January
The Batavia Police Department moves into its new quarters in the
rear of City Hall.
Feb 9
The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Mar 13
Kitty Genovese is murdered in New York City while 38 witnesses
do nothing to save her.
April
Drifter George Whitmore, Jr. is arrested by New York City police
and charged with the 1963 murder of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie.
Apr 22
The New York World's Fair opens on the Flushing Meadows site of
the 1939 fair. Among the attractions is a audio-animatronics robot
of Abraham Lincoln, created by the Walt Disney Studios.
July
Racial riots break out in Rochester, last for two days.
Jul 11
The estate of Albany socialite Mrs. Huibertje (Huybertie) Pruyn
Hamlin is sold at auction, brings $15,255.
Oct 21
Crime boss Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno is kidnapped
on a New York City Street the day he is to testify before a federal
grand jury. Nineteen months later he turns up unharmed.
Oct 24
Monroe County flight mechanic Eugene Richardson is killed while
flying ammunition to a Special Forces camp.
Oct 29
Disk jockey Jack Rolland (Murph the Surf) and two accomplices
break into New York City's Museum of Natural History and steal
the sapphire Star of India.
Oct 31
Rolland and his helpers are arrested. The sapphire is later returned.
November
Murray Schisgal's Luv opens at Broadway's Booth Theater.
Nov 9
In an attempt to steal viewers away from Johnny Carson, ABC premieres
its Nightlife talk show with Les Crane. Crane will leave
the show after the first four months.
City
Coney Island's Luna Park closes. ** The Verrazano (the Port Authority
drops one of the zees from the explorer's name)Narrows Suspension
Bridge, linking Brooklyn with Staten Island, opens. ** Gordon
Bunshaft's 140 Broadway is completed.** Surviving food market
chain co-founder Nicola D'Agostino retires, leaving the business
to his sons. ** AT&T introduces the picture telephone at the
World's Fair. ** Joseph Hazelwood enters the New York Maritime
College at Fort Schuyler. ** Richard Eells, adjunct professor
at Columbia University's business school, is named director of
its program for studies of the modern corporation. ** Mount Sinai
Hospital produces the first statistical evidence that asbestos
causes tumors. ** Richard Burton's production of Hamlet
opens.
State
Maurice B. Stein buys Camp Echo Lake, near Lake George, from his
wife Amy Medine Stein's parents. ** The William Henry Seward House
in Auburn is declared a National Historic Landmark. ** Concert
pianist Monica Dailey dies, in her Batavia home. ** Black politician
Shirley Chisholm is elected to the State Assembly. ** The Pultneyville
Historical Society is founded. ** The Colorado Fuel & Iron
Company's Wickwire-Spencer Steel plant in Buffalo closes. ** Robert
L. King graduates from Rochester's Brighton High School.
Rochester
Racial riots break out, last for two days. ** Frank T. Lamb is
elected mayor. ** Andrew P. Meloni is promoted to records lieutenant
of the Monroe County Sheriff's Department.
Feb 8
Temperatures in New York City rise to 61 degrees F, highest here
for this date.
Feb 14
Black Muslim leader Malcolm X's Elmhurst, Queens, house is firebombed.
Feb 21
Malcolm X, 39, is assassinated in New York City's Audubon Ballroom.
March
Paul Cooper, great-grandson of novelist James Fenimore Cooper,
has James' father William's A Guide to the Wilderness...
reprinted for a fourth printing, of a thousand copies.
Mar 10
Neil Simon's The Odd Couple opens on Broadway.
Mar 30
Ben Bagley and Vernon Lusby's The Decline and Fall of the Entire
World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter, opens at New
York's Square East theater.
Apr 19
Radio station WINS becomes New York City's first all-news station.
Apr 27
Newsman Egbert (Edward) Roscoe Murrow dies of lung cancer in Pawling
at the age of 56.
Jun 11
Leonard Melfi's Birdbath has its debut at New York City's
St. Marks Church-in-the Bowery.
