Morris Park - The Bronx

Land of the Lottery King

Before I started researching Morris Park, I assumed it got its name from the Morris family, the namesake of the neighborhoods of Port Morris and Morrasania, also in the Bronx. However, the neighborhood is actually named in honor of horse enthusiast and “Lottery King” John Albert Morris. 

Morris Park is between Pelham Parkway to the North, the Hutchinson River Parkway to the East, the Amtrak Northeast Corridor tracks to the south, and White Plains Road to the West. The neighborhood has traditionally been Italian American, though there has been a significant increase in the Albanian population in recent years.

THE GOLDEN OCTOPUS

John Morris made his fortune from the Louisiana State Lottery Company,  a venture he founded in 1868 under the pretext of raising money to fund reconstruction efforts after the Civil War.

At the time, most states had banned lotteries since they were, at best, immoral and, at worst, brazenly corrupt. For a long time, The Louisiana State Lottery Company was the only legal lottery in the US, a distinction it earned through generous bribes and influence peddling. Taking advantage of the reach of the U.S. Postal Service, the company sold lottery tickets nationwide, earning it the nickname of the Golden Octopus. It quickly became one of the largest businesses in the United States.

At its peak, the lottery was generating $2,000,000 in sales per week, a ”fountain of wealth to which that of Monte Cristo was but a mere bagatelle.” ¹

Finally, in 1890, Congress outlawed the mailing of any lottery-related material. Morris moved his headquarters to Honduras and rebranded as The Honduras Lottery Company. He circumvented the new postal ban by having employees collect and carry lottery tickets in their luggage. The scheme continued to operate in the shadows until 1907, when two printing presses owned by the company in Alabama and Delaware were seized, and they were forced to dissolve.

FROM HORSES TO HELICOPTERS

In 1889, flush with lottery money, Morris opened the Morris Park Racecourse, once described as "the finest race track in the world,” on the site of present-day Morris Park. From 1890 to 1904, the racecourse hosted the Belmont Stakes.

Maybe this haunted looking clubhouse kept people away

The Belmont was originally held at the Jerome racetrack, which I wrote about in my Kingsbridge Heights post.

Morris Park Race Track, the entrance to grandstand, B.J., Falk, 1903

The race track closed in 1904 due to declining attendance and, for a couple of years, was repurposed for automobiles, with the first-ever Indy car race held there in 1905.

Then, in 1908, the Aeronautic Society secured the lease for the 372-acre site in the Bronx, paving the way for the world’s first formal airfield.

The Aeronautic Society of New York was formed by members of The Aero Club of America, who were frustrated by the latter’s single-minded focus on hot-air ballooning. They viewed the Aero club as “dominated by a handful of elite sportsmen who had taken up ballooning, supplemented by a larger number of armchair aeronauts drawn from the cream of New York society.”²

The Aeronautic Society members wanted to focus on "heavier-than-air flight,” inspired no doubt by the well-documented successes of the Wright Brothers.

Society members set up shop in the vacant stables and barns and began to build some of the most fantastical machines ever seen.

Soon, the people of the neighborhood began to whisper to one another that queer-looking machines were being built up at the racetrack, and every day, curious, inquisitive little throngs would venture in and peep. Never before had the like of such things been seen in New York City!³

Take, for example, William Kimball’s helicopter with its 20 rotors driven by an intricate system of leather belts and pulleys.

Not to be outdone was the Rickman Helicopter, boasting 32 propellors powered by two men, possessing what must have been enormous quads, astride a tandem bicycle.

And there was the C.W. Williams’ “weird and wonderful ” monoplane

On November 3rd, 1908, those inventions and dozens more were put to the test in front of a crowd of 20,000 spectators.  Not a single one of them managed to get off the ground.

At least the wind-powered gliders made it airborne, though, in Lawrence Lesh’s case, he may have been better off staying put. Lesh spent seven months recovering in nearby Fordam Hospital after the crowds, excited to finally have a reason to look up, encroached upon his landing spot, forcing him into a crash landing that broke his ankle.

