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