In 1821, future Vice President and 8th President Martin Van Buren led New York Democrats in a Constitutional Convention to amend the State Constitution. The outcome was the Second Constitution of New York. Among the amendments adopted was the abolition of the land-owning restrictions for white men to vote. Also adopted was a tightening of requirements for Black men to vote - holding property with a value of $250. They also had to prove they lived in New York State, and paid taxes, for three years prior to the election.
1821 also saw the founding of "the largest and wealthiest church of colored people in (New York City), perhaps in the country." The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church rose out of Lower Manhattan's John Street Methodist Church, (est. 1766), which engaged in discrimination and segregation against Blacks, forcing several families to meet and consider their next steps. Keeping in mind that the potter's field where the AMEZ Church buried their dead was about to get repurposed into Washington Square Park, moving was becoming a necessity.
Two of the AMEZ founders were William Hamilton and James Varick. Hamilton was one of the first abolitionists in the United States, a fine orator, and suspected to be the illegitimate son of Alexander Hamilton (his mother was a freed woman of color). Varick, a Methodist minister, had been with John Street and encouraged a split in 1796, and in 1822 became AMEZ's first bishop as a debate raged within the Methodist Church over the acceptance of Black ministers. By the end of the Civil War AMEZ had over 46,000 members and was sending missionaries to the South to help the newly-freed enslaved and establish churches. Total membership in AMEZ and its satellite congregations across the country numbered over 200,000.
As AMEZ grew, so did this neighborhood near the Upper West Side, between what would have been Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 82nd and 89th Streets. Fleeing the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan, and the racism that came with it (Manhattan was a central location of the colonial slave trade), combined with the promise of land ownership, a Black shoeshiner named Andrew Williams bought three lots. Others followed suit, and in 1825 the five-acre Seneca Village was established by a group of Free Blacks, the first community of its kind in New York City. The name is rumored to have referred to anything from "Senegal" to the Roman philosopher Seneca (who advocated for individual liberty) to an Underground Railroad code word. At the time, most of New York City's residents lived in lower Manhattan, below 14th Street, so the remote north side of Manhattan had affordable land prices which were attractive to aspiring African-American landowners. There was a natural spring at Summit Rock - the highest point in what would become Central Park - that provided fresh water. There were over 250 residents of Seneca Village, over half of them property-owning Black residents. Thanks to the 1821 Constitutional Convention and the increased restrictions on how Black men could vote, Seneca Village was politically and culturally important. On July 4, 1827 New York became the first state to pass a law totally abolishing legal slavery. Seneca Village was growing. While Seneca Village contained just 1% of New York City's Black population, by 1855 it held 20% of its Black property owners and 15% of New York City's Black voters. Among these families was the Lyons family, educators and abolitionists who ran a boarding house for Black sailors that doubled as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Lyons' daughter, Maritcha, worked in Brooklyn schools for almost 50 years and fought alongside Ida B. Wells in anti-lynching activism.
When the potato famine hit Ireland in the 1840s as political unrest in Germany unfolded, many immigrants settled in the area. Seneca Village added another AME church as well as a Catholic church. Colored School No. 3 was one of the few integrated schools in New York City. Some of the homes in Seneca Village were two-story frame houses. There was room for gardening, sometimes even a barn. At its height Seneca Village boasted 264 residents and three churches, two cemeteries, and a school. Almost a third of Seneca Village was Irish - one of the three churches was All Angels, a racially integrated congregation in which Irish immigrants worshiped alongside Free Blacks - a picture of racial harmony often unseen.
Frederick Law Olmsted was getting ready to head to Yale when he got sumac poisoning, weakening his eyesight. He went to sea for a while, became a merchant, and then turned to journalism while he settled on the family farm on the south side of Staten Island. It was as a journalist in 1850 that Olmsted traveled to England with the expressed purpose of looking at gardens, specifically Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, which had opened three years earlier and was thought to be the first publicly-funded civic park in the world. That same year, 1850, Andrew Jackson Downing, publisher of The Horticulturist, brought English architect Calvert Vaux to help him design Matthew Vassar's "Springside" estate. Olmsted would visit Downing, who had published Olmsted's essay on his visit to Birkenhead, at his estate in Newburgh, New York - 60 miles north of Manhattan, on the Hudson River. It was there that Olmsted met Vaux. Downing died in 1852 in the sinking of the steamship Henry Clay at Riverdale in The Bronx. He was in the process of designing the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution when he died. Olmsted and Vaux carried Downing's influence with them for the rest of their careers.
