When I first saw it, I thought it was honoring fallen soldiers who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But this mural, at the end of the line on the 4 train at the Bronx’s Woodlawn Avenue station, memorializes Vietnam War veterans.
It’s been there since 1985, enduring graffiti tags ever since.
A few solitary, turn-of-the-century New Yorkers took advantage of the quiet, lovely paths of the upper portion of Riverside Park in this vintage postcard.
Grant’s Tomb, opened to much fanfare in 1897, looms ahead.
The road beside the Hudson River looks more like the Henry Hudson Parkway, not Riverside Drive, no?
Up ahead, north of Grant’s Tomb, lies another little-known tomb of a child that still exists today.
New York has some ugly riots in its history.
One of the strangest is the Hard Hat Riot, a clash between construction workers and war protesters in May 1970.
The spark was the Kent State University shootings. After the deaths of four students at the hands of National Guardsmen there, antiwar protesters here announced a rally memorializing the dead at City Hall.
Early on May 8, hundreds of peace activists gathered at Wall and Broad Streets. After their numbers swelled to about a thousand, they marched to the steps of Federal Hall and demanded the U.S. get out of Vietnam.
That’s when about 200 workers, carrying American flags and pro-USA signs, approached the protesters. Police reportedly did nothing as the hard hats chased protesters and beat them with their helmets for an hour.
“The workers then stormed City Hall, cowing policemen and forcing officials to raise the American flag to full staff from half staff, where it had been placed in mourning for the four students killed at Kent State University on Monday,” wrote The New York Times.
An estimated 70 people were injured, and six were arrested. Mayor Lindsay slammed the police for not stopping the rioters.
This earned the wrath of union leaders, who said the riot was a spontaneous act by workers who were tired of antiwar activists criticizing their country . . . an explanation disputed by some witnesses, who claimed to see two men in suits directing the rioters with hand motions.
Okay, we’re not talking about mountain as in the Rockies.
It was more of a hill, a 60-foot incline called Mount Pitt about where Grand and Pitt Streets cross today.
For Manhattan at the time, this “mount” was a high point, affording incredible vistas New Yorkers would kill for now.
Let a book published in 1879 by a descendant of the man who made his home on the hill give the details (and then check out the country road–like view in the NYPL Digital Collection illustration:
“Upon this fine site still, though graded down very much, the highest point of that part of the city, which then commanded a magnificent prospect, extending on the east beyond Hellgate, on the west over the city and the bay to the shores of Staten Island and New Jersey, and on the south over the East River and the heights of Long Island. . . .”
In pre-Revolution days, it was the location of a town home and gardens built by Judge Thomas Jones, hence why Mount Pitt is also known as Jones Hill.
During the war, colonists constructed a large redoubt on Mount Pitt called Jones Hill Fort.
Leveled after the war, Mount Pitt still exists in a way: fieldstone taken from it in the 1820s was used to build St. Augustine’s Church, on Henry Street.
Here’s Grand and Pitt Streets today: flattened out and a bit dreary. The current highest point in Manhattan lies several miles north.
There’s an incline along William Street, in the Financial District, that peaks where it intersects with John Street. Could it be a remnant of the colonial-era enclave of Golden Hill?
This was once the highest point at the tip of Manhattan—a place of an “abundant crop of grain, which it said waved gracefully in response to the gentle breeze and looked, in truth, like a hill of gold,” states an 1898 New York Times article.
Golden Hill isn’t only remembered for its pretty view; it was also the site of a bloody rebellion that led to the Revolutionary War.
On January 19, 1770, tensions were high between many New York residents and British soldiers. Colonists had constructed several liberty poles, signs of defiance against the Redcoats.
After the British destroyed a liberty pole in City Hall park, a confrontation ensued between soldiers and citizens several days later at Golden Hill. There, the British charged citizens with bayonets, wounding several.
“This is the first blood spilled during the American Revolution, two month before the Boston Massacre,” reports Old World NYC. “The clash would roll back and forth finally leading to a standoff . . . but the war had begun.”
Check out these other pieces from New York’s Revolutionary War past.
[Right: Battle of Golden Hill by Charles MacKubin Lefferts]
The gentle bend at Riverside Drive and 89th Street, seen here in an early 1900s postcard, is host to the majestic Soldiers and Sailors Monument—dedicated in 1902 to Union Army veterans.
