Category: History Blog

Several early Americans – including George Washington – had the idea of a canal connecting Lake Erie to the Hudson River… and thus, the Atlantic Ocean via New York City.

But it was four-time New York governor DeWitt Clinton who made it happen in the 1820s. Clinton sent recruitment teams to England to seek out those who’d built England’s extensive canal system. As it turned out, most of those people were Irish. So the legend goes, once the canal work was done many of them settled around Syracuse, New York instead of going back to England or Ireland. And thanks to the potato famine 20 years later, Irish refugees came to New York in droves. Many had relatives in Syracuse, which meant lots of those newcomers settled in Syracuse, too.

When stoplights came to town in 1925, folks in the Irish-heavy Tipperary Hill neighborhood complained about the red light being above the green light (red typically represented the British Empire on maps, and of course green was associated with the Irish). Teens (and adults) started tossing rocks at the light on a regular basis, breaking the glass lights. The exasperated town official in charge of traffic lights gave up and hung it upside down as the neighborhood wanted. Every few years a new official would show up and try to “fix it”, only for it to be pelted with rocks until they put it back. To this very day, the light at Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue is the only known “upside down” light in the US.

One subtle feature of London’s architecture you might not notice until your third or fourth visit to the city is… the sheer number of bricked up windows. Once you know to look for them, they’re EVERYWHERE. But why?

Because King William III enacted a tax on windows in 1696. Windows were expensive back then, so the theory was the tax would get most its revenue from the wealthy, since they had the most windows.

Except EVERYONE started gaming the system immediately. In some places, the tax was tiered, so you paid x tax on 1-6 windows, more on 7-12 windows, etc. A homeowner with 7 windows thus only needed to brick up 1 window to drop into the lower bracket.

And of course the poor inadvertently felt the brunt of the law. Many “apartment buildings” were houses converted into apartments. For tax purposes, they were considered one dwelling. So landlords would brick up all the windows on the first floor, where the cheapest rents were, or would brick up windows of tenants they just didn’t like.

The TRULY wealthy steered into the skid. Although Derbyshire’s Hardwick Hall predates the window tax by 100 years, its striking use of windows flips a finger at the taxman and shows the world who could REALLY afford to live large:

This is Thomas Edward Fitzpatrick. On September 30, 1956 he was completely hammered in a bar on St. Nicholas Ave. in Manhattan. He made a drunken bet that he could make it from New Jersey to New York City in 15 minutes.

Fitzpatrick thus drove his car to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, stole a small plane from the Teterboro School of Aeronautics and flew it, drunk and without lights or radio, and landed on St. Nicholas Avenue, stopping directly in front of the bar in which he’d made the bet. Long story short, because the airplane wasn’t damaged, the school refused to press charges, and just wanted it to go away. So Fitzpatrick was fined $100 for the stunt. Which is just around  $1,100 in 2025 dollars. It’s a fair amount of money, but all things considered it’s still a slap on the wrist.

The best part of the story is, a couple years later Fitzpatrick was once again drunk in a Manhattan bar, and someone refused to believe that he was the one who’d pulled off the original stunt.

Guess what Fitzpatrick did?

He drove back to Teterboro Airport and stole another plane from the school and landed this one in front of a Yeshiva University building at Amsterdam Ave. and 187th Street. This time the court decided the prank had gone too far, and sentenced him to six months in prison. For his part, Fitzpatrick blamed it all on “the lousy drink”.

Although that was the end of his aerial adventures, that wasn’t the end of his fame: before any of this, Fitzpatrick was known as “the first New York City resident to be wounded in the Korean War”.

He also had a drink named after him for his late night stunts: the Late Night Flight:

Ingredients:

½ ounce Kahlua
1½ ounces vodka
½ ounce Chambord
5 blackberries
1 egg white
Dash simple syrup

The idea here is to create a layered representation of NYC’s night-time sky.

Pour Kahlua into the base of a cocktail glass.

In a separate mixing glass, muddle the blackberries, add Chambord and one ounce of vodka, and shake with ice. Strain carefully into a layer over the Kahlua.

In another mixing glass, shake egg white, syrup, and remaining half ounce of vodka — without ice — to create an emulsion. Layer this fluffy white foam on top – like the clouds through which Fitzpatrick piloted.

Hollywood superstar Rudolph Valentino (center) talks to Atlanta Georgian reporter Bert Collier (left) and Atlanta Journal reporter Peggy Mitchell (right) on the roof of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, 1923.

Accessing the roof meant ducking through a low window with a four foot drop on the other side. When Mitchell had problems getting back inside, Valentino gently picked her up and carried her back into the hotel, which Mitchell called “the thrill of a lifetime”. She would later write a hugely popular novel under her given name, Margaret Mitchell.

Speaking of Gone with the Wind… contrary to popular belief, the world premiere of the film wasn’t at the Fox Theatre. It was at the nearby Loew’s Grand, where 300,000 people showed up hoping to catch a glimpse of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. A special, temporary “Tara” façade was even built on the front of the cinema:

Loew’s was built as “DeGive’s Grand Opera House” in 1893, and burned down in a “mysterious” fire in 1978 (wink-wink). The Georgia-Pacific Tower now stands on the site.

Some of the bricks from the Loew’s were salvaged to build the Houston’s restaurant at 2166 Peachtree Rd.;

The lobby chandelier from the Loew’s now hangs in The Tabernacle, a music venue inside a former Baptist church:

The Fox Theater was the site of the world premiere of Disney’s Song of the South. Walt Disney himself attended the event. But poor Walt just couldn’t bear the thought of criticism, so he quietly left just before the movie started, walking across Peachtree Street to his room at the very same Georgian Terrace Hotel… where he chain-smoked and paced around his room for the next two hours.

There are many words in American English which were once commonplace in British English before the American Revolution. Folks on both sides of the Atlantic regularly used words like “fall”, “diaper” and “faucet”. The British moved on to “autumn”, “nappy” and “tap” decades later, while American English stubbornly kept the older words.

One word in particular – check, as in “a financial instrument” – seems to really set off Brits. Many Brits assume American English switched from “cheque” to “check” because of Noah Webster. But that’s not how this story works: for around 125 years, “check” was the dominant form. Although “cheque” was used in Britain, it was used almost exclusively by goldsmiths. “Check” was by far the most popular spelling in Britain and the only spelling used in America.

In 1827, an English banker named James William Gilbart (below) published a book called Practical Treatise on Banking. Universities widely adopted it as a textbook and banks used it as an instruction manual. While writing the book, Gilbart decided to standardize on “cheque” to eliminate any confusion with other uses of “check”… and within 20 years “check” was completely gone from the British banking system, and British English generally.