Glancing Backward - August 1908 and 1958

by Beth Flory

August 1908

Of great local interest were the preparations for the State Fair in
mid-September in Syracuse. New large and lavish permanent structures
were among $2,000,000 worth of improvements. “Stars of the Turf” from
“every stable of prominence” were expected on the trotting course.
Alfred G. Vanderbilt was slated to come with his four-in-hand coach.
The hope was to outshine the fairgrounds in other states.

The grape harvest was a good one and berries were selling for 18
cents a pound. From M.H. Tenney’s four rows came 380 quarts of
raspberries.

A “clairvoyant doctor” was coming to town for two days. If you did
not have a satisfactory physician, you were urged to come early for an
instant diagnosis, free advice and cure. His medical credentials: he
was “the 7th son of a 7th son and born with a double caul.”

The town Poormaster was authorized to take a woman and her son to
the county farm in Bath where the son was rejected and “brought back to
remain a county charge until further notice.”

August 1958

Mildew and black rot were attacking an otherwise good quality grape
harvest. Fifteen tons of watermelons were dumped in Dansville when a
truck swerved and upset coming down Wayland Hill.

Just south of the rock cut on Route 21 a speeding car plunged 60
feet down the steep and wooded bank, instantly killing the three
Rochester-area occupants. The crash was heard by cottagers from
Walton, Grangers and Coye Points who hurried to the scene to offer
assistance. Music could be heard from far below the road; the car’s
radio had survived undamaged.

What would be the last of the Nundawaga Society pageants was partly
rained out for the first time in five years of performances and
rescheduled for the following weekend. While rehearsing by lantern
light one night (and battling mosquitos), the actors looked up to
witness the silent flight of Sputnik. A new era had begun.

Fred and Billy

1830 New York, no one-horse town

Fred Niblo, son of a Civil War veteran, put his horses up on the screen. On the eve of New Year’s Eve in 1925 the fifty-year-old director’s silent adaptation of a biblical novel by another Civil War veteran, Lew Wallace, premiered at New York’s George M. Cohan Theatre, on Broadway and 43rd Street. He may have gotten a good deal on the theater, by the way; he had been Cohan’s brother-in-law, until his wife died. The spectacular set piece of all versions of “Ben Hur” has been the chariot race. Audiences watched enraptured as Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman guided their plunging vehicles at breakneck speed around Rome’s Circus Maximus. The sound of thundering hoof beats, of course were only in the viewer’s mind.

Which may have been the case ninety-five years previously with another Niblo. According to Charles H. Haswell, writing as The Octogenarian back in 1830, “In July a trotting course was opened on the ground in front of the "Kensington House" of William Niblo, on the east side of the Old Boston Road at Seventieth Street, which he had opened several years before.”

We met William “Billy” Niblo on our last visit to Manhattan, when the entrepreneur re-opened his renovated Niblo’s Garden at Broadway and Prince Street, in today’s SoHo neighborhood. If Haswell was correct Niblo’s flier on the ponies was a rip-roaring non-success. First; none of the readily-available sources make mention of the project, and there’s only a brief mention in one, of a Kensington House, described as being on the East River. No connection is made there with Niblo. Even the location is suspect. In 1830 Prince Street was considered as being practically in the country. Seventieth Street, had it existed, would have been way “out of town”. Even if the transcription misread Seventeenth Street, as I suspect, there’s no further mention of a trotting track, run by anyone, anywhere near the spot. Haswell never mentions it again in the thirty further years he kept an account of the city’s history. So we can probably score one equine success and one failure for the Niblos.

And, in case you’re wondering, no, they were not related. Fred Niblo’s real name was Frederick Liedtke. It’s most likely he took his stage name from the producer. History can be messy.

The 1830s’ sporting crowd would have to travel over to Long Island to watch racing steeds or the newly-popular trotters. But there was plenty else to do in Manhattan, especially if the theater was your pleasure. And here Haswell is a fine guide. Even though James Stuart returns from his travels at the beginning of June he mentions attending the theater only once. But diarist and former mayor Philip Hone can help us fill in some of the blanks.

About the time Stuart was heading for South Carolina lower Manhattan’s Chatham Garden Theatre, which had failed last year, then been briefly reborn as the American Opera House (for a limited run of three months), opened once again, this time as Blanchard's Amphitheatre. “Under this style very good equestrian performances, with rope-dancing and the like, were offered.” So, if you couldn’t bet on the horses in Manhattan you could at least watch them prance around a ring.

