The Betrayal of Sarah Edelson: A New York City History Podcast Preview

In this newsletter: A podcast sneak peek, the pandemic outlook, and some words of advice.

Part I: A New York City History Podcast Preview

In the spring of 1902, a bartender named Sarah Edelson started a revolution on the streets of the Lower East Side.

Edelson wanted affordable beef, and revenge on the butchers gouging the neighborhood. One night in her bar on the most fetid block on the Lower East Side, she declared a beef boycott, and raised crowds of immigrant women to enforce it. The uprising spread up and down the East Coast, and Jewish immigrant women as far away as Boston seized raw meat and burnt it in the streets.

The revolution raged, and then the wealthiest men in New York City came downtown and stamped it out.

I tell the story of this revolt, and the conspiracy to put it down, in a podcast episode I've written and recorded. It's called “The Betrayal of Sarah Edelson," and it's a story about street violence, a corrupt beef monopoly, and power in old New York. You can listen by clicking on this private Soundcloud link, or this link to an MP3 of the episode. Please don’t share either link widely.

For detailed notes on the sourcing of the episode, click here. A password is needed to view that item; the password is "ratpod."

“The Betrayal of Sarah Edelson” is part of a project I’ve been working on forever. The idea is to make a podcast to tell the stories I’ve dug out of old New York City newspapers from between 1870 to 1940. The city had begun to take on a recognizable form in those years; Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge already existed, and the subways and skyscrapers were on their way. The lives lived there, though, are so foreign and unfamiliar that they might as well have been lived on the moon.

The podcast is called Rat Island: Stories of Old New York. I finished the episode on the beef riots last fall, but then the realities of pandemic-era parenthood interceded and I haven’t made much progress since. The idea was to wait until three or four episodes were ready and then publish them as an ongoing series downloadable through iTunes and any other podcast app. While I've got few more episodes in progress, I don't know when I'll be able to post the whole series. I do have this one episode completed, though, and after sitting on it for a year, I just want it to share it with interested listeners.

So, in the interim between now and that time in some notional future when I finish the other episodes, I thought I’d send "The Betrayal of Sarah Edelson" out to this newsletter list.

Let me know if you like it, and I’ll let you know when more episodes are ready.

Part II: Bored With Covid

The other week I published a magazine feature in Barron’s on what comes after the Delta wave. The good news is, some virologists think the virus won’t be as much of a problem. The bad news is, other virologists say it could turn into more of a problem! It’s all here. (The headline is about drug stocks, but the implications for those stocks only takes up a couple of paragraphs of the story, and I think it’s worth reading even if you don’t care what happens to the share prices of BioNTech and Moderna and Pfizer.)
 

Part III: Words of Advice

• Speaking of podcasts, I’d listen to an eight-hour-plus podcast series explaining this 3 minute music video in which a Slovenian punk band called Pankrti lip synchs their 1984 cover of the traditional Italian socialist anthem “Bandiera Rossa” while standing on a series of raised platforms (?) next to a white statue in a red cape (??) amid a group of confused-looking extras (???) who display an extraordinarily wide range of enthusiasm for the experience (????). The frontman seems drunk, the rest of the band stands there with their arms folded and barely moves their lips, half of the guys up on the platforms with them look like they’re waiting for the bus, and the rest look like retired party apparatchiks. I believe, based on some cryptic YouTube descriptions, that this was recorded for and broadcast on Slovenian television in 1994. Please watch it and explain to me what degree of irony is at play here. It’s either zero or infinity, and I have no idea which.

• ​I don’t know, I just like this and also this.

• There's an old Achewood from 2006 where Ray types "WHAT'S THE BEST THING YOU GOT" into the eBay search bar and the site shows him, among other things, Keith Moon's head, which costs $4.7 million. Anyway, if you typed the same search into the YouTube search bar, I think you'd probably get this, which is a live webcam showing what the fish under the pier in Deerfield Beach, Florida are doing at any given moment.

• Six years ago, I went to the racetrack, won a few hundred dollars, and bought the first pair of expensive sunglasses I ever owned. I drove over them last month and crushed them into the dirt. I replaced them, and now I’m the kind of person who owns expensive sunglasses that he didn’t buy with horse track winnings and I don’t like it. The advice here, I think, is don’t drive over your sunglasses. 

• The guy in the photo at the top of this email is "Two-Ton" Tony Galento, a boxer whose 1979 New York Times obituary reports that he "claimed to have defeated a kangaroo and a bear and to have choked an octopus to death."

That’s all I’ve got!

Josh