Fun with Images

I have been moving between research that is reading and research that is visual. I’ve found several images of the Worth Memorial location which show the site in such a way that you can compare that historical reference to its current state. This is fascinating to me because it so clearly shows how the city has changed.

When the memorial was originally constructed, it dominated the landscape. This can be seen clearly in the lithograph below, which shows its 1857 dedication ceremony. Any buildings are far away, as the intersections between Broadway and Fifth Avenue merged at its base and the cobbled stone roadways were wide and deep, with Madison Park seemingly far in the distance.

Ceremonies of the dedication of the Worth Monument. (Nov. 25, 1857), from The New York Public Library.

Some thirty years later, not much had changed. The area is still dominated by wide cobblestone streets, but now there are the metal tracks for the trolly lines, electric lines for arc lighting, and a posh hotel, build across from the monument itself.

Madison Square: Edison Electric Arc Light, Worth Memorial, William Seward statue, Hotel Victoria. Circa 1884. From The New York Public Library/

However, by 1930 (the likely date of the stereograph below) Broadway had been narrowed and buildings constructed, hemming the monument in.

Worth Monument, South Front view. Circa 1930. From The New York Public Library.

Over time, the buildings have only grown in height until they dwarf Worth’s resting place. In the comparison below, you can see the 1930 view and the 2021 view, side-by-side, at almost the same angle. Without the sky, the monument is absorbed by the streetscape.

Worth Square as seen in 1850 and in 2021. The 1850 image comes from the New York Public Library’s digital collection.

These images are metaphors for the man’s memory. At his death, his memorial dominated the scene. But now, subsumed by the street-scape, it disappears from our view. And yet, it is still there if you have a mind to see it.

[A note for Bret: No matter what I do, I cannot get my photos to render properly.  Something about this theme changes their aspect ratio.  Can you correct this?]

Crunch Time Approaches

Last week was Spring Break in CUNY-land and for the most part, our team agreed to honor it as an actual break. I think of this last week as the proverbial calm before the storm that is often the reality of birthing any kind of creative product. For myself, the timing was fortuitous as I received my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 and it hit me pretty hard: for three days following the shot I was not in any shape to do research or concentrate on anything technical. But I’m doing fine now and have picked up my research and am moving forward.

I’ve decided to break my research on our war memorial into six sections:

• An introduction to the project, as it relates to the Worth Memorial location.
• Biographical information about General Worth’s life.
• Information about the Worth Memorial itself, including its unveiling and how the city has changed around it since it was created.
• Some thoughts on the memorial within the context of the project.
• Conclusions from the research.
• The Clio walking tour [tentative]

Allen and Ginter. “William Jenkins Worth Cigarettes Card.” Circa 1888. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public domain collection.

Sadly, the NYPL was unable to send me the two books I requested. No reason was given for the denial, though I suspect it is because they only have one copy of either on file. They are able to send photocopies of up to 50 pages from each. Without being able to see the books, it’s hard to direct them as to what pages to copy. Luckily, I was able to find Edward Wallace’s original 1948 dissertation (which later became the published biography) on the Boston University website. A digital PDF has been created from the document, including some notes from the professors who reviewed it … fascinating for this digital humanist to see. I have now read enough about Worth that I feel I can move from his life and on to why the memorial was created in New York City, and what it meant in the context of that time.

The research continues ….

Last week was spring break, and as much as possible, I gave myself permission to step away from the Mapping Cemeteries project. I’m not sure how much I was able to enjoy my break from the project as I spent a lot of that time overthinking all of the work yet to be done, but I’m feeling good with my decision overall. And I feel more excited to come back to the project this week and deliver some deliverables.

Based on a class last semester–in which we had several very fruitful discussions when everyone tried to define “what is digital humanities?” and “what is text?”–I had an idea that everyone in our group should try and answer “what is Mapping Cemeteries?” As I suspected, we all came up with very different answers, and they’re all fantastic. We’re featuring this content on our Commons site homepage so readers can get an idea of the conversations we’re having as we create the project. We also hope our readers will join us in this conversation (we’ve turned on Hypothesis on every page of the site).

