USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 32
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54
When Stern took it over in 1933, he immediately converted the Path into a forthright New Deal supporter. The paper stresses news of intrin: social importance. Its editorial page, manned by a group of younger mell is a trifle shrill at times but easily the liveliest and most outspoken in t city. Altogether the Post has made more impressive gains than any oth newspaper in New York in the last few years, though there is still a tou.10 of the small town about its make-up and circulation methods.
Every borough has its own newspapers but the Brooklyn Daily Eag once edited by Walt Whitman, and the Bronx Home News are the on ones that can be considered of metropolitan stature. Among dailies closely specialized or "trade" character, the Wall Street Journal ar Women's Wear are conspicuous.
The Daily Worker, official organ of the Communist Party of the Unit States, occupies an important place among New York's labor newspaper Many well-informed persons outside the labor movement now find necessary or desirable to supplement their reading of the regulation new papers with a perusal of the Daily Worker in order to obtain a balance and comprehensive view of current affairs. The Jewish Daily Forwar is also notable for its labor news coverage, and it has played a prominer part in furthering trade union organization among New York's workers- the needle trades workers in particular.
In the foreign-language field, no fewer than 35 dailies, with a combine weekday circulation of approximately 800,000, are published in Ne York City. Chiefly prominent among these, with respect to the number ( readers that they reach, are the Forward, Jewish Morning Journal, D.
NEWSPAPERMAN'S MECCA 309
plag, and Freiheit, in the Jewish (Yiddish) field; Il Progresso Italo- vialmericano, Corriere d' America and La Stampa Libera, Italian; New York dit taats-Zeitung und Herold, German; Amerikai Magyar Nepszava, Hunga- radian; Nasz Przeglad, Polish; Novoye Russkoye Slovo and Russky Golos, hussian; and New Yorsky Dennik, Slovak. Others of the city's foreign- d linguage newspapers are mentioned in the various sections of the article phin Nationalities, contained in the present volume.
New York's very large Negro population has no local daily of its own, ut it supports three weekly papers-the New York Age, the Amsterdam Jews, and the New York News.
That special phenomenon of the American newspaper world, the Sun- Lay edition, attains in New York a bulk and comprehensiveness not to be hatched elsewhere. Of the foremost metropolitan papers that inundate P in he Sabbath with countless reams of news-print, the Times and the Her- ld Tribune offer by far the most palatable and nourishing fare. Each has na's separate magazine and book-review supplements, its rotogravure pic- ire sections, and its many pages of feature matter written by competent pecialists in every main field of current interest-along with a vast array f advertising that makes these other things possible. 1
Though they contain special features of various sorts, the Sunday edi- ons of the Journal-American and the tabloid News and Mirror for the host part merely increase the volume and speed the tempo of these papers' egular week-day editions. Each is blanketed in several layers of colored funnies," and the Journal-American carries as a supplement Mr. Hearst's ridely syndicated American Weekly.
Outside the borough of Manhattan, the only metropolitan newspaper hat publishes a Sunday edition is the Brooklyn Eagle, which follows the eneral pattern of its more affluent contemporaries on the other side of the ast River, while maintaining an individual emphasis on matters of espe- ial interest to residents of Brooklyn, Queens and the rest of Long Island. New York's lone Sunday afternoon newspaper, the Enquirer, employs host of the devices known to sensational journalism in an effort to gain atronage from those who throng the city's restaurants and theaters on unday night.
Twenty-one New York newspapers in the foreign-language field ap- pear on Sunday, several of them with magazine supplements, rotogravure ections and other special features. The Daily Worker also has its Sunday dition, with a magazine section.
a
it er 1
4
S-
n
310
THE PRESS
The circulation of New York's principal Sunday newspapers is by means confined to the metropolis, but reaches out to nearly every towhe and hamlet in the country. The News, with a total of more than three m lion readers, heads the list in this respect. Through book stores and oth special distribution channels, the book supplements of the Times and t cou per
Herald Tribune attain a large national circulation.
