Irregular Incidents

Starting in the 1970s, following a series of financial collapses, demographic shifts, landlords just flat out burning down apartment buildings for the insurance money when the prices of the property sank and they began to default on their taxes, and racist, illegal redlining practices in New York real estate, New York City ended up with a lot of, well, lots, which stood empty for years due to the city itself being too broke to look after them and the original owners not wanting to invest in putting something better there.

However, a combination of activists from Latino and African American communities in conjunction with the city council attempted to fix the situation through the creation of community gardens. This both got people in invested in creating community spaces, made the neighbourhoods nicer to live in, and improved the quality of life of local people by their not having to live in areas filled with ruined tenements an burnt cars like they were in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Movement's like 1979's Operation Greenthumb managed to create a huge boon for the various effected communities over the next several decades, a positive effect that wasn't taken into account when Rudy Giuliani became Mayor in the 1990s, when in 1999 he made the decision to auction off 114 community lots to property developers, putting some 700 public green spaces at risk.

His stated reason for doing this was that it would be used to create affordable housing, and that the community lots were taking up "underutilised" land which the city could generate revenue from by selling them. When the various communities were, rightly outraged by this, Rudy didn't help matters by dismissing their protests by repeatedly telling the press: "This is the free market era, welcome to the era after communism."

Following a legal battle and non-profits such as the Trust for Public Land and Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project (NYRP) rescuing lots from destruction, in 2002 New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer reached an agreement with the City where some 200 parks were to be preserved, with others either being under review and the possibility of more getting added to the list in the future.

Following graduation and his father's death, a 16 year old Orson Welles decided to spend 1931 touring Ireland and the Aran Islands in a donkey cart sketching and painting things. It is during this tour that Welles made his professional acting debut, when he strode into Dublin's Gate Theatre claiming to be a famous Broadway star from America who was looking for acting parts while he was in the country.

In 1992, David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City, proposed creating an all-civilian Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) to address reports of racial discrimination by the NYPD, in part due to the national outcry that followed the LA Riots earlier in the year caused by the acquittal of four of the policeman involved in the Rodney King police brutality case.

The idea being that the pre-existing CCRB, which was intended to address complaints against the NYPD and provide oversight, was then comprised of half-civilians and half-police officers, with Dinkins proposing that instead it become fully independent and comprised entirely of non-police members to enable to do its job without any conflicts of interest.

Unfortunately, between this, Dinkins refusing to allow the NYPD to have semi-automatic weapons, and his embracing the family of Jose "Kiko" Garcia, an undocumented Dominican immigrant who was fatally shot by NYPD officer Michael O'Keefe and whose death triggered the 1992 Washington Heights Riot, the police union called the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York decided to hold a rally to voice their displeasure...

Which quickly escalated to the 1992 Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Riot.

It all went down on September 16, 1992, when the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association organised a rally along the pub-lined Murray Street, which ran perpendicular to City Hall. The increasingly drunken cops quickly numbered around 10,000 people, where they chanted racist slogans against the Mayor, held up signs depicting Dinkins doing various sex acts, and accosted African American City Councilwoman Una Clarke to prevent her crossing the street.

And among the speakers that incited the riot? One, then failed, mayoral candidate Rudy Guiliani, who had lost to Dinkins in the 1989 election, and was there to pour more metaphorical gasolene on the fire like the sore loser he always was.

“The reason the morale of the police department of the city of New York is so low,” Giuliani says on video, “is one reason, and one reason alone: David Dinkins!”

“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the police department is so low,” Giuliani said. “He blames it on me. He blames it on you. Bullshit!” Giuliani then attacked an anti-corruption commission impaneled by Dinkins, which he said was created “to protect David Dinkins’s political ass.” More cheers rose from the crowd.

This was followed by the cops damaging cars and blocking the Brooklyn Bridge as they attempted to storm City Hall, and while Dinkins himself wasn't present, both Deputy Mayor Fritz Alexander and Acting Police Commissioner Ray Kelly had to ironically summon on-duty police officers to City Hall for crowd control against their colleagues.

