#Madonna on set of Desperately Seeking Susan

Fantastic.  

#Madonna Laura Pausini's Tour Stage Photos

Looking good.  Always dig a Madonna staircase.

thanks Paolina for correction.  xo

Oh, Laura.

'Mad Men' notes: Executive (and bohemian) dining

A square meal: The Tower Suite's packed dining room   


WARNING The article contains a couple spoilers about last night's 'Mad Men' on AMC. If you're a fan of the show, come back once you're watched the episode. But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don't watch the show at all. You can find other articles in this series here.

In trying to contrast the life-altering decisions made by two of 'Mad Men's central characters, the writers certainly did an excellent job last night in choosing two appropriate and familiar locales.

Don Draper (with Megan in tow) made a last-ditch effort to win over a difficult client by dining at the Tower Suite in the Time & Life Building. (The offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce were actually several floors below.) The restaurant on the 48th floor served as an executive dining room during the day called the Hemisphere Club, one of a number of elevated lunch spots in midtown Manhattan. The destination for businessmen looking to impress -- waiters were dressed as butlers  -- was opened by George Lang of Cafe des Artistes fame in 1961.

By many accounts however, the Tower Suite was considered a starched and even dreary dining experience. And quickly passe. In 1970, New York Magazine intoned "[T]he Tower Suite is still ideal for enchanting sheltered in-laws, teenagers, the hopelessly in love and out of town clients from Saginaw."

Peggy Olsen, meanwhile, had a more personal dilemma to attend to downtown in the heart of Greenwich Village where she's seen much of her personal growth. She's presented with a decision to make over dinner at Minetta Tavern, a corner Italian restaurant on MacDougal Street at the foot of small Minetta Lane.

This was the former location of The Black Rabbit, one of Greenwich Village's best known speakeasies, operated by Eve Addams. Her infamous tearoom Eve's Hangout right up the street was one of New York's first lesbian hangouts. The Black Rabbit switched to proper Italian cuisine in 1937.

The tavern had been immortalized the previous year in Joseph Mitchell's ode to eccentric bohemian Joe Gould, who frequented Minetta's in his later years. 'Joe Gould's Secret' would become one of Mitchell's best  known New York tales. (It was also be his last book.)

With the Tower Suite long gone, you can no longer enjoy its faux-butler service, but Minetta Tavern was renovated and reopened in 2009 by restaurateur Keith McNally.

#Madonna in @NormaKamali Leopard Bathing Suit '85

Summer beckons.  Do It Right.

#Madonna #MDNA Tour Stage?

HQ

#Madonna #MDNA #Masterpiece

I ❤ MASTERPIECE.  Can't get enough.

#Madonna on Wetten Dass 28.02.1998

Great Hair.

A fun, bizarre little Ray of Light era interview with Madonna on Wetten Dass.  She comes in at 9:10.  If you want to watch some bicycle riding around the studio before then, glow on.

#Madonna #MDNA Q Magazine Review: The Greatest Female Icon in the History of Pop.

MDNA has been on constant rotation since its release a month ago.  With each listen it gets better and I discover more brilliance.  All the chit chat shyt about the album sales drop irritates me so on a positive note, here's the Must Read Q Magazine review.

Click HERE For HQ

#Madonna on Arsenio Hall 1990

I know how you feel.  You don't know if you want to hit me or kiss me.  I get a lot of that.

For those in need of an interview.

Partners In Preservation: Help out a NYC landmark!

For almost five years, we have been extolling the virtues of New York's greatest and most treasured landmarks in our podcasts. At last, we can actually bring to your attention a very special project where you'll get to interact with some of these places and help get them get sorely needed funding.

The Bowery Boys: New York City History will be blog ambassadors for the Partners In Preservation initiative, sponsored by American Express in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  The initiative has helped historic sites in Chicago, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Boston, Seattle-Puget Sound, San Francisco and New Orleans in prior years. Finally they've come to New York City!

Partners In Preservation is providing $3 million to be given away to historic sites who have submitted grants. Each place has a different need in mind -- basic maintenance, renovation, site expansion, you name it.

