Let's be NYC in the 1900-1910 decade!

I'm my grandfather, living somewhere on Elizabeth Street, not far from Old St. Patrick's.

1) He's not building a bridge

2) He's likely building the Empire State Building, which with the Chrysler were 1930's projects.

So this all has jackshit to do with your named decade - which is actually 1900-1909. 1910 is the next decade.

I'm Schlomo from the shtetl in Poland. I escaped a pogram and now share a windowless one-bedroom with ten other people on the up-and-coming lower east side!

I'm every woman, walking around in a long skirt with a hem caked in mud and horse shit.

I am Bridget Malone, recently arrived from Cork. I am a scullery maid for a family in "the 400."

I'm a striking garment worker

I'm the anonymous blackface minstrel performing with Lew Dockstader's troupe at Tony Pastor's. Yassuh!

I am antiques dealer hired to loot Europe to furnish the Morgan Freeman Plant mansion at 52nd Street and 5th (today's Cartier).

I'm the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. We lock our stairwells to prevent employee theft.

I am a recent Barnard graduate who just moved into a settlement house

I'm the Edison talking doll that will give your kids nightmares

I'm Gennaro Lombardi, Italian immigrant, trying to make this thing called pizza happen!!!!

I'm syphilis!

I'mma make lasagne, but they don't like no hard boiled egg here in New York City.

I'm the Irish and Italian newsie boys, peddling newspapers and yelling Extra, extra, read all about it!

I'm Evelyn Nesbit, and I am a WHORE.

I'm a living sign on Fifth Avenue, New York City.

I'm two unidentified children, dancing.

I'm one of these poor immigrants, living 12 to 1 tiny room

I'm the first ball drop in Times Square.

I'm the Italian immigrants. We came all the way from warm, beautiful, rolling hills and vineyards of Italy to live in this filth and poverty??

How poetic, R21. You probably came from an Italian shit hole village stuck in the middle ages, or the slums of Naples, Rome and Palermo.

But you get to cook with tomatoes and basil and onions and meat, R21. Cucina di povera, baby.

I'm the thorny dildo stuck inside of R22's smelly twat!

I hope you never come out, R24.

I am the junk and sludge they are clearing out to build the subway

I am the newly opened subway, not yet smelling of piss and bleach.

I'm Nelly Bly, intrepid no-longer-a-girl reporter, back on the beat and predicting that dames won't get the vote until 1920.

I'm the flask hidden under John Barrymore's bad Three Musketeers wig

I'm May (not with an e yet) West, the vamp of vaudeville

I'm Gabrielle Carteris.

I was a young, dewey 19-year-old coming of age in Brooklyn in 1909!

I'm a ten-year-old girl, working as a full-time live-in maid, while my little brothers work as a delivery boy, a bowling alley pin-setter, an office boy, and a cigar maker.

Our two or three years of formal schooling will not prove adequate preparation for the 20th century.

John (not my real name) - back scrubber at the Ten Cent Turkish Baths in The Bowery.

All right, you pooves, break it up or I'll cart you off to jail in the paddy wagon for violating sodomy laws.

My name is Peter and I'm enjoying my fencing instruction at the New York Athletic Club. Teacher thinks he's hot stuff, though.

I'm a Western Union bicycle messenger boy who'll provide you my tip for a tip

I'm cannabis. I've got another 30 years of legality left before FDR signs the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 into law, so smoke 'em if you got 'em!

I am Diamond Jim Brady escorting Lillian Russell to dine at Luchow's on 14th Street. We are both such famously voracious gluttons that the kitchen will have to be restocked when we finish. Luchow's owner once described me as his 25 best customers. At my autopsy the coroner will note that my stomach is six times normal size.

I'm the stench of slaughterhouses, fat rendering plants, breweries, fish markets, prisons, and workhouses along the East River.

Lawrence, 25. I work at Wanamaker's 5th floor Bicycle Parlor. James, one of the musicians at this afternoon's combined riding demonstration and concert, has been wildly flirting with me every time I ride past.

I spotted this Jewish immigrant singing about rags in the alley

I am the curl's on Sam Bernard's head. He was "was one of the biggest comedy stars on Broadway."

YIKES....CURLS

Not sure how that happened. Probably because I was deciding to be one of the curls, or just all of them.

I've got a suite at the Plaza for a month this July between my sophomore and junior year at Yale. Mother is in Newport and father is living at home, working downtown and screwing his mistress in OUR library, the pig, every evening! Mother can't understand why I want to stay in the city. Howard is why. Did I mention it's a connecting suite?

