"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Who Knows How History Will Really Judge Anything-- Other Than The Climate Change Deniers?
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Pretty much everyone I know agrees that history will judge the Trump enablers in Congress harshly, very harshly. But I don't know Ken Starr. Yesterday on Fox News' American Newsroom, Starr asserted that history-- which already judges him harshly for his failed attempt to railroad Bill Clinton out of office-- will judge congressional Democrats harshly. "The text of the Constitution," he said, "just entrusts [impeachment] to the good judgment, whether it's being exercised or not, to the House of Representatives. But history will, I think, judge this not well. It should judge it not well. [You] didn't have a full debate on the floor of the House-- and that just lends itself to, 'then to let's go to court and have this litigated.' And of course, the chairman then says, 'you go to court, you're in contempt.'"
Starr said that "For [Schiff to] essentially declare guilt... is another procedural irregularity. He should try his best... to give the appearance of fairness and open-mindedness. He's already declared the president substantively guilty, as well as procedurally guilty."
Republicans have been whining-- for no sane reason-- that the deposition phase of the impeachment inquiry was secret. It was secret because the Democrats were following House rules proposed by John Boehner and passed by the Republican-dominated House. Well, now they'll have nothing to whine about, right? Pelosi announced the public phase of the hearings will be voted on this week. You think Trump and his enablers want that? Yesterday, the National Review ran an op-ed by Matt Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute, explaining why Republican senators aren't going to vote for impeachment. He points out that they would need Republican voters to change their minds about Trump in order for even senators who loath him and want to vote to expel him to do so. He points to a column by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post for backup. "Samuelson acknowledges that public opinion is sticky. People don’t like changing their minds. 'People define themselves by their beliefs. It’s who they are and want to be.' Their views of Trump are like hardened concrete. 'At least for his core supporters, Trump has seemed remarkably adept at controlling the narrative of his presidency.' Samuelson offers two examples of shifts in public opinion: same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. The public changed its mind about both. But advocates of impeachment shouldn’t get their hopes up. The comparison between cultural issues and political figures is misguided [and] the timeline for cultural change is much longer than the political calendar. It took decades for the public to accept same-sex marriage and pot. The rising generation is responsible for much of the difference in attitude. House Democrats hope to vote on impeachment by the end of 2019. Absent some technological breakthrough, there is not enough time for a pro-conviction GOP youth movement to be born, come of age, and displace Senate Republicans."
The Democratic strategy, Samuelson writes, “is premised on the hope that further shocking revelations will alter the political climate. Trump’s image will be so shattered that Republican senators will feel free to join the revolt against him.” This assumes the aim of the Democratic strategy is Trump’s removal, and not simply weakening him ahead of reelection while putting at-risk Republican senators like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner in difficult positions. The record is clear that not much Donald Trump does shocks conservative Republicans. They are prepared to tolerate a high degree of instability and dysfunction simply to prevent the Democratic left from gaining power. They would have to reject this bargain rapidly, wildly, stunningly, and decisively for the Senate to remove the president from office. As Lincoln said: Public sentiment is everything.
A former assistant to Starr, now a member of Congress, told me these assertions yesterday were "bullshit piled on top of other bullshit. For three out of the last five federal officials who were impeached, there was no authorizing vote. And the impeachment target never has the right of cross-examination during the investigation, only during the Senate trial, and only when the Senate feels like it. The Supreme Court has ruled that an official being impeached has, basically, NO due process rights; the Fifth Amendment doesn’t even apply. I think that history already is judging Ken Starr harshly, and he knows it."
Remembering 9/14 (that's right, 9/14) with the one and only Mitch Waxman, who muses on "the American way"
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Mitch writes: "When I was out wandering around on the 11th in Long Island City, it was somewhat forefront in my mind that I wanted to get an uncommon shot of the Freedom Tower from Newtown Creek, which is why I was wandering around in spots which are normally avoided due to fear of arrest for trespassing. The shot above overlooks the DB Cabin railroad bridge and the mouth of Dutch Kills, incidentally." Note 1 World Trade Center -- once, but no longer, aka the Freedom Tower -- popping out of the Manhattan skyline in the background. [All photos by Mitch; click to enlarge.]
by Ken
Especially since my Wednesday-Friday-Sunday DWT schedule had me posting on 9/11, I gave a fair amount of thought to some sort of 9/11-themed post, only to decide that, even with a deadline looming, I didn't have anything sufficiently post-worthy to pull it off -- not even in the week when I finally paid a visit to the One World Observatory, occupying the top three floors of the finally-open-for-business One World Trade Center (which somewhere along the way lost its original designation of "Freedom Tower." I gather the point along the way was when the developers figured out that it would be a lot easier to rent out a building called One World Trade Center than one called Freedom Tower.)
So I've had a ball today with the Newtown Pentacle post by my intrepid NYC-gadding pal Mitch Waxman, titled "fear him," which features an assortment of predictably sensational photos he took on a rare Sunday of solo gadding on this 9/11. (He explains that, while he does frequently get to wander solo during the week, more often than not on the weekends he's leading tours or participating in other public events.)
It turns out that on Sunday Mitch was assailed by a quasi-biblical plague:
I was attacked by friggin Grasshoppers while in pursuit of some of the images in today's post. Grasshoppers, as in a biblical plague like swarm of giant bugs flying at me with murder on their minds -- a gang of grasshoppers in friggin Long Island City. . . .
