New York City History

You might remember from previous posts, that the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division has been busy digitizing our historical map collections, with a strong focus on New York City fire insurance maps. We’ve added some excellent new titles (about 500 maps total) to that collection in recent months detailing Queens and Brooklyn from the early 20th century. The example below is from E. Belcher Hyde’s Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn, Vol. 7., 1907. This map shows an early Luna Park, Coney Island’s famous amusement park, just four years after it opened to the public, which itself was built on the site of the former Sea Lion Park, home of the world’s first looping roller coaster. And you thought the Cyclone was scary.

Who exactly were the Queens of Finance? The New York Herald reserved this title for Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin (or Tennie C Claflin). These sisters surmounted incredible odds by establishing a highly lucrative brokerage business on Wall Street in 1869. Born in Homer, Ohio they were not privy to the comforts and education afforded by wealth or high social stature. In fact, their childhood was quite a tumultuous one. Born to an alcoholic father, the sisters took charge of providing for the family while Tennessee was still an adolescent. Victoria and Tennessee moved to New York with their family and manage their combined living expenses with money earned from the brokerage business and profits made from their publication the Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Not only are they were they successful in finance but later both become involved in politics. Victoria actually ran for president in the 1872 election, before women even had the right to vote!

As I researched them I began to wonder how these tenacious women achieved so much during the period of time in which they lived. Here’s what I gathered from what I’ve read about them:  read more »

As one would guess, Roosevelt Island was not always known as Roosevelt Island. In fact over the past four hundred years it has gone through six name changes. From the Native American Minnahanonck, or “nice island,” to the Dutch name Varckens Island (meaning hogs island) to the English name Manning Island which became Blackwell Island, to American, Welfare Island and finally to the present, Roosevelt Island. Most of these names changes came as ownership was transferred from one party to the next, marking very distinct periods of history for the island which we now know as Roosevelt. Some of these names are descriptive; during the Dutch period, for example, the island was used to raise hogs. The period during which the island was called Blackwell seems coincidentally appropriate as it was certainly the bleakest.

While the island was known as Blackwell it was the site of asylums and a penitentiary. The conditions were inhumane as was noted by English Writer, Charles Dickens. During his circuit through the United States Dickens visited the island in 1842 describing it, in a work known as American notes, as having a “lounging, listless, madhouse air.” Nelly Bly, one of America’s first female journalists, worked under cover at the lunatic asylum as a patient to report on its atrocious treatment of inmates.  read more »

The photograph above is of High Island, an 8 acre spit of land between the Pelham Bay and the Long Island Sound, as seen from its more well-known neighbor, City Island. After researching High Island it remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Artifacts have been found on its shores, alluding to a time prior to the arrival of Europeans, but its Siwanoy name is still unknown. Even the origin of its present day name is uncertain. Some would guess that its name describes its physical location in the Northern reach of the city, or perhaps describing the profile of the island which is comparatively high. John McNamara, in History in Asphalt, states that it could be a Dutch name, Haai Eylgant, meaning shark island, due to the warm shallow waters of the Pelham Bay which tend to attract sharks.  read more »

The watery barriers of islands often prevent the infiltration of outside influences, as seen in the history of Broad Channel. For Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, however, these barriers were intended to keep potentially harmful change from spreading outward.

Ellis Island is rightly considered the gateway to New York City during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While this is the case, some immigrants took a detour through Hoffman Island or Swinburne Island. The two man-made islands, designated as quarantines for arriving immigrants, were created in the 1870’s in an area of the Lower New York Bay referred to as Orchard Shoals. Hoffman, the larger of the two, detained passengers exposed to contagious diseases while the sick and visibly infected passengers were hospitalized on Swinburne.  read more »

In a previous post, we looked at maps of Brooklyn from the 19th and early 20th centuries of the neighborhood once called Weeksville, centered on Hunterfly Road. It was there, in 1969, according to The Weeksville Society, that researchers rediscovered the "Hunterfly Road houses," the neighborhood's only remaining residential structures from the period. I'm curious to know if those same researchers used the Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s, located in The Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, particularly the photograph below, shot by Percy Loomis Sperr in 1940, in their reports. Click the link at the bottom of this post to see what the Hunterfly Road houses look like today.

Google Maps Streetview

Believe it or not, all of these names at one point referred to the same place: the only inhabited island in the Jamaica Bay, now known as Broad Channel. Have you ever been to Broad Channel? If you have, then you know that it looks nothing like the rest of New York City. Having spent half of my youth in Queens and the other half on the east end of Long Island, I can say that the Jamaica Bay area looks far more like the latter than the former. How did this happen?  read more »

On today's map you wouldn't have a clue as to where the Crystal Palace at Reservoir Square was located. Looking at a William Perris' fire insurance map from 1853 however reveals that, where now stands our magnificent central library on the corner of 5th Avenue & 42nd Street, once stood the huge Croton distributing reservoir, gravity feeding the thirsty city from near the top of Murray Hill and a spectacular Crystal Palace, seen here as the large purple shape on the top left.