Here's how we all come in. You can vote once a day for a particular site you want to support. Go directly to the Partners In Preservation webpage or vote on their Facebook page. The four sites that get the most votes will have their grant requests fully funded, and the remainder of the pot will be split between other sites chosen by an advisory committee made up of civic and preservation figures here in New York.

The list of 40 nominated sites is listed below, after the jump. We have spoken about a great many of them in our podcasts and here on the blog. Over the next few weeks -- up until the voting deadline of May 21 -- we will turn our focus on a few more of these great places. Our new podcast next week will feature one particular spot and its relation to one of our favorite early New Yorkers.

As for the contest itself, we don't have a particular horse in this race. The choice is yours. Just look through the list and find a spot that you have either a particular love for or a place you feel passionate needs the support. There are big places and very small places.  Spread the love! Go here to vote once a day. In a couple days I'll have an interface for the blog and our own Facebook page.

Next weekend (May 4-5), all 40 sites will have an open house with special events. Have fun with this! Visit and explore a place you've never been. And come back here for our take on a few of these interesting sites.

The nominees are:

PARTNERS IN PRESERVATION NOMINEES

-- Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island

-- Apollo Theater, Manhattan

-- Astoria Pool, Queens

-- Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, Bronx

-- Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, Brooklyn

-- Brown Memorial Baptist Church, Brooklyn

-- Caribbean Cultural Center, Manhattan

-- City Island Nautical Museum, Bronx

-- Cleopatra's Needle, Manhattan

-- Coney Island B&B Carousell, Brooklyn

-- Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn

-- Duo Multicultural Arts Center, Manhattan

-- Ellis Island Hospital Complex, Manhattan

-- Erasmus Hall Campus, Brooklyn

-- Federal Hall National Memorial, Manhattan

-- Flushing Town Hall, Queens

-- Gateway National Recreation Area, Brooklyn

-- Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, Brooklyn

-- Guggenheim Museum, Manhattan

-- Helen Hayes Theatre, Manhattan

-- Henry Street Settlement, Manhattan

-- High Line, Manhattan

-- Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Manhattan

-- Japan Society, Inc., Manhattan

-- Jefferson Market Library, Manhattan

-- Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens

-- Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Manhattan

-- Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center, Bronx

-- Museum of the City of New York, Manhattan

-- New York Botanical Garden, Bronx

-- Our Lady of Mount Carmel Society of Rosebank, Staten Island

-- Queens County Farm Museum, Queens

-- Rocket Thrower, Queens

-- Rossville African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Staten Island

-- Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Manhattan

-- St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, Manhattan

-- Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor, Staten Island

-- Tug Pegasus & Waterfront Museum Barge, Brooklyn

-- Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn

-- Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx

No Nonsense: Fifth Avenue lingerie from Brooklyn factories

Store: Kayser Hosiery
545 Fifth Avenue at 45th Street

German immigrant Julius Kayser didn't start off being so intimate with women. When he opened his first factory in 1880, he specialized in simple cotton gloves, and soon moved to the silken kind, the sort a proper woman wore to the opera or a masquerade ball. He even patented a 'process for reinforcing fingertips' which quickly made Kayser a rich man.

By 1913, Julius had expanded to hosiery, veils, swimwear and undergarments that were sold in all the most notable department stores. He employed a staggering 2,500 people in Brooklyn (in today's DUMBO area and later in Clinton Hill**) and several other New York state plants, manufacturing not only standard 'knit' underwear but the more exotic 'Italian silk underwear'.

Kayser brought his selection of women's delicates to 545 Fifth Avenue in the 1930s, with a renovation a decade later that included an 'extensive use of mirrors, both inside and outside the shop'. [source]

Further innovations -- like the 'nimble toe' pantyhose -- brought further expansion in the 1950s and a new three-story store at 425 Fifth Avenue and 38th Street, which featured a 1,200-seat 'Theater of Intimate Apparel' for fashion shows and a rooftop garden to display swimwear and outdoor fashions.

Kayser is still atop the women's undergarment pile. The company joined with Chester H Roth in 1958, and the merged company Kayser-Roth debuts the affordable No Nonsense brand of undergarments in the 1970s. I'm not sure if the current company still makes silk gloves, which got them started in the first place.

