https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Sat, 26 Dec 2015 02:28:06 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1458 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1458#respond Sun, 29 Nov 2015 03:57:09 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1458 On November 7, 1876 Samuel Jones Tilden, Democrat, of New York, won the election to succeed Ulysses S. Grant as President of the United States. On March 5, 1877 a Republican from Ohio placed his hand on the Bible, looked the Chief Justice in the eye, and repeated, "I, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, do solemnly swear..." The elections of 1876 are unique: the only time when we know the result was fixed and the loser entered the White House.]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1458/feed 0 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/868 Tue, 03 Feb 2015 21:40:33 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=868 Occasionally, we think about investments we  could have made that might have made us rich. Armed with clairvoyance, who would not have sunk the farm into Microsoft, back when Bill Gates was a nebbish? But we probably would have put our money into AT&T, U.S. Steel or Western]]> 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/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/1114 Sat, 07 Feb 2009 15:51:44 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1114 James Aloysius Harden-Hickey, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire by command of the Supreme Pontiff, editor, novelist, swordsman, and adventurer, who would proclaim himself James I, Prince of Trinidad, and die by his own hand, was born in San Francisco on December 8, 1854. ]]> 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/1380 Thu, 01 May 2003 03:29:42 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1380 On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before]]>