You can see both the reservoir and the Crystal Palace here.

An even closer look reveals a handwritten note reading "50,000". This is a fire insurance map which probably means that the fire insurance policy taken out for the Crystal Palace was $50,000 or about $1.5 million in today's dollars.

That seems like a shockingly low price for such a spectacular building.

Especially considering the fact that in 1858 it burned to the ground.

The story goes that the morning after the fire, in typical New York City fashion, street hawkers were selling still warm pieces of the melted Crystal Palace.

This Friday, the Milstein Division will be offering a free class on the best online resources to use in researching New York City’s history. I invite all students, history buffs and library lovers to come to the Humanities and Social Sciences Library to find out more about all the databases and websites used to research the people and the events that contributed to our city’s history. For this month’s class, I’ll be focusing on the history of this library’s immediate neighborhood – from the Crystal Palace and the Croton Reservoir to the wealthy inhabitants of swanky Fifth Avenue. We’ll be looking at census records, old photographs and postcards, maps, and newspapers to search for the stories, records and documents the neighborhood and its residents have left behind.

Here are the details:
Class: Digital Gotham
When: Friday, December 19th; 3:15-4:15
Where: South Court classrooms (1st Floor)
Humanities & Social Sciences Library
42nd Street & Fifth Avenue

I'm looking forward to seeing you there.

Weeksville was a community of African Americans founded in 1838 by a freed slave named James Weeks in an area straddling modern day Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. By the 1860s, according to Weeksville Society, it had become a cultural nexus and a draft riot safe haven for New York City's growing African American population. While much has been written about its people, both today, as in this NY Times article from 2005 and in the past, as in The Freedman's Torchlight, one of the first African American newspapers, not all that much geographic information remains about this historical landscape. There are traces that surface today, from the Hunterfly Road Houses to Weeksville Park, commemorating a landscape swallowed up by Brooklyn's street grid. One of the remaining pieces of the streetscape is Hunterfly Place.

This one block section of street was once part of the larger Hunterfly Road, the main thoroughfare of Weeksville that ran north to south from what is now Fulton Street to East New York Avenue. The following is a time series of maps of the area published between 1880 and 1908 from the NYPL Digital Gallery that document the physical changes to this community. These maps are part of the larger series of property mapping from the collections of The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division here at the NYPL.

Hopkins, G.M.
Detailed estate and old farm line atlas of the city of Brooklyn
1880

 read more »

The Milstein Division will be offering Digital Gotham this afternoon at 3:15 in the South Court classrooms which are located in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Digital Gotham is a free class that explores online resources on New York City history. This hands-on class will introduce myriad resources—from digitized newspapers, magazines, and books to photographs, menus, and maps—many of which are available from your own desktop.

Digital Gotham is open to the public and requires no preregistration. However, seats are available on a first-come-first serve basis, so we encourage you to come five to ten minutes before the class begins. We look forward to seeing you there!
 
 

Labor Day has become a holiday mostly associated with blow-out sales and backyard barbecues, but looking back at its origins reveals a highly political past. While its roots can be traced back to decades of civil discontent in the United States, the first Labor Day was on September 5, 1882 (which was actually a Tuesday). The celebration was a general strike in New York City, declared by the Central Labor Union, and consisted of a parade, a train ride to a local park, a picnic and other festivities. The parade took place in New York City, starting in lower Manhattan and ending at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, at that time the site of the Croton Reservoir.

Thus the holiday was celebrated without the sanction of the federal government for twelve years. Although many states recognized the holiday by 1885 it wasn’t until 1894 that President Cleveland signed the Labor Day holiday bill making it an official national holiday. By this time another similar holiday was created, May Day, first celebrated on the first of May, 1886. It took a more militant approach: one circular called it “a day of revolt, not rest!” (found in this book on page 248). Ms. Olive Johnson, a socialist of the early twentieth century, explains the differences between the two holidays in her pamphlet, May Day vs. Labor Day.

Works consulted in the creation of this blog post include: Red white and blue letter days, an American calendar; The first Labor Day Parade, Tuesday September 5, 1882: Media mirrors to labor’s icons; Origin of Labor Day and chronology events pertaining to the establishment of Labor Day and May Day: a short history. If you're interested you may want to look at Your library can serve your union, which documents five library's efforts to raise awareness of Labor Day and Shinnecock Labor Day pow wow, which I haven't yet seen but imagine would offer an interesting perspective.