"Dusk" historical refs, XXV-XL.
Jul. 17th, 2009 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ldhensonHistorical footnotes for "The Dusk Descending," Chapters XXV-XL. Divided by chapter.
Please read the story before the footnotes, as there will (naturally) be spoilers.
Footnotes for Chapters XV-XXIV.
Footnotes for Chapters I-XIV.
XXV:
The vertical iron ribs that re-inforced the iron walls of the Tunnel really were divided into seven unequal segments according to photos, though illustrations tend to show the opposite.
XXVI:
Stray cats really did hang around City Hall at the time. I kid you not. Little girls were said to bring them to play with in the Park, and the cats would sometimes get loose. Even the janitor of City Hall, who lived with his family on the building's third floor, had a young daughter who would take in the stray cats. In 1906, Alderman Frank Dowling threw a mock-serious birthday party for a stray cat named Old Tom who was known to leave dead birds in the Mayor's office.
Whether I knew about the "stray cats at City Hall" thing before I wrote one in, or whether it was just fortuitous coincidence, will be left to the reader's imagination.
XXVII:
The lack of rainwater: A heat wave and drought struck the eastern half of the U.S. in the summer of 1900. It lasted even to September, prompting summer resorts along the Atlantic coast to extend their season. Because even I am not that much of a stickler for detail, I am not treating it as a literal event in the story, just acknowledging that the boys' inability to find water has some historical basis.
It's not really shown in the movie, but the end of the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge sat next to the World Building in 1900, in the form of a glass-roofed train shed that housed the bridge trains. It could be reached from across the street by a set of stairs that went up to a walkway spanning Park Row (there were also other stairways). In 1896 the terminals on both the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides had undergone extensive remodeling in an effort to ease the congestion at rush hour; it was only partly successful at doing so. The bridge trains, in early 1900, were still cable cars.
The World Building had been the tallest building in, aptly, the world when it was completed in 1890. By 1900, the St. Paul Building and the Park Row Building (originally Ivins Syndicate Building), both of which were also on Park Row, beat it out for height. The World Building was demolished in 1955 in order to make way for the expanded approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Quadruple-plated sterling silver, due to the thickness of the plating, was the next best thing to solid sterling silver. The quad-plated silver teacup lined in gold is based on a real item, as are the items the boys sort through.
Even the automatic pencil is based on a real item. A search on the web, including Wikipedia, generally shows an invention date of 1906, but I found automatic pencils in the Sears catalog as early as 1897.
The lyrics are from the 1898 song "Kiss Me, Honey, Do." By today's standards the song is terribly un-PC, but it was a big hit at the time.
XXVIII, XXIX:
The 135th Street Gatehouse not only regulated the flow of the water through the Croton Aqueduct (as the other gatehouses did), but also served as a point where the Old and New Aqueduct joined before continuing downtown. It was built in 1890 as part of the New Aqueduct. The description is based on printed sources, photos, and the original 1886 engineering plans. Like the other gatehouses, it was mostly empty space; the various pipes, gates, chambers, etc. were all deep underground. In present day the interior of the Gatehouse has been gutted; the Aaron Davis Hall plans to turn it into a performance theater. It is an official landmark.
XXX:
Those 25-gallon cast-iron wash kettles weigh 65 pounds, to be exact.
XXXIII:
The twelfth running of the Futurity was at Sheepshead Bay on Aug. 26, 1899. The finish of the race was as described; Chacornac was the betting favorite going in. The high-profile race (one of six races run at Sheepshead on that day) kicked off the start of the Fall meeting at Sheepshead Bay, in which another twelve days of racing would be run over the following two weeks.
Sadducee, another two-year-old gelding, had made a name for himself by winning at least eight consecutive races that year (some or all at Sheepshead), plus crossing the wire first in another race from which he was afterwards disqualified. Many claimed him to be the best horse of the year and not surprisingly he was the crowd favorite going into the Dash Stakes on Aug. 30, 1899 at Sheepshead, but he ended up finishing fourth.
