Post St. Blues-Fiona at the library

[Dave]

Post Street, called Post Avenue in an earlier time, became one of the most news-producing districts of the city of Utica before it was wiped out by the "urban renewal" of a newly constructed Central Fire Station in 1913. I've never been sure if Post Street was indeed the center of the city's iniquity. For sure, the short one-block street of Negroes (as they were then called) and their frequent run-ins with 19th century morals were tasty fare for newspaper reporters whose editors would have been less comfortable printing reports of similar behavior among the white population... except when the latter were caught in flagrante and hauled into the police station, dragged over Post St. in the new paddy wagon - see post/reply number 5 in the Old News thread. Quite often the reporter's voice in the articles is derisive, because that's the way many people spoke of blacks in that era and the newspaper reporters reflected that attitude. We have no intent to pick on any race here, but like the newspapers of a hundred years ago, we do see a mother lode of human interest as well as the tragedy of confining a people to a short block of the city.
- Dave

Thanks, Fiona, for mailing the cut below to me, from a March, 1894 Saturday Globe of Utica. And I assume this was a Utica edition. (The weekly newspaper had many editions for locales across the nation.)

A woodcut of what we today call Post Street, which ran from Burnett St. to Charlotte St. along the back of the old Central Fire House, No. 2 engine and ladder companies.

[Dave]

The Saturday Globe was an excellent newspaper. Published from 1881 to 1924 in my hometown of Utica, NY, it lived and died before I was born. The Globe reached a weekly circulation peak of almost 300,000 and was read from Maine to California each week in thirty-one localized editions. It was noted for its early use of illustration and especially the early use of photographs.

[fiona]

Dave: that is fantastic. thanks so much for posting this. This part of Utica's history has been pretty much forgotten, bulldozed into the past. A while back I e mailed you a list of all the "Colored Folks" in Utica in 1865. If you don't have it, I have it on my desktop and can e it to you again. The list would be a nice companion piece for this research. I have some more info which I will follow up with as soon as I can. I think this area was also called "Little Hayti:, though I not 100% sure. I know that Mother Lavender resided there as well as on Elizabeth Street.

[Dave]

Mother Lavender! We just gotta find a place for her in the OGH story!




Utica's Mother Lavender: I'll See You in Heaven
by Malio J. Cardarelli, Robert Cimbalo (illustrator)

Relates the life of Ellen Lavender, a former slave who settled in the city of Utica, New York, and was known for her kindness and generosity to the city's poor people.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/7113119-utica-s-mother-lavender

Since my great grandfather was Overseer of the Poor in Utica in the 1880's, I guess he would have known her.

[dicknaegele]

Every time I have gone to Amazon to find one of Malio's books, they are out of print and not available. Are they available at the OCHS Fiona, or are they simply all out in circulation and no longer available for purchase new?

I always loved his historic writings that I read through the OD. I have never found one of his books available for purchase. Does the library have his books for loan? If so, I may try to read one when I am there the next time. He is a great historian, and Utica is blessed to have him to keep the history alive.

[Dave]

Dick, try here, which appears to be the author's website for selling his books:

www.booksbymalio.com/

[dicknaegele]

Thanks Dave. I found "Downtown Utica" among the books on my bedroom shelf. I had forgotten that I had received it a couple of years ago as a gift from one of my sons. I will have to order some of the others when I get a chance. Malio does a wonderful job of chronicling Utica's past and the pictures and illustrations make it interesting reading material.

[fiona]

I think that OCHS has the Mother Lavender Book. I will check it out for you. Dave: Objects in mirror are closer than you think: somehow, someway, we will work her in!

[dicknaegele]

Let me know Fiona. I DO think that I can order it from Malio's link that Dave provided. If I am unable to obtain it, I will let you know. I probably won't be ordering any books until after Kathy's surgery in May, as I recently spent a wad of money and obtained a dozen or so hardbacks to carry me through a month or two. I spent well over a hundred bucks at Books a Million, and Kathy had a fit, haha. I normally read for about 3 hours a day or so.

I really should spend more money on worthwhile publications, rather than on the James Patterson and John Grisham, etc.

I have found that there is not as much local history available here as there is up there in NY. There are plenty of books about Appalachian life, but few local authors that have chronicled events in our local history. I find few in bookstores, and have been able to find most at the public library and didn't have to buy them. I really have only a passing interest in the local history here, and my heart remains in CNY.

I love stories and books about the CNY area. OGH has me excited and loving every installment that you guys post. I really am surprised that you never found your calling as a writer rather than a social worker. You really are amazingly talented. I like to write, and have a large vocabulary and grasp of the English language, but English was never my favorite subject, and while I can write prolifically I often have problems with proper punctuation and grammar.