**222 Taaffe Place, to be exact. I just wanted to say that because Taaffe Street is one of my favorite street names in New York for some reason.

30th Anniversary for #Madonna Everybody

April 24, or October 6th, 1982?

There's some discrepancy about Everybody. Some say it was today when it all began, others say it was October 6, 1982?  What Have You Got for Me?


*UPDATE 
Nina got it straight:


'Everybody' was released in October 1982. The confusion with April is because Madonna was actually signed to Sire Records, for a singles-deal, in April 1982. Then after the success of 'Everybody' and 'Burning Up' on the Billboard dance/club and Bubbling Under Hot 100 singles charts, Warner Bros. (Sire's parent company) jumped in and signed her to a full-on record deal in 1983, through Sire. So basically she signed a singles-deal with Sire in April 1982, got 'Everybody' released in October 1982, then signed the record deal with Sire/Warner Bros. in 1983, with the debut album following that summer. The rest is history... THE MOST SPECTACULAR CAREER IN POP MUSIC.

Madonna signed to Sire Records.  Everybody was released.  I can go on and on about Everybody but I think it would be cool if we all shared what our favorite thing about it is.  I always loved the dub on the B side of the 12".  It was and always has been about that dirty bass line and that voice from the heavens.  Forever and ever.  Amen.


love the inhaling at the end.

Joyeux Anniversaire @JPGaultier

Happy 60th Birthday.  What can we say about JPG? Beyond Fabulous.
xxx

History in the Making: Double Decker Delight Edition

Ladies in their most decorative hats enjoy a sunny ride from a double-decker in the fleet of the Fifth Avenue Coach Company. Anybody recognize this street corner? There's an advertisement for McMullen's White Label Bass Ale, Guinness Stout, Appolinari's mineral water on the building in the background. (Photo by Alice Austen, courtesy NYPL. Labeled 1896, but most likely much later, perhaps early-mid 1910s)


Sage Advice: Sixteen tips and observations from an opinionated 1916 New York tour guide. "Another characteristic of New York, and one that applies to all grades of society, is the lavish and conspicuous mode of dress adopted by New York women on the public streets" [Cenedella]

Evergreen: It's Barbra Streisand's 70th birthday! Find out where she -- and 19 other extraordinary female vocalists -- got their start in New York's hustling nightlife in an older 2010 post from this blog. [Bowery Boys]

On the Menu: Dying to go to the Howard Johnson's restaurant depicted on last Sunday's 'Mad Men' episode and partake of a big, BIG orange sherbet? The Plattsburgh location is closed, but The Retrologist takes you to an original restaurant that's still open in Lake George. [The Retrologist]

Good Golly: The History Chicks podcast takes a look at the Titanic's most famous lady, the 'Unsinkable' Molly Brown. [The History Chicks]

The Wire: There are mysterious, almost invisible wires strung from lampposts all around the city. Ever notice them? [Slate]

Continuing Story: The latest on the embattled St. Mark's Bookshop, one of the last independent bookstores in the East Village. [Jeremiah's Vanishing New York]

Bronx Tracks: A meticulous truly adventurous walk along the old New York, Westchester and Boston Railway in the Bronx, with sights along Gun Hill Road, Dyre Avenue and stops near the old Freedomland amusement park. [Forgotten New York]

Commodious: The Brooklyn Historical Society takes a leap into the records of the Brooklyn Bureau of Sewers. [Brooklyn Historical Society Blog]

And, now, big news! We are very happy to announce our involvement as blog ambassadors for the Partners In Preservation grant program, sponsored by American Express and the National Trust For Historic Preservation. Forty historical places in New York City have been chosen to compete for $3 million worth of funding. It's a great chance for us to finally give back to some of New York's most treasured places we've spent years talking about. And you can help choose the grant awardees. More information on that this Thursday! [Partners In Preservation]

The Nude Madonna

Flawless.

This nude photo of #Madonna by Steven Meisel from 1990 is up for auction.

In the source they refer to the Sex Book as her tome and Erotica the album as raunchy. Fantastic.

