Strong reviews a fire

George Templeton Strong was known as a fine music reviewer, and his writings on music have been collected and published. But as the editors of his diary noted in 1952, he was also an accomplished reviewer of the fires that broke out frequently in 19th century Manhattan.

Though they found the 15-year-old Strong’s description of the Great Fire of 1835 (pictured) disappointing, they went to say, “He soon became an enthusiastic fire-goer and in time developed a real connoisseurship, disdaining mean and uninteresting fires and taking a great interest in the really spectacular ones.” As later entries show, he would get irritated when members of the “loaferage” blocked his view of a good fire.

This is the best of Strong’s fire reviews I’ve found so far, from December 29, 1842:

It was snowing when I got out at eleven and there was a great fire burning downtown, and never was anything more splendid than the effect it produced. The whole sky was lit up with a bright soft crimson glow, almost of uniform brilliancy. The snow reflected it back—streets and roofs were all tinted with the same color. It had a most magnificent and unearthly appearance. I was told the fire was in Wall Street, and started off on a run, expecting to find the office on fire and the old gentleman wringing his hands in front of it. The snow was deep and my run soon subsided into a trot, and then I took the first cab I could find and came downtown. Found that the fire was on Water Street, five or six stores blazing, and a fine sight it was. It was the worst fire we’ve had for a long time. The wind was very strong at N.E. The engines were retarded by the snow—the hydrants were many of them frozen—and at one time the fire crossed both Maiden Lane and Water Street, but it was checked in that direction. The walls kept each other up for some time but at last one gave way, and then four or five large stores came thundering down with a prolonged roar that seemed to shake the ground, and the change from the blaze and brightness of active conflagration to smothering smoke and comparative darkness, only lit up by a perfect hailstorm of sparks and cinders, and then to see great masses of thick smoke light up as the flames rose again among the ruins and eddy round and sweep off before the northeast wind till the glare of the burning buildings was fully displayed again, was very fine....

Strong on the panic of 1837

The more things change… Here is George Templeton Strong on the Wall Street panic of 1837, when he was 17 years old. He is writing on May 4.

Terrible news in Wall Street. [John] Fleming, late president of the Mechanics Bank, found dead in his bed this morning. Some say prussic acid; others (and the coroner’s jury) say “mental excitement” and apoplexy. Anyhow there’s a run on the bank—street crowded—more feeling of alarm and despondency in Wall Street than has appeared yet. The bank is to be kept open till five o’clock; politic move, that. Fears entertained that tomorrow the attack will be general on all the banks; if so they’ll go down and then all the banks from Maine to Louisiana must follow—universal ruin. People talk ominously about rebellions and revolutions on this side of the Atlantic, and if they come on this side, political disturbances will soon break out on the other.

There are matters of no little weight depending on the doings of Wall Street for the next four or five days. I wish I were ten or fifteen years older.

The Diary of George Templeton Strong

After reading a novel set in 1893, I’ve stayed in old New York for the first volume of The Diary of George Templeton Strong. Strong was the son of a lawyer, and a graduate of Columbia University (class of 1838). He was just a little younger than Thoreau, who graduated from Harvard in 1837, and in some ways he was the anti-Thoreau. Both men wrote enormous diaries, but Strong’s was all about politics, his legal career, and the turmoil of life in Manhattan, while Thoreau’s was largely about taking walks in the countryside around Concord, Massachusetts.

Strong’s diary is very entertaining to read, and it’s unfortunate that it’s almost unobtainable. Only the first volume can be checked out of the New York Public Library system. He is probably best known, to those who know him at all, through the entries he made in the Civil War years that were used in Ken Burns’ documentary, and read in the best upper-crust Manhattan tones by George Plimpton. But those excerpts didn’t give a sense of how funny he could be. Here he is griping about the Transcendentalists, on September 25, 1840. (His comments would apply more to characters like William Ellery Channing than they would to Thoreau.)

