Geneva1913
GenevaJanuary
Willa Cather returns to New York City from Pittsburgh, moves into an
apartment at 5 Bank Street with Edith Lewis.
February
George W. Ely and W. W. Batty open Ely's European Restaurant in
Batavia.
Feb 17
New York City's Armory Show introduces the modern art movement to the
U. S.
Mar 10
Abolitionist and former slave Harriet Tubman dies in Auburn at the
approximate age of 93.
May 14
John D. Rockefeller donates $100,000,000 to begin the Rockefeller
Foundation, in New York City. ** Dance critic Walter Terry is
born in Brooklyn.
Jun 11
Operatic mezzo-soprano Rise Steenberg (Stevens) is born in New York
City.
Jun 16
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1913 opens at New York City's
New Amsterdam Theatre.
Jul 22
Metropolitan Opera star Licia Albanese is born in Italy.
August
Two Rochester all-Italian bands, one lead by Biagio Antinarelli (the
Little Creatore) compete in Exposition Park.
Aug 28
New York City Ballet conductor and music director Robert Irving is born
in Winchester, England.
Sep 8
Victor Herbert's Sweethearts opens at New York's New
Amsterdam Theatre.
Sep 10
The New York-to-San Francisco Lincoln Highway opens. A Lincoln Highway
Association is founded.
Sep 12
New York City mayor William Jay Gaynor dies at the age of 65. Ardolph
L. Kline becomes Acting Mayor, serves the rest of the year.
Oct 26
Bandleader, vocalist and saxophone player Charles Daly "Charlie"
Barnet is born in New York City.
Oct 30
Jerome Kern's Oh, I Say! opens at New York's Casino
Theatre.
Oct 31
Historians Will and Ariel Durant are married in New York City.
November
Willa Cather returns to New York from a trip to Pittsburgh. **
Storms lash Lake Erie. Lightship 82 is sunk.
Nov 11
Justin Huntly McCarthy and Victor Herbert's The Madcap Duchess
opens at New York's Globe Theatre.
Nov 23
Novelist-biographer Maurice Zolotow is born in New York City.
Nov 25
Physician-author Lewis Thomas is born in Flushing.
Dec 10
Composer Morton Gould is born in Richmond Hill.
City
Warren and Wetmore's Seaman's Church Institute (now demolished) is
completed, on Church Street. ** Trowbridge & Livingston's Wall
Street offices of J. P. Morgan and Company are completed. ** The
Chambers Street subway station is completed. ** Harlem's Apollo
Theatre is built. ** The women's Zionist organization Hadassah
sends two nurses to Plaestine to start a matrnity center in Jerusalem.
** The College of St. Francis Xavier transfers its charter to
Brooklyn College, leaving Xavier High School as a separate entity.
** George Abbott begins his theatrical career, as an actor. **
Recently appointed Collector of the Port of New York John Purroy
Mitchel, running on the Fusion Party ticket, defeats Democrat Edward E.
Call to become mayor, serving 1914-1917. ** Thomas Nash's Chapel of
All Saints is added to Trinity Church. ** Willa Cather interviews
Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad for McClure's. They become friends.
** The American Society for the Control of Cancer is founded, to
educate people about the need for early detection. ** Baseball's
Ebbetts Field is completed, in Brooklyn. ** The Museum of Natural
History sends the Crocker Land Expedition in a vain attempt to explore
lands described by Robert Peary. One of the native guides is Minik,
once a ward of the museum's in New York.
State
The first Caledonia County Fair is held. ** Furniture designer
Gustav Stickley moves his offices from Binghamton to New York City.
** Syracuse architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee dies.
Batavia
Influenced by a vocal minority, governor William Sulzer vetoes a
measure to revise the Batavia village charter. ** Pianist Monica
Dailey quits the concert stage at the age of 32, returns home to
retire.
Rochester
Floods inundate Front Street. ** Main Street West is extended to
Chili Street and today's West Avenue. ** The city's first
Protestant Italian church opens on North Street. ** The Ridge
Road Transit Company bus line goes out of business. ** The
Rochester & Eastern Rapid Railway interurban installs automatic block
signals manufactured by General Railway Signal, resulting in speedier
service.
1914
Jan 10
Sigmund Romberg's first Broadway musical The Whirl of the
World opens at New York's Winter Garden Theatre.
