This classic (and unintentionally prophetic) photo, taken by Rudolph Eickemeyer, profiles chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit atop a fearsome bearskin rug when she was not yet either famous or infamous. Five years later the love triangle of Nesbit, husband Harry K. Thaw and architect Stanford White came to a tragic end on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The ensuing media sensation cannot be overstated. In a 1907 New York Times article, Mrs. Evelyn Florence Nesbit Holman recalls the odd and chilly nuptuals that took place on April 4, 1905 between her daughter and the sadistic and batshit crazy Thaw:

“I was not consulted about the marriage. We did not know that a marriage had been arranged until my husband and I were asked to go to the home of the Reverend Dr. McEwan. This was one hour before the ceremony. All the arrangements had been carried out by Mr. J. Dennison Lyon, Mr. Thaw’s banker. Mr. Lyon had the marriage license clerk at the clergyman’s house. It was necessary that the mother sign an application for a license, for my daughter was a minor. This I readily and cheerfully did. I was glad that Mr. Thaw was man enough to give her his name. 

“We were shown into the drawing room. No one greeted us or spoke to us. Mrs. William Thaw came in, accompanied by her son, Josiah, and another witness. The clergyman was there. No salutations were exchanged. Florence and Mr. Thaw entered. The ceremony ended, they and the rest immediately left the room. No words of farewell were said. I went into the hall and encountered one of the witnesses, a woman. I asked to see my daughter. ‘I will see if I can find her,’ she replied. She went away and did not return.

“Mrs. William Thaw came into the hallway. I told her I wished to see Florence. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ she said, and turned away.

“The clergyman was the next to whom I appealed. ‘I don’t know anything about her,’ he responded, passing by me. I have never seen my daughter since.”

Read also:

• Thaw tortures a young man, Nesbit swallows disinfectant. (1917/26)

• Thaw cuts own throat, but will not die. (1917)

From “Secret Soviet Cities,” a BLDG BLOG post about covert Cold War burgs and the outré medical experiments that were conducted within their invisible walls:

“Just last week, Nature looked at Soviet-era experiments in these closed cities, where ‘nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated’ as part of a larger medical effort ‘to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer.’ 

In an article that is otherwise more medical than it is urban or architectural, we nonetheless read of a mission to the formerly closed city of Ozersk in order to rescue this medical evidence from the urban ruins: ‘After a long flight, a three-hour drive and a lengthy security clearance, a small group of ageing scientists led the delegation to an abandoned house with a gaping roof and broken windows. Glass slides and laboratory notebooks lay strewn on the floors of some offices. But other, heated rooms held wooden cases stacked with slides and wax blocks in plastic bags.’ These slides and wax blocks ‘provide a resource that could not be recreated today,’ Nature suggests, ‘for both funding and ethical reasons.’ 

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the idea of medical researchers helicoptering into the ruins of a formerly secret city in order to locate medical samples of fatally irradiated mutant animals is a pretty incredible premise for a future film.”

In 1988, his dreams dashed and reputation destroyed, John DeLorean was living in Manhattan, now a born-again Christian, still believing he would get another chance. He granted a rare interview to a local TV station from his old stomping grounds in Detroit. Funny to see him strolling through Central Park.

More DeLorean posts:

• DeLorean growing tired of the big automakers. (1974)

• DeLorean wagers it all on his own car company. (1979)

• A People profile of the outlandish automaker. (1980)

• Pennebaker and Hegedus profile DeLorean. (1981)

"Finally the whale swam away dragging the two boats away with him."

Perhaps an 1890s sailor was truly swallowed alive by a whale and lived to tell about it, or perhaps, more likely, the editors from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had truly swallowed lots of alcohol. From that newspaper’s July 12, 1891 edition:

“The whaling vessel Star of the East arrived here yesterday, after a cruise of the two years and a half in the South Atlantic waters. She had on board a man who is a veritable Jonah, having existed in a whale’s belly thirty-six hours.