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Bury Them Not

New York City Continues Transforming in 1830

By David Minor

Apart from the stone water tower being erected on 13th Street now in 1830, few major construction projects were under way but, as usual, the layout of lower Manhattan was undergoing constant change. Settlement of the affairs of the late (29 years ago) property owner Captain Robert Richard Randall finally drew to a close when the U. S. Supreme Court cleared his land title to the area around today’s Washington Square. The original will, by the way, had been drawn up by no other than Alexander Hamilton. The freed funds will be used to purchase land on Staten Island for construction of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a retirement home for, “aged, decrepit, and worn-out sailors”, and to provide for its maintenance.

As for the Square itself, it had at one time been a potter’s field, where the city’s poor were buried in unmarked graves. Which made it a handy repository for criminals hanged on a nearby gibbet. But in New York, real estate rules and over the last four years the poor were reburied elsewhere and expensive homes constructed around the perimeter. New graveyards, especially for the poor will, of necessity have to be located away from lower Manhattan as the Common Council this year bans them from all land south of Canal Street. Meanwhile street construction goes on between 13th Street and Canal Street. Eleventh Street is laid out except for the two-block section between Broadway and the Bowery, construction there blocked by the apple orchard of council member Henry Brevoort, a buddy of Washington Irving’s. The second incarnation of Grace Church will rise on the site in 1843. Four blocks to the south, on lower Third Avenue one of the city’s many public markets will be laid out this year and named for the previous owner of the land, the late former governor and U. S. vice-president Daniel D. Tompkins. More changes to the city’s infrastructure are in the works this year as incorporation papers are filed for the Manhattan Gas Light Company, which will soon be providing gas street lights for the new neighborhoods.

Part of the impetus for the move of old money further uptown is the deteriorating condition of the area known as Five Points on the east side of the city a few short blocks northeast of City Hall. Here, where Park and Baxter streets intersect and Anthony Street thrusts its way into the crossing, buildings erected on formerly filled-in swamp land, the old Collect Pond, have begun to collapse in on themselves, driving out all but the most destitute. And there are over 13,000 of these unfortunates, existing in streets of flophouses and taverns, precursor of the tenements of the Lower East Side and the Bowery of future decades. Letters are beginning to appear in the New York Sun, complaining that these slums are not being demolished.

Across town (in today’s Triangle Below Canal Street, or Tribeca neighborhood), sits St. John’s Park, one of the city’s more exclusive neighborhoods. Now, in 1830, the residents have erected an iron replacement for the wooden fence that had surrounded the park they all face. As in a latter-day Gramercy Park, the gates are kept locked, the property owners all having their own keys. After the U. S. Civil War our budding millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt will knock down the fence, level the park’s greenery and convert the area into a stable for new toys, the iron steeds of his New York Central & Hudson River Rail Road.

© 2006 David Minor/Eagles Byte

Watkins Glen Pier

Early Snowbirds

New York’s weather reverts to normal in January, 1830

By David Minor

So far, as the residents of the New York City area welcomed in the year 1830, there would have been few complaints about the winter. James Stuart noted that the streets of Manhattan were so dry it was necessary to sprinkle them to keep the dust down. But, downstate or up, New Yorkers are suspicious of nice winter weather anytime before mid-April. They were not to be disappointed.

Exactly one month after Christmas the mercury headed for the cellar. Water transportation was halted between the city and both Philadelphia and Albany. According to Stuart, “. . . all hands were set to work in order to have the ice-houses filled with that article which is so indispensable in a warm climate. The ice-house attached to the boarding-house where we were living contains thirty tons of ice; and, as no ice is admitted into an ice-house here which is not perfectly clean and clear, so that a lump of it may be put into a glass of water or a bottle of wine, as much care is necessary in selecting the ice perfectly pure from the ponds, as in packing it in the ice-house.” He mentions that his Hoboken neighbors the Stevenses keep large supplies of ice both here in New Jersey and at Albany, for use on their steamboats during the warmer weather. Northeastern forests near the big cities are being depleted of wood, much of it for the bark, which is ground up by tanneries to produce a tannin-rich liquid for soaking animal hides, softening them to create pliable leather. The spent liquid is then put to use polluting nearby rivers and streams. Man-made recycling at its worst; at least until new technologies come along.

Unlike most residents of the area Mr. and Mrs Stuart have no ties binding them to the colder climates. He writes, ”On the 29th January, I set out on a long projected expedition to Charlestown, New Orleans, the Mississippi and Ohio.” Left to our own devices after the snowbirds have flown, we’ll hang around the mouth of the Hudson and see what’s going on during the rest of 1830. The Stuarts will return at the beginning of summer.

Meanwhile, the city’s search for decent water is ongoing. In April work is completed on a 27-foot high stone tower on 13th Street, built to contain Philadelphia engineer Thomas Howe’s iron tank, designed to hold 230,000 gallons of water. A system of twelve-inch iron pipes will be laid to carry the water under Broadway and the Bowery to supply three and a half miles of streets with water, capable of being pumped sixty feet above street level.

Two types of power are at work in this project - water and political. The Manhattan Company, a brainchild of Aaron Burr in the late 1790s, had been formed to bring Bronx River water downtown. But Burr had a more important goal in mind, slipping language into the enabling legislation to turn the entity into a private bank. Now, in the fall of 1830, State attorney general Greene C. Bronson will sue to have the Manhattan Company's charter dissolved, arguing that the company not only has no right to be in the banking business, but also has not fulfilled its main obligation to deliver drinking water. Company lawyers will keep this one tied up in the courts for the next two years. Proponents of alcoholic abstinence will leap into the fray, citing the lack of good drinking water as the excuse for intemperance. The waters will remain muddied (you should pardon the expression . . . or not) for some time to come.

© 2006 David Minor/Eagles Byte

"No" From Ontario County to 1793 Proposal

From John Robortella

Canandaigua, N.Y.

In 2001, the citizens of the Town of Farmington in Ontario County (N.Y.) spoke out to oppose a truck stop development in their town. The expression of their views was another in a long line of examples on how individuals have shaped Ontario County through the years.

Perhaps the first collective voice of the people was that heard in Ontario County in 1793. If the settlers back them had remained silent, today we might be living in the State of Genesee instead of the State of New York.

While looking up information on the Phelps and Gorham Purchase and the survey of the Pre-emption Line, I came across a more-than-200-year-old proposal to create a new state here in western New York. It was the idea of some apparently less-than-solid citizens—land speculators who wanted several counties, including Ontario, to break away from New York and form a new state that would encompass all of central and western New York.

The people of Ontario County would have none of it.

This started when soldiers from Sullivan's expedition returned home and told of the beauty and bounty of the Genesee Country and the Finger Lakes region. Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend, envisioned her New Jerusalem here. Prospective settlers imagined better lives for themselves and their families. Investors saw dollar signs.

Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham realized that land prices would drop if they competed and acted separately in their bids to acquire the rights to western New York. Instead, they joined forces and, with other investors who wanted "in" on the deal, purchased the rights from Massachusetts to six million acres, subject to clearing the Indian title to the land.

On July 8, 1788, Phelps reached an agreement with the Indians at Buffalo Creek for 2,600,000 acres, not the entire conveyance from Massachusetts, but all that the Indians would let him have. He hired Col. Hugh Maxwell, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, to survey the Pre-emption Line (the eastern boundary of the purchase) and divide the entire purchase into six-mile-square towns.

But while Phelps and Gorham were taking the legal steps to purchase their lands and prepare the property for sale to settlers, "covetous eyes," as historian and author Charles F. Milliken describes, had been cast upon the same land. Another group of speculators/conspirators, according to Milliken, also wanted the land. This group, led by John Livingston, Major Peter Schuyler, Dr. Caleb Benton and Ezekial Gilbert, organized the New York Genesee Land Company. Since they couldn't buy land from the Indians (state law prohibited that) or from Massachusetts (Phelps and Gorham were making those arrangements) they skirted the law by acquiring a 999-year lease from the Six Nations of the Iroquois in 1787.

James Parker, acting on behalf of Jemima Wilkinson and the Universal Friends, was one of their first customers. He "leased" (and probably didn't know that it was a lease) a large tract overlooking Seneca Lake, never imaging that the New York State governor would declare the "leases" null and void. The governor informed the Indians that they had been duped by men who had no legal right to negotiate real estate deals with them. The Friend and her followers at City Hill suffered heavy financial losses by having dealt with the "lessees," as the speculators were called. She and her group immediately moved west to the present-day town of Jerusalem in Yates County. Others lost their money and their land, as well.

The state's renunciation of their "leases" incensed the lessees. Two of them, John Livingston and Caleb Benton, circulated petitions urging the people of Otsego, Tioga, Herkimer and Ontario counties to "join a movement for the organization of a new state embracing the whole of central and western New York."

If the lessees were incensed, as Millken describes, then the people of Ontario County, which at the time comprised everything west of the Pre-emption Line, were furious. They wanted no part of the lessees' scheme.

A meeting of the judges, assistant judges and large majority of the justices of the peace, together with the residents of Ontario County, was called at Canandaigua on November 8, 1793. The Honorable Timothy Hosmer, first judge of the county, was elected chairman, and Nathaniel Gorham Jr., clerk.

In a five-paragraph resolution, the people strongly expressed their resentment with Livingston's and Benton's proposal to form a new state, saying that it disturbed their peace and harmony. They urged New York to take "most vigorous" methods to stop the plan.

For its time, the resolution adopted that day in Canandaigua was strong and harsh. Public opinion was unmistakably clear:

RESOLVED, That the inhabitants of the county of Ontario, sensible of many advantages that they have derived from their connection with one of the most respectable States of the Union, and desirous of the continuation of the same advantages, highly resent the ill-timed and improper attempt made by the characters above alluded to (referring to Livingston and Benton—JR) to disturb their peace and harmony, that they conceive their measure as pregnant with danger, and such as, if carried into effect, would introduce into our infant county all the complicated evils which anarchy and confusion can create.

RESOLVED, That this meeting highly resent the threats made use of by the said persons, and conceive that, under the protection of the State of New York, they have nothing to fear from any banditti they can collect for the purpose of forcing them into measures which they heartily disapprove of.

RESOLVED, That this meeting, fully impressed with the impossibility of the proposed state's defraying expenses of the most moderate government that can be devised, and aware of the impolicy as well as injustice of raising by enormous taxes on uncultivated lands such a revenue, or devoting to those expenses property purchased under the faith of the State of New York and Massachusetts, and of drawing into our flourishing county people that such iniquitous measures would attract; recommend to the persons above alluded to, to persuade some more laudable mode of gratifying their ambition, and to desist from proceedings altogether hostile to our interest and welfare.

RESOLVED, Also, that it is the opinion of this meeting that the proposed meeting at Geneva ought not to be attended, as it was called by strangers to the county, and that we will consider as inimical to the county such persons belonging to it, who, at said meeting, shall consent to any of the proposals before reprobated.

RESOLVED, That this meeting, expect, after having made this public declaration of their situation, that those intrusted with the administration of the State, will take the most vigorous measures to suppress any of the attempts made to destroy the peace and quiet of this county.

The people of Ontario County had spoken. Citizen activism in Ontario County was underway.

New Year's Eve Bash

No Times Square, But Gotham Welcomes 1830 in its own way.

by David Minor

It had been mid-summer back in 1828 when Scottish traveler James Stuart first arrived in New York City. His timing was such that he had missed the city’s New Year’s Day celebrations by a good eight months. Perhaps fortunately for him. He might have been callithumped. There are a number of possible origins of the obscure word ‘Callithumpian’. Whatever the source, it’s described in “Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words” as, “a noisy demonstration”. The whole thing was a British import, as described by historian Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas. “By beating on tin pans, blowing horns, groaning and shouting catcalls, the music was performed as a gesture of deliberate mockery . . . the callithumpians . . . directed their 'rough music' against those who seemed to be claiming too much dignity or abusing their power."

On January 1, 1828, the entire cacophonous shivaree got out of hand. It had begun up in the theater district along the Bowery, when a contingent of middle-class revelers, armed with all sorts of noisemakers and well fortified with liquid refreshments started tossing limes (don’t ask me where they found limes in early Manhattan during the winter) through the windows of one of the local bars. Then they made their boisterous way over to the City Hotel on Broadway (where the Stuarts would put up in the coming summer). After roughing up attendees at a fancy ball there, they turned next to a nearby African-American church, bursting through the street door, smashing windows, breaking up the pews, and physically assaulting the congregation who were gathered to see in the new year. Heading down Broadway they looted shops all the way down to the Battery Park, where they tore down its iron fence and tossed assorted missiles through windows surrounding the park where the city’s elite had their town houses. Then they presumably scattered, stumbling off to nearby gutters to lie down and make their resolutions.

We don’t hear of repeat performances in the immediately following years. Certainly now, in 1830, the Stuarts apparently enjoyed a much more sedate celebration, since he makes no mention of any merrymaking at all. The sun rose on a quite mellow January 1st; the Stuart party caught a steamboat out of Hoboken and headed off to Brooklyn Heights to watch the various sailing packet boats headed for and returning from Europe. Stuart reports, “I never witnessed a more animating scene. On our return through New York we were surprised to observe the streets more crowded than at any former period . . . it is usual for people of all descriptions to call at each other's houses, were it but for a moment, on the first day of the year. Cold meat, cake, confectionaries, and wines, are laid out upon a table, that all who call may partake; and it seems the general understanding, that such a one's friends as do not call upon him on the first day of the year are not very anxious to continue his acquaintance.”

As we’ve seen repeatedly 19th century Americans really liked to pack away the vittles. Local bakers outdid themselves creating the ‘confectionaries’ Stuart mentions. During the holidays they would each advertise their grandest creations and visitors come around to gawk at the grandest, before they’re cut. One of the bakers would seem to have been going for a Guinness record, had such things existed then. His cake weighed in at 1500 pounds.

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte