Brooklyn Death Trip*

January 12, 1893
“Henry BOERUM, an oysterman, who lives in his shanty on Plum's Marsh, Jamaica Bay, had a narrow escape from freezing to death on Wed. While out in his boat on Jamaica Bay, it became fastened in an ice floe.”

March 22, 1909

“Seized with an attack of vertigo as he sat in a chair at his home today John LAW, 23 years old, of 163 Utica Avenue fell to the floor. He sustained lacerations and contusions of the face and head and was removed to St. Mary's Hospital by Dr. McCluskey.”

 October 18, 1906

“Nora MURRAY, 28 years old, a waitress in the lunch room of the Commercial High School, Albany Avenue and Dean Street, was bitten yesterday on the thumb by a large tarantula which was concealed in a bunch of bananas. It was feared for a time that Miss MURRAY would
lose her arm as a consequence.”

January 10, 1871

“James GREGAN was drowned yesterday while cutting ice on the meadows in Fourth Avenue.”

August 15, 1888

“While Gertrude SCHERMERHORN, of 75 Lawrence Street was walking with her mother at Willoughby and Jay Streets Monday night, a stylishly dressed young man who carried a cane, poured a bottle of ink on her silk dress and spoiled it. The young man is not known.”

January 9, 1879

“Mary FOX, aged twenty-two years, a servant in the employ of
Mr. Orestes P. QUINTARD, of No. 158 Sterling Place, by accident yesterday afternoon, severely cut her foot with an axe.”

August 28, 1877 

“A verdict of suicide was today rendered by a Coroner's jury in the case of Valentine LEM, who shot himself near Evergreen Cemetery. The wife was too poor to bury the remains, but took the rifle home.”

August 13, 1887

“A member of the Coney Island police force last evening found near the Oriental Hotel a bottle containing a small quantity of brandy. Soaking in the liquor was a piece of paper on which had been written the following: “This ship has gone down ten miles off Sandy Hook, with all her cargo of rice and ten souls. There is nothing to save us, as we have not been seen and our signals not heard. The last survivors to the bark Victor H. T. Vallience.” It was dated Aug. 1, 1885.”

June 12, 1879

Deaths of a Week.
Mortality Report of the Board of Health. 

Measles: 1
Scarlet Fever: 8
Diphtheria: 16
Whooping Cough: 2
Erysipelas: 1
Diarrhea: 3
Dysentery: 1
Cholera infantum: 4
Cholera - mortius: 1
Entero Colitis: 2
Remittent fever: 5
Inanition: 1
Delirium tremens: 1
Cancer of breast: 1
Cancer of face: 1
Cancer of liver: 1
Cancer of pelvis: 1
Marasmus: 1
Consumption: 31
Tub. meningitis: 5
Hydrocephalus: 1
Meningitis: 7
Apoplexy: 3
Acute Hydrocephlia: 1
Softening of the brain: 1
Paralysis: 2
Anemia of brain: 1
Epilepsy: 2
Convulsions: 4
Dementia: 1
Melancholia: 1
Insanity: 1
Sunstroke: 1
Disease of heart: 2
Fatty deg. of heart: 2
Hypertrophy of heart: 4
Val. disease of heart: 2
Laryngitis: 1
Bronchitis: 6
Pneumonia: 12
Cong. of lungs: 1
Gastritis: 1
Gastro enteritis: 1
Peritonitis: 1
Hepatitis: 1
Nephritis: 2
Bright's disease: 3
Diabetes: 1
Uterine tumor: 1
Spinal disease: 2
Premature birth: 2
Preterm birth: 2
Cyanosis: 1
Dentition: 5
Flooding: 1
Puerperal convulsions: 1
Puerperal Metritis: 1
Asthenia: 1
Burns: 1
Drowning: 1
Falls: 2
Killed by motor: 1
Killed by blow: 1
Run over by steam car: 1

* cf. Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, 1973. The Wisconsin Death Trip Flickr stream here.  
News items from the fantastically sprawling Brooklyn Genealogy

images from the Brooklyn Museum Flickr stream  

The real Gashlycrumb Tinies

because it's perfectly reasonable to use beer and coffins to teach the ABCs

A late adaptation of "The Tragical Death of an Apple Pye"

A chapman (also called Running, Walking or Flying Stationers)— an itinerant book and broadside seller

Oh dear, someone's let the Elephant into the room again.