Newspapers rallied around the idea of a large, centrally-located municipal park within the limits of New York City, gardens similar to what you would find in London and Paris. In 1853 New York City officials began planning. The unofficial boundary of metropolitan New York City by the mid-1850s was 23rd Street, well south of Seneca Village, though New York City's population had quadrupled between 1821, the founding of AMEZ, and 1855. Initially, officials picked a spot known as Jones Wood, on the water on the Upper East Side, but white landowners had enough political pull to dissuade city officials from choosing it, asking for a further inland location. While this area of Manhattan was kinda-sorta vacant, there were over 1,600 New Yorkers living there, including the nuns of the Academy of St. Vincent, and Seneca Village. That Seneca Village was a growing Black community (and a chorus of thinly-veiled racist views that Seneca Village was on its way to becoming the next Five Points), and that the residents of Seneca Village didn't have the same political pull as the Upper East Siders, didn't help their cause. Seneca Village was cast as a "wasteland" inhabited by "squatters" who lived in "shanties." It was far enough away from metropolitan New York City that most New Yorkers didn't bother to run uptown and see for themselves.
The New York Commercial-Advertiser wrote:
Give us a park, be it central, or sidelong, here, there, anywhere...a real park, a large park.
City officials settled on a site On July 21, 1853 - 51 weeks after Andrew Jackson Downing's death - the Central Park Act was passed, in which the New York State Legislature set aside 778 acres of land between Fifth and Eighth Avenues and 59th and 106th Streets in central Manhattan to create the nation's first major landscaped public space (it would be extended four blocks north to 110th Street a few years later), which would be known as Central Park. The "socially-conscious" types figured that a massive park such as this would contribute to the well-being of New York society, in public health and in a progressive civil society. 17,000 potential building sites were removed from the real estate market.
Most New York City newspapers cheered the removal of "the insects" from Seneca Village. The N-Word was used. Not all were in favor, though. Social reformer Hal Guernsey wrote:
Will anyone pretend the park is not a scheme to enhance the value of uptown land, and create a splendid center for fashionable life, without regard to, and even in dereliction of, the happiness of the multitude upon whose hears and hands the expenses will fall?
Still, the City had to obtain that land legally, or at least something approaching legality. Enter Eminent Domain. The Just Compensation Clause in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides, "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." And "Just Compensation" indicates fair market value should be paid to the landowners. This was the justification used by New York City officials in razing Seneca Village (and other, smaller neighborhoods) to build Central Park. It didn't hurt that popular opinion had been swayed by newspaper owners and editors dead set on "modernizing" New York City, even if it meant tearing down a more modern version of America: that of a successful Black neighborhood featuring landowning freemen before the Civil War.
In June 1856, New York City mayor Fernando Wood (a Tammany Hall man who was a central figure in the Gangs of New York-famous Dead Rabbits/Bowery Boys Election Day fight) initiated a contest judged by a board headed by Washington Irving. Olmsted, already the superintendent of the Park's work force, and Vaux worked together on their plan, submitted it to the board, and won, beating out 32 other proposals.. Olmsted and Vaux called it Greensward, "for their preferred landscapes of sweeping meadows and vast water bodies designed to appear limitless, while brilliantly belying the Park's long and narrow rectangle within New York City's rigid grid."
The residents of New York City that found themselves firmly within the boundary of Central Park petitioned the courts for two years to save their homes, churches, and schools. Ultimately in 1857 the 1600 residents, including all of Seneca Village, were paid (evicted) from their homes to build Central Park. One newspaper wrote that the Seneca Village police raid would "not be forgotten...as many a brilliant and stirring fight was had during the campaign. But the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman's bludgeons."
Olmsted wrote that Central Park was "of great importance as the first real Park made in this country - a democratic development of the highest significance." It was one of the first examples of Urban Renewal, "reinvigorating" a Black neighborhood targeted for destruction for the purpose of the betterment of the elite. There are no known records of what happened to the eternal residents of Seneca Village's two cemeteries.
Click here for an interactive map of Seneca Village.