I'm a limburger cheese sandwich. This is the type of food people had to look forward to back then!

Most people looked forward to that kind of food (and liverwurst and pickled eggs and onion sandwiches and glasses of buttermilk) because many people were of northern and central European peasant stock and those were the foods of the common man. The more exotic foods from Italy, Eastern Europe, and Asia were still mostly feeding a niche audience in ghettos.

I am Julian Eltinge, the toast of Broadway and vaudeville, still considered considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, female impersonators of all time. Sometimes called "Mr. Lillian Russell," my biggest success was as the eponymous star of "The Fascinating Widow."

I'm Renee Harris not knowing that I will lose my husband, Henry B., in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and not knowing that our beloved Hudson Theater will show gay male porn in the early 1970s and later be named the Stephen Sondheim--whoever he is?

I'm Mary McGinty, a "Number Plee-uz" girl at The New York Telephone Company on Cortlandt Street. They prefer to hire Catholic school graduates. We take take instruction well, and don't sass the supervisors.

I'm Flo Ziegfeld, who still rolls over in his grave when people call me Zieg-FIELD !!!!

I am Pier 54 pf the Cunard Line across from West 13th Street on The Great North River, which some have started calling The Hudson River. I have recently been lengthened to accommodate the spectacular new superliners RMS Mauretania and RMS Lusitania. The RMS Carpathia will dock here to disembark the survivors of the ill-fated RMS Titanic; those needing medical attention will be taken to nearby St. Vincent's Hospital. A hundred years from now I will be gone but the steel framework of my entrance will have been allowed to survive in a riverside park to mark my former presence.

RMS Lusitania at Pier 54 on The North River:

Claude, 18. Pastry Assistant at Delmonico's.

Those damn Pièces Montées. ugh. My butt hurts sitting on that crate all day.

I'm Meyers's flawed report on ethnicity.

I am Typhoid Mary refusing to stay quarantined and/or washing my hands after I leave quarantine. I don't understand either. Let me cook dammit!

Oh my God! The guy at R33 getting scrubbed down looks like my uncle Ron when he was that age! My ancestors immigrated here from Ireland in 1899. Could this be one of them?

Glory hole in the Nickelodeon toilet on 14th!

I'm my great-great grandfather's grocery store and salumeria on Mulberry Street, where, on Fridays, you can pick up lasagne by the pound to go. There is never, ever a hard-boiled egg in our lasagne, and the sweet, bulk fennel sausage we use can be eaten at any time of day.

I am the one of many who survived a sinus infection before antibiotics.

I am Shine On, Harvest Moon, introduced in Ziegfeld's Follies of 1908 by famous vaudeville stars Norah Bayes and Jack Norworth. Although written as just one in a long line of Tim Pan Alley "Moon" songs, I will go on to enormous popularity, recorded and performed endless times even into the 21st century.

New York Society Held Up to Scorn in Three New Books; Mrs. Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth" a novel of Remarkable Power -- The Comedy of Social Life in "Our Best Society" -- New York Chapters in "The Reign of Gilt."

Oops, I forgot, I am a book review about three books in which NY Society is held up in scorn!

I'm Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt whose wedding was over the moment Uncle Teddy Roosevelt left and now I'm stuck in a house connected to my mother-in-law-from-hell's house and producing baby after baby. At least I know my husband Franklin will always be healthy and faithful!

R56 Supposedly, you could get a special kind of back scrub for a dollar.

I'm Belle da Costa Greene, the African American librarian for JP Morgan's private library. I'm widely accepted and loved in high society circles, and I come from a very prominent Washington, DC family.

My success and that of my parents before me is evidence that America wasn't nearly as racist as future Jews will try to have you believe.

^ The Wikipedia article explains that she passed for white.

I am Henry James. After many decades away, I visit NYC. When I tour a tenement and see the Jewish children, I remark -- "Here lies the End of America."

R65 SHE PASSED FOR WHITE. Are you black? Black trans?

You mean she had class, manners and intelligence?

Which one of you poofters keeps knicking my husband's underthings from the washing line?

Did the English move to the LES in the 1900s?

Once Jews overran the education system in the US, reading comprehension fell by the wayside.

R72 Is thinking of East Asian immigrants who have turned English and French classes to SHIT here in Canada. They don't have to pass, they have an ESL pass already!

r72, it was by design. Tricky Jews.

