The Upper West Side
Trivia Challenge
1. What gregarious Upper West Sider popularized the phrase "A House Is Not a Home" as the title of her best-selling autobiography?
2. What Upper West Sider claimed to be the "real" designer of Central Park?
3. What famous old Upper West Side institution once occupied the present site of Columbia University?
4. Early in the 20th century, Mary Mallon was arrested while working as the cook for a family on West 89th Street. Why?
5. Several blocks of old tenement buildings were torn down to make way for Lincoln Center, yet you can still see them today. Where and how?
6. In 1896 two Upper West Siders, Arthur Smith and Henry Bliss, crossed paths in a tragic landmark event. What and where?
7. Besides Mr. Bliss's accident the peaceful-looking corner of Central Park West and West 72nd Street has an extraordinary number of associations with violence and crime. How so?
8. What Upper West Sider was the first woman to be honored with a ticker-tape parade?
9. What Upper West Sider was the first New Yorker to own a private car?
10. Some historians take a rather cynical attitude toward the famous Maine monument on Columbus Circle commemorating the Spanish-American War. Why?
11. What national dance craze was introduced in an Upper West Side musical?
12. Another Upper West Side production was the first African-Americn musical show to reach the Broadway stage. What, here, and when?
13. In August 1926 a crowd of 80,000 mobbed the street outside Campbell's Funeral Church on Broadway and West 67th Street, even broke through the plate-glass window before the police restored order. What celebrity caused all the fuss?
Bonus question: What Upper West Side resident has been ranked as the most successful American forger of all time?
Answers:
1. Polly Adler, the most celebrated madam of the Jazz Age.
2. Brigadier General Egbert L. Viele, a West Point-educated civil engineer. He sued the city over the Park issue, and eventually won a court award of ten thousand dollars.
3. The Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum. Morningside Heights was also known as "Asylum Hill."
4. "Typhoid Mary" was a carrier of the deadly typhus bacillus. The city health department had repeatedly warned never to work as a cook, but it was the only trade she knew. She ended her days in quarantine on an island in the East River.
5. The empty streets were used for location shooting and dance numbers in the movie West Side Story.
6. As Mr. Bliss turned to help a lady alight from a streetcar at Central Park West and West 72nd Street, taxi driver Smith ran over him, crushing his chest. Bliss dies the next day, the country's first auto fatality.
7. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the convicted kidnapper-killer of the Lindberg baby, worked as a carpenter in the Majestic Apartments on that corner at the time of the crime. Later, mob bosses Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello all lived in the Majestic. Costello was shot (not fatally) in the lobby in 1957. And across the street, John Lennon was murdered in front of his home in the Dakota Apartments in 1980.
8. Seventeen-year-old Gertrude Ederle, daughter of an Amsterdam Avenue butcher, became a hero to New Yorkers in 1926, when she became the first woman and the first American to swim the English Channel.
9. The flamboyant James Buchanan Brady, of West 86th Street -- known to history as Diamond Jim. (Diamond Jim may actually have been beaten out for the honor by another, quieter Upper West Sider, the industrialist-lawyer-publisher Isaac L. Rice.)
10. William Randolph Hearst, who raised most of the money for the monument, owned most of the nearby real estate. Through his newspaper chain, Hearst had also done more than anyone else to get the U.S. into war with Spain -- and in any case, there was never any official finding that Spain had anything to do with blowing up the Maine; it was probably an accident.
11. The Charleston, introduced in 1922 by Elizabeth Welch in the last act of the all-Black musical Runnin' Wild at the Colonial Theatre, Broadway and 63rd Street.
12. Shuffle Along, with words and music by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, opened at the 63rd Street Theatre in 1921. The show introduced the immortal "I'm Just Wild About Harry," and Langston Hughes credited the show with "kicking off" the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
13. The body of silent-screen Sheik Rudolph Valentino, who had died at a nearby hospital. Interestingly, Valentino had started his show-business career just a few blocks away and 13 years earlier as a "taxi dancer" in a cabaret on Upper Broadway.
Bonus answer: Edward Mueller. Read Chapter 11 to get his full story.