It was while I was crouched down to get the shot above [which you can click on to enlarge -- Ed.] that the Grasshoppers grew angry at me, and hundreds of chitin clad bullets suddenly erupted from the brush. While I was flailing about in the buzzing crowd, a cramp developed in my left arm and one of my "spells" came upon me. I must've been laying on the tracks crying for a good half hour, cursing the fact that I hadn't decided on studio photography rather than urban landscape. The horror...
For a reason I'll explain in a moment, today Mitch has taken to looking back at what we might call This Day in History, 9/14, sprinkling these remembrances through the post:
On this day in 326 A.D., Emperor Constantine the Great's mom Helena (Helena was the Augusta Imperatrix) is said to have recovered a piece of the True Cross in Palestine, as well as finding the site of the burning bush and a few other odds and ends. She's a Saint now, the Augusta Imperatrix.
In 1741, George Frideric Handel's oratorio "Messiah" was completed on this day.
In 1812, an antichrist named Napoleon marched the Grand Armée of France into the City of Moscow on September 14th.
In 1901, President William McKinley died. The President was shot by an anarchist on Sept. 6th, and it was gangrene that ended up doing him in. McKinley's Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded him.
On Sept. 14th in 1959, a Soviet built probe called "Luna 2" crashed into the moon, making it the first man made object to reach the satellite.
In 1715, the French monk Dom Pérignon died on September 14th, and in 1836 - so did Aaron Burr. In the United States, September 14th is "National Eat a Hoagie day."
So what's got Mitch chronicling all those 9/14s past? Here again let me put together two paragraphs from Mitch's post, which you'll not take him back to 9/11 itself:
It occurs, since these shots were largely collected on the 11th of September, that there are certain calendrical markers which loom large in the collective mind. Unfortunately, these events tend to reflect recent history, whereas other moments which were once considered to be of maximum importance are forgotten. September 11th will be remembered for the events of 2001, of course, but what about September the 14th? . . .
Even on the day of the attacks, I mentioned to the little gaggle of refugees who had gathered at my home office in Upper Manhattan that it would be just a matter of two to three decades before Sept. 11th became a legal holiday of national remembrance like Labor Day. Within five to six decades, it would lose its significance, like Labor Day or Veterans Day have. Future generations would figure their vacations around the week between Labor Day and what will likely be called Remembrance Day, and there would be sales at retailers. It’s crass, but that’s the American way.
Yessir, that's the American way. And at the 15-year mark, Mitch's vision seems to be taking shape pretty much on schedule.
A new take on a favorite Long Island City-scape of Mitch's: Below grade in the foreground, a Long Island Rail Road train emerges from its tunnel under the East River, while overhead the subway viaduct waits for no. 1 7 [thanks for correction, D!] trains heading toward or coming from their tunnel not far from the LIRR one, and everywhere else in the photo the new supertall LIC skyscape takes shape. [Again, click to enlarge.]
President Watch: So that son of a bitch Warren G. Harding really did it!
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"Come 'n' get it, baby"?Don't believe your judgmental eyes. NYT reporter Peter Baker assures us that Warren G. Harding, who apparently had the ladies throwing themselves at him, "was seen by women of the time as attractive." Okay, noted. (Maybe when he was younger?)
by Ken
Our Noah just seems to find these things. Or maybe they find him, I don't know. Either way, among his pass-alongs this week was this:
WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.
Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding.
Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books. . . .
Noah has some observations to share, but we'll come to those later. Meanwhile, here I've been, blithely unaware that there's been all this controversy raging. Didn't everyone else also assume that ol' Warren G. done it? It seems not.
The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated.
“It’s sort of Shakespearean and operatic,” said Dr. Peter Harding, a grandnephew of the president and one of those who instigated the DNA testing that confirmed the relationship to Ms. Britton’s offspring. “This story hangs over the whole presidential history because it was an unsolved mystery.”
"The Nan Britton affair," Peter Baker explains, "was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House."
It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country.
While some historians dismissed Ms. Britton’s account, it remained part of popular lore. Pundits raised it as an analog after revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky. HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” made it a subplot a few years ago. The Library of Congress effectively recalled it last year when it released Harding’s love letters with another mistress, Carrie Phillips.
Ms. Britton, who was 31 years younger than Harding, had a harder time proving her relationship when she revealed it after his death because she had destroyed her own letters with him at his request and because his family insisted he was sterile.
WGH grand-nephew Peter Harding, 72, a physician in Big Sur, California, says he grew up buying the family's version. (“My father said this couldn’t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton.") But when he found a copy of The President’s Daughter, the book Nan Britton wrote (more about it later), among his father’s stuff and read it, belongings, "he concluded that the man described in it resembled the writer of the letters to Ms. Phillips, an expressive romantic who doted on women."
He enlisted his cousin Abigail Harding, a retired high school biology teacher in Worthington, Ohio, and they enlisted James Blaesing, whose mother was the disputed Harding offspring. And they turned to AncestryDNA ("a division of Ancestry.com, the genealogical website"), and its testing "found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding’s daughter."
Not subject to dispute, apparently, is that Nan Britton, who was from Marion, Ohio, where WGH was a newspaper publisher, had a 6½-year affair with him
She was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive. Ms. Britton hung pictures of Harding on her bedroom wall and sought his help finding a job. Harding agreed to meet her in New York. In July 1917, at age 20, she “became Mr. Harding’s bride,” as she put it, during a New York hotel room assignation.
For six and a half years they maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding’s Senate office, where Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support. He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president, repairing to “a small closet in the anteroom” in the West Wing where, she wrote, they “made love.”
