We have previously featured an overview of the Times Tower Building and Times Square. Now we present a street level view looking west from Broadway. The date is October 3, 1915 and there are a handful of people milling about on the street. Continue reading
The Art of The Book #2 – New York City Deco Dust Jackets From The 20′s & 30’s
We continue our look at some great New York City books from the 1920’s and 1930’s with exceptional artwork on their dust jackets. (click here to read part 1)
We begin with graphics on a dust jacket worthy of a large size poster from the quintessential art deco New York book. (click on any photo to enlarge)
New York by Paul Morand and Joaquin Vaquero Palacios. New York: Henry Holt, 1930, dj illustrator, Joaquin Vaquero Palacios.
A witty description of New York, via French writer Paul Morand, (1888-1976) from four visits he made to New York, none longer than a month, from between 1925-1929. Morand later became a supporter of the French Vichy regime.
Joaquin Vaquero (1900-1998) as he is credited in the book without the Palacios surname, was a Spanish architect and painter. His paintings are held in museums across the globe. Continue reading
Novel Readership, Not The Novel, Being Killed By The Screen According To Philip Roth
On the front page of the November 18, New York Times, Philip Roth discusses his retirement from writing fiction. 2010’s Nemesis, Roth’s last published work of fiction will remain his final novel.
In the article he clears up a long held misquote, that “the novel is dying.” He says, “I do not believe the novel is dying. I said the readership is dying out. That’s a fact, and I’ve been saying it for 15 years. I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has. The movie screen in the beginning, the television screen and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.”
Times Square featuring The Times Tower 1908 – click to vastly enlarge (six megabytes!)
Times Square is burgeoning with activity in 1908 and there is so much to see in this picture.
This photograph of Times Square was part of The Detroit Publishing Company collection, now housed at The Library of Congress. The company made picture postcards from these original photographs at the turn of the century.
The area formerly known as Longacre Square became Times Square after the New York Times opened their iconic flagship office building in 1905 at what would become known as “the crossroads of the world,” the southern end of Times Square, the triangular intersection of 42nd and 43rd streets where Broadway and Seventh Avenue diverge.
Flatiron Building in 1903
The Times Tower Building design is reminiscent of the Fuller Building, which became popularly known as the “Flatiron Building” soon after it opened in 1902 between 22nd and 23rd Streets where Broadway and Fifth Avenue intersect. The two buildings don’t look alike at all. But because they were each built on irregular plots of land, the triangular buildings both resemble flatirons.
The original Times Tower Building was a Gothic structure of beautiful light limestone and featured intricate terra-cotta and granite on the facade. More about the building later in the article. Continue reading
Umpires Make Mistakes: See Baseball History 101
Photo Mike Stobe / Getty Images
Everyone is in an unnecessary uproar over the Dewayne Wise phantom catch of a baseball that disappeared into the crowd at Yankee Stadium on June 26, 2012 during a 6-4 Yankee victory over the Cleveland Indians.
The umpire, Mike DiMuro is human. He made a mistake and admitted it after the game. That was the right thing to do.
Do you want the game to stop every time there is a controversial play? Aren’t the games slow enough?
Mistakes similar to this have been happening since baseball began and have been forgotten unless they affect the pennant race or a World Series game.
One forgotten incident that occurred on August 1, 1920 was whether Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox actually caught a baseball Babe Ruth hit into an overflow crowd at Comiskey Park. The aftermath of that play is shown below.
Babe Ruth & Miller Huggins argue with umpire Tom Connolly, Bob Meusel (with bat) listens © blackbetsy.com
Going into the game against the White Sox, Ruth was on a tear, having hit 37 home runs already, shattering his own record of 29 home runs set the previous year. Continue reading
The Beginning of New York City’s Traffic Lights
This ornate traffic light at 34th Street, was one of seven put up in New York City on the heavily traveled Fifth Avenue in 1922.
The city had experimented with traffic signals in 1917 when a device invented by an engineer, Foster Milliken, was installed at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The device was a revolving flashlight that would flash signals as red to stop and green for go. This may sound ridiculous now, but in the early days of traffic signals there was no standard for color relating to traffic. Continue reading
What do legendary blues and heavy metal guitarist, Gary Moore, rock album photographer Jim McCrary and playwright, screenwriter, author and jazz champion Max Wilk all have in common?
When they died, the New York Times did not cover their deaths in the obituary column. We all know space is limited, but these people were significant in their artistic fields, enriching the lives of countless others. It would be nice had the self-proclaimed “newspaper of record” recorded and noted their amazing lives. But The Times editors felt these people were not deserving.
The official policy about who the The Times decides to write up is :
When we look to see whether someone had made a newsworthy impact in some way — who “made a wrinkle in the social fabric,” — we don’t equate significance with fame. In point of fact, 9 out of 10 people we write about are indeed not household names (the 10th is — a movie star, a secretary of state). But that doesn’t negate their importance. Most made their marks in quiet ways, out of the public limelight, but they still made a mark, possibly on your life and mine.