As NY Magazine describes,

A group of officers lined up in front of the doors to City Hall. At one point, they let a woman attending the protest, who may have been the widow of a fallen officer, inside. “Someone yelled that they had arrested her and the mob of officers outside rushed the building,” remembered Bob Liff, a former City Hall reporter at Newsday who was inside the building at the time. “In all my years there, with lots and lots of demonstrations, it is the only time I ever remember the cops slamming the doors shut and putting the bars across the doors to keep anyone from getting in,” Liff said. “It is also the only time I remember feeling any sense of fear inside City Hall.”

Repelled from the building, the cops smashed cars, they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, they beat up multiple people (including several reporters or just civilians that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time).

Another quote,

Some of the city’s newspaper columnists, including Jimmy Breslin, the poet laureate of the city’s blue-collar working class, were repulsed. According to a column he wrote the next day, Breslin saw an officer in a PBA shirt saying to a female television reporter, “Here, let me grab your ass.” He saw one officer yelling “across the beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the n - - - - -s beating you up in Crown Heights?’” Another said, “Now you got a n - - - - - right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A n - - - - - mayor.”

In the aftermath of the riot, it was condemned by many, with some likening it to a Southern lynch mob. Of the 10,000 cops involved in the riot, 87 were able to be positively identified, and of those only 42 were actively investigated for any kind of misconduct (not, as you'd think criminal charges). Of those, only a handful actually received any actual punishment, including one of two policeman who decided to beat a random guy on the subway in the midst of the riot, with the officer getting charged with felony assault but with it getting bumped down to a misdemeanour, leading to his dismissal.

As for Giuliani and his heavily publicised appearance at the rally?

He refused to apologise for his part in the proceedings, refused to acknowledge hearing any racist and inflammatory remarks at the rally turned riot, and the following year rode the support he got from the primarily white boroughs to winning the 1993 New York Mayoral election. Rudy claiming that Dinkins and the African American communities comments about the obvious and open racism on display by the NYPD being examples of them retreating “into black victimization.”

The Vampire - Ross' Magazine (1st Dcember 1915)

In 1939 John Steinbeck wrote his famous novel the Grapes of Wrath, which followed the tenant farmer Joad family who between bank foreclosure and the Dust Bowl, decide to do what many other farmers from Oklahoma did in the Great Depression: Go to California in search of, if not a better life, than one that was actually liveable in contrast to what they currently had going on.

The Grapes of Wrath did win Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize (and a film adaptation the following year in 1940) to say that there was a negative reaction to the novel was understating it. Despite it being a historical fact that people in California were extremely hostile to the influx of migrant workers, and Steinbeck based it on his own experiences covering the plight of migrant workers as a journalist, the Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as a “pack of lies” and “Jewish propaganda".

Others objected to the depiction of banks as villains and the cause of hardship of working class people leading to accusations of the book being a work of communist misinformation. Others still accused the book of having obscene language and subject matter, and one group of California farmers burning the novel in one county. Eventually it reached a point that Steinbeck decided he had to carry a gun to defend himself from potential attacks.

Considering how, again, historically the negative way that wealthy Californians (and even some people in Oklahoma itself) reacted to tenant farmer refugees was definitely supported Steinbeck's work (which was based on his own lived and witnessed experience), the level of backlash indicates that the people depicted negatively were aware what they was doing was wrong, even if they were more concerned with others thinking they were bad people than actually amending their behaviour.

The first case of someone in the United States evading a murder charge due to a plea of temporary insanity came in the 1859 case where New York Congressman Daniel E. Sickles murdered Philip Barton Key, U.S. District Attorney and son of Francis Scott Key, the composer of the Star-Spangled Banner, in the middle of the afternoon on Pennsylvania Avenue within eyesight of the White House.

Why did Sickles decide to carry out the act? Well, hypocrisy played a big part in it.

You see, Sickles was famous for his many, many affairs, including with the deposed Queen Isabella II of Spain while he was in the country as an ambassador. This continued into his marriage with his much, much younger wife Teresa (so much younger that he'd lie about her age to make the gap seem smaller, what with her being 16 and his being in his early thirties), when Sickles would have an open affair with a sex worker by the name of Fanny White, which included taking her on a trip to England with him.

Teresa was understandably unhappy with this situation, so when she met the younger, more handsome and supposedly much nicer Philip Barton Key, the pair began having an affair of their own, which lasted right up to that fateful February afternoon where, after discovering what was going on, Daniel sought out Daniel and shot him to death in the street.

