Whale Fever at 35th and Broadway

One of the more outlandish things in Midtown Manhattan during the 1800s was The New York Aquarium, located at the NW corner of 35th Street and Broadway.

The aquarium was a short-lived, but very ambitious venture, founded by William Cameron Coup and Charles Reiche. Coup was already well-known for his collaborations with P.T. Barnum -- he helped set up and manage P.T. Barnum's Museum, Menagerie and Circus.

 The New York Aquarium opened on October 11, 1876. The building was 20,000 square feet, and included space for exhibition as well as research. The centerpiece of the main pavilion was a 30-foot tank intended to house a whale, or, whales (plural). Additional tanks flanked the whale tank, intended for sea lions and elephant seals, and tanks along the pavilion's north and east walls housed fish.

Image: MCNY

In his memoir Sawdust and Spangles, Coup devotes a chapter to the Aquarium and it's specimens. It sort of reads like a manual on how not to transport aquatic animals from distant places. Even so, his enthusiasm and love for the creatures comes through. He starts with a description of a rare species of Japanese fish that has three tails (it's a goldfish), and continues with a description of whale transport  that involved a days-long journey by boat from the Norwegian coastline to Canada, then a 90-hour train ride from Canada to New York City. Three died en route on separate journeys before one was delivered alive and transferred to the aquarium on October 15, 1876, a few days after the aquarium's official opening.

The whale exhibited -- briefly, before it too died -- was most likely a beluga whale. 

White Whale, drawing, c. 1820: source

The year 1870 brought the aquarium's first sea lions, another main attraction. Pinnipeds have been exhibited in captivity since around the 1600s, but this exhibit was likely one of New York's first. The pinniped pen was located next to the whale tank, and drew guests from all over.

In 1879 Coup and Reiche disagreed on the practice of opening the business on Sundays --  Reiche was for it, and Coup against. Reiche bought out Coup's share of the company and went on to pursue other enterprises.

The aquarium closed in 1881, and the NW corner of 35th and Broadway soon became known for its theater venues, first as the location for the New Park Theater in 1883, and from 1894 until 1914, the home of the Herald Square Theater.

The Herald Building: Now with a Duane Reade!

This post also appears on Fashion Herald.

The New York Herald building at West 35^th Street where Broadway meets Sixth Avenue, was a two-story building designed by Stanford White of architecture firm McKim, Mead & White. White was commissioned to build it for friend James Gordon Bennett Jr. to house the new Herald offices when the paper moved uptown from Park Row in 1894. The story of the Herald and its founders are here, here, and here.

Photo: MCNY

The Herald had offices in this building until Bennett Jr.’s death in 1918. Soon after, Frank Munsey bought the paper and merged it with the New York Sun to create the Herald-Sun. The new combo-paper’s offices were moved to West 42^nd Street. 

The north half of the building was demolished in 1921, leaving only the southern part, statues intact on the  building’s façade. 

Photo: MCNY

Eventually, in 1930, a new, 24-story office building was designed and built by the architecture firm Clinton & Russell where the northern half used to be. The firm was founded in 1894, the same year the Herald building was completed (weird coincidence!).

Photo: Berenice Abbott via the  NYPL and MCNY

In the 1930s the Sixth Avenue Group (a business improvement group of sorts) sponsored a contest to re-design and “beautify” the area following construction of a new underground subway line and station, and the razing of the Sixth Avenue elevated line. The low rise portion of the Herald building was completed in 1940. I’m pretty sure that "completed" meant that the building was stripped of its Stanford White-designed façade work and given the 1940s-1950s simple (sterile) treatment. The front windows are much larger in the new building, and the ground floor looks lower, but I think the building's original bones are still there. That same year, the James Gordon Bennett memorial was installed in Herald Square in the form of a 40 ft. tall monument, unveiled during a dedication ceremony on November 19, 1940. 

Postcard: Pisark's

Herald Square and the surrounding area went into a decline in the 1970s and 1980s, but were brought back to life with a late 1990s renovation by the 34th Street Partnership.The building is still there, and the first two floors are currently home to a massive Duane Reade.Time marches on.

