http://www.cityofsmoke.com New York History, Commentary, and Culture Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:23:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1383 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1383#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:21:06 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1383 In his eight decades, Sadakichi Hartmann fried eggs with Walt Whitman, discussed verse with Stéphane Mallarmé, and drank with John Barrymore, who once described him as "a living freak presumably sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly." Critic, poet, novelist, playwright, dancer, actor, and swaggering egotist, Hartmann might lift your watch Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1383/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1467 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1467#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:56:09 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1467 He wrote near the end that his life was divided into four rivers: writing, theater, body, and action. He memorialized all of it through photographs. Some were conventional. When Yukio Mishima came to New York with his wife for a belated honeymoon in 1960, they were photographed on the Staten Island ferry and before the Manhattan skyline, like any tourist couple. Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1467/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1638 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1638#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:24:02 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1638 At her death, the Witch of Wall Street was worth more than J. P. Morgan, and nearly all of it was in cash. Yet Hetty Green had worn the same dress for thirty years and lived in squalor. The Witch's son Ned was another matter, a six-foot, four-inch, 300-pound eccentric Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1638/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/407 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/407#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:38:01 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=407 The Royal Governors of the Province of New York, the men who ruled here in the names of Britain's kings and queens before the Revolutionary War, are forgotten. Place-names recall some. Fort Tryon Park bears the last royal governor's name. Staten Island's Dongan Hills commemorates Col. Thomas Dongan Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/407/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/363 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/363#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:53:41 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=363 Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, a successful gynecologist, his wife Susie, and their sons Homer and Langley moved from Murray Hill to 2078 Fifth Avenue, at 128 Street, in 1909. The house was a three-story brownstone mansion, with mahogany paneling Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/363/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/348 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/348#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:36:11 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=348 He went four times around the world and inspired Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. He devised the financing scheme for the transcontinental railroad, lobbied Congress to enact it, and made a fortune from it. And at the end, nearly penniless and living in a Greenwich Village single Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/348/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/340 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/340#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:08:14 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=340 In December 1951, a ninety-year-old man was evicted from 157 East 34th Street. The building's former live-in janitor and furnace tender, his old age and ill-health had precluded satisfactory performance and the landlord had fired him. Out on the sidewalk, his books and papers, neatly tied and wrapped in brown paper, were piled six feet high, eleven feet across, and forty feet long. Major Honoré Joseph Jaxon told reporters that Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/340/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/611 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/611#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:17:42 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=611 Throughout his adult life, Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman working for pure commission. If he didn't sell, he didn't eat. Happily, his diverse and insatiable appetites were all the incentives he needed to earn a million dollars a year. Half a century after his death in Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/611/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/292 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/292#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:04:51 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=292 In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, those 60 years between 1890 and 1950, New York had as many as 14 English-language dailies, with telegraphs and telephones to speed the news-gathering, even as high-speed presses printed tens of thousands of newspapers an hour. The radio was not Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/292/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/285 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/285#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:53:47 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=285 In the summer of 1916, while staying in a New Hampshire cottage, Aleister Crowley crucified a frog that he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth. The man who called himself the Beast 666 offered it gold, frankincense and myrrh; he worshipped it as God incarnate and then arrested and charged it Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/285/feed 0