The most remarkable journalistic development of the New Deal peri was the first stirring of labor consciousness among newspapermen-a př nomenon that finally flowered into the present American Newspap Guild, with Heywood Broun as its national president. The Guild was giv considerable impetus by the NRA, and after a while picked up pow enough to go ahead on its own. Its declared purpose is that of all lab unions-collective bargaining to obtain better conditions and wages, will the addition that it seeks to raise the standards of the profession. It h met with the bitter opposition of many publishers, who were quick to rai the cry of "freedom of the press"; but it has already won several notab victories. A few old city-room die-hards mutter darkly about the impen ing doom of a noble calling; but the majority of news gatherers, especial! in New York, have rallied to the movement with great enthusiasm. Tl Guild's more sanguine supporters even look forward to the time when, 1 the strength of their organization, they will be able to demand a mo # complete freedom in factual reporting. Carl Randau, president of the Net York Guild, has revealed that "a few alert publishers are already recogni ing that only through constant honesty in the news can they retain the cor fidence of the public-a confidence that has been largely sacrificed throug the flagrant special pleading many editors have injected into the new columns."
All the major press associations make New York their headquarter The first to begin operations here was the Associated Press, which bega as a purely local affair in 1848 and gradually developed into the vast an powerful world organization that it is today. It was followed by the orig inal United Press in 1882; this service was soon forced to discontinue, bu it was later revived by the Scripps-Howard interests. Hearst's International and Universal News Services, which followed soon after and have sinc been merged, serve the Hearst papers as well as others. The New Yor) City News Association, a cooperative enterprise to which most of the ma jor papers belong, covers the routine stories in Manhattan and the Bronx including news from most of the far-flung municipal buildings. The Stand
3II
NEWSPAPERMAN'S MECCA
by ad News Association provides a similar service for a territory that takes in e remainder of the metropolitan area.
The trend toward "chain" journalism has been increasingly apparent in ew York, as elsewhere throughout the country, in recent years. Today, ur of the city's eight major dailies are in the hands of men who own wspapers in several other cities. In the resulting standardization and loss individuality, journalism is slowly losing its glamor and interest. A mptom of the public craving for more individual fare is seen in the cur- nt vogue of the columnists, both serious and light, who sometimes give e only personal touch to a paper, by providing the interpretation and mment that were once functions of the editorial page.
Many of Manhattan's most celebrated newspaper workers have deserted urnalism for more lucrative fields. Radio has claimed a number of those t h ith good voices, others have succumbed to the lure of Hollywood's lush raufastures, while still others have retired to do the "free lance" writing that tab cial TH I newspapermen dream of doing some day and so few accomplish. But otwithstanding these defections, Manhattan remains the newspaperman's tecca. From the journalistic backwaters of the republic a steady flow of casoned veterans and aspiring neophytes pours Manhattan-wards, their ars humming with the roar of its giant presses. They flock to New York nofor the greater rewards held out to those who "make the grade," and for Nthe chance it gives the working reporter to see for himself at close hand nthe vast and lavish spectacle of the great metropolis.
COPA ug en erse ga an
bu
to e m oth
perid
Pap giv DOW lab
XVI. SPORTS
Athletics by Proxy
R
THE NEW YORKER-the average insensitive resident-is conditionedto even oblivious, to crowds. He is a member of many publics; his life i spent among great crowds of his fellows, herded together in search cn happiness or trains. He belongs at one time to the subway public, at ar th other to the theater audience or the fight mob. But he always belongs to tos crowd, and except at rare moments (in telephone booths or shower baths he is only one of the faces one sees without recognition in such crowds.
That is why, to look at New Yorkers, one goes to the Garden, or thd Yankee Stadium or even the subway. In those places the New Yorker ind immersed in his native mass; he is excited or delighted, irritated or tired but safe and with his guard down. Look as long as you please.
This crowd-man, if he has come from the outlands, tends to balk at hi fate when he first becomes aware of it. But that soon stops. On some un marked day he doesn't care any more, one way or another. He's a Newli Yorker then. He knows the high-sign.
But, the laws of motion being what they are, one doesn't get much recreation in crowds. Most citizens, condemned to lives in which the el. bows of other people are jammed into their patient ribs, don't get much play. And, because of that, New Yorkers make the world's greatest audi. ences. They will wait in line longer, they will pay more, they will gamble more on a bad fight than will the citizenry of Elyria, O., on a good one.
