public spaces of all kinds.

Erik Baard of the blog Nature Calendar:Your Urban Wilderness Community posted an interesting interview with Kurlansky last week, and also points us to the upcoming Spring/Summer 2008 Oyster Gardening Event:

This program, in collaboration with NY/NJ Baykeeper and the New York Harbor School, seeks to increase stewardship among residents of the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary by working with volunteers from schools and community organizations in New York City to help prepare an oyster reef off the Tribeca waterfront. The project builds on the results of NY/NJ Baykeeper oyster reef restoration in New Jersey and research conducted by The River Project at its Pier 26 field station in New York.

A taste of the interview with Kurlansky:

Erik Baard: The Dutch and British settlers used that shell lime to construct stone homes. And I’m kind of curious about the many ways oysters were used. It’s a very versatile product, the meat, the shell being used for construction of buildings… How else were they used?

Mark Kurlansky: They were used in roads, you know, paving roads and in landfill. They were use to fertilize soil, to increase the lime content of the soil, which used to be called “sweetening the soil.” You could just plow oysters under. In fact, Europeans who visited were surprised to see that. The European way was always to grind it up and create this lime powder that you use as fertilizer, but New York farmers used to just take whole shells and put them in the earth.

Erik Baard: And this would lower the acidity?

Mark Kurlansky: Right. Okay.

Erik Baard: Now also, Pearl Street, you clarified some mythologies on that.

Mark Kurlansky: Yes, for some reason there’s a lot of mythologies about Pearl Street. I was just on Pearl Street last Saturday, I was thinking about this. Pearl Street was the waterfront in Dutch times, in the original Manhattan. It continues now several blocks further because of landfill. And there’s lots of stories about why it was called Pearl Street. But the real reason seems to be that on the waters edge there, the Indians had left large piles of shells.

Erik Baard: It wasn’t paved with the oyster shells?

Mark Kurlansky: No you often hear that but, one of the first things I noticed when I was researching this book was that the street got its name before it was paved

HMS Ontario: 1780 Intact British Warship Found

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Big news last week with the discovery of the “practically intact” HMS Ontario in nearly 500 feet waters of Lake Ontario. The Revolution War era 80-foot British sloop of war went down during gale in 1780 with a compliment of Canadian crew, British Soldiers, and possibly American POWs.

It’s considered one of the earliest discovered shipwrecks in America. New York is also home to the a 1758 Land Tortoise fully intact in Lake George’s south basin.

The Associated Press carried the story of the HMS Ontario – “the oldest shipwreck and the only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes.”

The finders of the wreck said they regard it as a war grave and have no plans to raise it or remove any of its artifacts. They said the ship is still considered the property of the British Admiralty.

The sloop was discovered resting partially on its side, with two masts extending more than 70 feet above the lake bottom…

The Ontario went down on Oct. 31, 1780, with a garrison of 60 British soldiers, a crew of about 40, mostly Canadians, and possibly about 30 American war prisoners.

The warship had been launched only five months earlier and was used to ferry troops and supplies along upstate New York’s frontier. Although it was the biggest British ship on the Great Lakes at the time, it never saw battle, Smith said.

After the ship disappeared, the British conducted a sweeping search but tried to keep the sinking secret from Gen. George Washington’s troops because of the blow to the British defenses.

Hatchway gratings, the binnacle, compasses and several hats and blankets drifted ashore the next day. A few days later the ship’s sails were found adrift in the lake. In 1781, six bodies from the Ontario were found near Wilson, N.Y. For the next two centuries, there were no other traces of the ship.


Disappearing NYC Inspired Blogs

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Disappearing New York City landmarks have inspired two blogs worthy of note.

Check out Jeremiah Moss’s “ongoing obituary for my dying city” Vanishing New York, subtitled “The Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in The Process of Going Extinct.”

A second blog, Brooks of Sheffield’s Lost City, declares itself “A running Jeremiad on the vestiges of Old New York as they are steamrolled under or threatened by the currently ruthless real estate market and the City Fathers’ disregard for Gotham’s historical and cultural fabric.”

