Creative History

The date is July 30, 1858 and the gentlemen and ladies of London’s upper class are walking through the streets with heads bowed and perfumed handkerchiefs held to their noses.  A massive cloud, an opaque yellowish mist with the consistency of a thick soup, is hanging in the air.  This cloudy mist has been rising up from the river Thames for the past month and now, by the middle of the Summer, it has enveloped the entire city in its miasmic haze.     The river Thames cuts through all of central London.  It is the main artery of transport for the entire city through which the commerce of almost the whole English speaking world flows.  The Thames is the center of maritime world trade, and in many ways in conjunction with the greater Atlantic Ocean itself into which it flows, the Thames is the primary reason that the sun is said to never set on her majesty Queen Victoria’s British Empire.  But during this stinking summer of 1858 London’s all i...

“It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which nature had clapped a Snuffer...leaving nothing of the city’s activity but a struggling ember.” -The New York Times, Tuesday, March 13, 1888 One hundred and twenty years ago the New York City skyline looked very different than it does today.  Late Victorian-era New York was a city sheathed in a constant pall of smoke; covered by a blanket of dusty black coal soot.  It was a city made up almost entirely of brick, masonry and wood.  A city that moved via horse, elevated train and on foot with main streets of macadam cobblestone and dark muck filled back alleys.  Asphalt, the automobile, and the subway still remained in the not to distant future. Had you stood on the New Jersey side and gazed across the Hudson, back then, you would have seen a short squat bustling city ready to leap skyward like a rottweiler poised to fight with the coming dawn of a new century. The cityscape of 1888 was spreading...

It’s a bright morning with a deep blue sky that goes upward forever.  Already, warm rays of sun cascade down and splash across the town green, hinting at the heat of late summer that is sure to come in only a few short hours. This would be the perfect day for an outdoor wedding.  And crowds, some dressed in their finest clothes exactly like those of a wedding party, are beginning to gather in abundance on the open fields of the town square. On the narrow lanes that lead into the center of town, carriages and carts of all descriptions are jostling with one another in long snaking lines of traffic.  Horses are neighing impatiently and the din of iron-shod wooden wheels clattering over cobblestones can be heard above all the shouts and sounds of this mass of excited humanity. Entire families, men women and children; the well-to-do and ne’er do wells alike are all moving in the same direction.  All of them are eager to get the best view possible of the upcomin...