Forgotten News

by Jack Finney

  FORGOTTEN NEWS

  The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories

  Jack Finney

  D O U B L E D A Y & C O M P A N Y, I N C.

  G A R D E N C I T Y, N E W Y O R K

  1 9 8 3

  1 thank Harvey Susser for his fine work in the copy photography needed for reproducing the illustrations for this book.

  And I thank Elaine Chubb for a job of copy editing so complete, imaginative, and far beyond routine requirement that it has sharply and creatively improved this book. Her work even makes it appear—and I'm grateful—that I can spell and write grammatically.

  J.F.

  Copyright © 1983 by Jack Finney

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  FIRST EDITION

  For Don Goodwin

  What Is This Book?

  Some several years ago I was thinking of writing a novel—which I did, eventually, calling it Time and Again—whose central character would somehow be able to do what I've always wanted to do: visit the nineteenth century. Physically, literally, go back in time to a New York of the last century, and walk around seeing the sights. But I wanted him to see a lot more than what all of us know he'd see: more than gaslights and horsecars. I wanted him to see everything I wished I could; as clearly and with the greatest actuality I could manage.

  So I began something I called "research," though really too much fun to entitle me to describe it as soberly as that. I spent a winter, that is, exploring nineteenth-century newspapers, on microfilm. Picked a decade arbitrarily, limiting myself to the 1880s. Got up each day, had breakfast, and spent the rest of the day till mid-afternoon, head in the viewer, reading everything that seemed directly useful, straying into plenty that wasn't. Day after day I read the New York Times, following the excitements of another time. And the Tribune. And Frank Leslie's Illustrated (weekly) Newspaper, looking at the pictures (and, with Leslie's, ranging well beyond and before the eighties). Made notes from the Times on what the produce market was selling, so I'd know something of what people were eating. Read the ads to see something of what they were buying and wearing. Stuck pins in a big wall map of an earlier New York to determine for myself where the people in the crime news lived, and where the rich people lived, and had their fun. Read what they were seeing in the theaters, and attended the opening—through a fine lavish description in the Times—of a glittering new Wallack theater, equipped with a lobby fountain that sprayed perfume. That winter I didn't envy anyone, and, looking friends in the eye, I told them I was working, too.

  Easily the best part of all this was Leslie's; which, as you may know, was a kind of nineteenth-century Life magazine stuffed with splendid trifles, and bounteously illustrated: if you couldn't show it, it wasn't news, seemed to be Frank Leslie's policy, and some of his old woodcuts are magnificent. I expect it's a lost art. The best of them have a hard-edged bright clarity that excites the eye, especially those done by his best artists directly from photographs. Every time I turned a page it was with a small thrill of anticipation: What next?

  A look at the Pope's new private railroad car, maybe; its entire exterior hand-carved by crazed Italians, the miter on its roof tall as a smokestack.

  Or Horace Greeley's watch and chain.

  Or a splendid view of the New York City morgue in the days when women wore hoopskirts.

  Or a glimpse of discipline as practiced in the United States Navy …

  …or at justice as dispensed by New York cops before they had to worry about abstractions like civil liberties.

  And a fine double-page spread illustrating a gang battle in the streets of Manhattan, which continued for three days one summer, and which featured street barricades; the positioning of a large cannon to command an entire city block, although it was never fired; and the almost complete absence of the police, until the gangs got tired out and things quieted down.

  Below at the left are the gang leaders: silk hat heads "The Bowery Boys," the other "The Dead Rabbits."

  Leslie's gave me this glimpse of the mysterious parade of the "Belva Lockwood Marching Club," all men identically dressed in women's costume.

  And of ways that New Yorkers used to have fun: in summer, like this in Central Park;

  in the winter, like this in upper Manhattan;

  and in Albany like this, with joker in pith helmet, carrying fan.

  Where else but Leslie's for the annual "Ball of the Lunatics" on Blackwell's Island?

  Page after page of stuff like that; hundreds and hundreds of that kind of picture. And I was working!

  A fine winter, and when it was over, and I had to quit working and go to work, I missed Leslie's. And when the novel whose preliminaries had led me to Leslie's was written; and when some more years had passed; the addict's hunger had not gone away. I still wanted more Leslie's, and there were more: thirty-odd years of them yet that I'd never seen. So finally I did what I'd wanted to do ever since my first fix. Arranged with the state library to send me half a dozen bound volumes at a time, beginning with the first issue, in 1856. The real thing this time, not microfilm but tall gilt-stamped old books, covers loose, spines sprung. But the pages inside strong and white, the ink as powerfully black, as in the days when Leslie's hung from the eaves of vanished New York newsstands. They generally used good material in the century before the world went bad.

  Every page—I turned through them all—of every issue of Leslie's right up to nearly the end of that hustling century, when muddy photographs replaced bright woodcuts. And the artists who'd made them, along with beer gardens, vaudeville, sleighing on Fifth Avenue, and plenty of other things better than television, joined the Great Auk. As I turned Leslie's pages I made notes on, and later Xeroxed the illustrations for, hundreds of forgotten marvels and glimpses of lost times. Some kind of book was what I had in mind. But vaguely, not sure what kind. I was waiting to see.

