Riverside Park’s tomb of the Amiable Child

Not far north of Grant’s Tomb, at the edge of some woods near 125th Street on Riverside Drive, lies another tomb that’s much more modest. 

It’s the tomb of the Amiable Child, a monument marking the grave of 5-year-old St. Claire Pollack. 

Little St. Claire lived on a vast estate here in the 1790s. In 1797, according to one account, the boy fell to his death from the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. His body was recovered on the rocks below.

His family chose to bury him on the property where he lived. When the estate was sold, they asked that the monument be kept “always enclosed and sacred.”

Eventually the land was absorbed into the neighborhood known as Claremont; then it was the site of Riverside Park.

The original monument had to be replaced a few times, most recently in 1967, after falling victim to the elements. 

The back of the monument includes this from the Book of Job: “Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh like a flower and is cut down he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.”

The Civil War prison in New York Harbor

New York isn’t exactly known as a center for Civil War history. But just a half-mile from Battery Park lies the remains of a POW camp that once housed hundreds of Confederate soldiers.

It’s called Castle Williams (left, in a 1860s photo by Mathew Brady), on Governors Island. Built in 1811 as a fort to guard the harbor, the castle welcomed its first group of POWs on September 4, 1861. 

High-ranking officers were taken to Fort Jay, on the island’s other end, where they enjoyed more comfortable quarters.

Regular troops, however, went to Castle Williams—nicknamed the “Cheesebox” because of its circular design. Confined to small casemates, Southern soldiers passed the time playing games and reading secondhand newspapers and bibles, according to Governors Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor, by Ann Buttenwieser.

Castle Williams in an early 1900s postcard

Conditions weren’t good. Within weeks, all three tiers of the castle were packed with more than 700 men, whose meager provisions included little more than a dirty blanket and one set of clothes. A measles outbreak killed at least 12 of them, Buttenwieser writes.

As prisoners left Governors Island—shipped off to other Union prisons—new captured soldiers arrived. Over the course of the war, 47 men died in Castle Williams. Eleven were buried on Governors Island.

What Nellie Bly found on Blackwell’s Island

Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pennsylvania in 1864, journalist Nellie Bly (she adopted the pen name because at the time, women reporters didn’t use their real names) moved to New York in 1887.

Broke but brave, the 23-year-old convinced New York World editors to let her investigate conditions at the city lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island. 

Bly feigned insanity and instantly got herself committed. She spent 10 days there before the World was able to get her released.

In a subsequent series of articles, she reported that the food was inedible, nurses often picked on and physically abused residents, and that many were sane but either couldn’t speak English or were left there by husbands who didn’t want them. And doctors couldn’t care less.

“The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat trap,” she wrote. “It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.”

Bly later published her articles in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House. The asylum, with its famous (and still existent) circa-1830s octagon tower, was closed. Mentally ill New Yorkers were then sent to a new facility on nearby Ward’s Island. 

Bly became a sensation, embarking on an international career as a journalist. She died in 1922 and is buried in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. 

A New York cop shot by the Mafia in Italy

Born in Salerno, Italy, in 1860, Giuseppe “Joseph” Petrosino joined the New York Police Department in 1883. He is the only New York cop killed in the line of duty on foreign soil.

Petrosino grew up in Little Italy. Fluent in many Italian dialects, he rose through the NYPD ranks quickly, earning a promotion to detective in 1895 and then founding the NYPD bomb squad to thwart Mafia bombings. 

After another promotion, to lieutenant, in 1908, Petrosino was put in charge of the Italian Squad, an elite group of detectives who handled mob-related crimes. On his watch, thousands of arrests were made, and crimes against Italians dropped by half.

In March 1909 he went to Palermo, Sicily, on a top-secret investigation. Mobsters in the U.S. would not kill a policeman. But in Palermo, things were different. Lured into a meeting with a supposed informant, Petrosino was shot dead.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers attended his funeral; the procession went from Little Italy to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. In 1987, Kenmare Square, on Lafayette Street, was renamed Joseph Petrosino Square. 

Church of the Intercession, 155th Street

Vernon Howe Bailey was a New York City artist who sketched regularly for newspapers and periodicals.

He also created gentle, understated sketches of city bridges, skyscrapers, street scenes, and churches on his own. This 1935 sketch depicts the Church of the Intercession at 155th Street and Broadway. 

