New York Exposed


December 1, 2001


BROOKE GLADSTONE: The first modern tabloid was launched in Britain in 1903. Called The Daily Mirror, it was intended for women, but everybody read it -- or more to the point, looked at it - and still does -- and that included Joseph Medill Patterson, a scion of the Chicago Tribune who made a crucial visit to publisher Lord Northcliff after the first world war. Patterson took the idea back to America and launched that mother of all tabloids, The New York Daily News. Recently a coffee table book arrived in our office filled with 80 years of gritty and grainy scenes of New York City from the Daily News. The first featured photograph is weirdly of a terrorist attack on Wall Street on a September day in 1920. The street is thronged with police and pedestrians, smoke and dust. The bomb that had blasted the headquarters of banking giant J.P. Morgan killed 30 and injured 400, and the crime was never solved. Newspaperman Pete Hamill wrote the essay that opens the book, New York Exposed. He says Patterson's New York abounded in the kind of characters that made for fabulous photos.

PETE HAMILL: My favorite in the book is this. There's a photograph taken at the morgue, and there's a man on a slab whose face we don't see, but it's, it's Monk Eastman who was one of the first great Jewish gangsters, and he was sent to prison. He was sent to Sing Sing. Got out in 1915; joined the Army and became this extraordinary war hero. You know the Germans never saw anything like some tough Jew off the Lower East Side. [LAUGHTER] They never saw anything like that in their lives. And he ended up getting a pardon for his heroic war service, so he could vote again --early and often! [LAUGHTER] He was out 6 months; Prohibition was in, and he was shot to death by a crooked prohibition agent. So in this photograph, he's the man on the slab. The coroner himself is standing there, showing off the, the-- what we called in the tabloids in my youth "the stiff," and watching are 5 or 6 of his followers -- the little tough-looking Irish guys from up the block from where we are. And the notion, a) that you would have that kind of access -- that's how young the medium was. You know, today it would be unheard of for the coroner to let you into the morgue to take a photograph and, and let 5 gangsters go in too!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the heyday of the tabloid newspaper, how much did the photo journalist get involved in the story he was covering?

PETE HAMILL: Well I think a good example is the execution of Ruth Snyder, a famous murderess who helped hit her husband in the head with a sash weight [LAUGHS] and was the first wom-- you know, as a woman electrocuted in Sing Sing. In that case they brought a photographer from out of town, from Philadelphia. Then they slipped him in with a camera strapped to his ankle, and he took the famous photograph of Ruth Snyder getting hit with-- I don't know, a 100,000 volts of electricity. It's out of focus; it's not particularly handsome as photography, but it's very mysterious and eerie. There-- there's a guy looking as if he's watching something happening at the stock market rather than the taking of a human life. The Daily News became a sensation at the point -- great ethical quarrels and arguments in the other newspapers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A quarrel that's still going on!

PETE HAMILL:That's still going on. I mean if you believe in capital punishment in my opinion you ought to ask that it be on all the networks. If its idea is to be a deterrent, let's go see it. And that sort of brought us face to face with what this was -- that this is not a-- some nice little clean operation in a - you know a chapel-like-- execution room but-- but something that's pretty horrific. And so in that case I think you find the photographer being right in the middle of a story.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was your overall impression of the themes and the era as portrayed in the 80 years of pictures we see in this book?

PETE HAMILL:Looking at the earlier ones I'm reminded so much of pictures of father with his snap-brim Fedora and-- and the world in which the -- to which he came in 1923 and my mother in 1929 from Ireland as immigrants. This was the world. And they used the Daily News to become Americans, as so many others did. It was much more important to them than reading De Toqueville. You know, you picked up the News, you said this is what this place is about. And then there's-- specific things - the sports things, the DiMaggio, the Peewee Reese, the Dodgers, the, the things that we lost, because I think any history of any city is about the way we remember the things we have lost.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what does this 80 years of photographs tell you about New York?

PETE HAMILL:I didn't get the book in my hand until after September 11th, and it filled me with this great wash of emotion, because it was the kind of world - this - we seemed to have lost on the morning of September 11th - a kind of world with - where people get hurt and people get murdered and people get executed and people dance on the decks of troops ships and then it all seemed like some innocent past with -- just the scale of things was so much smaller. Not just the scale of houses, or, or buildings or-- or skyscrapers but the scale of calamity! Thirty dead in 1920 as compared to 5,000 in--in September of this year-- is, is that shift in scale. I think the challenge to photographers is the same as the challenge to citizens -- can you look at the scale of these calamities and not harden your heart? You know - not grow callous around your heart and refuse to look at the world clearly. I think that's part of what a book like this or any examination of our history is about. [THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Pete Hamill, thank you very much.

PETE HAMILL: Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Pete Hamill is a novelist and veteran newspaperman.

BOB GARFIELD:That'll do it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers; engineered by George Edwards, George Wellington and Dylan Keefe and edited-- by Brooke. Our old friend Sean Landis is back, and our web master is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at Onthemedia.org and e-mail us at Onthemedia@WNYC.org. This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And she's Brooke Gladstone.