Alienist Books History - Caleb Carr & The Alienist Books

Early Films of New York (1898-1906)

Posted on March 5, 2014No Comments

As I am currently hard at work on the new addition to 17th Street that I intend to upload at the end of next week in time for the 20th anniversary of The Alienist, I have decided to feature a few short historical film playlists related to the Alienist books in the meantime that were created by the Library of Congress. Today’s playlist, The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898–1906, was described by Library of Congress as follows:

This collection contains films of New York dating from 1898 to 1906 from the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress. Of these, twenty-five were made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, while the remaining films are Edison Company productions. This collection contains forty-three rare, actuality motion pictures made between 1898 and 1906 in New York City. Actuality films capture real, day-to-day events of the time. Two early film companies produced these motion pictures which were viewed by the public in nickelodeons. The collection also contains two films that use actors and a contrived plot; the novelty “What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City,” and the melodrama “The Skyscrapers of New York.” The dramatic motion pictures were included in the collection because they contain some actuality footage. The collection highlights the urbanization of New York City at the turn-of-the-century. Some films document the start of the construction boom that would last thirty years in the city.

You can view all the films in the playlist by clicking “Play”. Alternatively, you can view individual films by clicking the word “Playlist” in the top left hand corner of the film box and selecting a specific film after clicking the “Play” button. Check back in a few days to see another playlist related to the Alienist books.

New Locations: Grand Central Depot & Madison Square Garden

Posted on January 9, 20141 Comment

In the Big City Book Club chat with Caleb Carr this time last year, one reader commented that they had not been aware that the Grand Central Depot had been the precursor to the Grand Central Terminal as New York’s primary railway station. As I thought other readers may be interested to learn a little more of the history of this lost piece of New York history, I have now added a brief history of this early depot to the New York City locations page of the site, along with a venue visited by John More and Mary Palmer in the novel that also had railroad ties, Madison Square Garden (and was the site of a sensational murder in the early 20th century). A copy of the depot’s entry from the locations page has been included below.

Grand Central Depot

Address: 42nd Street and Park Avenue, New York, NY
Featured in The Alienist (see map)

Within The Alienist, Dr. Kreizler and John Moore take a brief trip to Washington D.C. via a train departing from the Grand Central Depot to search for further clues about John Beecham’s life prior to his arrival in New York City. The precursor to New York’s current Grand Central Terminal, the Grand Central Depot was the largest train station in the country at the time it was built in 1871 by Cornelius Vanderbilt, and covered an area of 37 acres stretching between 42nd and 48th Streets, and from Lexington to Madison Avenues.^1,2 At the time of the depot’s opening, 42nd Street was the northernmost edge of the city and took 45 minutes by trolley to travel to from the central business district.² With rural homesteads and grazing animals visible across the street from the depot, critics complained that the new station was “neither grand nor central”.¹ Nevertheless, 42nd Street was the closest point that the depot could be constructed due to a law passed in the mid-1850s forbidding passenger trains to pass any further into the city.^1,2

The station proper, an attractive French Second Empire style building designed by John B. Snook, serviced the three major rail lines in New York at the time — the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, the New York and Harlem Railroad, and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad — with each maintaining their own waiting, baggage, and ticketing facilities in three separate towers of the building. Mansard caps topped each tower and displayed the name of the train line on their upper facades.² Located behind the L-shaped station proper was an immense train shed more than 652 feet long that became the second most popular tourist attraction in the United States. Inspired by London’s Paddington Station, this engineering marvel, with an arched glass and wrought iron ceiling 112 feet high, contained 12 tracks separated by raised platforms. At night the glass ceiling was illuminated by gas lamps, giving the structure an otherworldly glow.^1,2

Even though the impressive depot had cost $6.4 million to build², the design was not without its problems. The large number trains that used the station (up to 85 per day) could only exit in reverse, and the open tracks that ran northward from the depot were a death trap for anyone attempting to cross them. Even when footbridges were built, the steam from the trains made the area noisy, chaotic, and dangerous.¹ Given the problems with its original design, the decision was made to lower many of the tracks below street level, first with a deeply cut roofed over and then with a multistory tunnel that ran from 96th Street and fanned into 41 tracks on the upper level at 57th Street, and 26 tracks on the lower level.³ The station proper also underwent renovations in 1898 to accommodate the now 1.5 million commuters using the depot daily. Three floors were added to the 42nd Street frontage, and the three towers were changed from Second Empire style mansard caps to a French Renaissance style design.²