The sketch doesn’t show adjoining Trinity Church Cemetery, an upper Manhattan treasure and one of the coolest burial grounds in the city. It’s the quiet final resting place of many prominent New Yorkers, such as Clement Clark Moore, author of “A Visit From Saint Nicholas.” 

In honor of Moore’s famous tale, Church of the Intercession holds an annual Clement Clark Moore festival at Christmastime. 

Here’s a look at the church’s colorful stained glass windows and other interior photos.

“The most beautiful girl in New York City”

In 1914, 20-year-old Pennsylvania native Olive Thomas was working in a Harlem department store when she entered a beauty contest run by a popular photographer.

She won the contest, was crowned the most beautiful girl in New York City, and went on to become a model, magazine cover girl, and socialite.

Her next move: joining the Ziegfeld Follies. Thomas performed as part of the racy Midnight Frolic, an after-hours show on the roof of 42nd Street’s New Amsterdam Theatre. 

Thomas hit the silent-film circuit, married the brother of actress Mary Pickford, and then died on vacation in France in 1920 after accidentally ingesting medicine containing mercury.

She’s buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Supposedly her ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theater.

The final resting place of the Kip family

That’s Kip as in the Kips Bay Kips, the New Amsterdam family that acquired a land grant along the East River in the mid-17th century and called it Kips Bay Farm. Now the area is Kips Bay the neighborhood.

The Kip house, a landmark at a time when few homes existed north of lower Manhattan, stood at what is now the Eastern end of 34th Street from 1655 to 1851.

Dozens of Kip family members were interred in this vault from 1842 to 1895. It’s in The New York City Marble Cemetery, on Second Street between First and Second Avenues, along with the vaults of other old New York families.

Henry James’ quiet, genteel Washington Square

Author Henry James was born around the corner from Washington Square, on Washington Place, in 1843. 

That’s about when Washington Square was in its prime: a wealthy enclave of Federal-style townhouses inhabited by upper-class families. The townhouses surrounded a new park that had served as a marshland, public gallows, and potter’s field.

The refined Square of the mid-1800s is the setting of one of James’ best novels, Washington Square. In this story of a domineering doctor, his witless daughter, and the young man who may or may not be marrying her for her money, the narrator describes the Square as “the ideal of quiet and genteel retirement.”

“The ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble.”

This sketch depicts Washington Square Park in the 1880s, decades after James’ novel is set there. On the right is the original Gothic-style building put up by New York University in 1837. In the center, partially obscured by trees, are the Federal-style townhouses described by James, many of which still stand.

John Jacob Astor IV: the richest Titanic casualty

Of all the insanely wealthy passengers booked in first class on the Titanic in April 1912, John Jacob Astor IV, 48, was at the top of the financial heap.

Great-grandson of the John Jacob Astor who came to New York in the 18th century and made a fortune in beaver pelts and opium, Astor IV was accomplished in his own right: He was an inventor, builder of the Astoria (later Waldorf-Astoria) Hotel, and author of a sci-fi novel set in the year 2000.

He had also knocked up his 18-year-old second wife, Madeleine Force, and the scandal of divorce and remarriage forced the couple to bide their time in Europe and Egypt. But with a baby due later that year, the Astors decided to return to New York City.

They settled in to a first-class room (reportedly costing about $4,000 a night, more like $50,000 today) with a manservant, maid, nurse, and their dog, Kitty.

After the ship hit the iceberg and women and children began getting into lifeboats, Astor supposedly asked a crew member if he could sit with his wife in one of the empty lifeboat seats, citing her pregnancy. He was refused but reportedly took it like a man.

Days later his crushed body was found in the Atlantic; he’s buried in Trinity Cemetery. His son, John Jacob Astor VI, was born in August 1912.

Astor, at left, waiting for the train that would take him to the Titanic for boarding.

When Houdini hung upside-down over Broadway

 Here’s magician and master of escape Harry Houdini performing his upside-down straitjacket stunt on Broadway and 46th Street in 1907. It only took two minutes for Houdini to get out of the straitjacket once he was suspended in mid-air.

Escapologist—now that’s a great professional title.

Houdini died in 1926 from a ruptured appendix; the story goes that after giving a lecture, he let a college student punch him in the stomach to see if he could withstand the blows. He couldn’t.

He’s buried in Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. The New York Times‘ City Room blog has more on Houdini’s unkempt  grave.