Dance The Night Away

Location:   The Big Apple
Year:   Now

Sanitation workers in New York City refer to  maggots as “disco rice.”

Yellow Cabs

Location:   Manhattan and Chicago
Year:   Early 1900s

Ever wonder why New York taxis are all yellow?  It's because John D. Hertz, an enterprising immigrant from Hungary, discovered through his own researches that bright yellow is the color most quickly identified against a busy background. Beginning in 1915, Hertz founded the Fifth Avenue Cab Company in New York, the Yellow Cab Company in Chicago, and the nationwide Hertz Auto and Truck Rental businesses. Until he sold his interests in these companies in the 1940s, he maintained a virtual monopoly on the "pay-to-ride" / "pay-to-drive" industry in the Northeast and Midwest. Yellow became, and remains, the traditional color for taxis.

The Dutch skyscraper

Location:   New York, New York
Year:   1660s

The New York City skyline is world famous for its skyscrapers, which have been the tallest buildings in the world and the Western Hemisphere. In 1660, however, the New Amsterdam skyline was dominated by a two-story-high windmill.

 

Paying The Beer Tax

Location:   New York City
Year:   1931

Ah, Prohibition!  The Eighteenth Amendment was easily the most violated law in American history. Everybody violated the Volstead Act, even Volstead. Besides mountain moonshiners and urban bathtub gin distillers, numberless speakeasies and blind pigs dotted the American map ("blind pigs" got their name because they exhibited odd animals --- one-armed monkeys, tailless raccoons, and blind pigs --- for a small fee.  Visitors were entitled to a free snort with their admission price. Since the hooch wasn't being sold, technically it wasn't illegal). 

Gentleman Jim. "Would you care for some tea with that tea, sir?"

Bob Hope as "Beau James"

When it came right down to it, there was nothing New York City's "Night Mayor" Jimmy Walker loved more than a good brouhaha unless it was a chorus girl. "Beau James" was a fierce opponent of Prohibition, and made no secret of it, taking on the stodgy Federal government and its ardent (and not so ardent) drys at every opportunity. Populist that he was, he supported the citizenry's right to knock a few back.  In 1932,  he organized a "We Want Beer" parade down Fifth Avenue in lieu of a dry Oktoberfest. And he made sure, quietly, that the people got what they wanted.

Here's a toast to raising taxes!  ;)

Walker maintained several secret stashes of expensive liquor  for his own use all around the city. Walker might not have known it, but he had a friend in FDR, who kept his own secret stashes in the White House, the Presidential retreat at Shangri-La (Camp David), and at his home, "Springwood" in New Hyde Park, New York.

Bottoms up!

"When it rains, it pours."

Location:   Wyoming County, New York
Year:   1848

The Onondaga Salt Company opens its first salt mine in Wyoming County, New York, in anticipation of a massive demand for salt by the '49ers of the California Gold Rush.

Business booms, and the company relocates its headquarters from Syracuse to Chicago in 1849, changing its name to the Richmond Salt Company. In 1889, Joy Morton, the son of J. Sterling Morton, robber baron, politician, and founder of Arbor Day, buys the Richmond Salt Company, renaming it the Morton Salt Company  in 1910.  

In 1911, Morton devises a salt compound that does not cake with dampness.  In 1914, the company adopts its famous "Morton Salt Girl" logo and and motto, "When it rains, it pours." 

Eventually, the company becomes the world's largest producer of table salt. Its Wyoming County salt mine still produces salt to this day.  

Ithaca, New York, or: Sodom-By-The-Lake

Location:   Ithaca, New York
Year:   1790

The City of Ithaca, New York, at the southern end of Cayuga Lake, was named for Odysseus' home island in the eponymous Homeric epic. There are over 100 waterfalls within a ten square mile radius of the town. 

Originally Iroquois land, Euroamerican settlement in the Ithaca area began in 1790, when the U.S. Congress began giving land grants to Revolutionary War veterans in lieu of back pay.  

The region was known as "The Central Military Tract" and the main settlement was known first as "Ulysses" and then "Odysseus" before it became "Ithaca".  Ithaca was also informally called "Sodom-By-The-Lake" for awhile due to the many taverns and houses of ill-fame that served its early mostly male population. It is now the site of Cornell University and Ithaca College. 

Famous natives of Ithaca include "Roots" author Alex Haley, astronomer Carl Sagan, television writer Rod Serling, and former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz.

The blast-proof Buddhist

Location:   The Upper West Side of Manhattan
Year:   1955

Shinran Shonen (1173-1263) was the founder of the True Pure Land School of Buddhism in Japan. Ordained a monk at age nine, in his twenties he became disillusioned with the increasing deification of the Shogun within Japanese society and within Japanese Buddhist practice. He joined the monk Honen, who founded the Pure Land School.Pure Land Buddhism taught that society was so corrupt that individuals necessarily had to seek spiritual intercession from a higher power to achieve Enlightenment. Both men's practice focused on chanting the Nembutsu:

Namu Amida Butsu  --- "I take refuge in the Amida Buddha."

Due to their disregard for the Shogun, both Honen and Shinran were forbidden to associate or teach.  Although they each continued to teach secretly, their long separation caused the two men to develop different approaches to the practice they taught. Shinran believed that entry to the Pure Land (Enlightenment) could be attained in life, while Honen believed that it could only be attained at life's end. Honen died in 1212, the two men never having seen each other again. 

Although Shinran always considered himself a disciple of Honen's, their followers did not, and the Pure Land School and the True Pure Land School remained distinct. Eventually, Shinran's True Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhism) became the largest Buddhist sect in Japan, a status it retains today. 

Shin temples all have a statue of Shinran standing guard at their entrance. The Shinran figure at the doorway of the New York Buddhist Church on Riverside Drive is unique. Until 1945, the statue stood before a Shin temple in Hiroshima just over a mile from Ground Zero of the atomic bomb blast. Although the temple was utterly destroyed in the blast, the statue endured, unscathed. 

In 1955, the statue was gifted to the NYBC as, “a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace,” as its commemorative plaque reads.