Geneva1904 January W. E. B. Du Bois attends a black leadership conference at New York City's Carnegie Hall. He and Booker T. Washington make closing speeches. ** Theodore Dreiser gets a job as feature editor with the New York Daily News. He and his wife Sara move to the Bronx. Jan 4 George Bernard Shaw's Candida has its New York premiere at the Madison Square Theatre. Jan 23 Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky is born in New York City. February Willa Cather's story A Wagner Matinée, painting a picture of a farm woman's dreary life, appears in Everybody's Magazine. Feb 1 Humorist Sidney Joseph Perelman is born in Brooklyn. Mar 7 Workers in the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees (AASERE), the Brotherhood of Locomotive Englineers (BLE) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF) walk off the job. Mar 11 The transportation workers give and an open shop is imposed. Mar 12 The two crews constructing a tunnel beneath New York City's Hudson River break through the remaining soil and meet in the middle. Hudson and Manhattan Railroad president William Gibbs McAdoo and his party walk through, under the river. Mar 26 Mythology scholar Joseph Campbell is born, in New Rochelle. April Scribner's publishes Edith Wharton's story collection The Descent of Man. Apr 21 New York City's Polo Grounds sports field opens. Apr 22 Physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer is born in New York City. May 12 The racehorse Tanya sets the world record for four-and-a-half furlongs, at New York's Morris Park doing the distance in 51.5 seconds. May 21 Composer-pianist Thomas "Fats" Waller is born in New York City. Jun 4 Francis Thomas Young dies of a bullet wound while riding in a New York City hansom cab with Floradora Girl Nan Patterson on his way to a second-honeymoon cruise with his wife. Patterson claims it was suicide, but murder is suspected. She is never convicted. Jun 15 The excursion steamer General Slocum burns in New York's East River. 1,024 die. ** The first Rochester & Eastern Rapid Railway interurban cars reach Geneva, New York. Jun 23 The first motorboat race is held, in the Hudson River. Standard wins the gold cup, averaging 19.67 nautical miles per hour in the 32-mile course. July Rochester bans fireworks. ** William Dibble purchases Edward Gibbon's Batavia lunch cart, features Western eggs. Jul 1 New York City tailors go out on strike. Jul 2 The Socialist nominating convention meets in New York City. Jul 8 The Socialists nominate Charles Hunter Corregan and William Wesley Coxe. Jul 19 New York Yankees shortstop Mark Koenig is born in San Francisco. August Construction begins on Clifford Beebe's Rochester, Syracuse and Eastern Railway interurban line. Sep 1 Helen Keller, blind and deaf since the age of two, graduates from Radcliffe College. Sep 13 Anne Crawford Flexner's adaptation of Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and Lovey Mary, under the first title, opens at New York's Savoy Theatre. Sep 28 A woman is arrested in New York City for smoking a cigarette in an open car on Fifth Avenue. Oct 4 The Interborough Rapid Transit Company and New York City build an electric subway (the IRT) running up the eastern side of Manhattan, from City Hall to 145th Street. ** Statue of Liberty sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi dies in Paris. Oct 8 The first Vanderbilt Cup auto race is held on New York's Long Island. George Heath drives a Panhard to victory, averaging 52.2 miles per hour. Oct 18 Columnist-author Abbott Joseph (A. J.) Liebling is born in New York City. Oct 20 Jazz vocalist Adelaide Hall is born in Brooklyn. Oct 27 The first New York City subway is opened to the public. Nov 7 George M. Cohan and Sam Harris' Little Johnny Jones opens at New York's Liberty Theater. Nov 14 Writer and social critic Marya Mannes is born in Manhattan. December Edith Wharton returns to New York City from Massachu Dec 12 C. M. S. McLellan's Leah Kleschna, starring Minnie Madern Fiske and George Arliss, opens at New York's Manhattan Theatre. City A mass rent strike is staged in the Lower East Side. ** The Jewish Museum opens. Judge Mayer Sulzberger begins the collection with a donation of books, manuscripts and objects to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. ** Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor open a film theater. ** The Broadway subway line is completed. ** Rhea Wallace, wife of disgraced former Museum of Natural History superintendent William Wallace and foster mother of the Greenland eskimo boy Minik, dies. William and Minik move to a flat in the Bronx. ** Lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo organizes and oversees the first tunnel under the Hudson River, and founds the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. He pays female ticket sellers the same pay as males. ** The Ansonia luxury apartment complex is completed. ** Willaim Waldorf Astor's Hotel Astor, designed by Clinton & Russell, is built. ** Credit Mobilier financier George Francis Train dies in New York City's cheap Mills Hotel. State Louis Comfort Tiffany builds himself a mansion on Long Island's Oyster Bay. ** The approximate date Francis C. Pollay of Pulteney writes an account of his service, as a ship's carpenter, with Commodore Perry's 1852 expedition to Japan. ** The Rochester & Eastern Rapid Railway interurban is completed to Geneva. One of the company's trains outraces a train on the Auburn branch of the New York Central. ** A lodge is built at Mud Pond (later called Elk Lake), in the Adirondacks. ** Balloonist "Captain" Thomas S. Baldwin travels to Hammondsport to commission a new engine from Glenn Curtiss for his dirigible California Arrow. ** Robert Ferdinand Wagner, Sr., is elected to the State Assembly. Batavia Aldermen begin studying revisions to the village charter. ** Grand Rapids, Michigan, railroad executive Daniel McCool marries Kate Fisher in her family's East Main Street home. ** Attorney Harris Day dies. His daughter Alice Day Gardner, his partner, continues the practice. Her brother George joins the practice. Rochester Local units of the Bersagliere La Marmora, Regina Elena, Giovanni Garibaldi, Duca Degli Abruzzi and Joseph Verdi societies celebrate Victor Emmanuel Day. ** Samuel Wilder rebuilds his Academy of Music on Exchange Place and renames it the Corinthian Theater. Exchange Place becomes Corinthian Street. ** Sibley's Department Store is destroyed by fire. ** Claude Bragdon presents the city with his designs for a civic center. West Point Joseph Warren Stilwell graduates. ** Ralph Adams Cram's administration office is completed. 1905 January The serialization of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth begins in Scribner's. Henry James visits her in New York City. Jan 9 George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell opens in New York City. Jan 30 250 exhibitors display their products at the New York Auto Show at Madison Square Garden. ** Johann Hoch is arrested in New York City and charged with murdering nine wives. Feb 15 Composer Harold Arlen is born in Buffalo. March Edith Wharton completes The House of Mirth, two months after serialization has already begun. Scribner's publishes her Italian Backgrounds. Mar 17 Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt are married in New York City. Mar 25 Actor Maurice Barrymore (Herbert Blythe), 58, dies in an Amityville, Long Island, mental asylum. Mar 26 Future Hammondsport mayor C. Arthur Niver is born in Wayne. April The new pulp magazine Smith's Journal makes its debut with Theodore Dreiser as editor. Apr 24 Modern dance and Broadway choreographer Helen Tamaris (Becker) is born in New York City. May Ethel Barrymore opens in Hendrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in New York City. May 1 Radium is tested in New York City as a cure for cancer. May 3 The chorus at New York City's Metropolitan Opera go on strike. May 4 Long Island's Belmont Park race track opens. May 12 A ten-foot boa constrictor gets loose on New York City's Fifth Avenue, is recaptured. ** Broadway producer Sam S. Shubert, for whom New York City's Shubert Theater is named, dies. Jun 5 New York clergymen declare the Russians are greater pagans than the Japanese. Jun 11 Will Rogers begins appearing in vaudeville at Keith's Union Theater in New York City. Jul 2 The section of the Rochester, Syracuse, and Eastern Railway interurban between Newark and Macedon opens. Jul 5 A steam-powered automobile breaks the speed record in New York City, doing one mile in 48.8 seconds. Jul 14 A female police detective in New York City leads a raid on a