“There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.” - Douglas Adams

These pictures reminded me more than a bit of the work of Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison. In particular, this image, The Sower:

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After a big fire at the racetrack in 1910, the city auctioned off the land to real estate developers in 1913.

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PSAC II

Several years ago, while working with the great musician and photographer John Cohen on his archive in the Hudson Valley, I would frequently drive by the blunt silhouette of a building slowly rising on the edge of the Hutchinson River Parkway. One day, I finally pulled over to take a picture.

I love unadorned buildings, structures reduced to the simplest of geometric forms. While I can appreciate the haphazard offset stacks of 56 Leonard (the Jenga building) or the graceful concrete curves of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, there is just something about a simple rectangle that feels both ancient and futuristic.

PSAC II, a 450,000-square-foot monolith, is a perfect cube, a 240-foot wide by 240-foot tall concrete block sheathed in a serrated aluminum facade. The near absence of windows is a security measure.

PSAC stands for Public Safety Answering Center. It can handle all emergency 911 calls and communications in the event that PSAC I (in the Metrotech Center in downtown Brooklyn) goes down. The building was designed to survive a natural disaster or an attack and is said to be “virtually impregnable.” Anti-ram walls and bollards surround the grounds, and the loading bays are equipped with blast doors. There are multiple generators and battery systems, along with enough food to keep the center running for days off the grid.  It is a fortress.

MPC

The Morris Park Crew, or MPC, was a gang of graffiti “bombers” formed in the neighborhood in 1977. In the early 80s, notorious bomber Cap One took over the crew. Cap was infamous for “going over” other graffiti artists’ work, a practice that made him the public enemy of anybody not in the MPC.

Not MPC’s work

The fantastic 1983 documentary Style Wars (free on Youtube) was called the “defining documentary of early hip-hop culture" by Pitchfork (RIP). The doc features interviews with graffiti writers like Cap, Kase 2, and Skeme, whose interview alongside his mothers is one of the best parts of the film.

Other highlights include footage of the dance battle between the Rock Steady Crew and the Dynamic Rockers and a clip of Mayor Ed Koch half-seriously proposing that wolves patrol the train yards to deter would-be vandals. There is no better document of early 80s New York City culture.

5/5 stars

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s field recording is heavy on birds and trains.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Here is another photograph from the great Camilo Jose Vergara. Vergara came to the US in the 1960s from Chile to study sociology at Notre Dame University in the 1960s and has been documenting the urban condition ever since.

180th St. Station, Morris Park Ave., South Bronx, 1983

NOTES

• This painting, The Fledglings by Rudolph Dirks, depicts that first exhibition at the Morris Park Aerodrome in 1908. Dirks was the cartoonist behind the Katzenjammer Kids, the longest running newspaper comic in history.

• Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta lived in Morris Park. Can you find him in this picture taken outside his home?

  

• I stumbled upon this game simulation someone made of a race on the Old Morris Park racetrack. Amazing!

• Conti’s Pastry Shoppe is an old-school Italian bakery that has been in business since 1921. The restored bakery has tin ceilings and wooden cases filled with a Thiebaudian display of treats.

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• This is Frank Stella’s piece, Honduras Lottery Co. It sold last year for 18.7 million dollars. I couldn’t find any reason why Stella named the piece after John Albert Morris’ lottery scheme, but I do think had Morris been aware of the pricing of the contemporary art market, he might have decided to become an artist rather than a Lottery King. Or as “The Guy” on Twitter says:

  

1. “John A. Morris, Lottery King” The New York Times February 11, 1894

2. Crouch, Tom D. “The Aeronautic Society of New York and the Birth of American Aviation, 1908—1918.” New York History 92, no. 4 (2011): 268–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23645508.

3. https://www.earlyaviators.com/as01.htm