September
Albany builder Lewis A. Sawyer is given an estimate of $217,000
for moving the Pruyn branch of the Albany Public Library at North
Pearl and Clinton Avenue, scheduled for demolition, to the north
side of Clinton. It would cost $267,000 to move it to Orange and
North Pearl. The drive to save the building, lead by Mrs. Frederick
deBeer, fails.
October
The Bittner farm in the Rochester suburb of Brighton is destroyed
by fire. The ruins are plowed under.
Oct 3
President Lyndon Johnson signs a bill, at the base of the Statue
of Liberty, abolishing the immigration quota system.
Oct 4
Pope Paul VI conducts a mass in Yankee Stadium, and addresses
the United Nations.
Oct 17
New York World's Fair closes.
Nov 6
Composer Edgar Varèse dies in New York City at the age
of 81.
Nov 11
William Alfred's Hogan's Goat premieres in New York.
Nov 29
The former home of Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle is
demolished for urban renewal.
City
An addition is built on the Irving Trust Company building on Wall
Street, by Voorhees, Walker, Smith, Smith, Haines, Waehler &
Lundberg. ** The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, in lower
Manhattan, is restored as a shrine church dedicated to former
resident of the site St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. ** William
Eaton becomes co-founder of the law firm of Eaton, Van Winkle,
Greenspoon & Grutman (later Eaton & Van Winkle). **
The city awards its first cable television franchises. **
Controller Abraham D. Beame defeats Paul R. Screvane, William
F. Ryan and Paul O'Dwyer to win the Democratic mayoral primary.
Running on the Democrat- Civil Service-Fusion ticket, he's defeated
by Republican-Liberal-Independent Citizen candidate John V. Lindsay.
Conservative author-publisher William F. Buckley places third.
** The Eighth Street Bookshop moves from Eighth and Macdougal
streets to 17 Eighth Street. ** Baltimore poet Ogden Nash
gives up his New York residence at East 57th Street. **
The musical Man of La Mancha opens. ** New York
Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin advocates sending
hundreds of thousands of U. S. forces to Vietnam. The paper runs
an editorial denouncing his stand. ** New York Telephone
general medical director Norman Plummer retires. ** The
city passes the Landmarks Preservation Law, restricting changes
to historic buildings. ** The Port Authority begins phasing
out Brooklyn's Erie Basin as a cargo terminal. ** Department
of Relocation commissioner Herman Badillo is elected Bronx borough
president. ** Mary Lawrence Tonetti gives her sculpture
of Julia and Comfort Tiffany, twin daughters of designer Louis
Comfort Tiffany, to her friend, actress Katharine Cornell, who
has it mounted over her doorway at 328 East 51st Street when
she buys the Tonetti home and moves from Sneeden's Landing, New
York. ** President Lyndon B. Johnson declares Ellis Island
a National Monument. Congress refuses to appropriate restoration
funds. ** Pennsylvania Station is demolished. ** Consolidated
Edison's Ravenswood Power Plant on Vernon Boulevard in Queens
goes on line.
State
Niagara Falls' Adams Power Station is demolished despite efforts
to save it as a technology museum. ** Efforts begin to save
Olana, the Hudson River villa of artist Frederic E. Church.
** The Historical/Architectural/Landmark Committee is formed
to advise the Herkimer-Oneida Counties Comprehensive Planning
Program on landmarks for preservation. ** The Millard Fillmore
Memorial Association dedicates a replica of the former president's
log cabin birthplace, in Fillmore Glen State Park, near Moravia.
** Emily Woodward Rivas, youngest daughter of Genesee Pure
Foods Company founder Orator Woodward, dies. ** The Adirondacks
Northway expressway opens, connecting the New York State Thruway
with the northern Adirondacks. ** 1900 people in Mount Kisco,
Pleasantville and Peekskill turn out to demonstrate in support
of the Selma, Alabama, civil rights march. ** The mothball
fleet of Liberty ships is deactivated and moored in the central
Hudson River. ** The Tonawanda Library moves into a new
building. The Historical Society of the Tonawandas takes over
the old depot. ** Albany's Sheridan Avenue is blacktopped.
