Sue Simmons: A Four-Letter-Word-ing Celebration

Shake-up on the set! My favorite all-time New York news anchor Sue Simmons, a part of the WNBC news room since 1980, has been 'let go' from her long-time position, as the network won't be renewing her contract when it expires in June. One of the highest paid news anchors in New York history, Simmons is perhaps best known nationally for letting loose an expletive during a commercial news tease. I have no idea what Chuck Scarborough is going to do without her.

Here are four videos that encapsulate her resplendent, telegenic glow -- and her occasional lack thereof. Plus, I just enjoy watching '80s newscasts for some reason:

Alive at Five!


Interviewing Kate Bush in 1985 -- and getting the name of her song wrong.

Featuring Jack Cafferty and Al Roker!

And of course.....

Networked New York: This Friday at NYU!

What are the challenges of presenting the history of New York in a digital landscape? How does technology make New York history richer?

The Project on New York Writing, the Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, and the Workshop in Archival Practice at New York University is presenting an all-day conference this Friday, March 9, 'Networked New York', examining the relationships among "physical New York (the city’s buildings, streetscapes), digitized New York (its blogs, websites, tweets), or institutional New York (its archives, museums)".

I'll be representing the Bowery Boys in an afternoon panel discussion "Blogscapes and Digital Interaction," joining fellow bloggers Maud Newton, Rachel Fershleiser, and Teri Tynes of the Walking Off The Big Apple blog.  The panel will be moderated by NYU English professor Bryan Waterman, who also produces the blog Patell and Waterman's History of New York.

This discussion is begins at 4 p.m. in the Great Room at 19 University Place, right off of Washington Square Park. The conference begins at 10 a.m. All panel events are free and open to the public! There are many history-related speakers, and I think you'd all enjoy many parts of the program, so check out the schedule of events here. And read some in-depth descriptions of events at Bryan's blog.

And there's a new podcast ready for download this Friday. It's a big one!

Picture above "See Something or Say Something: New York" Caption reads: "Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both."  Image courtesy Eric Fischer, who pretty much has the coolest Flickr stream ever.

Ten fabulous facts about 70 Willow Street, Brooklyn Heights, aka 'the Truman Capote house'

The strange, yellow Brooklyn Heights mansion best known as the home where Truman Capote wrote 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' has finally been sold for $12 million, after many months of humbling markdowns from its original hefty pricetag.

Located in the heart of old Brooklyn, the new owners will be winning more than a literary prize. The house has a rather unusual past full of influential inhabitants and has been used in some curious ways:

1) 70 Willow Street, in the popular Greek revival style of the day, was built in 1839 by Adrian Van Sinderen, the descendant of original Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and a fiery Revolutionary War-era reverend from Flatbush, Ulpianus Van Sinderen. Van Sinderen's lavish urban villa -- it has almost a dozen fireplaces -- is one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood, but not the oldest. There are a few neighboring houses that are older, including 24 Middagh Street, just a couple blocks away and built in 1824.

2) The house passed to his son Adrian Jr., a prominent New York lawyer, who fell spectacularly from grace when he mishandled the family trust. He died nearly penniless and alone in New Lots, far outside the sphere of wealth, in 1864. (There's an avenue near that east Brooklyn neighborhood named for the Van Sinderen family.) His descendants appear to have done better. Another Adrian Van Sinderen has an annual book-collecting competition named for him at Yale University.

3) The 'estate of Van Sinderen', as it was often called then, was built for a single family, but by the late 1860s, the roomy floors were being split up for several tenants. From an October 1869 classified ad in the Brooklyn Eagle:"One large, handsomely furnished second floor room for gentleman and wife or gentlemen willing to room together."***

4) The primary resident during the late 19th century was the banker William Putnam, better known as a significant trustee for the Brooklyn Museum in its early years. He betrothed to the museum paintings by Rembrandt and Monet, as well as some 'Royal Copenhagen  porcelain' that rivaled that of European rulers, according to the Times.

5) The house was a pivotal location for the women's suffrage movement. Scratch that, the anti-women's suffrage movement. The newly married lady of the house, Caroline Putnam, and her sister Lillian joined other local ladies of means in organizing protests against granting women the right to vote or, in the words of their 1894 petition, to protest "the obligations of the ballot upon the women of the state." Mrs. Putnam also hosted French conservation classes and literary salons from her parlor here. [source]

The picture at top shows the house as it looked in 1922. At right, the home in 1936. (Pictures courtesy New York Public Library.)

6) After Mrs. Putnam died in 1940, the house sat entirely vacant until 1944, when it was donated to the Red Cross. They used the house as a classroom, teaching arts and crafts, Braille to the blind and cooking classes to the wives of returning soldiers from World War II.

7) In 1953, the old house landed in the hands of renown Broadway stage designer Oliver Smith, responsible for the original scenery from great American musicals like Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls and West Side Story. In his lifetime, he was nominated for 25 Tony Awards. With some of his earnings from the musical On The Town, Smith bought 70 Willow Street and lived here until he died in 1994.

8) From 1955 to 1965, he lent the basement apartment to his friend Truman Capote. The blond Southern writer was simply wild about Brooklyn Heights and basically charmed himself into a permanent room on Willow Street. From his essay 'A House on the Heights,' Capote describes, "We [Smith and Capote] sat on the porch consulting Martinis -- I urged him to have one more, another. It got to be quite late, he began to see my point; yes, twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot; and yes it seemed only fair that I should have some of them."