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2020
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
The Cook Who Was Quarantined For 26 Years
Mary Mallon was born in (no kidding) Cookstown in County Tyrone of present-day Northern Ireland - about 45 miles around Lough Neagh west of Belfast - on September 23, 1869. In 1883 Mary escaped the poverty of Cookstown by herself to join her aunt and uncle in New York City, upon which she was employed as a cook for wealthy families.
Up to this point - and this point only - hers is a fairly traditional immigration story. Poor girl from Ireland moves to New York City in the 19th century and gets a job as a wealthy family's help. Standard stuff. Now it gets weird.
From 1900 to 1907 Mary worked for seven different families. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Typhoid was A Thing About Which To Be Worried. It's a bacterial infection that results in a high fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. You can get it from contaminated drinking water or mishandled food. Wash your hands often, and it's generally not an issue. However, in 1906, New York City alone endured over 3,400 cases of typhoid reported, with 639 deaths.
People who lived in the houses where Mallon worked tended to get sick. Typhoid Fever sick. Two dozen of them, in fact, in houses where Mallon served as a cook. By the time public health officials were able to trace the source of the typhoid outbreak back to the house, Mallon had moved on to a different house.
Enter George Soper. Soper got a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1895, and was awarded a Ph. D. in sanitary engineering in 1899 from Columbia. Soper's specialty was investigating the origins of typhoid outbreaks. He had worked for the Boston Water Works and successfully investigated typhoid outbreaks in Ithaca, among other cities.
In Summer 1906, General William Henry Warren - a well-off New York banker - had rented the house of Mr. & Mrs. George Thompson in the Oyster Bay section of north-central Long Island. Oyster Bay is the home of the Seawanhaka Yacht Club - one of the oldest yacht clubs in the western hemisphere. It's that kind of place. Think: Gatsby. Notable people from Oyster Bay include Billy Joel, Sean Hannity, and John Gotti, Jr. Oyster Bay was the site of Theodore Roosevelt's "Summer White House." General Warren had his family and seven servants with him. One of those servants was Mary Mallon. Typhoid ran rampant throughout the house, causing severe illness to six people - first Warren's daughter, then two maids, and then Warren's wife. Then another daughter, then the gardener.
The Thompsons heard of Soper through some social connections and hired him to investigate the cause of the outbreak. If the Thompsons could find the cause and correct it, they could rent the house out again the following summer. Soper couldn't find anything. The closest he could come to an explanation surrounding the Thompson house was an "old Indian woman who lived on the beach had brought polluted shellfish," but he eventually ruled that out, as well.
Ultimately Soper settled on a theory he had read in some German papers that there are people who could be "carriers," or people who had the bacteria and weren't affected, but just straight up wrecked those who would be affected by the bacteria. This would be the first recorded instance of a carrier in the United States. Mary Mallon had infected feces. And sanitation wasn't exactly highly regarded at the time, and she was a cook...you see where this is headed.
Mallon loved to serve an ice cream dish with fresh sliced peaches. Soper knew this would have been an extremely easy way to transmit typhoid. Why? Because it wasn't cooked. Pretty much every other meal would have been heated to the point that it would have killed the bacteria. But Mary Mallon had left the employ of the Warrens in September 1906, six months before Soper was hired by the Thompsons. Soper found that Mallon had been hired by the Warrens through the well-known Mrs. Stricker's employment agency on 28th Street in Manhattan. Mallon kept to herself, so the other servants couldn't offer much in the way of information, other than that Mary Mallon "was not particularly clean."
Armed with this information, Soper discovered that seven of the households for which Mary worked from Long Island to Manhattan to Maine had experienced a typhoid outbreak. After leaving the Warrens, Mary was a cook for just over a month at a house in Tuxedo, NY, upstate a little bit. There was a typhoid outbreak. It took Soper four months to find Mary Mallon, which he did, working as a cook on Park Avenue. Soper:
I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and that I wanted specimens of her urine, feces, and blood. It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. I passed rapidly down the long narrow hall, through the tall iron gate, out through the area and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape.
