https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Sat, 26 Dec 2015 02:35:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1041 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1041#respond Sat, 26 Dec 2015 02:00:30 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1041 Continue reading "Rebels on the Green"]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1041/feed 0 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1075 Sat, 07 Feb 2015 01:03:42 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1075 Continue reading "Sheridan’s Ride"]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1068 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1068#respond Fri, 06 Feb 2015 22:16:39 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1068 Abner Doubleday," baseball historian Harold Peterson wrote, "didn't invent baseball. Baseball invented Abner Doubleday." Even Ezra Warner's Generals In Blue, the biographical dictionary of Union generals, says Doubleday is more famous "for the canard that he originated the game of baseball than his military career." Most Union generals were forgotten in]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1068/feed 0 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1062 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1062#respond Fri, 06 Feb 2015 21:13:24 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1062 In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he was apprenticed to a Philadelphia ship owner. To Levy, it was life and death. A]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1062/feed 0 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/808 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/808#respond Wed, 04 Feb 2015 01:53:38 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=808 Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet between 23rd and 25th Streets, across from Madison Square Park. North of the intersection stands a marble obelisk. On bands around the shaft are names of battles and wars: Monterey, Chapultepec, Chippewa, Molina del Rey, Churubusco, Contreras. On its southern face is a bronze relief]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/808/feed 0 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/543 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/543#respond Sat, 31 Jan 2015 05:43:48 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=543 On August 19, 1815, the Commerce, an American brig of 200 tons, Captain Misservey commanding, raced through the Narrows under full sail after outrunning two British frigates in the lower Bay.  Someone—Misservey never said who—had paid him 18,000 francs in gold to depart immediately from Bordeaux for New York, and]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/543/feed 0 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