Lovely posters advertising the New York Herald

In the late 19th century, the city supported close to 20 English-language daily newspapers, with the New York Herald one of the most popular.

The Herald’s winning formula? A sensationalist tone, reliance on illustrations, and coverage of fashion, arts, and culture.

Yep, all the lifestyle fluff newspapers today need to attract readers.

Perhaps these sweet, apparently hand-drawn posters advertising the coming Sunday edition had something to do with it though.

Cartoons, new fiction, and illustrations of Central Park plus new routes concerning the cycling craze: good reading on a May Sunday in the mid-1890s.

[posters from the New York Public Library Digital Collection]

Griping about the subway: a New York tradition

The first subway line opened to riders on October 27, 1904. And almost since that day, New Yorkers have been grumbling, justified or not, about crappy service.

“Trains will run at the company’s convenience” states the fine print in this New York Herald cartoon from 1905.

It wasn’t just lateness that annoyed residents a century ago. Other grievances are the same ones we have today, like jam-packed trains and filthy stations. 

“All the trains are dirt-filled and full of nameless odors,” bellyached one passenger in a letter to the New York Times in 1915.

Even dim lighting was open to complaints. “The lighting of subway trains was now so poor as to be dangerous to the sight of passengers who might attempt to read their newspapers,” states a 1909 Times article.

The successful newsboy strike of 1899

Hawking newspapers in the 19th century was hard work. Rather than working for the newspaper itself, a newsboy—usually a kid or young teen from a poor family, often homeless himself—had to buy copies of the paper from the publisher, then sell them independently.

An estimated 10,000 newsboys worked the streets of New York City. Publishers wouldn’t buy back unsold copies of their papers, which made it tough for a kid to eke out a profit.

Newsboys plying their trade on the Brooklyn Bridge. Those bundles look heavy.

In 1899, the Evening World and Evening Journal started charging newsboys 60 cents for a hundred copies of their papers, a hike from 50 cents. Pissed off, thousands of newsboys went on strike. They held protests all over Manhattan and got into fights with men and boys hired by the papers as replacement workers.

But the strike worked—somewhat. After a few weeks of gloating media coverage in other New York City papers, the publishers agreed to buy back unsold newspapers, though they did not scale back the original price.

New York City’s long list of defunct newspapers

It’s hard to believe that in the 1890s, New York’s population of just a million and a half residents supported 19 daily English-language newspapers—along with scores of weeklies and foreign dailies.

These papers were an illustrious bunch. There was the anti-immigrant New York Herald; publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., reportedly said that a newspaper’s role is “not to instruct but to startle.”

The New York World, published by Joseph Pulitzer, was hugely popular with working class residents. It was known for stunt journalism—as well as printing its Sunday supplement in color.

The dead newspaper list also includes the New York Sun, the New York Journal American, the New York Mirror, and the often-lamented Brooklyn Eagle.

Many were headquartered around City Hall, then nicknamed Newspaper Row. This thermometer/clock affixed to the old New York Sun building down on Chambers Street doesn’t work, but it’s a nice remnant of the neighborhood’s past.

The Great Central Park Zoo Escape

It’s 1874. Central Park is about 15 years old, the playground of New York’s leisure class. One of the park’s most popular attractions is the menagerie near East 64th Street, home to elephants, zebras, bison, big cats, and monkeys, among other creatures.

On November 9, the New York Herald ran an article reporting that all the animals had escaped their cages and were roaming free in the park, leaving dozens of people “mutilated, trampled, and injured,” not to mention killed. 

It wasn’t true of course; at the very end the writer admits it’s a completely made up version of what might happen if conditions in the menagerie aren’t improved.

But how many people read all the way to the end of the piece? Not many, considering the panic that gripped New Yorkers that day. The entire city fell into a frenzy before finding out that it was all a hoax.

The rival New York Times was miffed enough to editorialize about the stunt. The Times article called it “a violation not only of journalistic propriety and a due respect for the public, but also of common decency and humanity.”

I love this last line in the article at left, “Governor Dix Shoots the Bengal Tiger in the Street.” Can you imagine Governor Paterson doing that?

Little Nemo in the Sunday New York Herald

Little Nemo in Slumberland follows a boy named Nemo (“nobody” in Latin) whose dreams take him on fantastical adventures through surreal landscapes and distorted worlds—until the last panel, when he wakes up. 

This full-page Sunday comic strip by Winsor McCay ran in two sensationalist city papers: the New York Herald from 1905 to 1911 and William Randolph Hearst’s New York American from 1911 to 1913.

  

Reportedly the strip wasn’t terribly popular when it originally appeared—well, it was up against slapstick comics like the Katzenjammer Kids.

In 1966, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged an exhibit of McCay’s black and white line drawings. Little Nemo’s fan base has been increasing ever since.