May 26, 1910- Caption from this Sun-Recorder photo: “Across from the Cathedral of St. Vitus on Lorimar Avenue, Col. Harrison Barstow demonstrates one of the new mechanical call boxes installed for his new police force, to begin operations Monday.” Colonel Harrison Barstow was a wealthy man who had distinguished himself in the Spanish-American War. Upon returning home,…
April, 1933 – This photo was taken one week before construction was “temporarily” halted on the City Transportation Company’s (Now the City-Suburban Transit Authority) planned transit center on the Ostahanoc Riverfront. To be built in stages, the center would have facilities for regional and local buses, planned subway and elevated train lines and even an…
November 6, 1914- Former City Council President and acting Mayor Walter Larchmont warily casts his ballot in the emergency election called after Mayor Jonathan T. Sanders succumbed to influenza in October. Former Deputy Mayor Sanders himself had taken over after Mayor Jonah Woolsey fell to the disease in September. Larchmont needen’t have worried- he was…
June 1911- Legendary boxer Jack Johnson trains briefly at a facility set up in a corner of a former Methodist retreat camp, about ten miles east of the city. 96 years later, musician and former surfer Jack Johnson would play a concert at the QuadstatesEC Ampitheatre, part of an entertainment complex (including a small skiing…
July 4 ,1911- Mayor Jonah Woolsey (second from left) addresses a large crowd gathered at Main Avenue and Baylor (now Third) Street, during three hours of speeches in celebration of the holiday. Later that evening, stray sparks from fireworks at Memorial Park would light several piles of unused bunting afire next to the Geo. Hardlin…
April, 1946- In a public education effort to cut down upon traffic fatalities, a sign on the east lawn of Old City Hall marked the number of days between such events. From its installation in 1940 to its removal in late 1947, the highest number it ever displayed was “08.” - RJ White -Original-
May 1940- Winning float in the 1940 Memorial Day parade, Manufacturer’s Division. The Samson Aeronautical Manufacturing Company’s entry, featuring a scale model of a “Personal Helio-copter.” Local aerospace magnate Lemuel Samson (he of the tiny homes of Samson Heights) would eventually let his obsession with this mode of transport ruin his company and deplete his…
June 1912- A crew of county and city surveyors poses in at lot at 870 S. Harner Street, which would have been the exact geographical center of the city after the proposed Annexation of 1913. After a bitter battle (both physically and legally) with two of the eleven townships and villages to be subsumed into…
Caption on the reverse of the photo: “March 13– Dr. Archibald Vinson, head of the City Health Department, administers a dosage of polio vaccine to his granddaughter, Becky Simmons, in her classroom at Calvin Coolidge Elementary School, as a demonstration of his confidence in Dr. Jonas Salk’s new creation. – Harlow Barton, Clarion-Standard” In 1956,…
Intersection of Ludlow and Barnham Streets, in the city’s Northside section, during the Great Flood of 1914. The late-January flood was a result of an unseasonable warm spell dumping the melted remains of the Great Blizzard of 1914 (which itself had also indirectly led to the Cronin & Sons sawdust factory explosion) into the already…