9) Decked out in green wallpaper and odd knickknacks, "an atmosphere of perpetual Christmas," the house would prove a place of great inspiration for Capote. He wrote part of 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' here. Perhaps more notably, it was here that he picked up a New York Times are read about the brutal slaying of a Kansas family. Capote set about working on what became 'In Cold Blood' the next day.

10) I can't leave the tale of 70 Willow Street without mentioning one of its most famous lunch guests -- Jackie Kennedy. Capote conveniently left out the fact that the house was Smith's, not his. "She laughed about it, because suddenly in the middle of lunch she got the idea that it wasn't his," Smith recalled later. "I suppose I acted as if it were mine."

And here's some literary bonus points -- it's just down the street from the old home of Arthur Miller (155 Willow Street)

***A reader emailed me to say that the addresses for Willow Street were differently numbered before 1865 and that this ad probably refers to a neighbor of 70 Willow Street. In that case, I'll replace that fact with one I should have mentioned in the lede of this article -- as reported by Brownstoner, the $12 million final price tag for 70 Willow Street makes it the most expensive house purchase in Brooklyn history. Does this mean that nobody has yet bought my dream apartment in DUMBO?

Movin' out! The Bronx Zoo closes the Monkey House

The charismatic Baldy the Chimp, on display during the 1910s, was one of the House of Primates' most famous inhabitants. (Pic courtesy Wildlife Conservation Society)

The landmarked Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo was officially closed as an exhibition space this past Monday. It was really quite a throwback, a lovely fossil of a building but an artifact of antiquated zoological style. Even as the Bronx Zoo's popularity soared due to regional exhibits like the Congo Forest, Wild Asia and Madagascar, the Monkey House was kept open, displaying smaller primates like marmosets and tamarinds.

While hardly ideal for any type of primate today -- inmate or visitor -- the Monkey House is one of the few links to the zoo's beginnings.

Originally called the House of Primates, the quirky Beaux-Arts structure by Heins & La Farge was finished in 1901, making it the oldest landmark in the park. (The Reptile House, which opened in 1899, is not landmarked, presumably because most of the building has been replaced.) The zoo once kept all its apes, baboons and monkeys here, including Baldy the Chip (at top), amateur roller skater and acquaintance of President William Howard Taft. Today, you can still find baboon adornments atop the entrance, made by famed animal sculptor Alexander P. Proctor.

This building has been closed before, in 1950, when the inhabitants were shipped out to the newly built Great Apes House* (which no longer exists). It was reopened in 1959 and has housed the smallest monkeys from that date until this past Monday.

The Monkey House was also witness to the sorriest moment in Bronx Zoo history -- the exhibition of the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga at the House of Primates in 1906.

For more information on Ota Benga and the rest of the zoo, check out our podcast on the history of the Bronx Zoo.

*As evidenced by this depressing article, the Great Apes House was no great place with primates either.

'The Greatest Grid' and an even greater book

Reason to love New York No. 12,306: A museum honoring the city's history has a hit on its hands with an elaborate show about surveying and real estate.

'The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011', the smash-hit exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, is the most fully realized and in-depth show they've produced in a few years, and it's done almost entirely without the help of traditional three-dimensional objects.  (The show has also been extended, until July 15.)

The story of the Commissioners Plan of 1811 and the effects of the Manhattan grid plan are wondrously illustrated with an extraordinary collection of maps and photographs, documenting the island's almost century-long conversion into a major metropolis. The most substantial, non-printed object is a small marble surveying post.

But there's a problem with a show based on maps. You actually want to touch things, draw your finger along familiar areas, and stand staring at pictures unfamiliar landscapes, trying to find evidence of your present street corner. More than once I caught myself poking an artifact in sudden amazement. (My apologizes to the museum curators.)

This is what makes the exhibit's companion volume 'The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011', edited by Hilary Ballon, pretty much invaluable. Published in a slender landscape binding, the book condenses the exhibition but allows for unabated curiosity and imaginative wanderings over vivid prints of aged topography.

This exhibit stands in contrast with Mannahatta/Manhattan, another excellent show from 2009 which aroused New York history lovers. Mannahatta was map-based, but pure speculation, an imagining of what the island was like before European habitation. 'The Greatest Grid' starts from many of the same sources -- the Mannahatta Project was built upon early 18th century topographical maps -- but elaborates forth upon the present landscape with stunningly detailed drawings of almost every inch of Manhattan.

While the show gives nods to the original three commissioners -- and of course to John Randel, the surveyor tasked with outlining every foot of land -- it's the later applications of the grid plan that I found most fascinating. The book reprints images of country homes next to street plans that would shortly cut through the property. It's a melancholy display, I guess, the destruction of natural beauty has rarely been as fascinating.

Original surveying maps are complemented with lithographs and photography illustrating the final product, in some cases carved blocks with lonely structures, waiting for the city to catch up to them. The companion guide, stuffed with short essays and full-bodied artifact descriptions by museum staff, reprints almost every image from the show.

Many such exhibition books suffer from the transfer. As an extreme example, last year's lustrous, blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was rendered into a diminutive curio with its accompanying companion book. 'The Greatest Grid' suffers no such problem, especially to those of us who find tinted topographical maps and black-and-white images of old New York as scintillating as haute couture.

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Our podcast on the Commissioners Plan of 1811 merely skims the surface of material presented in 'The Greatest Grid', but I think it makes for a fine introduction. And I'm not ashamed to say we spend quite a bit of time talking about Gouverneur Morris. [You can download it from here.]