Jan 1
Novelist and short story writer J. D. (Jerome David) Salinger is born in New York City.

Jan 6
Former U. S. president Teddy Roosevelt dies at Sagamore Hill, Long Island.

Jan 24
Composer-pianist Leon Kirchner is born in Brooklyn.

Feb 17
The 1300 black men of the Fifteenth Regiment of New York's National Guard, returning from the war, arrive at Pennsylvania Station and march up to Harlem. Among officials and spectators are Governor and Mrs, Alfred E. Smith, New York Secretary of State Francis Hugo, acting New York Mayor Moran, U. S. Secretary of War Emmett Scott, Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves, , General Thomas Barry, Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, John Wannamaker, Henry Clay Frick, Mrs. Vincent Astor and NAACP official James Weldon Johnson.

Feb 21
U. S. Army corporal Jesse Clipper, 33, of Buffalo, becomes the first African-American to die in the war, of pleurisy and pneumonia.

Feb 26
Additions are made to Lewiston's Oakwood Cemetery.

Feb 27
The American Association for the Hard of Hearing is formed in New York City.

Apr 2
Temperatures in New York City drop to 22 degrees F, lowest here for this date.

Apr 4
The Buffalo, Lockport, and Rochester Railway Company interurban, having been sold, is reorganized as the Rochester, Lockport and Buffalo Railroad Company.

Apr 25
Temperatures in New York City drop to 29 degrees F, lowest here for this date.

Apr 26
Temperatures in New York City drop to 31 degrees F, lowest here for this date.

May 3
Actress, singer, lyricist Betty Comden is born in New York City.

May 8
The NC-4 flying boat, created by Glenn Curtiss and the U. S. Navy, takes off for Halifax, Nova Scotia, first leg on a trans-Atlantic crossing.

May 27
The NC-4 lands on Spain's Tagus River, the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic.

Jun 4
Operatic baritone Robert Merrill is born in Brooklyn.

Jun 16
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 opens at New York's New Amsterdam Theatre. John Steel introduces the song A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody.

Jun 26
Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert McCormick's New York Daily News , the city's first tabloid, begins publication.

Jul 4
Staten Island's Frederick Beckman House, one-time home to Giuseppe Garibaldi, is dedicated on his birthday. In attendance are New York Representative Fiorello La Guardia, Garibaldi's nephews Giuseppe and Ezio Garibaldi, Italian Consul General Romolo Artoni, and other Italian notables and spectators.

Aug 19
Irving Berlin's revue Yip Yip Yaphank is presented by soldiers from Camp Upton. Berlin performs Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.

Aug 20
Screenwriter Walter Bernstein is born in Brooklyn.

November
Willa Cather's father visits her for a week in New York.

Nov 19
Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney's Irene opens at New York's Vanderbilt Theatre.

December
Willa Cather completes her story "Coming Aphrodite".

City
Enrollment in Pace accounting schools exceeds four thousand. ** The college division of the Brooklyn Female Academy (later the Packer Collegiate Institute) becomes the first junior college approved by the State Board of Regents. ** Historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson resign from Columbia University in a dispute over the firing of two professors who oppose the war, found the New School for Social Research. ** The Astoria Studios are built to house Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. ** Frank Sullivan leaves Collier's Weekly, begins writing a column for the Evening Post. ** Henry A. Murray, a pioneer in personality theory, receives his medical degree from Columbia University. ** Actors Alfred Lunt and LynnFontanne meet. ** Willa Cather considers leaving Houghton Mifflin. She works on her novel Claude in New York, and in Toronto where she visits her friends Isabelle and Jan Hambourg. Her war effort articles "Roll Call on the Prairies" and "The Education You Have to Fight For" appear in Red Cross Magazine. She battles the flu in the fall. ** Dial telephones are introduced here. ** The Stoneham family buys the New York Giants baseball team.

State
George F. Johnson and his family donate the first of six carousels to the city of Binghamton. ** Governor Hugh Carey is born in Brooklyn. ** Pavilion's natural gas production begins falling off.

Batavia
Dr. James Wallace sets up a veterinary practice on State Street. ** The approximate date Milo B. Langworthy sells his horse sheds to DeWitt Cramm, who names them the Farmers' Fireproof Sheds. ** C. F. Andrews operates a stable behind the Hotel Richmond. ** Father William Kirby has the building used as a church at the corner of Central Avenue and Liberty Street torn down and replaced with a temporary building.

