Celebrating New Year’s in old New York

The whole Times Square-ball drop thing didn’t start until 1904. Before then, the hip place to celebrate the holiday was at the base of  Trinity Church, on Wall Street and Broadway.

Huge crowds would show up, something like 15,000 some years, looking to see and be seen as well as to hear the tolling of the bells to welcome the New Year.

The second Trinity Church, 1788-1841. The original burned down in the Great Fire of 1776, and the third one still remains there today.

And just like Times Square, it attracted a bridge and tunnel group of revelers, as this New York Times article from 1897 reports: 

“The crowds came from every section of the city, and among the thousands, who cheered or tooted tin horns, as the chimes were rung out on the night, were many from New Jersey, Long Island, and even Staten Island.”

A march on Washington Square

On May 10, 1933, 100,000 New Yorkers marched from Madison Square Park to Battery Park to protest Nazi policies and denounce anti-Semitism. This photo shows the marchers making their way down Fifth Avenue and through Washington Square Park.

A New York Times article reported that the participants were Jews “with many Christian sympathizers.”

“While the demonstration was in progress, the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York, at its one hundred and fiftieth convention at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, adopted a resolution expressing sympathy for the sufferers in Germany and calling upon Christians everywhere to voice disapproval of anti-Semitism,” the Times reported.

The second-worst fire in New York City history

You know what the worst is. Next on the list—in terms of loss of firefighter life, that is—comes the 23rd Street Fire in 1966, which killed 12 firefighters.

It started in a brownstone at 7 East 22rd Street at 9:30 p.m. on October 17. An art dealer stored paint in the cellar, which fueled heavy smoke and a raging basement fire.

Unable to make their way to the source of the flames, firefighters went around the block to 23rd Street to try to enter through a building that shared the cellar.

Firefighters didn’t know that after a renovation, a wall in the shared cellar had been moved, weakening the floor. The entire first floor soon collapsed into the basement inferno, killing 10 firefighters. Two more died in another part of the building.

The city was astounded and distraught. Days later, 10,000 firefighters flanked Fifth Avenue as fire trucks carried coffins to St. Thomas Episcopal Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Above photo: FDNY. Below: The New York Times)

The site is now home to a high-rise apartment house, just across from Madison Square Park. A small plaque honors the men who lost their lives there 43 years ago.

Back in time with the Times wedding pages

If you’re a fan of the “Weddings & Celebrations” section of the Sunday New York Times, then you may be pleased to know that the wedding announcements of 2009 read pretty much the same as they did more than 100 years ago. 

The main differences: The couples of the early 1900s were super WASPy, as opposed to the more multicultural mix featured today.

And society writers back then went to great length to describe the bride and bridesmaid dresses and flowers—something the Times hasn’t done for years.

Here’s the writeup of the Darlington-Hubbard nupitals, from the February 24, 1907 paper. Interestingly, the groom is named first; contemporary announcements always lead with the bride’s name.

I wish they told us where the “bridal trip” was planned for.

The Little Church Around the Corner

Officially known as the Church of the Transfiguration since its founding in 1848, the lilliputian Episcopal parish at 29th Street off Fifth Avenue got its nickname because it welcomed actors during a time when acting was considered a disreputable profession.

In 1870, when another church nearby at 28th and Madison refused to host an actor’s funeral, the Church of the Transfiguration stepped in. “God bless that little church ’round the corner,” a friend of the dead actor supposedly said. And the name stuck.

The Little Church also hosted the 1893 funeral of actor (and brother of a presidential assassin) Edwin Booth. It was and still is a popular places to get married in the city.

Set back from the street (which, needless to say, no longer looks as pristine as it does in the 1910 postcard above) with pretty gardens and an ornate entryway, it’s a captivating spot to break away from the rush of city life.

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.

Brooklyn: the borough with its own holiday

If you notice lots of school-age kids roaming the streets on Thursday, chalk it up to the day off all city students get on the first Thursday in June.

Why the holiday? It’s a relic that originated way back in the 1820s as Anniversary Day (or Rally Day), which commemorated the formation of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union. Hey, Brooklyn didn’t earn its nickname, City of Churches, for being secular.

Campfire girls in middy blouses march down Bedford Avenue in honor of Brooklyn Day, around 1920.

For decades, the holiday was celebrated in Brooklyn, officially becoming Brooklyn Day in 1905. Tens of thousands of Brooklynites paraded all over the borough every year, carrying banners and listening to politicians expound on the importance of God, religion, and freedom.

By 1959, the holiday was broadened to Brooklyn-Queens Day; Queens Sunday Schools had been having parades of their own all along. In 2006 it became a day off for students in all five boroughs.

New York’s “fairy” wedding of the year, 1863

General Tom Thumb, born Charles Sherwood Stratton, was already an international sensation even before his celebrated New York City marriage. Three-foot tall Tom had toured the world with P.T. Barnum, who taught him how to sing, dance, and perform when he was a kid. 

On February 10, 1863, Tom, 25, married 20-year-old Lavinia Warren, also part of P.T. Barnum’s traveling sideshow. The wedding took place at Grace Church on Broadway and East 10th Street; the reception held at the Metropolitan Hotel, down Broadway on Prince Street.

Barnum milked the nuptials as best as he could. He sold tickets to the reception for $75 a head, displayed Lavinia’s hand-made wedding dress in a department store window, and hawked souvenir trinkets.

Thousands of New Yorkers crowded the streets outside the church while Vanderbilts and Astors watched inside. Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, who had a studio nearby, took photos. Newspapers ran stories about the “loving lilliputians” and their “fairy wedding.” 

Tom and Lavinia continued to tour with Barnum. They had no kids (much to Barnum’s chagrin), and the marriage lasted until Tom died of a stroke in 1883.

When a bomb went off near Wall Street

By all accounts, September 16, 1920 started out like any other workday for the financial institutions centered around lower Broadway.

Just before noon, however, a wagon led by a lone horse stopped near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, in front of the headquarters of J.P Morgan and across from the United States Assay Office. The New York Stock Exchange was around the corner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 12:01, a bomb hidden in the wagon exploded. Witnesses reported the carnage as horrific. Thirty-nine people were killed and 300 injured; bodies (and body parts, including horse parts) lay in the street, and maimed Wall Streeters took refuge in Trinity Church. Most of the dead were clerks, messengers, and other office staffers.

The bomb was immediately denounced as the work of anarchists. The next day, thousands of people came to the corner where it detonated and sang America the Beautiful. Many suspects were questioned, but no one ever charged, and the bombing—the worst in the U.S. until Oklahoma City in 1995—remains unsolved.

An eerie reminder of the destruction: Pockmarks from shrapnel are still visible on the J.P. Morgan building.

An actor’s funeral procession down Broadway

Judging by the 100,000 people lining Broadway, you’d think the hearse in the photo below would be carrying the coffin of a politician or war hero. 

Nope, it’s Rudolph Valentino, the silent movie heartthrob who died suddenly in a New York City hospital in August 1926. He was 31. Before becoming one of the first A-list actors, he clocked in time as a busboy at city restaurants and then as a dancer at Maxim’s, a swanky Manhattan nightclub.

His body was brought to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Church at Broadway and 66th Street. An estimated 30,000 fans tried to get a glimpse into his open casket, smashing windows and causing a near riot.

From there funeral home staffers orchestrated a Hollywood-like procession, driving the casket down to St. Malachy’s Church—the Actor’s Chapel—on Broadway and 49th Street for a mass. Crowds of young women swooned and cried as the procession passed.