'Mad Men' notes: New York becomes an LSD playground

A mind-twisting exhibit at the Riverside Museum, formerly at 310 Riverside Drive/103rd Street, makes it on the cover of a national magazine. But not everybody would enjoy the trip.


WARNING The article contains a couple spoilers about last night's 'Mad Men' on AMC. If you're a fan of the show, come back once you're watched the episode. But these posts are about a specific element of New York history from the 1960s and can be read even by those who don't watch the show at all. You can find other articles in this series here.

Sure, it's 1966. I thought maybe Peggy Olsen might be the one to trip the light fantastic. (She was otherwise engaged this week.) But I never expected hallucinogenics to materialize as they did on last night's 'Mad Men'. After a staggeringly serious dinner party narrated with empty philosophical conversation, Roger Sterling and his wife are invited to take the drug LSD by their host. Far from the dorm rooms and basement clubs of Greenwich Village where one might expect such experimentation, this evening of psychedelia was presented as a drawing-room intellectual exercise, with serene music unspooling from a reel-to-reel and no object more trippy than a mantel mirror.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, which I doubt can actually be said while experiencing its effects, was considered a mind-opening tool for some early psychiatrists, laying bare subconscious feelings and forcing the user to confront difficult issues in a surreal environment. By the mid '60s, its leading advocate was Timothy Leary (below), a psychologist who had studied the benefits of psychedelic drugs to explore the mental capacities. Today we might naturally lump him with the trappings of '60s counter-culture, but in 1966, with the parameters of psychiatry still in flux, his experiments also appealed to intelligentsia.

The depiction of 'Mad Men's after-dinner drug soiree seem to follow Leary's instruction quite explicitly. In 1966, he advised, "Don't take LSD unless you are very well prepared, unless you are specifically prepared to go out of your mind. Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it. And don't take it unless you are ready to have your perspective on yourself and your life radically changed, because you're gonna be a different person, and you should be ready to face this possibility."

An article in March 25, 1966, LIFE Magazine laid out the details of the drugs in almost an introductory fashion. "A black market dose costs only $3 to $5. But that's enough to send a person on a 10-hour 'trip'."

The same article also underscored a growing fear: "A few pounds of it dumped into the water supply of a major city would be enough to disorient millions."

The federal government had been concerned of this supposed conspiracy as early as the 1950s, fearful that Russians might pollute New York's water and "turn drug-addled American citizens against their own government." [source] Of course, the CIA itself experimented with LSD during this period with its covert Project MKULTRA, which conducted experiments in New York during the mid-50s, using prostitutes and junkies they found in local bars in Greenwich Village. An experiment performed on CIA operatives themselves led one agent in 1953 to leap from a window at the Statler Hilton, today's Hotel Pennsylvania. (Or was it murder?)

By the 1960s, the drug had become a virtual entrance exam for New York's blossoming counter-culture music scene, or so the more hysterical believed. "In New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, a girl just off the bus from Boise can find it quicker than the YWCA merely by asking around for 'a trip'," warned Life Magazine.

The fear of an unwitting populace overtaken with LSD only grew with the 1960s, and this time, some thought it was New York's counter-culture rebels itself who may be wielding it.  A 1967 journal opined on the urban legend with all seriousness. "[A] single ounce will provide fuel for 300,000 trips, reported one periodical, and it is believed that a few pounds dumped into the water supply of New York City would disorient the nearly 8,000,000 residents."

Perceptions of LSD were slowly divorced from its supposed therapeutic qualities, especially as the drug soon found itself as the subject of films like Roger Corman's 'The Trip' and 'Enormous Midnight', where town water supply is poisoned with LSD and turns its citizens into orgiastic zombies. In New York, LSD entered the club world; hallucinogenic mid-60s destinations like Cerebrum and the Electric Circus (which became Andy Warhol's preferred spot in 1966) seem almost conceivable without it.

New York legislators quickly vowed to outlaw the new drug. Bellevue Hospital reported over 200 new patients affected by the drug. In April 1966, two local crimes energized the press: a Brooklyn girl accidentally ingested a sugarcube coated with LSD, and a week later, a ex-mental patient killed his mother-in-law, allegedly under the influence of the drug. With the Stagger-Dodd bill in 1968, the possession of LSD became illegal in the United States.

