TENEMENT MUSEUM TALKS

After They Closed the Gates

Monday, April 216:30 PM

 Despite quotas set in the 1920s meant to sharply reduce the influx of immigrants into the country, immigrants continued to come. Historian Libby Garland tells the untold stories of the Jewish migrants and smugglers involved in that underworld. Garland also helps us understand how Jews were linked to, and then unlinked from, the specter of illegal immigration. Tenement actors will dramatize some of the cases highlighted in the book.

This event is free and seats are first-come, first-serve; however, you can reserve two seats by purchasing a copy of After They Closed the Gates. Contact Laura Lee at llee@tenement.org or 212.431.0233, ext. 259 to purchase the book.

Events take place at 103 Orchard Street at Delancey Street in Manhattan.

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1798

1798

January

The New Theatre - designed by French architect Marc Isambard Brunel and brothers Joseph-François and Charles Mangin and later known as the Park Theatre - opens at 23 Park Row.

Jan 13

Lower Manhattan's 1767 John Street Theatre closes. Part-owner Lewis Hallam, Jr.  Hallam sells it for £115 to neighboring grain and hay store. The acting company moves to the New Theatre.

February

Isaac Mann, Jr., Stillwater, New York, supplier of logs to New York City for its water system pipes during the Colles project, petitions the city for payment of the balance due. Records cannot be found for the contract and the council suggests Mann sue for his money.

Mar 2

A correspondent for the New York Gazette & General Advertiser estimates that the average cost of Tea Water is $15 per family, suggests an annual tax to raise money for a public waterworks. Nothing will come of the suggestion.

May

John Beddoe, his wife Catherine, and his cousin David Morse arrive in New York City from England, set out for the Finger Lakes region.

May 13

Manhattan's  original Rutgers Presbyterian Church, built on ground donated by Colonel Henry Rutgers, at what would become Henry Street at the intersection of Rutgers Street, is dedicated.

July

Surveyor Melancton Smith dies of yellow fever in New York City, the first death in a summer-long epidemic in the city that will claim 2,086 lives. As the summer passes coffins will be sold on street corners.

Jul 2

Westchester County, New York, doctor Joseph Browne, Aaron Burr's brother-in-law, writes that the health of a city depends more on the quality of its water than any other comestibles. He proposes supplying New York City from the Bronx River.

August

Yellow fever has claimed close to 100 New York City lives by the early part of the month. A carpenter sends around a wagon loaded with coffins to be sold in the streets.    **    New York's City Council appoint a temporary health committee to aid the indigent though the epidemic. They will spend $5,000 over the next three months.

September

1,000 New Yorkers die of yellow fever, including the family of doctor Alexander Anderson. He will later turn to engraving.

Sep 1

U.S. Military Academy superintendent Richard Delafield is born in Manhattan.

Sep 2

New York doctor Elihu Smith writes that new cases of yellow fever are dwindling, due to the small number of people remaining in the city.

Sep 13

63 New Yorkers die of yellow fever, including the father of a future mayor, 17-year-old Philip Hone.

Sep 17

Doctor Elihu Smith contracts yellow fever.

Sep 18

Hone's mother dies of yellow fever.

Sep 19

Elihu Smith dies of the fever.

October

New York's yellow fever death toll tops 400.    **    New York City museum owner Gardiner Baker dies in Boston in his mid-thirties. His Tammany Museum collection is sold.

November

Over 2000 New Yorkers are now dead from yellow fever. Colder weather ends the epidemic.

Nov 15

John Jacob Astor advertises in the New York Gazette and General Advertiser that he has 24 cannons and other military supplies for sale.

December

Nicholas Roosevelt revives his proposals for supplying water to New York City. Judge William Cooper proposes a plan to lay water pipes there.

Dec 17

A New York City committee chosen to evaluate water supply proposals - John Bogert, John B. Coles, Jacob de la Montagnie, and Gabriel Furman - reports that the Bronx River is the best source, but that a few alterations need to made to Joseph Browne's plans.

