Excerpt from Satirical History of NEW YORK
NEW “ALL-TOO-TRUE-BLUE” (ALTERNATIVE) STATE HISTORIES
Indians & J. Fenimore Cooper
The Kings of the Hill, the Cocks of the Walk, in New York when the Europeans arrived uninvited were the tribes that made up what came to be known as The Iroquois Confederation.
When James Fenimore Cooper moved to the area where this confederation had lived since time immemorial (eastern New York), he got to know some of these aborigines at the local watering holes. Cooper was especially drawn to the Mohicans. They taught him how to play Lacrosse. He wasn’t quite up to the fast pace of that game, though, and so invented a sport of his own, which he called baseball.
Mercilessly teased by the Iroquois for not having the stamina to play Lacrosse (they called him a wimpy bookworm), Cooper pulled up stakes and moved west, to central New York, and founded a settlement he modestly named Cooperstown. There, he worked on making baseball popular.
Simultaneously and surreptitiously, he also worked tirelessly on a pet project to make the Indians look silly: a book called Least of the Mohicans.
The irate Indians got back at Fenimore by scalping tickets at his baseball games. Cooper died a broken man, impoverished and living in a sugar hogshead barrel.
It could have been this one:
1609 – Henry Hudson, Stowaway
In 1609, Henry Hudson, A pyg farmer from England (who was the inspiration for the leading man in “My Fair Lady”) got fed up with the stench of his porkers and became a stowaway on a ship sailing for America.
When the crew of the ship finally discovered him, hiding in an apple barrel in the hold of the vessel, they dragged him up to the captain of the ship to see what punishment that august fellow wanted to mete out to the unwelcome passenger.
Fortunately for Henry, the captain took a liking to the young lad, and even named the river up which they were sailing after him.
Tragically, when the boat was tied up at Albany taking on coal, Henry was bitten by a rabid Duck-billed Platypus while taking a swim near the shore of the river named in his honor. To protect himself from himself, his mates fashioned a collar that would prevent him from biting himself in the neck. You can see that in the image below, which was drawn before the “hydrophobie” had its full effect.
1614 – Origin of NYC
Everybody knows the giant metropolis in New York State as New York City now days. It wasn’t always named that, though. The Indians who lived there simply called it “home,” but when the first European settlers came to the area from “The Netherlands” (Holland), they gave it the name New Hamster Dam.
They did this after watching beaver along the East River as these rodents of unusual size built dams by gnawing down trees and towing them across the narrowest parts of the river.
When no humans were looking, they sometimes used cables and winches to make their engineering work easier.
Anyway, the Dutchmen had never seen beavers before, and mistook them for hamsters. So, since the place was situated near the “new hamster dam,” that’s what they named their new city.
Later, the British barged in and took over the city, and renamed it according to their lights. They called it New York, for the peppermint patties that grew in the paddies next to the beaver dams, and which were served to arrested Irishmen as they were transported to jail in the patty wagons. The bobbies gave the paddies patties not so much out of affection, but to modify the smell of Guinness that otherwise permeated the close quarters.
New York City is so big that it is divided up into five sub-cities. These are called burros. The reason they are called that is because each one covers a large enough area that it would take a burro a whole day to walk around it. To determine the boundaries of each “burro,” Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza was hired to ride his sidekick, Dapple (in both cases, the sidekick was the one that actually got kicked in the side, rather than being the one doing the side-kicking).
Here is Sancho Panza riding Dapple in his pre-New York days, as he was traveling around Spain with his old boss Don Quixote:
1765 – Stamp Act Riot
Wanting to monetize their colony in New York, the British parliament passed a law in 1765 that required the installation of sixteen stamp mills in downtown Manhattan.
The colonists refused, rebelled, and revolted over the Stamp Act, due to the extremely loud noises generated by stamp mills. New Yorkers demand peace and quiet above all else.
The British hadn’t foreseen this. In fact, part of the reason they wanted the stamp mills located there was because they also had an ulterior motive in doing this: they wanted all the New Yorkers to go deaf, so that they couldn’t hear Thomas Paine when he was speaking.
In protest against the Stamp Act, there were riots throughout all of New York City, and the British had to revoke their law before it was even put into practice.
London had the last laugh, though, because the exact same sound as that of sixteen stamp mills can now be heard every day in downtown Manhattan, as drivers play hip-hop music at deafening volumes as they “cruise the strip.”
The stamp mill the British had in mind for downtown Manhattan was the model shown here:
1825 – Erie Canal
Beginning in 1808, an attempt was made to build a mote around New York State so that Canadians could not slip in to the Ewe-Knighted States. The mote was completed in 1825, and was named the “Erie Canal.”
Before this impediment was put in their way, the Canadians would often sneak into the country in an attempt to interest the Ewe-Knighted Staters in hockey and maple bars.
Thomas Jefferson, the Ewe-Knighted States president at the time, considered this a form of cultural imperialism, and saw to it that the Erie Canal was completed to keep the Canadians at bay.
One dark, snowy day, a workman on the big ditch complained that the ambiance seemed “eerie” to him. That’s how the canal got its name, although it’s been misspelled ever since, because the county clerk who filed the paperwork was a lousy orthographer.
You can see why the weary workman had the heebie-jeebies by this picture, which portrays the eeriness of the canal:
Jefferson’s idea worked: not that many Canadians try to come to the Ewe-Knighted States any more.
1886 – Statue of Liberty
The giant statue given to the Ewe-Knighted States by France is commonly called the “Statue of Liberty.” The actual name of the work, for which “Gibson girl” Emma Lazarus posed, is “Liberty Enlightening the World.”
