A Story Of A Shirtwaist Fire Witness

cuneo-podesta
from Maria Blank:

"My grandmother was born in 1894 in New York City and she lived near Washington Square Park. She died in 1995 when she was 100. She was a witness to the fire. The images haunted her for the rest of her life. I feel that she would want everyone to know how awful and tragic it was.
I have attached some very old pictures that my mother gave me. I think the most interesting one is a picture of my grandmother's grade school class. She is in the second row standing fourth girl in the row. It looks like she is the shortest one in the class. Do you think that some of the girls in her class worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory? The other picture is one take of my grandmother when she was about seventeen (around the same time as the fire). The last picture was taken much later. It's one of Lorenzo Cuneo's stores. My mother said it's on one side of Washington square park but I'm not so sure of that. She also said that this is the parking garage which is supposedly the first one in New York City. Hope you find the pictures interesting."

Maria's grandmother was Mildred Cuneo. Her great grandfather was Lorenzo Cuneo. In the 1910 census she was living at 12 E. 8th Street, two blocks from the Asch Building.

Justin Bieber's Valentine To KV's Marion Fox

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

A Black History Month KV Special Edition: John Coltrane and Edward Strickland on Coltrane

Edward Strickland is famous in Knickerbocker Village history. He lived at 10 Monroe Street. Here's another posting about Strickland
below is an excerpt from an article Strickland wrote about Coltrane in the Atlantic in 1987

What Coltrane Wanted
The legendary saxophonist forsook lyricism for the quest for ecstasy
by Edward Strickland
JOHN COLTRANE died twenty years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work. In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms--blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works.
The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane's relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane's journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues.

from Strickland's 1998 obituary

Bay State Banner
09-24-1998
Edward Strickland, 68, educator, artist, writer
Edward Strickland, professor of the psychology of visual arts, a friend to artists, and himself an artist and writer, died in the early morning of Sept. 16 at Deaconess Hospital. He succumbed to respiratory failure due to lung cancer. He was 68.
Throughout his life, in his painting, as an arts administrator and critic, and as a individual, Dr. Strickland sided with those who were struggling to achieve equity in society. He was generous with his time on behalf of such efforts, even though it took him away from his studio where he took an intense pleasure in immersing himself in the …
A woman stands among a smother of foliage, and the leaves around her stir, responsive to her voice. "It's as though she's singing a linden tree into existence," says Edward Strickland, the painter of the scene.
Strickland, through December, is presenting a 40-year retrospective of paintings and drawings in the handsome AAMARP Galleries on the fourth floor of the Ruggles Building of Northeastern University, at 11 Leon St. The retrospective represents the broad scope of his interests built on the dual foundations of psychology and the visual arts. An associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and former chair of the black studies department, …

Meyer London: A Socialist Elected To Congress 1914

London makes it clear that he is not about to start a revolution but to begin formulating and introducing social legislation.

Fenruary Brings The Rain (and more snow)

Images Of Meyer London

meyer-london

Triangle Shirtwaist Commemoration 2010: Suzanne Pred Bass Speaks Of Her Aunts

Video I had uploaded but had forgotten to post here. I'm probably wrong about the Eldridge address. Evidently Rosie was living at 119 St, Marks Place and not 119 E. 8 St.

Kitty O'Neil's Champion Jig

Some info from youtube on this and another version of the song

This interesting piece, being unusual with 7 lines of non-repeated themes, comes from Ryan's Mammoth Collection. In it we hear lots of the "Banjo Licks" common in the tutors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the last one part of the "Dick Van Dyke" TV show from the 60's?
Love your playing of this tune. I suspect it’s about as historically accurate as any I’ve heard, considering your source and the instrument you play. Well done!
You’re probably already be aware of this, but the tune survives in the current repertoire of Irish traditional musicians under the name of Kitty O'Shea’s. Two notable recorded sources are by Tommy Peoples and Kevin Burke.
Kitty O'Neil, the tune's namesake, was a popular New York-based dancer and singer of the 1870s and '80s.
One such melody is “Kitty O'Neil's Champion Jig,” an elaborate, seven-part fiddler's showpiece that has been revived in recent years by Irish traditional musicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the tune's Irish-sounding name and its adoption into the contemporary Irish repertoire, “Kitty O'Neil's Champion” is actually a hardy survivor from 19th-century American minstrelsy and variety theater.
Kitty O'Neil, the tune's namesake, was a popular New York-based dancer and singer of the 1870s and '80s. The revival of Kitty’s “Champion Jig” hasn't done much to revive her reputation, however, because the tune has become widely known as “Kitty O'Shea,” the title under which it mistakenly appeared on a recording by Donegal fiddle great Tommy Peoples, who started playing the tune in concerts during the 1970s and included it on his 1982 LP The Iron Man.

