SO A TAXICAB JUMPS INTO A FOUNTAIN… (1909)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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When Brooklyn woke up one April morning in 1909, there in Prospect Park Plaza’s “Electric Fountain” sat a little blue taxicab.
To many, the thing appeared as though it had always belonged there. Some wondered whether they’d simply not noticed it all along. But others realized that something was wrong.
Something was certainly wrong.
THE CASE OF THE IMPETUOUS TAXICAB
It seems as though the Grand Army Plaza has always had a fountain.
But back when the plaza was called Prospect Park Plaza and it encompassed a larger amount of land, that fountain was much larger and took up much more space.
The fountain was then what was called an “electric fountain,” and after it was installed it would attract people by the thousands each year when the lights and the water were turned on.
One year, after the winter had passed and after the water was supposed to have filled the reservoir, with the jets darting, and the lights dancing, the fountain sat silent. So, as popular as the fountain was to Brooklyn, the reporters of the city had descended upon Parks Commissioner Kennedy about it’s inactivity.
And in the midst of the hubbub – came the crash.
HOW IT ALL CAME ABOUT
It was 11:30 on a Sunday night when the blue cab from a Manhattan taxicab company found itself perched upside down within the empty fountain.
According to the driver, Alexander Fiedel, who was the only one injured in the accident, he had taken his charges, four young men who wanted to see Coney Island, down to the attractions. After depositing them at the heart of the amusement park, he “stayed at the island a short time,” starting for home afterwards with his passengers.
The trip back, evidently, was “uneventful,” according to Fiedel, “until after they got in the vicinity of Prospect Park,” where they “dodged a few trolley cars.
“Just to be careful,” he noted, he “did not drive through the park, but skirted around it, and came along Ninth Avenue, or Prospect Park West side.”
It had been his intention to go out to Eastern Parkway to Bedford Avenue, but “he was crossing the plaza at a good rate of speed, about 11:30 o’clock, when things happened.”
“THE TAXICAB RAN ITSELF”
It was at this point that the blue taxicab had passed the Grand Army arch and “had turned its nose toward Eastern Parkway, when suddenly a Flatbush avenue car came along at great speed with the motorman clanging his gong.”
Fiedel “gave a quick turn of the wheel and threw the cab about at a sharper than right angle turn, just in time to miss collision with the trolley car.”
The turn, though, was also just enough to aim the cab towards the fountain. But something happened to Fieldel between the point of the “near collision” and the fountain because, with the fountain almost 400 feet away – and growing closer by the second – Fiedel simply continued on his crash course.
Fiedel claimed he “simply lost control and could not regain it,” adding that “the taxicab ran itself.”
At this point, it struck the curb enclosing “the grass plat surrounding the fountain,” continuing straight across the grass, striking the coping surrounding the fountain, whereupon it “jumped” over it, and “plunged into the empty reservoir.”
The helpless cab landed immediately on its “right forward corner and turned a somersault,” tossing Fiedel, in the process, from the vehicle.
His passengers, penned in the overturned car, managed to get the door open, and tumbled out from the capsized cab into the empty fountain. The young men soon made their escape, though, going away without bothering to pay Fiedel their fare.
The following day, when commuters were regaled with the righted machine in the empty fountain, the “taxi-meter clock,” like a snapshot in time, still registered their unpaid bill – $8.50.
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