A subsequent interview didn't feature threats of violence, but Mary dismissed the idea of her being a typhoid carrier. Soper found that Mary Mallon was soon to leave her post on Park Avenue, and knew that finding her again would be extremely difficult, so he brought her case to the attention of Health Commissioner Thomas Darlington and NYC Health Department Medical Officer Dr. Hermann M. Biggs. They sent the police to bring her into custody. When they knocked on the door and tried to enter, Mary took off running out a window and over a fence. Ultimately, she was found hiding in the outside closet of a nearby house, and taken to Willard Parker Hospital (which was known for treating patients with communicable diseases) on East 16th Street along the East River for observation where she "provided" a fecal sample which tested positive for pure Bacillus typhosus.
Due to her being deemed a flight risk, Mary was essentially arrested and placed into quarantine. It was 1907. The San Jose Evening News wrote:
The case is without parallel in medical records. Never has there been an instance, as the present, where a woman who never had typhoid fever should prove a veritable germ factory.
She was furious about her situation. She was perfectly healthy and, to her knowledge, had never gotten anyone sick, but she apparently refused to cooperate with Soper and the Department of Health. They transferred her to Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, on the East River between The Bronx and Riker's Island. Riverside was another communicable diseases hospital (specializing in smallpox patients) founded in the 1850s.
At Riverside, Mary was given "a little bungalow" originally built for the superintendent of nurses. Soper noted that she had a living room, kitchen, and bathroom with gas, modern plumbing, and electricity, "pleasantly situated on the river bank, next to the church." Someone even cooked her food for her, which she ate alone. Soper seemed incredulous that a lawyer named George Francis O'Neill took up Mary's case after the William Randolph Hearst's New York American published a story about "Typhoid Mary" on June 20, 1909. Mary had been quarantined for two years.
Eight days later O'Neill - 34 years old and a former customs official who had been admitted to the bar two years earlier - filed a habeas corpus petition for Mary's release from prison. O'Neill argued a lack of due process in Mary's detention - she had not been accused of a crime and not given a hearing and had never engaged legal counsel. The case made it to the New York Supreme Court, which ruled:
The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.
Basically: Mary Mallon's freedom wasn't worth everyone around her getting typhoid. Despite her condition being a natural one, and one she couldn't necessarily control, and that her condition not actually a crime, Mary Mallon was a danger to society.
However, the Health Department Commissioner Ernst Lederle believed Mary had learned about how to properly manage her condition and released Mary on her pledge to not handle or cook food for anyone and appear before the Health Department every three months. She was not trained in any other occupation. As soon as she was released, Mary bounced. She changed her name and worked as a cook in restaurants, hotels, even sanitariums for five years. There were typhoid outbreaks throughout those five years, but due to the noms des cuisines (probably not correct French, but whatever) it's kind of impossible to know how many of those were due to Mary's poop-stained fingers.
The head OB/GYN at Sloane Hospital for Women in midtown Manhattan called Soper asking him to come to the hospital for a "matter of great importance." He had 20 cases of typhoid on his hands and a cook who the other workers called "Typhoid Mary." Could Soper come see if it was her? Soper did, identified her as Mary Mallon, and the Health Department was notified. This time she submitted to the Health Department without a struggle.
Mary stayed on North Brother Island for 23 years. She was allowed to occasionally leave and visit the City, but always came back. In 1932 she had a stroke and was paralyzed from the waist down, and passed away in November 1938. Mary Mallon was 69 years old, with a funeral at St. Luke's that only nine people attended, and was buried in The Bronx.
Throughout her career the number of typhoid cases directly attributed to her numbered 51, with three deaths as a result. The actual number is surely higher.
Up to this point - and this point only - hers is a fairly traditional immigration story. Poor girl from Ireland moves to New York City in the 19th century and gets a job as a wealthy family's help. Standard stuff. Now it gets weird.
From 1900 to 1907 Mary worked for seven different families. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Typhoid was A Thing About Which To Be Worried. It's a bacterial infection that results in a high fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. You can get it from contaminated drinking water or mishandled food. Wash your hands often, and it's generally not an issue. However, in 1906, New York City alone endured over 3,400 cases of typhoid reported, with 639 deaths.
People who lived in the houses where Mallon worked tended to get sick. Typhoid Fever sick. Two dozen of them, in fact, in houses where Mallon served as a cook. By the time public health officials were able to trace the source of the typhoid outbreak back to the house, Mallon had moved on to a different house.
