Archive for 2010
Mulberry Streets
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Note: The series of posts you’re about to see, over the next few days, are offered as a notebook- sort of a work in progress. When I get something wrong, please let me know, as this is a learning experience for your humble narrator.
The “Bloody Sixth” provides a certain context, in my mind, for why the vast numbers of people left Manhattan for points east and populated Brooklyn, Long Island City, and Newtown. In many ways, we live in the wreckage of their utopia… here in the Newtown Pentacle.
This is an image of a Mulberry Street Tenement from the
Harper’s Weekly of September 13, 1873, from the Library of Congress:
A familiar illustration, it’s linked to by many people, and is provided for context- although it is difficult to read the actual text- even in the larger version attained by clicking the image. It describes a visit to a Mulberry Street Tenement and it’s “back house” in the upper drawing, and an inspection of a fruit market set up along the sidewalk in the lower.
This is a short post, but likely interesting to long time readers and antiquarians…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Exiting from St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, I noticed a surprising relict of the ancient sixth ward. The bloody sixth, as it was called by sensationalist and muckraker alike, was famous for the smaller structures that landlords would erect in their back yards in order to maximize their real estate. So called “back houses” were once a common sight, but were the worst places to live- as they shared their living space with the outhouses and privy drains of the larger structure and the enormous population housed therein and most were in perpetual shadow.
from nytimes.com
The worst thing in New-York from a sanitary point of view is the rear tenement. It kills more people than war or famine in proportion to its opportunities. It is a sure lurking place for dirt, disease, and death.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
For some reason, the progressives of the 19th century were horrified by open air markets set up along the sidewalk. On modern day Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, one can observe similar merchant activity to that described by Jacob Riis and others- little shops set up in hallways and along the sidewalk, any hole in the wall- by an insular people loathe to let go of their customs and language.
Other Riis terminologies like “Tramp Burrows”, “Jewtown”, and “Heathen Temples” trample upon modern political corrrectness, however, and will most likely be trimmed from future discourse.
Moving about the sixth ward in 2010, one might happen across a Chinese grocer offering alien vegetables of unknown specie, who barely hides her umbrage when the Gwai Lo tourists ask “What’s that?”. Many sidewalk vendors were noticed to have displayed signs that say “photos $2”.
from wikipedia
Gwai Lo (鬼佬) literally means “ghost man” (the word “ghost” refers to the paler complexions of stereotypical Caucasians). The term is sometimes translated into English as foreign devil. The term arose when the first group of Europeans appeared in China as they were associated with barbarians . For several thousand years, Chinese people had the image of its borders continuously breached by “uncivilized tribes” given to mayhem and destruction. The term was popularised during the Opium Wars in response to the Unequal Treaties. In Southern parts of China, the term gwai lo was used. In Northern parts of China, the term (Western) ocean ghost ((西)洋鬼子 (Xi) Yangguizi) was used, Europe being West of China.
Also of interest, this is a digitally retouched and colored image found in the Public Domain over at Wikimedia Commons, representing Mulberry Street in 1900:
My belief – if the signage displayed in the above photo is accurate and 88 Mulberry Street means the same thing now as it did 110 years ago- is that this is the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets, looking uptown from below Canal Street with Five Points behind the camera. Obviously, the photographer had someone watching his back.
from wikipedia
The street was named after the mulberry trees that once lined Mulberry Bend, the slight bend in Mulberry Street. “Mulberry Bend is a narrow bend in Mulberry Street, a tortuous ravine of tall tenement-houses… so full of people that the throngs going and coming spread off the sidewalk nearly to the middle of the street… The crowds are in the street because much of the sidewalk and all of the gutter is taken up with vendors’ stands”.” For the urban reformer Jacob Riis, Mulberry Bend epitomized the worst of the city’s slums.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My 2010 shot looks downtown toward Five Points from the far end of the scene above, at Mulberry and Grand Streets in modern Little Italy’s “main street” restaurant row, and at the infamous “Mulberry Bend”.
from wikipedia
Much of the neighborhood has been absorbed and engulfed by Chinatown, as immigrants from China moved to the area. What was once Little Italy has essentially shrunk into a single street which serves as a tourist area and maintains few Italian residents. The northern reaches of Little Italy, near Houston Street, ceased to be recognizably Italian, and eventually became the neighborhood known today as NoLIta, an abbreviation for North of Little Italy. Today, the section of Mulberry Street between Broome and Canal Streets, is all that is left of the old Italian neighborhood. The street is lined with some two-dozen Italian restaurants popular with tourists, and seemingly very few locals. Unlike Chinatown, which continues to expand in all directions with newer Chinese immigrants, little remains of the original Little Italy.