Tried to read Kent this morning, but his pages, which never were remarkable for order and perspicuity, seemed even more hazy than ever. It was a toss-up between the ex-Chancellor and the Boston transcendentalists. The latter gentry have rather the advantage, by the way, for whereas the Chancellor merely contradicts himself on alternate pages and writes a book as his wife would make a pudding, by taking care to mix the ingredients—eggs, butter, and all—into undistinguishable homogeneity, the Eastern Magi take care to write so that it’s impracticable to know what any one sentence means and no one can therefore safely assert that any two passages are irreconcilable or unconnected, which is very delightful to behold and shows a true Yankee ingenuity in dodging the shafts of criticism. They’re safe behind the thick cotton of the infinite and The Incomprehensible.

As to their enunciation of the fact that “Matter is orbed and spirit is sphered” (or vice versa -- I forget which and it don’t much matter), I do not entirely agree with the pundits aforesaid. The thoughtful mind can never forget that in the polarization of the universal dual the essential idea is first individually evolved, and that from this purely spiritual genesis, extending as it does upwards into the profound and downwards into the exalted (and not according to Locke, vice versa), or in other words from the intensely spirituous, is first seen to emanate the dawnings of the Exotic. Strange, then, that any should be so utterly blind as not to deduce from these self-evident propositions the identity of the Ideal and the truncatedo-conical of the material and the right angulo-hexagonal triangular!

More Jeffrey Ford

I just finished Jeffrey Ford’s novel The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, which is set in New York City in 1893. It’s ingenious and entertaining, and combines the wildly improbable with some well-researched details on portrait painting, old New York, and other matters. If you liked Time and Again, Ragtime, or The Alienist, you should like this—and Ford doesn’t bring on as many distracting cameo appearances by famous names as the latter two books. (The artist Albert Pinkham Ryder does appear as a character, and his painting The Race Track is one of the book’s key images.)

Meanwhile, Jenn has created a website bringing together Ford’s works in a more complete and accessible way than has been done before—and with many links to work that’s available online. It’s called Jeffrey’s World, but the URL is www.thedrownedlife.com, after Ford’s latest collection (discussed here recently). 

A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851

I recently wrote about A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, and the pros and cons of using it as an introduction to the Journal as a whole. But aside from noting the missing hyena, I didn’t say much about what you will actually find in this cross-section of Thoreau’s great work.

Thoreau seems to have done more sightseeing this year than usual. He went to a menagerie more than once, and he viewed a painted panorama of the Rhine, perhaps planting the seed for this elegiac passage from 1858. He went to Boston Harbor, and sketched the egg cases of skates that washed up on the beach. Thoreau’s 34th birthday left him in a philosophical mood, inspiring an entry that became the “different drummer” passage in Walden.

Thoreau also explored the world of Concord after dark. I’ve quoted here from his account of a moonlight walk he took two years later, but he went on many in 1851, and they produced some evocative writing.

Thoreau also had a lot to say about crickets in 1851. The cricket may have been the animal with the most significance to Thoreau, tied as it is to the turn of the seasons and Thoreau’s themes of resurrection and anticipation. Thoreau noted the first crickets of spring as a promise of warm weather to come, and the last crickets of November left him bereft.

1851 includes an account of Thoreau at a party ("I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour—simply because she has regular features"), of the unfortunate accident of “Perch” Hosmer, and his description of the little Irish boy Johnny Riordan on his way to school, a passage that Thoreau reworked repeatedly.

There are also a couple of ominous entries about the local gunpowder mill, foreshadowing the deadly explosion of 1853. On September 4, he wrote, “At the Powder mills--the carbonic acid gass in the road from the building where they were making charcoal made us cough for 20 or 30 rods.” And on September 15 there was this. (Sure enough, it was the kernel mill that blew up first, sixteen months later.)

Found one intermediate boundstone near the Powder mill drying-house on the Bank of the river. The workmen there wore shoes without iron tacks-- He said that the Kernel house was the most dangerous--the Drying house next--the Press house next. One of the Powder-mill buildings in Concord?