Enter George Soper. Soper got a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1895, and was awarded a Ph. D. in sanitary engineering in 1899 from Columbia. Soper's specialty was investigating the origins of typhoid outbreaks. He had worked for the Boston Water Works and successfully investigated typhoid outbreaks in Ithaca, among other cities.
In Summer 1906, General William Henry Warren - a well-off New York banker - had rented the house of Mr. & Mrs. George Thompson in the Oyster Bay section of north-central Long Island. Oyster Bay is the home of the Seawanhaka Yacht Club - one of the oldest yacht clubs in the western hemisphere. It's that kind of place. Think: Gatsby. Notable people from Oyster Bay include Billy Joel, Sean Hannity, and John Gotti, Jr. Oyster Bay was the site of Theodore Roosevelt's "Summer White House." General Warren had his family and seven servants with him. One of those servants was Mary Mallon. Typhoid ran rampant throughout the house, causing severe illness to six people - first Warren's daughter, then two maids, and then Warren's wife. Then another daughter, then the gardener.
The Thompsons heard of Soper through some social connections and hired him to investigate the cause of the outbreak. If the Thompsons could find the cause and correct it, they could rent the house out again the following summer. Soper couldn't find anything. The closest he could come to an explanation surrounding the Thompson house was an "old Indian woman who lived on the beach had brought polluted shellfish," but he eventually ruled that out, as well.
Ultimately Soper settled on a theory he had read in some German papers that there are people who could be "carriers," or people who had the bacteria and weren't affected, but just straight up wrecked those who would be affected by the bacteria. This would be the first recorded instance of a carrier in the United States. Mary Mallon had infected feces. And sanitation wasn't exactly highly regarded at the time, and she was a cook...you see where this is headed.
Mallon loved to serve an ice cream dish with fresh sliced peaches. Soper knew this would have been an extremely easy way to transmit typhoid. Why? Because it wasn't cooked. Pretty much every other meal would have been heated to the point that it would have killed the bacteria. But Mary Mallon had left the employ of the Warrens in September 1906, six months before Soper was hired by the Thompsons. Soper found that Mallon had been hired by the Warrens through the well-known Mrs. Stricker's employment agency on 28th Street in Manhattan. Mallon kept to herself, so the other servants couldn't offer much in the way of information, other than that Mary Mallon "was not particularly clean."
Armed with this information, Soper discovered that seven of the households for which Mary worked from Long Island to Manhattan to Maine had experienced a typhoid outbreak. After leaving the Warrens, Mary was a cook for just over a month at a house in Tuxedo, NY, upstate a little bit. There was a typhoid outbreak. It took Soper four months to find Mary Mallon, which he did, working as a cook on Park Avenue. Soper:
I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and that I wanted specimens of her urine, feces, and blood. It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. I passed rapidly down the long narrow hall, through the tall iron gate, out through the area and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape.
A subsequent interview didn't feature threats of violence, but Mary dismissed the idea of her being a typhoid carrier. Soper found that Mary Mallon was soon to leave her post on Park Avenue, and knew that finding her again would be extremely difficult, so he brought her case to the attention of Health Commissioner Thomas Darlington and NYC Health Department Medical Officer Dr. Hermann M. Biggs. They sent the police to bring her into custody. When they knocked on the door and tried to enter, Mary took off running out a window and over a fence. Ultimately, she was found hiding in the outside closet of a nearby house, and taken to Willard Parker Hospital (which was known for treating patients with communicable diseases) on East 16th Street along the East River for observation where she "provided" a fecal sample which tested positive for pure Bacillus typhosus.
Due to her being deemed a flight risk, Mary was essentially arrested and placed into quarantine. It was 1907. The San Jose Evening News wrote:
The case is without parallel in medical records. Never has there been an instance, as the present, where a woman who never had typhoid fever should prove a veritable germ factory.
She was furious about her situation. She was perfectly healthy and, to her knowledge, had never gotten anyone sick, but she apparently refused to cooperate with Soper and the Department of Health. They transferred her to Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, on the East River between The Bronx and Riker's Island. Riverside was another communicable diseases hospital (specializing in smallpox patients) founded in the 1850s.
