March 26: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
ON THIS DAY IN 1911, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “More than 150 persons, according to the estimate at an early hour this morning — nine-tenths of them girls from the East Side — were crushed to death on the pavements, smothered in smoke, or shriveled crisp yesterday afternoon in the worst fire New York has known since the steamship General Slocum was burned to the water’s edge off North Brother’s Island in 1904. Nearly all, if not all, of the victims were employed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of a ten-story loft building at 23 Washington place, on the western fringe of the downtown wholesale clothing, fur and millinery district. The partners of the firm, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, escaped unscathed from the office on the tenth floor, carrying with them over an adjoining roof Blanck’s two young daughters and a governess. There was not an outside fire escape on the building.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1931, an Eagle editorial said, “The German astronomers reporting the observation of a new asteroid — presumably — in the area of the Constellation Virgo, no doubt know something of the thrill that Keats derived from reading Chapman’s Homer and supposed ‘stout Cortez’ — he should have said Balboa — to have felt on seeing the Pacific. It is a modest edition of the same thrill; the same in kind, for it, too, springs from the sense of having discovered something hidden from others’ view. Everyone who has read proofs must have some slight sense of this elation on detecting a typographical error not previously observed by the printer or the proof reader. And, in fact, the detection of these asteroids corresponds in astronomy to the spotting of misplaced commas and superfluous letters in a printed text. As far as human intelligence can tell, these eccentric bits of matter, the casual asteroids or comets, bear no essential relation to the readable text of the heavenly systems. They are just there. As the astronomer cannot strike them out with the proof reader’s convenient ‘dele,’ he does the next best thing by attaching to them a name and thus making them serve the infinitesimally useful purpose of monuments to the memory of ancient worthies or mythical characters. On the whole, the reader of printed proofs has the better of the game in this respect. To the substantial joy of discovery he can add that of destruction or amendment. The astronomer just has to let the asteroids stay in the text.”
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.