Additional Sources:

Kruger, Richard. The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune

“Sixth Ave. Group to Beautify Parks,” NYT, March 24, 1939

“Frank A. Munsey Buys the Herald and the Telegram,” NYT, January 15, 1920

The James Gordon Bennetts' New York Herald, Part 3

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on the New York Herald.

After returning to the States, Bennett commissioned Stanford White to design new offices for the Herald. The new building would be located a fair distance from Park Row and competitor Joseph Pulitzer's World building, completed in 1890. Bennett obtained a 30-year lease at Sixth Avenue and 35th Street, at the south border of a small clearing then known as Dodge Plaza in honor of William Earle Dodge, who I've mentioned before.

Park Row, and most of the competition

Bennett chose the new site for its proximity to public transportation and nightlife. The elevated train line had been built a few years before, and now afforded the public, including Herald's reporters, easy access to most parts of the city. The site also bordered Tin Pan Alley, and several music halls and theaters, including places like Jim Corbett's and the Haymarket.

Corbett's, said to be a hangout spot for JGB Jr., c. 1900. Photo: MCNY

No stranger to scandal himself, Stanford White designed an elaborate Renaissance Revival building based on Fra Giancondo's Loggia del Consiglio, a late 15th century seat of the local city council in Verona.  The Loggia's roof was lined with sculptures of famous poets, including the risque poet Catallus. It is said that this inspiration was chosen on purpose as a nod of sorts to the Herald's coarse nature and Bennett's sporting life.

Instead of poets lining the roof, Bennett chose his spirit animal, the owl. Supposedly he claimed that an owl's cry saved him at sea during his Civil War service.

the Herald building shortly after construction. Postcard: Pisark's

A couple of them are now incorporated in the Bennett memorial in Herald Square. I've written of the monument before, and so have others. . .

Ever-conscious of public perception, Bennett mandated that there would be windows along the Broadway side of the building allowing passersby to view the presses below. People loved it and regularly crowded at them to watch sheet after sheet of the Herald come off the presses.

The Herald building's elaborate western facade and people crowding near the windows, c. 1902 Photo: LOC

And, what they saw below:


The Herald presses, c. 1902. Photo: LOC

The acclaim of the building and increased commerce of the area led to a name change for the Square. It became known as Herald Square in the late 1890s. Still a commercial hub, now instead of newspapers, the square welcomes millions of daily shoppers.

Part 1 can be found here; part 2 here.

More sources:
Broderick, Mosette. Triumvirate, McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America’s Gilded Age.

The James Gordon Bennetts' New York Herald, Part 2

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on the New York Herald.

In 1866 James Gordon Bennett Sr. passed the publishing duties of the New York Herald on to a man who many thought to be an unlikely successor -- his son James Gordon Bennett Jr.

Image: NYPL

James Gordon Bennett Jr. is best known in history for his devotion to yachting, ballooning, and socializing on a grand scale. Mostly due to the Herald's commercial success, he was raised to cultivate and enjoy just about any recreational activity that required expensive equipment and/or traveling. Aside from a brief stint serving as a Third Lieutenant for the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service during the Civil War, Bennett practiced a life of leisure with a consistency and fervor that led artist friend and Julius LeBlanc Stewart to paint it at least twice. 

On the Yacht "Namouna", Venice (1890), Julius LeBlanc Stewart

 . . . with totally different lighting schemes. The sky in the painting below looks like the sun is rising and setting at the same time.

Yachting on the Mediterranean (1896), Julius LeBlanc Stewart



As publisher of the Herald JGB Jr. had an extensive list of "Don'ts" for reporters to follow. The list contained very detailed instructions on how to address or refer to the wealthy (i.e. his friends) in text. Father and son were a study in opposites: James Gordon Bennett Sr. was known for exposing scandal, and James Gordon Bennett Jr. was known for living it. Their contradictory lifestyles did not escape other members of the press, who regularly satirized both, and often referred to Jr. as "The Commodore." Here, JGB Sr. visits his namesake from the grave to keep him in line, and Jr. reacts.

