"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan MandijnThis week's Link Dump is here!Party time at Strange Company HQ!Who the hell was Edward II's very secret lover?What the hell are the Skara Brae artifacts?The "Worst Woman on Earth."Marguerite of France, twice a queen.Hundreds of people die defending the Ark of the Covenant. In 2121.A brief history of the British Women's Police Service.Government mind
Soapy Smith - "street fakir"The Daily NuggetJanuary 28, 1882Tombstone, Arizona
STREET FAKIR WAS WORKING THE 'SOAP RACKET'"
It's been a number of years that we've known that Soapy Smith went to Tombstone, Arizona. I knew that he operated swindles there, likely the prize package soap sell racket, but never had any solid provenance, until now. Good friend, author, and Tombstone historian,
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
In 1894, Lizzie Halliday was sentenced to death for
murdering her husband and two others and. A state commission judged her insane
and commuted her sentence to life in an asylum. Though she exhibited all
the signs of a woman who was violently insane, many believed that Lizzie was
merely a gifted actress.
At Mattawan State Asylum, she killed her favorite nurse with
a pair of scissors. No one
After John Sloan and his wife left Philadelphia and relocated to New York City in 1904, the couple lived first in Chelsea and then in various places in Greenwich Village, where Sloan also took a studio at Sixth Avenue and Cornelia Street to create art that found “beauty in commonplace things and people,” as he […]
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica Family […]
The first automobile in Manhattan was a Woods Electric Brougham owned by Diamond Jim Brady. After its maiden voyage down Fifth Avenue the NYPD put a ban on horseless carriages.
Diamond Jim Brady.
James Buchanan Brady, better known as “Diamond Jim,” was the most flamboyant of all the Gilded Age millionaires. Even in those extravagant times, Diamond Jim Brady was the undisputed master of conspicuous consumption. His nickname derived from his well-known love of diamonds which adorned everything he owned, from his underwear to the spokes of his bicycle wheels. Equally famous was his gargantuan appetite which he satisfied with several multi-course meals a day. A typical dinner might include a dozen oysters, six crabs, bowls of turtle soup, followed by a main course of two whole ducks or six or seven lobsters, a sirloin steak, and one or two whole pies for dessert.
Lillian Russell.
Diamond Jim’s life and career included a number of notable milestones. He invented the modern notion of the expense account, proving that wining, dining and otherwise entertaining prospective clients could sell more railroad equipment than any product demonstrations. His forty-year relationship (mostly platonic) with Lillian Russell, the most celebrated actress of the day, was the longest of her life, outlasting all four of her marriages. And Diamond Jim owned the first automobile in Manhattan.
The vehicle was a custom built electric brougham manufactured by A. H. Woods of Chicago. The automobile arrived accompanied by a mechanic named William Johnson—an African American man who knew how to run it and fix it. Brady immediately hired Johnson away from Woods, dressed him in a bottle-green uniform and gave him the title of chauffeur.
Brady had Johnson drive him around the city on five consecutive mornings between three and four o’clock, when no one was watching, so he could be confident that the automobile would not break down. Then he alerted the press before debuting his horseless carriage in the daylight. On a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1895, William Johnson in his uniform and Diamond Jim Brady in a top hat, drove down Fifth Avenue to Madison Square. Crowds gathered along the way to view the spectacle and cheer them on. The new machine delighted the spectators, but horses on the road were much less welcoming. When the brougham reached the busy thoroughfare of Forty-Second Street at least five teams of horses bolted in surprise and ran away. After several trips around Madison Square they stopped at the Hoffman House and Diamond Jim went inside and ordered a lemon soda at the bar (he did not drink alcohol.)
The trip had caused so much disruption that the New York City Police Department ordered Brady not to bring the contraption out again during the day. This prohibition was short lived; within a year automobiles powered by gasoline as well as electricity were a common sight in New York City.
Sources:
Burke, John. Duet In Diamonds . New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons , 1972
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841