Supposing these assertions to have been admitted into evidence, it fol- lows that any discussion of the place of sport in the city's life must deal primarily with those games in which a few men participate, to be watched by thousands of others. But first a word about the men-and the women -who watch.
There was a time when a fight fan was not to be seen at a tennis match, and the baseball mob spent dull winters because they didn't like basket- ball. Crowds were typical then; now they tend to coalesce, to represent as audiences not a single New York type but New York in the mass. You
312
ma
Th
ipre
ATHLETICS BY PROXY 313
lay see top hats at the fights and low brows at the Metropolitan Open. A number of forces worked for a number of years to bring this about. here were, for instance, the great 1920's, the Big Money, and such reat national movements as Tex Rickard, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bill 'ilden, Bobby Jones.
Each of these men, by the power of his personality or-in the case of ickard-the depth of his guile, caught the fancy of population brackets which had never thought before of the specific sport in which the indi- idual hero was engaged. Each man arrived at the right time, a point not ero be lost sight of in considering their titles to greatness.
Dempsey and Ruth, of course, simply took advantage of an increasing ational interest in old and established sports. Tilden and Jones foisted atheir games onto the public consciousness by dint of sheer technical virtu- o sity. But Tex Rickard created a cult and a mystery-ballyhoo. e
Rickard, too, came along at the right time. But, more than the others, he elped to fashion the time. Dempsey swung a hook or Ruth a bat out of a eep physical necessity. Rickard created the million-dollar gate only after ue process of intellection.
He appeared on the New York scene in 1915, and took the Garden for is own. The old Garden, to be sure, had been in Madison Square long before Rickard had been anywhere. It had been Madison Square Garden ince 1879, following an early career as a railroad station and successive ncarnations as Gilmore's Garden and Barnum's Hippodrome. Giants had ebuilt it in 1890, the elder Morgan and P. T. Barnum using their money, Stanford White his ill-starred genius. White had lived atop the building n one of the first penthouses, in sight of the ornate if nude Diana.
But it didn't suit Rickard for long, memories or no memories. In March :916 he staged the Willard-Moran fight in the old building, but by 1920 he had envisioned the Big Money. The million-dollar gate arrived with he Dempsey-Carpentier fight in July 1921, and in 1923 Dempsey pulled inother million through the turnstiles to see him in there with Firpo for bout four minutes.
In spite of the sociologists of the sports pages, Tex wasn't thinking ibout a monument to play when he got the ear of John Ringling and started his "Association of 100 Millionaires." Tex was thinking that now the fight racket was respectable; that he, Tex Rickard, wanted dough and heeded more room.
The new Garden was capitalized for $5,650,000 and completed in 1925 at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. It's still there.
ns
314 SPORTS
Nowadays, if New York has a heart, it might be the Garden. Almo ard. everyone goes there, for one purpose or another. There are dog shows, an Gar Sonja Henie and mass meetings; one may pay 25 cents to sit through men mass meeting or $300 for a box at the horse show. Les Canadiens may dlend battle with the Americans on the night after Henry Armstrong ha knocked over another featherweight. bec
The Garden is probably America's greatest spot for ethnic research; fany has a lot of influence on cultural values, and no top-flight anthropologie see would be lost in one of its crowds; it contributes to the social well-beingoo of the community, and it earns a pretty profit. It's quite a place. Ware
The Garden (always excepting the ball parks in summer, which becom gridirons in fall) is in almost absolute control of professional and sem: professional sport in New York. Boxing, hockey, and (in recent years basketball have become its special charges.
In the city of New York 15 corporations are licensed to operate 20 club pp or arenas in which pugs may throw punches at one another for a fee. Bulge under the iron hand of Mike Jacobs, who learned at the feet of Rickard ipl only the Garden has access to the top-notchers. Every high ranking heavy weight is contracted either to the Garden or to Jacobs personally. h
Jacobs came into control during 1937, after a long and bitter duel with th Jimmy Johnston, the colorful "Boy Bandit." Since the death of Rickarda the associates of the Madison Square Garden Corporation had cast about here and there for a successor. They didn't find one. Johnston did well fo:ttl a time, but he never came within shouting distance of Rickard's $3,000,000 dividends in four years.
