New York City

In my last post a few weeks ago I wrote of the history of rioting and protesting in Tompkins Square Park. New York has always been a riotous city, where citizens have time and time again taken to the streets to demonstrate, strike and protest. Over the centuries the nature and character of these events has evolved, as has the reaction of the general public and the police to these group manifestations of displeasure. The subject of popular disorder and collective action or violence tends to be a fairly popular topic among researchers at the library and I’ve found that studying riots and strikes in New York provides a great way to gauge the social and economic climate of the city at different points in time.

Early on in the city’s history, from colonial times up until the first decade of the 19th century, rioting in New York was generally an accepted part of the city’s political culture, a legacy of English tradition. Many scholars who have written on the history of public protest in early America note that prior to the 1830s, most of the protests and more violent riots were of two kinds; either they were of a distinctly political nature, such as the post-revolutionary Anti-Federalist riots, or they were aimed at enforcing community standards and widely held moral values, such as the Doctors’ Riots in 1788 or the bawdy house raids of 1793 and 1799.

Our visual world is made up of many bits and pieces. It is the fragments merging together to make up a whole that really make a difference in what we see. Taken alone, these individual parts tend to go unnoticed by most people. For example in architecture, it is the color of the stone, the decoration, the lettering on the sign above the door or the carved letters on a gravestone that help define the structure and create a feeling.

Lettering is a small part of the ornamentation of an architectural structure. It is generally the colossus of the structure itself that grabs the eye first, but if you look carefully and take in the entirety of a structure, a visual reward is there waiting and it is often in the letters of the words that adorn it.

Words are as much a part of our visual landscape as the buildings, streets and trees or the people we see every day. A vibrant visual world indeed. Many of us are inured to the most vulgar visual sights, as well as the sublime. Some of us don’t even notice the first spring flowers or the glowering flashing lights of a neon sign, advertising a dingy car service business. We may take a second glance but we easily move on, letting our eyes wonder aimlessly, registering nothing. But really there is much to admire in the letters of the words that plaster our visual landscape. It is the design of the letters that make words noticeable. Most us recognize what we like in structures all over the city without really even knowing why. Buildings are adorned with incised or raised letters above entryways, signs are brightly lit and splashes of paint in cryptic words jump off building walls on dimly lit streets. These visual displays are designed as a feast for our eyes and it is impressive and purposeful.

On Sept 2. at 6:30 PM, on the 6th floor, Mid-Manhattan will host a FREE slide lecture program From Gravestones to Graffiti: 250 Years of Lettering in New York, with guest speaker Paul Shaw. Paul Shaw is a designer and design historian. His specialty is lettering, whether written, drawn, carved or typographic. He teaches at Parsons School of Design and at the School of Visual Arts. He is also the author of Looking for Letters in New York: A Tale of Surprise and Dismay. Paul Shaw is the recipient of many prestigious grants and lectures widely. Mr. Shaw is an expert on the subject of letters and can speak eloquently on the design, complexity and craftsmanship of letters that are everywhere from subway signs, to grave markers, to graffiti. Please join us for a wonderful evening.

Books on letter design and graffiti can be found at the library in both the circulating and non-circulating catalogs. Also at the Picture Collection at the Mid-Manhattan Library, there are an abundance of images on letters/alphabets/graffiti that can be viewed.

More upcoming programs at Mid-Manhattan.

An article on Paul Shaw by New York Times' Streetscapes columnist Christopher Gray.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the protest in Tompkins Square Park that devolved into a 5-hour long clash between police, East Village residents and other park habitués. The day following the riots the New York Post dubbed the incident "Night of Rage" while the Daily News ran with "Tompkins Park Fury." However, there wasn’t just one violent confrontation to be remembered. Rather there were a series of demonstrations and pitched protests during the eighties and early nineties between older residents, newcomers to the neighborhood, the police, neighborhood squatters, and the younger crowd that frequented the park and surrounding streets.

The protests and clashes of late July and early August 1988 were alternatively described in the newspapers as being a result of a newly instated 1 A.M. park curfew, the influx of homeless camped out there, the noise of the crowds that gathered in the park to play music and hang out, and the overarching dispute over housing and perceived gentrification of the neighborhood. These were the years when “Die Yuppie Scum” seemed a valid and meaningful protest chant and graffiti often expressed other anarchist desires and pipe dreams. What drove the August 6th anti-curfew protest over the edge was not only the rowdy and violent behavior of some of the protesters that night, but the extreme reaction of the police force to the protest.