XXXV:
The details about the Great Fire of 1835 are real.
Edward F. Croker was NYC's Fire Chief from 1899 - 1911.
The unfilmed original script for Newsies puts the Jacobs' home in the Lower East Side, on Broome Street. But I'm not counting it as canon, and for logistical purposes I moved the home to King St. instead, on the west side of the city, where there were also (yes, I checked) tenements and a Jewish population at the time. The tenement described in the story is fictional.
XXXVIII:
The geography of City Hall Park is accurate, as far as I know, for 1900.
The large Post Office was built in 1878 on the triangular lot at the south tip of City Hall Park. It was generally thought to be an ugly structure, and was demolished 1938.
The dragons' behavior of tracking attackers back to and destroying their source comes directly from the movie.
The Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, New York, was formed in 1847. Their Armory, a giant red-brick fortress (which includes such things as a bronze gate, a huge drill hall, and a room decorated by Tiffany), still stands today on Park Avenue (not to be confused with Park Row). It was built in 1880, and throughout the years underwent a number of changes. The description is accurate for 1900, when it still had the central belltower, and the fourth and fifth floors had not yet been added. Today the building is sometimes used for exhibitions.
XXXIX, XL:
The layout and dimensions of City Hall is as accurate as I could find for 1900, and let me tell you this was not easy to track down. I will not complain too much, however, as in this day and age floorplans of civic buildings don't need to be made public anyway.
Jack has some climbing to do to get to the first-floor windows, which are a considerable height off the ground due to the high basement. He doesn't know it, but the window he enters through opens directly into the second of the outer chambers, a long narrow room, leading to the Mayor's office. (When City Hall was first built in 1812, the Mayor's office was in the West Wing, but this was moved before 1900.) He then escapes (through the door) into the smaller outer chamber, and from there to the main corridor.
The County Courthouse (a.k.a. the Tweed Courthouse) stands just behind City Hall, almost like a larger version of it, with its central rotunda and east/west wings.
The description of City Hall's rotunda, front entrance, columns, and roof are also accurate to the best of my knowledge.
Please read the story before the footnotes, as there will (naturally) be spoilers.
Footnotes for Chapters XV-XXIV.
Footnotes for Chapters I-XIV.
XXV:
The vertical iron ribs that re-inforced the iron walls of the Tunnel really were divided into seven unequal segments according to photos, though illustrations tend to show the opposite.
XXVI:
Stray cats really did hang around City Hall at the time. I kid you not. Little girls were said to bring them to play with in the Park, and the cats would sometimes get loose. Even the janitor of City Hall, who lived with his family on the building's third floor, had a young daughter who would take in the stray cats. In 1906, Alderman Frank Dowling threw a mock-serious birthday party for a stray cat named Old Tom who was known to leave dead birds in the Mayor's office.
Whether I knew about the "stray cats at City Hall" thing before I wrote one in, or whether it was just fortuitous coincidence, will be left to the reader's imagination.
XXVII:
The lack of rainwater: A heat wave and drought struck the eastern half of the U.S. in the summer of 1900. It lasted even to September, prompting summer resorts along the Atlantic coast to extend their season. Because even I am not that much of a stickler for detail, I am not treating it as a literal event in the story, just acknowledging that the boys' inability to find water has some historical basis.
It's not really shown in the movie, but the end of the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge sat next to the World Building in 1900, in the form of a glass-roofed train shed that housed the bridge trains. It could be reached from across the street by a set of stairs that went up to a walkway spanning Park Row (there were also other stairways). In 1896 the terminals on both the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides had undergone extensive remodeling in an effort to ease the congestion at rush hour; it was only partly successful at doing so. The bridge trains, in early 1900, were still cable cars.
The World Building had been the tallest building in, aptly, the world when it was completed in 1890. By 1900, the St. Paul Building and the Park Row Building (originally Ivins Syndicate Building), both of which were also on Park Row, beat it out for height. The World Building was demolished in 1955 in order to make way for the expanded approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Quadruple-plated sterling silver, due to the thickness of the plating, was the next best thing to solid sterling silver. The quad-plated silver teacup lined in gold is based on a real item, as are the items the boys sort through.