I also found some very interesting articles about COVID and the deathscape in New York City published by THE CITY. I’ve added all of them to our What We’re Reading page with Hypothesis links in the hopes that our readers will also engage with us here. Two of the articles focus on Hart Island, which isn’t a location we’re covering specifically in our initial phase of the project, but it is such a prominent part of the deathscape in the city (being the largest mass grave of its kind in the United States). In many ways these articles about Hart Island and the uncounted COVID deaths in city prisons reflect one of our aims, which is to make visible deaths that are treated as invisible and unimportant and create space for reflection, care, and memorialization.

Inspired by our class and group discussions in last Thursday, we decided our project would benefit from having a companion WordPress site on the Commons. We already have a Commons group where we share all of our files, keep track of deliverables, and conduct most of our conversations via forum threads. Creating the Commons group was fairly simple, and I only had to check a box to create the companion site: So. Simple.

Yes, and no. A weekend and various additional hours later and our site exists, but I’m also not quite happy with it. In our meeting this evening, my group was very supportive of what is built so far. And I know I shouldn’t be quite so hard on myself as this is my first time ever building a website. And yet…

I think the content we’re building on our Commons site is very solid already. We’re envisioning this site as a space where we can better address our audiences’ pedagogical needs–going more in depth about the making of/behind the scenes of Mapping Cemeteries and explaining our thought processes and decisions along the way. Indeed, we’re finding we can reuse much of what we’ve already contributed in our class blog (aside: this post will definitely be making its way into our Commons site blog, and in posting on our class blog I will be experimenting with my ability to simultaneously post there too, rather than posting twice and backdating–see my comment to see if it worked!).

We’ve engaged comments on our blog page, and we’ve engaged Hypothesis collaborative annotating on every page of our site. We also have a “What We’re Reading” page where we are highlighting articles we are finding particularly influential in our research, which we are linking to via Hypothesis–so we can show our audience our own notes and also encourage them to contribute their own annotations. Our current issue is that an article we’ve found fundamental to our understanding of necropolitics isn’t open access. As a student at the Graduate Center, we have access to the PDF of the article via Project Muse. Hypothesis has a suggested tool where I can drop any PDF and make it accessible for public annotating, and I’ve successfully done so, but if we make the link live, then I think we’re violating copyright. We need to discuss the ethics of this with a librarian. Update to come. So for now our Commons site remains private. But I will share it with the class when it’s ready.

This is the first week I think I’ve felt more excited than overwhelmed by the project. I made time to get lost in research, and I learned so many fascinating (read: horrible) things.

After class last week, I decided to poke around the New York Public Library’s digital archives and see what kind of public domain images they have that I could use of City Hall, City Hall Park, and the First Almshouse. And there are many, so that was very reassuring. I found images of Bridewell Prison, which seems to have a pretty brutal reputation. And I also found this image of a public execution (it is not public domain and I would not to replicate an image of an execution on our site even if it were), which was tagged as “Conspiracy of 1741.” So I had to dig further (see here and here). In short, after a string of fires, the wealthy elite and government were afraid of a slave uprising, the ties between the slave community and the multiracial working class community, and also anyone with Spanish and/or Catholic ties as England was at war with Spain. As a result, there were mass executions (both hangings and burnings) and exiles (with many Black people sold into slavery in the Caribbean and white “conspirators” exiled from the colony).

All in all, my research is leading me toward an understanding of the space that is now City Hall and City Hall Park (and was previously the Commons) as a place imbued with a whole lot of death. The seat of power built upon a space so preoccupied with punishing bodies; this inheritance seems more than symbolic.

For the horizontal timeline aspect of our project, which will help put our cemetery and memorial locations into the context of the wider history of the city, I focused my research on different outbreaks–yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, polio, smallpox, influenza, AIDS. Of particular interest, I learned more about “Typhoid Mary.” I realize I knew of her, but knew nothing really about her: a young immigrant woman who worked in the kitchens of several wealthy families on Long Island, with the unfortunate ability to carry typhoid and infect people without ever getting sick herself. She was by no means the first person to do this, nor the worst asymptomatic “offender.” But given her status in comparison with those who she inadvertently infected, she was branded a pariah and forced to spend the last 20+ years of her life in isolation on North Brother Island. And I found similarities to the person wrongly accused of being “patient zero” in the AIDS crisis, and I dare say there are parallels with the upswing in anti-Asian hate crimes being committed now during COVID. Illness being treated as the moral failure of certain individuals.

I really was excited this week, though typing all of this up in my blog post is getting me down. We shall see where my research leads me this week.