Daniel was arrested shortly afterwards, with the newspapers praising his murder of Philip as his defending the women of Washington DC from "the rogue Key". During the trial, Daniel would go on to argue that the news of the affair had driven him temporarily insanity, and forced Teresa to give a graphic account of her affair as evidence of what made him "snap" (this only sold to humiliate her further, as the judge ruled it inadmissible).

Unfortunately, this being the 1850s, the jury chose to acquit him for his murder, to the anger of some members of the public, with his decision to publicly forgive Teresa for her "crime" managing to anger the people who were on his side, his killing of Philip having been covered by the national press at this stage.

On 28th August 1944, actor Bela Lugosi spoke at an anti-fascist rally in Los Angeles, where on behalf of the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy (HACD) he spoke to an assembled 2000 people requesting that the Roosevelt administration to end immigration restrictions for Hungarian Jews and to pressure the collaborationist Nazi regime that controlled Lugosi’s homeland to protect those that remained.

Unfortunately, the rally in conjunction with Lugosi's union activities and writing for various left-leaning publications led to his being monitored by the House of UnAmerican Activities as a suspected communist, with the agents spying on him even giving themselves the nickname "the Dracula Council", as a reference to his most famous role. The Dracula Council believed that HACD was actually a front for communists and not a pro-democracy humanitarian organisation, which it was.

At the Woman's Club by Frank A. Nankivell

"I had a row with my husband after the play, last night." "What about?" "He tried to call me down for going out between the acts to see a woman."

Cover from the magazine Puck, v. 45, no. 1151, (1899 March 29)

While it's generally accepted that the conspiracy on display in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that the Los Angeles trolley system specifically the "Red Cars" (Pacific Electric) and "Yellow Cars" (Los Angeles Railway), were bought up by people with an interest in making people individually buy their own cars instead... The truth is actually a little more complicated.

In actuality, the Los Angeles Railway (LARy) was originally run real estate companies, such as how the Pacific Electric trolley company was owned by tycoon Henry Huntington, whose main business were power distribution and real estate. Thus the trolley system was intended to link up all of the newly built, formerly rural parts of Los Angeles, to make the land more viable for people to live in as mass-transit enabled people travel about more freely rather than centring the entire population in a more central spot (thus contributing to the city's noted sprawl).

However, over time when the newly built communities were more fully integrated into the city proper, investment in the railways began to decline, as the land and property already had been bought from people such as Huntington so from their perspective they were running a utility that wasn't making them enough money to maintain upkeep despite how their existence was a good chunk of why people began to move there in the first place.

In 1945, the Huntington Estate sold on the Los Angeles Railway to National City Lines, who promptly renamed it the Los Angeles Transit Lines, and started dismantling the streetcar lines. General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire were among the shareholders, hence the term the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy.

By the late 1950s, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority acquired Los Angeles Transit Lines and the successor to the Pacific Electric passenger service, Metropolitan Coach Lines, making it arguably the public service that it should have in the first place, but by that time the trolleys had already had their peak, and the progressively more car-centred transportation system is known for (and the resulting smog in the decades to come) was already in place.

A more... direct form of this kind of corruption actually occurred in the UK, where the one prominent tram system within London (and a large chunk of the national railway network) was largely dismantled by the notorious Minister for Transport Ernest Marples, who not so subtly gave the task of building Britain's new motorways and car-friendly streets to the road construction business Marples Ridgeway which he used to run... until he gave his shares to his wife.

Today (26th January 2026), marks the 100th anniversary of Scottish inventor John Logie Baird, demonstrating before members of the Royal Institution (a London-based organisation for scientific research) and a reporter from The Times the first television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation.

The first human to be broadcast in this manner as a moving was Baird's business partner, Oliver Hutchinson, while the first images technically broadcast included Laird's ventriloquist dummy heads "James" and "Stooky Bill" in his experiments in 1924...

Stooky Bill ended up becoming the subject of a Doctor Who episode relatively recently, which looking at the image sent I can certainly see why (either Doctor Who or the Magnus Protocol).

On 7th April 1926, Irishwoman Violet Gibson attempted to assassinate Italian prime minister and fascist Benito Mussolini as he walked among the crowd in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome after leaving an assembly of the International Congress of Surgeons.