Ms. Britton was devastated when he died in office in 1923 at the age of 57 and more so when she discovered there was no provision to support their daughter. In need of money and shut out by Harding’s family, she wrote “The President’s Daughter” in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters.
Which left Nan Britton and her family in a pretty horrible darkness that still enshrouds them. Grandson James Blaesing says that her relationship with Harding "was a love story and her family always believed her."
“She loved him until the day she died,” he said. “When she talked about him, she would get the biggest smile on her face. She just loved this guy. He was everything.”
Mr. Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades. They were followed, their house was broken into and items were stolen to try to prove the relationship was a lie. “I went through this growing up in school,” said Mr. Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Ore. “They belittled him and her.”
The tests, he said, finally vindicate his grandmother. “I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong,” he said.
NOAH WAS ALSO STRUCK BY THIS BUSINESS OF WGH
BEING "SEEN BY WOMEN OF THE TIME AS ATTRACTIVE"
"Judging from the photo of 'The Hard One,' " he says,
I guess women of the day ate a lot of strange mushrooms. Rudolph Valentino he wasn't!
Maybe it was just the fact that many women are attracted by power and status, all wrapped up in a nice suit. We've always heard about what goes on in the Senate cloak room, but all Harding had was a coat closet.
"Not to cheapen [Nan's} love for the man," Noah says, "but she may have really just been an obsessed groupie. Clearly, she had stalker attributes. She was 20. He was 50. What's a guy to do? The job has a lot of stress." Noah points out that Warren G. "was a republican the first time republicans went crazy."
Planting the seeds of economic disaster and nurturing them isn't easy. Cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy of the day was a fight. So was fighting to reduce veterans' benefits (Sound familiar?).
"Who knows?" says Noah. "Harding may have even had some sort of sense that his time on Earth would be short."
Spiritualism was all the rage in his time. Maybe he'd received a message from beyond and decided to go for the gusto. We've always heard about what goes on in the Senate cloak room, but all Harding had was a coat closet, so, let's have a little sympathy for the man!
"I give him credit, though," Noah says. "He was no Bill Cosby!" He also can't help flashing ahead in time to a more recent president's misadventures with a young woman.
I'm struck by the fact that Harding's mistress had no absolute proof and paid dearly for it, as did the love child. Fast-forward 75 years or so and wonder how Monica Lewinsky's life could have been made even worse than she made it by those who would have destroyed her credibility had she not kept that dress.
The Stonewall Inn becomes NYC's first landmark designated solely on LGBT-historic significance
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NYC has its first landmark "based solely upon LGBT history."
by Ken
It seems only appropriate to get the news from the Greenwich Village Socity for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), undoubtedly the city's most energetic preservation organization, and a major player in a noteworthy development it reported yesterday:
History was made and preserved today, as the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously to approve landmark designation of the Stonewall Inn at 51-53 Christopher Street, the first such site the Commission has landmarked based solely upon LGBT history. GVSHP first proposed the Stonewall for landmark designation in early 2014, and spearheaded the campaign to get the City to take this action. This is an important step forward in not only recognizing the critical role this site has played in civil rights history, but in ensuring that it will be preserved for generations to come.
There's been a lot of attention focused on the Landmarks Preservation Commission this year as it celebrates its 50th birthday -- and as the community watches to see whether the de Blasio-appointed LPC will demonstrate a tad more conviction than the LPC did under the heavily pro-business thumbs of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, when its rabidly pro-developers' ideology might have made it more aptly called the Anti-Landmarks Preservation Commission. So it's interesting to note that the Stonewall individual-landmark designation was unanimous.
There are various criteria applied to the landmarking process, generally juggling some combination of architectural and historical significance. The designation of the Stonewall site clearly had nothing to do with architectural significance, especially since the building has been significantly altered, generally a red flag when it comes to landmarking consideration, and designation based entirely on historical significance is always a harder sell -- and, obviously, that much harder a sell when the proposed recognition is, as the GVSHP statement puts it, "based solely upon LGBT history."
For anyone who's aware that the site was already in the LPC-designated Greenwich Village Historic District, the question may arise as to why it needed landmarking at all. Bloomberg News, in its report, turned to GVSHP Executive Director Andrew Berman:
The vote by the Landmarks Preservation Committee closes a loophole that might have allowed a redevelopment or demolition of the bar at 51-53 Christopher St., where a police raid on June 28, 1969, led to six days of sometimes-violent protests, the first major uprising against law enforcement harassment of gay men and women.
While the site's location in the Greenwich Village Historic District required that any changes to the building be approved by the landmarks panel, that designation was made two months before the demonstrations. The site's social significance wasn't included in any reports commissioners use to approve or deny alterations, according to Andrew Berman, executive director for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
"Specific things that we want to make sure are protected are not noted, and potentially one could interpret the building as not being an important building," Mr. Berman said in an interview before the vote.
Bloomberg went on to report:
Testimony in support of landmark status focused on the historical impact of the events at the bar.
"To me, the Stonewall Inn represents what Selma represents to the civil rights movement and what Seneca Falls represents to the women's rights movement," New York City Public Advocate Letitia James said before the commission. "It must be protected from rapacious developers who would destroy the history and what this place represents."
The Stonewall Inn was added to the New York state and national registers of historic places in 1999 and the following year was made a National Historic Landmark, two largely symbolic distinctions. Today, a gay bar of the same name with different owners occupies the space at 53 Christopher St., with QQ Nails and Spa in the other half of the original space.