The house of Dagger John
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When you first enter the place, your pupils are narrowed, as the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself stares down upon you. This is hallowed ground, one of the places where the modern nation cast off its caul. You are in Manhattan, but the builders of this place called the island New York, and this is their Cathedral.
In 1815 New York City was Manhattan only, and it only extended from the Battery to fourteenth street, by 1865 paved and graded roads went as far as Forty Second Street.
On June, 8th, 1809- the cornerstone of this building was laid down, and it was dedicated on April 14, 1815.
from wikipedia
In the 19th century, the city was transformed by immigration and development. A visionary development proposal, the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, expanded the city street grid to encompass all of Manhattan, and the 1819 opening of the Erie Canal connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the North American interior. Local politics fell under the domination of Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish immigrants. Public-minded members of the old merchant aristocracy lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which became the first landscaped park in an American city in 1857. A significant free-black population also existed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Slaves had been held in New York through 1827, but during the 1830s New York became a center of interracial abolitionist activism in the North. New York’s black population was over 16,000 in 1840. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, and by 1860, one in four New Yorkers – over 200,000 – had been born in Ireland.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The king of France himself commissioned stained glass windows to adorn this structure, but those artifacts ended up at Fordham university, which is just as well because they would have been consumed in the 1866 fire that gutted the place.
Hellfire, however, was no impediment to Dagger John’s flock which feared it not.
During the 1830’s and 40’s, large tracts of Manhattan building stock were converted from domestic to industrial usage, and the flood of arriving immigrants- largely from Catholic Germany and Ireland, and overwhelmingly single young men, crowded into certain neighborhoods walking distance from the new factories.
This building was designed by Joseph Francois Mangin, and beneath the place is a labyrinth of mortuary vaults.
from nyc.gov
In the 17th century, the Dutch City Hall was in the old City Tavern on Pearl Street. A new City Hall was built in 1700 at Wall and Nassau Streets. It was renamed Federal Hall when New York became the first capital of the United States. The 1833-1842 Federal Hall National Memorial is now on this site. The Common Council talked about a new City hall as early as 1776 but the Revolutionary War intervened. A site was chosen, the old Common at the northern limits of the City, now City Hall Park.
In 1802, a competition was held for the new City Hall and twenty-six proposals were submitted. First prize of $350 was awarded to John McComb, Jr. and Joseph Francois Mangin. John McComb’s father repaired the old City Hall in 1784. John McComb, Jr. was a New Yorker while Joseph Mangin was trained in his native France. McComb designed the landmark Hamilton Grange on Convent Avenue, Castel Clinton in Battery Park and the James Watson House on State Street. Joseph Mangin was City Surveyor in 1795 and published an official City map with Casimir Goerck in 1803.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When anti catholic “nativist” mobs from the nearby “Lower East Side” river fronts approached the place in 1842, they found that Dagger John had great walls erected about his church after similar riots in 1835, and that those walls and the surrounding streets were manned by the hated Irish.
By the late 1840’s, the word tenement had become a familiar term to refer to the crowded warrens in New York, and an official City census by the Council on Hygiene reported some 500,000 people living in just over 15,000 buildings.
In 1866, a conflagration consumed the place, and it was rebuilt in 1868.
from wikipedia
Anti-Catholic animus in the United States reached a peak in the nineteenth century when the Protestant population became alarmed by the influx of Catholic immigrants. Some American Protestants, having an increased interest in prophecies regarding the end of time, claimed that the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. The resulting “nativist” movement, which achieved prominence in the 1840s, was whipped into a frenzy of anti-Catholicism that led to mob violence, the burning of Catholic property, and the killing of Catholics. This violence was fed by claims that Catholics were destroying the culture of the United States. The nativist movement found expression in a national political movement called the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which (unsuccessfully) ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in 1856.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
They thrust rifles through and over the walls, brandished pistols and brickbats, and in the end- the Irish Squad of Dagger John called the Hibernians battled the riot away from this place. Honored even today for their courage, these Hibernians showed the so called “English” that in America, things would be different for their people.
