A Scholar Brings to Life New York’s History

For Francis Sypher Jr., New York City’s history is full of life. This fall, a slender volume he edited was published by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, “Minutes of Coroners Proceedings, City and County of New York, John Burnet, Coroner, 1748-1758.”“The British colonial period,” Mr. Sypher said, “is something of a black hole in our historical consciousness. People know of Peter Stuyvesant and have the idea of Dutchmen smoking pipes and the British come in 1664. Then you fast forward to the American Revolution and George Washington is riding down Broadway on his white horse. But in between, we have a period of 120 years. What happened in British colonial New York? A lot happened. We’re not as conscious of that period at all,” he said.Mr. Sypher offered a couple of reasons for the relative lack of popular awareness of his chosen subject: after the Revolution, Americans didn’t want to be reminded of British rule and the Loyalists cleared out, mainly in favor of England or Canada. The city was flooded with newcomers following the revolution.Speaking of the book, he said, “It contains a lot of human-interest stories that would make British colonial New York feel very real and very familiar to today,” he said. The book contains reports of persons dying from drowning, alcohol intoxication, or as a result of a construction accident. “All of this is very familiar,” he said.Mr. Sylpher, a New Yorker with consummate manners and understated modesty, is a man of myriad academic interests. His research ranges from articles on classical literature to the 20th-century author of “Peyton Place.” This scholarly generalist has, over the past three and a half decades, researched and written a stream of work, penning short stories about Africa as easily as articles on English literature and American history. During the 1980s he lived in West Africa, including two years in Gabon on a teacher exchange. He spent another two years in Togo, and one year in Senegal.Mr. Sypher’s early school years provided a springboard for research. He attended Trinity School on West 91st Street, for 12 years, which piqued his interest in St. Agnes Chapel, an Upper West Side outpost of Trinity, Wall Street – the chapel was once adjacent to the school but no longer stands. Mr. Sypher never actually saw the building, although his grandmother, who grew up in a townhouse across the street, was a parishioner there and his great-grandfather had been a pew holder in 1892. Mr. Sypher was curious as to why the building had been torn down and forgotten, and in his research discovered that its destruction had been a painful chapter in the history of the neighborhood and associated institutions.While earning his undergraduate, master’s, and doctorate degrees at Columbia University (where members of his family have studied over four generations), Mr. Sypher studied with medieval and Renaissance historian Paul Oskar Kristeller and classical scholar and essayist Gilbert Highet. Mr. Sypher remembers Highet as a dynamic lecturer who offered him helpful advice and exhibited outstanding conscientiousness in preparing for class. Of the emigre scholar, Kristeller, Mr. Sypher recalls an inspirational figure with whom he could talk over scholarly problems.He has continued a scholarly connection to his alma mater by researching historical features of the university. One article he wrote described a 15-ton sundial made of dark green, lathe-turned New York State granite that once adorned the university’s south court.Another article of Columbiana was spurred by the chance sight a blue circle in a stained glass west window of the Church of the Heavenly Rest on the Upper East Side. It was the Columbia seal. “Why is this here?” he asked, and set out to find answers. The west window was given in memory of a rector who was a Columbia graduate, as was his successor.He often works at Columbia University libraries and at the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society, which he called one of the great resources in New York for biography and local and family history.Asked what makes a history book great, Mr. Sypher said one that brings vividly to life day-to-day conditions and “imaginatively recreat[es] the feeling of what it was like to really be there.”Examples of such vividness abound in “Minutes of Coroners Proceedings.” One death described therein resulted in political controversy. A British man-of-war in the Hudson River fired on a woman passenger in a small pleasure boat that had failed to salute the naval vessel. She was hit in the head and killed.Mr. Sypher said that the incident offers evidence that the British were sensitive about colonists respect for British naval authority. The response of the British ship was “way out of proportion to the offense” and the public was angered. The lieutenant of the British boat slipped away to England, the gunner was caught and held in jail. Governor George Clinton intervened since the boat captain was his son-in-law, and the coroner Burnet was fired as a result.Mr. Sypher said this episode was a good example of tension between civil authorities in New York and the British colonial authorities – tensions that not long after helped spark the American Revolution.The book is of import to constitutional history since the coroner’s jury, Mr. Sypher said, was an early example of a representative body.One theme of his work appears to be rescuing voices, researching those whose contributions in the past deserve to be recovered. While living in Togo, he became aware of a poet and novelist named Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who was internationally known in the Regency and Early Victorian period, and died mysteriously in West Africa in 1838.He was inspired to research her life and has written or edited 14 volumes by and about her work.A sampling of his other recent works include a book published by the New York State Society of the Cincinnati containing 475 biographies of revolutionary officers of New York State; letters a family in Tarrytown in the 1720s received from relatives from Germany; a book about a statistician who improved industrial conditions in the workplace; a history of the Yorkville Civic Council, a coordinating agency facilitating civic and social services on the Upper East Side; and a history of Hanover Square, where the British are planning a memorial garden remembering the tragic events of September 11.He attributes his love of books to reading as a youth in his grandfather’s library in Closter, N.J. It is no accident that he also studied painting and art at the Art Students League of New York. As a genealogist, Mr. Sypher gained experience reading deeds, wills, legal records, and agreements. He has deftly combined his skills of portraiture and knowledge of historical documents to make the past live on.

A Scholar Brings to Life New York’s History

A Scholar Brings to Life New York’s History

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