I'm John D Rockefeller. I control 90% of the oil in the US, but my Standard Oil will be broken up in 1911.

I'll still go on to be the wealthiest American ever, bitches. 1/90th of the US GDP!

When are you talking about, R72?

Must we have antisemitic shmegegges in every thread? Oy Gevalt!

r71, r76

I'm John D. Rockefeller, later in life. I lost a dime in a payphone trying to make a call. I got the operator on the line and she told me to give her my name and address and a dime would be mailed to me. I told her never mind, she'd never believe me, and hung up.

I am one of the street urchins hanging out with my buddies beside a dead horse.

I'm Madison Square Garden II. My architect, Stanford White, will be killed here over the whore actress Evelyn Nesbit, in 1906. Everybody will know the saga as "The trial of the century", and I'll be a HUGE part of the story!

I am a goose. And these New York "society women" had races with me and other unlucky geese.

I am a boy in a dress, way before the "transkids" craze.

I'm Edith Ewing Bouvier. I'm 10 years old, and I love little kitty cats!

I am a sox salesman. Won't you buy?

whoops re 85 here

I'm Boss Murphy, the Irish head of Tammany Hall beginning in 1902. I dramatically reform the reputation of Tammany, and I play a huge role in reforming factory safety and child labor.

I wasn't really a goody goody, but my humanitarian reforming ways endear me to the Eyetalians and the dirty Jews, god bless 'em.

I'm George Walker, fabulous star of "In Dahomey"

Another, too too fab. 1903

I'm the unwashed hordes of filthy, stinking Irish, here to debase civilized society with their drunkenness and Catholicism.

R59, where's the rest of that story?

R91, it's from the Burns Archive in the Evolution of Medicine on Pinterest. That was the least offensive picture on that page. It was not unusual in 1900 to see people walking around with holes for noses (from syphilis) or with horrible disfigurements from TB, infectious diseases, etc.

[quote]ORBITAL ABSCESS WITH DISPLACEMENT OF THE EYE, 1908 In pre-antibiotic days orbital cellulitis and abscess could result from infections in the upper respiratory tract, sinusitis, furuncles or other infection on the face. This abscess has displaced the eye downward. As the eye is protected in a boney socket with little room for pus or tumor tissue hence it is easily forced from its socket. The infection easily spreads to the brain along the optic nerve or through blood vessels draining the eye.

I'm Little Egpyt, belly dancing for the patrons at the dime museum

Kid Blink was the one-eyed boy wonder who helped make the lives of 1900 paper boys much better:

"The newsboys' strike of 1899 was a U.S. youth-led campaign to force change in the way that Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers compensated their child labor force of newspaper hawkers. The strike lasted two weeks, causing Pulitzer's New York World to reduce its circulation from 360,000 to 125,000.[1] The strike was successful in increasing the amount of money that newsboys received for their work.[2]"

"Several rallies drew more than 5,000 newsboys, complete with charismatic speeches by strike leader Kid Blink.[14] So named because he was blind in one eye, Kid Blink (Louis Ballatt)[15] was a popular subject among competing newspapers such as the New York Tribune, who often patronizingly quoted Blink with his heavy Brooklyn accent depicted as an eye dialect, attributing to him such sayings as "Me men is nobul." Blink and his strikers were the subject of violence, as well. Hearst and Pulitzer hired men to break up rallies and protect the newspaper deliveries still underway.[16] During one rally Blink told strikers, "Friens and feller workers. This is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we'se got to stick together like glue.... We know wot we wants and we'll git it even if we is blind."[17] Although the World and the Journal did not lower their 60¢-a-bundle price, they did agree to buy back all unsold papers and the union disbanded, ending the strike on August 2, 1899."

How the fuck hasn't there been a movie about Kid Blink and the bad ass paper boys of 1899?

Cultural representations[edit] The newsboys were fictionalized in 1942 by DC Comics as the Newsboy Legion, first appearing in Issue number 7 of Star Spangled Comics and continuing therein through issue 64, as well as also continuing in various forms to modern-day comics. The events of the 1899 strike later inspired a 1992 Disney film Newsies, including a character named Kid Blink (who wears an eye patch), but in this version of the story the leader of the strike was named Jack Kelly. A musical theatre adaptation of the film, also called Newsies, debuted in 2011 and played on Broadway from 2012 to 2014 and on tour from 2014-2016. The newsboy strike is described in detail in the 2003 non-fiction book, Kids on Strike!

I'm Grandpa Frank, sent away to military school, to toughen me up.

R92, thanks! It just shows you what antibiotics have done for us. It's scary to think that a lot of the ones we use now may not continue to be effective forever, thanks to new antibiotic resistant illnesses. I'm going to check that site out.

A lot of people must have made a living shoveling horse shit off the streets. Or did they just leave it there?

We grew up fast, capiche?

My father gave me a trip to Europe hoping I'd forget my beau. But I'll show him. I'll enjoy the trip but then we'll eventually get married and have lots of children as God intended. (It will be icky but I'm a good Catholic girl and will close my eyes and think of the Pope.) I'll raise my daughters to be nuns and my sons to marry good girl. My beau wants our sons to go into politics but that's just as icky. Maybe one of them will be a priest!

Racial harmony

White privilege

I'm Little Norway in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You'd never know such a place existed when you visit there now.

I'm Union Square

Orchard Street

I'm the balconies that served as extra closets

Alec, your hot Page Boy working Peacock Alley at the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

I'm the beautiful building on the right, soon to be demolished and replaced by a much shorter building, go figure.

replacement building, JP Morgan HQ

Groucho and Harpo Marx

Chinatown, 1899

I'm Dr Elizabeth Bruyn, ambulance surgeon

Take a sightseeing tour on the Observation Automobile. It's the Only Way!

I'm the bar at the Hotel Astor, a known gathering place for pansies. It's where they meet and then go off to engage in sodomy, the godless degenerates!

I'm the ice man. I bring coal in the Wintertime.

I'm Central Park on a snow day

I'm your hot New York taxi cab driver.

Dude looks like Brando. Is that taxi named "Desire"?

I'm the phrase, "23 skidoo." What the cops said to the scallywags hanging around the Fuller Building in order to catch a glimpse of bloomers at the windiest spot in the city. W. 23 St.

R118, that look says "Yeah, bitches, you know what else I'm riding."

For r115:

Just got pinched at the Ass-tor bar Well, did you evah? What a swell party this is.

HELP!! I'm a construction worker lost somewhere in the seven floors of steel stacks being installed below what's to be the main reading room of the New York Public Library now under construction.

Inspector, Ellis Island. .. Let me stick my fingers in your eyes, and maybe we could meet up for a drink sometime?

Did the inspectors of Ellis Island inspect immigrant men's HOLES, as well?

Only the ones who they thought had anal fissures, R125.

I am Francesca. I am 15 years old. I have just begun working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory with my sister, Anna Maria, who is 17. She is engaged to be married. We botH make 15 cents for each finished shirtwaist.

Next year we will both leap to our deaths when a terrible fire destroys the factory. Mostly because of unsafe work conditions.

Most of the casualties are young Italian and Jewish immigrant girls like myself.

We are "workhouse boys" aged 12 and under. Our families depend on our income.

Our life expectancy is about 30 to 35.

I'm Little Italy before the Asian invasion.

I am practically naked on the beach. I see no reason to take my shoes of in the water.

I'm so excited to be starting my new job here today!

Here you go, boys.

We're the cunning Jews who owned the Triangle Shirtwaist Company

We're a quintet of bathing beauties, flouting convention and flirting with scandal by showing our bare legs and ankles in public! Hopefully, we won't get arrested for this.

HARLOTS!

I will be the inspiration for Reginald van Gleeson.

I'm John Sloan. I painted the Haymarket, danced, dined and dicked my way to heaven there, too!

Gotta say, this is a fabulous thread.

Klaus, Dietrich, Ernst, und Hans ... Neueinwanderer in Coney Island, 1904.

Der 'sexy' Mann im Hintergrund starrt immer bei uns!

Tom, 20, Bakery worker. Try breathing in flour all day and working with these zombies!

If you're going to Coney Island drop by to say hi and visit our exciting Infant Incubators Exhibit!

Welcome to our opium den!

I'm the scandalous, nude bronze statue of Diana, perched atop Madison Square Garden II for all of New York to see. I was absolutely, positively NOT modeled after jail-bait Evelyn Nesbit!

I'm the racist bartender who charged that uppity negro vaudeville star Bert Williams $100 for a glass of whiskey; of course he can't afford it, right?

That happened to Jack Klugman (?) but it was over an expensive deli meat and the rude counterman was a fellow Jew.

