Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln's Funeral

Are you watching The Roosevelts: An Intimate History on PBS? In typical Ken Burns style, it is both fascinating and dense and I find that I have to watch it in snippets in order to take it all in.

In the first episode, Burns briefly showed a still image of Teddy Roosevelt and his brother, Elliot, watching Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession through Union Square.

Here's the photo:

The building on the upper left side of the image was Roosevelt's grandfather's house. It's hard to make out in this copy, but Teddy and Elliot are hanging out of the open window on the second floor.

We mention this moment in Footprints in New York, along with another picture taken around the same time: the only photo of the president in his coffin. I'll post that on this blog or over at blog.insidetheapple.net soon.

My first record player....

Over at the Inside the Apple blog today, I write about Thomas Edison and the first wax cylinder phonograph.

My first record player was this:

I can remember my brother cutting out cardboard discs from the back of cereal boxes and poking holes in them so that he could make his own "records" that would play on it. He probably had the patience to actually make his discs play tunes. I'm sure when I copycatted him, mine were John Cage-ian random conglomerations of discordant notes.

But my first real record player was either this model or something very similar to it:

And here's the weird part. If you look closely at the 45 on the turntable in this photo that I found on the Internet, it's Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life," which was also the very first record I ever owned. Coincidence?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL7xrYWReis]

"So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy...."

Advice I still use -- and teach -- to this day:

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”

—  John Keating, Dead Poets’ Society

RIP, Mr. Keating and Mr. Williams.

Searching Your Own Collection on Google Books

A lot of virtual (and real) ink has been spilled over the question of whether or not it's a good idea for Google to digitize all the world's books. I will not weigh in on that, except to give this example of how it has been helpful to me.

If you are a researcher, or just the curious sort, you know well that a book's index is an invaluable tool that often falls short. As Michelle and I have found out in each of our three books, only so much can fit in an index, and it can be a painful process deciding which important terms end up on the cutting room floor.

Enter Google Books.

Even a book that's available only as a preview at books.google.com will be fully searchable. I often find myself half-remembering a fact from some obscure New York City reference work on our shelves. I plug in the name of the book and the information I want to find and -- presto -- Google Books more likely than not tells me exactly what page its on. I go to the shelf, pull down the book, and read the passage I want. Without a digital index, this would have been impossible.

Now, if Google Books could only tell me how to actually find the books in my over-stuffed personal library.....

The Mimeograph

Where would we be without Thomas Edison? The light bulb, the record player, the movie projector -- just to name three.

Well, here's a fourth: the mimeograph. On August 8, 1876, Edison received a patent for "autographic printing."

Long before photocopiers became ubiquitous, we had a mimeograph that I would monitor as my father struggled to produce the church bulletins every week. The smell of freshly printed paper coming out of the "ditto" machine is a distinct touchstone of my childhood.

Did anyone else have to use one of these machines way back in ye good olde days?

Calvert Vaux

When Michelle and I were writing our first book, Frommer's 24 Great Walks in New York (sadly out of print, but available here), we were surprised to discover that the person who appeared the most number of times in the index was Calvert Vaux, co-architect of Central Park. It shouldn't really have been that surprising -- we love his work and include it on many of our walking tours.

Anyway, apropos of that, I wrote a fun piece for Curbed about Vaux's imprint on New York City. I hope you enjoy it!

John Peter Zenger

Today marks the 279th anniversary of the acquittal of John Peter Zenger on charges of seditious libel. We write about this in Footprints in New York in our chapter on the Delancey family, as James Delancey was the Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court at the time, and basically instructed the jury to find Zenger guilty.

I blogged about the Zenger trial in more depth back in 2010 over at Inside the Apple. You can read that post here: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2010/08/libel-trial-of-john-peter-zenger.html.

In other news, I got my website up and running today:
www.jamesnevius.com. Check it out!

Cafe Wha?

If you're a Dylan-head or just an aficionado of the Greenwich Village music scene from the 1960s, you know of Cafe Wha?, Manny Roth's legendary coffee house where Bob Dylan got his start (that's him at the left of the photograph above, allegedly at his very first Cafe Wha? performance, backing up Karen Dalton and Fred Neil.)

So, it was with some sadness that I read earlier this week that Roth had died at age 94. Piece by piece, person by person, the traces of that era are slipping away and there's almost no movement to preserve them. We trace Dylan's footsteps along MacDougal street in Footprints in New York; I wonder how long it will be until that chapter is out of date.

Do you have recollections of Cafe Wha? or MacDougal Street in the early 1960s? If so, please post a comment.