Ephemera Fair 32 this past weekend

Obsessed.
Doug, Sam and I went up to Old Greenwich for Ephemera 32, the antique paper and printed matter fair held by the Ephemera Society of America. It was more paper, posters, postcards, business cards, autographs and advertising than you ever thought could possibly survive the decades, priced from a couple dollars to several thousand. There we stumbled upon a large and (to a bottom-level ephemera collector) breathtakingly expensive scrapbook of brightly hand-colored woodblock illustrations seemingly culled from a series of British children’s books. The latest image appears to date from about 1840. All were affixed to pages of linen edged in red silk and were bound in a now-disintegrating cover marked “Juvenile Scrapbook” and “B. de B. Russell.” We were unable to get it out of our minds as we drank our tepid coffee in the lunch area.

Dear Reader, we bought it. More on the scrapbook as information surfaces.*

Now, on to some background research: Stories, ballads, rhymes and popular tales of piety were passed down through the generations verbally. These oral trasmissions started to be written down and printed in the 16th century as broadsides, leaflets and booklets called chapbooks. These were popular and cheap—and cheaply produced— texts of instruction of any sort, typically from 8 to 32 pages and sold by itinerant peddlers called chapmen. “Chap” is etymologically related to an old (Middle?) English word for “trade” (see place name Cheapside in London), and by extension, cheap. Chapbooks in the form of manuals of instruction and entertainment specifically for children became popular in the mid-1700s. These small chapbooks and other printed matter proliferated and gradually took the place of the medieval educational form of hornbooks—the alphabet carved on a wooden paddle and literally covered in a transparent sheet of horn. (There were folding cardboard items called “battledores” that were also used as instructional items in the early 1800s. Named after the paddles used in the game of shuttlecocks, the ones I've seen dont actually look like paddles and dont seem to offer any benefit from having this more complicated folded form. A wash if you ask me.)

Certain publishers became known for this sort of printing expressly. The Newberys of St. Paul's Churchyard, London, for instance—proprietor, son, stepson and nephew— published a couple of thousand titles over the period 1740-1814, including A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Little Goody Two-Shoes, and The Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies.

Just about everything captivates me about these things: their small, beautifully worn and weathered form; the texture of the printing and hand coloring; the elliptical, incongruous, sometimes morbid text; and of course, the strong, graphic illustrations (The celebrated engraver Thomas Bewick and his brother started out carving woodprints for children’s books in the mid -late 1700s. These illustrations were copied, reused out of context, and adapted for decades).

You may have already noticed more than a passing resemblance to the work of Edward Gorey. I wonder if he amassed an actual collection of these? Or was he just proficient in the curious ways of the chapbook... 

All images from these sites:

Ball State University Digital Media Collection

Banbury Chap Books and Nursery Toy Book Literature, 1890 from Google books
The Historical Children's Literature database at the University of Washington—worth hours of perusal!

*In doing feverish research since the Saturday purchase we’ve discovered the scrapbook belonged to someone named “Blois de Blois Russell”, an Oxford alum who died at 22.