While that effectively ended the living-room therapy sessions such as the one experienced by Roger Sterling, the drug, now underground, would increasingly influence all aspects of New York bohemian culture.

From the Cerebrum club mentioned above:






Pictures courtesy Newsweek and Life Google Images. For more information on the CIA's LSD experiments, you might be interested in watching this video.


If you're watching 'Mad Men' when it broadcasts at 10 PM EST, then follow along with me on Twitter at @boweryboys. I'll be giving a live fact-Tweeting, dropping little factoids about the events being depicted on the show

Can We Get Together?

Madonna at G.A.Y. November 2005

W.E. need this show!!!

Happy 9th #Madonna American Life.

Love.

#MDNA Gets Better with Each Listen.

#Madonna #MDNA is by far her best album since her first. Going on our 4th week, it just gets better with each listen.

List your Top 5 as of today.

Mine:

1. I Fucked Up:

If you wanna know how to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. <---I just heard that line last night!

2. Turn Up the Radio

3. Beautiful Killer

4. Masterpiece

5. Love Spent

Buy MDNA Now!

#Madonna Full Video on Daybreak & Lorraine Kelly ITV1

"Sometimes I think I'm Super Woman and I can do it all..."

"It's not like I went from a couch potato into a cannon ball..."

#Madonna #MDNA Tour is to end up Top 10 Tours of All-Time.

On going chatter that the Madonna tour, and by extension her multi-rights deal with Live Nation, are underperforming is "baseless,"according to sales figures provided by tour producer Arthur Fogel chairman of Live Nation Global Touring.

According to Fogel, the guy who would know - these are the facts: 76 Madonna shows at arenas and stadiums are on sale in North America and Europe combined. More than 1.4 million tickets have been sold, banking about $214 million for an average in the $2.7 million per show in a mix of stadiums and arenas.And the tour doesn't even begin until May 29 in Tel Aviv, first hitting America in Philadelphia Aug. 28.

Fogel's not sure what to make of the detractors. "This tour is completely on track to end up in the top 10 tours of all time, especially considering we haven't put South America or Australia on sale," he tells Billboard.biz. "To say this tour is not performing is so off base I don't even know what to say. When this tour is said and done, combined with 'Sticky and Sweet,' you're talking $750 million in gross ticket sales. That sounds pretty impressive to me."

"She's at the top of her game and she ain't goin' away," he concludes.

ohnotheydidnt

The missing: Revisiting the Etan Patz disappearance in SoHo and holding on to memories of a transformed neighborhood

The scene at Wooster and Prince Street on April 19, 2012.

 The world has changed since the disappearance of Etan Patz from the streets of New York on May 25, 1979. At least it seemed that way yesterday when the FBI and the New York Police Department reopened the cold case of the boy's disappearance and focused its attentions on a building in SoHo at 127 Prince Street. Etan went missing after leaving his home at a few doors down, at 113 Prince Street, on the way to the bus stop.

The neighborhood today is a concentrated collection of boutiques, franchise clothing stores, art galleries, cafes and an Apple Store. The building that may hold the secrets to one of New York's most famous unsolved mysteries holds a Lucky Brand jeans boutique on its ground floor.

Etan would be about my age now. But I have never lived in SoHo. For Etan, it was the only place he ever called home. The SoHo of today is a broad caricature of that neighborhood he lived in. It's sunny and mostly welcoming now but oddly dispiriting. One block way is a two-story retailer entirely devoted to Crocs.

It's a neighborhood that has changed dramatically in tone over the past thirty years, even if its appearance has remained almost identical thanks to its designation as a historic district in 1973. (Given the madness of development along the neighborhood's western edge, could you imagine what would have happened here without it?) Its sleek, bustling character is of fairly recent invention, a perversion of the 1970s art and fashion scene which flocked here, attracted to the abandoned old factories and warehouses garbed in striking cast iron.

