Dyin' Before the Good Stuff--Part Six...An Ellis Island Experience

Last week we featured ten people who "died before the good stuff."  They were all famous.  Christina Jansen is less well-known unless you've been on one of my tours of Ellis Island.  I've been torturing my tourists with this tale of grief for YEARS.

I first read about Christina in Tales of Gaslight New York, a compilation of news features from a century ago.  This excerpt comes from Romances of New Americans written by Eleanor Hoyt.  It first appeared in Everybody's Magazine in May, 1903.  I love the story, sad though it is, and the old-fashioned journalism and phrasing (e.g., "proved it by oracular demonstration").

When the lover does not meet the penniless sweetheart who has come across the seas to him, when he cannot be found, or, being found, desclaims all resonsibility, what can the S.I. (Special Inquiry) Board do?

If the gril has other friends who will provide for her, or if she be strong, able to work, willing to stay in a strange land alone and earn her living, she may be admitted.  If not, she must go back, shamed, heartsick, wretched.

There was one lovers' tangle which some of the employees on the Island still remember with a twinge in the region of the heart.

A Swedish girl came over to be married to a sweetheart who had come on before to prepare a home for her.  She had waited, but now the home was ready.  Olaf had sent for her, would meet her in New York, and they would go home together--to the farm.  Yes, he had a farm--in three years--all his own.  It was wonderful--but then, Olaf was so remarkable--and in America one has the chance.

All the steerage heard the story, and listened patiently.  She was so pretty, so happy.  Even the immigrant women whose views on domesticity had lost their rose color hadn't the heart to air those views before Christina.  They compared matrimonial notes and shook their heads behind her back, but they accepted Olaf's halo without question. 

And when the Island was reached, every one kept an eye out for Olaf.  He would be the handsomest man one had ever seen.  There couldn't be the slightest difficulty about recognizing him.  Christina had assured them of that.

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Five

THE WORKERS BENEATH AND BESIDE THE HUDSON

9--Clifford Holland was a pioneer in the construction of underwater tunnels.  In 1919, he became Chief Engineer for the first vehicular tunnel beneath the Hudson River, connecting New Jersey and Manhattan.  Holland was responsible for the two-tube design and oversaw the construction from 1920-1927, but died ONE DAY before the New Jersey and New York teams met in the middle.  In his honor, the tunnel (at one point called Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel Project) was given his name.

(Bonus Trivia:  Ole Singstad who designed the revolutionary ventilation system and eventually took over as Chief Engineer for the Holland Tunnel would go on to design the rest of Manhattan's underwater tunnels--the Lincoln, the Queens-Midtown and the Brooklyn-Battery.)

10--Herman Melville also worked on the Hudson--at the Gansevoort Docks, as a customs inspector.  After the publication of Bartleby the Scrivener and Moby Dick and after the possible suicide of one of his sons, he took this bureaucratic post and worked there for almost twenty years.  He retired in 1886 and died in 1891.  Unlike, say, Fitz Greene Halleck who died, convinced his poetry would last through the ages (he has a statue on the Mall in Central Park along with major figures like Shakespeare, Columbus, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott), Melville died thinking his contributions to literature would fade with him.  (Only one newspaper carried an obituary--and a brief one at that--for one of America's most significant authors.)  There was some attention paid to his work upon his death, but there would be no major revival until a generation later, in the 1920's, when many of his works were revisited and reissued and one of his novellas, Billy Budd, was published for the first time.  It would prove extraordinarily successful, adapted into an opera and a film, and Moby Dick, of course, has come to be considered one of novels in American literature.

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Four

THE THEATER

6--Jonathan Larson wrote for the theater for fourteen years with nods of encouragement here and there but with no breakthrough until a forty thousand dollar grant that helped fund a workshop of his musical, Rent.  On the eve of the show's first preview, after much encouragement from friends and an off-the-record compliment from a reporter at the New York Times, he died at home of an aortic aneurism at the age of 35.  The show would go on to win every major award that year including several Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It would transfer to Broadway in April, 1996 and play until September, 2008, becoming the seventh longest-running show in Broadway history.  It would be performed in theaters around the world and influence countless other composers including this year's Tony winner, Lin Manuel Miranda.  It would also retain its power to provoke--just this February, the decision to ban the musical by a principal of a high school in Orange County sparked outrage.  The production was reinstated.

7--Gower Champion, the director of Bye, Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly, died hours before his final show, 42nd Street, officially opened.  The shrewd and frequently outrageous producer, David Merrick, the "Abominable Showman," waited until the end of several curtain calls before shocking the cast and audience with the news.  That stunt ensured the musical landed on the front page of The New York Times multiple times that week.  42nd Street would go on to play 3486 performances.