At Riverside, Mary was given "a little bungalow" originally built for the superintendent of nurses. Soper noted that she had a living room, kitchen, and bathroom with gas, modern plumbing, and electricity, "pleasantly situated on the river bank, next to the church." Someone even cooked her food for her, which she ate alone. Soper seemed incredulous that a lawyer named George Francis O'Neill took up Mary's case after the William Randolph Hearst's New York American published a story about "Typhoid Mary" on June 20, 1909. Mary had been quarantined for two years.
Eight days later O'Neill - 34 years old and a former customs official who had been admitted to the bar two years earlier - filed a habeas corpus petition for Mary's release from prison. O'Neill argued a lack of due process in Mary's detention - she had not been accused of a crime and not given a hearing and had never engaged legal counsel. The case made it to the New York Supreme Court, which ruled:
The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.
Basically: Mary Mallon's freedom wasn't worth everyone around her getting typhoid. Despite her condition being a natural one, and one she couldn't necessarily control, and that her condition not actually a crime, Mary Mallon was a danger to society.
However, the Health Department Commissioner Ernst Lederle believed Mary had learned about how to properly manage her condition and released Mary on her pledge to not handle or cook food for anyone and appear before the Health Department every three months. She was not trained in any other occupation. As soon as she was released, Mary bounced. She changed her name and worked as a cook in restaurants, hotels, even sanitariums for five years. There were typhoid outbreaks throughout those five years, but due to the noms des cuisines (probably not correct French, but whatever) it's kind of impossible to know how many of those were due to Mary's poop-stained fingers.
The head OB/GYN at Sloane Hospital for Women in midtown Manhattan called Soper asking him to come to the hospital for a "matter of great importance." He had 20 cases of typhoid on his hands and a cook who the other workers called "Typhoid Mary." Could Soper come see if it was her? Soper did, identified her as Mary Mallon, and the Health Department was notified. This time she submitted to the Health Department without a struggle.
Mary stayed on North Brother Island for 23 years. She was allowed to occasionally leave and visit the City, but always came back. In 1932 she had a stroke and was paralyzed from the waist down, and passed away in November 1938. Mary Mallon was 69 years old, with a funeral at St. Luke's that only nine people attended, and was buried in The Bronx.
Throughout her career the number of typhoid cases directly attributed to her numbered 51, with three deaths as a result. The actual number is surely higher.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
A Short One About the Times Square Ball Drop
It's the end of another year and a crowd of people whose size can only be referred to as "Shocking" and "Anxiety-inducing" will gather in midtown Manhattan to watch a ball drop as a clock counts down to midnight. (An aside: my wife and I have Leveled Up as parents and discovered you can stream the BBC on YouTube so your kid can watch it "turn midnight" and go to bed at A Reasonable Hour)
Why do people do this?
It goes back to Adolph Ochs. ACTUALLY, it goes back to Greenwich, England, where the Royal Observatory (home of "Greenwich Mean Time") dropped a ball at 1pm every day so that nearby captains could set their ship's chronometers. They still do it.
NOW it goes to Adolph Ochs. Born in Cincinnati in 1858, the son of German Jewish immigrants, Ochs grew up delivering newspapers in Knoxville, Tennessee. Adolph's father was a leader in Knoxville's small Jewish community and Adolph worked at the Knoxville Courier to supplement the family income. In the late 1870s, at 19 years old, Ochs borrowed $250 to buy a controlling interest in the Chattanooga Times where he became a leader in southern journalism.
By the 1890s the New York Times, which had been printing since 1851, had fallen on hard, uh, times. The newspapers losses were mounting thanks to the economic collapse of the Panic of 1893, and the sheer number of daily newspapers in New York City were cutting into the Times' readership. After being told that Chattanooga was the next Pittsburgh and investing a ton of money in real estate, the aforementioned depression happened and he lost almost anything. Rather than declare bankruptcy, Ochs decided to go all-in on publishing newspapers. In 1896, Ochs bought the Times for $75,000. Under Ochs' ownership/editorship, the Times' circulation rose from 9,000 to 780,000 by the 1920s.
Most newspapers of the time were openly one-sided in how they reported the news, according to their political leanings. Ochs provided a down-the-middle voice for "all the news that's fit to print," a phrase he added to the Times' masthead.
Longacre Square was once the site of William Vanderbilt's American Horse Exchange. The "Longacre Square" moniker was a nod to "Long Acre," the center of London's horse and carriage trade. John Jacob Astor made "a fortune" selling lots to hotels and other developers taking advantage of New York City's rapid expansion in the middle of the 19th century as immigration ramped up.