Both are worth a read, and can be found at our blogroll at right.

If you have tips for the New York History Blog about relevant blogs, sites, events, or news, drop us a note via our e-mail address at right.

A Western New York Online Historical Resource

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Forwarded from Tim Stowell who posted it to the NYDUTCHE (Dutchess County NY) genealogical mailing list, is notice of this massive online archive from the Western New York Library Resources Council. It includes a tremendous collection of maps of the Holland Patent area which are held by the State University of New York at Fredonia.

According to Stowell, “These maps are mainly about New York state and western New York at that – from Herkimer west, but also contain early maps from Pennsylvania to Maine to Georgia and points in between.”

New Woodstock Museum Opens Today

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Built on the site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, the Museum at Bethel Woods includes a 6,278 square foot exhibit gallery space, a 132-seat theater, an events gallery, a museum shop, a 1,000-seat outdoor terrace stage and more.

The Poughkeepsie Journal has some of the best coverage of the new museum including photos and video. According to the paper:

The Museum at Bethel Woods opens Monday. On display are seven high-definition monitors, 15 interactive touch-screen computers, more than 300 objects and photographs and more than 2,000 pieces of music and film, as well as photographs, included in the films and interactive exhibits.

Alan Gerry, the cable television magnate who built Bethel Woods, sees the museum as he viewed a 15,000-seat concert pavilion he opened two years ago on the same property – as an economic engine to help a region of the state that was once flush with tourism.

“We think the addition of the museum to the performing arts center is going to be the catalyst to keep this place open 12 months a year,” Gerry said during opening remarks Wednesday. “It’s going to attract more tourism and that was the whole idea in the beginning, trying to do something to resurrect our community – to put it back on the map.”

The museum’s exhibits take visitors on a journey through the music of the 1960s, explain who played the Woodstock concert, who didn’t play and why. There is an actual school bus painted in psychedelic colors and art, with a film about cross-country journeys to the Woodstock concert projected onto the windshield. And there is a Volkswagen Bug.

On the web you can check out the Woodstock Project, an attempt at a complete Woodstock Discography. You can also take a look at someone’s photos of the original Woodstock here.

2009 Conference on New York State History

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The 29th Conference on New York State History will begin on Thursday, June 5th at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

Among the presenters will be the Brooklyn Historical Society’s Oral History folks who will discuss their current exhibit In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans. [Read more…] about 2009 Conference on New York State History

Skenandoah – Chief of the Oneida

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Mrs. Mecomber over at New York Traveler offers an interesting post on the Skenandoah Boulder, a monument to Oneida Chief Skenandoah.

Her site includes lots of photos of the memorial, some research she conducted and a link to her trip to Skenandoah’s grave site at Hamilton College cemetery in Clinton, Oneida County.

According to the Chiefs website:

In 1766, Samuel Kirkland, an American missionary, began living with the Oneida. He adopted many of their customs, but at the same time preached Christian ways. He was largely responsible for persuading the Oneida to abandon their neutral stance and support the Americans. Skenandoah, who was a close personal friend to Samuel Kirkland, began sending some warriors to help the Americans.

When George Washington’s men were starving at Valley Forge, Skenandoah sent baskets of corn. Skenandoah also informed residents of German Flats, New York, that Joseph Brant and the British Loyalists were going to raid their town. The settlers were able to save themselves, but lost all their property and possessions. In recognition of Skenandoah’s invaluable support, George Washington named the Shenandoah Valley after him. Following the American Revolution, Skenandoah remained the principal chief of the Oneida. In 1816, Skenandoah died. Per his request, he was buried next to Samuel Kirkland at Hamilton College cemetery in Clinton, New York.

Mrs. Mecomber reports that the boulder’s plaque says:

This marks the site of the last home of SKENANDOAH Chief of the Oneidas, “The White Man’s Friend.” Here he entertained Governor DeWitt Clinton 1810, and many other distinguished guests, and here he died in 1816 aged 110. He was carried on the shoulders of his faithful Indians to his burial in the cemetery of Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, and laid to rest beside his beloved friend and faithful teacher Rev. Samuel Kirkland.