Jacobs, who had been the power behind the throne of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, came into the Garden on a pay-as-you-go arrange. ment during 1937. Jacobs' sagacity in judging the crowd's temper is shown by his gamble with Sonja Henie in January 1938, in which the Scandi. navian ice star carted off about $300,000, and the Garden directorate smiled from the windows of various exclusive clubs.
The Garden is indisputably a great cultural center and a good solid in- vestment. At least a carrying income is assured each year from rentals -- the circus, rodeos, horse and dog shows, mass meetings and conventions. And the increasing mass attention to spectator sports, nurtured in some cases by the Garden management, makes the gamble with the gate more and more of a sure thing.
The directors seem at present inclined to play safe, taking an assured income rather than the bigger risks for greater gains of the days of Rick-
315
ATHLETICS BY PROXY
Imord. But that assured income is greater today than in Tex's time. The , an Farden controls the New York Rangers and has a receipt-sharing agree- igh ay ent with the Americans, while even the amateurs use the place for hockey nd pull big gates.
So it may be that the high-flying days are over. Maybe the Garden has ecome just an investment, with no stake in the great outdoor fights or h; ny other of the bigger promotions. But for a long while to come one may ogilee claret on its ring floor or hockey players (they paid the directors $640,- eiroo in 1935) bashing one another with their sticks. The color and noise re not gone. It's just that business is indisputably business.
pectator Sports
The great divide in sports used to admit of clarification. There were rofessionals and amateurs. It was all as simple as that. Today only one enerality, and that very rough, is admissible. There are people who lay and people who watch.
Consider the players. Collegiate basketball, in New York, has become a ighly profitable sport. The game has moved from the smaller gyms into vithe Garden, and a promising double-header between two New York teams ar nd two visiting quints will fill that great cultural center on any night you os are to name. And filling the Garden for basketball means seating more fo nan 16,000 addicts.
Now then. Are the players amateurs? They get no money for their ervices; their schools insist that no advantage, monetary or scholastic, ac- rues to them as a result of their efforts. They must be satisfied, it seems, ge vith the things of the spirit. Yet they are engaged in a strictly commercial nterprise, from which one commercial institution (the Garden) and vari- us educational institutions profit. The methods employed in attracting big at gates are those of the prize-ring or hockey promoters. A column of news- paper publicity is so much cash in the bank to the participating firms-or nstitutions, if you like.
This subtle distinction, which makes amateurs of persons engaged in professional activity, extends to every sport that draws an audience. An amateur sport used to be one which great numbers of people played, for pleasure only, and without reference to the number of onlookers. But for the purposes of the present term paper it becomes simpler to forego the amateur-pro hairline. There remain, then, sports which great masses of the people play, and sports which great masses of the people watch.
d
en ars
B ar
316
SPORTS
Batter Up!
Among watched games, of course, baseball comes first. And in basebal New York comes first.
The three major league teams draw each season almost three million cuspplay tomers. The Yankees top the list. Their stadium accommodates more thanadu 83,000 for baseball, and in addition they've been the best team in th kids game for the past two years. tea
The Yankees are a well-mannered group of business men, highest paid line on a team average the game has known. They seldom have fights on th the field; they are courteous, if cool, with the umps. They can hit harder as : group than the opposition, and their pitching and fielding are as good a the best. They have a great farm system, and can outbid any club in sight fo. new talent. Some New York sports writers, after the 1937 nickel serie. (that's carfare, not gate receipts ), seriously suggested that the Yanks werdfon too good for the present major leagues, and that their proficiency, if carriec out on so high a plane much longer, would lessen interest in the game. That hasn't happened yet, evidently. People still go to ball games. Kh
The Giants are gentlemen off and on. One of the greatest defensive combinations ever, they defend themselves at one and the same time from hot grounders, internecine strife and public vilification. Giant players never look on the flowing bowl, and are respected by one and all. Even the Yankees respect them.
Another aspect of the purely professional game is presented by the teams which make up the National Negro Baseball League, in which New York is represented by the Black Yankees, who play at Dyckman Oval. Though Negroes have been playing professionally since the 1880's, and have developed more than one authentic star of the diamond, none has yet appeared in major league baseball.