Ochs persuaded NYC Mayor George B. McLellan, Jr. (son of Civil War general George B. McLellan, Sr. and a mayor whose most notable act was in December 1908, when he cancelled the licenses for a new innovation in entertainment called "motion pictures," claiming that they "degrade or injure the morals of the community" and due to the fire hazard of celluloid.) to build a subway station. In 1904 Ochs moved the headquarters of the Times to Longacre Square. The Times' headquarters was a 25-story structure modeled after Giotto's campanile for the cathedral in Florence. Five stories were underground to accommodate the printing presses and the subway. At the time of its completion, it was the tallest building in the world.
On April 8, 1904 Longacre was officially renamed "Times Square" in honor of, but not due to the influence, the presence of the New York Times. Ochs said, "I am pleased to say that Times Square was named without any effort or suggestion on the part of The Times," and that the building was "the first successful effort in New York to give architectural beauty to a skyscraper."
Anyhow on December 31, 1904 Ochs had fireworks guys put on a show at One Times Square. 200,000 people were in attendance and at the stroke of midnight the sound emanating from Midtown could be heard 30 miles away, in Croton-on-Hudson. The tradition had begun.
In 1907 a ball dropped from a flag pole, the first innovation in the celebration. The ball was made of iron and wood, decorated with 100 25-watt light bulbs. It was 5' in diameter and weighed 700 pounds. It was made by Jacob Starr, founder of the company that would become Artkraft Strauss. Artkraft Strauss was responsible for many of Manhattan's iconic advertisements including the Camel Cigarettes billboard which blew smoke rings over Times Square. On December 31, 1907 waiters in hotels around Times Square were given battery-powered top hats that blinked "1908." When they "flipped their lids" at midnight, "1908" emblazoned the parapet of One Times Square.
Even though the Times moved to 229 West 43rd Street in 1913, the New Year's Eve festivities continued at One Times Square. Each year since, crowds have gathered in Times Square for the famous ball drop. For two years, however, there was no ball. 1942 and 1943 saw the United States observing the wartime "dimout" of lights in major cities. Still, crowds gathered in those years to ring in the new year, though with a minute of silence "followed by the ringing of chimes from sound trucks parked at the base of the tower - a harkening back to the earlier celebrations at Trinity Church, where crowds would gather to 'ring out the old, ring in the new.'"
In 1920 the original wooden ball was replaced by a 400-lb wrought-iron ball. In 1955 that ball was replaced by a 150-lb aluminum ball, which remained in place until the 1980s. For New Year's Eve 2000, the ball was redesigned by Waterford Crystal and Philips.
The 100th anniversary of that original ball drop - 2007 - saw Waterford Crystal and Philips create a new LED crystal ball that increased the brightness and color of the Ball (capitalized now, like "Bono" or "Cher."). The Centennial Ball weighs nearly six tons and is 12' in diameter featuring 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles and 32,256 Philips Luxeon LEDs. It sits above Times Square year-round, waiting for tonight.
A "Time-Ball" drops from a flagpole at the United States Naval Observatory every day at 12pm.
Ochs and his wife, Effie Wise Ochs, had one child, a daughter whom they named Iphigene. Iphigene married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who assumed publishing of the New York Times from August Ochs' death in 1935 until 1961. A Sulzberger has published the Times ever since.
Why do people do this?
It goes back to Adolph Ochs. ACTUALLY, it goes back to Greenwich, England, where the Royal Observatory (home of "Greenwich Mean Time") dropped a ball at 1pm every day so that nearby captains could set their ship's chronometers. They still do it.
NOW it goes to Adolph Ochs. Born in Cincinnati in 1858, the son of German Jewish immigrants, Ochs grew up delivering newspapers in Knoxville, Tennessee. Adolph's father was a leader in Knoxville's small Jewish community and Adolph worked at the Knoxville Courier to supplement the family income. In the late 1870s, at 19 years old, Ochs borrowed $250 to buy a controlling interest in the Chattanooga Times where he became a leader in southern journalism.