The man’s statement is vouched for by the captain and crew of the vessel, and today he is an object of great curiosity among the sailors. The man’s name is James Bartley and he hails from New Bedford, where he was born thirty-eight years ago. He had made two voyages from this port on the Star of the East, and notwithstanding his exciting experience during his last trip he says that he will ship for another voyage as soon as an opportunity to do so offers itself.

The strange story told by him is, in substance, as follows:

Last February the Star of the East was in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands searching for whales, which were very scarce. One morning the lookout sighted a whale about three miles away on the starboard quarter. Two boats were manned and put chase to the prey.

In a short time one of the boats was near enough to enable the harpooner to send a spear into the whale, which proved to be an exceedingly large one. With the shaft in his side the animal sounded and then sped away, dragging the boat after him with terrible speed. He swam straight away about five miles, when he turned and came back almost directly toward the spot where he had been harpooned. The second boat waited for him, and when but a short distance away from him he arose to the surface. As soon as his back showed above the surface of the water the harpooner in the second boat drove another spear into him. The pain apparently crazed the whale, for it thrashed about fearfully, and it was feared the boat would be swamped and the crews drowned. Finally the whale swam away dragging the two boats away with him. He went about three miles and sounded or sank, and his whereabouts could not be exactly told. The lines attached to the harpoons were slack and the harpooners began to slowly draw them in and coil them in the tubs. As soon as they were tautened the whale arose to the surface and beat about his tail in the maddest fashion. The boats attempted to get beyond the reach of the animal, which was apparently in its death agonies, and one of them succeeded, but the other was less fortunate. The whale struck it with his nose and upset it. The men were thrown itno the water and before the crew of the other boat could pick them up one man was drowned and James Bartley had disappeared.

When the whale had become quiet from exhaustion the waters were searched for Bartley, but he could not be found, and under the impression that he had been struck by the whale’s tail and sunk to the bottom, the survivors rowed back to the ship. The whale was dead and in a few hours the great body was lying by the ship’s side and the men were busy with axes and spades cutting through the flesh to secure the fat. They worked all day and a part of the night. They resumed operations the next forenoon, and were soon down to the stomach, which was to be hoisted to the deck. The workmen were startled while laboring to clear it and to fasten the chain about it to discover something doubled up in it that gave spasmodic signs of life.

"He was placed in the captain’s quarters, where he remained two weeks a raving lunatic."

The vast pouch was hoisted to the deck and cut open, and inside was found the missing sailor doubled up and unconscious. He was laid out on the deck and treated to a bath of sea water, which soon revived him, but his mind was not clear and he was placed in the captain’s quarters, where he remained two weeks a raving lunatic. He was carefully treated by the captain and officers of the ship and he finally began to get possession of his senses. At the end of the third week he had entirely recovered from the shock and resumed his duties. The skin on the face and hands of Bartley has never recovered its natural appearance. It is yellow and wrinkled and looks like old parchment. The health of the man does not seem to have been affected by his terrible experience; he is in splendid spirits and apparently fully enjoys all the blessings of life that come his way.”

From an interview at 3:A.M. with P.D. Smith, author of City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, a passage about the way views of urban life have evolved:

“3:AM: There is a certain, largely religious, strand of thought that connects cities with evil, and the pastoral or rural with innocence and morality. One can see it now in the idea of middle America, opposed to the coastal cities, and one can also see it in Victorian proponents of city reform. Why do you think this strand of thought exists, and how does it affect cities?

P.D. Smith: The idea of the ‘sin city’, of Sodom and Gomorrah, is certainly a strand in Judeo-Christian thought. It’s interesting to note that the first city builders in Mesopotamia did not long for some lost Garden of Eden, a bucolic Golden Age. Instead they believed their gods gave them the city. It was their home and where they were meant to be. But, yes, Augustine condemned the City of Man and directed people’s gaze towards the City of God. These ideas have been very influential. In the US, long before gangsta rap the city was associated with crime, violence and moral corruption. The city, with all its attendant social problems, was seen as a reminder of the Old World. The New World was meant to be a land of opportunity, of wilderness and far horizons, not Dickensian slums and urban crime. These ideas feed a deep distrust of cities in America. It surfaces in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle condemns New York’s crime: ‘This city here is like an open sewer, you know, it’s full of filth and scum.’ It’s a rich subject both in the US and in Britain. In fact, it’s something I would like to explore in another book.”

