Author: annsepstein@att.net

In many of New York City’s Lower East Side tenement buildings, electricity was not installed until mid-1924, and that was only after pressure and legal threats from City Council. Gas lighting was added abut twenty years earlier to comply with the Tenement House Act of 1901, which required a light source on every floor from sunset to sunrise. Tenants paid for gas through a coin-operated meter in the kitchen of each apartment. Before electricity, they navigated the building’s dark hallways and back rooms using kerosene or oil lamps. Read more about the hard lives of immigrants on the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

Proofing pages for my upcoming historical novel Tazia and Gemma (Vine Leaves Press, May 2018), I double-checked to make sure I wasn’t anachronistically using the word “nerd.” The relevant scene is set in 1956. To my relief, I confirmed that the word was in common use at the beginning of that decade. Nerd first appeared in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950) when narrator Gerald McGrew says he will put “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too” in his imaginary menagerie. Within a year, nerd was a popular term for a drip or square in Detroit and then spread to the rest of the country, and beyond. Read more about the evolution of “nerd” in BEHIND THE STORY and about Tazia and Gemma in NOVELS.

In the early 1900s, garment sweatshops on New York’s Lower East Side had no ventilation and poor lighting. Immigrant laborers worked 12-16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Weekly sweatshop wages were $6-10 for men; $4-5 for women, and less than $1 for children. Minimum age for workers was 14 years old, but this law was routinely violated. Read more about the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century in On the Shore (NOVELS).

New York City’s Central Park was the first landscaped city park in America. It opened to the public in 1858. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. The Statue of Liberty, across the East River, was dedicated in 1886. Not until twelve years later (1898) were the five boroughs — Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), and Richmond (Staten Island) — consolidated into one municipality. Read more about New York City history and the immigrants who were welcomed by the Statue of Liberty in On the Shore. To learn why NYC is called “Gotham” see BEHIND THE STORY.

Researching my novel-in-progress, One Person’s Loss, set during World War Two in New York City, I learned that the first penicillin factory in the world was opened by Charles Pfizer and Company in Brooklyn in 1943. The factory made 90 percent of the antibiotics carried by Allied forces on D-Day. Are you curious about what else was manufactured in New York City to support the war effort? See BEHIND THE STORY.

In the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic, there were 50-130 million deaths; 500 million people were infected (one-third of the world’s population), 10-20% of whom died. Of U.S. soldier deaths in Europe in WWI, over half (43,000) were killed by the Spanish flu rather than by enemy fire. Read more about the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic and WWI in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

Following a wave of xenophobia, the U.S. began to restrict immigration in 1917. The annual rate peaked in 1921 (800,000) until the Immigration Act that year limited new arrivals to 3% of the country of origin’s population. After that, the annual rate swung widely. It fell during the 1922 Depression (300,000), rose in 1923 (500,000), and again in 1924 (700,000), until the 1924 Immigration Act, which favored northern Europe, imposed severe restrictions on central, southern, and eastern Europeans (mainly Jews and Catholics). As a result, immigration dropped once more in 1925 (300,000), until the limits were relaxed in 1929. Read more about the immigrants who made it to America at the turn of the last century in On the Shore (see NOVELS).