As you can see in the image below, the verdigris lady is holding aloft a giant ice cream cone, so that her little brother and sister won’t be able to take it from her. A plaque at the base of the statue reads, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream”
1892 to 1924 – Ellis Island
After the Ewe-Knighted Staters got established in New York, many other people, especially Europeans, wanted to move over. This was mainly because of the rave reviews they had read about Nathan’s Hot Dogs, New York style pizza, and the courteous drivers in New York.
To accommodate all these newcomers, an island was built as a welcome center and reception area. This gala resort was especially busy between 1892 (when it was christened Ellis Island, for New York Yankees pitcher Dock Ellis, who was named that because he was born on the dock there) and 1924.
During that period, sixteen million new arrivals to America’s shores were processed. That’s an average of half a million per year, or forty-two thousand per month, or 1,400 per day.
Among the people who came into America via Ellis Island over the years include Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Dynamite, Jimmie Walker, and Barack O’Bama, who was born in Ireland.
Many arrivals had their names changed by immigration officials who had either misunderstood them or simply lost patience with the communication difficulties they had with the immigrants due to their thick foreign accents.
One illuminating instance of this happening is illustrated by an event that took place in the 1920s in Butte, Montana. A visitor noticed a restaurant on Main Street with the name “Ole Olefson’s Chinese Restaurant.” This intrigued him, as he could not understand why a Scandinavian would be running a Chinese restaurant. He walked in, and asked to see the owner.
In due time, the owner appeared. The visitor asked him, “Are you Ole Olefson?” The restaurateur, who was obviously Chinese, not Scandinavian, answered in the affirmative.
Having grown accustomed to the confusion his name provoked, Mr. Olefson explained how it was that he ended up with that name.
When the restaurant owner had arrived at Ellis Island, and was in line to be processed, he was standing behind a Swedish man in the queue (although it was actually he, not the Swede, who had a queue). The Swedish man was asked his name by the Ellis Island official, and the Swede replied, “Ole Olefson.”
When the Chinaman’s turn came next, he was asked the same question, and he responded “Same Ting.”
In the picture below, Ellis Island is depicted on one of its busier days. For all we know, this is Mr. Olefson’s family:
1933 – King Kong Scales the Empire State Building
King Kong, who had escaped from the Bronx Zoo after being teased by a ditzy blond named Fay Wray (mother of proto-rock’n’roller Link, most famous for his instrumental Rumble), chased Ms. Wray up the Empire State Building.
When he caught her, he gave her a stern warning about ever teasing him again. Ms. Wray apologized, and promised to never call him “Big Ape” again. Only then did he let her go.
You can see below the pre-apology state of affairs:
1961 – Greenwich Village / Bob Dylan
The times changed in 1961 when gopher stater Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village. Greenwich is ground zero for time. West of Greenwich Village, time flows backwards; east of the Village, time flows forwards.
This irritates people, and so it is called “Greenwich Mean Time” - because this warping of time makes people who live there really mean (and nasty). They get angry and upset and mean when they think about time going two directions at the same time – and there they are, at time zero, with time standing still!
Here’s a picture of Greenwich Village in 1960, the year before Dylan arrived. You can tell how depressed and mean the people were from the downcast look on their shoulders. Even the horses seem to be plodding in a desultory fashion, and the boy is just sitting on the street, with no ambition to sell newspapers or apples or anything:
1969 – “Woodstock”
In White Lake, New York, a three-day-long “Aquarian Exposition” was presented in the summer of 1969. Expecting only a few thousand people to show up, it ended up being millions. Every hippie in the world was there. If you don’t believe that, ask any old hippie you know (they were there!)
Some people had been in such a hurry to get to the “happening” that they had forgotten their clothes. Unfortunately, none of the farmers in the neighborhood were willing to lend them any, either.
Some of the musical groups that performed at the festival were quite famous at the time, but they are all totally forgotten today, lost in the dim mists of time gone by. Among these were City Joe and the Fowls, Jimi Hydrox, Janis Kansas City, John Sebastian Bach and the Lovin’ Forkful, and Ten Years Before.
1970s – Love Canal
In an attempt to emulate the success of the Erie Canal in keeping the Canadians out of the country, the city of Buffalo, New York decided to take another tack and build a canal that would keep Ewe-Knighted Staters in the country, rather than going to Canada (this was during the Vietnam War, when some able-bodied men were finding Canada fascinating, and taking extended vacations up there without even bothering to leave a forwarding address).
This ingenious canal was engineered in such a way that the only vessel that could navigate it was The Love Boat, and it was being used by Hollywood, and so was unavailable.
Thus, anybody reaching the canal was stuck. They could go no further. They must remain on the Ewe-Knighted States side of the canal.
This was in actuality not a form of repression, but rather an act of grand benevolence on the part of the canal builders. The reason this is so was because the Ewe-Knighted States is a much better place to live than Canada, which is too cold, has citizens that speak with a funny accent, and makes its citizens watch hockey and sing Queen songs (such as Hudson Bay Rhapsody).
For some unknown reason, somebody protested the building of Love Canal, as you can see below:
. . .
Each Saturday and Tuesday an excerpt of one State’s (satirized) history will be posted here, in alphabetical order (from Alabama to Wyoming).
For “the rest of the story,” the (32-page) complete book “The New All-too-True-Blue History of New York” is available here.
The regions of the U.S. have been combined into volumes, too; New York is included in the volume The New All-too-True-Blue History of the American Northeast
You can listen to this excerpt here.
Blackbird Crow Raven is also the author of the book “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle”