Elevators That Force You To Take the Stairs

A feature in last week's New York Magazine called Step It Up by Alex Pasternack is filled with interesting trivia about our city's 54,806 elevators, the new health initiative to convince people to take the stairs, the theory behind the architectural trick that forces you to do just that (as seen in the Cooper Union's new building), and this byte to chew on:  "...Stair-climbing is a more efficient form of exercise than walking: Two additional minutes of stair-climbing per day (approximately three floors) can burn more than enough calories to eliminate the average adult’s annual weight gain."

Today in Big Apple History

Today, in 1916, a transplanted New Yorker became America's first billionaire.

Who was he?

Hint:  He is the only individual in the world who amassed a personal fortune (in today's dollars) that exceeded $300 billion.

Overheard on the Subway

After several minutes of sitting on a train that wasn't moving, we were told that it was being taken out of service.  It wasn't until we disembarked that most of us noticed the station was filling with smoke from an electrical fire beneath the front car.  We were hot, we were sweating, we were breathing through our shirts.  As we waited for another train, we were treated to this exchange from a mother and daughter who had apparently notified the station agents about the smoke.

MOTHER:  Two-twenty-five.  And this is what we get.  Nobody's doing anything. 

DAUGHTER:  Just sittin' there.  Don't even see the smoke.

MOTHER:  All these people working here and we got to be the ones to tell them the station's full of smoke.

DAUGHTER:  They woulda done nothin'.

MOTHER:  And nobody knows what this shit is.  Doesn't smell like smoke.

DAUGHTER:  Maybe it's not.  Did you see The Happening?

MOTHER:  Oh, Kim, shut your mouth!  Please!  Don't tell us that shit.

DAUGHTER:  I'm just sayin', if you see people breathing it in and then killing each other, you better run.

MOTHER:  STOP THAT!

DAUGTHER:  I'm serious!

MOTHER:  SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today in Big Apple History

What major event in American history happened two hundred twenty years ago today, when New York was the nation's capital and the federal government met at Wall Street and Broad?

What famous New York graduate school was founded uptown in 1912?  (Hint: they are in the news every April.)

Answers after the jump.

NYC Decade by Decade--1860-1869

During this decade, the city exploded in three days of rioting.  Still considered the greatest urban insurrection in U.S. history, the Draft Riots took place in July  of 1863 and paralyzed the city.  119 deaths have been verified, but historians generally believe that as many as 1000 perished during the chaotic days of rampage and during the aftermath when order was restored by the military.  (Five regiments of the Union Army were rushed to the city from the battlefield at Gettysburg.)

ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:

1860--The population of Manhattan now exceeds 800,000.

1860--Henry Ward Beecher holds his most famous slave auction at Plymouth Church when he brings a nine-year-old named Pinky in front of his congregation and implores them to buy her freedom.  He then places a ring on her finger and "weds thee to freedom."

1861--The Civil War breaks out.  With so much of the city's economy tied to southern exports, there is talk of the city's secession and the creation of Tri-Insula. 

1861--Brooks Brothers receives their first contract for 12,000 Union uniforms.

1862--The Monitor, the Union's first ironclad, designed by John Ericsson, is launched.  Parts of the ship are built in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and in Manhattan where Thirteenth Street meets the Hudson River.

1865--Abraham Lincoln is assassinated within a week of the end of the Civil War.  He is honored in New York with a massive funeral procession up Broadway.

1865--A municipal fire-fighting system replaces the gangs of volunteer companies.

1866--Henry Bergh establishes the ASPCA.

1866--The rest of Manhattan is incorporated into the grid.  (The 1811 Plan only reached 155th Street.)

1867--Prospect Park in Brooklyn opens.

1867--The stock ticker is patented.  Brokerage houses proliferate.

1868--Andrew Green proposes consolidation for the first time.  Thirty years later, five separate cities will become the five boroughs of Greater New York.

1868--The first elevated railroad is erected in the city, running up Greenwich from the Battery to Cortlandt Street.  (You might as well walk.)

1869--Fisk and Gould corner the gold market.  For the first time in American history, the federal government, (i.e., President Grant) intervenes on a large scale to bring stability to the marketplace. 

1869--Mary Mason Jones and her sister move from Wavery Place to a lot WAY uptown--the northeast corner of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth.  Other wealthy citizens will follow north, "keeping up with the Joneses."

Sources:  Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; Manhattan in Maps by Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; New York:  An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.

The Obscene Elephant at the United Nations

The United Nations is back in session and hosting world leaders as they do every September.  We thought we would post our byte on one of the U.N.'s largest (and best concealed) pieces of art. 

For more on the history and architecture of the site, scroll down to the last four videos on our tour:  Crossing Manhattan at 46th Street.

Next Year's Emmy? I Can Give You the Exact Block!

Last night, the Emmy for Best Comedy went to 30 Rock, a show set in the eponymous building between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth between Fifth and Sixth.  The Emmy for Best Drama went to Mad Men, a show set in a fictional office building right around the corner between Forty-Seventh and Forty-Eighth between Madison and Park.

While watching the Emmy's last night, a few of us thought it was high time to write a show set on the block right in the middle.  This would be the block between Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth and Madison and Fifth.

I took this photo last December from the Palace Hotel (where Gossip Girl frequently shoots).  The skyscraper in the middle is Tower 49 (where our brilliant show will be set).  The building in the foreground on the left, by the way, is where DDB is headquartered (the ad agency formerly called DDB Needham whose history partially inspired Mad Men).  On the right is the office building for New York Magazine, which will hopefully write several articles about our show.  (They tend to write quite a bit about Mad Men, Gossip Girl and 30 Rock.)

Life is too short.

A personal tidbyte from Cayce:

R.I.P. Mary Travers

A great loss to American music lovers.

The first live concert I ever had tickets to, was Peter, Paul & Mary. When the day finally arrived, my mom wouldn't let me go because I had a fever. The first songs I ever played on the guitar: P, P & M songs. I bumped into Mary (30 years ago!) in Greenwich Village, outside the now defunct Bottom Line, she was as charming & gracious as you would expect. I will miss her.

NYC Decade by Decade--1850-1859...Central Park, Macy's and McSorley's

The landscape was literally transformed in the 1850's.  The state legislature authorized the city to accumulate hundreds of acres north of Fifty-ninth Street.  By the end of the decade, Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward Plan was chosen as the official design for Central Park.

ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:

1851--The New York Times begins publishing as The New York Daily Times with an anti-immigrant platform.

1852--Boss Tweed enters politics as an alderman in the Seventh Ward.

1853--The World's Fair opens in the Crystal Palace beside the Reservoir in what is now Bryant Park.  Otis will demonstrate his elevator safety brake here.  The Crystal Palace, a glass and iron structure, will burn down in 1858. 

1854--McSorley's opens on East Seventh Street.

1855--The theater known as Castle Garden becomes an immigrant depot through which eight million immigrants will pass over the next few decades. 

1855--The first "model tenement" opens at Elizabeth and Mott. 

1856--George Washington by Henry Kirke Brown is erected at Union Square.  It is Manhattan's oldest outdoor bronze and the second equestrian statue carved in the United States.  

1857--Another Financial Panic.

1857--The E.V. Haughwout Building, one of the city's most important landmarks, is built on Broadway and Broome.  The first building in the world to have an Otis safety passenger elevator, it's known today as the Parthenon of Cast Iron Architecture.

1858--R.H. Macy opens a dry goods store on Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street.

1858--Theodore Roosevelt, the only U.S. president to be born in New York City...is born in New York City.

1859--The Cooper Institute opens.  See Little Byte below.

 

Sources:  Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; The Works by Kate Ascher; New York:  An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.

Five Other September Eleventh Anniversaries

September 11th, 1609--Henry Hudson sails into New York Harbor...400 years ago.

September 11th, 1776--Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge meet with General Howe on Staten Island for a British-American peace conference two weeks after the Battle of Long Island.  The conference takes about three hours.  Howe does most of the talking, but the American delegates make it known that the colonies will not retract their recently signed Declaration of Independence.  Since there is no room for negotiation, the conference ends and the war resumes.

