History, Natural History & the Arts
Reconstructing the biography of a building is a way of obtaining information about the activities and beliefs of previous generations of inhabitants. The approach differs from archaeological research.
In a “building biography,” the structure is seen as the frame around which a family, group or institution is investigated in order to gain an insight into socio-economic or cultural conditions of a certain period. [Read more…] about Bill the Butcher: A Nativist ‘Know Nothing’ Movement Martyr
Nestled within New York City’s sprawling Chinatown is a little, one block street named Mosco. It is the last remnant of Cross Street (later Park Street) which originally ran from Lafayette Street on the west to Mott Street on the east in the first half of the 19th century.
The telescoping of Cross Street into Park Street and finally, into Mosco Street would normally be considered a sad diminution of a once proud thoroughfare were it not for the little street that remains in its wake. [Read more…] about Chinatown’s Mosco Street: A Last Remnant of the Five Points
The following essay, “‘Crazy Uncle Gail’s’ Idea and What Came of It,” by Eliza Archard Conner, appeared in the June 10, 1893 Northern Star of Lismore, New South Wales, Australia. It was transcribed by Hudson River Maritime Museum volunteer George A. Thompson and annotated by John Warren.
About forty years ago Gail Borden, a civil engineer of New England ancestry, conceived the idea that milk could be boiled down in a vacuum till from the liquid condition it became substantially solid, and in that state, preserved by means of another Yankee invention — the sealed tin can — it could be kept for any length of time. [Read more…] about The Borden Company’s Milk Condensing Plant in 1893
Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion Books, 2023) by Lottie Whalen, is an eye-opening new history of the women in New York City.
This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture. [Read more…] about Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern
This week’s article was submitted during the summer by David Fiske who passed away on October 28 after a battle with cancer. We publish this story posthumously in his memory.
Rebecca Jones was born in Schoharie County, NY in the 1820s. Her family moved to Ballston Spa, in Saratoga County, where Becky attended a girl’s school. By 1850, she was living in the city of New York and working as a domestic servant for the family of Andrew Gordon Hammersley, a lawyer and banker. [Read more…] about Obstinate Becky Jones: At Home in Ludlow Jail
It was 1924. America was in the midst of a roaring economic boom, and so was R.H. Macy & Co.
It had gone public in 1922 and, flush with capital, had bought out competitors, opened a network of regional stores, and transformed its flagship New York City emporium. [Read more…] about Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: Some History
The fabled 1621 “First Thanksgiving” celebrated in elementary school plays across the country was reported on by Edward Winslow in Mourt’s Relation (A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, 1622) and William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation. [Read more…] about Abraham Lincoln’s First Thanksgivings
The following text is from the 1819 letters to his father by Henry Meigs (1782-1861), who served as Congressman from New York from 1819 to 1821, describing his life in then rural Greenwich Village. It was transcribed by Hudson River Maritime Museum volunteer George A. Thompson and lightly edited for clarity and annotated by John Warren.
1819: New York, February 6th, 1819
Dear father. Since I last wrote you, Julia and I have decided on placing our tent in the Country [at what is now Greenwich Village] as we call it for the ensuing summer. Where we can live much more economically and deliciously. [Read more…] about 1819 Letters From Greenwich Village
Nicholas L. Syrett’s new biography, The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (The New Press, 2023), tells the story of one of the most important female doctors of the nineteenth century, a tale with unmistakable parallels today.
“Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control, delivered children, and performed abortions for decades in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. “Restellism” becoming a term detractors used to indict her. [Read more…] about The Trials of Madame Restell: A Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime
An 1829 farmhouse at 1213 Clove Road, Sunnyside, one of the few surviving structures on Staten Island associated with early Vanderbilt family history, could be surrounded by a new housing development.
Constructed at a time when Staten Island was rapidly evolving from an isolated rural area to a community populated by new development the John King Vanderbilt House is a survivor of this transitional period. [Read more…] about 1829 Vanderbilt House on Staten Island Faces Development Pressure