Thanks for checking on the Mother Lavender book for me. If I can't get it from Malio's site I will appreciate your help in obtaining it.

Black history in the city of Utica interests me. While I know that there are typical stereotypes that draw public ire, I have nothing but pleasant memories of growing up associated with and playing with some of the city's prominent or better known black families, and have a soft place in my heart for their plight. It seems sometimes as though they get lost in the shuffle and are counted with the despicable class of blacks that has moved to Utica from downstate and brought crime and violence with them.

[jon]

THE RUE DE POST
___________________

SOME FACTS ABOUT UTICA'S
FAMOUS THOROUGHFARE
___________________

A Treatise on a dark subject - The Serious
Side of a Social Phenomenon

New York has it's Green street, Utica has its Post Avenue. Each has better neighborhoods to live in, - luckily for everybody concerned. And yet there was a time when Green street had some pretentions to respectability, and when Post Avenue boasted what were then considered good residences. How many of our citizens have walked thorough Post Avenue within the past five years. Very few. It is rated as

[jon]

A DIRTY LOCALITY

It is dirty, but more inside of the frame dwellings that face the street than in the street itself. The pavements are kept rarely clean, - cleaner than they are on many streets of more pretentious and more reputable fame. Only the odors, and the prevailing air of steady, long-continued decay which has fastened
itself on the very frames of the dwellings would lead the casual passer-by to the knowledge that he was among

THE WAY-DOWN FOLKS

of a way-down neighborhood. Yet such would be the case, and no interior city with which we are acquainted has a locality which more unmistakably bears the impress of "way-downness" than does Post Avenue. Its progress on the down grade has been rapid. It is not quite forty years since the land was cut up into lots, and Post Avenue was opened. It was ten or fifteen years since it was all built up, and now it is almost ready to

[jon]

TEAR DOWN

One by one its respectable tenants have left it, until to "go on the Avenue" is as great a slur as can be cast upon the fair fame of any Utican. This reputation, though, is not entirely deserved. It came originally because of the color that overshadowed the street. But colored people lived there when Northern
negroes were somebody, before they had the right of suffrage, and when they

WORKED FOR A LIVING

There are still many, who work for a living; there are more, we are sorry to say, who do not do a whole day's work from one year's end to the other. How do they live? Easiest matter in the world sometimes.

Sometimes they beg provisions.
Sometimes they buy provisions.
Sometimes they steal provisions.

In either case, they obtain enough to eat at a minimum of expenditure. They do not beg piecemeal from door to door; they have more system than that. They

[jon]

BEG WHOLESALE

They avoid private residences; that would be piecemeal. Their best friends are the boarding-houses and the hotels. It is there they beg wholesale. Many a lucky darkey has carried home an old clothes-basket full of cold pieces given him by some boarding-house keeper who either thought she was doing an act of charity or was glad to get rid of the refuse. Many and many a less lucky darkey has bought basket-full after basket-full from the hotels at

TEN CENTS A BASKET

And many lucky darkeys, having got a basket full of eatables safe home at night, have found it in the possession of some other enterprising resident of the Avenue in the morning, empty as a sjevo. Clothing costs them more than anything else. Once in a while they have to do part of a day's work; they get money; money gets whiskey; whiskey gets them drunk; drunkenness is happiness. They must have

[jon]

MONEY

and so they work once in a while. They spend what they make in rum and clothes. It is only a short time since that a Gorman who knew the ways of the world, and the general hard-up character of the Avenue, went about this city and begged old clothes. Nothing came amiss to him. Whatever garment was given to him was a fish for his net. When his collection was complete, he took it down on Post Avenue, and sold out to the colored people.

YOUR CHOICE FOR TENANTS

was his motto. A hat cost ten cents; so did a coat; a vest; pair of pantaloons; pair of boots. The darkeys were happy, and the next day the Avenue was out in full dress; Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any one of these. Looking as they do most of the time, almost everybody on the Avenue has acquired such dissolute habits that there is scarcely any

[jon]

WICKEDNESS

but is committed there every day. Colored people are not the only denizens of the Avenue. There are many low-down white people who are fully as bad, if not worse, than their colored companions.

WHY NOT?

The question has often been asked by residents of the Fourth Ward who consider that their property is injured by having a street of such character in the neighborhood, "Why can't Post Avenue be cleared out and made into a respectable street? It could but it wouldn't pay. The buildings are almost worthless, insurance rates are not high, taxes are very low, and rents in proportion are very high. As an instance we will cite the case of a house and a lot which some years ago, when