Mike Wallace > Quotes

“Many novelists fumed at men they saw as jailers. A host of masculine villains paraded through their plots—neglectful fathers, cruel husbands, and assorted gamblers, alcoholics, philanderers, failures, or murderers—with whom courageous and creative women did combat or from whom they fled.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“By 1864 Wall Streeters had spies in the Confederate high command and could learn southern battle plans before colonels in the Army of Virginia did.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Citing Poe’s celebrity—everybody was “raven-mad about his last poem”—Briggs took him on as junior partner.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“William Mitchell followed suit, halving his Olympic Theater’s admission prices and focusing almost exclusively on what he called “tragico-comico-illegitimate” productions: travesties of local events, topical commentaries, and Shakespearean burlesque (Julius Sneezer and Dars-de-Money). Shipbuilders”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“From Feltman’s, they might have walked to see the Elephant, a wood-framed, tinskinned hotel, 150 feet long and 122 feet high. It had thirty-four rooms in its head, stomach, and feet, a cigar store in one foreleg, a diorama in the other, and a dairy stand in its trunk.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“a nostalgic belief that New York City had been a far better place just after the Revolution, and a conviction that the evils now afflicting it—rising rates of crime, pauperism, and immorality—were foreign imports.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“The transition from competitive to corporate capitalism, and the emergence of Wall Street bankers as organizers of the industrial economy, created new facts on the ground. On the one hand, the tremendous concentration of power gave even greater cause for worry about individual malfeasance. But on the other, the magnitude and complexity of the new economy seemed to transcend the ability of any set of actors to control it.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Hoop skirts blocked traffic, which is why Mme. Demorest’s Imperial “dress-elevator” was immensely popular: its weighted strings allowed women to raise or lower their skirts at will, thus clearing New York’s mud and slush.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Among other wonders, the Fifth Avenue offered private bathrooms, an unprecedented extravagance, as well as the city’s second passenger elevator (equipped with Otis’s safety device), described variously as a “perpendicular railway intersecting each story” or “a little parlour going up by machinery.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Widows (though not widowers) were expected to wear mourning for two years, just as, in general, the burdens of refinement fell most heavily on women.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“But that isolated coup was as nothing compared to the body of work sustained over years by George Leonidas Leslie (or Western George, as he was known) and his colleagues. This Ohio immigrant lived a remarkable double life. At one moment he was an independently wealthy man-about-town, known for his impeccable manners, his tailoring, his love of books, and his membership in several excellent clubs. At other moments he headed a highly sophisticated gang of bank robbers whose careful preparations—obtaining architect’s plans of the building under scrutiny, or constructing special burglars’ tools—helped pull off perhaps a hundred jobs like the robbery, in 1869, of the Ocean National Bank at Greenwich and Fulton, which netted them over threequarters of a million dollars. Beginning in 1875, Western George spent three years preparing for his master heist, a knockover of the Manhattan Savings Institution on Bleecker and Broadway, arrangements that included purchasing a duplicate of the Manhattan’s vault in order to ferret out its weak spots.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“In 1906 Gulick and others founded the Playground Association of America (PAA) to spread the New York gospel to the country. (Crucial funding would come from the Russell Sage Foundation.) Honorary President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in the organization’s magazine, the Playground (1907), that cities must find “some other place than the streets” for children to play “if we would have our citizens content and law-abiding.” Members were ecstatic about playgrounds’ ability to produce “more loyal as well as more efficient citizens.” One PAA director noted in 1907 that Tompkins Square Park, where once “the rally to the red flag” had been commonplace, was now “the scene of games . . . and other forms of patriotic play.” Another suggested that six weeks of playground interaction between Jews and Italians so reduced animosities that “they did not know whether they were Jews or Italians.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Nor was her support for the urban realists a one-off affair. In 1907 she set up an apartment and studio in Greenwich Village, remodeling a stable at 19 MacDougal Alley, just north of Washington Square, and made it available for informal exhibitions. In 1914 she bought the adjacent building (8 West 8th Street) and established therein a professional gallery, the Whitney Studio,”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Taverns, and the dozens of dramshops that catered to seamen and the laboring classes, were often run by widows who received free licenses from the Common Council, an inexpensive form of relief. Women were also prominent in the retail shops that boomed after the late 1720s. The Widow Lebrosses carried Canary wine and olive oil in her store at Hanover Square, the city’s shopping center, while the Widow Vanderspiegel and her son sold imported window glass. Mrs. Edwards started a cosmetics business in 1736, offering “An admirable Beautifying Wash, for Hands Face and Neck, it makes the Skin soft, smooth and plump, it likewise takes away Redness, Fredkles, Sun-Burnings, or Pimples.” The continuing role of women in trade, English as well as Dutch, promoted a certain feistiness among their ranks that ran contrary to prescriptions for proper female behavior.