July 12: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
ON THIS DAY IN 1903, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Josiah Allen’s wife, who was so solicitous to make housework easy for Mrs. Astor of the Astor House that she was on the point of volunteering to help her ‘do up’ the ‘tea things,’ would doubtless be somewhat astounded today if she were confronted with the dishwashing proposition in one of New York’s mammoth hotels, where 10,000 pieces of china and glass are handled at a single meal. Yet this comparison between the work of the old-fashioned farmer’s housewife and the daily duties of the 1,000 or more servants employed in a first-class metropolitan caravansary, aided by all the latest labor-saving inventions, from the dishwashing machines to the steam cookers and the ice-making plants, is only on a line with the mighty advances made in the last few years, and the still mightier advances contemplated in the amazing plans for new gigantic hotels now under course of construction in New York. Fifteen magnificent transient hotel palaces at a combined cost of $50,000,000 are now being built in the greater city. An idea of the wonderful extent of this undertaking may be obtained when it is known that these hotels will have a total of 8,720 sleeping apartments and jointly accommodate 14,300 guests a day at an aggregate cost of $75,000. There are now about 60 first-class hotels in New York.”
***
ON THIS DAY IN 1908, the Eagle reported, “A virtually new school of medical science, incalculable in its importance, is foreshadowed in the gift by Henry Phipps of $500,000 to the Johns Hopkins University for the study of insanity. Mr. Phipps has figured in a number of bequests that had for their aim the amelioration of physical suffering. He gave $1,300,000 to found the Phipps Institute of Tuberculosis Research in Philadelphia. But the gift to the Baltimore institution is perhaps even more important from the fact that it means the beginning of a treatment on a big scale for the woes of the mentally unsound, whose humanitarian effects should be far-reaching. Mankind has long sought and long battled for a cure for consumption, but it is only within the last few years that intelligent modes of treating the mentally unbalanced have been worked out. There are few more perplexing propositions with which medical science has to do than disorders of the brain.”
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’.