No. 513
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
March 24, 2020

An Underground Stale-Beer Dive.

March 24, 2020
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Tag: Fashion

Her Striped Stockings.

Bound to be in style - The expedient of a carriage painter's daughter at Vallejo, Cal., to obtain striped stockings.

11/30/2021

Fashion's Fillies.

A Fancy For Horse-Show Week.

2/25/2019

Too Mild a Description.

It is more than simple, my dear. It is idiotic.

10/9/2017

Disguising Nature.

Society’s male darlings “making up” their faces for the purpose of “looking pretty” to their addlepated female counterparts; Saratoga, N. Y.

5/29/2017

The Graces in a High Wind.

A scene taken from nature, in Kensington Gardens.

5/8/2017

Chicago’s Latest Craze.

Every Garden City belle wants to have her hair cut like a little man’s.

4/24/2017

December 1860.

Styles for the Month.

12/5/2016

A New Wrinkle.

How the fashionable women of “sawciety” get their complexions whit the assistance of a hypodermic injection.

12/14/2015

Her Last Quadrille.

The bursting of an artery due to tight lacing causes the death of Miss Mary Crawford of Detroit, Mich.

12/1/2015

The Cruelties of Fashion.

“Who is killing all the beautiful blue breasts, and green breasts, and purple breasts, and gold breasts. Add the gorgeously-feathered songsters of groves in every clime?”

10/12/2015

Beautiful Forever.

7/29/2014

Society Unveiled.

2/3/2014

The Tyranny of Fashion.

6/25/2013

New York Society Classified.

11/27/2011
New York is a city of hooks—Red Hook in Brooklyn, Corlears Hook on the Lower East Side, Tubby Hook in Inwood, for example. Okay, Tubby Hook is a name that hasn’t been widely used for a century. But in the colonial era, Dutch settlers gave the name “hoek”—later anglicized to “hook”—to the many irregular-shaped spits […]
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Ephemeral New York - 5/4/2026
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
 Welcome to this week's Link Dump!ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?Why you wouldn't want to be punished by a pirate.Why you wouldn't want to see a supervolcano erupt.The mystery of the 115,000 year old human footprints.The mystery of the undersea "Bloop."  Related:  The ocean contains all sorts of creepy stuff.A chair that may have belonged to Anne Boleyn.How nuns helped create a fertility
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Strange Company - 5/1/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
(New York Evening Journal, March 18, 1898)Around 1 a.m. on September 2, 1896, Samuel Meyers ran out of the tenement at 202 East 29th Street, screaming, “Murder! Murder! Police! Police!” Patrolman Tyler heard his cries and ran to the spot. “My wife is murdered!” said Meyers, “Somebody has killed my wife. She’s dead.” Tyler and another officer followed Meyers to a second-floor apartment.
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Murder By Gaslight - 5/2/2026
Whatever you believe about the guilt or innocence of Lizzie Borden, I have always believed film makers do a great injustice to the story by not beginning at the beginning- the death on March 26, 1863 of the first Mrs. Borden. In the dying moments of Sarah Morse, Emma takes on the weight of the care of her little sister, not yet three years old. Emma herself was just 12 on March 1st. Emma has seen her mother suffer for a long time, seen her pain and loss of little Alice Esther. Emma is old enough
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 3/26/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
"Assisted Emigrant" | An Irishman and a Yankee Settle a Dispute.

An Underground Stale-Beer Dive.

Stale Beer Dive

An Underground Stale-Beer Dive Late at Night in Mulberry Bend.

The low concert halls and stale-beer dives offer the fullest field for night mission work. These vile places are most often in cellars. The rooms are small, the ceilings low, and the air is always full of the fumes of tobacco and stale beer. The men are thieves, loafers and “crooks” often of the most dangerous order. The women are of the most degraded type. Here beer and spirits are sold in buckets, pails and bottles, and the inmates spend what they have earned, begged, or stolen for these vile drinks. Children are often sent to these places for liquor.


Campbell, Helen, Thomas Wallace Knox, and Thomas Byrnes. Darkness and daylight, or, Lights and shadows of New York life: a woman's pictorial record of gospel, temperance, mission, and rescue work "in His Name" .... Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington, 1897.