The political map of the time was drawn around this district, whose death rate was six times that of the rest of the city, and where the principal form of garbage collection were a population of roaming hogs.
Incidentally, this is where the baptism scene from the Godfather film was filmed.
from aoh.com
Anti-Catholic bigotry, cloaked in the guise of American patriotism, emerged in a nativist prejudice against immigrants –– especially the Irish, who began arriving in large numbers. A period of extreme intolerance was launched in the early 1800s that began with social segregation, resulted in discrimination in hiring, and reached its climax in the formation of nativist gangs such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, the True Blue Americans and others bent on violence against the Irish Catholic immigrant population. These gangs would coalesce in 1854 into the American Party or ‘Know Nothings’.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When you’ve been inside for a minute or two, your eyes adjust to its permanent twilight interior, and reflect on what it must have been like in the 1870’s and 80’s to enter this space after having experienced the surrounding neighborhood, described by Charles Dickens as “leprous houses where dogs would howl to lie”.
The “ward”, which translates into a modern political term roughly as “district”, was once the worst slum on earth according to contemporaries- who actually did factor Calcutta, Shanghai, and London (from personal experience, mind you) into their opinion.
This is the Bloody Sixth Ward, just north of the “Mulberry Bend” and “Five Points”.
from urbanography.com
The district was known as the Sixth Ward bounded, south, by Reade Street; west, by West Street; north by Canal Street; east by Broadway. The Five Points so named in the 1830’s from the convergence of the intersection of five streets: Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth St.), Cross (now Park), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water Street (no longer exists). This neighborhood was built over the Collect Pond and its adjacent swampland north of City Hall and the Courthouse, between Broadway and the Bowery.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lords and ladies of the Newtown Pentacle, welcome to the progenitor and founder of Calvary Cemetery, the stage of Dagger John Hughes and the birthplace of modern New York. This is St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, we’re in Manhattan for a change, and we’ve come here to figure out where the other half lived.
from oldcathedral.org
Her sidewalls rise to a height of 75 feet, and the inner vault is 85 feet high. The church is over 120 feet long and 80 feet wide. Near the west wall stands the huge marble altar surrounded by an ornately carved, gold leaf reredos.
At the opposite end of the church in the choir loft is a historic organ, an Erben 3-41, in its original condition. The organ was built by Henry Erben in 1852, and is one of less than a dozen such great instruments surviving in New York City. The organ is still used in liturgies today.
Project Firebox 7
Firebox (actual number) 182 – photo by Mitch Waxman
Just down the block from the Grand Avenue Bridge, on the Brooklyn side, one may marvel at this survivor of an earlier time. Oddly, it’s also just up the block from a firehouse which should negate its necessity. The sticker affixed is meant to boost the fortunes of a candidate for high office in the Teamsters union, James P. Hoffa.
Of course, this is Hoffa the younger, as the storied elder Hoffa has been missing from our national dialogue for some time.
from wikipedia
He is the only son of Jimmy Hoffa, who was also a president of the Teamsters, and his wife Josephine (née Poszywak). He is the brother of Judge Barbara Ann Crancer. Hoffa has a wife, Virginia, and two sons, David and Geoffrey.
Born in Detroit, Michigan on May 19, 1941, Hoffa established himself as a leader as early as his high school years while attending Cooley High School. There, he became a member of the National Honor Society, and an all-city and all-state football player.
Hoffa often accompanied his father to Teamster meetings and events, and became a Teamster on his 18th birthday. Hoffa holds a degree in economics from Michigan State University (1963) and a law degree (LL.B) from the University of Michigan Law School (1966). Hoffa was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship to work in the Michigan State Senate as an aide to senate and house members doing constituent relations and research. Hoffa is a member of Alpha Tau Omega.
A member of the Teamsters since his 18th birthday (1959), Hoffa was an attorney for the Teamsters from 1968 to 1993.
shivering gargoyles
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gilman, Gilman, Gilman.
That note, attached to governmental correspondence, was signed Gilman. Impossible, unbelievable, and beyond sane reasoning… Gilman. As your humble narrator scuttled along in miserable mood, that certain day, I became convinced that my name was being called from some unknown point beyond the bulkheaded fence lines adorning that sewer fed ribbon of urban lore called the Newtown Creek.
