Looking Ahead

LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis

As we travel down Broadway, complaining about the tightness of the roadway and the crowdedness of the sidewalk, let’s keep in mind that it was constructed for the traffic needs of 1673, a point in time about 60 years after the arrival of the first settlers of New Amsterdam. You are indeed following the footsteps of the Dutch burghers and their British conquerors, whose rule was briefly overturned in the same year by a Dutch naval squadron.
Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (1660-85), who had to flee to the Netherlands in 1651, after the Glorious Revolution of the Puritans executed his father, Charles I, was restored to the throne after the death of Cromwell. He repaid his Dutch providers of exile by warring against them, conquering New Amsterdam in 1664. Well aware of the value of communications, in 1672 he ordered Governors Francis Lovelace of New York and John Winthrop of Connecticut "to enter a close correspondency,.’ and a year later the first brave rider (his identity has been lost) left New York for Boston, getting there in the incredibly short time of two weeks . His unmarked route led through New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester and Cambridge, not quite paralleling the roughly 220 miles along US 95, 91 and 95 that I travel regularly in 5 hours (he did not discover the US 84 Hartford to Sturbridge shortcut).
The early mail riders did not have just nature to worry about, there were also hostile Pequot Indians who could bushwhack them (a tradition that has revived since 1987, when the Mashantucket Pequots opened the Foxwoods Casino in Ledyard, Connecticut). King Phillip in 1675 ranged all over Massachusetts, destroying settlements, and the sporadic attacks following the war named after him continued for several years.
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The routing of the King’s Road through Manhattan was identified with 14 milestones in 1769, with the first just outside the city, on the west side of the Bowery, steps south of Canal Street, the next on southwest corner of Fourth Avenue and Astor Place, then at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, east side of 3rd Avenue midway between 45-46th Streets, west side of 2nd Avenueat 62nd Street, NW corner of 3rd Avenue and 81st, and Central Park west of 5th Avenue, between 97-98 Streets. With the 8th milestone at St. Nicholas Avenue between 115-116th Streets the Great Road moved to the West Side, continuing through the west side of St Nicholas Avenue, opposite the north line of 133rd Street, then through the SW corner of 153rd Street, on to west side of Broadway, near 170-171st Streets, continuing to corner 190th Street, then to about 204th Street, and ending at the Harlem Ship Canal. It is fascinating to follow it on a map.
The crossing of Harlem River was at Spuyten Duyvil Creek, then a narrow tidal stretch (now filled in, the site of the Marble Hill Houses) where John Verveleen established a pole-boat ferry in 1669 at what was known as the Wading Place. A smart businessman, manor lord Frederick Philipse built a toll bridge there, near the now intersection of 230th Street and Marble Hill Avenue, in 1693. He named it Kings Bridge, for William III. The neighboring farmers protested, and years later one of them, Benjamin Palmer, built a free bridge. Stopped by a court order inspired by the Philipses, Palmer moved his bridge to 225th Street and opened it in 1759. He had great hopes of building a new city to rival Manhattan, and tried to develop City Island, failing in the effort. Not even a Benjamin Palmer grade school commemorates his name.
The crossing was an important point - the Kings Road divided there, to branch into the Albany Post Road.. Markers were continued in the Bronx, on the New Boston Post Road. Eventually the laborious Kingsbridge detour was eliminated, with a bridge at 130th Street, and now Willis Avenue Bridge and the Bruckner Expressway ease the Boston trip.
No such comforts were there for the early post riders, although eventually the Boston Post Road became three roads, to service other population centers along the route. A Middle Road split at Hartford to service such population centers as Manchester, Mansfield, Mendon, Milford, Medway and Millis. A Lower Road split at New Haven to follow the shore, crossing the Narragansett Bay to pass near Fall River and Providence.
The Kings Road is where the post office had its origins. "The scrivener" John Hayward was appointed to organize the taking and conveying of letters. It became a business monopoly in 1691 when Thomas Neale (who never came to America) was granted the royal patent for 21 years. The expensive and undependable service was reorganized after 1751 by Joint Deputy Postmasters William Hunter (for the south) and Benjamin Franklin (north). Franklin placed well-cut milestones along the roads, charged postage by the mile, and put a price on the mail delivery of newspapers, encouraging local publishing. Franklin was appointed Postmaster General by the Congress, and his image was on the first 1847 postage stamp (5 cents), along with Washington’s (10 cents).
Stagecoaches were a natural replacement of the saddlebag-carrying postriders, with the first mail contract awarded to a stage line in 1785, and just 53 years later the Congress declared every railroad an official post road. By 1850 the coaches were doomed, at least in the northeast. There was a network of stages and taverns that made the three-week trip from Philadelphia to Boston survivable, and a number of today’s pleasant country inns in New England date back to the stagecoach days.