“I am an aged hemlock; the winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches . I am dead at the top. The generation to which I belonged have run away and left me.” Skenandoah.

Erected 1912 by Skenandoah Chapter, N.S.D.A.R. Oneida, NY

1840s New York Smut Revisited

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Last Tuesday’s Village Voice included a great review (by Tom Robbins) of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Robbins writes:

Like [Al] Goldstein’s Screw, the publishers [of long-forgotten sex rags from the early 1840s] chose titles that got right to the point: The Whip, The Rake, The Libertine, The Flash, and others with even shorter publishing lives. One of these, The New York Sporting Whip, offered a kind of mission statement: “Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified,” the newspaper asserted, “and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally seeks the woman of pleasure.”

The so-called “father of the smutty papers” was William J. Snelling, a hard-drinking Bostoner who dropped out of West Point, hunted with the Dakota Indians, and helped found anti-slavery organizations. Inspired by a sex scandal involving a wealthy theater producer, Snelling launched The Sunday Flash in 1841 together with an eccentric minstrel singer named George Washington Dixon. They didn’t mince words: The theater producer in question, they wrote, was “a hoary leper,” a “Scoundrel whom even Texas vomited from her afflicted bowels.”

The papers were an immediate hit. Newsboys hawked them for six cents apiece at ferry landings and oyster bars. Paid circulation averaged 10,000 to 12,000 per issue. Among the surefire circulation-building devices were in-depth reviews of the city’s hundreds of brothels. “Princess Julia’s Palace of Love,” a story in the June 6, 1841, edition of a weekly called Dixon’s Polyanthos, depicted a popular brothel run by a fashionable madam named Julia Brown: “On ascending the second story, up the splendid steps, you fall in, with apartment No. 1. This room is occupied by Lady Ellen, and a glorious lady she is, with the dark flashing orbs, and full of feeling—so full of intellect that one might stand and gaze, and gaze . . .”

The full review is here.

2008 America’s Most Endangered Historic Places

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Two locations in New York State have been listed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual list of America’s Most Endangered Places. The non-profit membership organization hopes that saving the places where great moments from history – and the important moments of everyday life – took place, will help revitalize neighborhoods and communities, spark economic development, and promote environmental sustainability.

This years list includes eleven threatened one-of-a-kind historic treasures. Listing them as threatened raises awareness and helps rally resources to save them. The two New York locations on the list are: [Read more…] about 2008 America’s Most Endangered Historic Places

P.T. Barnum’s American Museum On The Web

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The New York City History blog The Bowery Boys has a great post on Barnum’s American Museum that includes a podcast, lots of images and a link to The City University of New York website devoted to Barnum’s, The Lost Museum. Both sites are worth checking out.

Barnum’s American Museum was located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York City from 1841 to it was destroyed by fire in 1865 [pdf of NY Times Article]. P.T. Barnum’s partner was John Scudder the original owner of the museum (then known as Scudder’s American Museum). Scudder recently found new fame as character inspiration for the HBO series Carnivale – a must see for those interested in carnies, the ballies, flying jennys, sugar shacks, the midway, and oh, the Great Depression.

According to wikipedia:

Barnum opened his museum on January 1, 1842 to create a place where families could go for wholesome, affordable entertainment but his success drew from the fact that he knew how to entice an audience. Its attractions made it a combination zoo, museum, lecture hall, wax museum, theater and freak show,that was, at the same time, a central site in the development of American popular culture. At its peak, the museum was open fifteen hours a day and had as much as 15,000 visitors a day.

On July 13th, 1865, the American Museum burned to the ground in one of the most spectacular fires New York has ever seen. Animals at the museum were seen jumping from the burning building, only to be shot by police officers. Barnum tried to open another museum soon after that, but that also burned down in a mysterious fire in 1868. It was after this time that Barnum moved onto politics and the circus industry.

While we’re talking Phineas Taylor Barnum, we should point readers to Robin Freeds’ “In Business for Myself: P.T. Barnum and the Management of Spectacle.”

Also, the Disability History Museum has the full text of Barnum’s 1860 catalog online.