** The construction of the Kinzua Dam south of the Allegany
Reservation floods 9,000 acres of Seneca Land. ** Alfonse
M. D'Amato is elected public administrator for Nassau County.
** The steeple of Canandaigua's United Church is dismantled
and replaced with a smaller one. ** The Alden Inn is demolished.
** Elmer Davenport transcribes the notebooks and letters
of Colonel Maxwell. Davenport's daughter, Mrs. Fred R. Reynolds
of Geneva, presents the original to the Geneva Historical Society.
Rochester
The civil rights organization FIGHT holds its first convention.
** Genesee Hospital's west wing opens. ** Thomas P.
Ryan, Jr. is elected to a third term as supervisor. ** Front
Street is demolished; among the businesses forced out is John
Taylor & Sons, hatmakers. ** The RKO Palace movie theater
on Clinton Avenue North is demolished. ** Crescent Beach
Hotel owner Ray Geis retires; bartender Joseph Barry becomes the
new owner.
Jan 1
35,000 Transportation Workers Union (TWU) members walk off the
job. ** New York City's temperature reaches 62 degrees F, highest
here for this date. ** John Vliet Lindsay is inaugurated as mayor
of New York City.
Jan 2
8,000 members of New York City's Social Services Employees Union
(SSUE) walk off the job.
Jan 13
The TWU members return to work, having won a wage increase. The
city's fares will go up.
Feb 1
New York's social workers return to the job having gained wage
increases, and improvements in benefits and work caseload reductions.
Feb 8
Jazz bandleader, violinist and bassist Vernon Andrade dies in
New York City at the age of 63.
Feb 12
Temperatures in New York City rise to 58 degrees F, highest here
for this date.
Apr 11
Six from La Mama opens at New York City's Martinique Theatre.
Leonard Melfi's Birdbath is the critical standout.
May 27
Eat the Document, a television documentary features non-musical
footage of John Lennon and Bob Dylan together. It airs on New
York City educational-TV station WNDT.
Aug 4
Broadway choreographer Helen Tamiris Becker dies at the age of
61.
Sep 10
Texas running back John Hill Westbrook of Baylor University is
sent on the field in a game against Syracuse, becoming the first
black to play football in the Southwest Conference.
Nov 8
Jazz trumpeter Harold "Shorty" Baker dies in New York
City at the age of 53.
Dec 9
Temperatures in New York City rise to 66 degrees F, the highest
here for this date.
City
The demolition of the 1910 Pennsylvania Station is completed.
** The Ambrose Light Tower is erected 25 miles off the mouth of
the Hudson River, replacing lightships previously anchored there.
** Adams and Woodbridge's Bishop Manning Memorial Wing is added
to Trinity Church. ** The comedy Cactus Flower opens on
Broadway. ** The U. S. Navy sells the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the
city. ** Photographer Berenice Abbott moves to Maine. ** An oil
barge being maneuvered by a tug rams the Spuyten Duyvil Swing
Bridge, putting it out of commission for two weeks. ** The remaining
piers at Brooklyn's New York Dock company are modernized. The
growing use of containerization will quickly make them obsolete.
** The New York City Housing Authority's Stuyvesant Village Tower
building in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood is completed.
State
Painter Frederick Church's Hudson River home (Olana) is saved.
** Genesee Brewery president John L. Wehle founds the Genesee
Country Museum, a recreated village, near Mumford. ** The Hudson
River salt line reaches as far north as Poughkeepsie. ** A steeple
is added to the East Penfield Baptist Church. ** The second Steuben
County Agricultural Society grandstand in Bath is destroyed by
fire. ** The former Canandaigua home of Gideon Granger, at 90
Howell Street, is damaged and subsequentially demolished.
Rochester
The first local kidney transplant is performed at Strong Memorial
Hospital. ** Claude Bragdon's New York Central Railroad Station
is partially demolished. ** The 1824 St. Luke's Episcopal Church
undergoes restoration. ** Three-term city supervisor Thomas P.
Ryan loses his post to Republican lawyer Gary Smith by 115 votes.
© 2002 David Minor / Eagles Byte