The waves build, barrel in and crash. It is an endless cycle. One after another waves give beach lovers true pleasure. It is the relentless rhythm of the in and out of the water, accompanied by the sound of the waves tumbling in that lulls the wave watcher into a opiate like pleasure, truly a natural high. The site and sound is addictive.

Exciting news: The New York Public Library has received a very important gift from the Genealogical and Biographical Society. To read more about it, see the press release found on our website and the New York Times article from Saturday's paper.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

0ne.. two.. one.. two.. touch, pull, push, glide. Three.. four.. three.. four.. touch, pull, push, glide. Seven.. eight.. seven.. eight.. touch, pull, push, glide. Stroke.. stroke.. breath, stroke.. stroke.. breath. Glide.

The morning sun is refracted in the water. The water shimmers and sparkles. The water is quiet. The lanes are filled with swimmers partaking in a morning ritual. Their arms twirl in a constant rhythm. Their legs kick in sympathy with their arms. From afar it looks and has the feeling of the slow twirl of windmills. And like a windmill, the arms and legs of the swimmers are creating energy, propelling each swimmer forward. Each swimmer’s stroke is unique, like handwriting.

Did anyone happen to catch this article in the New York Times on Monday on the Seal of New York City? It reminded me of a post that I put up about the city flag which, as I was corrected by Michael Miscione, displays the city seal not the state seal. The article provides a background to the debate and politics surrounding the date on the New York City seal, presently listed as 1625.

The article also mentions helpful resources that we have here in the Milstein Division such as Seal and flag of the city of New York, The encyclopedia of New York City, The island at the center of the world, and Gotham: a History of New York City to 1898. Care to join the debate?
 
 

So far, Staten Island trolley tours are filling up
by Staten Island Advance Thursday July 10, 2008, 12:38 PM

Hilton Flores/Staten Island Advance
Tourists and Staten Islanders alike took time yesterday to take the 55-minute tour of the borough, which is free this week.

On a day when the haze turned Manhattan's famous skyline into so many ghostly, jagged silhouettes -- obviating the reason so many tourists hop the ferry to Staten Island before making their typical, quickie U-turn -- a red trolley idling in the downstairs parking lot yesterday beckoned the uninitiated to venture deeper into New York City's best-kept secret.

Everyday here in the Milstein Division, we get questions from all over the city and around the country about the history of New York City. Questions range from the very specific, “What was the weather in Manhattan on May 7th 1864?” to the dauntingly vague, “My great-grandfather lived in New York, his name was Patrick Murphy. Could you send me information on him?” Fortunately, the library’s collection of reference material on New York City history is astounding and rare is the question that goes unanswered. But for those who don’t have direct access to our print collection and are interested in researching the history of our great metropolis, I invite you to a free research class at the library this week.

With all of our concrete and asphalt spaces, it is sometimes very difficult to find refuge from the summer heat in New York City. As a child I envied my neighbors in the apartment building across the street which had a pool. It was surrounded by a fence high enough so that you could only see swimmers plunge off the diving board. If only I had known then of the free public swimming pools scattered through all of the five boroughs!

“Cartographic materials” and “cartographic resources” are phrases that we use in the map library world to describe a whole gamut of map-like information sources. Elevation profiles and geologic sections are particular types of cartographic materials that represent vertical planes, perpendicular to the earth’s surface, in contrast to the typical horizontal-surface representations commonly referred to as maps.

Here are a couple of examples from the NYPL Digital Gallery that show the added dimension that profiles can provide for an understanding of the New York City environment. Click on the images to connect to them in the Digital Gallery, where you can enlarge and zoom into them.

Profile of the twelve avenues in the city of New York

[Profile of] Tibbits Brook route [of Croton Aqueduct from the Harlem River to the Battery in Manhattan]

(Note the distributing reservoir on the crest of Murray['s] Hill, the site of NYPL!)

Residents of New York City, members of a metropolis that somehow simultaneously operates as a small village, are all familiar with certain “characters” who frequent public spaces. Today it is the “Naked Cowboy” one can find entertaining the tourists in Times Square, the affable gentleman selling vegetable peelers in Union Square, or even the kids who perform gravity-defying acrobatics on the A train. A similar character who was surely familiar to many in the streets of NYC during the nineteen-teens through the nineteen-thirties was Kitty Marion, hawker of the Birth Control Review.