women's poolroom. Jul 15 Broadway lyricist Dorothy Fields is born in Allenhurst, New Jersey. Jul 16 Commander Peary's ship sails from New York City, headed for the North Pole. Jul 26 President Theodore Roosevelt unofficially meets with the Japanese representatives at his Oyster Bay home. Sep 6 The Armstrong Insurance Investigating Committee of the New York State Legislature begins hearings, Charles Evans Hughes presiding. Sep 11 A New York City elevated train plunges onto Ninth Avenue, killing twelve people. Police are blaming railroad employees for the accident. Sep 14 Rochester, Syracuse, and Eastern Railway interurban service reaches Rochester's University and Culver avenues. Sep 15 The Armstrong Commission reveals that the insurance industry paid $50,000 to Roosevelt's campaign chest. Oct 1 Workmen in New York City throw stones at a gathering of 2,000 Jews. Oct 10 George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island has its U. S. debut in New York City. Oct 14 The New York Giants defeat the Philadelphia Athletics to win the second World Series, four games to one. ** Scribner's publishes Wharton's The House of Mirth. Oct 31 George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warrens's Profession opens in New York and is shut down in one day by Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Prevention of Vice. Nov 6 Maude Adams opens in Charles Frohman's production of James M. Barrie's Peter Pan in New York City's Empire Theater. Nov 7 New York City elects George B. McClellan, son of the Civil War general, as its mayor. Nov 10 British Rear Admiral Battenberg arrives in New York City on a visit. Nov 14 David Belasco's stage extravaganza, Girl of the Golden West , opens at New York's Belasco Theatre. Nov 17 British Navy boxing champion Cocknaye defeats U. S. Navy champion Jack Reine, in a New York City exhibition match. Nov 20 Charles Klein's play The Lion and the Mouse opens at New York's Lyceum Theatre. Nov 28 Columbia University abolishes football. December Edith Wharton attempts a stage version of The House of Mirth in collaboration with Clyde Fitch. Dec 4 125,000 march in New York City to protest slaughtered Russian Jews. Dec 5 Willa Cather attends a birthday party at New York City's Delmonico's Restaurant in honor of Mark Twain. Dec 16 Young theater critic Sime Silverman begins publishing the weekly show business trade paper Variety, using $1,500 in cash from his father-in-law, Syrcause alderman George Freeman. Dec 25 Victor Herbert and Henry Blossom's Mlle Modiste opens at New York's Knickerbocker Theater. Dec 31 Film and Broadway composer Julius Kerwin "Jule" Styne is born in London. City A rodeo steer bolts into the stands at Madison Square Garden during a rodeo. Mounted cowboys Bill Pickett and Will Rogers capture the runaway, in the stands. ** Architect Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz extends his American Society of Civil Engineers headquarters to the west. ** Construction beginsuare Presbyterian Church. ** Heins and LaFarge's Battery Park Control House, surviving entrance to the original Interurban Rapid Transit (IRT) subway line, is completed. The IRT reaches the ferry terminal at South Ferry. ** Varina Davis, widow of the former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, dies here. ** Gangster Richie Fitzpatrick is executed by rivals. ** Builder Charles F. Rogers buys All Souls Church, on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 66th Street. ** Plans are made to build a ferry terminal at Whitehall Street. ** Producer F. F. Proctor introduces the intermission to vaudeville, in his 58th Street theater, to clear the audience out after each show. ** Western painter Charles M. Russell and his wife Nancy make their second trip here. His sculptures The Buffalo Hunt, Counting Coup and Scalp Dance are cast in bronze and sold at Tiffany's. ** Giants pitcher Christey Mathewson leads his team to a four-games-to-two victory over the Philadelphia Athletics. ** Journalist Edward Kennedy is born in Brooklyn. ** Alfred Stieglitz opens gallery 291. State Southern hotel man William R. Ormrod erects his Hilltop mansion in Churchville. ** Rebuilding of the Erie Canal begins. ** The legislature authorizes the Cayuga and Seneca Canal of the New York Barge Canal System. ** The Ponce de Leon Spring Water Company