I'm the bottle beside Constance Collier, star of the New York and London stage, here being very dramatic in a production of Oliver Twist at the New Amsterdam Theatre.

I'm a magazine that forgot about style and taste a hundred years later...

Excuse me as I try to recover from my night out at the Everard Baths.

I'm going to make salacious insinuations about Lily Bart in mixed company!

Welcome to Sing Sing! Your medical intake exam will be INVASIVE!

I'm Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, bohemian sculptress!

I'm young Leo Frank, Brooklyn Jew who will grow up to be an Atlanta sweatshop owner who raped and murdered little Mary Phagan, and then tried to blame it on the black guy.

But because of my New York connections, and because I was president of the Atlanta Jewish secret society B'Nai B'Rith, I will forever be defended in the Jewish press as an innocent man framed by the evil Southern gentiles.

Basically I'm as crooked and slimy as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Jews, who probably also did their fair share of raping and exploiting before the fire.

R152 is Jim Conley's great grandson, presumably. Bad blood will out, it seems.

Jack, I feed the seals at the Central Park Menagerie.

As does Jew blood, r153.

Let;s save up all of our monthly wages and then take a trip to Luna Park!

Newspaper is our favorite kind of garbage

Manhattan Bridge

I'm the drunken micks, a derelict race who spend all their wages on the demon drink in seedy saloons, before they're loaded into the paddy wagon.

Boyfriend-of-the-month and I buying clams in Mulberry Bend.

R124 - That's where my grandfather(26) and grandmother(16) entered North America from Odessa Russia in 1906 from the SS Rotterdam ship, or a ship that sailed from Rotterdam(?). They took in a world's exposition(oral history), and made their way to Saskatchewan, Canada. A decision they regretted, but on the other hand, other distant relatives that stayed behind ended up in Siberia. They weren't Russian though, they were German. I have a copy of their entry at Ellis Island because of the work of Lee Iacocca. Apologies for going off theme. This is my only connection to New York between 1899-1909, my grandparents were two of the millions that passed through there.

I'm J. P. Morgan's unretouched rhinoplymatic nose!

His prostitutes have to get right up to close to me and pretend I don't make them gag.

I'm Mrs. Stuyvesant "Mamie" Fish, and I rule NYC society. I could have every single one of you for breakfast.

That includes you, John D Rockefeller,. your wife would kill to be invited to my parties.

I was once the lady friend of Stanford White!

We're the Women's Christian Temperance Union - lips that touch liquor will not touch ours!

And that means BOTH sets of lips, you drunken degenerates!

Just one of the "Mess Boys" at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital.

Rat problem? .. Just call 'Ferrets R Us.'

Banana Docks,1906.

bump

**BREAKING**: Woman Loses FAAAABulous Hat During Fit of Despair!

What do you call a one-legged newsie? Probably something like Hoppy. Or Stumpy Pete.

I'm the hot pieces of Irish ass. Drunken, living in tight quarters, with endless supply of men to screw.

I'm the emerging black ghetto of Harlem, filled with class and sophistication. White people have stolen me. and black ghettos across America are now crime ridden slums.

I'm the East River, which would freeze over in the winter and people would walk on the ice between Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.

r174, is that true? Thats cool..I think.

I'm this chaotic scene in Little Italy/Mulberry Street, now available in color!

Hurry! It's FREE ICE day in Knickerbocker Village!

Speaking of Delmonico's here we are hosting Mark Twain's 70th birthday in 1905.

Walking the Brooklyn Bridge was all the rage.

The Columbia University rowing crew.

A real life pygmy from Africa exhibited in a cage at the Bronx Z00 in 1906. 250,000 people came out to see him. His name was Ota Benga.

I'm Topsy the Elephant. I was considered a "bad" elephant, killing at least one circus goer and possibly other men over my career. I ended up at Luna Park in Coney Island but I was so hard to control and caused so many disturbances that even the ASPCA agreed I needed to be put down. The execution was done by a combination of poison, strangling with ropes, and electrocution.

Contrary to popular belief I was not killed by killed by Edison as a demonstration of direct current. The AC/DC Current wars were long over and Edison was out of the electric business by 1903. But Edison's film company did film my execution and that famous film coupled with Edison's reputation with electricity still lead people to believe I was Edison's victim.

Someone named Anderson Cooper is gong to buy our brand new firehouse someday!