Image: NYPL

Under Bennett Jr.'s leadership, the Herald's circulation gradually dropped and expenses steadily rose. Bennett moved to Paris in 1877 (Wikipedia, 4th paragraph) and continued to run the newspaper from there. While in Paris, he launched the Paris Herald (forerunner to the International Herald Tribune), and an evening edition of the paper called the Telegraph. He wasn't gone for good though. The famous Herald building was still yet to be built and the Square named after the paper of the same name. More on this in part 3.

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

The James Gordon Bennetts' New York Herald, Part 1

This is part 1 of a 3-part series on the New York Herald. All three posts will eventually appear on Fashion Herald, a blog about 34th Street district retail.

One of the fathers of modern journalism, James Gordon Bennett Sr. founded the New York Herald in 1835 in a small office on Wall Street. Bennett vowed that his new penny paper would have none of the political alliances and proselytizing found in other papers.


Cross-eyed, Bennett once wrote that his affliction came from watching the "winding ways of [President] Martin Van Buren." Photo: Library of Congress

Bennett had excellent intuition for what was missing in journalism of his time, and how to appeal to the general population. With an almost prophetic sense of the financial crisis to come in 1837, the Herald was the first general interest paper to pen a financial column. "Money Markets" debuted within a week of the paper's first issue in 1836 and was immensely popular. In it, Bennett exposed stock market fraud and speculated that the rise and fall of the stock market was not accidental.

Bennett also tapped into what have since become public obsessions -- crime, scandal, and celebrities. Lurid descriptions and relentless coverage of these are common today, but in the 1830s, murders and the like were scarcely reported, if at all. The murder of prostitute Ellen Jewett in 1836, and the Herald's subsequent front page coverage of the event and trial changed all of that.

One of many postmortem caricatures of Ms. Jewett. Photo: Library of Congress

The Herald was the first paper to take reporting to that special macabre place by printing detailed descriptions of the courtroom proceedings and crime scene. Bennett was also one of the first editors to publish interviews with key witnesses and others involved in the case, the first being a lengthy interview with Jewett's Madame Rosina Townsend. 

For those who couldn't afford theater or concert tickets, the newspaper turned the news into its own little episodic show -- kind of like one really long Law and Order episode. Each day readers could open the paper to a new spectacle of horrors. Because intimate knowledge of the case was dispelled daily via the paper, devoted readers could consider themselves an active part of the drama.

Bennett spared no expense on technology advances to increase the paper's reporting and production efficiency. During the Mexican-American War, he established a courier service that was faster than the post office in order to get reports from the front lines to the Herald offices in New York City. (It was soon shut down by the postal service.) Bennett secured a steady readership while covering the Civil War by publishing eyewitness accounts of soldiers on the front lines. To evade Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton's censorship ban on the press, Bennett printed war casualty lists. People bought editions of the paper every day in hopes of finding the names of lost loved ones. Like the Jewett trial case, this produced a regularly paying audience addicted to tragedy, though this time is was more personal.

Bennett's coverage of politics was meant to be impartial, and compared with other papers, it mostly was. The April 15, 1865 edition of the Herald shows a strange marriage of the grisly and the political with its Lincoln assassination coverage. Click here to see a large version of the image below. If you enlarge it, the copy theatrically describes Lincoln's murder scene and the ensuing investigation.

Image: Library of Congress

In 1866 Bennett Sr. passed his duties on to his son James Gordon Bennett Jr. who had long been the subject of tabloid-ish reporting in rival papers. More on him in part 2 next week.

Sorry for the lack of links, but most of this was culled from print sources, including these:
-Carlson, Oliver. The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett
-Kluger, Richard. The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune
-Pray, Isaac Clarke. Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times (google books)
-Sandburg, Carl. Storm Over the Land: A Profile of the Civil War.
-Seitz, Don C. The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son, Proprietors of The New York Herald.