THE NEED TO PROTECT STONEWALL AND OTHER SITES
GVSHP's Andrew Berman had explained the anomalous situation of Stonewall and other sites of great LGBT-historic importance in a January 2013 letter to the LPC:
In recent years, the LPC has begun to include references to LGBT history in designation reports for new historic districts in Greenwich Village and the East Village, as well as some individual landmarks. The designation report for the just-designated South Village Historic District contains, for the first time, a section specifically dedicated to the LGBT history of the district -- a welcome development.
However, this is not the case for our city’s older historic district designation reports, which contain some of the most important sites in New York City and the world in connection to LGBT history. As a result, these incredibly important sites enjoy no formal recognition or protection from the LPC on the basis of their LGBT history. And in spite of some very important historic designations made at the State and Federal level specifically around LGBT history, no individual sites in New York City have been granted landmark or historic district designation on the basis of their significance to the struggle for LGBT rights, though some tremendously important LGBT history sites have been allowed to be demolished, such as 186 Spring Street and the Provincetown Playhouse and Apartments.
First among the "very important steps the LPC could take right away to correct these conspicuous omissions," Berman wrote, was individual recognition of Stonewall, "not currently formally recognized by the LPC for its highly significant role in relation to LGBT history."
[T]he existing designation report for the Greenwich Village Historic District, which dates to two months prior to the riots, makes no mention of these incredibly important historic events and the impact they had and continue to have across the city, country, and world. Thus the LPC is not currently obligated to acknowledge or recognize this history in considering how to regulate, preserve and protect this singularly important building, leaving the site open to potential future changes which could compromise or erase that history.
FOR GVSHP, THIS IS JUST THE FIRST STEP
Not surprisingly GVSHP, while naturally pleased with the individual landmarking of the Stonewall site, sees this as just the first step in the battle. Yesterday's statement went on:
GVSHP is continuing the fight to get the Commission to consider three other sites of importance to LGBT civil rights history for landmark designation:
• Julius’ Bar at 159 West 10th Street, the oldest gay bar in New York City and the site of the first civil disobedience for LGBT rights in 1966, a protest against NY State’s de facto prohibition on gay bars. Built in 1826, Julius’ has been located here since 1864.
• The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center at 208 West 13th Street, one of the oldest such community centers in the world, and the birthplace of ACT-UP and many other highly influential activist and service organizations. Built in 1869, expanded in 1899, it is the former home of P.S. 16 and the Food and Maritime Trades Vocational High School.
• The (former) Gay Activists Alliance Firehouse, 99 Wooster Street, home of one of the most impactful LGBT groups of the post-Stonewall era, whose “zaps” and face-to-face confrontations influenced generations of activist and political groups. The GAA was located in this abandoned city firehouse until a firebombing forced them out in 1974. Designed in 1881 by acclaimed architect Napoleon LeBrun.
99 Wooster, site of the former Gay Activists Alliance Firehouse
GVSHP and Casa Vera productions has also created a website dedicated to the effort to protect these sites of significance to LGBT history here. Learn more about the Village’s LGBT history here.
If you want to visit the museum on the site of Teddy Roosevelt's birth and boyhood, you'll have to wait a year
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Regardless of what the National Park Service says, Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace hasn't existed for nearly 200 years. For the next year, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site -- on the site of TR's birthplace -- will be closed for renovation.
GRAMERCY -- Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace is getting a major renovation to upgrade its fire and electric systems and make the museum more ADA accessible, officials said.
Since all things Roosevelt are hot now, in the wake of the most recent Ken Burns docu-series, I thought fans would want to know about this not-quite-breaking news. But before we proceed, we have to correct something the writer of DNAinfo New York piece herself knows is incorrect, as she makes clear deeper into the piece.
The brownstone — which features five period rooms, two museum galleries and a bookstore — had been demolished in 1916. It was then rebuilt in 1919 by the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association with the help of Roosevelt's widow and sister in a bid to look as similar to the original as possible.
So, notwithstanding the heading you'll find at the National Park Service Web page linked in that DNAinfo NY opening paragraph, as illustrated above, what has been closed is not TR's birthplace, which hasn't existed for almost a century -- and even then what stood on the site didn't bear much resemblance to the "birthplace" as young Teddy would have known it.
What's more, half of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site was ever the site of TR's birthplace, though the other half of the site does have a historical connection. The National Park Service knows all about this too, because within its "Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace" Web page, there's a page that gets the story pretty much right, as far as I can tell. (This is the page linked at "Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association" in the later paragraph above.)
On November 30, 1919, the Woman's Roosevelt Memorial Association paid off the $25,043.63 mortgage on 28 E. 20th Street, thereby acquiring ownership of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace, as well as the adjoining 26 E. 20th St. property that was once owned by Theodore's uncle, Robert Roosevelt. This transaction completed the first step in a long process of restoring and renovating the late president's childhood home into a memorial. However, 28 an 26 E. 20th Street in 1919 was a much different place than it had been when Theodore was born there in 1858.
With the evolution of the Gramercy area into an increasingly commercial district in the mid-late 19th century, the Roosevelts decided to move uptown to 6 W. 57th Street in 1873. By 1898, the once neo-gothic brownstones of 20th Street had been transformed into storefronts. While celebrating TR's 47th birthday in 1905, the Roosevelt Home Club decided to buy 28 E. 20th Street, in hopes of preserving its initial structure from further renovations and maintaining the site as a National Landmark. However, in 1916, the group let go of the building, and it was then transformed into a two-story café. Roosevelt declined the opportunity to preserve the mantelpieces or any other part of the house before its demolition.