City

Population: 4,000 households.    **    A residence is built at 207 Front Street.    **    John Stevens conducts steamboat experiments on Collect Pond for the third year in a row.    **    Three health commissioners requested by the city and appointed under the state "Act to provide against infectious and pestilential Diseases" are empowered to enforce the city's health regulations. Dr. Richard Bayley is named head of the Health Office.    **    Coles' bridge across the Harlem River is completed but his mill works at the site is still unfinished.   **    The Tammany Society moves from its usual Barden's Tavern meeting spot at Broadway near Bowling Green to new quarters at Brom Martling's Tavern at Nassau and Spruce. The new place is nicknamed the Wigwam.    **    The state legislature recognizes The Corporation for the Relief of Widows and Children of Clergymen of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York as a separate entity from a three-state umbrella organization.   **    The United Insurance Company and the New-York Insurance Company for Maritime Insurance are chartered.    **    Upstate land speculator James Wadsworth arrives, back from a stay in England.    **    The city orders a survey of the area along the Bronx River, with an eye to eventually obtaining a drinking water supply from its waters.    **    The Bank of New York establishes a branch on eight lots in Greenwich Village. The street where the lots are located will become Bank Street.    **    The city begins grading and paving South Street. Structures along it are built back from the wharves to accommodate the bowsprits of ships moored along the docks.    **    This year - after the fort in lower Manhattan was torn down in 1790 - the need for new fortifications leads to guns being placed in temporary fortifications close to Government House. 

Brooklyn

Shipbuilder John Jackson and his yard on East River’s Wallabout Bay - the future U. S. Navy Yard - build the 28-gun frigate John Adams for the Navy.

Technology

John Stevens conducts steamboat experiments on New York City’s Collect Pond for the third year in a row.

Ireland 

Irish insurgents are defeated by the British at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, in County Wexford. Many of the former will emigrate to the U. S. , and settle in a Brooklyn neighborhood that will become known as Vinegar Hill.

© 2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

Script 66 - STAR'S EVENING

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Not to be too morbid, but death, as ever, was at the center of many stories in 1922. One, dating back a few millennia, was confirmed in November as archaeologists discovered the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

Some deaths would remain shrouded in mystery, even into to our own time. In Hollywood, film director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered. And closer to home, in Linden, in western New York, 72-year-old Frances Kimball was battered to death in her home. Two years later, in 1924, three other people were murdered in the same small hamlet. None of the four crimes was ever solved.

Giovanni Martini had cheated death once, by not being in the wrong place at the right time. But Martini, George Armstrong Custer's orderly at the Little Bighorn forty-six years previously, died in Brooklyn this year.

There were other, relatively serene deaths. The literary world lost several leading figures. In Paris the semi-invalid Marcel Proust passed away at the age of 51. William Henry Hudson, born in Argentina, also died this year. Most of the public would remember him not as the naturalist he was by profession, but by his one novel and its central character, Rima, the Bird Girl, of Green Mansions .

One of the most mourned of those dying in 1922 was Mrs. Alexander P. Moore. She was winding down from a long and varied career when she died on June 6th. Her husband, her fourth actually, a Pittsburgh newspaper publisher and Republican stalwart, had just helped put Warren G. Harding in the White House. Mrs. M. had worked tirelessly on the campaign as well, and Harding did not forget. Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had recently arrested 6,000 U. S. citizens on the grounds of Bolshevik sympathies and deported close to a thousand, including Emma Goldman and Wobbly labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood. Anti-immigrant feelings were also running high in these post-war years. Harding decided to send Mrs. Moore to Europe to try and discover what compelled thousands to flee their homeland and sail to American shores. She labored mightily and came up with the unfortunate and simplistic conclusion that “Alien infiltration wrecked Rome.” Immigration should be curbed. Continuing to lecture even though weakened by a fall suffered on board ship while returning home, she soon wore herself out and was dead a few weeks later. It was in this rather bizarre scenario that the world lost one of its most colorful characters, a woman who had sent male hearts racing in a series of operettas, made audiences laugh in Weber and Fields vaudeville skits, and turned Come Down My Evening Star into the favorite song of thousands. To all of those thousands of fans Mrs. Moore, born Helen Louise Leonard sixty years earlier, was far better known as Lillian Russell.