Buffalo
The Thomas and Elizabeth Dickinson Building is built on Van Staphorst Avenue (now 620 Main Street). For many years it will house the city's first jewelry store. ** The Huff Feeding Corporation piggery opens.

Rochester
One final boat uses the Erie Canal aqueduct. ** Claude Bragdon designs the sets for Walter Hampden's Chicago production of Hamlet. ** The Italian Women's Civic Club is formed. ** The city annexes parts of the towns of Chili, Gates and Greece, increasing its own size to 33.30 square miles, nearly twice its 1874 size. ** Having gotten out of the trolley business, the Rochester Railway and Light Company changes its name to the Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation.

Jan 1
New York City's Gotham Book Mart opens.

Jan 3
The Boston Red Sox trade Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. His new salary is $125,000.

Jan 31
Temperatures in New York City drop to 1 degree below 0, lowest here for this date.

Feb 1
Temperatures in New York City drop to 2 degrees below 0, record cold for the date for the second day in a row.

Feb 7
Rochester's Klondike Klan, made up of veterans of the 1896 Yukon gold rush, holds a reunion.

March
Rochester publisher Clement G. Lanni merges two weekly Italian-language newspapers, La Tribuna and Il Popolo Italiano, into La Stampa Unita.

Mar 27
Rochester realtor Linus S. Appleby, vice-president of General Realty Service, announces the future development of 75 acres on St. Paul Street across from Seneca Park, as 350- 400 homesites.

Apr 2
Rochester reports there are fewer than 25 houses for rent in the city.

Apr 16
AT&T president Theodore Newton Vail dies in Baltimore at the age of 74.

Apr 25
Radio and television personality Robert (Q.) Lewis is born in Manhattan.

Jun 11
Socialist critic-editor Irving Howe is born in the East Bronx.

Jun 17
The trustees of Rochester's Reynolds Library Association sell the Reynolds Arcade to Thomas J. Swanton, president of the National Bank of Commerce and developer Henry J, Naylon, for $600,000. The two plan to erect a 15-story office building on the site.

Jun 22
Ziegfeld's Follies of 1920 opens at the New Amsterdam Theatre.

Jun 25
Marcus Loew announces plans to build a $1,000,000 vaudeville house on Rochester, New York's South Clinton Avenue that will seat between 3500 and 3800 people.

Jul 14
Hotel executive Leona Helmsley is born.

Jul 24
Politician Bella Savitsky (Abzug) is born in New York City.

Jul 28
Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's Poor Little Ritz Girl opens at New York's Central Theatre.

August
An expurgated version of Willa Cather's story "Coming, Aphrodite" appears in H. L. Mencken's Smart Set , under the title "Coming, Eden Bower".

Aug 2
Boston swindler Charles Ponzi, about to be uncovered, goes to his Hanover Trust office and removes $2,000,000, then has himself driven to Saratoga Springs, New York, checks into the United States Hotel under the name Charles Bianchi and heads for the gaming tables.

Aug 5
Ponzi returns to Boston, the $2,000,000 gone.

Aug 17
The steamer T. P. Phelan runs aground on Iroquois Shoal, in the St. Lawrence River. She settles on the bottom and the owners, the Canada Steamship Company, abandon her to the insurance underwriters.

Aug 26
The 19th amendment goes into effect. Women are given the vote. Charlotte Woodward and Rhoda Palmer, the only surviving attendees of the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, attend the signing. Only Woodward lives long enough to vote.

September
Knopf publishes Willa Cather's Youth and the Bright Medusa. She stops using her middle name, Sibert, on her books.

Sep 16
A wagon full of explosives is set off at noontime by an anarchist, at the Wall Street offices of J. P. Morgan and Company, killing 30 people and injuring 100.

Sep 24
Film musical star Joe Yule, Jr. (Mickey Rooney) is born in Brooklyn.

October
The Phelan's underwriters sell her to the J. E. Russell Company of Toronto.

Oct 21
Frieda Loehman opens a discount designer clothing store in Brooklyn.

November
The Russell Wrecking Company refloats the Phelan and she's taken to Kingston, Ontario, for repairs. ** Willa Cather returns to New York after traveling in Europe.