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Spurned by the upper class, Wood garnered support from the organized workers. Ira B. Davis denounced the Wall Street Democratic renegades, noting that none had objected when the state government bailed out the banks: apparently what was “virtuous in them” was “a crime in Mayor Wood or the workingmen.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Robert Underwood Johnson, should advocate “dignity, moderation and purity of expression” and oppose “vulgarity, sensationalism, meretriciousness, lubricity and other forms of degeneracy.” The academy should also resist “the tyranny of novelty,” said Johnson, and consider drawing up “well considered lists of words or meanings taboo.” Academicians inveighed against “polyglot corrupters” of Anglo-Saxon English, and insisted that fiction uplift coarse and sordid people, not describe them.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Poe had invented a genre—the detective story—that played upon but in the end relieved his readers’ urban anxieties. Social order was possible after all, Poe implied, if authorities adopted scientific methods of investigation and control. The detective, embodiment of this reassuring message, became a fixture on the urban literary scene.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Appropriately enough, in the years following Pulitzer’s coup, the term “skyscraper” first gained common currency. It was not a novel word, having had a long history of other associations. Since the eighteenth century it had been used to describe the triangular sails, set above the royals in calm latitudes, called skyscrapers or moonrakers due to their great height.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“The key to success in the Gold Room was information. Knowledge of a battle’s outcome obtained an hour before one’s competitors could be parlayed into a phenomenal fortune. At first, brokers haunted the wire services. Then they built their own: by 1863 private wires brought military results to New York’s financial district before they reached Lincoln in the White House.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“own independent exhibition, marketing it as an American Salon des Refusés. In February 1908 eight painters showcased their work at the Macbeth Galleries. The Eight, as critic James Huneker baptized them, included Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn—the Philadelphia Five—and three others, stylistically different but equally determined to crack open NAD’s restrictive practices: symbolist Arthur B. Davies (who was well wired into wealthy New York collector circles), Impressionist/realist Ernest Lawson, and Postimpressionist Maurice Prendergast. (Davies and Lawson had been among the blackballed in 1907.)”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Crime stories were paralleled in popularity by the occasional hoaxes the paper concocted. In August 1835 Day began publishing a series of articles recounting life on the moon—spherical amphibians rolling about—as supposedly revealed by a powerful new telescope.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“An eccentric Connecticut whaling captain named Preserved Fish and his cousin-partner Joseph Grinnell shifted from hawking New Bedford whale oil to running the Swallowtail line.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“In the early 1870s Feltman, a German immigrant, had opened a shanty stand at the beach and begun selling clam roasts, ice cream, lager beer, and what Harper’s would call a “weird-looking sausage, muffled up in the two halves of a roll and smoking hot from the vender’s grid-iron.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Carnally inclined males kept abreast of the possibilities by perusing handbooks such as Charles DeKock’s Guide to the Harems, Free Lovyer’s [sic] Directory of the Seraglios, and Butt Ender’s Prostitution Exposed.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Political editors were a truculent breed. Leggett’s boss, William Cullen Bryant, took a cowskin whip to William Leete Stone of the Commercial Advertiser in 1831, who riposted with a sword cane, a thrust Bryant parried with his whip until onlookers broke them apart. In 1836 James Watson Webb would assault James Gordon Bennet in the middle of Wall Street. By”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“When Barnum’s American Museum burned down in July of 1865—a spectacular blaze, which left a dead whale in the street for two days—Bennett decided to erect a showpiece building on its Broadway and Ann Street site.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“When the North Atlantic Squadron steamed into New York harbor on September 29, 1899—its progress upriver marked by a Journal balloon that released showers of colorcoded confetti over Grant’s Tomb—it touched off two days of frenzied adulation.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Moments later Hamilton had a second confrontation with prominent opponents of the treaty, shouting that he would “fight the whole party one by one . . . the whole detestable faction.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Confluence didn’t guarantee connection, and indeed could underscore its absence.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898