Tim Rowland - Strange and Obscure Stories of New York City: Little-Known Tales About Gotham’s People and Places

Copyright 2016 by Tim Rowland

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jane Sheppard

Cover photos: iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0012-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0013-0

Printed in the United States of America

To Beth, for believing in me more than I believe in myself.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1
Selling the Public on a Jump from the Brooklyn Bridge

CHAPTER 2
A Humble Printer Establishes Freedom of the Press

CHAPTER 3
Botched Abortion, Botched Justice

CHAPTER 4
The US Mail Underfoot

CHAPTER 5
The Grand Slave Conspiracy that Wasnt

CHAPTER 6
Mark Twain Takes New York by Storm and Spirit

CHAPTER 7
The Rise and Fall of Little Germany

CHAPTER 8
New Yorks Cross-Dressing Governor

CHAPTER 9
A Deadly Battle of Shakespearean Actors

CHAPTER 10
Woodlawn Cemeterys Celebrated Clientele

CHAPTER 11
A Building and a Food Fight for the Ages

CHAPTER 12
New Yorks New Insane Classes, and the Woman Who Fought for Them

CHAPTER 13
New York Declares War on Pigs

CHAPTER 14
A Floating City of Liquor

CHAPTER 15
A Lake Gets Its Revenge on Manhattan

Photo Insert

Preface

I n New York City, it goes without saying, strange stories are a dime a dozen. The chore is not to ferret them out, the chore is to narrow the selection down. Obscure stories are harder to find, since the city is blessed with an uncountable amount of excellent books, blogs, and websites that have dutifully catalogued and chronicled just about everything thats happened in New York since the Earth cooled.

So if the historical essays presented here are more strange than they are obscure, this is why. It is hoped, however, that they will add layers and context that give added meaning and amusement to readers, even if they have heard in passing that, say, New York had a cross-dressing governor or that the US mail once sailed along in tubes buried beneath city sidewalks.

What is also striking is the degree to which New York reflects the nation at large. Yankees though they might have been, the city had slave riots that rivaled anything in the South, and at the time of the Civil War, Mayor Fernando Wood even agitated for secession from the Union.

New Yorkers were at the fore in undercutting prohibition. They witnessed a steamboat demonstration that predated Robert Fultons by twenty years. The rhetoric of its leaders in commerce soared to the stars and set the tone for the nation, yet it produced criminals so shameless and rank that it was hard to think of them as human.

A matre d in New York could accumulate more fame and adoration than a deacon in any other town. In everything from architecture, to design, to sports, to politics, New York set the standardit might not always have been a pretty standard, but it was a standard that could never be ignored. So if its stories (even the obscure ones) are strange, wonderful, and, like the city itself, they cannot be ignored.

C HAPTER

Selling the Public on a Jump from the Brooklyn Bridge

I n all probability, on a midsummer day in 1886, a twenty-five-year-old man named Steve Brodie joined thousands of other New Yorkers by not jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. No matter. The young huckster from the Bowery parlayed this nonevent into a storied career that lives on in the annals of history, pop culture, and showmanship. There is, however, just that chance that he did jump; like Brodie himself, that facts that surround that July day are hopelessly complex.

The Brooklyn Bridge had been completed in 1883, and the engineering marvel had captured the imagination of New Yorkers almost from the day that it was proposed in a set of improbable architectural sketches. Dubbed one of the Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, one hundred and fifty thousand pedestrians and eighteen hundred vehicles crossed the bridge into history on its opening day. A week later, a rumor spread that the massive stone structure was in imminent danger of collapse. The news caused a stampede that killed a dozen people. Sensing an opportunity, the legendary P. T. Barnum later paraded twenty-one elephants across the bridge to prove its stability.

But with a height of 135 feet, equal to a fourteen-story building, from the decking to the water, the bridge quickly attracted the attention of daredevils, who contemplated the odds of leaping from the bridge and surviving.

The first was Robert Emmet Odlum, a swimming instructor from a family torn by the Civil War, who taught aquatic skills to the children of such luminaries as Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and William T. Sherman. Always seeking new challenges, Odlum transitioned from endurance swimming into high-diving. He escaped unharmed, more or less, from dives off a ninety-foot bridge near Washington, DC, and a ladder affixed to a steamship 110 feet high. Meanwhile, as he was plummeting to the depths below, so was his business. His swimming school, while critically acclaimed, failed, and his proffered side bets on how far he could swim found no takers. He was one of those whose success in life never seemed to translate into financial reward; he won applause for his swimming feats, and as a hotel lifeguard he was credited with the ocean rescue of Sky Colfax, son of Lincolns Vice President Schuyler Colfaxbut these heroics werent paying the bills. Odlum reckoned a jump from the celebrated Brooklyn Bridge might be the ticket to success, and he began to make plans for just such an event.

Unfortunately, the police got wind of the stunt, and the chief police inspector put out the word to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. Odlums mother would later say that her boys motives were pure; he wanted to prove that the rushing air of a fall was not, in itself, fatal. This, she said, would convince the men and women trapped in the upper floors of a burning building to be at ease jumping into a fire net. And, of course, if he happened to parlay the daredevil act into a little coin, well, what woman in those days couldnt use a little cash?