IN OUR February/March issue Albert Macomber, living in Washington, D.C., in 1863, described a “dilapidated pile of bricks” just north of the U.S. Capitol as the residence of George Washington.
He was wrong, says John H. Rhodehamel, archivist of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association: Washington never lived in the city that bears his name. “The crumbling buildings that impressed Mr. Macomber were actually President Washington’s Capitol Hill town houses, designed by him in 1798 and subsequently built by William Thornton, first architect of the Capitol. Hoping by his example to encourage the development of the new federal city, Washington may also have responded to the old speculative impulse that led him to acquire tens of thousands of acres as a younger man. Within easy walking distance of the Capitol, the two adjoining buildings were to serve as rooming houses for the senators and congressmen who would soon descend on the city that still existed largely in the vision of its planners.”
On September 12, 1798, Washington wrote a letter to Alexander White, one of the commissioners in charge of laying out the new Capitol. He began rather plaintively: “Your letter of the 8th. instant, with a plan of the Squares in the vicinity of the Capital, came to me on the 10th; and for the trouble you have been at in designating such lots as you think would answer my purpose, I feel much obliged.
“From what you have said, and from the recollection I have of the ground, I give a decided preference to lot No 16 in square 634; but the price I fear (upwards of $1200) will sink too deep into the fund which must be appropriated to the buildings; and therefore, if the following queries respecting lot No. 2 in 731 are satisfactorily answered, I must content myself with that; as it is not with a view to accumulate property in the City, but merely to contribute a mite to the accomodation of Congress, that I purchase it at all.”
After posing some questions about the land, Washington continues: “As I never require much time to execute any measure after I have resolved upon it; if an Undertaker could be engaged in ye City or its vicinity, to dig the Cellars and lay the foundation … I could wish it to be set about and executed this fall (and the earlier the better)…
“I am not skilled in Architecture, and perhaps know as little of planning, but as the houses I mean to build will be plain … I enclose a sketch, to convey my ideas of the size of the houses, rooms, and the manner of building them…
“My plan when it comes to be examined may be radically wrong, if so, I persuade myself that Doctr. Thornton, (who understanding these matters well) will have the goodness to suggest alterations.
“I shall make no apology for soliciting this favor of the Commissioners. To promote buildings is desirable; and is an object under present circumstances, of the first importance to the City. If then they can comply it conveniently, I persuade myself they will do so.… With very great esteem etc.”
In the end, Washington did build on the costly Lot 16 (Lot 2, the one he was asking White about, is now occupied by the Library of Congress). John Rhodehamel finishes the story: “In 1814, Washington’s town houses shared the fate of the Capitol and the Executive Mansion in being destroyed by fire. Apparently the ruins were incorporated into a new structure erected about 1817, giving the building Macomber saw at least a claim to direct descent from George Washington’s townhouses. This later building is marked by a tablet on the Capitol grounds.”
BASEBALL BEFORE DOUBLEDAY
IN THE LAST issue Victor Salvatore examined the origins of the myth that Gen. Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. In name at least, the game stretches back far beyond the general’s birth, and across the Atlantic. Herewith, some citations:
1700: Rev. Thomas Wilson of Maidstone, England, recalls in his memoirs: “I have seen Morris-dancing, cudgel-playing, baseball and cricketts, and many other sports on the Lord’s day.”
1744: In A Little Pretty Pocket Book, a rhyming alphabet primer that went through several American editions, the letter B stands for “base-ball”:
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destined Post,
And then Home with Joy.
1748: Mary Lepel, Lady Harvey, describes the family of Frederick, Prince of Wales, as “diverting themselves with baseball, a play all who are or have been schoolboys are well acquainted with.”
1778: George Ewing, a Revolutionary soldier, writes of helping pass bitter winter days in Valley Forge by playing “base.”
1786: A Princeton student confides to his diary: “A fine day, play baste ball in the campus but am beaten for I miss both catching and striking the ball.”
1798: Jane Austen writes in her novel Northanger Abbey, “It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books.”
1825: The political boss Thurlow Weed recalls in his autobiography; “Though an industrious and busy place, [Rochester’s] citizens found leisure for rational and healthy recreation. A base-ball club, numbering nearly fifty members, met every afternoon …”
1829:Boy’s Own Book, published in London, gives rules for the game of “rounders”; when the book is republished in Boston under the title Boy’s and Girl’s Book of Sports, these same rules appear under the heading “Base, or Goal Ball.” When the American edition is republished in 1839, the game has become simply “Base Ball.”
HOW TO MAKE A PRESSMAN’S HAT
LAST OCTOBER’S issue, devoted to the American press, omitted one crucial bit of newspaper lore: those deftly constructed square hats that pressmen would whip together from a sheet of newsprint at the beginning of the working day to keep ink, grease, paper lint, and oil out of their hair. Here is how the pros do it, according to the New York School of Printing, which distributes these instructions to its students, and which tells us that pressmen were wearing paper hats folded along this pattern as early as 1748.
DID YOU ONCE SEE STELLA PLAIN?
THE STRIKING pictures of the San Francisco earthquake that appeared in our February/March 1983 issue bear ample witness to the dedication and grit of J. B. Monaco, the local photographer who took them. But this was not the only time in his career that Monaco recorded a San Francisco phenomenon: were it not for his enterprise, the sensation of the 1915 PanamaPacific Exposition would have been forever lost.
Nobody knows quite why Stella made such a hit. As Alfred Heller tells the story in World’s Fair, an attractive quarterly devoted to international expositions (P.O. Box 339, Corte Madera, CA 94925), the painting of the full-blown nude by an artist named Nani had been shown around the country to apathetic audiences for some time before the fair and had come to rest in a St. Louis garret. Her owner, Norman Vaughan, decided to give her one more chance and sent her west to the fair—where she caused an uproar. More than threequarters of a million people paid a dime to see her, and she became the most popular attraction in “the Zone,” the fair’s midway.
She was handsome, to be sure, but as Morton Todd points out in his five-volume history of the exposition, “there were a dozen nudes in the Palace of Fine Arts by some of the greatest modern painters, that could have been seen for nothing.” Whatever the reason—and there is continuing speculation that a bellows hidden behind the canvas was used to animate her generous bosom—Stella clearly had what it took.
Among those who visited her was J. B. Monaco, and he set about getting a picture with the same determination that had spurred him to record the catastrophe that befell his city nine years earlier. With the help of a friend who worked at the fair, he approached Stella’s pavilion under cover of darkness and stealthily drilled a hole through the wall opposite to the one on which she hung. Then, putting his lens to the opening, Monaco made a highly illegal time exposure. He took it home and developed it: no good. So he tried again the next night. This time everything worked perfectly, and Monaco made off with the handsome image shown here.
