Katia over at Pardon Me for Asking, published the above photo of the Williamsburg Savings Bank, the caption of which notes that Brooklyn was "long known as 'the city of homes, churches, and rubber plants.'"
Nowhere in the world are there so many rubber plants in captivity as in Brooklyn, and nowhere is so much affection and care lavished on these docile and harmless household pets as in the borough at the drowsy end of the bridge.
Anyone have experience with Brooklyn's famous "family pets"?
Happy Year of the Ox! As Chinatown gets ready to usher in the New Year (see Explore Chinatown for a comprehensive list of events), we thought it would interesting to turn to the archives and look at how the New York Times reported coverage of Chinese New Year’s back when Chinatown was limited to Mott, Pell, and Doyers streets.
The Times first year of coverage was 1883. Despite its Victorian racism (the celebrating Chinese are “agitated,” the young men wear “Melican” clothes), the Times’s coverage seemed to be trying to demystify Chinese culture and show that New York’s Asian residents weren’t as strange or foreign as most people thought.
Also, New York’s Chinatown evidently had no temples (or “joss parlors” in the parlance of the day), thus forcing worshippers to head to Belleville, New Jersey, if they wanted to partake in traditional temple prayers.
It is also worth noting that interest in Chinese New Year coincided with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act--originally set to run for ten years--which severely curtailed Chinese immigration into the United States.
As anti-Asian sentiment in New York increased over the next few years, coverage of New Year’s Day grew more hostile. By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act was extended in 1893—essentially banning Chinese immigration for the next 50 years—the Times was reduced to calling the celebrants “heathens” and the entire celebration “shifty.” And soon thereafter coverage of the event was dropped by the paper altogether, not to return with any regularity until after World War II.
You can read more about Chinatown and the Chinese Exclusion Act in Inside the Apple, available for pre-order today.
Today’s dramatic Hudson River plunge by US Airways flight 1549—with no loss of life—brought to mind a number of other airplane crashes over the years, from the 2001 American Airlines crash in the Rockaways to the B-25 that flew into the Empire State Building in 1945.
However, perhaps the worst aviation disaster in New York history was the midair collision of a United Airlines DC-8 and a TWA Super Constellation propeller plane on December 16, 1960. The United plane, en route to Idlewild (as JFK was then called), was put into a holding pattern. However, due to poor visibility, a breakdown in the plane’s communications system, and pilot error, the United plane was flying too high and off course, setting it directly in the path of the TWA flight that had been cleared to land at La Guardia.
The two planes struck each other over New Dorp, Staten Island. The TWA plane immediately fell, crashing at Miller Field, a military airstrip. However, the United Flight was still airborne (despite being shorn of its right engine and part of the wing) and began descending toward Brooklyn. Some have guessed that the pilot may have been trying to make an emergency landing in Prospect Park. However, the plane slammed down at the corner of Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, destroying a funeral home and the aptly named Pillar of Fire Church. Tragically, all 128 passengers and crew on the two planes along with six people on the ground died, making it the worst aeronautical disaster up to that time. Among the people on the ground were a caretaker of the church and a man selling Christmas trees. It is the only time such an in-air collision has taken place over a metropolitan area and—despite criticisms of how the federal government handled the investigation—ultimately led to better training for pilots and safer planes.
Though the scars have faded over the last 48 years, if you go to the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place today, you can still see some faint reminders from the crash.
This post isn’t so much about New York City history as it is about doing something good about New York City’s future. One of the major polluters in our landfills is used electronic equipment. And, since manufacturers build all our computers, cell phones, etc., with planned or perceived obsolescence, it is a problem that is only getting worse.
On Saturday, January 10, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Tekserve, “the old reliable Mac shop,” is holding its Third Annual Technology Drive at its store at 119 West 23rd Street. Bring in your old computers, monitors, fax machines, copiers, DVD or VCR players, radios, telephones, cell phones, televisions, cameras, and stereo equipment and Tekserve will make sure they end up in the right place and not just dumped in the ground.
For more about the program—and your chance to win a new aluminum MacBook or one of three 16GB iPod nano, go to http://www.tekserve.com/service/recycling.php.
We'd like to send out a thank you to Alltop for including us in their New York City resources page at http://newyorkcity.alltop.com.
If you are unfamiliar with Alltop, the site is a self-described "online magazine rack" that brings together the best content from around the Internet and slots it all into helpful categories. We have certainly found things at Alltop's New York City page that we wouldn't have stumbled upon elsewhere--it's worth checking out.
On another note -- to those of you who subscribe to the email feed of this blog, our apologies that you are sometimes getting the same entry in two different emails. It is a known issue and we are working to iron out the kinks in the delivery system. Thank you for your patience!