Armed with a pistol and a rock (in case she had to smash open his car window to get at him), Mussolini's life was unfortunately saved when he turned his head at the last moment, resulting in Violet's bullet grazing the bridge of his nose instead.

The crowd attempted to lynch her, but fortunately she was rescued by the cops, who arrested her and took her to a police station. When questioned why she had attempted to murder the fascist, Violet replied that she had done so to "glorify God" and that he had sent an angel to keep her arm steady (not steady enough, considering, y'know, Benito survived).

Violet was declared insane by the Italian authorities, and because she didn't hold an Irish passport due to her Unionist views (her father had been Edward Gibson, 1st Baron Ashbourne, had been Lord Chancellor of Ireland under Britain's rule), she was instead extradited to Britain, where she was committed to a mental hospital in Northampton until her death in 1956.

Mussolini, meanwhile, dismissed the assassination attempt as a "mere trifle" and would wear a big bandage for several weeks afterwards. I have not found any evidence of any of his followers deciding to also wear bandages as a show of support, which is just as well, as considering current events that would be a bit on the nose.

On September 21 1966, New York real estate developer Fred Trump decided to celebrate upcoming demolition of the Coney Island amusement park Steeplechase Park’s Pavilion of Fun on the two year anniversary of the park's closure.

Built in 1908, the Pavilion of Fun was considered to be the centrepiece of the park, known for its painted windows and the symbol of the park "Funny Face" or "Steeplechase Jack".

Unfortunately, while Steeplechase Park and its neighbouring Luna park were considered to be America's first theme parks, by the coming of the 1960s their heyday had regrettably come to pass, leading to Fred Trump snapping up the land with the intention of redeveloping it for condos. Notably, Fred's 19-year-old son Donald was present when the owner of Steeplechase, Marie Tilyou, signed over the sales contract.

Now, you would have thought that the buying of several important pieces of New York history would be handled with some level of grace when it came to their demolition... But as Charles Denson, the executive director of the Coney Island History Project, states in an article with the Brooklyn Paper, “That was a real turning point for Coney Island, everything changed after the pavilion was demolished — Fred Trump really shaped Coney Island in a negative way.”

As shown in the main image, the Trumps decided the best way to showcase the demolition of the pavilion was to hire women in bikinis to hand out champagne and sold bricks to guests while engaging with petty vandalism of the historic site.

“Trump sent out engraved invitations and invited people to throw rocks and bricks through the Funny Face — it was a desecration of an icon, it was insane.” Denson said. “Most developers are worried about making a profit, most wouldn’t throw a party to desecrate a stained glass window.”

In the month following Fred's drunken window smashing spree, New York City decided that they actually wanted to rezone the idea and turn the property into a city park instead... leading to Fred contesting the rezoning, leading to 15 years of lawsuits and his eventually winning $1.3 million.

The Trumps were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to convert the now mostly empty lot into "luxury condos", with Fred renting the land ironically to a series of fairground amusement ride manager for a spell, until eventually the City succeeded in gaining control of the land once more in the 1980s with the aim of restoring some of the historical attractions there.

So a happy ending there. Of a sort.

One of roughly 5000 "Wanted for Treason" posters created and distributed by Robert Surrey, an associate of the McCarthyite Major General Edwin Walker, who would give speeches about his conspiracy theories about how the US government had been infiltrated by communists.

These flyers were distributed in and around downtown Dallas in the days leading up to Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963, placed on car's wind-shields and tucked within the pages of two of the city's anti-Kennedy newspapers.

Prior to Kennedy's decision to travel to Dallas, he was warned six times not to travel to the city, due to growing unrest caused by racism (due to the advances made in civil rights under JFK), anti-communist rhetoric spouted by right-wing cranks like Walker, and anti-catholic bigotry aimed at Kennedy for being America's first Catholic president (with groups like the John Birch Society claiming that he was secretly being controlled by the Pope, which is some 1600s kinda bigotry there).

Additionally, due to Kennedy wishing to reassess America's oil production, JFK hinted in Feburary 1963 that Texan oil barons could loose their "oil depletion allowance", a tax loophole that allowed the oil industry to keep 27% or so if their revenue tax free, meaning that they potentially stood to have losses of $300m. This naturally angered oilmen like Nazi-sympathiser Haroldson L Hunt who used their fortune to spread anti-Kennedy propaganda, which all came for naught as following Kennedy's death his successors abandoned discussion of getting rid of the allowance regardless.