  Pretty soon I thought it might be a thick book packed with as many as a hundred or more of the kind of thing I was saving, every one illustrated by a woodcut, and amplified, not just a book of old reprints. I'd redo every one of them; nineteenth-century newspaper prose can be deadly. And expand them; make them more complete and informative and interesting in whatever ways ingenuity might suggest. Thus, I mailed a Xerox of a Leslie's story, very brief but hugely illustrated, describing and picturing what seemed to be a helicopter flying across the low Manhattan cityscape of 1876, to an aircraft designer, Joseph Lippert, Jr. And, both our tongues in cheek a little bit, he replied solemnly that yes indeed, this machine, as illustrated and described, really could have flown across New York a long century ago. And he supplied a drawing showing how similar were the workings of the old machine and today's helicopters. (This particular item was published on the New York Times Op-Ed page, with Lippert's drawing included, and brought me some startled mail, and a couple of excited phone calls: one from Life, the other from Reader's Digest. But I felt obliged to tell them what Mr. Lippert and I had neglected to mention: that while the 1876 machine undoubtedly did fly, as reported in Leslie's, it was probably only a spring-wound model.) I dealt with the White House on other items, the Smithsonian, Greenwood Cemetery, and I wrote to the Vatican about the Pope's railroad car. I wanted photographs of that, especially of the interior. They told me where to get them: from a Roman museum. To which I wrote, first having my letter translated into Italian. And wrote them again… and again …and again, never receiving a reply, so that the Pope's car never got into the book.

  A kind of light, entertaining bedside volume, I thought, to open at random and find something briefly intriguing for eye and mind. Most items no longer than a page, some only half a page. Others might run two or three pages, a few might go half a dozen, and maybe on
e or two—such as the killing of Dr. Harvey Burdell and the sinking of the steamship Central America, both serious stories with interesting ramifications— might run as long as ten, twelve, or fourteen pages.

  One day it occurred to me that probably I should check what other publications of the day had reported about some of my stories; and maybe learn a little bit more I could use. So I went over to the Berkeley campus and its Newspaper Room to check the New York Times coverage on the death of Harvey Burdell. And I mean it truly when I say that what I found appalled me.

  Because the Harvey Burdell story turned out to be, not what the few pages of summary in Leslie's had suggested, but instead what may very well be one of the biggest single stories the Times has ever covered. I don't know that, and perhaps it is not the case, but there cannot have been many longer-running stories in the Times's history. I sat there in Berkeley numbly turning past endless columns of fine newsprint on this story, running day after day after day, and wondering what I was supposed to do now.

  For a while I thought, urged on by my wife, of finding a job somewhere away from home and typewriter; outdoors, maybe, working with my hands. Instead I decided to buy the microfilmed Times for 1857, and give one month to reading into that mass of material as far as I could in the time. And then decide whether it yielded up enough more of interest to be worth continuing. I ended up, over far longer than a month, by reading every word of that long coverage; and with over a hundred single-spaced pages of typed notes. And facing a story, one story alone, not of a dozen pages but one which itself could not be told in much less than book length. It was as though I'd come upon a scattering of small stones, and in trying to dig one out had uncovered a kind of Pompeii.

  For in the murder of Harvey Burdell I found a forgotten or semiforgotten story of the past so strange and complex, so sensational and endlessly surprising, that it astonishes me yet. It turned out, at least for me, rich in event and character: peopled with as strange a lot, as malevolent, eccentric, and amusing, as any I could ever hope to come across. Reading column after column of directly quoted testimony—hearing, in the old type, these long-ago people speaking, arguing, lying, and shouting in their own words—made them real. And from Leslie's I had many of their actual portraits, drawn from photographs; and some of the very places they talked about, drawn from life. And came much, much closer now, than in the research I'd done for a novel, to moving back into a lost past.

  In the story of the sinking of the Central America I found one more such story: the long detailed account, most of it in its people's own words, of a story alive with human behavior and the kind of powerful personality peculiar, it seems to me, to the nineteenth century. And my book became, not a hundred light amusing tidbits, but two long—at times almost melodramatic, and sometimes chilling—very serious stories.

  Not quite entirely, though. I couldn't leave out all the others, though maybe I should have: the book is really the two long stories. But I included a few of the others anyway. Between the two principal stories as a kind of breathing spell. And a few more at the end. Their purpose, I've told myself and now tell you, is to be a kind of setting for the two main stories. To give you a heightened sense of the remarkable century in which they occurred. This may even be true. It was a wonderful varied time, the last century; and if this book can help you visit it with anything like as much pleasure as it's held for me, then it was worth the three years I never dreamed it would take me. It was worth it anyway.

  Jack Finney

  FORGOTTEN NEWS

  1

  This is the house I hoped to find still standing at number 31 Bond Street, New York City, when I walked out of the Algonquin Hotel one morning in June a couple of years ago: an unlikely yet not quite impossible hope. I took a bus downtown, camera hung from my neck, a tourist, and found Bond Street where my map said it would be: below Eighth Street between Broadway and the Bowery. From the bus stop I walked back along a fairly busy Broadway, then turned off it, to the right, onto this little two-block-long street: Bond Street today.

