Mormons in New York City

When I worked on a student newspaper at BYU, we were embarrassed one issue when the headline of our leading article read: “America’s Facination with Fame.” You’d be surprised how easy it is to make that kind of mistake.

Of course, the journalists of the 1840s made mistakes too, and one, in the New York Gazette in early November 1845 was at the expense of Mormon immigrants:

There were a large number of convicts to Mormonism on board the steamboat Rochester, at Albany, recently, on the way for Nauvoo, most of whom were from Lowell, Mass.

Horace Greeley, editor of the competing, New York Tribune, caught the error, and on the 5th of November, responded:

Rather a curious mistake, Mr. Gazette! Or did you mean it?

Of course, LDS Church members have been told to show the courage of their convictions, but somehow I don’t think that’s what the Gazette had in mind.

nycldshistory.com has moved!

I’ve moved servers and in the process changed the addresses for this blog and for the nycldshistory wiki. Instead of the www.nycldshistory.com address for these sites, they are now at:

• blogs.nycldshistory.com/nycldshistory/ — for this blog
• wiki.nycldshistory.com/w/ — for the wiki

I’m sorry if the change has led to confusion. I’m trying to get the old addresses to forward to the new ones.

The next meeting of the New York New York Stake History Committee will be held on February 1st at 6:30pm at Glen Nelson’s home, 457 West 57th St #601. As always, we request that those attending bring a dish of food. We will make the agenda for the meeting available ahead of time, as usual.

Our New York City LDS History Committee met the evening of January 11th for our normal monthly meeting. Good food and fun conversation helped us get through our agenda and make plans for the next few months. We discussed the status of our upcoming newsletter issue, the banners we have placed in the LDS buildings around the city, our walking tours, and upcoming newsletter issues and events. The principal decisions made include the following:

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The next meeting of the New York New York Stake History Committee will be held on December 7th at 6:30pm at Glen Nelson’s home, 457 West 57th St #601. As always, we request that those attending bring a dish of food. We will make the agenda for the meeting available ahead of time, as usual.

Our New York City LDS History Committee met the evening of November 2nd for our normal monthly meeting. Good food and fun conversation helped us get through our agenda and make plans for the next few months. We discussed the status of our upcoming newsletter issue, the banners we have placed in the LDS buildings around the city, our walking tours, and upcoming newsletter issues and events. The principal decisions made include the following:

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The Fall 2008 BYU Magazine has an article on Harleman Halls, the building on West 111th Street that has managed to fill nearly half its apartments with LDS Church members. The article not only tells how the building gained such a preponderance of Church members, but also gives a sense of the community in the building that developed as a result.

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I came across an interesting blog post this past week, some brief notes about the stay of Charles Henry Crow in New York City in 1856-1859. I’ve asked for further information from the author of the post, hoping that the information will give us further insight into what the Church was like in New York City while the Eastern States Mission was closed for a few years. The mission was reopened again in the early 1860s, and then closed for nearly 30 years until 1893.

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Saturday morning, 25 or 30 people joined Jim and Kent for our walking tour of LDS Church history sites in lower manhattan. To keep the groups manageable, we divided the group into two, and the group I took included a number of non-member Chinese speakers. One of the missionaries with the group provided interpreting.

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Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune

I came across the 1859 interview of Brigham Young by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley this week and was able to add it to our site. The interview is quite comprehensive, in terms of the issues of the day, covering slavery and polygamy as well as some of the unusual aspects of Mormonism at the time, such as tithing.

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