“IT BURNED WELL” (1885)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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Have you ever left something aboard a subway car and wondered what happened to it?
The Metro Transit Authority has an entire “Lost & Found” room devoted to articles that were forgotten on their property. In it, they hold items discovered (or turned in) on their trains and buses for “three months to a maximum of three years, depending on the estimated value of the item.” If your item is not retrieved within this period of time, it is either auctioned or, if it is in poor condition, sent for disposal.
Back in the late 19th century it appears that disposal was the only method employed.
FOUND ON THE BRIDGE
Well, apparently, the Brooklyn Bridge being so new in 1885, having so recently opened, and being so popular with the public, the accumulation of so many disparate articles on the “cars” was likely a phenomenon that had not presented itself before.
As such, there was no program designed to locate the owners of the materiel left on trains and street-cars.
It was simply summarily destroyed.
According to a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that year, a “great assortment of odds and ends which have been picked up on the bridge cars and promenade during the past year were cremated in the big furnace this afternoon. The collection would have made a wagon load.”
“Its promiscuity,” the Eagle continued, “was startling.
“One of the articles was a hoop skirt which some lady had lost on the cars,” the Eagle reporter noted, apparently grievously offended.
The reporter then went on (fortunately for us) to list nearly everything of note that could be seen in the pile of articles that were about to return to their original state:
“(T)here were twelve old hats of both sexes, baby clothes enough for a Mormon family, muffs and tippets and cuffs and collars, and lunch baskets and gripsacks, ten or twelve decrepit umbrellas, half a dozen pairs of glasses, a score of canes, several ladies’ cloaks and gentlemen’s overcoats, fifty or sixty parcels of old books and papers and general trash, workmen’s tools of various kinds and an infinity of odds and ends.”
Captain Ward of the bridge police force, in charge of the disposal of the items, said that it “gave him the cholera to look at it.”
After the city’s “big furnace” had done its duty on the pile of lost items, the Eagle reporter commented on its efficiency.
“It burned well.”
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Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