I've always been fascinated with landscapes changing through time as seen though the lens of the map. Shorelines, especially where there are lots of waves and tides, are particularly interesting things in that they are so clearly dynamic. These fire insurance maps of Coney Island, created between 1880 and 1907 document those changes beautifully. In addition to those covering Coney Island, the NYPL has digitized close to 2000 maps at this level of detail for all five boroughs of New York City.

G.W. Bromley, Atlas of the entire City of Brooklyn, 1880, Plate 35

E. Robinson, Robinson's atlas of Kings County, New York, 1890, Plate 20

G.W. Bromley, Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn, 1907, Plate 28

If you like the "Satellite View" feature in Google Maps then you should enjoy these aerial photographs of New York City. In 1924 Arthur Tuttle flew over the city snapping pictures of every building and landmark there was. His images of NYC rooftops clearly show the outline of all the buildings. The atlas containing his photos is called:

Sectional aerial maps of the City of New York / [photographed and assembled under the direction of the chief engineer, July 1st, 1924].

Here are a couple of samples cropped from larger images:

The Staten Island Ferry Terminal (from image 21A)

What makes stretching out on the Bryant Park Lawn irresistible? This photograph taken in 1925 could easily be a scene of the park today. The similarities, however, would end there considering the Bryant Park depicted in the above photo and the Bryant Park of today. Those of you familiar with the park's evolution know that its history is dappled with periods of renovation and dereliction.

The power of the Manhattan Bridge cannot be denied. It is an orchestration of rivet studded girders, harp like cables and beautiful beaux art design and it spans the East River like a dancer leaping across a stage. Her audience is the city of New York and specifically its Brooklyn residents. I ride across her expanse daily via the subway. I always position myself by a window. Once the train is delivered from darkness, I stop what I am reading and look out: out the windows, through the massive metal beams, beyond the walkway and out into the city. It is a ride I never tire of because the beauty is apparent and it is relatively short lived. Slowly the train descends into the tunnel on the other side and the journey continues and my eyes return to the page in the book I am reading.

There's a great selection of Staten Island maps and Atlases in the NYPL Digital Gallery. Using the "Pan and Zoom" feature the maps can be enlarged to the point where you can read street names and even the names of residents of individual houses. "Pan and Zoom" is not available on all maps, however.

Here are some of the maps and atlases available:

Atlas of Staten Island, Richmond County, New York, from official records and surveys; compiled and drawn by F. W. Beers.
Published in 1874, this Atlas contains 35 maps of neighborhoods on Staten Island including property lines, names of property owners, and outlines of individual buildings.

Borough of Richmond, Topographical Survey. (1906-1913)

Have you lived in New York City long enough to remember when it used to be dangerous? Even the Worst Case Scenario Handbook:Travel has a section on how to handle riding the subway here! While this city is now arguably a safe place to live it certainly has a history marked with violence.

Take riots for example. New York City has had many of them; in fact the anniversary of a bloody and misguided riot is upon us. On May 10, 1849 violence erupted, due not to a draft, or a food shortage, or low wages. The Astor Place Riot ensued over a petty dispute between two actors, Edwin Forest, an American and William Macready, an Englishman. The deeper issue, however, was one of nationalism and classism as expressed in this surviving broadside. You can read a very dramatic account of the riot and the events leading to it in The Great Riots of New York City, by J.T. Headley. The event was so dramatic that it actually inspired Richard Nelson's play Two Shakespearean Actors.

Can you think of a present day equivalent to the Astor Place Riot? The closest I came was a fight between the Blue Man Group of Berlin and the one working at Astor Theater over which city has the hippest art scene. But that wouldn't be dangerous, that would just be bizarre.

While riding the subway over the past weeks I couldn’t help but notice the posters promoting the month of May as the month of the bike. Since 1990, May has been officially designated as Bike Month NYC, celebrating cyclists, bicycles and generally, all things bike, by sponsoring bike tours, rallys, and other events. Every May I see thousands of bicyclists pedaling through my neighborhood in the Five-Boro Bike Tour (which sold out rapidly this year) and every year I’m pleasantly surprised by the sheer number of people involved. New York City has had a long relationship with the bike. Admittedly it’s been a bumpy road, but really it was love at first sight, though perhaps infatuation might be a better term.