On the opposite corner is something interesting: another view of the Isaac L. Rice mansion, built in 1903 by a wealthy lawyer when Riverside Drive was lined with grand free-standing homes and rivaled Fifth Avenue in luxury.
The Isaac L. Rice mansion is still there today, but maybe not for much longer unless it gets the maintenance it needs.
While the official 9/11 memorial is now open downtown, some unofficial street murals in neighborhoods across the city continue to commemorate the day in their own small ways.
These are some of the first memorials that went up, visceral responses to the city’s darkest hour. This one above, in Gravesend, is gathering grime under the F train tracks.
Graffiti just beneath it mars this commemorative mural on West Broadway.
I think this one is in the East Village, but I didn’t record the neighborhood correctly. Can anyone confirm? The Daily News has a slideshow of more street murals here.
Sworn in when he was just 34, reformist John Purroy Mitchel became New York’s second-youngest mayor ever in 1914.
His age set him apart from his predecessors—as did his mission: to get rid of the corruption that had infiltrated city politics since Tammany rule in the 1800s.
“While in office Mitchel cut waste, improved accounting practices, and worked to professionalize the city’s civil service by standardizing salaries and work guidelines for municipal employees,” explains Columbia University (Mitchel was part of the class of 1899.)
He also cut police graft and created the first zoning laws, and four years later ran a reelection campaign that endorsed a national draft.
Tammany bosses were determined to beat him in 1917, and he was defeated by Tammany-backed John Hylan.
After losing the election, he enlisted in the Air Service and prepped to fight in World War I. On a training mission in Louisiana in 1918, he fell from his plane and was killed.
[Above: Mitchel throwing out the first pitch at the Polo Grounds in 1916]
Mitchel was memorialized all over the metro area: two flagstaffs in Bryant Park, Mitchel Air Force Base in Long Island, and this plaque at the entrance to the Central Park Reservoir.
[Photo: centralparknyc.org]
Created by the Dutch as a cattle market in the 17th century, Bowling Green became New York’s first park in 1733—leased to three private landlords for “one peppercorn a year.”
Amazingly, the cast-iron fence built in 1771 to surround the park still stands.
But it was partly destroyed on the eve of the Revolutionary War, and you can still see the desecration if you look closely.
It happened on July 9, 1776. After the Declaration of Independence was read to Washington’s troops at nearby City Hall, a crowd of patriots, whipped into a frenzy, rushed to the park at the foot of Broadway.
There they toppled the statue of King George III the British had placed inside it—and they also sawed off the finials that crowned each post.
“[A] partially drunken mob, led by the patriot Isaac Sears, raced to the fence that surrounded the park,” states It Happened in New York City, cowritten by Fran Capo.
“Sears and the others systematically sawed off the king’s crowns on each of the thick supporting fence sections.”
You can still see the saw marks. What became of the finials is unclear, but the lead from the statue was melted down and used as ammo against the Redcoats.
In the 1820s, it was an open-air market for horses and dry goods bordering a genteel neighborhood of row houses (as seen here, in an illustration looking back on 1812).
By the 1850s, Chatham Square was kind of the Times Square of its day, a seedy district of flophouses, taverns, cheap merchants, and the city’s first tattoo parlors on the outskirts of the East Side’s notorious Five Points slum.
How seedy was it? Describing the prostitution rampant there in his book City of Eros, Timothy J. Gilfoyle writes:
“Along its western edge, the Bowery and Chatham Square were a bourse of sex. The patrician George Templeton Strong claimed that after nightfall, amid the theaters, saloons, dance halls, and cheap lodging houses, the thoroughfare overflowed with ‘members of the whorearchy in most slatternly deshabille.’
“Once elegant eighteenth-century residences like that of the merchant Edward Mooney at 18 Bowery now served as brothels.”
Like everything in New York, the red-light districts change as well. Prohibition, the Depression, a growing Chinatown, and slum clearance all remade Chatham Square into a messy but not sleazy intersection off the Bowery.
It’s now known as Kimlau Square, which honors American servicemen of Chinese ancestry who died for their country.
[Above photo: an 1853 Daguerreotype of Chatham Street, now Park Row, looking toward the Square]
