Manhattan

Oyster Slurpers: A Tale of Two Rivers

January 19, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp 1 Comment

For thousands of years the Thames provided London’s inhabitants with a plentiful supply and variety of fish. Until the 1820s locally caught fish was the city’s staple diet. Subsequent pollution of the river drove many professional fishermen and their families into financial ruin because of the collapse of fish populations.

Up until the twentieth century New York Harbor oysters reigned as the quintessential New York food long before pizza, pretzels, bagels, or hot dogs took their place. The metropolis once was a Big Oyster. There too, reckless management of the marine environment led to the obliteration of a huge natural resource. [Read more…] about Oyster Slurpers: A Tale of Two Rivers

Fulton’s Steamboat, The Black Ball Line & The Erie Canal

January 17, 2022 by James S. Kaplan 3 Comments

For thousands of years prior to the early 1800s maritime transportation was dependent on sailing ships. In the first few decades of the 19th century however, entrepreneurs in New York helped revolutionize the industry so that one hundred years later sailing ships were an anachronism that hardly existed, except for show.

In the latter part of the 1700s the development of the Boulton & Watt steam engine in England made it theoretically possible to power a boat. Before 1800 a number of inventors, including New Yorkers such as Nicholas Roosevelt, John Fitch, Robert R. Livingston, John Stevens III and others, experimented with boats that used such steam engines. Before Robert Fulton made his first run in the North River steamboat (later renamed Clermont) in 1807 more than a dozen steamboats had been constructed in the United States with varying degrees of success. There were difficulties in making such craft commercially viable. [Read more…] about Fulton’s Steamboat, The Black Ball Line & The Erie Canal

The Spirit of the Times: A 19th Century Chronicle of American Sports

January 14, 2022 by Bill Orzell Leave a Comment

In the early 1800s it was unusual for Americans to be interested in sporting matters on their own shores. News from Europe was the only sporting news of merit, and publishing an American sporting journal was considered a risky use of capital.

The first attempt along these lines may have been in 1829 Baltimore, where John S. Skinner published a monthly magazine which focused on race horse pedigrees called The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. Another early attempt was published in New York by the recognized writer and horseman Cadwallader R. Colden, whose organ was called The New-York Sporting Magazine and Annals of the American and English Turf, first published in 1833.

Among the most notable of the sporting press arrived in 1831, when William T. Porter and James Haw published the first issue of The Spirit of the Times, focusing on horse literature and sporting subjects. They had chosen the name for their broadsheet from a quotation in Shakespeare’s King John, “The spirit of the times shall teach me speed.” [Read more…] about The Spirit of the Times: A 19th Century Chronicle of American Sports

Barber-Surgeons, Bloodletting & The Leeches of Manhattan

January 9, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp 5 Comments

December 12th, 1799, was a freezing cold day in Virginia, but the weather conditions did not stop President George Washington riding out on horseback for the daily inspection of his Mount Vernon plantation. On return, he developed a fever and respiratory distress.

As there were no means to diagnose or treat a bacterial infection, doctors believed that bloodletting would improve a patient’s condition. In addition to the application of crude purgatives and emetics, over half of Washington’s blood was drained in just a few hours. Today, it is widely held that the President died from aggressive bloodletting which resulted in severely low blood pressure and shock.

Recurrent yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia and George Washington’s medical treatment contributed to a fierce politico-medical fall out in which the issue of bloodletting took center stage.

Harriet Jacobs in New York State

January 4, 2022 by Paula Tarnapol Whitacre Leave a Comment

“A handsome book of 306 pages, just issued, which is receiving highly commendatory notices from the press.”

So announced the abolitionist Liberator about the 1861 publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a book written by Harriet Jacobs about her life in slavery and seeking freedom. Forgotten for many decades, it is one of the only known books written by an enslaved Black woman. Most of the book takes place in the coastal town of Edenton, North Carolina, where Jacobs was born in 1815.