Privately chartered turnpikes, the predecessors of the toll highways, furthered the expansion of travel and commerce in early United States, until the competition of railroads (for passengers and freight) and canals (for freight) cut the price of moving goods and people down considerably. The toll-charging pikes went out of business, the hated gate-keepers had to find new jobs, and the roadways became public highways. Some of them continue to charge tolls, such as the Massachusetts Turnpike, the easiest-to travel heavy-traffic road that I know.
Which brings us back to the hard-to-travel Broadway. For the history buffs, the routing of the King’s Highway present a challenge. The mile-markers are a thing of the past, and the taverns on the road have disappeared within Manhattan, where St. Paul’s Chapel (1764-66) and the Bowling Green fence (1771) are the oldest downtown survivors. Route 9, the Albany Postroad, can be traced with some ancient mile markers still in place (I remember one, in Croton).
For history readers, The Old Post Road by Stewart H. Holbrook (1962) is still the source, and Richard J. Koke of the Kingsbridge Historical Society has traced the milestones (The New-York Historical Society Quarterly, July 1950).

LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis

Now that the Presidential election of 2000 is moving towards the surreal, with challenges from both sides having the potential of extending beyond Florida, let’s revisit another challenged contest, the November 1876 election, which was not resolved until March 2, 1877, two days before the then inaugural date. The loser was our neighbor, Samuel Jones Tilden of 16 East 20th Street (now the National Arts Club), Governor of New York, and the winner was General Rutherford B. Hayes, Governor of Ohio. The chief loser was the US, condemned to four years of divisive political strife, with the office of the Presidency exposed to calumnies and recriminations that besmirched the reputations of two honest men.
We have been used to viewing our local hero, Sam Tilden, as the victim of unscrupulous Republicans, who, faced with the loss of the Presidency due to the oerwhelming popular vote for Tilden, did some ballot-fixing and bribing among the members of the returning boards of Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, the three Southern states still remaining in Federal military control under the laws of Reconstruction. Alternate lists of 19 electors were brought forth from the three Southern states, also one from Oregon. After much debate, five Senators, five members of the House and five Associate Justices of the Supreme Court were chosen to constitute a blue-ribbon Electoral Commission, to choose between the two sets of the electors. Their decision would stand, unless it were to be rejected by both houses of the Congress. There were eight Democrats on the Commission. When the Democrat Judge David C. Davis resigned, having been elected to the Senate from Illinois, a Republican judge was substituted, who allegedly knew that the Florida electors were illegaly appointed. However, the now Republican majority voted a straight party line on each elector, awarding all 20 votes to Hayes, thus giving a him a one-vote majority (184 to 185) in the Electoral College.The Democrats decided to forego a challenge, although fraud was established, most prominently in Florida. Hayes became President, despite the fact that the popular vote for Tilden exceeded that for Hayes by a count of 250,000 , or about 3 percent of the total. But the Democrats of the South saw a threat of potential civil war, wanted to avoid it, and persuaded Tilden not to challenge the decision. They exacted concessions from the Republicans - the military was to be withdrawn, the carpetbagger governments had to be disavowed , and blacks were to be accorded the same subordinate political status as the white laboring classes in the North. The agreements affirmed white supremacy in the South, until the 1960s.
An article by Sanford Mock in the Spring issue of Financial History, published by our friends at the Museum of American Financial History, 26 Broadway, tries to explain the events in different terms. Based on two biographies of Hayes, it highlights the miserable conditions of the Reconstruction South, with unscrupulous Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags trying to make their fortunes while the populace was rebuilding their destroyed lives. U.S.Grant’s roughshod troops were making sure that the liberty and voting rights of blacks guaranteed by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were enforced, and the Southern whites were edoing their best to stop the Republican ascendancy via the black vote, Riots were frequent, and black voters were suppressed by the Klan.It could be implied that, in a sense, the "bought" state commissioners may have been righting a wrong.
It is to the credit to the honorable contestants that, whenever they discovered their campaign staffs at bribery, they stopped it. Hayes was angry about the Democratic Tammany Hall-type fixers in the North and the suppressors of the black vote in the South, and, once in office, tried to right things. But the hostility of the Democratic majority in Congress ruined his program. The withdrawal of the soldiers from the South angered his Republican supporters, as did his attempt to reform the civil service.The economic depression in his term of office brought on the first nationwide strike by rail workers in 1877., and sending in troops to quell riots angered the electorate..In 1880 Hayes declined the offer to run again, and retired to his native Ohio to devote himself to education and philantropy. He died at the age of 71, in 1893. Tilden became somewhat of a recluse at his Gramercy Park and Yon kers enclaves, and died in 1886, at 72, leaving most of his $5 million fortune for the building of the New York Public Library (he had earned it as a successful lawyer, mostly defending the railroads). Although the monies were whittled down to less than a half by litigious relatives, twThis task was completed by his friend and biographer John Bigelow of 21 Gramercy Park South, in 1911 [Bigelow’s daughter Grace chaired the Park trustees, and his great-great grandson NYC Commissioner of Finance Andrew Eristoff was, until recently, the local City Councilman]. Tilden’s mausoleum in New Lebanon, upstate, bears the inscription: "I still trust the people."










LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis
The contested Presidential election of 1876 divided the country
Now that the Presidential election of 2000 is moving towards the surreal, with challenges from both sides having the potential of extending beyond Florida, let’s revisit another challenged contest, the November 1876 election, which was not resolved until March 2, 1877, two days before the then inaugural date. The loser was our neighbor, Samuel Jones Tilden of 16 East 20th Street (now the National Arts Club), Governor of New York, and the winner was General Rutherford B. Hayes, Governor of Ohio. The chief loser was the US, condemned to four years of divisive political strife, with the office of the Presidency exposed to calumnies and recriminations that besmirched the reputations of two honest men.
We have been used to viewing our local hero, Sam Tilden, as the victim of unscrupulous Republicans, who, faced with the loss of the Presidency due to the oerwhelming popular vote for Tilden, did some ballot-fixing and bribing among the members of the returning boards of Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, the three Southern states still remaining in Federal military control under the laws of Reconstruction. Alternate lists of 19 electors were brought forth from the three Southern states, also one from Oregon. After much debate, five Senators, five members of the House and five Associate Justices of the Supreme Court were chosen to constitute a blue-ribbon Electoral Commission, to choose between the two sets of the electors. Their decision would stand, unless it were to be rejected by both houses of the Congress. There were eight Democrats on the Commission. When the Democrat Judge David C. Davis resigned, having been elected to the Senate from Illinois, a Republican judge was substituted, who allegedly knew that the Florida electors were illegaly appointed. However, the now Republican majority voted a straight party line on each elector, awarding all 20 votes to Hayes, thus giving a him a one-vote majority (184 to 185) in the Electoral College.The Democrats decided to forego a challenge, although fraud was established, most prominently in Florida. Hayes became President, despite the fact that the popular vote for Tilden exceeded that for Hayes by a count of 250,000 , or about 3 percent of the total. But the Democrats of the South saw a threat of potential civil war, wanted to avoid it, and persuaded Tilden not to challenge the decision. They exacted concessions from the Republicans - the military was to be withdrawn, the carpetbagger governments had to be disavowed , and blacks were to be accorded the same subordinate political status as the white laboring classes in the North. The agreements affirmed white supremacy in the South, until the 1960s.
An article by Sanford Mock in the Spring issue of Financial History, published by our friends at the Museum of American Financial History, 26 Broadway, tries to explain the events in different terms. Based on two biographies of Hayes, it highlights the miserable conditions of the Reconstruction South, with unscrupulous Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags trying to make their fortunes while the populace was rebuilding their destroyed lives. U.S.Grant’s roughshod troops were making sure that the liberty and voting rights of blacks guaranteed by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were enforced, and the Southern whites were edoing their best to stop the Republican ascendancy via the black vote, Riots were frequent, and black voters were suppressed by the Klan.It could be implied that, in a sense, the "bought" state commissioners may have been righting a wrong.
It is to the credit to the honorable contestants that, whenever they discovered their campaign staffs at bribery, they stopped it. Hayes was angry about the Democratic Tammany Hall-type fixers in the North and the suppressors of the black vote in the South, and, once in office, tried to right things. But the hostility of the Democratic majority in Congress ruined his program. The withdrawal of the soldiers from the South angered his Republican supporters, as did his attempt to reform the civil service.The economic depression in his term of office brought on the first nationwide strike by rail workers in 1877., and sending in troops to quell riots angered the electorate..In 1880 Hayes declined the offer to run again, and retired to his native Ohio to devote himself to education and philantropy. He died at the age of 71, in 1893. Tilden became somewhat of a recluse at his Gramercy Park and Yon kers enclaves, and died in 1886, at 72, leaving most of his $5 million fortune for the building of the New York Public Library (he had earned it as a successful lawyer, mostly defending the railroads). Although the monies were whittled down to less than a half by litigious relatives, twThis task was completed by his friend and biographer John Bigelow of 21 Gramercy Park South, in 1911 [Bigelow’s daughter Grace chaired the Park trustees, and his great-great grandson NYC Commissioner of Finance Andrew Eristoff was, until recently, the local City Councilman]. Tilden’s mausoleum in New Lebanon, upstate, bears the inscription: "I still trust the people."