Below: Crosby and Spring Street, 1978 (Flickr/straatis)

The district was pulled from the jaws of destruction -- Robert Moses' failed project, the strange and insane Lower Manhattan Expressway-- in the 1960s, then became populated with adventurous young creatives drawn to the neighborhood's relative isolation and large lofts. Former storage rooms for textiles and other dry goods became ideal for art galleries and performance spaces. The 'cast iron district' may have itself informed the creativity that flocked here. Gallery owners could think ambitiously. High ceilings, canyons of uniform metal, and stark cobblestone streets appealed more to the avant garde.

There was still something mysterious about SoHo in the mid-1970s, a time before high-end fashion became entrenched in the windows. It allowed artists and bohemians to thrive in a place that in many ways seemed off limits from the rest of the city, more rarefied. SoHo took on a different artistic hue from the East Village where art mixed with poverty. Quirky (and expensive) clothing boutiques soon arrived; Betsey Johnson, for instance, opened her first store in SoHo in 1978.

The elevation into a sort of edgy high culture was palpable enough that it soon seeped into pop culture. Between horrifying visions of death, Faye Dunaway traipsed the streets here in 1978's 'The Eyes of Laura Mars'. Martin Scorsese paid homage to its eccentricity in his 1985 film 'After Hours'.

But SoHo would not have been immune to the New York's deteriorating infrastructure of the 1970s. Or its escalating crime. While perhaps not unsafe during the day, this stretch of Prince Street where Etan would have walked in 1979 had far less foot traffic on a weekday, clearly free of today's starving artists, latte sippers and jewelry and tee-shirt sellers. By 1984, when New York Magazine proclaimed SoHo was "on the verge of becoming a downtown Madison Avenue," the crime rate was actually increasing. The depths of the neighborhood's swift gentrification were clashing with reality.

It would take a financial upswing in the late 1980s and early 1990s for SoHo itself to change again. Wealthier residents moved in, as did high-end retailers -- and then, slightly less-than-high-end retailers along Broadway. This forced out a great many of the original galleries, now drawn to a new area of warehouse-filled remoteness in West Chelsea.

When Etan Patz disappeared in 1979, the tragedy literally changed how Americans thought about missing children. The search erupted into a media frenzy with detectives fielding hundreds of false leads driven by lost-child flyers that blanketed New York City.

It became the "widest and longest search for a missing child undertaken by the city's Police Department in decades" [source] and quite possibly the most publicized child abduction in America since the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's infant son in 1932.  In 1983 President Ronald Reagan established National Missing Children's Day on May 25, the day of Etan's disappearance. He became the first missing child to adorn a milk carton.

And so, over 30 years later, this case now leads right back here to a building in SoHo a short distance from his home, in a place he might find unrecognizable and in a country transformed by his disappearance.

#Madonna Boosted the Ratings for Rock Center.

Full Rock Center Interview

Therefore don't show a BOTCH EDITED version. Show minimum 20 minutes. I couldn't even tell you the other segments.

Up two-tenths of a point in the demo, to a 0.7. Total viewers a whopping 2.87 million. Close to what the 11:30-12:30 late-night shows get in total viewers.

Early #Madonna Interview

The South Street kidnappings: During Prohibition, did 'shanghai gangs' really lurk in the shadow of the ports?

The old port at night was no place to be. Weathered taverns and boardinghouses sit next to uninhabited warehouses, separated by dimly lit South Street from the shadow of rocking masts and creaking piers that sank into the black water of the East River. A lonely sailor, soused from the wares of the cheapest Water Street saloon, stumbles down the cobblestone. A figure emerges from the corner. A whistle. Another man steps from behind. And the lonely sailor has vanished.

The fear of 'disappearing' in New York kept many awake at night in the 19th century. In a world where everybody was essentially 'unplugged' and 'off the grid', there was a sense that people could simply vanish, almost as if absorbed into the urban environment without a trace. Moral crusaders, in a tirade against personal independence, warned parents to keep close watch on their daughters for fear they would be snatched from the street, plied against their will with opium and turned into prostitutes. Some thought this might have been the fate of 'cigar girl' Mary Rogers back in 1841. And as late as 1911, some speculated this was the fate of the socialite Dorothy Arnold, one of the most prominent disappearances of the Gilded Age.

But it was men who were often the victims of street kidnapping. The transient nature of the New York port world mixed with the influx of new immigrants -- many of them younger men -- fostered a disturbing cottage industry of so-called impressment (or 'shanghaing' in the old vernacular), where drunken men were either forcibly taken off the street or taken advantage of in their inebriated state and put to work on a sailing ship.

In 1870, a sailor 'under the influence of liquor' was tied up and dragged onto a boat. A Fort Hamilton soldier in 1882 was kidnapped and placed aboard a ship off Staten Island. While his message, thrown overboard in a bottle, was received, officials were unable to rescue him as the boat sailed for its destination: Hamburg, Germany.

Below: The forest of masts along South Street, 1890

It's impossible to know exactly how many men were forced onto boats along New York's port, as the victims were frequently drunk, thrown onto boats that embarked on long voyages and then failed to press charges when they returned. An article in 1910 claims that '[h]undreds of sailors were captured [in New York Harbor], usually in the saloons, beaten into insensibility, to awake when the ship was at sea and the Captain an absolute tyrant."

There would be an actual, near legal version of shanghaiing called crimping where the sailors, still taken at will, would be forced to sign an agreement, paid for their services but not allowed to leave. They would embark on often long voyages, and by the time they got back, "his anger is likely to have died out."

By the late 1910s, federal laws protected the rights of seamen, and most shanghaiing and crimping practices were abolished. Except, of course, for those in illegal industries, and especially a brand new one created by the advent of Prohibition in 1920.

This type of kidnapping was perhaps the most frightening of all. "South Street Whispers of Shanghaing" announced a rather in-depth New York Times article in 1925. Now, instead of 'crimps', who lurked in sailor's boarding houses, looking for possible captives, it was whole 'shanghai gangs' that ruled the shadows of the seaport.

"I have been drugged and held captive on a ship," claimed one note found in a bottle and mailed to the police. An anonymous shipping master reported hearing of a victim "drugged in one of these newfangled speakeasies that are run as drug stores. They said along the street that a shanghai gang had got him, stole his money and shipped him to sea....The man is gone, and who can trace him?"

Below: South Street in 1920 in a snowstorm during the first year of Prohibition (Courtesy Flickr/wavz13)

The destination for these unlucky men wasn't a long-distance voyage but rather a line of near-invisible vessels permanently moored off the American coast. 'Rum Row' facilitated the distribution of alcohol into the United States, with product passing to smaller boats and shady, midnight deals made between mobsters and smugglers. It was an unpleasant and dangerous job, constantly under the fear of capture, betrayal and accident. In an illegal industry with few rules, unwilling men could be discarded.

This also made Prohibition-era impressment a mystery and something of an urban legend. How much forced capture really went on? The Times report interviews several sailors and even a salty South Street bartender, but their names are kept out of the story. Two men, thrown aboard a Rum Row schooner, "were made to work, starve and suffer for water, under threats," only escaping when the vessel was captured by authorities.

South Street's changing fortunes may have prevented a widespread problem of the sort which occurred in the 19th century.  The old pubs and grog houses were closed or turned to speakeasies, and heavy shipping had moved on to other ports throughout the harbor, on the Hudson River side, and in Brooklyn and New Jersey. The ports themselves were heavily controlled by mob bosses -- and the promise of mob money -- which perhaps made such forced recruitment unnecessary. And of course the success of illegal Prohibition industries relied on knowing which laws to abide and which to skirt.

Yet the fear of vanishing kept men on their toes at night as they passed through the neighborhood, keeping in the light as they stumbled down South Street.

At top: Drawing by Barbara Latham courtesy New York Times.  It accompanied the article mentioned above.

Long Time #Madonna Supporter Dick Clark dies Today

You mind if I call you Dick?

Dick supported Madonna throughout her career. From her now legendary performance of Holiday on American Bandstand in 1984, to him lobbying hard to get her on Live Aid in summer of 1985, Dick Clark was always there for Madonna. R.I.P. Dick.