is founded near Ellenville, utilizing water from a Shawangunk Mountain underground spring. ** A shirt making company in Troy creates the Arrow Collar Man, as illustrated by J. C. Leyendecker. ** Canada's Ontario Car Ferry company is incorporated at Ottawa, backed by the Grand Trunk and the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh railroads, mainly to transport railroad coal-carrying cars. ** James Blodgett, the Hermit of the Hermitage, dies when his Wethersfield township mansion burns to the ground. Batavia The Batavia Carriage Works closes. ** Special legislation solves street paving political problems. The committee studying revisions to the village charter disbands. Rochester The city's first auto traffic squad is formed. The police hire Italian interpreter Abraham Laturni (Abe Lincoln). ** The Bersagliere La Marmora buys Germania Hall and converts it into an Italian community center. ** George Eastman's East Avenue completed. He donates land to the city that will become Cobb's Hill Park. ** Nicola Iannone begins publishing the weekly La Corrier di Rochester. ** Professor Louis J. Vannuccini proposes an Italian civic and educational league. ** The Seneca Hotel and the new Sibley's store on Clinton Avenue are completed. ** The city annexes Cobbs Hill and the village of Brighton, increasing its own size to 20.02 square miles. ** Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Clarke found the Ridge Road Transit Company, using a twelve-seat Knox motor bus, following a route along Rudge Road between Greece and Parma Corners. 1906 Jan 1 George M. Cohan's Forty-five Minutes from Broadway opens at New York's New Amsterdam Theater, featuring the song Mary's a Grand Old Name. Jan 6 Jazz trumpeter Robert Victor "Bobbie" Stark is born in New York City, on West 62nd Street. Jan 26 Competing in New York City, Melvin Winfield Sheppard sets a world record, running the mile in 4 minutes 25.2 seconds. Feb 3 Colonel George Harvey proposes Woodrow Wilson for the Presidency, at a dinner for Wilson in New York City's Lotus Club. Feb 4 The New York City Police Department begins using fingerprint identification. Feb 5 Actor Richmond Reed (John) Carradine is born, in Greenwich Village. Feb 12 George M. Cohan's George Washington, Jr. opens at New York's Herald Square Theatre, with Cohan himself introducing the song The Grand Old Rag (soon changed to You're a Grand Old Flag). His song I Was Born in Virginia is also introduced in the show. Feb 21 New York City's Singer Company files plans for the world's tallest office building. Feb 22 U. S. swimmer Charles M. Daniels uses a modified Australian crawl to become the first American to swim 100 yards in under a minute (57.6 seconds) tieing the world record, at the New York Athletic Club. Mar 13 Woman's movement pioneer Susan B. Anthony, 86, dies in Rochester. Mar 21 John Davison Rockefeller III is born in New York City. Apr 24 Nazi propagandist William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) is born in Brooklyn. May 14 Former Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, 77, dies in New York City. May 23 Edward Payton Weston arrives in New York City, having walked from Philadelphia in 23 hours and 31 minutes. Jun 14 Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White is born in New York City. Jun 17 The racehorse Sysonby, 4, dies of septic poisoning at Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay Race Course. Jun 20 A tunnel under construction for Pennsylvania Station floods, drowning two workmen. Jun 25 Socialite Harry K. Thaw shoots architect Sanford White on the roof garden of Madison Square Garden, which White had designed. Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbitt, White's mistress, witnesses the shooting. Thaw surrenders to the police. Jun 28 Manhattan Project physicist Maria Goeppert, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, is born, in New York City. Jul 7 A New York City court permits performances of George Bernard Shaw's controversial Mrs Warren's Profession. Jul 21 Financier Russell Sage, 89, dies on Long Island. Jul 27 New York City meetings of the plumbers union are disrupted by several bombs. Jul 29 A Pacific Express train plunges into the Hudson River, killing 45 aboard. Aug 2 Journmalist-author Roi Ottley is born in New York City. Aug 12 