"When word of his death reached Philadelphia, Congress voted to create a monument to Montgomery's memory and entrusted Benjamin Franklin to secure one of France's best artists to craft it. Franklin hired King Louis XV's personal sculptor, Jean Jacques Caffieri, to design and build the monument.  ... In 1788, it was installed under the direction of Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant [who redesigned St Paul's interior, the first national capitol on Wall Street, and later Washington DC].  [It is] beneath the portico of St. Paul's Chapel, which served as George Washington's church during his time in New York as the United States' first president in 1789, and where it remains to this day.  Montgomery's body, which was originally interred on the site of his death in Quebec, was moved to St. Paul's in 1818.'

We see the General Montgomery Memorial on my Colonial NYC Tour and my World Trade Center tours.


1890:  New York World's pioneering investigative reporter

Nellie Bly triumphantly returned to New York after traveling around the world in 72 days, faster than Jules Verne's fictional 80 days.


1915:  Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental telephone call from New York to San Francisco.


1947:  Brooklyn-born Al Capone died at 48.


1959:  The Jet Age for the begins in the USA from New York to Los Angeles.  

" We loved your tour! You were fantastic and made our trip so special. It was so fun walking around in NYC with you. ...  Jared. Do you have ANY idea how good you are?  Fabulous, actually....Your brains ...blew both me and Robert completely away... "

retaliation for a workplace injury.


1965:  Actress Diane Lane born in NYC.


1970:  The Boeing 747 went on its first regularly scheduled commercial flight, from New York to London.


2008:  Actor Heath Ledger died in his NYC loft after overdosing on normal doses of prescription and over-the-counter medications to address painful backache and persistent flu symptoms.  The combination led to liver failure.

We can go by his home on Little Italy tours and SoHo tours.



* "CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE" and how it got to Central Park (in a quiet clearing on a knoll behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The following piece was adapted by me from one written by  Paul Rush, a respected NYC tour guide for the Partners in Preservation Program, which raised money to preserve this wonderful monument.  The piece was abridged for brevity and it loses the drama and beauty of his writing.  If there are errors, they are mine.  Here is my digest:


'What is now a felicitous Central Park surprise was once a matter of international significance tracing back 3500 years to the reign of Egypt's Pharaoh Thutmose III's jubilee at the Temple of the Sun. 

900 years later it was toppled by the Persians.

500 years later, Augustus Caesar had the pair obelisks relocated to Alexandria from Heliopolis to celebrate Caesar's deification, much as they had for the Pharaoh.  There they stood for 1300 years when one tumbled due to an earthquake amidst the ruin of Caesar's temple, which had crumbled years prior. 

Nearly 600 years later the US Navy's Lt Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe was inspired by the standing obelisk.  The fallen one was removed to London.  In 1876 an Egyptian leader proposed gifting the obelisk to the US. 

By 1879 the New York (and therefore the nation's) press had obelisk fever.  The New York Herald stated:

"It would be absurd for the people of any great city to hope to be happy without an Egyptian Obelisk!  Why, London, Paris, and Rome could point the finger of scorn at us and intimate that we could never rise to any real moral grandeur until we had our own obelisk!" 

That year Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt gave it to the City of New York. 

Now comes the challenge: moving a stone rock weighing 200 tons with a height of 69 feet and width of 8 ft, then erecting it.  It took the Roebling Factory [related to the Brooklyn Bridge project] to engineer the apparatus. 

Meanwhile, in Alexandria, protests decried the loss of the obelisk, but gold donated by the Vanderbilts to the protest leaders proved mollifying, and the stone was draped in an American flag as it boarded its steamer.

Gorringe's mission was nearly sunk by the weather. 

After arrival, it took months for this two hundred ton, yet delicate, monument to make its way across half of Manhattan using a custom-built railway.

On an icy day, the obelisk was erected amidst hushed silence.  As it rested in place the crowd roared. 

Gorringe died at 44 of an accidental fall.  His tomb is marked by an obelisk.'


Here is a link to Paul Rush's actual and beautifully written and well-researched piece.


















Tangent:  as of this blog 1/23/13, the Statue of Liberty's island, and Ellis Island remain closed due to the Super Storm Sandy on 10/29/12.  The Statue and the Immigration Monument are undamaged but the landings require about $60 million in repairs.  There are no plans to fix this, so the islands remain closed.