aesthetic consumerism notes: an update

The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

The Museum is an imaginarium of immigrant struggle. Its cleaned-up, prettified tableaux are irritatingly appealing to me. "People suffered in these stifling hell holes," I have to remind myself... and yet...that linoleum is... really cute. Somehow the privations of the past become... aspirational./
The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.//

update: I posted the surreal juxtaposition of Martha Stewart Living and a kitchen in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at top 5-1/2 years ago. If the Tenement Museum represents the masses of yesteryear cozied up for an afternoon's tour, and Martha Stewart created an aspirational, nostalgic version of that long-ago for today's upscale consumer cognoscenti, what does the Pottery Barn catalog I got recently (above) represent? Dumbing down the rarefied nostalgia of yesteryear's masses for today's masses? Pottery Barn's ticking stripe ironing board covers and French wire hampers share space with prop rotary fans, faux washboard "art" and actual cast-iron hand irons. Seriously, PB is selling old coal-heated hand irons (scavanged from India) and fake washboards to hang in your laundry room. There's something odd going on in the aesthetic zeitgeist when a museum and a mass market catalog look alike. Where is Susan Sontag when you need her?

In related news, I have irrefutable evidence from that same catalog that my own home decorating style has jumped the shark. Scattered old wooden and metal letters? check. framed flea market-sourced antique buttons? check. Animal horns? I'm afraid so. Rusted metal industrial detritus? Color-grouped depression-era pottery? Done and done. Regardless of whether it's time for a change anyway, what does one do when one's formerly "personal" style, accrued over the years from here and there, is on wholesale offer at Pottery Barn? When anyone can buy all their 'vintage-inspired' needs at one fell swoop, what happens to the genuine collection? This nothing new — I'm sure all the peerage of Britain cough into their handkerchiefs at the sight of Ralph Lauren Home—it's just happened so rapidly and completely. And I happened to feel it personally.

I'm not saying I originated a style, I simply gravitated to the objects I was drawn to and my sensibility grew up around that. A sensibility already familiar to some, yes; there was John Derian or Anthropologie or ABC carpet along the way, for reference/inspiration/validation. Now my apartment could be any Brooklyn boutique— or Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn outlet. It feels phony. Yet I still like the horns and the 19th century type specimens and the twee rusted objets. The cognitive dissonance is killing me.

[several comments here are from the original post]

 

I'd just gotten this linen grain sack (!) up in Hudson, NY when I got the PB catalog.
Their vintage-inspired linen pillow cover, bottom.

five images above, my apartment

Pottery Barn

Atheist, Radical, Poet

Unused design for Shelley's Ghost exhibition at the New York Public Library

Proposed banner for Shelley's Ghost exhibition at the 
New York Public Library. Unused.

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889
A romanticised view (painted much later) of Shelley's friends burning his body on the beach in Italy after he drowned.(Walker Gallery, Liverpool) We used this as a mural in the show.

Shelley's water-damaged pocket copy of Sophocles' Tragedies, with him when he drowned.
Its about 3 x 5 x 2" thick as I recall. Perhaps if he had tossed this brick he would have had a chance...

Presumption-- "a new Romance of peculiar interest"
The 1823 playbill for the stage version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

"Mr. T. P. Cooke in the Character of the Monster"
—an early portrayal of the monster before he acquired neck bolts

Design for one the specially created letterpress keepsakes with quote from Shelley.
They chose not to print this one...
Shelley self-published The Necessity of Atheism at age 19. It got him kicked out of Oxford.

Four letterpress keepsakes with quotes from Shelley (designed by Doug and me!)
that were ultimately produced.
Free for the taking at Shelley's Ghost

The ghost of Shelley's Ghost...
proposed banner treatment, unused.

Proposed banner for Shelley's Ghost exhibition at the
New York Public Library. Unused.

Cover and inside cover for the brochure

The exhibition Shelley's Ghost has finally opened at the New York Public Library—
Doug Clouse, Barbara Suhr and I worked for months on the design for this show!

I had detailed some of my early thoughts and background inspiration in a post when I had just started the project:

a small but significant exhibit at the New York Public Library on the life of Romantic poet and early hipster Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822)....The show is related to but quite different from Oxford University/Bodleian Library's Shelley's Ghost exhibit and catalog. Some of the items in the show will come from Oxford, but a majority will be pulled from the NYPL’s Pforzheimer Collection, one of the premier collections in the world for the study of English Romanticism.