By the 1890s the New York Times, which had been printing since 1851, had fallen on hard, uh, times. The newspapers losses were mounting thanks to the economic collapse of the Panic of 1893, and the sheer number of daily newspapers in New York City were cutting into the Times' readership. After being told that Chattanooga was the next Pittsburgh and investing a ton of money in real estate, the aforementioned depression happened and he lost almost anything. Rather than declare bankruptcy, Ochs decided to go all-in on publishing newspapers. In 1896, Ochs bought the Times for $75,000. Under Ochs' ownership/editorship, the Times' circulation rose from 9,000 to 780,000 by the 1920s.
Most newspapers of the time were openly one-sided in how they reported the news, according to their political leanings. Ochs provided a down-the-middle voice for "all the news that's fit to print," a phrase he added to the Times' masthead.
Longacre Square was once the site of William Vanderbilt's American Horse Exchange. The "Longacre Square" moniker was a nod to "Long Acre," the center of London's horse and carriage trade. John Jacob Astor made "a fortune" selling lots to hotels and other developers taking advantage of New York City's rapid expansion in the middle of the 19th century as immigration ramped up.
Ochs persuaded NYC Mayor George B. McLellan, Jr. (son of Civil War general George B. McLellan, Sr. and a mayor whose most notable act was in December 1908, when he cancelled the licenses for a new innovation in entertainment called "motion pictures," claiming that they "degrade or injure the morals of the community" and due to the fire hazard of celluloid.) to build a subway station. In 1904 Ochs moved the headquarters of the Times to Longacre Square. The Times' headquarters was a 25-story structure modeled after Giotto's campanile for the cathedral in Florence. Five stories were underground to accommodate the printing presses and the subway. At the time of its completion, it was the tallest building in the world.
On April 8, 1904 Longacre was officially renamed "Times Square" in honor of, but not due to the influence, the presence of the New York Times. Ochs said, "I am pleased to say that Times Square was named without any effort or suggestion on the part of The Times," and that the building was "the first successful effort in New York to give architectural beauty to a skyscraper."
Anyhow on December 31, 1904 Ochs had fireworks guys put on a show at One Times Square. 200,000 people were in attendance and at the stroke of midnight the sound emanating from Midtown could be heard 30 miles away, in Croton-on-Hudson. The tradition had begun.
In 1907 a ball dropped from a flag pole, the first innovation in the celebration. The ball was made of iron and wood, decorated with 100 25-watt light bulbs. It was 5' in diameter and weighed 700 pounds. It was made by Jacob Starr, founder of the company that would become Artkraft Strauss. Artkraft Strauss was responsible for many of Manhattan's iconic advertisements including the Camel Cigarettes billboard which blew smoke rings over Times Square. On December 31, 1907 waiters in hotels around Times Square were given battery-powered top hats that blinked "1908." When they "flipped their lids" at midnight, "1908" emblazoned the parapet of One Times Square.
Even though the Times moved to 229 West 43rd Street in 1913, the New Year's Eve festivities continued at One Times Square. Each year since, crowds have gathered in Times Square for the famous ball drop. For two years, however, there was no ball. 1942 and 1943 saw the United States observing the wartime "dimout" of lights in major cities. Still, crowds gathered in those years to ring in the new year, though with a minute of silence "followed by the ringing of chimes from sound trucks parked at the base of the tower - a harkening back to the earlier celebrations at Trinity Church, where crowds would gather to 'ring out the old, ring in the new.'"
In 1920 the original wooden ball was replaced by a 400-lb wrought-iron ball. In 1955 that ball was replaced by a 150-lb aluminum ball, which remained in place until the 1980s. For New Year's Eve 2000, the ball was redesigned by Waterford Crystal and Philips.
The 100th anniversary of that original ball drop - 2007 - saw Waterford Crystal and Philips create a new LED crystal ball that increased the brightness and color of the Ball (capitalized now, like "Bono" or "Cher."). The Centennial Ball weighs nearly six tons and is 12' in diameter featuring 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles and 32,256 Philips Luxeon LEDs. It sits above Times Square year-round, waiting for tonight.
A "Time-Ball" drops from a flagpole at the United States Naval Observatory every day at 12pm.
Ochs and his wife, Effie Wise Ochs, had one child, a daughter whom they named Iphigene. Iphigene married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who assumed publishing of the New York Times from August Ochs' death in 1935 until 1961. A Sulzberger has published the Times ever since.
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