Jerry McAuley's Helping Hands

Just south of Greeley Square Park on West 32nd Street, near Sixth Avenue and one of the neighborhood's drastically altered corners is the former location of one of Jerry McAuley's rescue missions. The Cremorne Mission was established in 1882 by Jerry McAuley his wife Maria.

McAuley was a river thief and alcoholic who, while serving time in Sing Sing, found religion and vowed to change his ways. After his release in 1864, a couple of relapses, and many personal struggles, he established one of the first rescue missions in the city that catered to adult men -- most at the time concentrated their efforts on women and children -- and called it The Helping Hand for Men. McAuley's mission was located on Water Street and by the 1880s, was a well-known and respected establishment. Around this time the McAuleys decided to expand their efforts into the much talked about Tenderloin district further uptown.

(In yet another weird connection between 34th Street and Bryant Park, William E. Dodge, who now presides over the Reading Room in BP, was also one of the Cremorne Mission's early financiers.)

McAuley chose the name and location for his new mission carefully, opening it next door to a gambling house that provided all types of vice at all hours with no cover charge. In hopes of luring wayward drunks toward their salvation McAuley cleverly gave his mission a very similar name to its neighbor. On plenty of occasions patrons of the Cremorne Gardens who were looking to revel in a scene like this. . .

. . . would accidently enter McAuley's Cremorne Mission, to find a revival sermon in progress similar to this:

Still, many of them stayed, listened to the sermons, changed their ways, and were grateful for the intervention. Some historians theorize that the combination of spirituality, confession, and peer pressure present in the Mission formed the basis for today's Alcoholics Anonymous programs (Sante).

The mission eventually moved to 42nd Street, and was later closed in 1972, though a small memorial to McAuley remains in Greeley Square today. Dedicated in 1913, and donated by the McAuley Committee of the New York City Rescue Mission, the Jerry McAuley Drinking Fountain was the second fountain made in his honor. For for several years, it lived just outside Greeley Square as a monument to McAuley's contribution to the neighborhood. Here is a somewhat awkwardly staged photo of it in use from the mid-1950s:

The fountain has been lovingly restored and is still in Greeley Square Park; look for it in the north end of the park next time you venture to Broadway Boulevard for a class or to scout other neighborhood architectural gems.

Another lasting monument to McAuley and his wife remains in the present-day New York City Rescue Mission. From Water Street to 32nd Street, and back downtown, the NYCRM and its many volunteers continue to help those in need get back on their feet.

**All images courtesy of the NYCRM. Thanks for your amazing work!

Works Cited:
Sante, Luc. Lowlife
Offord, Rev. R.M. Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (google books link)
Bonner, Arthur. Jerry McAuley and His Mission

Civil War in Midtown

This post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

Awhile ago at work I was half asked, half told to find a connection between the park and the American Civil War in order to commemorate its sesquicentennial. I'm not a Civil War historian, which makes finding non-obvious connections within this hugely dense topic of history difficult. Bryant Park, then known as Reservoir Square, was most likely used as an encampment for Union soldiers during the war, but I think that was true of most parks and public spaces in the city. Also, most of the confirmation of this comes from NYC guidebooks, not actual primary sources. I did find a small connection via one of my favorite monuments in the park.

At the east end of the reading room stands a monument to William Earle Dodge, founding member of the American chapter of the Y.M.C.A., New York 8th District Congressman from 1866-1867, and Native American rights activist, among many other things.

Photo: BPC

He was also the father of one of the youngest Brigadier Generals in the Union Army, Charles Cleveland Dodge, who aside from his commitment to public service, shares his father's stance.

Though Dodge left the service in June1863, he returned to volunteer with the U.S. Army to restore order in the city during the Draft Riots under Major General John Z. Wool. Transcripts of Wool's reports are available online. The Draft Riots, still considered one of the largest (and by day three) heinous acts of civil disobedience in the country, waged on for four days throughout the city from July 13 - July 16, 1863. The African-American community was especially targeted and horribly mistreated, leading to an exodus from the city by that community, which I'm sure had a huge impact on New York City's cultural and social development in the following decades.