In 1900, it was legal buy cocaine in a pharmacy for around $1.00 an ounce. I'm the guy that died of a severe nose bleed.

On the other hand, productivity was an at all time high in the office, R184. The shorthand world record was surely never surpassed.

I'm Diamond Black, and I live in the NYC Zoo. I modeled for the buffalo nickel, and the 1901 $10 US Note. After a long and distinguished service, they cut me up and sold me as steaks.

(Christmas Moose, a word to the wise!)

People say I'm photogenic. And tasty.

I'm Tim "Pan" Alley, r60's hero!

I'm Robert Moses, rubbing his hands together, planning, planning ...

Got blood bucket? ... Preparing for surgery, New York Presbyterian, 1901.

The annual Horse Parade sponsored by the ASPCA to celebrate the city's many work horses and get people thinking about their welfare. The parade started at Washington Square, with horses and drivers going up Fifth Avenue to Worth Square at 23rd Street. About 1200 horses would participate. In 1908, the Borden's Milk Truck Team won the Obstacle Race.

OP, why pretend when you can BE!!!

I can always find my grandfather in family photos because he always had a boater hat (as in R192).

R173 - my grandmother was born across the street from what is now Marcus Garvey (Mount Morris) Park during that decade.

Imagine how nasty people smelled back then. No showers, maybe a bath once a week. Deodorant and shampoo as we know it today didn't exist. No A/C in the summer. If we could go back in time to this period, we would be disgusted by the lack of hygiene and the smells.

People were certainly more aromatic back in those days but didn't necessarily reek, at least in upper middle class and above. In the 18th and even early 19th centuries, bathing was regarded as unhygienic but by the turn of the 20th century, people knew that washing the armpits at least once a day relieved the odor. My grandmother (and I am an old) told me that all properly raised young southern girls knew that dipping a cotton ball in alcohol and swabbing the pits removed odor, even if had to be done frequently. And body smells can be quite erotic, especially if you are used to them.

I'm convinced that part of the objection of woman in the workforce stemmed from men feeling insecure about smelling.

There's an expression: when everyone smells, no one smells.

We're the shoeshine boys in Little Italy who'll put the sparkle in your shoes for a pittance!

What are you guys talking about with these smells?

I'm sure guys that looked like this smelled HEAVENLY!

Exactly, R198.

R200, do you know why his bed is elevated? Rats.

Did gay guys do a-rimming back then?

r203 I doubt it, as clean holes were very rare.

I'm sad, then, that men did not yank down their suspenders and present hole to one another!

I'm infant mortality, hovering somewhere between 150 and 175 infant deaths per 1,000 newborns!

But that's probably because of serious underreporting among recent immigrant populations badly underserved by public health.

Again, by 1900 it was known that regular bathing would keep a person from becoming totally rank and it was expected in the middle and upper classes. To a society born before the use of deodorants (which didn't become the standard for American men until the 1950s), the aroma from a healthy person was not necessarily offensive and could be attractively erotic, they were otherwise clean and healthy.

Before that, though, when regular bathing was considered unhygienic, well.....

Lady seated next to Dr. Johnson at dinner: Sir, you smell!

Dr. Johnson: No, madame. I stink, you smell.

I am romantic hair!

We're shirtwaists, and we're brisk and efficient.

r180 I'm Jimmy, the coxswain and pass-around bed warmer.

We're German Jews, and we got here first. Most of us didn't even come in through Ellis Island.

We're more professional, better educated, more nicely dressed, and have prettier homes than those tacky Polish, Russian, and other Jews. Just saying.

Some of us even have Episcopalian friends!

... unlike, say, these poor schmoes. What did they pack with them from the old country? Hampers of dirty laundry? Spoiled fruit? Ewww.

Even among the outsiders... some of us were less outside than others.

We're a family of 10 Irish Catholic immigrants (not clear whether we're all siblings, or 2 are the parents, or what...) but aren't we cute together? We all settled in Brooklyn originally but none of us remain there. We're all long dead.

One hundred odd years later, there are about 150 descendants all over Long Island and parts of New Jersey. Married mostly (but not exclusively) to other descendants of Irish Catholic immigrants. Who don't have a clue, by comparison.

I'm the guy that sez to hell with the poverty, odor, horrible food and living conditions, unsafe jobs, ugly hair styles and down right inhumanity- fuck the good ole days because they weren't so good at all.

I'm Little Mary Pickford, and I pretty much own the power to bend men's minds to my girlish whims.

