Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:44:53 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss William Bryk :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/William+Bryk istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/britains-brooklyn-girl/52216/ Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Jennie Jerome was an American, and better yet a Brooklyn girl, born at what is now 197 Amity St. in Cobble Hill. As Charles Higham points out in "Dark Lady: Winston Churchill's Mother and Her World" (Carroll & Graf, 256 pages, $25.95), a house at 426 Henry St. bears a large plaque that incorrectly proclaims it the place of her birth (and provides the wrong date for her birth, too). Her parents, as Mr. Higham notes, had lived there until shortly before she was born. If Mr. Higham had maintained... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/man-with-the-chicago-plan/44037/ Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood." These ringing words, attributed to Daniel Burnham, the brilliant architect who designed and built the renowned "White City" that housed the 1892–93 Columbian Exposition, have long moved the hearts of those who love great schemes of urban development. But Burnham is also remembered for inspiring America's first comprehensive attempt to re-imagine a major city, realized in an imaginative, beautifully produced, and visually appealing... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/atlas-of-the-plague-year/42226/ Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Modern New Yorkers take clean drinking water, flowing at the turn of a spigot, for granted. The working-class Victorian Londoners of Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map" (Riverhead Books, 301 pages, $26.95) would have found this miraculous: They drank water drawn by hand with pumps from wells in the street. In late August, 1854, a well on Broad Street, renowned for its pure, good-tasting water, suddenly teemed with cholera bacteria. A leaky cesspool within three feet of the well had saturated the... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/good-fellow-and-a-wise-guy/37568/ Wed, 9 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST George Washington Appo, the oncenotorious Asian-Irish-American petty criminal who flourished during the last quarter of the 19th century as a pickpocket and swindler, had pretty much faded into obscurity at his death in 1930, aged 73. Even the street where he lived, Donovan's Lane (better known as Murderer's Alley) is gone, buried with the infamous Five Points slum beneath the federal courthouses in Foley Square. Appo resurfaced in Luc Sante's 1991 best seller, "Low Life," which briefly... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/fighting-fire-with-knowledge/33114/ Mon, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 EST There are few recruiting slogans more nobly eloquent than the New York City Fire Department's "Heroes Wanted." And I suspect historian Peter Hoffer, author of "Seven Fires" (Public Affairs Press, 480 pages, $27.50), agrees. His new book briskly integrates the progress of American firefighting over three centuries into broader questions of urban planning, real estate development, public finance, and social justice. As Mr. Hoffer points out, the cost of fire protection is more than the taxes... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/rancor-murder-in-1880s-chicago/29732/ Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST It was after 10 p.m. on May 4, 1886, amid the greatest strike Chicago had ever seen. With clouds covering the moon, a mass meeting of workers was taking place in the Haymarket, an open-air farmers' market stinking of horse manure and rotting vegetables. After the last orator had called for violence against the rich and powerful, a phalanx of police moved in to close things down.Then, someone threw a dynamite bomb. It exploded among the police, and the surviving cops opened fire on the crowd... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/honest-abes-dark-side/25876/ Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST Is there any president we know as well as Abraham Lincoln? Honest Abe, the rail-splitter, the largely self-educated man (his formal education ended before the second grade) whose prose rings with common sense and an eloquence learned from Shakespeare and the King James Bible? Whose life has inspired more biographies than that of any other American? What more could we know? The History Channel takes a shot in the cheesy new series "Lincoln," which premieres today. Advertised as a kind of expose... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/capturing-manhattans-bloodiest-street-war/24868/ Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST The New York City draft riots of July 1863 were American history's most powerful working-class uprising, yet they have been neglected by historians. Now, Barnet Schecter, whose "The Battle for New York" is the definitive history of the city during the Revolution, has captured Manhattan's bloodiest street war (Walker & Company, 320 pages, $28). When the Confederacy invaded the North in June 1863, nearly every soldier in New York was sent to Gettysburg. Only 2,500 soldiers, sailors, and marines... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-bosses-ruled/23998/ Tue, 6 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST Long after Tammany Hall was as dust, and the once-famous bosses William Vare of Philadelphia and Tom Prendergast of Kansas City mere footnotes, Chicago's political machine endured. Indeed, it has prevailed, still absorbing every emerging special interest and ethnic group into its ranks. "Lords of the Levee" (Northwestern University Press, 385 pages, $19.95) by Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, republished this month by Northwestern University Press with a delightful and affectionate foreword by... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/remembering-new-yorks-bleak-history/21135/ Fri, 7 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST The dignified white-haired gentleman who appears on the posters for "Slavery in New York," the New-York Historical Society's inspired new multimedia show, was named Caesar. Apparently, he had no other name. Born a slave in New York, he served three generations of Knickerbocker aristocrats, and when an unknown photographer took his daguerreotype in 1851, he was about 114 years old. Caesar's is only one of the many powerful images in the nation's first major exhibit sponsored by a major museum to... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/out-and-about/dr-feelgood/20251/ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST By the late 1930s, German refugee Max Jacobson, M.D., had established a general practice on the Upper East Side catering to writers, musicians, and entertainers who nicknamed him "Miracle Max" or "Dr. Feelgood" for the "vitamin injection" treatments that made them happy and gave them seemingly limitless energy. Jacobson's panacea was 30 to 50 milligrams of amphetamines - the mood-elevating neural energizers also known as speed - mixed with multivitamins, steroids, enzymes, hormones, and... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/trouble-up-in-harlem/19941/ Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST In the late 18th century, before Manhattan was enlarged by landfills, the East River's Kips Bay reached as far inland as today's Third Avenue at 33rd Street. There, on the morning of September 15, 1776, within three weeks of driving George Washington's army from Brooklyn, the British landed in force, determined to reoccupy Manhattan. By midday Washington had ordered General Israel Putnam to evacuate the army from the city to Harlem Heights. A short, stocky, 58-year-old veteran of the French and... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/big-bang-on-wall-street/19578/ Tue, 6 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Thursday, September 16, 1920, was clear and mild. Between 11:30 and 11:58 a.m., five crudely printed circulars were deposited in a mailbox at Cedar Street and Broadway in the financial district. They read: "Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you. American Anarchists Fighters." Around 11:55 a.m., an old wagon, drawn by a dark bay mare, halted near 23 Wall Street, the offices of J.P. Morgan & Company. Trinity Church's... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-americas-future-hung-in-the-balance/19316/ Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST On August 22, 1776, British troops commanded by Sir William Howe landed at Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn, with 88 warships for fire support. He had 15,000 men ashore by noon with scarcely a shot fired. Washington's forces were up on the Heights of Guan (now Crown Heights, Stuyvesant Heights, Ocean Hill, and Ridgewood). They had left unguarded the Jamaica Pass, "a deep winding cut" at today's Broadway Junction, near East New York. It led to the Jamaica Road, which ran parallel to today's Fulton Street... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/unsolved-mystery/19003/ Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Joseph Crater made headlines throughout the city last week, which is not bad for someone who went missing 75 years ago. The son of Irish immigrants, Crater opened a law office after working his way through college and law school. He joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, the base of Tammany district leader Martin Healy, and he invested years in organizing campaigns and providing free legal services to constituents. Eventually, he became club president and Healy's right-hand man. On April 8, 1930... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/home-of-the-rat-pit/18638/ Tue, 16 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Manhattan's third-oldest building, 273 Water Street, was built during the British occupation, no later than 1781. When new, its back door faced the East River, and its owner, Captain Joseph Rose, moored his brig, Industry, behind the house. It has since known many uses. But no plaque commemorates 273's most famous - or infamous - occupant. Shortly before the Civil War, Christopher "Kit" Burns, also known as Keyburn, leased the building as "Sportsmen's Hall." He promoted bare-knuckle boxing... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/father-of-the-four-hundred/18321/ Tue, 9 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Ward McAllister was long the most famous of Manhattan's social arbiters. McAllister was born in Savannah, Ga., in 1827, but he and his jurist father struck it rich practicing mining law in California during the 1849 Gold Rush. After coming East in 1853 and marrying an heiress, he spent several years in Europe, where he studied wines, haute cuisine, and the etiquette of balls and formal receptions. He moved to New York after the Civil War. Contractors and speculators had made enormous fortunes... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/poor-printer-of-new-york/17896/ Tue, 2 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST William Cosby, who became royal governor of New York in August 1732, loathed opposition. When provincial Chief Justice Lewis Morris ruled against him in a private lawsuit, the governor replaced Morris with the "young and arrogant" James DeLancey. Morris, who organized other "gentlemen of the landed interest" against Cosby, crushed a Cosbyite opponent at an October 1733 Assembly election. On November 5, 1733, the Morrisites unleashed the New York Weekly Journal, edited and published by John... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/bums-go-west/17655/ Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Walter O'Malley, the Brooklyn Dodgers president who moved the team to Los Angeles in 1957, lives in infamy. Even novelist Wilfrid Sheed dedicated his 1993 memoir "My Life as a Fan" not to but against him. The Dodgers were named for their fans, known as trolley dodgers for their skillful evasion of fast streetcars en route to the ballpark. Club President Charles Ebbets moved the team to Ebbets Field, between Flatbush and Crown Heights, in 1912. His oddball successor, Wilbert Robinson, wouldn't... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/hard-boiled-charlie/17311/ Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST A century ago, Charles Chapin of the New York Evening World was considered "the ablest city editor who ever lived." He was also among the most hated: Nearly everyone who ever worked for Hard-Boiled Charlie found him a sadistic tyrant. Yet his ideas remain relevant. He envisioned reporting news without slant or prejudice and instituted the legman/rewrite system still in use: reporters gathering facts and telephoning them to rewrite men who then write the story. He forced reporters to use the... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/importance-of-being-general/16915/ Wed, 13 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST At first light on June 19, 1776, Private Daniel McCurtin, one of General Washington's soldiers in Manhattan, rose and checked the weather. Then he glanced down the Bay toward the Narrows, and was stunned. The view had utterly changed. The "whole Bay [was] ... full of shipping," their countless masts resembling "a wood of pine trees." King George's men and ships had arrived under cover of night. Forty-eight men-of-war and transports, bearing General Sir William Howe, commander in chief of His... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/height-of-comstockery/16526/ Wed, 6 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Anthony Comstock crusaded against what he saw as vice in all its manifestations, from contraceptives to pornography. He personally arrested at least 3,000 persons for selling obscene pictures, contraceptive articles, abortifacients, and gambling materials. In 1913 he told the Evening World that he had "convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches, 60 coaches containing 60 passengers and the 61st almost full," and driven 16 people to their deaths by suicide or misadventure... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/eagle-of-the-seas/16267/ Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST The oldest commissioned warship still afloat visited New York for the last time in August 1931, during a nationwide tour ordered by Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams, a descendant of President John Adams, under whose administration she had first gone to sea. Her arrival was reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner's "The Fighting Temeraire": a square-rigged wooden man-of-war nudged along by a tiny minesweeper. Yet USS Constitution - Old Ironsides - unvanquished in battle, still wore the star-spangled... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/king-of-the-dudes/15834/ Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST "Dude" was first used in the city around 1883 as a pejorative for a man who affected excessive refinement in dress. But one New Yorker embraced the insult as an honorific. E. Berry Wall was King of the Dudes, beau ideal of masculine fashion, whose life was a pursuit of pleasure, and who was probably the first American to wear a dinner jacket, commonly known as a tuxedo, in public. Wall was born in 1860. His father and grandfather each left him more than $1 million between his 18th and 22nd... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/men-who-would-be-kings-or-knights-or-counts/15429/ Wed, 15 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST The Founding Fathers disdained aristocracy and hereditary privilege. Forty years after Evacuation Day, New York City politicians still charged their opponents with having "aristocratical notions." Perhaps they sought to deny the human passion for distinctions - titles, decorations, fancy uniforms, any outward ornament - that raises one above the common crowd. Consider military medals. Our first decoration, the Medal of Honor, was instituted only during the Civil War. No other federal awards... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/towers-of-central-park-west/15088/ Wed, 8 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Movies of the 1930s made Central Park West's great apartment towers exemplify urban glamour. The city had improved the avenue only within the previous decade by widening its roadbed, removing its streetcar tracks, and building a subway beneath it. A soaring stock market created surplus capital for real-estate investment. The effective exclusion of Jews from many East Side luxury buildings redirected demand toward more welcoming neighborhoods. A final touch, the 1929 Multiple Dwelling Act... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/rebel/14738/ Wed, 1 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST In December 1951, the bearded, decrepit Major Honore Jaxon was evicted from 157 E. 34th Street. Several "gentlemen of the Bowery, led by one called Bozo" moved him into the offices of Harry Baronian's legendary Bowery News, the self-proclaimed voice of society's basement. The 90-year-old died within a month. He had claimed to be a Canadian half-breed revolutionary. The story was only part fudge. He wasn't half-American Indian. But nearly 70 years before, he had fought in Riel's Rebellion. Few... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/mayor-who-meant-business/14383/ Wed, 25 May 2005 00:00:00 EST Some political commentators find our current, self-made businessman mayor anomalous. Yet until the mid-19th century most mayors were businessmen, handling public affairs in their spare time. After New Yorkers began directly electing mayors in 1834, the elites found that democracy required time that could be more profitably invested in their businesses. They largely left politics to professionals, who happily shouldered the day-to-day work of winning elections as the price of access to the... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/queens-own/14008/ Wed, 18 May 2005 00:00:00 EST New York's royal governors are largely forgotten, recalled largely in place names, such as Sir William Tryon (Fort Tryon Park) or Colonel Thomas Dongan (Dongan Hills). But an 18th-century portrait, painted by an unknown artist, has made one mildly notorious. "Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury" hangs in the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West. Cornbury is portrayed with a double chin, heavy jowls, sensual lips, and a suggestion of five o'clock shadow while wearing a woman's elegant... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/calendar/old-smoke/13666/ Wed, 11 May 2005 00:00:00 EST Few modern statesmen enjoy resumes like that of Congressman John Morrissey, who once told the House: "I have been a wharf rat, chicken thief, prize fighter, gambler, and member of Congress." When Morrissey, irritated during congressional debate, roared, "If any gentleman on the other side wants his constitution amended, just let him step into the Rotunda with me," his threat was not empty. Yet Morrissey was enormously popular simply because he was his own man. The Irish-born Morrissey... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/memory-of-persistence/13309/ Wed, 4 May 2005 00:00:00 EST A widely advertised exhibition of the works of Salvador Dali called to my mind his long residence in New York, where the painter, who claimed to recall the moment of his conception, was a public figure for four decades. His artistic vision was founded in self-discipline, hard work, and sound training. He pressed his teachers for technical training: how to draw, mix the oils, spread the colors, and blend the tones. To his adolescent disgust, they espoused anarchism: Students should paint what... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/best-seller/12900/ Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST In October 1835, the American Protestant Vindicator, a newspaper published by Dr. W.C. Brownlee, pastor of New York's Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church, began serializing tales of sexual abuse purported to have occurred in the Hotel Dieu, a Roman Catholic nunnery in Montreal, as related by an escaped novice, Maria Monk. Maria claimed the Hotel Dieu was riddled with secret entrances, tunnels, and prisons. Priests nightly debauched the nuns, entering through a subterranean passage from a... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/stamp-acts/12537/ Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST Miami Beach Monsters, an off-off-Broadway musical that came and went around 1999, revolved around old movie monsters, long retired to Florida, suddenly rediscovered due to a new issue of commemorative postal stamps. In one scene, Dracula complains he had not consented to the use of his image. Life imitates art: Long before opening night, the Postal Service had honored Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Wolfman. Since then, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety Bird, and the Disney characters... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/collyer-brothers/12165/ Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST Long after Harlem became the center of African-American life, Homer and Langley Collyer, scions of one of the city's oldest families, stayed in their mansion on Fifth Avenue near 128th Street. Both men were Columbia graduates. Homer, born in 1881, practiced law until his stroke in 1933. An affable, Dickensian character, he had affected high collars, sideburns, and an elegant, Spencerian hand. Younger brother Langley, a former concert pianist, favored flowing bow ties. They disconnected their... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/arts/pluck-luck/11788/ Wed, 6 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST If literary success is measured by the quantity of books one writes and sells, perhaps New York's greatest author was Horatio Alger Jr., whose name is welded to the American dream that anyone can rise from rags to riches through his own efforts. Since the 1860s, about half a billion Horatio Alger books have been sold - some 125 novels and 500 short stories, not counting roughly 280 magazine serials never put in book form. Born on Friday, the 13th of January, 1832 in Revere, Mass., Horatio Alger... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/banquet-on-horseback/11409/ Wed, 30 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST Back in 1898, when a roadster was a fast trotting horse, not a speedy automobile, and what we now call swimming pools were called baths, millionaire sportsman C.K.G. Billings rode east from Chicago to conquer the big city. A photograph of one of his parties is still famous. Billings had enriched himself in creating a monopoly over Chicago's natural gas supply. But after inheriting much of his family's fortune, he moved to New York and retired from his gas company in 1901, around his 40th... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/end-of-the-line/11007/ Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST In July 1803, Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon's youngest brother, then serving as a naval officer, arrived in New York on leave. His brother's fame opened every door. He called on President Jefferson in Washington; he went to a ball in Baltimore. There he met Betsy Patterson. When they danced, a chain on his tunic snagged her gown, and they became much taken with each other. Speaking with unknowing prescience, Betsy declared she would rather be the wife of Jerome Bonaparte for one hour than of any... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/older-brother/10674/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST On August 19, 1815, the brig Commerce, out of Bordeaux, came barreling through the Narrows. She had made an unscheduled nighttime stop on July 24 off the Gironde to pick up passengers from an open boat, including one Comte Surviglieri. He took rooms in Mrs. Powell's boarding house on Park Place, just off City Hall Park, under the name Bouchard. One afternoon, the man who now called himself Bouchard was strolling down Broadway when a French ex-grenadier who had served with Napoleon's armies in... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/road-of-hubris/10307/ Wed, 9 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST The IRT's Dyre Avenue line is the remnant of the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway, the Road of Ease, which ran safe, stylish, and efficient trains on time from 1912 to 1937 - and never made a dime. Incorporated in 1872 to build from the Harlem River north to Connecticut, the Westchester collapsed in the Panic of 1873 and slumbered for a generation as a file in its lawyers' office. In 1906, the J.P. Morgan interests bought this paper railroad for $11 million. Its franchise - the right... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/great-mouthpiece/9965/ Wed, 2 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST In the nine years that William J. Fallon, "The Great Mouthpiece," practiced law in Manhattan, he lost none of the more than 120 headline homicide cases he tried. Coldly intelligent, blessed with a phenomenal memory, his charm, good looks, and ready wit made him a media favorite. Born on West 47th Street on January 23, 1886, and a graduate of Fordham College of Law, he served as a Westchester prosecutor before opening a Manhattan law office with Fordham classmate Eugene McGee in 1918. Fallon... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/superfluous-man/9565/ Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST Anarchism, which holds the state intrinsically inhumane, has an individualist right as well as anarcho-syndicalist left. The left has enjoyed more press; the right, more cultural influence. Thus, the radical individualist Albert Jay Nock's prose style and ideas still influence American paleo-conservatism. He appeared in New York in 1910 at 40, as a staff writer for American Magazine. Genial yet astonishingly private throughout his adult life, Nock revealed himself when he described Thomas... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/little-old-moneymaker/9282/ Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST The counterfeiter Emerich Juettner, also known as Edward Mueller, who lived near Broadway and West 96th Street in Manhattan, eluded authorities from 1938 to 1948, longer than any other moneymaker in American history. The first 63 years of Juettner's life were quite respectable. Short, blue-eyed, white-haired, mustachioed, and with a winning (if toothless) grin, Juettner had learned the rudiments of photoengraving in his native Austria. After immigrating to America at 13, he worked as a building... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/analysis-of-an-unsolved-murder/8932/ Wed, 9 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST Veteran political exile Carlo Tresca had survived more than half a century as a militant firebrand before his murder in New York during World War II. When he was 25, an Italian court sentenced him to either 18 months' solitary confinement or 10 years' exile for his journalism and union organizing. Tresca bolted to Switzerland, where he shared a room with future dictator Benito Mussolini, and then emigrated to the land of the First Amendment. Over the next four decades, he organized strikes in... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/calendar/prince-of-34th-street/8599/ Wed, 2 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST James Aloysius Harden-Hickey, man of letters, swordsman, and adventurer, who would proclaim himself James I, Prince of Trinidad, was born in San Francisco on December 8, 1854. Hickey's French-born mother soon took him to Paris. Richard Harding Davis, among the last century's most glamorous reporters, wrote, "When Harden-Hickey was a boy, Paris was never so carelessly gay, so brilliant, never so overcharged with life, color, and adventure." Napoleon III, the new emperor, was transforming Paris... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/king-of-the-bohemians/8227/ Wed, 26 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST Sadakichi Hartmann fried eggs with Walt Whitman, discussed poetry with Stephane Mallarme, and drank with John Barrymore, who described him as "a living freak... sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly." W.C. Fields said the critic was "a no-good bum." But though Hartmann might lift your watch (he was an accomplished pickpocket), his opinion was not for sale. Born in Japan to a German merchant and his Japanese wife in 1867, he was disowned at 14 and shipped to a Philadelphia great-uncle... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/orpheus-in-new-york/7897/ Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST On May 6, 1876, the French luxury steamer Canada arrived in New York on its maiden voyage from Le Havre. Aboard was the composer and conductor Jacques Offenbach, making his only American tour. Born in 1819 as Jakob Offenbach, the son of a cantor in Cologne, he went to Paris at 14. Jakob became Jacques and, while playing in the Opera-Comique's orchestra, began composing, "dashing off three waltzes before lunch and a mazurka after dinner." Despite lifelong ill health - gout and rheumatism were... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/securing-central-park/7547/ Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST One of 1959's great hits, Jimmy Driftwood's "The Battle of New Orleans," borrowed from an old bluegrass fiddle tune, "The Eighth of January." On that date in 1815, Andrew Jackson and his mixed bag of 3,500 soldiers, sailors, citizen militiamen, smugglers, slaves, and Choctaw Indians repelled the final assault of 15,000 British regulars on the Crescent City, winning America's greatest land victory of the War of 1812 two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed at Ghent. Part of New York's... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/new-york-jeweler-swayed-monetary-policy/7214/ Wed, 5 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST Raymond Chandler's "The High Window" revolves around a stolen coin called the Brasher doubloon. The coin was no fiction. Nicknamed for its creator, Ephraim Brasher, one of 18th-century New York's leading jewelers, his gold pieces illustrate America's monetary chaos after the Revolution. Lacking the power to finance the war through taxation, Congress and the 13 colonies instead printed piles of paper money, denominated in dollars or pounds, shillings, and pence, all of which soon became nearly... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/decline-of-americas-greatest-composer/6881/ Wed, 29 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST On December 14, 1894, Edward MacDowell, then considered America's greatest living composer, performed his Second Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. Although it had been first performed in Boston in 1889, the work was new to New Yorkers: After all, before phonographs and radios, orchestral music could be heard only in performance. MacDowell, a magnificent pianist, triumphed. W.J. Henderson of the New York Times found the concerto impossible to speak of "in terms of judicial calmness... WILLIAM BRYK http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/marm-a-gilded-age-mastermind/6634/ Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST Thieves cash in with the aid of those dealers in dubious goods known as fences. In the male-dominated underworld of the Gilded Age, New York's leading fence was female. Her success was as straightforward as the woman herself: She was honest in her dealings and a shrewd judge of character. Between 1864 and 1884, most New York robbers, burglars, and bandits made the most of their ill-gotten gains by trusting Mother Mandelbaum, who handled as much as $10 million in swag - roughly equivalent to...