James Fitzsimmons & John Wedlock - Peace Officers in Victorian Helston During the decades surrounding the American Civil War, a myth-laden period of mass Westward migration, expansion and settlement, a number of legendary (“When legend becomes fact, print the legend”) law enforcement officers emerged. Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Pat Garrett, Luke Short and Ned Buntline among others came...
Little Red in Spaldeen CityI always hated school. I hated it from the moment my mother first left me, age four, at the Winfield Nursery on Horatio Street to the day in 1959 when I slipped out through one of the Amsterdam Avenue fire doors of the High School of Commerce, never to return. I still can’t say positively whether...
Rattling a Skeleton in the British Television Closet Over three consecutive nights in mid-January 1981 the ITV Network broadcast a four-part police drama serial. The first British-made production to be shown in the mini-series format, it drew audiences averaging 13 million. It was called Wolcott and concerned the adventures, trials and tribulations of a Metropolitan police detective constable in North East...
Joseph Mitchell, a 21 year-old aspiring newspaper reporter, arrived in New York City from his native North Carolina in October 1929 on the eve of the Black Tuesday Wall Street crash that heralded the Great Depression. Among the most (to use a word he rather overworked himself) salient personalities in contemporary journalism at the time was H.L. Mencken. A hugely...
Helston’s Cross Street takes its name from what the relevant Ancient Monuments Listing describes as a “Preaching cross. Probably pre-Conquest. Wheel-based granite monolith with incised flared Latin cross set into a roughly hewn granite base.” Some feel that this cross may date from the earliest period of Christianity in Cornwall and perhaps reflect echoes of an older religion. The cross...
Little Red in Spaldeen City My mother and father were both born and raised in Chicago and were, respectively, second and first generation Irish-Americans. Their desire to move from the Gem of the Prairie to New York City – and to Greenwich Village particularly – was a commonplace among people with their interests, ideas and, in my father’s case, ambitions. Many...
Introduction “Local history? Why local history?” is a question occasionally asked of those who indulge in this fascinating but, to many, marginal field of study. For myself – in addition to the general historian’s desire to know something about the past in order to make a little more sense of the present - the answer is made up of three...
LITTLE RED IN SPALDEEN CITY On September 1st 1942 my parents and I moved into an apartment comprising the entire second floor of 29 Bethune Street, on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, a block and a half east of the Hudson River. I was 79 days old at the time and it was my second Greenwich Village address. Prior to my arrival...