Hee.

R203 They might have done it after going swimming naked in a river, lake, the ocean, etc. Or even the Y.

Oh my God , R200 literally made me recoil in horror ! That mattress must have been INFESTED with vermin . The Pater in R211 is hot ,and obviously potent .

Why did men all swim naked back then when other things like sex were not even talked about? Now that's all people talk about and you are not allowed to swim naked at the gym.

Sleeping on the stoop.

Naked boxing at the Turkish baths!

I'm an underaged garment worker living in a flea-infested tenement. Thanks to labor unions and the New Deal, I will live out my days watching color t.v. in Coral Gables amid wall-to-wall carpeting, air conditioning, and the laughter of my grandchildren.

R220 I'm a member of the Fraternal Order of the Small Dicks.

I'm the great Fifth Avenue mansions, which were built for the ages, but won't last a single generation.

Reminder: Showers are for horses ONLY!

"One day, when I'm feeling VERY naughty, I'm going be daring enough to show my ankles on the beach!"

Looking at these old photos, it's so strange to see white people living like this. Hard to imagine white people with multiple kids living like third worlders today, especially in America.

R226 is mentally stupid.

r227 that's white trash, which is different.

It's probably Irish or Italian, not considered white back then

If r228 was living back then, he would view those white people as "white trash, that's totally different".

He clearly lacks the empathy to view people as people, and clearly dehumanizes "trash" as "totally different".

And that's how it works. Demonizing the poor, making them into a different species, is how we end up with the need for violent revolution in the end.

Oh look, the humorless dykes have arrived!

I'm Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a pug nosed bulldog of a woman, and I'm still proud of forcing my beautiful daughter, Consuelo, into marrying the Duke of Marlborough.

I'm Annette Kellerman. I am a polio survivor who overcame my disability through swimming. I became a champion swimmer and a champion for women's rights. I got arrested in Boston for wearing a man's swimsuit. I swim at the Hippodrome and will swim nude in the silent movies I make. In the '50's Esther Williams will star in a movie about me. I was voted as having the nicest female figure of the time.

I'm Eugen Sandow, famous Prussian bodybuilder. This photo was taken in New York City, more than likely for one of my many appearances while on tour with the Trocadero Vaudevilles. For a small fee, women could come backstage and touch my muscles (donated to charity, of course). This was Mr. Ziegfeld's idea.

You can see why I am sometimes referred to as "the father of modern bodybuilding."

And speaking of Mr. Ziegfeld, here we are, some of the original Ziegfeld Follies girls from 1907.

I am "the love that dare not speak its name."

It's the 28th of July, 1908, and I am Edit Corse Evans of 19 West 12th Street (a very fine address), and I have just read that the design plans for the wonderful new ship Titanic have been set, and I am DETERMINED to book passage on its maiden voyage in a few years!

It will be the experience of a lifetime, I'm sure!

We are a bunch of kids playing in the gutter beside a dead horse. (1903)

^ One site said 1903, another said 1905

I am a cartoon giant, messing around with New York in 1905.

I'm the subway, which was much more civilized than it became in later decades.

I'm the subway, in motion!

I'm a cartoon complaining about the subway service in 1905

I'm a cartoon complaining about the subway service in 1905

I'm a cartoon complaining about the subway service in 1905

I'm a cartoon complaining about the subway service in 1905

I'm a cartoon complaining about the subway service in 1905

ooops sorry about the repeats!

I am what happened on 23rd Street. Scandalous plus featuring that annoying little photobomber in the background, acting like he's never seen a motion picture camera before!

Huge whiff of tuna at the end of that clip

I'm the wind, trying to blow everyone's hat off, at the foot of the Flatiron Building, circa 1903.

Washington Market in Lower Manhattan, 1907 .. a place for sellers to unload goods from the train yard in bulk. Sort of like Costco.

Do you know where your children are?

They might be swimming in the East River.

Oh my god , how FILTHY must that water have been ?!?

River would have been the cleanest place to be in the city.

You get out of the river and hope one of those horses didn't shit on your clothes.

And when it rained , R257 ? Where do you think all that horse shit etc , ended up ? Pittsburgh ?

There was horse shit everywhere back then, the people didn't even really notice it.

good point, r258, they probably just shoveled the shit into the river when it wasn't raining too.

With horse shit everywhere, I imagine there were horse flies everywhere?

I am a "bohemian" drag ball in Webster Hall... in 1910.