Nov 13
The Hudson River freezes over, at Albany.

Nov 10
George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House has its New York premiere.

Dec 2
Irondequoit native Lawrence G. Hickson broadcasts the first recorded radio music inthe Rochester area from his home.

Dec 14
Jack Dempsey knocks out Bill Brennan in New York City to win the heavyweight championship.

Dec 24
Operatic tenor Enrico Caruso gives his last public performance, in New York City.

Dec 26
Gangster-bootlegger Monk Eastman is shot to death in New York City.

City
The Sutton Place town houses are completed. ** Brooklyn College closes the College of St. Francis Xavier. ** The Queensborough Realty Company begins offering cooperative apartments in Jackson Heights. The area now has 3600 residents. ** Florenz Ziegfeld's musical Sally opens. ** Willa Cather signs a contract early in the year with Alfred Knopf's recently founded publishing company for a collection of eight stories entitled Youth and the Bright Medusa. Four tales are reworkings of The Troll Garden stories. ** The Astoria Studios begin production. ** The Port of New York is now the world's largest. ** Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, president of the National Women's Party, refuses to vote because no woman is running for President of the U. S.

State
Utica's population reaches 94,000. ** Additions are made to Batavia's Johnston Harvester Company's buildings. ** Herman J. Bates is elected supervisor for the Town of Troupsburg. ** A garage for automobiles is built at the Watervliet Shaker colony near Albany. ** William Blossom Hayton, proprietor of Canandaigua's Hayton Harness and Trunks, dies. ** The approximate date horsecars are discontinued in Albany's Lumber District. The U. S. Supreme Court rules in United States v. Boylan that 32 acres of Oneida land cannot be seized for non-payment of debt due to federal protection.

Rochester
The Erie Canal through the city is abandoned. ** City gangs invade the suburb of Fairport, rioting in a dispute over a woman. ** The playground on Front Street closes permanently at the end of the season. ** Architect Claude Bragdon's second wife, Eugenie, dies. ** The Chamber of Commerce sponsors the first of a series of annual Community Festival and Homelands Exhibits. ** The Bartholomy Brewing Company becomes a dairy. ** The Western New York Institute for Deaf Mutes changes its name to the Rochester School for the Deaf.

Tonawanda
The approximate date the Tonawanda Creek Dam on the Erie Canal is removed, making Tonawanda the western terminus. All canal traffic going further west has to enter the Niagara River and travel to the Black Rock Canal to continue on to Buffalo. ** Construction begins on the Goodyear-Dunlop North America tire factory.

January
Novelist Willa Cather informs her Boston publisher, Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, she's decided to go with New York publisher Alfred Knopf. ** Alice Monteith Gould opens a restaurant on Main Street in Batavia. It will later become the Berry Patch.

Jan 18
George Arliss opens in William Archer's The Green Goddess, in New York City.

Feb 2
The first overnight airmail flight from San Francisco to New York is begun.

Feb 9
The Immigration Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives claims 10,000 undesirable aliens have entered the country through Ellis Island.

Feb 14
New York City magazine editors Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson are charged with obscenity when they publish excerpts from James Joyce's Ulysses in the Little Review.

Feb 23
An overnight airmail flight from San Francisco to New York is completed in 33 hours and 20 minutes.

Mar 21
Temperatures in New York City rise to 84 degrees F, highest here for this date.

Mar 29
Naturalist John Burroughs 83, dies while traveling from California to New York City.

Apr 2
German scientist Albert Einstein arrives in the U. S. to lecture on relativity at Columbia University.

Apr 10
Pianist-bandleader Martin Denny is born in New York City.

May 2
New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art opens an show of Impressionist art.

May 15
Aviatrix Laura Bromwell breaks her own record in Garden City, New York, performing 199 straight loop-the-loops. ** The New York State legislature gives a state commissioner the right to censor dances.

Jun 5
U. S. aviatrix Laura Bromwell is killed at Garden City, Long Island, when her planecrashes while doing a loop-the-loop.

Jun 13
Babe Ruth hits his longest home run, at the Polo Grounds in New York City 460 feet.

Jun 22
Stage producer Joseph Papirofsky (Papp) is born in Brooklyn.