In 1919, shortly after TR's death, the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association purchased the 20th street properties and established very specific plans for the buildings' restorations. 28 E. 20th Street was to be a meticulous reproduction of Roosevelt's home as it was in his childhood, complete with family portraits, original furniture, and other Roosevelt heirlooms. Any original pieces that could not be salvaged were to be reproduced exactly. The 26 E. 20th Street home would be renovated into a museum and a library, holding influential works in addition Theodore's own writings. The fourth and fifth floors of both buildings would hold auditoriums where New York school children could attend assemblies on the history of the country and the state, as well as the life and work of the Theodore Roosevelt. The Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association wanted to transform the buildings into more than just museums; they wanted to create an interactive experience to promote the principles that helped shape Theodore's strong character.
On January 6, 1921, the second anniversary of Theodore's death, General Leonard Wood, former commander of the Rough Riders, laid the cornerstone of the Roosevelt House, officially marking the renovation commencement. The memorial was formally opened to the public on October 27, 1923, which would have been Theodore's 65th birthday. Three hundred people attended the opening ceremony inside the newly restored house. Tributes were made from General Wood, President Calvin Coolidge, James Garfield, Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Cabinet; Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania, Chief Forester during the Roosevelt presidency; and Theodore Roosevelt, TR's eldest son.
As articulated by the Woman's Roosevelt Memorial Association, the Roosevelt house was to be a living testament to the president's great American spirit; "a place where his voice may, year after year, be clearly and strongly heard". The association hoped the late president's former home would promulgate Theodore's ideals of courage, fairness, service, and perseverance, especially to the country's youth. The memorial would be national center for Americanization and an inspiration of greatness for generations to come.
So the cumbersome verbiage of the name "Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site" actually makes the thing correct, in the same way that the cumbersome name "Federal Hall National Memorial," for the building at the intersection of Wall, Nassau, and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan's Financial District, is a correct designation for the building that now stands on the site of the Federal Hall where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States in 1789 -- but "Federal Hall" is not correct.
Standing there on his pedestal in front of Federal Hall National Memorial, George Washington is probably wondering what happened to the "Federal Hall" on whose balcony he famously took the presidential oath of office.
And here there's no issue of "look-alike" reconstruction. It's hardly a secret that the building that was known as Federal Hall in 1789 (built in 1700 in smaller form as NYC's second City Hall was torn down, after going through several other uses (there was hardly any call for a Federal Hall in NYC once the capital was moved to Philadelphia and then Washington, DC), including once again serving as City Hall, in 1812, when the new City Hall (still in service) opened. The building that replaced it, a decade in the building before its opening in 1842 as the first U.S. Customs House, was never meant to bear any resemblance to Federal Hall; its significance-by-location was recognized only much later, with its designation in 1939 as Federal Hall National Memorial National Historic Site. (Now there's a mouthful.)
No, the cars aren't original either.
The "TR's birthplace" situation more closely resembles that of a different famous Lower Manhattan site, also associated with George Washington, "Fraunces Tavern." Visitors flock to the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets, maybe a quarter-mile south of Federal Hall National Memorial, and often think they're looking at the historic tavern that was a favorite haunt of George when he was in New York, the Queen's Head (for the portrait of Queen Charlotte on the building front), run by his supporter Samuel Fraunces. The thing is, the building that housed the historic tavern, after an additional century-plus of extensive damage and alteration, was finally slated for demolition. What's there now, completed in 1907, is a purported "replica" of the original -- a neat trick considering what sketchy knowledge there was of what the original looked like. (Just to confuse matters further, the building-that-isn't-Fraunces Tavern was designated as a NYC landmark in 1965. Since 1977 so has been the lovely block of old buildings it anchors on Pearl Street.)
No doubt the replica of TR's birthplace is a good deal more plausible, since presumably better information is available, and/or more plausibly conjecturable, about the actual birthplace, including its state when the future NYC police commissioner, NYS governor, and U.S. president was born, in 1858.
AS FOR THE RENOVATIONS TO THE SITE --
National Park Service spokesman Liam Strain describes the rehabbing of the TR birthplace site as "very delicate work," reports DNAinfo NY's Sybile Penhirin.
Strain said crews began removing artifacts from the home and relocating them to a secure facility and plan to begin renovation work this summer.
"We need to do work that doesn’t destroy the fabric of the home, it’s not like a private home where you could just remove walls. We have to be as minimally invasive as possible." . . .
The federal agency, which had been wanting to do the renovation work for the past several years, recently received 3.7 million to conduct "necessary and important improvements" at the historical site, officials said.
The museum's entire electric system, which dates back to when it opened to the public in the 1920's, will be replaced, Strain said. The fire alarm and sprinklers will also be swapped out for modern ones, which will be less likely to damage the museum's collection in the case they go off, he added.
The changes will also make the house more accessible to mobility-impaired visitors by adding two chair-lifts, one on the stairwell at the entrance level and another one that will go from the third floor to the auditorium on the fourth floor.
There is currently an elevator in the building, but it only goes up to the third floor of the four-story building. In addition, the auditorium hasn't been used for at least three years because the space wasn't accessible to everyone, Liam said.
A contractor for the work hasn't been chosen yet. NPS will put out a request for bids in July, with work expected to commence in August, Strain said.
Roosevelt, the only United States President born in the city, was born in the brownstone in 1858 and lived there until he was 14 years old.