Way back in 1868, New Yorkers were swept up in a craze over the fore-runner to the modern bicycle, the velocipede. Developed in France, the two-wheeled velocipede made its way across the Atlantic to the United States in the 1860s and was taken up by middle-class New Yorkers as a novelty. However, within a few years a full-fledged velocipede-mania developed, eventually dying down in the early 1870s. In 1868 and 1869 alone, nearly a dozen riding schools and tracks opened up across Manhattan and Brooklyn and a number of velocipede manufacturers set up shop in the city as well, fueled by the high demand for more and better versions of the velocipede. Newspapers and periodicals of the day were constantly commenting upon the craze and the effect it had on city life, particularly in the streets and parks. The consequences of the introduction of the velocipede in New York City were many, ranging from discussion of the need for new laws to regulate traffic to debate over the propriety of women riding velocipedes. A nice little article from the New York Times describing the intensity of excitement over the velocipede can be read here

The New York Public Library, of course, has tons of material on the history and development of the bicycle. There are books on the velocipede as it was in the mid-nineteenth century such as, The Velocipede: Its Past, Present and Future, published in 1869, as well as more recent takes on the history of the bicycle like Herlihy’s Bicycle: the History. However, as I enjoy reading contemporary accounts of events I went to our historical newspaper and periodical databases to get some first hand takes on the mania that swept New York and the rest of the country. A good database to start with is the ProQuest Historical Database which provides access to historical runs of major U.S. newspaper and over a 1,000 periodicals. But there are many more electronic resources available, like Harper’s Weekly and America’s Historical Newspapers , both of which provide tons of material on 19th century America.
Another source to keep in mind, especially when researching a machine such as the velocipede, which was constantly being improved upon, is Google’s Patents Search. While periodicals in the 19th century, such as Scientific American, frequently updated readers on new patents and other technological advancements they don’t show readers the patent in all of its glory. My favorite thus far is the Land & Water Velocipede of 1869; but really any patent search for “Improved Velocipede” yields testimony to the endless inventiveness of Americans.

Happy Bike Month!

Yesterday…

…and today!

OK, so this is the thing about which just about all Staten Islanders, no matter what their background or politics, have over the years been least proud. The Fresh Kills Landfill (or as we used to call it, “the dump,”) closed on March 22, 2001, certainly in part as a reward from then mayor Rudy Giuliani to Staten Island for its political support.

The dump opened up in 1948 and was supposed to be temporary. It grew to be by most accounts the largest garbage dump in the world.

I had the pleasure(?!) of growing up about two blocks away from one section of the dump. I can remember before it was there. It was a salt marsh that today we would call wetlands. There was a guy whose nickname was “Yonk” and his family owned horses and a barn, and he used to ride a wagon pulled by horses (I swear this is true!) and harvested the hay to feed his horses. This was in the late 1950s or early 1960s. When they started filling in the area with garbage, some were glad because they felt it would kill the horrible infestations of mosquitos we used to get during the summer. However, the mosquitos didn’t go away, and we had the horrible stench to go along with the skeeters. It was good for weather forcasting, though, as right before it rained it REALLY stunk!

Once they covered the garbage with a dirt layer, however, it became somewhat of an unofficial recreation area. Shallow pools of water quickly froze in the winter and we went ice skating there. Some guys went hunting, sometimes getting pheasants but more likely killing rats and sea gulls. Some went fishing, and some went swimming in the Fresh Kills creek. There was a dock with boats there that pre-dated the dump.

I never ate any fish or animals from the dump, (or went swimming there) but I did eat some vegetables that grew up there. They were pretty good (great fertilizer, I guess) but heaven only knows what kind of chemicals were in them. Well, no apparent effects up to this point!

Today, the West Shore Expressway (Route 440) cuts right through the dump. (It wasnt’t there when I was a kid.) It is amazing how quickly nature took over after the dump closed, along with some human help, to make it look like it does in the second picture above. It is actually quite pretty now. Really! The whole thing is going to be turned into parks. Hope it isn’t the usual city project and takes years and years. I’d like to go up there again before I throw off this mortal coil!