I first heard the voice, while deep in denial at the Pulaski Bridge, a whispered gutteral which seemed like an isolated phenomena.
from wikipedia
Tutti Acceptance typically contains the concept of approval, it is important to note that in the psychospiritual use of the term infers non-judgmental Acceptance is contrasted with resistance, but that term has strong political and psychoanalytic connotations not applicable in many contexts. By groups and by individuals, acceptance can be of various events and conditions in the world; individuals may also accept elements of their own thoughts, feelings, and personal histories. For example, psychotherapeutic treatment of a person with depression or anxiety could involve fostering acceptance either for whatever personal circumstances may give rise to those feelings or for the feelings themselves. (Psychotherapy could also involve lessening an individual’s acceptance of various situations.)
Notions of acceptance are prominent in many faiths and meditation practices. For example, Buddhism’s first noble truth, “All life is suffering”, invites people to accept that suffering is a natural part of life. The term “Kabbalah” means literally acceptance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Isolating myself in a guilty agony, hiding behind dark sunglasses and a long iPhone playlist which had finally wound- inevitably- to the darker side of Patti Smith, I skirted the Creek and made for the River of Sound.
Overwhelmed by its inevitability of oligarchy, I noticed that the auditory hallucination that my name was being called from the water had abided, and the decision to make haste for the safety of almond eyed Astoria was wise, back to the loving arms of Our Lady of the Pentacle and the unquestioning devotion of my little dog Pazuzu.
from wikipedia
Karma is the belief held by some major religions that a person’s actions cause certain effects in the current life and/or in future life, positively or negatively.
For example, if a person always does good deeds then it is believed that he or she will be “rewarded” for his or her behavior with fortunate events such as avoiding fatal accident or winning the lottery. If he or she always commits antagonistic behaviors, then it is believed that he will be punished with unfortunate events.
According to Buddhism, inequality amongst living beings is due not only to heredity, environment, “nature and nurture”, but also to Karma. In other words, it is the result of our own past actions and our own present doings. We ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We create our own Heaven. We create our own Hell. We are the architects of our own fate.
Perplexed by the seemingly inexplicable, apparent disparity that existed among humanity, a young truth-seeker approached the Buddha and questioned him regarding this intricate problem of inequality:
“What is the cause, what is the reason, O Lord,” questioned he, “that we find amongst mankind the short-lived and long-lived, the healthy and the diseased, the ugly and beautiful, those lacking influence and the powerful, the poor and the rich, the low-born and the high-born, and the ignorant and the wise?”
The Buddha’s reply was:
“All living beings have actions (Karma) as their own, their inheritance, their congenital cause, their kinsman, their refuge. It is Karma that differentiates beings into low and high states.”
He then explained the cause of such differences in accordance with the law of cause and effect.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Slipping and stumbling, my denial and self imposed hermitage blossomed into anger and rage, surely- the note signed by Gilman was nothing of the sort. The same agencies which have directed their gaze upon me are attempting to rub my nose in their power and my inability to react.
from wikipedia
Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism, is the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response (environment-behavior) and cannot deviate.
The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly climate, influenced the psychological mind-set of individuals, which in turn defined the behaviour and culture of the society that those individuals formed. For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness, relaxed attitudes and promiscuity, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes led to more determined and driven work ethics. Because these environmental influences operate slowly on human biology, it was important to trace the migrations of groups to see what environmental conditions they had evolved under.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Attempting to bargain with this malicious universe called New York City, a foul harlot indeed, I wandered into the empty corridor in a tightly compressed state of mind. Encounters with security men, and other creatures of the street not mentioned in the posting, formed a silo of despair about me.
from wikipedia
“Forbidden fruit” is any object of desire whose appeal is a direct result of the knowledge that it cannot or should not be obtained or something that someone may want but is forbidden to have. The metaphorical phrase forbidden fruit refers to the Book of Genesis, where it is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As a result of their decision to eat the fruit, Adam and Eve lost their innocence, became separated from God and were exiled from the garden where they were forced to adopt agriculture under less than desirable circumstances for a living.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finally, as the vapor dulled sunbeams cast those queer shadows which form the tenebrous patterns distinctive of the Newtown Creek and its tributaries during the humid and hot months, your humble narrator was forced into acceptance of the notation- written in atavist hand on a scrap of brown kraft paper which smelled of salted cod- as genuine.
from wikipedia
The Qur’an doesn’t name this tree and it is always referred to as “the tree”. Muslims believe that when God created Adam and Eve, He told them that they could enjoy everything in the Garden but this tree, and so, Satan appeared to them and told them that the only reason God forbade them to eat from that tree is that they would become Angels or become immortals.