September 11th, 1786--The Annapolis Convention begins in Maryland.  New York is one of only five colonies to send delegates (Egbert Benson and Alexander Hamilton).  The aim of the meeting is to address defects of the federal government as defined by the Articles of Confederation.  Its report will lead to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the Constitution.

September 11th, 1789--Alexander Hamilton is appointed first Secretary of the Treasury

September 11th, 1850--Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale, gives her first American concert at Castle Garden at the Battery.  Promoted by P.T. Barnum, Lind is perhaps the country's first marketed celebrity.

Remembering September Eleventh

NYC Decade by Decade--1840-1849

What was the most significant event of this decade?

From an 1842 diary entry by Philip Hone:  "Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton Water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impede our progress through the streets...It is astonishing how popular the introduction of water is among all classes of our citizens, and how cheerfully they acquiesce in the enormous expense which will burden them and their posterity with taxes to the last generation.  Water!  Water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city..."

Two years after the Fire of 1835 (and after decades of disease resulting from polluted water), New York began the massive task of bringing fresh water to the city from Westchester County.  The Croton River, more than thirty miles north, was dammed near the Hudson and then diverted through an elaborate series of aqueducts, tunnels and reservoirs.  From The Works:  "Entirely gravity-fed, the system could provide 30 million gallons a day--enough to meet the growing city's need through the turn of the century."

ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:

1841--St. John's (now Fordham) opens in the Bronx.

1842--John Jacob Astor's library opens.  (This collection, opening the same year as the Croton Reservoir, will become part of the New York Public Library whose building in the next century will replace the original Reservoir structure at 42nd and Fifth.) 

1844--Matthew Brady opens his gallery at Broadway and Fulton.

1844--William Cullen Bryant publishes an editorial entitled A New Public Park, launching the movement to create what will become Central Park.

1845--Edgar Allen Poe publishes The Raven in January and becomes an overnight sensation.

1846--The third Trinity Church building--the one that still stands today--is consecrated on May 1st.

1846--The Potato Famine in Ireland will send waves of Irish immigrants to the city.

1846--Twelve blocks up Broadway, at Chambers, A.T. Stewart opens America's first department store and revolutionizes retail.  (In today's dollars, Stewart is ranked as the twenty-fourth wealthiest individual in history.)  See the Little Byte below for more information.

1847--Madison Square is first laid out as a park.

1848--The political uprisings in Germany during this year would send waves of German immigrants to the city.

1849--The Pfizer Pharmaceuticals plant opens in Williamsburg.

1849--Plymouth Church opens in Brooklyn Heights where Henry Ward Beecher will become America's most famous preacher.

1849--James Bogardus designs New York's first complete cast-iron facade.  Cast iron architecture will rise and reign in the next decade. 

1849--More than twenty are killed and more than one hundred are wounded in the Astor Place Riots.  See the Little Byte below for more information.

Sources:  Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; Manhattan in Maps by Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; The Works by Kate Ascher; New York:  An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.

The New York City 400

The Museum of the City of New York just opened its newest exhibit in commemoration of Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage.

Inspired by the 400 years that have passed since the Half Moon entered the harbor as well as the old term for the city's creme de la creme--the number of people that could fit comfortably in Caroline Astor's ball room, the curators have compiled "the first-ever list of New York City's ultimate movers and shakers since the City's founding—from politics, the arts, business, sports, science, and entertainment."

See who made the cut.

Little Bytes Recommends...an Afternoon (Maybe Even an Eternity) at Green-Wood Cemetery

As reported yesterday, Green-Wood Cemetery opened in 1838.  Inspired by Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Green-Wood was landscaped by David Bates Douglass as one the country's first rural cemeteries.  Initially, people still preferred to bury their dead in churchyards and on family land, but in 1845 the widow of DeWitt Clinton, one of the most important New Yorkers in our history who died in 1828, had his remains transferred from a graveyard near Albany to Green-Wood.  For the rest of the nineteenth century, many of the most famous New Yorkers chose Green-Wood for their final resting place and visitors from across the country made it one of the most visited attractions in the United States.