New York State also plays a large, if lesser-known role in the life of Harriet Jacobs, who escaped to the city of New York in 1842 and lived there at two separate times. She also lived in Rochester and in Cornwall, Orange County, where she spent years writing the powerful book that is read and cherished today. [Read more…] about Harriet Jacobs in New York State

A History of Wall Street: Tontine Coffee House & The Buttonwood Agreement

January 3, 2022 by James S. Kaplan Leave a Comment

Many New Yorkers, and many Americans generally, consider Wall Street – to be the world’s most famous and important street. Many tourists are surprised to find that Wall Street, once described as “a short street with the river at one end and a Church at the other,” is only seven blocks long.

Originally named for a palisade wall built by the Dutch in the 1640s (and torn down by the English in 1699), the street was an important east-west thoroughfare until the American Revolution. At that time the entire city of New York, home to about 15,000 people, was south of City Hall Park.

One of the current ironies is that Wall Street today has returned to its residential roots. The financial institutions which became famous there now are located in midtown Manhattan or elsewhere. [Read more…] about A History of Wall Street: Tontine Coffee House & The Buttonwood Agreement

Gymnastics History: The Legacy of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s Turnerism

December 27, 2021 by Jaap Harskamp 4 Comments

By the mid-nineteenth century European gymnastics was an established system that had evolved through a century of innovation and adaptation. Originating in the Enlightenment with the
experiments of educational reformers intent on reviving a Greek ideal which the Roman poet Juvenal had summarized as mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), gymnastics achieved widespread recognition after Friedrich Ludwig Jahn initiated the Turnverein (gymnastics club) movement.

The inventor of apparatus such as the balance beam, parallel bars, and vaulting horse, he used the discipline of organized exercise to inspire young gymnasts with a sense of national (Prussian) duty and solidarity. Jahn turned gymnastics into an agency of German patriotism.

The ambiguity of his message: enjoyment of competition and companionship versus militant nationalism, brought about Jahn’s contrasting legacies in Europe and the United States. [Read more…] about Gymnastics History: The Legacy of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s Turnerism

Saratoga’s ‘Fanny the Flower Girl,’ Gotham Book Mart Founder

December 14, 2021 by Jaap Harskamp 1 Comment

Frances Steloff was the daughter of a Russian immigrant and itinerant rabbi who, in an age of rising anti-Semitism, was one of the early Jewish settlers in Saratoga Springs. The large family lived in dire poverty.

After the death of her mother, Frances was “informally” adopted by a wealthy Boston couple. Having run away from her foster parents, she made her way to New York, worked in a Brooklyn department store selling corsets, before establishing a tiny bookshop in Midtown Manhattan. On her death, after eighty-one years in the business, she was revered as one of America’s most influential booksellers and bibliophiles. Founder of the Gotham Book Mart, she turned her establishment into a center for avant-garde literature. [Read more…] about Saratoga’s ‘Fanny the Flower Girl,’ Gotham Book Mart Founder

New Book Sheds Light on Jazz Age Disappearance of a NY Judge

December 6, 2021 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.

The new book Finding Judge Crater: A Life and Phenomenal Disappearance in Jazz Age New York (Syracuse University Press, 2021) by Stephen J. Riegel is a fascinating chronicle of the life, times, and notorious disappearance of Judge Joseph F. Crater in Jazz Age Manhattan. [Read more…] about New Book Sheds Light on Jazz Age Disappearance of a NY Judge

NYC Politico Jimmy McManus and Tammany History (Series Conclusion)

November 11, 2021 by James S. Kaplan Leave a Comment

Jimmy McManus was interested in promoting the political history of Hell’s Kitchen and Tammany Hall. He occasionally would co-lead walking tours about the political history of Hell’s Kitchen for the 92nd Street Y or Culture Now.

One of McManus’s earlier activities in this regard was as a member and later President of the National Democratic Club of New York, which dated from 1834 and was credited with swinging the 1844 Presidential election to Democratic candidate James K. Polk, when as the Empire Club it helped carry New York State to James K. Polk over his opponent Henry Clay. [Read more…] about NYC Politico Jimmy McManus and Tammany History (Series Conclusion)