Feb 13
The American Society of Composers Author's and Publishers (ASCAP) is
formed in New York City.
Mar 12
Inventor-tycoon George Westinghouse dies in New York City.
Mar 13
Blues bass player Robert Sherwood "Bob" Haggart is born in New York
City.
April
Governor Martin H. Glynn signs legislation that allows Batavia to
revise its village charter and third class cities to adopt modern forms
of charters.
Apr 26
Novelist Bernard Malamud is born in Brooklyn.
May 20
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and the U. S. meet in Niagara Falls to
seek a solution of the Mexico-U. S. crisis.
Jun 1
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 opens at the New
Amsterdam Theatre, features comedian Ed Wynn.
Jun 9
Batavia voters approve a new charter.
Jun 30
The Niagara Falls Conference breaks up, having achieved nothing.
Jul 31
The New York Stock Exchange closes, to prevent panic over the Balkan
situation (the Sarajevo assassination).
Aug 10
A German-American weekly, The Fatherland, begins
publication in New York City.
Aug 28
Operatic tenor Reuben Ticker (Robert Tucker) is born in Brooklyn.
Oct 20
Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone's Chin-Chin musical
opens at New York's Globe Theatre.
Oct 28
Dr. Jonas Edward Salk is born in New York City.
Nov 14
A "Christmas ship", the Jason, sails from New York
with $3,000,000 worth of gifts for European war victims.
City
Louis Balducci arrives from Italy, starts a grocery store in Brooklyn.
** Henry Clay Frick's mansion is completed. ** The Gaelic
Athletic Association (GAA) of New York is founded. ** A storm
batters New Jersey's Sandy Hook, leading to the building of a seawall
between Sea Bright and the Hook, using materials taken from the Holland
and Lincoln Tunnel excavations. ** Poet Carl Van Vechten and his
wife, actress Fania Marinoff, move to Gramercy Park.
State
Macedon's Erie Canal Lock 60 is abandoned to make way for the Barge
Canal. ** Geneva's Nester House (Geneva-on-the-Lake) is
completed. ** Lydia Avery Coonley Ward opens a summer school at
Hillside, her Wyoming home. It lasts three seasons. ** An patent
appeals court finds against Glenn Curtiss and for the Wright Brothers.
Curtiss begins building the Curtiss JN-4 (Jenny). ** The Hudson
River steamer Orange is launched.
Batavia
A clock is installed in the 15-foot tower of the Bank of the Genesee.
** Box manufacturer E. N. Rowell builds a mansion at the top of
Ellicott Avenue.
Rochester
The Federation of American Zionists meets here. ** Claude
Bragdon's New York Central Railroad Station opens. ** Crosswalks
are first painted at the city's intersections. ** The People's
Rescue Mission moves to new quarters in the Richmond Hotel at Front and
Market. ** The city annexes parts of the towns of Brighton,
Chili, Gates and Irondequoit, increasing its own size to 24.87 square
miles. ** The New York State Railways interurban's wooden car No.
157 is destroyed by fire, then replaced by a steel car purchased from
the Niles Company. The car's number is retained.
1915
Jan 1
Batavia becomes a city. Dr. Harvey J. Burkhart is the first mayor.
Jan 8
Musicologist John Denison Champlin dies in New York City.
Jan 25
Alexander Graham Bell makes the first transcontinental telephone call,
from New York City to his assistant Thomas Watson in San Francisco,
California.
Feb 12
Rochester begins permitting privately-owned autos - jitney (coin) buses
- to carry passengers for a 5-cent fare. They soon disappear.
Feb 26
Tenor sax jazzman Joseph Edward Filipelli "Flip Phillips" is born in
Brooklyn.
Feb 28
Musical-comedy actor Zero Mostel is born in Brooklyn.
Mar 3
D. W. Griffith's feature-length film The Birth of a
Nation opens in New York City.
Apr 16
Conservative U. S. senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, 74, dies in New
York City.
Apr 20
President Woodrow Wilson makes a speech at New York City's Waldorf
Astoria Hotel, urges strict U. S. neutrality.
Apr 23
The annual St. George's Day picnic given by Rochester immigrant John A.
Roncone draws over 2,000 people.
May
Rochester Italian consul Cesare Sconfietti reports that nearly 2,000
recent Italian immigrants in his 12-county area have volunteered to
return to Italy for military service.
May 1
Germany publishes a warning in a New York newspaper to travelers on
British ships in war zones.
Jun 17
61 Italian young men leave Rochester to fight for Italy. A total of
866 from Monroe County will go, over the next two months.
Jun 21
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 opens at the New
Amsterdam Theatre, features comedian W. C. Fields.
Jul 3
Cornell University German instructor Erich Muenter, alias Frank Holt,
shoots at J. P. Morgan, misses. caught, he also admits setting off
yesterday's bomb in the U. S. Senate.
Jul 6
Muenter kills himself in jail.
Jul 16
A New York State Justice frees Harry K. Thaw, killer of architect
Stanford White, from a hospital for the insane.
Jul 24
Dr. Heinrich Albert, German director of propaganda in the U. S., leaves
a briefcase containing documents detailing U. S. sabotage plans on a
New York City subway train, where they are recovered by a U. S. Secret
Service man.
Jul 30
Ex-police lieutenant Charles Becker is executed for the 1912 New York
City murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal.
Aug 10
U. S. Army general Leonard Wood opens a camp for volunteer civilians at
Plattsburgh.
Aug 15
The New York World begins publishing the German
documents recovered on the subway train.
Sep 18
A Peugot sets a speed record of 108 mph at Sheepshead Bay Speedway.
Oct 15
A New York City syndicate, lead by J. P. Morgan, agrees to loan the
Allies up to $500,000,000.
Oct 17
Playwright Arthur Asher Miller is born in New York City.
Oct 23
25,000 people demonstrate for female suffrage in New York City.
Oct 24
Several Germans in New York City are arrested and charged with plotting
to blow up departing war supply ships.
Nov 14
Jazz guitarist William Henry "Billy" Bauer is born in New York City.
Nov 20
Joseph Greentanner's State Street livery stable in Batavia, New York,
being prepared for an auction to sell off its equipment, catches fire
and burns to the ground. A previous day's rain keeps the rest of the
business district from desrtruction.
December
Father Joseph Laguzzi, pastor of Batavia's St. Anthony's Church,
retires. Bishop Charles H. Colton appoints the Reverend Victor Fasella
to succeed Father Laguzzi.
Dec 23
Guy Bolton, Philip Bartholomae and Jerome Kern's Very Good
Eddie opens at New York's Princess Theatre.
City
James Gamble Rogers' 44th Street building for the Yale Club is
completed. ** The father of outdoorsman Lee Wulff moves his
family from Alaska to Brooklyn. ** The New York Yankees begin
wearing pinstripe uniforms. ** The Dow Jones averages rise by
81%. ** Mount Sinai Hospital perfects a method of storing blood,
for transfusion, with citrate as a preservative. ** The Marx
Brothers play New York City's Palace Theater in the vaudeville revue
Home Again. ** Willie Hammerstein's Victoria
theater on Times Square closes.
State
The Buffalo station of the Lehigh Valley Railroad is completed. **
The Cohoes Company transfers its water and property rights to the
Cohoes Power and Light Corporation. ** The Corning Glass Works
creates pyrex. ** B. F. Bartlett purchases the former home of the
Fox Sisters and moves it from Hydevill to Lily Dale. ** Dwight
David Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and James A. Van Fleet graduate from
West Point.
Batavia
Manufacturer E. N. Rowell marries Martha May Emka, his second wife.
** The approximate year John Mayer sells his Main Street restaurant.
** Solomon Lyman sells his State Street livery stable to **
Businessman Fred B. Parker is named to the New York State Fair
commission, where he serves to 1931.
Rochester
Spring floods nearly inundate Front Street but are halted by a cold
spell which slows the snowpack melting. ** Architect Claude
Bragdon and his wife Eugenie produce the first of their Festivals of
Song and Light environmental performance pieces in Highland Park. **
Clement Lanni becomes the first Italian to graduate from the
University of Rochester. ** Professor Vannuccini is hired by East
High School. ** The city's Italians produce their first winning
candidate for public office, for constable. ** Walter E. Wegman
begins working in his parents' grocery store. His brother, John,
peddles produce from a pushcart.
David Minor
Eagles Byte Historical Research
Rochester, New York
716 264-0423
http://home.eznet.net/~dminor