Aug 9
Carlo Sanders, Howard Johnson, Philip Bartholomae and Guy Bolton's musical comedy Tangerine opens at Broadway's Casino Theater, to run for 3347 performances.

Aug 21
Representative Herman Badillo is born in Caguas, Puerto Rico.

Aug 24
Four DeHaveland planes fly from New York to Alaska.

Sep 7
Heywood Broun publishes his first column for the New York World. ** The Broadway extravaganza Tarzan of the Apes opens.

Oct 2
Babe Ruth hits his 59th home run as the baseball season ends.

Oct 3
U. S. immigration authorities announce Ellis Island will close Sundays, to deal with a backlog.

Oct 5
Newly-formed Newark, New Jersey radio station WJZ (later WABC) broadcasts the first play-by-play World Series description. The New York Giants defeat the New York Yankees, five games to threethe first Subway Series.

Oct 13
New York's Giants and Yankees end the World Series, with the Giants victorious.

Oct 25
Gambler-lawman William Barclay "Bat" Masterson, sports editor for New York City's Morning Telegraph, dies at the age of 76.

Oct 31
Rudolph Valentino's film The Sheik premieres in New York City.

Nov 3
Striking New York City milk drivers pour thousands of gallons into city streets.

Nov 18
New York City considers staggered work hours to alleviate traffic congestion.

Nov 19
Temperatures in New York City climb to 72 degrees F, the highest here on record for the date.

Nov 29
Zoel Parenteau and Schuyler Green's musical Kiki opens in New York City at the Belasco Theater. It features the song, "Some Day I'll Find You" and runs for 600 performances.

Dec 26
Television personality, songwriter and mystery author Stephen Valentine Patrick "Steve" Allen is born in New York City.


City
The Port of New York Authority is established by New York and New Jersey. ** Benjamin Wistar Morris' Cunard Building is completed. ** The D'Agostino brothers arrive from Abruzzi, Italy. Nicola becomes a pushcart peddlar and his brother Pasquale (Patsy) a butcher. ** Incumbent mayor John F. Hylan defeats Republican Henry H. Curran and Socialist Jacob Panken to win re-election, serves through 1925. ** Eddie Cantor stars in Lee and J. J. Shubert's The Midnight Rounders of 1921. ** Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue opens. ** Malvina Thompson, future secretary to Eleanor Roosevelt, marries school teacher Frank Scheider. ** A Bronx gangster nicknamed Crazy Fat is burned alive by rivals in the middle of Wilkins Avenue.

State
Ralph Henry Gabriel's The Evolution of Long Island is published. ** Troupsburg Town Supervisor Herman J. Bates moves his family from their farm into town. ** Hiking trails are opened at Fillmore Glen, near Moravia. ** Glenn Curtiss builds the racing Wildcat plane, on Long Island. ** The motorship Day Peckingpaugh is built in Duluth, Minnesota. It is transported to New York where it is used to carry building materials on the Erie Barge Canal. ** Former schoolteacher Anna Edson Taylor, the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive, dies in poverty. ** Mrs. Frederick Ferris Thompson purchases the hotel on the site of Canandaigua's former Blossom House and spends $315,000 improving and restoring the property. ** An ad hoc Irish-WASP coalition gives Democrats control of Albany's city government; they retain it for 62 years.

Batavia
The city makes a few charter revisions. ** The Metropolitan Restaurant (formerly Ely's) closes. ** Veterinarian Dr. Walter E. Frink buys the State Street practice of Dr. Lefler.

Rochester
The city authorizes a subway in the old Erie Canal bed. The canal bridge on West Main is removed. ** Rochester's municipal terminal at Charlotte opens. ** 1,440 Italians are naturalized this year. ** The Italian Women's Civic Society begins awarding an annual scholarship to the University of Rochester. * Miss Mary Pulvinobegins giving annual picnics for the widows and orphan of Italian residents. ** Italian ambassador Vittorio Rolandi-Ricci visits the city. ** Grocers John and Walter Wegman buy the Seel Grocery Company. They combine grocery and bakery operations. ** The Young Men's Christian Association's Camp Cory, Rochester's first overnight camp, opens.

Tonawanda
The Goodyear-Dunlop North America tire factory is completed. ** The city acquires former canal property from New York State. Part of the land will become Niawanda Park.



© 2002 David Minor / Eagles Byte

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