Brooklyn Waterfront Watch: Stacking coffee as high as an elephant's eye -- on the eve of Prohibition
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"Coffee in Brooklyn," c1920 (click to enlarge). On the flip
side of the photo there's a link to Prohibition! Read on.
by Ken
Of course you know all about "Postcard Thursday" from the Inside the Apple team of Michelle and James Nevius, right? Well, they're not the only ones regularly sending out great archival pictures. The Brooklyn Historical Society dips into its overflowing archives for a "Photo of the Week," and for some reason I can't stop looking at this week's, titled "Coffee in Brooklyn." I don't know, maybe it's the coffee-hoisting getup of the gent on the right, from boots to hat, or maybe it's the totality of the fashion statement made by him and his partner in hoisting. Or maybe it's trying to figure out what exactly our power lifters are going to do with that coffee bag or whatever it is they've got in high-hoist mode.
The photo is presented by BHS digitization associate Tess Colwell:
Artisanal coffee roasters have been popping up everywhere in Brooklyn in recent years, but it might come as a surprise that Brooklyn has a long history of coffee roasting that spans long before it was considered hip. The photo of the week was taken around 1920 in a warehouse at Bush Terminal (now Industry City) and features two men lifting a large bag of coffee. To me, the most interesting part of this photograph is actually the verso (i.e. the text written on the back of the photograph). It speaks to the sentiment towards prohibition at the time and the opportunity for growth in the coffee industry. It reads,
“MORE COFFEE DRINKING WHEN NATIONAL PROHIBITION COMES — A STORY OF PRODUCTION. Stacking coffee in a big warehouse at the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn, N.Y. Coffee from Central America. Scientists say that every adult takes some kind of a stimulant, and coffee is the most widely used of all the stimulants. When all traffic in intoxicants is stopped, millions of people will drink more coffee. The consumption of coffee will increase greatly through the lunch room trade. Hundreds of thousands of people will go into lunch rooms and eat pastry and drink strong coffee instead of going to saloons for drinks, when prohibition puts an end to all saloons in this country.”
While it’s not entirely true that prohibition led to increased coffee consumption, it’s true that the popularity of coffee was on the rise. In the early 20th century, Brooklyn was roasting more coffee than any other place in America. John Arbuckle (1839-1912) is credited as pioneering the way we purchase coffee today—roasting and grinding beans onsite, packaging coffee in one pound bags, and marketing it to different consumers around the country. By 1909, Arbuckle was roasting about 25 million pounds of coffee a month. Arbuckle Brothers continued to roast and store coffee at the Brooklyn waterfront factory until 1930, when it was sold to General Foods.
BHS has teamed up with Brooklyn Bridge Park to produce a Brooklyn Waterfront History website, which promises "much more about the history of coffee in Brooklyn, as well as other interesting historical facts about the waterfront." You can begin exploring BHS's online photo gallery here. Finally, to receive BHS's "Photo of the Week" along with news about the society's rich assortment of public programs (the BHS building itself, on Pierrepont Street in Downtown Brooklyn, is a landmark and well worth a visit in its own right), you can sign up here.
On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. To honor that achievement, the U.S. Postal Service issued the above airmail (or "air mail") stamp on June 11, just three weeks after the historic landing. That was the same day Lindbergh received the Distinguished Flying Cross, but five days before he collected his $25,000 prize from Raymond Orteig for making the flight.
[More about the flight, and a pic of Lucky Lindy, onsite.]
History Watch: As Dr. Henry Chickenkisser* said so famously, "History is just one damned thing after another"
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"For more on Robert Grossman's should-be-legendary character Dr. Henry Chickenkisser and his should-be-legendary quote, check out this April 2007 post.
by Ken
I've mentioned before the free writing workshop for seniors offered on Wednesday afternoons by the New York Transit Museum in association with the New York Writers Coalition, and I couldn't resist the new session in the spring-summer program calendar," which started this week. Hey, it beats most anything else I could be doing these Wednesday afternoons. Like sitting at my desk, to pick a not-quite-random example.
(So far for spring it's a small group, so there's still room for newcomers for the session, which runs seven more weeks, through June 10, at the Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn. If you're interested, call Elyse at the Transit Museum, 718-694-1867. You can tell her Ken suggested you call, but she'll be just as nice to you if you don't. And if you have questions about how the Transit Museum is defining "senior," talk to Elyse. The thing is, it really is free, no strings attached. And the writing doesn't have to be transit-themed. The museum itself is there to inspire us if we choose to be so inspired -- we usually write in an ancient IRT car with wicker seats which is part of the museum's collection.)
For the first session Eileen, our instructor from the NY Writers Coalition, in keeping with the transit theme, passed around a bunch of photos from the 1964-65 World's Fair, and invited us to take off from that in any way we wished -- or, if we preferred, to ignore the prompt altogether. As it happens, with last summer marking the 75th anniversary of the 1939-40 fair and the 50th anniversary of the 1964-65 one, over this past year I've done a scad of tours looking at what's left of the two fairs, trying to conjure up what was once there, and of course exploring Flushing Meadows Corona Park itself. So that was my point of departure for this half-hour meditation, I guess, on history.
Since I had to type the thing up anyway, I could hardly resist the temptation to make a few tiny improvements and some amplifications, but this is pretty much what I wrote in pencil on Wedneday. (We're not allowed to use pens in the irreplaceable subway cars housed at the Transit Museum.) I realize this is kind of like posting the thing on my refrigerator, but I don't have any refrigerator magnets anyway.