Don't forget to come Shoot the Chutes at Luna Park, Coney Island. Youtube video.

We're porn.

Regardless of our private proclivities.

Unspeakable acts of depravity!

Yes, R265. Unspeakable.

Because it IS hard to speak with a fat cock in one's mouth.

That Victorian era orgy is said to be six separate photos that someone's put together in a composite.

And here we are just BEFORE the photo in R265 was taken!

Busy afternoon!

And we all had to head to Hartford for anonymous Confessions so we could say Mass the next morning!

Coming to an office near you!

Our latest model for 1900 is the Underwood No. 5, and one of the first to allow the operator to actually see interactively the results of a key press. On this keyboard, you'll be able to read what you're typing as you type it! This is a clear indicator of things to come!

We're just college chums, we swear!

New York Athletic Club, circa 1900

I'm the random DL poster who claims to have been 40 in like 1963, being born at St. Francis hospital.

R271 wow that brick house in the tights.

"Rooftop gardens" for entertainment were popular, like the Jardin de Paris

"Where the Smart Set Go!"

I'm Eva Tanguary, the "I don't care!" girl.

I bet I'd be popular on DL 1909!

R255 & R256, my NYC-born dad and his buddies used to swim and dive in the Hudson River when it was hot in the summer, as little boys. This was back in the late '40s, early '50s. Boys back then were expected to get a "little dirty," and people weren't as germ-phobic as they are now.

I've heard that the Hudson and East rivers were "cleaner" back then, r277. Do you know anything about that?

I imagine if anyone tried to swim in one of those rivers today, there would be a full-on NYPD SWAT team operation, and it would be national news.

R277-278..There was no EPA back then , and you mean to tell me that companies WERENT dumping god knows what into the east river ? Just because they may have swam in the east river doesnt mean it was healthy or wise to do so . Gowanus canal ring a bell ?

R278, probably more human waste in first-world rivers in the past, than today. Our rivers were also more likely to catch fire in the past, than today. Conversely, the Rxs we use today get pissed out and make their way into the food chain.

What about the kids playing in the gutter beside the dead horse at R240? That doesn't look sanitary.

Dirty irish & italian boys r240

That is what the globalists want to turn NYC back into.

bump

Were there old queens in 1960s/70s NYC who were all, "1905 Manhattan was SOOOO much better!!!"

w&w R285!

Yes, R285. And living in the Village and Chelsea since the 1970s. I can say maybe they were right.

I would like to time-travel to this era of NYC just for one week.

Guys in suspenders are hot.

p.s., I would like to suck & fuck during that one week, too.

Same here, r288. That's one period of NYC history I've always been interested in. I would love to go back for a week to see how it really was. I think I could deal with all the smells.

Me, too R290. Does anybody know any good gay-male fiction set in this era?

Been re-watching "The Knick" on Cinemax today, it's such a wonderfully atmospheric representation of the period. Would love to be able to experience that time, and the bohemian underground that thrived in many large cities.

What was the gay scene like?

Who was their Lady GaGa? :-P

I'm a dentist on Fifth avenue. Business is lousy and I don't know why, I can pull a tooth and you'll barely scream. Simply raise your right hand when the 'pressure' becomes too much and I'll stop. I do recommend brushing the teeth at least once per week, whether you need it or not.

I need to go out and get more Laudanum! I just can't function without it anymore.

bump

[quote]Me, too [R290]. Does anybody know any good gay-male fiction set in this era?

Try Caleb Carr. At least one of his novels involved gay males--prostitutes and lowlifes, IIRC. Don't remember which book, though.

I'm the ungodly hordes of filthy, drunken Irishmen puking and fighting in the streets.

Bump.

I am the Flatiron Building. Be sure not to get knocked over by my updraft as you gaze upwards at my Beaux Arts magnificence.

I am three of my four grandparents, landing at Ellis Island. Two are from Ireland, but they won't meet each other until they move to New Jersey a few years later. My mother's father moved from Austria. Where would he have departed Europe from?

I'm the outhouses behind the tenements. I smell mighty nasty!

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I'm Andrew Carnegie, and this is my house. It's 1902. Last year, I sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J.P Morgan for $480 million, and I'm richer than Rockefeller.

We're the Snake Feeders at the Central Park Menagerie.

I was once the ladyfriend of Stanford White!

I will be the foreskin surrounding the intact peni before the US decided to become all Jewish and mutilate boy babies.