••••••••••

“Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal”:

One more post about Jacqueline Susann and then I promise I’ll stop. This 1967 appearance by Susann on What’s My Line? isn’t particularly riveting, even though it was made in the wake of her jaw-dropping success as a debut novelist with Valley of the Dolls. What’s amusing is the cultural earthquake quietly occurring during this short segment. This brainy program had just been cancelled, a victim of a country’s changing mores. Susann was representative of a new America, a post-Pill society, one that was leaving literate panel shows in its wake. The “barbarians” had crashed the gate. It might seem like the trashy author’s rise and the classy show’s demise was a sad commentary on our nation, but it was really a sign of an improving America, one that was more open, more democratic, more inclusive and more honest. Sometimes I get weary of our in-your -face culture, but I’ll always opt for oversharing instead of no sharing, for too much information rather than not enough.

I miss living in NYC! (Somewhere in the USA)

Some great times I had there….got so much ass it was unreal! Women, men, couples….GREAT SEX! Where I live now, everyone is married at 23 and kids by 25

Urban planner Rahul Mehrotra, in a New York Times conversation with Neha Thirani, talking about gated communities, a dark side of the development in India that’s being fueled by global capital:

“At the micro level our biggest concern is going to be that of the immense polarization that is occurring in our built environment. The between what we call slums or the informal city and large-scale infrastructure and global architecture is going to set up enormous social tensions in our society. Global capital is landing in our cities and bullying its way physically to create a presence and a polarization which will be hard to reverse and resolve as we go on unless we address this issue very quickly.

What results from that polarization are conditions like gated communities, whether they are vertical gated communities or communities at the edge of the city. Because gated communities usually have their own water supply, sewage disposition, they are actually parasitic on the city because they don’t give to the city. They exclude the city but engage with the city on their own terms, and so it’s not a two way kind of exchange.”

The opening of a 1994 New Scientist interview with well-compensated prognosticator Alvin Toffler, still best known for his incredibly popular 1970 book, Future Shock:

“What led you to write Future Shock? While covering Congress, it occurred to us that big technological and social changes were occurring in the United States, but that the political system seemed totally blind to their existence. Between 1955 and 1960, the birth control pill was introduced, television became universalized [sic], commercial jet travel came into being and a whole raft of other technological events occurred. Having spent several years watching the political process, we came away feeling that 99 per cent of what politicians do is keep systems running that were laid in place by previous generations of politicians.

Our ideas came together in 1965 in an article called ‘The future as a way of life,’ which argued that change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people. We coined the phrase ‘future shock’ as an analogy to the concept of culture shock. With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture.

Were you surprised by the reaction to the book? I think that it touched a nerve. Remember we were coming out of the Sixties, countries were being torn apart, change was almost out of control for a period. It touched a nerve, it gave a language, it introduced a metaphor that people could use to describe their own experience.

Looking back to 1970 when the book came out, how would you have done it differently? The great weakness was the book wasn’t radical enough, although everybody said it was a very radical book. The reason for that is that we introduced the concept of the general crisis of industrialism. Marx had talked about the general crisis of capitalism and the argument of the left was always that capitalism would collapse upon itself and socialism would triumph. We argued that both capitalism and socialism would collapse eventually because both were the offspring of industrial civilization, and that we were on the edge of a new way of life, a new civilization. Had we understood more deeply the consequences of that idea we would not have accepted as naively as we did the forecasts of the economists. If you think that economists are arrogant now, in the Sixties they were really riding high. They claimed we would never have another recession, and the reason was that we understand how the economy works, and ‘all we have to do is fine-tune it” as one economist told us. We were young and naive and we bought that notion. We should have anticipated that the revolution we were talking about would have hit the economy in a much deeper way.”

See also:

• The film version of Future Shock, narrated by Orson Welles.