  Once this was "a fashionable and reputable part of town," said the New York Tribune of 1857, although the Times thought Bond "simply genteel." But today it looked about as I'd expected; there are a lot of obscure lower Manhattan streets like it. Most of its remaining worn-out old houses have been converted long ago into small-business premises, their upper windows blank and dusty, although people still live in some of them.

  Not surprisingly, my number 31 was gone. On its site stood a newer 31; it's there at the right: the one with the fire escape and the arched windows. I didn't go in, though if my 31 had been there still, it would have taken police to have kept me out of it.

  Just as unsurprisingly, since lower Manhattan is filled with relics of earlier New Yorks, even though the old 31 was gone there were still a few houses left that, for well over a century, had survived to the present from this moment of a long-ago February day in 1857 when crowds stood along a tree-lined Bond Street staring up at number 31 in awe and excitement at what had just happened inside it.

  I think the drawing is accurate. It was made by a Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper artist, who then signed it under the tree at lower right; and presently I'll explain why I think it meticulously represents the way Bond Street looked when Copcutt stood with his pad or notebook where I followed with my camera, standing where he stood, a hundred and twenty years later.

  You can see from his drawing that several groups of houses on Bond Street then were identical; people called them "pattern" houses. Now look carefully at 31, the house with the crowd on its stoop: notice that like the other beside it, the two dormer windows have angled roofs … the lintels over the windows are straight … there's an ornamental arch over the doorway … a keystone at its top, stone insets along its sides…. Now look at the house at left, number 26 Bond Street, still here today.

  Mentally remove the fire escape and added-on storefront, then compare it with the drawing I've repeated beside it of the long-vanished 31 for which I came down here looking; and there number 26 Bond Street still stands, as it stood near midnight, Friday, January 30, 1857, when "Murder!" sounded in the darkness and the night air stank of burning wool and leather.

  And so I did find something left of the street and the night through which one of its prominent residents once walked for the last time. And as I walked the littered, gritty length of the same street, stopping to stand looking up at these relics (number 50, at left, survives, too), I was almost able to understand that the bloody thing that once happened here, and the astonishing events that followed it… really had happened; that a living man, fear tight in his stomach, had once walked here, too, under the vanished trees and gas-lighting toward 31 Bond Street.

  This is the man; it is how he really looked:

  this and other portraits that follow are precise woodcut renditions of actual photographs from professional studios of the day: Meade, Bacon, Fredrick's, and others.

  He is Dr. Harvey Burdell, well-known dentist and physician, of 31 Bond Street—which he owned and in which he conducted a dental practice, becoming rich in consequence, then as now.

  On Sunday afternoon, January 25, 1857, he arrived at Bacon studios and spoke to a friend, Mrs. Ann Benjamin, a photographer there. People who knew Harvey Burdell said he talked very rapidly and with a "sort of twang to his voice," said a cousin, "a sort of barking." What he almost surely told Mrs. Benjamin in this odd voice—for by now he was saying it to most everyone—was how frightened he was for his life. And that he wanted his portrait made, right now.

  There he sits facing the big wooden camera, Mrs. Benjamin hunched under the black cloth. He is motionless, quite possibly holding his breath, the back of his head held steady by a clamplike device. As he waits for his image to etch the plate for this final portrait of his life he is terrified: this is known. And I think he looks frightened, that it shows in his eyes.

  If that is so—if that's fear staring out at us across a century—this is the woman who put it
there:

  Emma Augusta Cunningham, thirty-six, widow of a Brooklyn distiller; as formidable in fact as she is in appearance: no fear in those eyes.

  They're gray, her hair dark brown, complexion dark, but it isn't easy to see in this portrait—another careful woodcut copy, of an ambrotype— what Harvey Burdell saw in Emma Cunningham when first they met. "… we understand she was formerly very prepossessing," a newspaper reporter said, "[but] she is not at the present moment an extra-ordinarily attractive woman." Still: cover her antique dress with one hand, obscure the old hairstyle with the other, then picture her smiling, and possibly you'll see something of the attractiveness Dr. Burdell saw. Or it might have been this: the same reporter said Mrs. Cunningham was "very well preserved, her bust showing considerable fullness," and Burdell liked women, at least in bed: maybe that explains what this portrait doesn't.

  But do you agree that a determination can be seen in her eyes, a hardness of purpose? Possibly not, maybe I'm straining, but apparently it could be seen in the living face, because a Leslie's reporter wrote: "… her lips and mouth generally display remarkable determination." This observation didn't follow after the fact, either: the world didn't yet know the unbelievable—I mean literally unbelievable—extent of this remarkable woman's single-mindedness. One time Harvey Burdell told a cousin, Mary Wilson, as she recalled it, that Emma Cunningham was " 'a very dangerous woman. She is always planning, and she told me she had never been thwarted in her life; that whatever plans she attempts she generally carried out.' " This turned out to be true; and Mrs. Cunningham almost literally scared Harvey Burdell to death.