In the early hours of the morning of 11th September 1851, a federal marshal approached the home of escaped slave William Parker in the town of Christiana, Pennsylvania.

Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850s, it was now legal for people from slave states to travel into states where slavery was illegal to kidnap former enslaved people (or people whom they could claim to be escaped slaves to sell in the Southern States, such as what happened to Solomon Northup, of 12 Years A Slave fame, albeit prior to the Act itself) to return them to their "owners", in addition to the Act introducing harsh penalties for those harbouring escaped slaves or assisting in their escape and requiring free state officials to assist in the slave hunters' activities.

Now, the town of Christiana had a population of mostly freed and escaped African American people, and as such was subject to frequent raids by Southern slave hunters and their Northern collaborators, and for the past twenty yeas a successful resistance movement had formed to repel these attempts to kidnap people, with the current leader of the resistance being the aforementioned William Parker.

It was due to this resistance movement, an agent of the Special Secret Committee as Thomas Slaughter's 1991 book Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North called it, Samuel Williams, spotted slave owner Edward Gorsuch recruit two Philadelphia police officers as he was gathering a posse as he planned to come to Christiana to kidnap four of Gorsuch's escaped slaves.

So when Gorsuch, the cops and his other slave hunters arrived at Parker's home, he found the home both heavily fortified and filled with heavily armed African American folk with their white Quaker neighbours and allies. Gorsuch, perhaps predictably for a racist, assumed that the Parker's white allies were actually the people in charge and tried addressing them in an attempt to say that, legally, they had to hand over his "property".

One of the aforementioned escaped folk, Samuel Thompson, was then physically confronted by Gorsuch, with Samuel promptly clubbing him to the ground, where he was swiftly shot to death. Gorsuch's son, Dickinson, attempted to rescue his father, only to get shot multiple times too, and had to be dragged to safety by a member of the slave hunter posse, who then fled under a hail of bullets.

Following the Christiana Incident (or Riot or "Tragedy" if you're from a slave state), Parker, the escaped slaves, and some of the other black resistance members fled to Canada, with Parker making a stop at the home of Frederick Douglass along the way. The response of President Millard Fillmore was to call in the marines, where they arrested 36 blacks and five whites, and promptly charged them with treason in an attempt to make an example of them.

The government decided that Castner Hanway (sometimes spelled Hanaway), one of the white men charged, was "obviously" the ringleader... only for the jury to find him not guilty after 15 minutes deliberation (with some interpreting this as meaning that the anti-slavery group's use of violence was justified, and others arguing that they it was absurd to argue that a bunch of poorly armed Quaker farmers had decided to wage war on the United States). Likewise all of the other people, including the black people, were also acquitted.

The Christiana Incident is held up as one of the many, many contributing factors to the start of the American Civil War (with Southerners being angered at the North for not convicting/executing anyone for Gorsuch's death, while the Northerners arguing that a slave owner being able to enter a Free State and commandeer a bunch of cops by force to help him kidnap people as an example of the Southerners' political over reach), but a direct link to the wider history of the United States comes after Gorsuch's youngest son, Thomas.

Oh hey, it's Dracula Day! As such, here's a tangentially related historical Dracula fact.

The the play of Dracula, called Dracula, or The Un-Dead, was a production was both written and directed by Bram Stoker himself in order to secure the stage rights to his novel, lest they get get sniped by someone else. Mina in the play was portrayed by the actress Edith or Edy Craig (main image), who was herself a fascinating person in many respects.

Edy was herself an outspoken socialist, feminist, suffragist, actor, costume designer, theatrical producer, AND poly lesbian, who was in a decades long relationship with her partners playwright and author Christopher St John (born Christabel Marshall) and the artist Clare "Tony" Atwood until Craig's death in 1947.

It's somewhat interesting considering more recent queer interpretations of the characters Mina Harker and Lucy Westernra in Dracula, that historically the first depiction of Mina in a non-book medium was literally portrayed by a lesbian actress... albeit while Craig and Stoker did work out of the Lyceum Theatre at the same time (Craig as an actor and then costume designer, Stoker as business manager), Edith and Christopher didn't become a couple until roughly the year after the novel had been published.