"Even though I told him in 1984 that I wanted to rule the world, it's Dick Clark who has ruled the world" - Madonna

#Madonna on Daughter Lola Leon Smoking

Discusses tonight on Harry Smith interview

On tonight's episode of Rock Center, Madonna addresses her daughter's drag for the first time. "I don't approve of anyone smoking cigarettes, most of all, my daughter," she said in an excerpt of the interview that ran on the Today show this morning. When Harry Smith countered with the fact that Madonna suckles on a cig in her Girl Gone Wild video, she said, "I don't smoke, that's just an accessory. She smoked that cigarette before I did that video, so she didn't get that from me."

And she'll keep on surviving and singing. This interview was conducted around midnight since Madonna had spent all day rehearsing for her upcoming world tour. And she'd like fans to know that at 53-years-old, she has no plans to stop any time soon. "I certainly have stuff left to say, I still feel like expressing myself -- I'll keep doing this as long as I do."

theinsider.com

Rock Center: #Madonna 'Daybreak' Interview 2012 with Harry Smith Preview

Hair, outfit and face = sock'n it. Can't wait for whole thing. This Wednesday 9pm NBC.

Commodore Nutt: Barnum's dwarf star, NYC police officer

The attentions of most New Yorkers 150 years ago today were understandably occupied by the events of the Civil War. The general mood in April 1862 had turned cynical and grim. It had been one year since the first battle at Fort Sumter. The bloodiest skirmish yet, the Battle of Shiloh in northwestern Tennessee, left thousands dead on the battlefield just two weeks before, and attention now turned to the standoff at Fort Pulaski.

And yet the city in April 1862 was overflowing with distraction. The jewellers Ball Black & Co. displayed a framed personal letter from Queen Victoria, thanking New Yorkers for their well wishers following the death of her husband a few months earlier. Across the street, at Niblo's Garden, theatergoers could delight in 'The Enchantress', featuring actor William Wheatley, who would later stage the world's first Broadway musical, 'The Black Crook', on that very stage. Merry gentleman and naughty ladies drank up in lower Manhattan's various concert saloons, bracing for the effects of a new law passed that month that would effectively close down such bawdy amusements. (Luckily, the law had little effect.)

But New York's merry king of showbiz in 1862 was P.T. Barnum, his American Museum still New York's most popular attraction. That April, Barnum featured a 'living hippopotamus' and two beluga whale in its basement, and among the museum's many shows at Broadway and Ann Street was the feature 'Hop O' My Thumb, or The Ogre And The Dwarf' starring Barnum's biggest small star General Tom Thumb.

Thumb, however, was not Barnum's only dwarf star in 1862. Earlier that year, Barnum unveiled a New Hampshire teenager afflicted with dwarfism and presented him with the stage name Commodore George Washington Nutt. Known as the '$30,000 Nutt' due the amount of money he was supposedly paid (although later disproven), the young man was advertised as "the Smallest Man in Miniature in the known world" and "Most Attractive and Interesting human being ever known."

At right: Nutt in an illustration from Harpers Weekly, February 1862, 'bursting out of his shell'

Although Nutt would perform at the museum, he was frequently used as an instrument to promote Barnum's many endeavors. He would serve as Tom Thumb's friendly rival for the hand of diminutive actress Lavinia Warren (whom Thumb later married at Grace Church in 1863) and tour throughout Europe with Barnum. But on April 17, 1862, Nutt had a local duty to perform -- at the headquarters of the New York Police Department.

According to the Daily Tribune, Nutt met with local police commissioners in an effort to get an officer specifically assigned to Barnum's museum. And just in case the idea would be met with indifference, Nutt himself applied to become a New York police officer, although his height of three feet might have precluded him from such an occupation.

A uniform was immediately ordered for the young star, and by telegraph to the Ninth Precinct, he claimed he would hold 'extraordinary powers to arrest' troublemakers at the Museum. It appears, however, that Nutt held few responsibilities for the police force.

During his tour of the police facilities, including the famed Rogue's Gallery, the charming performer even got in a rather dirty joke. According to the article, "Some one said that on the stage the Commodore had been seen to kiss a girl on the mouth. 'Well, that was the right place, wasn't it?' was the reply."

Top picture courtesy NYPL

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