When they ate from this tree their nakedness appeared to them and they began to sew together, for their covering, leaves from the Garden. As a result of their sin, they were removed from heaven and placed on Earth to live and die. Consequently, they repented to God and asked for his forgiveness and were forgiven. It was decided that those who obey God and follow his path shall be rewarded with everlasting life in Heaven, and those who disobey God and stray away from his path shall be punished in Hell.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
By the time I came to Dutch Kills, at the Hunter’s point avenue bridge, I had managed to subsume this fact when I noticed that the hallucination had returned. A gurgling echo, which could have easily been the sound of some unknown machine reverbing along the cement, or some far off car stereo, or some physical effect caused by playing the music on my headphones too loudly for too long.
And I noticed that the vegetation along the shoreline was stained with the colour, and it was swaying against the breeze.
from wikipedia
The Biblical description of the garden says :
Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.[…] The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
There have been a number of claims as to the actual geographic location of the Garden of Eden, though many of these have little or no connection to the text of Genesis. Most put the Garden somewhere between Najaf and Kufa in the Middle East.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One thing I can tell you, lords and ladies of Newtown, is that the search for Gilman- rather than being retarded by this mysterious missive- will be redoubled. Whoever Gilman was, somebody in a high position does not want his story told. The note, written in old timey handwriting, is worrisome.
Gilman, who -and perhaps, what – were you?
from wikipedia
In many myths the chthonic serpent (sometimes a pair) lives in or is coiled around a Tree of Life situated in a divine garden. In the Genesis story of the Torah and Biblical Old Testament the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is situated in the Garden of Eden together with the tree of immortality. In Greek mythology Ladon coiled around the tree in the garden of the Hesperides protecting the entheogenic golden apples.
Similarly Níðhöggr (Nidhogg Nagar) the dragon of Norse mythology eats from the roots of the Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
Under yet another Tree (the Bodhi tree of Enlightenment), the Buddha sat in ecstatic meditation. When a storm arose, the mighty serpent king Mucalinda rose up from his place beneath the earth and enveloped the Buddha in seven coils for seven days, not to break his ecstatic state.
123rd Annual Feast of Our Lady of Carmel and Saint Paulinus of Nola
– photos by Mitch Waxman
Here’s a slideshow of what was going on in Williamsburg on Sunday the 11th of July. According to the Press Release I was handed when I began brandishing my camera around- the “Giglio” (italian for lilies) is 80 feet tall, weighs three tons, and requires 130 men to dance it around the mean streets of Brooklyn. An additional 120 men are required to perform the locomotive tasks for a second platform, upon which a second band and a life sized representation of a boat ride, which means that 250 “lifters” are required.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel has a continuing series of celebrations next weekend, check them out at OLMCfeast.com.
from catholic.org
Bishop of Nola and writer. Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus was born to a wealthy Roman family at Bordeaux, in Gaul. His father was the praetorian prefect of Gaul who made certain that his son received a sound education. Paulinus studied rhetoric and poetry and learned from the famed poet Ausonius. He subsequently became a well known lawyer. He became the prefect of Rome, married a Spanish noble lady, Therasia, and led a luxury filled life. Following the death of his son a week after his birth in 390, Paulinus retreated from the world and came to be baptized a Christian by St. Delphinus in Aquitaine. With Therasia, he gave away their property and vast fortune to the poor and to the Church, and they pursued a life of deep austerity and mortifications. About 393, he was forcibly ordained a priest by the bishop of Barcelona. Soon after, he moved to an estate near the tomb of St. Nola near Naples, Italy There, he and his wife practiced rigorous asceticism and helped to establish a community of monks. To the consternation of his other relatives, he sold all of their estates in Gaul and gave the money to the poor.
The Newtown Pentacle 