Green-Wood was also an inspiration for Central Park and it probably wasn't coincidental that the winning proposal put forth by Olmsted and Vaux was called the Greensward Plan, a name that would surely evoke pleasant associations.  Green-Wood is 478 acres of rolling hills and valleys, thousands of trees, four lakes, and a myriad of avenues and pathways with names like Glade, Birch, Sassafras, Marigold, Vernal, Jonquil, and Garland. 

Besides the landscaping, the cemetery is home to some of the finest sculpture and mausoleums in America.  Sometimes called the Pere Lachaise of Brooklyn, there is stunning artistry almost everywhere you turn.

Green-Wood is huge (more than half the size of Central Park) with so many twists and turns and ups and downs, and almost 600,000 buried, you can't expect to see it all.  A friend and I were lucky to have had a security guard pick us up while we were walking along Sylvan Lake and took us for a tour in his air-conditioned car, showing us graves and remarkable sculptures we never would have reached on foot.  

On Wednesdays, at 1:00, the cemetery offers a tram tour for $15, which can be booked online here.  I'm actually planning to take that tour next Wednesday, 09/09/09.  Join me!

What family tomb is the largest private mausoleum at Green-Wood?  ANSWER AFTER THE JUMP...

NYC Decade by Decade: 1830-1839

Following the opening of the Erie Canal, the city became very wealthy...or some people in the city did.  (From this decade onwards, New York would always have the largest gap between its wealthiest and its poorest citizens.) Not one but three upper class enclaves were built in the first three years of the 1830's--the Row on Washington Square, La Grange Terrace on Lafayette, and Gramercy Park.

The decade would also see the first crime of the century and the birth of the tabloid, a financial crisis, and the Great Fire of 1835, one of the worst disasters ever to befall New York.

ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:

1831--NYU is founded under the name the University of the City of New York.

1831--The Northern Dispensary (still standing near Sheridan Square) is built north of the city in Greenwich Village.

1832--The New York and Harlem Railroad build the city's first line, which runs on Bowery and Fourth between Prince and Fourteenth Streets.

1833--The New York Sun is founded.

1835--James Gordon Bennett establishes The New York Herald and revolutionizes journalism with the first tabloid.  A penny paper, The New York Herald seems to cater to what the people want to read and its circulation will explode with its sensational coverage of the murder of Helen Jewett (1836). 

1834--The village of Brooklyn becomes the city of Brooklyn.

1835--Executions are no longer public.  The first private execution takes place with a dozen witnesses inside Bellvue.

1835--The tradition of the Christmas tree (brought over by Germans living in Brooklyn) first appears in a piece of American fiction by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

1835--The Great Fire of 1835 destroys 674 buildings, everything to the southast of Broad and Wall.  The glow of the fire can be seen as far away as Philadelphia. 

1837--The Panic of 1837.  New York loses sixty million dollars.

1837--The New York and Harlem Railroad reaches Harlem.

1838--Green-Wood Cemetery is established.

Sources:  Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; Manhattan in Maps by Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; New York:  An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.

Macy's and a Second Unclaimed Corner

You might remember this byte and the story about the corner Macy's refused to buy:

A fun story, isn't story?  Last month, however, while walking on Seventh Avenue, I was reminded that there are actually TWO corners on that block that don't belong to Macy's--the one on 35th Street.

This building was built in the 1800's.  Why didn't Macy's buy it when it was purchasing the rest of the block?  I'm sad to say I don't know, but will keep researching and update you when I do.  Or if anyone of you knows or is the mood to solve a mystery.....

Kalliopi Lemos at the Olympic Tower

During the tour season, one of my favorite places to sit and read near Fifth is in the atrium of the Olympic Tower.

It's a peaceful spot with the hushed sounds of a waterfall and features a coffee bar, accessible bathrooms and one of the city's most powerful hand dryers.  

Original plaster castings of marbles from the Parthenon also line the walls, and there's a small gallery for Hellenic art in the basement, a lounge to watch the World Cup every four years, and other temporary art displays.

This installation is entitled Perpetual Transitions and opened in July.  It was created by Kalliopi Lemos, a Greek artist living and working in London, who began making these beautiful boats in reed and plaster earlier in the decade.