Even the automatic pencil is based on a real item. A search on the web, including Wikipedia, generally shows an invention date of 1906, but I found automatic pencils in the Sears catalog as early as 1897.
The lyrics are from the 1898 song "Kiss Me, Honey, Do." By today's standards the song is terribly un-PC, but it was a big hit at the time.
XXVIII, XXIX:
The 135th Street Gatehouse not only regulated the flow of the water through the Croton Aqueduct (as the other gatehouses did), but also served as a point where the Old and New Aqueduct joined before continuing downtown. It was built in 1890 as part of the New Aqueduct. The description is based on printed sources, photos, and the original 1886 engineering plans. Like the other gatehouses, it was mostly empty space; the various pipes, gates, chambers, etc. were all deep underground. In present day the interior of the Gatehouse has been gutted; the Aaron Davis Hall plans to turn it into a performance theater. It is an official landmark.
XXX:
Those 25-gallon cast-iron wash kettles weigh 65 pounds, to be exact.
XXXIII:
The twelfth running of the Futurity was at Sheepshead Bay on Aug. 26, 1899. The finish of the race was as described; Chacornac was the betting favorite going in. The high-profile race (one of six races run at Sheepshead on that day) kicked off the start of the Fall meeting at Sheepshead Bay, in which another twelve days of racing would be run over the following two weeks.
Sadducee, another two-year-old gelding, had made a name for himself by winning at least eight consecutive races that year (some or all at Sheepshead), plus crossing the wire first in another race from which he was afterwards disqualified. Many claimed him to be the best horse of the year and not surprisingly he was the crowd favorite going into the Dash Stakes on Aug. 30, 1899 at Sheepshead, but he ended up finishing fourth.
XXXV:
The details about the Great Fire of 1835 are real.
Edward F. Croker was NYC's Fire Chief from 1899 - 1911.
The unfilmed original script for Newsies puts the Jacobs' home in the Lower East Side, on Broome Street. But I'm not counting it as canon, and for logistical purposes I moved the home to King St. instead, on the west side of the city, where there were also (yes, I checked) tenements and a Jewish population at the time. The tenement described in the story is fictional.
XXXVIII:
The geography of City Hall Park is accurate, as far as I know, for 1900.
The large Post Office was built in 1878 on the triangular lot at the south tip of City Hall Park. It was generally thought to be an ugly structure, and was demolished 1938.
The dragons' behavior of tracking attackers back to and destroying their source comes directly from the movie.
The Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, New York, was formed in 1847. Their Armory, a giant red-brick fortress (which includes such things as a bronze gate, a huge drill hall, and a room decorated by Tiffany), still stands today on Park Avenue (not to be confused with Park Row). It was built in 1880, and throughout the years underwent a number of changes. The description is accurate for 1900, when it still had the central belltower, and the fourth and fifth floors had not yet been added. Today the building is sometimes used for exhibitions.
XXXIX, XL:
The layout and dimensions of City Hall is as accurate as I could find for 1900, and let me tell you this was not easy to track down. I will not complain too much, however, as in this day and age floorplans of civic buildings don't need to be made public anyway.
Jack has some climbing to do to get to the first-floor windows, which are a considerable height off the ground due to the high basement. He doesn't know it, but the window he enters through opens directly into the second of the outer chambers, a long narrow room, leading to the Mayor's office. (When City Hall was first built in 1812, the Mayor's office was in the West Wing, but this was moved before 1900.) He then escapes (through the door) into the smaller outer chamber, and from there to the main corridor.
The County Courthouse (a.k.a. the Tweed Courthouse) stands just behind City Hall, almost like a larger version of it, with its central rotunda and east/west wings.
The description of City Hall's rotunda, front entrance, columns, and roof are also accurate to the best of my knowledge.