Kitty O'Neil And Wood's Minstrel Hall

Kitty-O'Neil
In the previous post where the Autobiography of a Thief is viewable the protagonist mentions on p 13 (17) that he had gone to Wood's Minstrel Hall. Kitty O'Neil was a big attraction there. I guess I can see why.

Hutchins Hapgood: Autobiography Of A Thief, 1905

from recollection books

Hutchins Hapgood, journalist and author, was born on May 21, 1869 in Chicago, Illinois.
    Hutchins Hapgood received his early education in the Alton public schools. Like his father and two brothers, he attended Harvard University, receiving the B.A. degree in 1892 and the M.A. in 1897. In the interim he spent two years in study at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg, Germany, reading sociology and philosophy, and also traveled extensively. For a time he was an instructor in English composition at Harvard and the University of Chicago. After trying his hand at various jobs, Hapgood eventually decided to become a journalist like his older brother Norman.
    Charles Hutchins Hapgood had a tremendous influence upon the character of his sons. Although not a religious man, he imparted to them a strong moral sense, an abhorrence of great wealth, and a basic belief in progressive socialism. This, coupled with a liberal Harvard education and appropriate connections, led Hutchins Hapgood into the thick of muckraking journalism.
    His first newspaper job was with the New York Commercial Advertiser under the tutelage of Lincoln Steffens. Here he met Steffen's assistant, Neith Boyce, whom he married on June 22, 1899.
    In 1904 Hapgood became the drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post.
    Returning to New York, he later became an editorial writer for the Evening Post, the Press, and the Globe. While maintaining his career as a journalist, Hapgood also wrote books. During the first decade of the twentieth century, he produced the bulk of his major works, including Paul Jones (1901), The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), The Autobiography of a Thief (1903), The Spirit of Labor (1907), An Anarchist Woman (1909), and Types from City Streets (1910). The anonymously published Story of a Lover (1919), describing the "open" marriage which he and Neith maintained, was initially suppressed as pornographic. Hapgood's last great work was his autobiography, A Victorian in the Modern World (1933).
    Hutchins Hapgood was a close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan and an habitue of her salon at 23 Fifth Avenue. Other close friends included Bernard and Mary Berenson, Jacob Epstein, Max Eastman, Anton Johanson, Walter Lippmann, Robert Morss Lovett, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Maurice Sterne, and Mark Sullivan. He and Neith were founding members of the Provincetown Players.
    Hapgood's career declined following the death of his eldest child, Boyce, in 1918 and the end of the muckracking era. The last several years of his life he spent with Neith in Key West, Florida, at their home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and on a farm in Richmond, New Hampshire.
    Hutchins Hapgood died on November 19, 1944, in Provincetown, and was buried in the family plot in East Cemetery, Petersham, Massachusetts

The_autobiography_of_a_thief
above, an interesting account of life in the fourth ward as well as neighboring ones in the late 1800's.

Memories Of The Rag Trade In Save The Tiger, 2

a clip from an excellent movie starring Jack Lemmon and Jack Gilford
from wikipedia

Save the Tiger is a 1973 film about moral conflict in contemporary America. It stars Jack Lemmon, Jack Gilford, Laurie Heineman, William Hansen, Thayer David, Lara Parker and Liv Lindeland. The film is adapted from the novel of the same title by Steve Shagan, (the first book by the author of The Formula and other thrillers, and generally regarded to be his most successful novel by literary standards).
Jack Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, an executive at a Los Angeles apparel company on the edge of ruin. Throughout the film, Stoner struggles with the complexity of modern life versus the simplicity of his youth. He longs for the days when pitchers wound up, jazz filled the air, and the flag was more than a pattern to put on a jock-strap. He wrestles with the guilt of surviving the war and yet losing touch with the ideals for which his friends died. To Harry Stoner, the world has given up on integrity, and threatens to destroy anyone who clings to it. He is caught between watching everything he has worked for evaporate, or becoming another grain of sand in the erosion of the values he once held so dear.

Memories Of The Rag Trade In Save The Tiger

a clip from an excellent movie starring Jack Lemmon and Jack Gilford
from wikipedia

Save the Tiger is a 1973 film about moral conflict in contemporary America. It stars Jack Lemmon, Jack Gilford, Laurie Heineman, William Hansen, Thayer David, Lara Parker and Liv Lindeland. The film is adapted from the novel of the same title by Steve Shagan, (the first book by the author of The Formula and other thrillers, and generally regarded to be his most successful novel by literary standards).
Jack Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, an executive at a Los Angeles apparel company on the edge of ruin. Throughout the film, Stoner struggles with the complexity of modern life versus the simplicity of his youth. He longs for the days when pitchers wound up, jazz filled the air, and the flag was more than a pattern to put on a jock-strap. He wrestles with the guilt of surviving the war and yet losing touch with the ideals for which his friends died. To Harry Stoner, the world has given up on integrity, and threatens to destroy anyone who clings to it. He is caught between watching everything he has worked for evaporate, or becoming another grain of sand in the erosion of the values he once held so dear.