Defying New York City courts, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company raises itsfares to 10 cents. Aug 26 New York City orders the deportation of 30 Russian-Jewish orphans. Sep 2 The two halves of Pennsylvania Station's north tunnel meet under the Hudson River. Sep 3 The U. S. Atlantic fleet stages a naval exhibition in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Sep 9 New York City clergy stage a protest against the Bronx Zoo when it displays a pygmy in a cage with apes. Sep 24 Victor Herbert and Henry Blossom's The Red Mill opens at New York's Knickerbocker Theater. October The stage version of The House of Mirth flops in New York. Oct 14 McKim, Mead and White's Madison Square Presbyterian Church, in New York City, is dedicated. Oct 23 Olympic swimmer Gertrude Ederle is born in New York City. Nov 4 Charles Evans Hughes is elected governor of New York, defeating William Randolph Hearst. Nov 13 Russian actress Alla Nazimova opens on Broadway in Hendrik Ibesn's Hedda Gabler. Nov 23 Enrico Caruso is charged $10 for annoying a Miss Hannah Graham in New York City's Central Park Zoo monkey house. Nov 27 David Belasco and Richard Walton Tully's play The Rose of the Rancho opens at NewYork's Belasco Theatre. Dec 3 An expl River kill five workmen. Dec 5 The Reverend Algernon Sidney Crapsey of Batavia is unfrocked for preaching against the divinity of Christ, using higher criticism in interpreting the New Testament. Dec 9 Rear Admiral Grace Beewster Murray (Hopper), mathematician and computer scientist, is born in New York City. Dec 23 New York City politician Hulan Edwin Jack, Sr. is born in St. Lucia, British West Indies. Dec 28 William James gives the presidential address The Energies of Men to the American Philosophical Association in New York City. City Walker & Gillette's Battery Maritime Building is completed. ** Builder Charles F. Rogers retains the architectural firm of Harde and Short to build an apartment house on the former site of All Souls Church. ** Brothers Homer St. Clair Pace and Charles Ashford Pace open a school of accountancy at the New York Tribune Building. It will later become Pace University. ** Henry James begins the preparation for the New York Edition of his works. ** Copper king F. Augustus Heinze sells his Butte, Montana, holdings to a coalition of Amalgamated Copper partners, and returns to New York. ** Poet Carl Van Vechten is hired by the New York Times as an assistant to music critic Richard Aldrich. State Johnston Harvester Works founder Byron E. Huntley dies. ** Troupsburg farmer Herman J. Bates marries Laura Reynolds of Rexville. ** Ellenville's Ponce de Leon Water Company is sold and renamed Sun-Ray. ** Jell-o manufacturer and popularizer Orator F. Woodward dies at the age of 50, in Le Roy. ** Chester Gillette is tried for the murder of Grace Brown in the Herkimer County Courthouse. he crime is the basis for Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. ** Russian dramatist Maxim Gorky stays in the Adirondacks for several months, working on his novel The Mother. ** John S. Baldwin, his airship facility destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake, moves to Hammondsport. Baldwin and Curtiss visit the Wright Brothers while on an excursion to a fair in Dayton, Ohio. Curtiss builds two 8-cylinder motors for aviators. ** New York makes it mandatory for telephone companies to provide police and firefighters free access to calling facilities. ** Millionaire William Vanderbilt and his friends begin constructing a private highway on Long Island. Batavia Claude Leland Carr arrives to manage the Oliver and Milne Company department store. ** Three brothers, Augustino, Paul and Sam Caito move here from Cortland. Rochester The port of Charlotte's export revenue falls to $134,000, but imports reach $1,349,000. 220 U. S. and 754 foreign vessels visit the port. ** The Italian Protection League is founded. ** St. Anthony Padua Church, the first Italian Catholic church in the city, opens in the former No. 6 School. ** Nurseryman George Ellwanger dies. ** Local professor Henry A. Ward is killed in a Buffalo traffic accident. ** The Ridge Road Transit Company bus line, founded last year in Greece fails. David Minor Eagles Byte Historical Research Rochester, New York 716 264-0423 http://home.eznet.net/~dminor