New York has a fair representation of amateur and semi-pro teams, but the paucity of diamonds throughout the greater city restricts their growth. Land values, in most cases, make city purchase of ground prohibitive, and the parks have almost reached the point at which one more diamond wouldn't be fair to people who don't play baseball.
Thus variations of the game have taken hold in New York. In point of numbers participating, "stickball" is easily the city's greatest summer game. For this variant, the required equipment is a rubber ball, a broom- stick, and a street with or without traffic.
C
P
S dot
317
ATHLETICS BY PROXY
Primarily a kid's game, it often enough pulls papa off the front stoop of evening to do or die against the kids from the next street.
Softball, because most playgrounds offer space for it, and any vacant t (there are vacant lots) is large enough for a diamond of sorts, is cusplayed by thousands. Organized teams and leagues account for 25,000 the Hult players alone, while the playground pits many more thousands of thids against one another in dubious battle. Dubious, since neighborhood ams often lay bets against one another, and when the dough's on the paine ... Even rumors of thrown games occasionally float ominously about the lower East Side.
he Manly Art
In point of annual attendance boxing would seem to rank an easy sec- nd to baseball in the collective New York mind. In the professional anks, of course, the Garden dictates. There were times when Mike Jacobs vas the Garden's only serious rival, with his lease on the Hippodrome and is position as head of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club. But, during 937, Mike consolidated himself. He runs the Garden, and he runs the Hippodrome. The really top-line bouts go into the Eighth Avenue taber- acle. The Hipp may be regarded as a testing field for talent.
Among the larger of the second-flight clubs are the Windsor Palace (the ans still call it St. Nick's), the Broadway Arena and Dyckman Oval. They all do well enough, and the very small temples throughout the five boroughs seem still able to pay the rent.
The amateur game flourishes, with the Daily News Golden Gloves tourna- nent leading the way, and other organizations sponsoring occasional simon- pure bouts. The boys are sometimes, alas, not amateurs. But they fight, and how they fight!
For figures on the real love-of-the-game variety of boxing one would have to post checkers outside the various institutional gyms and count the hpusted noses as they pass out the doors.
Wrestling, too, was once regarded as a manly sport. But that was be- fore Bill Muldoon (now among the shades) took over the cult and the mystery. Nowadays, though lots of people attend matches, the State Ath- letic Commission will have little or nothing to do with the business. These affairs are held weekly at the Hippodrome and fairly regularly at most of the town's small clubs, and must be billed as "exhibitions." The artists, of late, have taken to beards in alarming numbers. d
er e
h
al
ti- er
ebal
d
as
318
SPORTS
Hell on Ice
Ice hockey, after all these years, has hooked on in New York. Theo Rangers and Americans fill the Garden regularly, and pay handsome div. dends.
The rise of the game really dates from 1925-26, when the American and Rangers joined the newly organized professional loop. The amateur had been at it regularly since the 1880's, but their audiences were ther as they are now, restricted to a few fans and the student bodies of pat ticipating schools.
Then the pros arrived, swinging. They have made it the fastest andse roughest game now played anywhere; they have created probably the mos fanatic sports audiences to be found. They have littered the Garden's fanc icing with opposing players, and they have made money in scads.
Very nearly 500,000 fans see the Rangers and Americans each winte at the Garden.
Hockey is probably directly responsible, incidentally, for the astonish ing vogue of winter sports which has swept the city and the country. Nev Yorkers, a few of whom skated, seem never to have thought of what migh be done on skis, snowshoes or bobsleds. But, with the rise of hockey, they began to see the ingenious uses to which a pair of skates might be put The 1936 Olympics, with their stress on winter sports, finished it off Nowadays an astonishing number of our citizens, who naturally can't sk !. or toboggan in a borough like Manhattan, hopefully watch the winter skies and keep posted on the snow trains.
The professionals have entered here, too. The 1937 Winter Carnival at the Garden was a smashing success, what with a real ski-run and all. But Sonja Henie, who does "Tales of the Vienna Woods" and such things, came along in January of 1938 to make that money look like peanuts.
Dying for Dear Old . . .
Even men now living can remember when football had to do only with colleges. Now, in New York at least, the pros threaten to give the col- legians a run for it.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.