Everything could have been different
Maybe if I had gotten to the World's Fair, everything that came after would have been different. No, not the 1939-40 fair -- how old do you think I am? Yes, I know that the 1964-65 one wasn't really a world's fair. It wasn't sanctioned by whichever sanctioning body sanctions world's fairs (say, I wonder how you get a job on one of those commissions; that sounds like an easy enough gig), and the Soviet-bloc countries steered clear, and so, I think, did most of the Third World ones. Still, that's the fair I could have gone to, the 1964-65 one, if it hadn't been such a long schlepp from Brooklyn. That excuse got me through the summer of 1964, and by 1965 I didn't need an excuse to not do anything.
I have, however, paid multiple visits to the site today, in the world of 2015, which you'd think would be the "World of Tomorrow" that was celebrated in 1964-65. It isn't, though -- either onsite or in the world at large. Even Shea Stadium, which was built at the same time as the home of the New York Mets, is no longer part of the World of Tomorrow. We have Citi Field instead, and that's just as good, I guess. Soon, if the developers have their way, we'll have a shopping mall -- right there on land that's actually part of Flushing Meadows Corona Park (as was Shea Stadium and as is Citi Field). Yessiree, a shopping mall on NYC parkland -- is that the World of Today or what? Will it also be the World of Tomorrow? Care to guess?
The old Corona Ash Dump
Of course, the fact that we have Flushing Meadows Corona Park, a truly great park, is owing to the 1939-40 fair -- the real world's fair. That's when Robert Moses, who presided over both fairs, cleared the giant ash heap that we all remember from The Great Gatsby, drained and filled a lot of marshland, and did much other rejiggering of the landscape and waterways, with a view to leaving a big new park behind when the fair was done. That was the good side of Robert Moses, who wore, among his dozens of hats, that of NYC parks commissioner. Both the good and the bad sides of Robert Moses played a crucial role in shaping the real World of Today, not to be confused with the World of Tomorrow from back in the day.
No, we're not so good at predicting the future. But I read just recently a piece that argued that we're not much good either at predicting the present based on the past, which the piece argued is what historians do. Even having all that past laid out for them, and knowing how it all turned out, at least so far, historians can't agree on why it all happened or what might have changed those outcomes.
So I feel perfectly entitled to speculate that everything would have been different for me if I'd gotten to the 1964-65 fair. I'll bet I would have enjoyed those Belgian waffles that were the runaway hit of the show, which are certainly part of the World of Today, thank goodness. I would have enjoyed them, that is, provided the lines weren't too bad. I don't remember what I've heard about lines at the 1939 or 1964 fair, but we know that there were especially popular pavilions, and I expect that they involved pretty substantial lines. How many things are there that are really worth enduring long lines for? I mean, apart from the things where you have no choice -- like the truly horrible old days of the Department of Motor Vehicles, where doing a routine license renewal could be an all-day project.
The DMV has actually fixed that, though, with License X-Press. It's not nearly so bad now; it can be almost easy. That's a World of Tomorrow we can believe in. But, even knowing that transportation was a favorite subject at the 1964-65 fair, and that given Mr. Moses's predilections, "transportation" meant cars, when it wasn't planes or other flying craft, I'm doubtful that there was an exhibit devoted to a revolutionary new way, in the World of Tomorrow, to renew your driver's license.
Now, addressing the world of 2065, I can say confidently, how the heck would I know? I wish I were more optimistic, but maybe there are people working now, or people who will come along soon, to make the prospects look less grim. One thing I know is that I could go for one of those Belgian waffles.
In April 2014, former Staten Islander Martha Flynn Winecki e-mailed this photo of herself eating a Belgian waffle at the 1964 New York World's Fair to the Staten Island Advance from Cambridge, England.
No, not the actual posting
BONUS: "LOOKING FOR LOVE"
After we'd read and commented on our writings -- always supportively, focusing on "what's working for us" -- we had 15 minutes left in the session, so Eileen suggested a five-minute effort taking off from a posting she'd seen somewhere around town by a 60-ish gentleman, with a suitably unglamorous picture, who declared himself "Looking for Love," which had touched her with its apparent sincerity in declaring a wish to eschew games and blah-blah-blah -- you know, all the things that are said by people who post postings purporting to be looking for love. As always, we could take this any way we liked, including perhaps just a list of words that were suggested to us by it, or write something else entirely.
Not all of us were as touched as Eileen by the plea from our gentleman poster, to whom she had given the name "Albert." What I wrote. It got a couple of laughs. Here it is.
Yeah, Albert, we're all looking for something. Only we don't all deface public property as part of our quest. Or were you planning to remove those goddamn postings yourself? As for love, you appear to have been around the block once or twice, at least. Am I guessing correctly that in all this time nobody has stepped up to the plate yet? Is there maybe a lesson in that? Thanks for sharing.
Thinking about the "Godfather" films in the spirit of "the one-dot theory of history"
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Can we imagine The Godfather without Brando? Or Coppola?
"History is the prediction of the present. Historians explain why things turned out the way they did. Since we already know the outcome, this might seem a simple matter of looking back and connecting the dots. But there is a problem: too many dots. Even the dots have dots. Predicting the present is nearly as hard as predicting the future."
And I wonder whether what Louis Menand has in this wonderful piece to say about the inherent difficulties of writing history also apply to fictional history (not to mention the history of fiction).
Anyway, it's interesting approaching, or should I say re-approaching, the Godfather films (or at least the two great ones, I and II) with Menand's mediation on history fresh in mind. You really need to experience for yourself the way he uses the "too many dots" image to explain why none of the many ways we've devised for looking at history prove "wholly persuasive."
