BURY ME DEEP, IN A METALLIC CASE (1852)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Beware BODY SNATCHERS! Beware GRAVE ROBBERS! BEHOLD, the Fisk Metallic Burial Case! F.A. MORREL, UNDERTAKER AND DISTRIBUTOR, 57 MYRTLE In 1852, a Brooklyn Heights “sexton and general undertaker” by the name of F. A. Morrel, practicing at his “coffin-wareroom” at No. 57 Myrtle Avenue, was promoting to the Brooklyn public the latest design in funerary offerings – the Fisk Metallic Burial Case. Originally designed as a vessel that would keep a dead body from decomposing if the individual had died far from home, the Fisk Metallic Burial Case would soon “take on a new life,” so to speak, for those who wanted their nearby loved ones to keep from rapidly decomposing, as well. For this reason, many Fisk ads promoted their cases for the general preservation of the body – which was important to those whose burial case included a “viewing plate,” allowing for the living relatives to view the departed one’s face. “From a coffin of this description the air may be exhausted so completely as entirely to prevent the decay of the contained body on principles well understood,” noted Fisk’s patent, “or, if preferred, the coffin may be filled with any gas or fluid having the property of preventing putrefaction.” Another of the selling points of these cast iron […]
SHOT BY AN ORGAN GRINDER (1895)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Two things can be said of most 19th century Brooklyn organ grinders – they were rarely accompanied by monkey assistants, and they were chiefly non-violent types. As romantic a figure as they are to us today, though, they were not altogether loved by the citizens of their time. Many found the “music” of their hand organs to be grating and and an unforgivable breach of the peace. By and large, most were harmless poor Italian men simply plying their trade in order to bring in a meager living – usually to feed a large family. One morning, though, in December of 1895, the tune of one grinder did not present as sonorous music to the ears of a rising Brooklynite, and in the process this resident found that, attempting to prevent the strains of a lilting ballad, he had “stirred the wrong Italian.” OUTSIDE A BAR ON AN EARLY MONDAY MORNING Michielo Geraso, accompanied by another Italian with a hand organ, appeared in front of the saloon of Bernard Lyons on Tillary street at about 9:30 a.m. Geraso’s companion turned the organ crank while Geraso “made ready to collect money.” The organ had scarcely tuned up when the Italians were ordered to move on. Lyons’ saloon was closed on account of […]
THE HIPSTERS OF WARTIME FORT GREENE (1864)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Walt Whitman wrote this line at the beginning of the poem that later became “Song of Myself.” Whitman was a self-styled loafer. And, in the mid-1800s, loaferism was not a very popular pastime – excepting, of course, with the loafers. Loafers, to bring the term into a modern day focus, were the rowdy hipsters of their times – non-conforming, proudly different, and not at all afraid to show it. “…(T)he age abounded in loafers. There were literary loafers, Yankee loafers, French loafers, genteel loafers, common loafers, and country loafers, among others…” noted Michael Zakim a paper entitled, The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or, a Labor History of the Nonproducing Class. “(L)oaferism was essentially a metropolitan phenomenon,” he continued, “haunting the city’s sidewalks, wharves, museums, and parks, and serving as a ready epithet for anyone needing to hurl an insult.” And insults and rowdyism seemed to be what they did best. The newspapers are filled in ante- and post-bellum times of accounts of loafers, how bad they were, and what the good, upright, and moral citizens were to do about them. “Loafers were known for cursing without shame and for smoking cigars,” Zakim noted. “They cared little for […]
WONG SING BOW’S WHITE WIFE MINNIE (1877)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** In 1886, the life that Wong Sing Bow had been building up for years began to crumble before his eyes. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Wong Sing had been born “a subject of the emperor of China.” But he had been in America “long enough to save considerable money and to appreciate the beauty of Irish girls,” said one paper of the time. Wong Sing spoke English fluently and was often called upon by the authorities to interpret. With all that Wong Sing had going for him, it had originally seemed likely that he was going to have a good life. But this was the 1800s. And Wong Sing was Chinese. ANTI-CHINESE PREJUDICE IN 19TH CENTURY BROOKLYN After Wong Sing’s arrival in the U.S. around 1870, according to one paper, “the celestial youth immediately fitted himself in the groove of circumstances. “He decided to become intensely American. He shaved his cue off, doffed his Chinese garb, proclaimed his intention to become a citizen, and went to Sunday school ‘all samme like Melican man.’” Apparently, the papers, like most Americans, had no politically correct bent in those days. But the Chinese were located squarely at the bottom of the social construct – just slightly beneath the Irish and the Germans – and so […]
REMEMBERING BROOKLYN’S UNDEAD (1922)
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” So reflected Mark Twain to a reporter with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1897, after the New York Herald had incorrectly reported that the famous writer had passed away while in London. While journalists are taught from their very first story to “trust but verify,” the U.S. military, though, has never fostered suffering compunction from such mistakes made. So it was when reports were being dispatched back to the U.S. during the First World War. While the adjutants of these military units, whence the reports originated, were doing their best to keep track of deaths and injuries, it can be imagined that quite a few names were inadvertently added to one or the other of the lists. After the Great War, accounts of American soldiers often surfaced, of their having previously been added to the list of the war dead, and then having shown up quite healthy – and with plans to continue living for many years to come. Such was the case with one Brooklyn man, Anthony Pentola, who, upon returning to the U.S. after fighting in the Great War, learned that not only had he been reported amongst the war dead, but that, he subsequently realized, his greatest and most substantial proof against the correctness of this report – his appearance one day in the War Department – was woefully insufficient in reversing the departments’s bureaucratic march toward its repeated lionization of him as an American patriot for […]
