coffee | Maxwell Coffee Plant | Ancient Rome | Old Subway | YouTube Rabbithole
Going with the Stumblin’ Along with coffee by Miguel on in the background. I had a different song in mind but I’ll save it for Friday.
Nothing like a nice cup of coffee in the morning….
…so here is a bit of Hoboken history on coffee…
Maxwell Coffee Plant
The Maxwell House Coffee company was originally founded in 1892 by a fella named Joel Owsley Cheek in Nashville, Tennessee. The name of the brand stemmed from the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, they were their first coffee customer. Back then, when you bought coffee the beans were still green. Joel Cheek was responsible for perfecting the right blend of beans and was different because he sold his coffee beans already roasted. In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt stayed at the Maxwell House Hotel and it was said that he made a comment, “Good to the last drop.” Maxwell House Coffee took the quote and ran with it, making it their famous slogan. Cheek was an advertising visionary, he spent a then world-record $1.1 million on ads which made Maxwell House Coffee the most popular coffee brand in the world. (TN Museum)
In 1939, Maxwell House Coffee opened a giant plant in Hoboken, New Jersey. Along the Hudson River, the plant was on the waterfront stretching from 10th to 12th Streets. It was the largest coffee-processing plant in the world until it closed down in 1990 when their Jacksonville, Florida, plant became the main plant of Maxwell House’s coffee operations. The coffee plant in Hoboken was built on the grounds of the birthplace of baseball, Elysian Fields.
Elysian Fields was not only the birthplace of baseball, but it was also considered New York’s First Central Park. Opened in 1831, the park was conveniently set up with a ferry system run by the Stevens family, the ones that established the Stevens Institute of Technology. Elysian Fields was considered a leisure spot where New Yorkers would come across the river to hang out in pavilions and odd stuff 19th-century people would do for fun.
Today, the Elysian Fields and Maxwell House Plant land is now referred to as Maxwell Place Park. It’s got a grand view of the Empire State Building and grass for leashed doggos to frolic around on.
This Week’s Bit on The Roman Empire
This week your quick bit on The Roman Empire brought to you by Week to Week Notes featuring Ancient Rome: The Exhibition in New York is on Roman groma.
I briefly touched on the Roman groma last week but it turns out we need a deeper dive. This surveying instrument was handy in ancient Roman times. Surveyors used the groma in many ways like measuring land, plotting roads, and drawing lines for military camps. Without the groma, none of the cities in the Roman Empire could have been built. Archaeologists found an ancient groma inside the ruins of a Pompeii workshop and called it a surveyor’s cross, but I like groma more.
If you want to make your own groma at home, it is a pole about 5 to 6.5 feet in height (1.5 to 2 meters for the Europeans). On top of the pole was a mobile arm that allowed 360-degree swivel. Then they would make a wooden cross that they would fit into the swiveling arm. At the end of each cross, they drilled a “plumb line”, or string with a lead weight at the end of it. Each of the plumb lines was referred to as cardinal points (North, South, East, and West).
Usually, the groma was set up on high ground so that the surveyor could get a good look at their surroundings. The cross of plumb lines would rotate so that the surveying operator’s perspective would line up exactly in the same direction that the road or construction was going to be built. An assistant to the surveying operator would then travel 125 or so paces from the groma and plant a marker peg in exact alignment with the plumb lines. This process of placing marker pegs was repeated until the assistant to the surveying operator ran out of markers. Then they would move the groma to the last marker and start all over again. The “East and West” plumb lines were used for making 90-degree angles for roads and buildings.
Old Subway Car (Vol IX)
R-11 Prototype/R-34 Car
This subway car was built in 1949 by Budd Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Budd Company was responsible for the creation of the first all-steel automobiles. The steel automobile company was founded in 1911 and had a hand in Dodge cars as early as 1913. Anyway, these cars were initially built post-WWII with the idea that 2nd Avenue would have a subway line built. The City ordered 10 of these R-11 Prototype Cars which at the time were thought of as the “car of tomorrow.” Each of these cars was priced at $100k and was known at the time as The Million Dollar Train. Since the 2nd Ave subway wasn’t built, the cars needed to be stripped down and remade as R-34s. The stainless steel exterior was the only part that was actually used. Somebody must have got a kickback somewhere, we’re talking about The Million Dollar Trains.
The R-11s had a very modern look to them. They had new public address systems as well as air filtration systems equipped with electrostatic dust filters and ultraviolet germ-killing lamps installed. These replaced exposed fans and ventilators in an effort to curb the spread of airborne diseases. One flaw with these subway cars was that their fluorescent lighting was less than reliable. One rider of this car told the New York Times, “While the car was a wonderful improvement, it has a penchant for going blind. No provisions have been made to enable trainmen to replace quickly burnt-out sections and therefore many cars run in the dark.”
Okay, yeah, this would be kind of creepy if half the lights were out and it was dark.
Wow, who knew Barron G. Collier Incorportated pretty much invented memes?