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Dear Mr. President-Elect: appoint Al Gore as Environment Ambassador
As a former petroleum executive you are fully aware of the shrinking world supply of oil. Using US government supplied data, analysis shows that there is a potential of the Earth running out of natural oil in 38 years. This is not the only environmental crisis that we are not prepared to cope with. Emissions (fully half of the greenhouse gasses come from CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, 1/6 stem from chlorofluorocarbons), bio-engineering, the population growth in poor nations that has resulted in such things as the self-destruction of the sub-Saharan nations (draining of the water table and destruction of arable land resulting in famine and death of millions of people) are some of the painful environmental concerns that we ignore. "Not on my watch," say governments, the Pope and the Muslim clerics.
Al Gore, a man who has thought and written about the environment a great deal, could be our ambassador to the world, to spur action toward the preservation of humanity beyond the next century.
On the subject of energy, the issue you have worked with: there is an urgent need to develop bioenergy, energy from renewable resources, to replace the vanishing petroleum. Ethanol is the principal product, a storable clean energy source. US produces 1.2 billion gallons a year from corn and other agricultural crops (Brasil produces 3.2, from sugarcane). By 2010 bioconversion could produce 14 billion gallons of ethanol a year (10 percent of fuel needed for automotive transportation in the US) from corn, agricultural residues, wood residues from excess growth in unmanaged forests, industrial and municipal waste streams. This would also provide jobs in agriculture and generate valuable animal feed byproducts. Most importantly, this is clean-burning fuel, with no net increase in carbon dioxide in the air (the growing process takes it out, the burning puts it back in). This reduces the greenhouse warming.
Biomass is the term used to describe the sources of bioenergy.
There is an US Energy Information Agency (eia.doe.gov) that documents this subject. Renewable energy sources also include solar thermal collectors for heating water, space and utilities' processes. There are collectors atop new residences all over Israel, while their use in the US has dropped considerably after peaking in 1985. Here, 9/10ths are used for swimming pools, with a puny annual value of $30 million. In 1997 the US Department of Energy launched a Million Solar Roofs program, which may improve the results, but I doubt its success to date. Photovoltaic cell and module production has continued to increase steadily during the same period, to nearly $200 million a year.
Renewable energy still constitutes only 7.5 percent of energy uses in the US, and more than half of it is conventional hydroelectric power (growing). The other half is from biomass (not growing; US stats include also straw, tires, landfill gases); solar energy use is less than 1/10 of one percent of energy consumption. Non-renewable fossil fuels provide 85 percent of US energy (45 percent from petroleum, the rest evenly divided between coal and natural gas). Nuclear power is down to 7 percent of total energy consumption.
The world's non renewable oil reserves of 1,033 billion barrels are spread out as follows: 4 percent in Far East and Oceania, 7 in Africa (3 in Libya and 2 in Nigeria), 67 in the Middle East (11 in friendly Saudi Arabia, 10 in the Emirates and 10 in Kuwait; alas, 11 in Iraq and 9 in Iran); 5 in Russia; 2 in Western Europe, 9 in Central and South America, and 7 in North America (5 in Mexico, .5 in Canada, and a puny 2 percent in the US). Here we see why oil drives world policy. The figures also explain some of the new emphasis on keeping the US militarily strong. Of the world's 5,141 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves,the Middle East has 34 percent, Russia has 33 and the US has 3.
Given that the world's annual consumption of petroleum is 27 billion barrels (the US accounts for 24.6 percent of it, with all of Europe at 20.5 percent, Japan at 7.5, Russia at 3.4 and China at 5.6 percent) and the oil reserve is 1,033 billion barrels, we the world will run out of fuel in 38 years (natural gas is good for 62 years). That should cause a pause for thought. The way we are consuming, forget about protecting the Alaskan wilderness from extinction, we have to protect humanity from extinction.
A look at the entire world's sources of energy confirms its total dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels. Of the 373 quadrillion BTUs consumed annually, 40 percent come from petroleum, 22.5 from natural gas, a like amount from coal, 7 from hydroelectric and nuclear power, and a pitiful .5 percent from biomass and solar. The day when we all run out of fuel and start cutting down our forests for firewood, the way they did it in sub-Saharan Africa may come within the lifetimes of our children.
The US today imports 50 percent of its oil, a number that is continuing to move up, from 30 percent during the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. It accounts for 30 percent of our trade deficit. Isn't it about time we and the rest of the world recognized and did something about the impending self-destruction we are facing? Al Gore the environmentalist could be the man who would successfully move us and the world off the dime. I would ask him to help if I were you, Mr. President-Elect.
Wally Dobelis and the staff of T&V wish a happy Holiday seas.on to our readers, and best of everything to all of us, health and wisdom, governments and governed, in the new millenium of rapid changes.