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Three

THE ARCHITECTS

5--Ray Hood did get to see his skyscrapers finished (including the American Radiator Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and the Daily News Building) but he died before the completion (and before being recognized as the lead planner) of New York's most important business and entertainment complex.  According to Daniel Okrent's history, Great Fortune, Hood's "obituaries made surprisingly little mention of his role in Rockefeller Center, presumably because, at the time, the specific contributions of the various architects were not clear.  Hood never once attempted to claim credit due him for the design triumph that was Rockefeller Center."  

6--A major critic of Hood's (and almost every other architect) was Frank Lloyd Wright who still eulogized Hood respectfully:  "Architecture needs about ten first class funerals of the higher-up more than it needs his."  Unlike Hood whose reputation was quiet, Wright loudly proclaimed his own genius, perhaps rightfully so as he gave us some of the greatest structures in the U.S.  Wright designed few buildings in New York City, but one of his masterpieces and one of his final achievements stands boldly on Upper Fifth Avenue:  the Guggenheim.  Wright died in April, 1959, and his inverted ziggurat opened that October.  (Solomon Guggenheim for that matter also never saw the museum that bears his name, the temple for nonobjective art he dreamt about and financed--he died a decade before it opened.)

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Two

THE SCULPTORS

3--Karl Bitter, an Austrian who came to America in 1889, quickly became one of the country's preeminent sculptors.  He's the man who gave us the elaborate and intricate bronze doors at Trinity Church as well as one of the city's most popular gathering spaces--the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel.  Bitter was not yet finished with that fountain in 1915 when he and his wife attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. Trying to cross the street afterwards, Bitter was hit by an automobile and dragged thirty feet in front of a horrified crowd.  He died at the hospital and work on the Pulitzer Fountain fell to his assistant.

4--George Grey Barnard, described as a "titanic genius" and the "American Michelangelo," realized while living in Paris that he could make more money selling medieval sculptures and fragments he picked up from the French countryside than he could by selling his own work.  Accused of "stealing the soul of France" in 1913, Barnard was able to clear French customs with hundreds of items before a new law was passed to stop him.  He displayed much of the work in his studio in Upper Manhattan and in 1926 sold it all to Rockefeller for $600,000.  The acquisition became part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a permanent facility was built to house the medieval collection a few hundred yards from Barnard's studio.  Sadly, Barnard died on April 24th, 1938, 16 days before the Cloisters opened to the public.

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part One

A few years ago, a young Georgian presented a point to ponder when she asked from the back of the bus, "Why do people always gots to be dyin' before the good stuff?"  At first, I had no idea what in the world she was going on about, but then I thought back over some of my commentary.  There is a significant number of New Yorkers who have died before seeing their contributions to the city completed or recognized.  This week we're featuring ten of them, two a day.

THE MONUMENTS

1--The most enduring work by Emma Lazarus, a prolific writer on the subjects of Judaism and America, is a sonnet written to raise funds for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.  (The French sent over the statue without a stand and asked us to take care of that.  The French also like showing up at parties with flowers and forcing the hostess to scrounge around for a vase.)  The New Colossus, concludes with the lines: 

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

By putting these words in Liberty's mouth, Lazarus framed the sculpture as a beacon for immigrants and a symbol of the American promise, associations that were more hers than they were the sculptor's.  Though her poem is now engraved on a plaque located inside the very pedestal she helped to finance, Emma Lazarus never got a chance to see the Statue of Liberty.  Suffering from cancer, perhaps Hodgkin's Disease, Lazarus left for Europe in 1885, a year before the statue was assembled.  When she returned in 1887, she was too sick to come to the deck, and she died on the Upper West Side two months later.

2--Ulysses S. Grant led the Union forces to victory in the Civil War and served two terms as president.  Then the tides turned.  Unable to secure a third nomination, he moved to New York and trusted almost all of his assets to a Barry Madoff type character named Ferdinand Ward who bankrupted his company, ruining the former president as well as other investors recruited by Grant.  Around this time, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer.  It seemed an ignominious end to a remarkable career, but he was soon approached by none other than Mark Twain who offered to publish his memoirs.  Grant, ill and destitute, set to work and finished his book a few days before his death.

The memoirs would go on to sell 300,000 copies and provide his family with almost half a million dollars.  The success of what many still consider the best presidential memoirs ever written played a part in raising the donations to build Grant's Tomb, the largest mausoleum in North America.