So please stop by the main library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and take a look. It's in the Wachenheim Gallery on the main floor. You'll find:

• the book Shelley had in his pocket when he drowned (see above)
• handwritten manuscript pages from Frankenstein
• Harriet Shelley’s last letter before she drowned herself
• bits of Shelley’s skull 
• an illustrated cast of characters (just how were all those Marys, Janes and Claire related anyway!) 
• free letterpress keepsakes we created for the show, expertly printed by Coeur Noir press in Williamsburg
• and, as they say, much, much more

We were encouraged to incorporate theatrical flourishes into the show's design... Perhaps to the surprise/dismay/delight of Shelley scholars! Let me know what you think. All comments (and constructive criticism) welcome.

Iron Man

Daniel Badger's Iron Works, one of the leading cast iron foundries,
took up an entire square block 13th to 14th Streets and Avenues B to C.

detail of plan for grain bins

The jaunty Honnewell Building, Boston. Just looking at this makes me happy.

"tension rod girders"

The exquisite Haughwout Building on Broadway and Broome Streets, 1856.
A confection in cast iron.

2007. See my earlier post about the Haughwout

The Cary Building, on Chambers Street

Cary Building, detail, from Lower Manhattan Real-Estate.com

Badger foundry marks are visible all over lower Manhattan. Photo by Walter Grutchfield

Of the great many foundries in the New York City area during the 19th century, Daniel Badger’s Architectural Iron Works was one of the leading manufacturers catering to architectural use. Badger cast the prefabricated iron components for many of the now iconic facades in Soho, downtown*, and Brooklyn, as well as for buildings around the country and as far away as Havana and Cairo. One of Badger's lasting and notable works, however, was not a building but a handsome architectural catalog produced as an advertising tool in 1865. It is the only known extant NYC foundry catalog, now scanned and online, thanks to a grant from the Margot Gayle Fund of The Victorian Society New York.

Daniel Badger (1806–1884) started off in Boston. One of his earliest jobs, in 1842, was a storefront for which he proposed cast-iron columns and lintels. The client, so wary of the newfangled architectural approach, included a proviso in the contract that should the process fail, Badger would remove the iron work at his own expense and substitute granite piers. Needless to say, the ironwork... worked. Although mentions of cast iron facade components predate Badger, his flair for self promotion forever linked his name with the innovation.

Moving to New York in 1848 he set up shop first on Duane Street, then to a massive square block facility between 13th and 14th Streets and Avenues B and C (see the fantastical Steam Punk factory portrait at top). By 1860, the Architectural Iron Works employed 400 people. In 1865 he published his nearly 500-page catalog “at great cost” in order to, among other things, "improve the public taste.”

Badger begot the dubious legacy of the NYC roll-down security gate when bought the rights to new “burglar-proof rolling iron shutters” and popularized them as “Badger Fronts.” Also on offer:

Iron Store Fronts, Manufactories, Grain Warehouses, Arsenals, Ferry Houses, Bridges, Roofs, Domes, Rolling Shutters, Venetian Blinds, Wrought Sashes, Railings, Verandahs, Balustrades, Cornices, Stairways, Columns, Capitals, Arches, Window Lintels and Sills, Consoles, Brackets, Rosettes, Urns, Door and Window Guards, Lamps, Awning and Horse Posts, Girders, Beams, Patent Lights and Iron Sidewalks. — J. Leander Bishop, A History of American Manufacturers from 1608 to 1860, 1868

Badger retired to Brooklyn in 1873 and died in 1884. He currently resides at Green-Wood...//

*See the Haughwout and Cary buildings above, Badger's Architectural Iron Works also supplied the iron for the Cooper Union building, the Gilsey House (1869-71) on Broadway at West 29th Street and Commodore Vanderbilt's original Grand Central Terminal.

--> Go to the Victorian Society's Cast-Iron site, with its survey of 69 NYC buildings, including two that have been demolished in the past 3 years!)