Here's just a taste:
No historian lines up all the dots. Every work of history is a ridiculously selective selection from the universe of possible dots. What the historian is claiming is that these are the particular dots that lead us from there to here, or from time step 1 to time step 1.1. Lots of other stuff happened, the historian will agree. But, if these things hadn’t happened, then life as we know it wouldn’t be, well, as we know it.
This can be an existentially entertaining thought—that, but for some fluky past event, experience would be entirely, or at least interestingly, different. We tend to imagine our own lives that way, a story of lucky breaks, bullets dodged, roads diverged on a snowy evening, and the like. Speculating about sparks that failed to ignite versus sparks that did and contingencies that failed to materialize versus contingencies that did is one of the reasons people like to write history and like to read it. There is even, to appeal to this taste, the subgenre of counterfactual history, in which Napoleon conquers Russia, or the Beatles give “The Ed Sullivan Show” a pass.
The problem: just too many dots. Which perhaps explains the appeal of the the "single dot," or "the x that changed the world" form, where everything that followed is explained according to the single person or event or year championed by the explainer of the moment. It's a form that Menand suggests is not only the most enjoyable kind of history to read but probably the most enjoyable to write.
They try to make the course of human events turn on a single phenomenon or a single year. Recent works in the single-phenomenon category include books on bananas, fracking, cod (that’s correct, the fish), the Treaty of Versailles, pepper, the color mauve, and (hmm) the color indigo. (All right, who’s the baddest color?) In the single-year category, we have books on 33, 1492 (huh?), 1816 (long story involving a volcano), 1944, 1945, 1959 (even though, without going to Wikipedia, you probably can’t come up with two important things that happened in 1959), 1968, 1969, and 1989.
This is part of Menand's way of leading up to writing about W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began (California), "a worthy, informative, and sporting attempt to convince us that the world we live in was crucially shaped by things that happened in 1995" -- to which he adds parenthetically: "Campbell insists that there is a distinction between 'the x that changed the world' books and his own 'the year the future began' book, although it's hard to grasp."
"The book is not completely persuasive," Menand writes, "but that's not important. None of the 'x that changed the world' books are completely persuasive, for the reason that all dots have dots of their own." After all, "Whatever happened in 33 or 1959 or 1995 never would have happened unless certain things had happened in 32, 1958, and 1994. And so on, back into the protozoic slime. All points are turning points." Nevertheless, he argues, the valuable books of the single-dot genre are valuable because the make us look more closely at people, events, or whatever that we might not otherwise.
So how does this apply to the Godfather films? Well, only vaguely, since there are, after all, many fewer dots to connect in this species of history. Mostly it applies because this afternoon and evening I'm headed for screenings of both Godfather and Godfather II at the Museum of the Moving Image, in a series called See It Big, which in the case of these pictures I haven't in quite a while, and am really eager to. Only, to say that I haven't "seen them big" recently doesn't mean that I haven't seen them recently. In fact, I've never stopped watching them. I had them, and regularly watched them, on VHS and then on Laserdisk and now on Blu-ray -- and also the clever VHS Godfather Chronicles, which rearranged I and II in chronological format, gathering the "prequel" portions of II and placing them before I and gathering the "sequel" portions and placing them after.
For the record, I also have Godfather III on VHS, Laserdisk, and Blu-ray, and I'm here to tell you that I can actually watch the thing (though somehow I don't believe I've quite gotten around to watching the Blu-ray yet). As I've written here before, there are interesting things in it. But for our present purposes let's just say that in Godfather II Francis Ford Coppola made maybe the greatest sequel to anything ever, and then in Godfather III he didn't.
In case you hadn't detected it, I'm a little nervous. Am I possibly just a bit Godfather-ed out? I guess I'll find out.
Possibly by way of mental distraction, I found myself pondering a side question, which it occurred to me later is of the "single-dot" variety: Would the whole Godfather kaboodle have been what it was without Brando?
There is, of course, a vast literature about the Godfather films, which I've mostly tried to avoid dipping into. But I know enough to know that Paramount fought Coppola on almost all of his casting choices for I, generally preferring nice, safely bankable Hollywood types, and was prepared to dump him from the project over his fascination with Brando, of whom they were scared stiff, seeing him as a has-been who would make it impossible to get the picture made.
Honestly, I suppose there were any number of actors who could have made the part work. In much the same way that when Coppola went looking for an actor play the young Vito Corleone in Godfather II, with no "young Brando" available, he found Robert De Niro. There might even have been other actors who would have made the Godfather himself memorable. But, I'm thinking, not "Brando-memorable." And just think how much his presence saturates the Godfather films in which he didn't appear.
At some point in my idle speculations I found myself inadvertently bumping back into the question, what would the Godfather film(s) have been without Francis Ford Coppola? Certainly the first film would have been made, and with whatever version of a script Mario Puzo would have written for another director (I find it interesting that, for all my Godfather obsession, I've never been impelled to read Puzo himself), it probably would have been successful, maybe even very successful. But would it have achieved anything like the stature of the film Coppola made? And even if it had been successful enough to spawn a sequel, is it possible to imagine one of the quality of the one we got?
Which is all the more intriguing if we look at the rest of Coppola's filmography, where the closest thing there is to a point of interest is the mess that is Apocalypse Now. Hmm. What can I say except that in the grand scheme of thigns, when you make films of the quality of Godfather I and II, you really don't owe anyone any explanations or excuses.
And you know, it's been a long time since I looked at the Godfather Chronicles version. Yeah, I've only got it on VHS, but still . . . .