Even with the 1898 renovation, the facilities offered by depot were considered inadequate to the demands of the ever-expanding city. Customer service was poor and crime within the station was high.⁴ Moreover, although the lowering of the tracks had eliminated the problems associated with the original open tracks, they had created an even deadlier problem: the smoke-filled tunnels had extremely poor visibility.^1,2 In 1891, the first head-on collision of commuter trains took place, resulting in passengers being trapped and burnt alive under the wreckage.⁴ When the tragedy was repeated in 1902, with a passenger train from New Rochelle crashing full-speed into a stopped train from Connecticut, the city put forth a requirement that all tracks become electrified.^1,2 This was the final straw for the outdated depot, and a proposal to build a new $35 million station in the depot’s place was advanced that completely separated pedestrian, train, subway, and automobile traffic.^1,3

Eleven years later, New York’s current Grand Central Terminal was opened in the original depot’s place. Although Cornelius Vanderbilt did not live to see the new magnificent Beaux Arts station, the Vanderbilt family retained control over the railroad until the 1950s when preservationists prevented the family from demolishing the terminal.²

References

1. Reiss, Marcia, “Lost New York” 2011.
2. Miller, Tom, “Daytonian in Manhattan: The Lost 1871 Grand Central Depot — 42nd Street” 4 Feb. 2013. Link.
3. Jackson, Kenneth T., “The Encyclopedia of New York City” 1995.

The Education of Sara Howard – Part Three

Posted on December 5, 2013No Comments

View Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of the Education of Sara Howard series.

Today’s final installment in the Education of Sara Howard series moves beyond our hypothetical Sara’s college years to focus on the career choices a young woman of Sara’s social class in New York had available to her in the 1880s and 1890s. As indicated at the conclusion of Part Two, the life choices female college graduates faced in the years immediately following college during the late 19th century could be stressful, with many young women forced to make difficult choices between the family claim and the social claim, the choice between marriage and a career, and the limited number of professions open to women if they did decide to pursue a career. However, a determined minority — of which Sara was one — pushed beyond societal expectations and made choices women earlier in the century would never have dared dream about. These college graduates were known collectively, in America and abroad, as “the new women”, and this is their story.

The Post-College Years

In 1896, a manual for young women was published that discussed common problems faced by female college graduates in America. Entitled “After College, What?“, the manual explained that most young women faced a “blank nothingness” at the conclusion of their college degree that left them feeling a “deep and perplexing unhappiness” until they either got married or were able to find “something [useful] to do”. Having spent four years immersed in an environment that fostered the development of independence and autonomy that was not encouraged in the typical patriarchal family home, these young women completed their college degree with a yearning to go out into the world at large and fulfill their “social claim” — a calling to use their advanced education in the same way that their brothers could; as an independent citizen with a role beyond that of wife and mother. However, upon returning to the family home following graduation, the majority of women found their parents in direct opposition, asserting the “family claim”.

Although these middle- and upper-class families had permitted — and even encouraged — their daughter to pursue self-improvement in the form of advanced education, by the time their daughter reached her early-to-mid-20s, she was expected to turn her attention to domestic responsibilities, devoting herself to taking care of parents and siblings until she could find a suitable husband, and filling any spare hours with charity work and sewing circles. For many young women who had for the first time started to think of a world beyond the home being made possible by her four years away at college, these conditions were stifling. Their girlhood friends who saw marriage as the only possible step once they returned from finishing schools, trips abroad to the continent, and formal debuts, did not want to mix with the young college graduate “whose aims were so different from their own”, and the college women faced “what was almost social ostracism”. One young graduate lamented, “We college girls are made to feel that we are different, we feel our separation.” Another, Marion Talbot, who would eventually become Dean of Women at the University of Chicago in 1895 recalled of her own difficult years immediately post-college in the early 1880s, “Here, then, was Marion Talbot with a college degree and an absorbing desire to make herself and her education useful, but with as barren an outlook for such a future as one can imagine.”

However, not all parents during this period were unsupportive or asserted the family claim. As a result of her daughter’s negative experiences, Marion Talbot’s mother founded the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1882 for graduates from Oberlin, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges, and Michigan, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Boston Universities to provide support that young women often lacked following graduation, and to help them through the anxiety and depression that frequently resulted from their feelings of isolation. In another example, Hilda Worthington Smith’s mother encouraged her daughter to volunteer for mission work following her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1910 as she felt that life as a homemaker was “too much to ask” of Hilda, and she went on to encourage her daughter to find a paying position a few years later. On the subject of her mother’s atypically supportive attitude toward entering the workforce, Hilda commented:

This I knew was a great concession, as several of her friends had warned her against letting me venture into the untried world of women’s work. Those women who did it were still thought very “advanced.” Any such excursions from home might lead to a daughter wanting her own apartment and becoming alienated from her family.

Mrs. Smith’s “advanced” views served her daughter well. Hilda went on to become Acting Dean and Dean of Bryn Mawr College from 1919 until 1922, and then Director of Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers from 1921 until 1933. Fortunately for the clever and independent Sara, it appears as though her parents views were as similarly “advanced” as Hilda’s mother’s, which we get a glimpse of in The Alienist, 78, when John Moore relates one of her post-college activities:

…right after Sara’s graduation from college, her family had gotten the idea that her education might be fully balanced by some firsthand experience of life in places other than Rhinebeck (where the Howards’ country estate was located) and Gramercy Park. So she put on a starched white blouse, a dreary black skirt, and a rather ridiculous boater and spent the summer assisting a visiting nurse in the Tenth Ward.

However, perhaps the most important thing to note, regardless of how supportive or unsupportive families were, is that for almost all of the young women who belonged to the pioneering generation of female college graduates in the late 19th century, parental attitudes and family ties were the key factor in the decisions they made about what to do following graduation. Although there were rare college graduates who decided to find a means of supporting themselves in order to live completely independently immediately following graduating in order to avoid the need to consider the family claim at all, these women were the exception rather than the rule — and given her supportive family and the influence they had on her decision to gain firsthand experience as a visiting nurse in the Tenth Ward, it seems safe to say that Sara would not have been one of them. | Continue reading →

The Education of Sara Howard – Part Two

Posted on November 26, 2013No Comments

View Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of the Education of Sara Howard series.

Late last month, we began an examination of Sara Howard’s historical context in an effort to understand the kind of upbringing, education, and career choices a young woman born in a similar decade and socioeconomic group to Sara would have had available to her in the late 19th century. I termed this woman a “hypothetical” Sara, and today’s post will build upon on last month’s to discuss the pre-college and college educational opportunities our hypothetical Sara would have had during the 1870s and 1880s in New York.

The Pre-College Years

The Alienist, 90-1:

“… My father was an expert marksman. My mother, however, was an invalid, and I had no siblings. I therefore became my father’s hunting and trap-shooting partner.” All of which was perfectly true. Stephen Hamilton Howard had lived the life of a true country squire on his estate near Rhinebeck, and had trained his only child to ride, shoot, gamble, and drink with any Hudson Valley gentleman – which meant that Sara could do all those things well, and in volume.

As described in Part One, our hypothetical Sara was an only child born to an upper-class New York family in the mid-to-late-1860s. Given her father’s ownership of a Hudson Valley estate as well as a city home on Gramercy Park, it seems reasonable to assume that he would have shared some of the values common among old New York gentility such as the importance of “good looks, health, grace, and cleverness” in women. However, as the quote above describes, this particular father seemed to be determined to provide his only daughter with the same advantages he would have offered a son. Although this would have resulted in our hypothetical Sara receiving an education superior to that received by many girls during the same period who were frequently educated in “practical” subjects at home for most of their youth, statistically Sara’s was not an unusual upbringing for girls raised by educated parents in middle- and upper-class families in the Northeast—provided, of course, that their daughters were only children or had few brothers. Even though most of these parents still ultimately desired their daughter enter the respectable sphere of domesticity once she reached her early-to-mid-20s, a good education during her formative years reflected the family’s belief in the value of self-improvement and personal advancement (also see Part One). | Continue reading →