https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Sat, 26 Dec 2015 02:30:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1638 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1638#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2015 23:24:02 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1638/feed 1 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/547 Sat, 31 Jan 2015 06:17:17 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=547 Continue reading "Wilson Mizner, Champion Wiseacre"]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/407 Fri, 30 Jan 2015 16:38:01 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/340 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/340#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2015 04:08:14 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/340/feed 1 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1383 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:21:06 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1467 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:56:09 +0000 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. ]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/363 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:53:41 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/348 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:36:11 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/611 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:17:42 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/292 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:04:51 +0000 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]]>