Bennett's Owls

This post also appears on Fashion Herald.

James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s adoration of owls may have bordered on pathological, but in the best possible way. While serving as a Third Lieutenant for the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (the pre-Coast Guard Coast Guard) during the Civil War, the son of New York Herald founder James Gordon Bennett Sr. claimed that a serendipitous owl guided him through rough seas to safety.

As a tribute to his spirit animal, he lined the Herald building with several bronze owls in 1894, and years later even had an owl shaped tomb designed to hold his remains. The Herald owls, along with the statue of Minerva and the bell ringers, were created by French sculptor Antonin Jean Carles. The two corner owls with their wings spread had eyes that lit up to the delight of evening passersby.

The Herald building in the early 1900s, looking north from 34th Street. Statuary from the Bennett monument in Herald Square is on the facade of the building along with Bennett's owls.

Today those two owls perch on either side of the Herald monument, and their eyes continue to light the way.

Back of the Herald Square monument, facing south. Photo: 34SP

Two more of Bennet's owls guard the entrance to Herald Square.

Entrance owl. Photo 34SP

The Herald building may have been Bennett's most well known tribute to the bird, but it wasn't his first. At some point in the mid 1800s Bennett bought a stone villa in Newport Rhode Island, originally built in 1833 by Rhode Island stonemason Alexander McGregor. The new homeowner enlisted the help of Newport architect Dudley Newton to add several embellishments to the property, including gateposts topped with owl statuary. It's hard to see in this picture, but these look to be a leaner species than the Herald owls, but no less fierce.

Bennett's stone villa and owl sentries in 1957, shortly before the building was demolished to make way for a shopping center. Photo: Preservation Society of Newport County

So solid was his devotion to the bird, he also had Stanford White design a 200-foot high tomb shaped like an owl that would serve as Bennett's mausoleum. Work was halted due to the untimely but not entirely surprising death of Stanford White in 1906. The design never came to be, but the Times reported that in 1918, shortly after Bennett's death, drawings of a model owl tomb were found on the desk of sculptor Andrew O'Conner, who had been commissioned by White to work on the initial designs.

That same year Frank Munsey, then owner of the New York Sun bought out the Herald, combined the two papers, and moved the offices to 42nd Street. The owls were removed from the facade of the Herald building. A few have since resurfaced: aside from the Herald Square owls mentioned above, the Brooklyn Museum has a couple on display, and there are a few above the entrance to NYU's Shimkin Hall.

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.