So who is deserving?
Apparently an unremarkable low-life, graffiti tagger, StayHigh 149, a.k.a. Wayne Roberts , can get a full write-up.
Yes, Roberts definitely, as the Times puts it, “made a mark on your life and mine.”
More like a blemish.
Especially in New York City in the 1970’s when the city was bombarded with the eyesore of graffiti defacing public and private property.
As is noted in the obituary, this great man (sarcasm) in the 1960’s was working as a messenger on Wall Street and smoking about an ounce of marijuana a week, earning the Stay High nickname.
Inspired by other vandals tagging subway cars, he then began defacing public property.
Chris Pape a fellow graffiti aficionado says in the Times obituary:
“He (Roberts) rode empty trains all day with markers in his pocket, and he wrote everywhere.” By the early ’80s, Pape said, drugs had begun to take their toll. Roberts left his World Trade Center job, and his wife, because of his drug use. “He was a functional junkie who occasionally did time in prison for stupid things,” Pape said. “He was like that for 20 years. He didn’t want to be found.”
For some reason, I can only think of the millions of wasted dollars that it cost taxpayers to eradicate the vandalism this cretin created. As I have said before – graffiti is definitely not art.
This is the sort of person The New York Times chooses to cover in their obituaries?
For the record, when one of the most influential singers in heavy metal history, Ronnie James Dio, died on May 16, 2010, the following day The Times devoted 493 words to summing up his life.
Graffiti vandal Wayne Roberts had 838 words written about him.
Babe Ruth, King Of The Sports Memorabilia World
Nearly sixty-four years after his death, Babe Ruth set another record on Sunday May 20, 2012 . His circa 1920 Yankees road jersey sold at SCP auctions for a staggering $4.4 million.
Photo © SCP auctions
This eclipses the previous highest amount paid for a piece of sports memorabilia, a Honus Wagner baseball card, which sold in 2008 for $2.8 million.
To put the amount of the sale price in some perspective, Babe Ruth earned approximately $910,000 during his entire major league baseball playing career from 1914 -1935. This of course does not account for inflation. In modern dollars with inflation Ruth would have earned $15.3 million.
Also Ruth made vast amounts of money during the off-season, barnstorming and doing various product endorsements and personal appearances.
How would Ruth have felt about his uniform selling for more than he made his entire career? I’d like to think Ruth would have had a good laugh at that fact.
Babe Ruth, second from left, with his Yankee teammates, early 1920’s
Here is a photograph of Babe Ruth early in his New York Yankee career during spring training, possibly wearing the multi-million dollar uniform.
On a side note
The Kansas City Royals defeated the New York Yankees last night, May 21 at Yankee Stadium by a score of 6-0. What made me notice this otherwise unremarkable game was what the New York Times said today in the sports section:
But the clutch-hitting woes of the Yankees — not just their wheezing All-Star first baseman — remained for another game, a 6-0 loss to the Kansas City Royals in front of 39,229 fans.
Anyone attending or watching the game on television knows the announced attendance of 39,229 was a joke. Looking at the mostly empty stadium, there were probably no more than 8,000 people attending the dreary game, which was played under a constant, steady rain.
The idea that baseball attendance is counted not by clicks of the turnstile, but by tickets sold is ridiculous. It’s another slight problem in a laundry list of things that MLB should address before baseball becomes completely irrelevant.
This view looking north on Fifth Avenue taken at the turn-of-the-century shows New York City holding its famous Easter Parade. The parade, known for its display of beautiful bonnets and fancy hats, has been occurring since the 1870’s in New York. You can see how packed the streets near St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Anyone could walk Fifth Avenue on Easter, but it was generally the well to do who participated in the exhibition. Fifth Avenue being home to some of the most expensive homes made this a natural gathering spot for the wealthy. But is that where the tradition began?
One of the first places crowds gathered to display their Easter finery in New York City was not Fifth Avenue, but Central Park. Continue reading
The headline in the New York Times of March 7, 1909 proclaimed, Aerial Yachting Promises to be the Real Thing in Sport. For some reason, this sport never took off – if you’ll pardon the pun.
Aerial Yachting would be for “the sport loving public who want the latest thing to machines that can be conveniently managed in the air and accommodate from three passengers up to half a dozen or so, making the trip socially pleasant apart from the novelty of the expedition.”
All you would need to participate would be a large sum of money to have a massive 100 foot plus dirigible powered by a motor constructed for you. Then of course you’d have to figure out how to fly the thing on your own because there weren’t too many aviators at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Clement-Bayard ship illustrated in the accompanying article below, was 175 feet long and had made successful flights over Paris. Mr. Adolph Clement the builder of that dirigible, planned to open an agency at his automobile showrooms in New York to promote dirigible flights.
This was the dawn of aviation and World War I would see the dirigible used extensively for military purposes. The luxury aspect of dirigibles as a sport, never really caught on with the wealthy.
Original Times Article March 7, 1909 – click to enlarge