Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

In the 1860s, much of the area south of Pennsylvania Avenue and a few blocks east of the White House had become a disreputable slum known as Murder Bay, the home to an extensive criminal underclass and numerous brothels. During the American Civil War, so many

prostitutes took up residence in Murder Bay to serve the needs of General Joseph Hooker's Army of the Potomac that the area became known as "Hooker's Division."

He created the Bureau of Military Information, which was the first all-source intelligence organization employed by the U.S. military. Allan Pinkerton was contracted by Federal and a number of state and local governments to solve cases such as train robberies. In early 1861,

Pinkerton assumed responsibility for Abraham Lincoln's safety, including gaining wind of an alleged assassination attempt.
Shortly after the start of the Civil War, Pinkerton was contacted by George B. McClellan (a friend and former client) to provide intelligence for the

Department of the Ohio. Colonel Charles Pomeroy Stone also utilized a number of detectives. Starting in 1862, General Winfield Scott hired Lafayette C. Baker to provide him services similar to those Pinkerton provided McClellan. Lincoln hired William A. Lloyd to infiltrate the

On January 26, 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker was given command of the Army of the Potomac. One of his first orders was for his deputy provost marshal, Colonel George H. Sharpe, to establish an intelligence unit. Sharpe, a New Yorker and an attorney before the war, was

assisted by John C. Babcock, a civilian and former employee of Pinkerton. On February 11, 1863, they established the Bureau of Military Information. In July, 1864, Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant, in preparation of the campaign to capture Richmond, stationed Sharpe and the

BMI staff into his command headquarters, in order to ensure he would have the most up to date knowledge of the battlefield. Sharpe and BMI continued to serve Grant up until the Battle of Appomattox Court House, where they were responsible for paroling the former members of

the Army of Northern Virginia, including Robert E. Lee himself. The BMI was disbanded in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. The United States would not create another formal intelligence agency until the Office of Naval Intelligence was established in 1882. The Army would create

its Military Intelligence Division in 1885, which would become the predecessor of the Military Intelligence Corps and United States Army Intelligence and Security Command. Following Lincoln's assassination, Baker would be responsible for tracking down the conspirators, but would

eventually be dismissed by Andrew Johnson due to allegedly spying on the President himself for Edwin M. Stanton. Baker would also hunt for Lincoln's conspirators, this time in Europe as a special agent of the United States Department of State. After being elected President of

the United States, Grant appointed Sharpe as United States Marshal for the Southern District of New York where he helped root out corruption, including disbanding the Tweed Ring.

They would buy up undeveloped property, then use the resources of the city to improve the area – for instance by installing pipes to bring in water from the Croton Aqueduct – thus increasing the value of the land, after which they sold and took their profits. Below Grand Street,

a small number of well-off customers of the Manhattan Company had fresh water delivered to them, but that company was actually more focused on banking— it eventually became Chase Manhattan—and only paid as much attention to its water activities as it needed to avoid losing the

state charter that allowed it to bank.

From the Receiving Reservoir, water flowed down to the Croton Distributing Reservoir, better known simply as the Croton Reservoir, a similar fortified tank located on Fifth Avenue between 40th Street and 42nd Street, where the New York

Public Library Main Branch and Bryant Park are located today. This reservoir was built to resemble ancient Egyptian architecture. Despite its size, the capacity of the Old Croton Aqueduct could not keep up with the growth of New York City, and construction on a New Croton

Aqueduct began in 1885 a few miles east. The new aqueduct, buried much deeper than the old one, went into service in 1890, with three times the capacity of the Old Croton Aqueduct. It currently supplies 10 percent of New York City's water. The Croton Receiving Reservoir continued

to supply New York City with drinking water until 1940, when Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Robert Moses ordered it drained and filled to create the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond in Central Park.

The Yorkville Reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct system (also known as the Lower

Reservoir or the receiving reservoir) was built in 1842 to store the city's drinking water.[13] The community of York Hill was displaced for the creation of the reservoir, and the population moved to Seneca Village to the northwest, which itself was demolished when Central Park

was constructed in the 1850s. The reservoir was surrounded by a stone retaining wall, a portion of which is still visible near the 86th Street transverse. The southwestern corner of the reservoir was overlooked by Vista Rock, atop which Belvedere Castle was built in 1869.

When Central Park was completed, the Lower Reservoir served as a complement to the Upper Reservoir, now the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. Belvedere Castle was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867–1869. An architectural hybrid of Gothic and Romanesque

styles, Vaux's design called for a Manhattan schist and granite structure with a corner tower with conical cap, with the existing lookout over parapet walls between them.[1] Its name comes from belvedere, which means "beautiful view" in Italian. Starting in 1919, Belvedere Castle

housed the New York Meteorological Observatory, which had been taken over by the United States Weather Bureau. The current weather station in Central Park, an Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS), is located immediately south of the castle, though wind equipment is still

located on the main tower. The castle was designed by the architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould as an additional feature of the Greensward Plan, created by Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted and Vaux were re-hired to their positions in mid-1865 after quitting abruptly

several years before. After the New York Meteorological Observatory automated its equipment and moved its offices to Rockefeller Center in the 1960s, Belvedere Castle was closed to the public and became an object of much vandalism, neglect and deterioration.

In 1861 Olmsted took leave as director of Central Park to work in Washington, DC as Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. On the home front, Olmsted was one of the six founding members of the Union League Club of New York. In 1863,

Olmsted went west to become the manager of the newly established Rancho Las Mariposas-Mariposa gold mining estate in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.[20] The estate had been sold by John C. Fremont to New York banker, Morris Ketchum, in January of that same year. The

mine, for whatever reason, did not prove to be successful; and "[b]y 1865, the Mariposa Company was bankrupt, Olmsted returned to New York, and the land and mines were sold at a sheriff's sale."In the 1860s, he partnered with Peter Cooper, John Jacob Astor Jr., Hamilton Fish and

others to form a new committee, the Special Council of Hygiene and Public Health. Morris Ketchum, with his son Edward B. Ketchum, led the financial firm of Ketchum, Son and Company in New York City. His son Edward was later found to have embezzled nearly $2.5 million to cover his

losses in the 1860s;[7][8] it was Morris's good reputation that kept the public from suspecting Edward of embezzlement for a time.[9] Morris had to resign as president of the Fourth National Bank of New York.

In 1864, the Frémonts purchased an estate ranch in present-day Sleepy

Hollow, New York from the newspaper publisher James Watson Webb. They named it Pocaho, an Indian name. For Jessie it was a chance to recapture some of the charm and isolation of living in the countryside, now that John had retired from politics.[156] The house, now at 7 Pokahoe

Drive in Sleepy Hollow, is currently a private residence. The land that would become Sleepy Hollow was first bought from Adriaen van der Donck, a patroon in New Netherland before the English takeover in 1664. Starting in 1672 Frederick Philipse began acquiring large parcels of

land mainly in today's southern Westchester County. In 1779, Frederick Philipse III, a Loyalist, was attained for treason. The manor was confiscated and sold at public auction, split between 287 buyers. The largest tract of land (about 750 acres (300 ha)) was at the Upper Mills;

it passed to numerous owners until 1951, when it was acquired by Sleepy Hollow Restorations. Thanks to the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller Jr., about 20 acres (8.1 ha) were restored as today's historic site. Initially, landscaping of the grounds was given to the firm of

Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Manhattan's Central Park. Rockefeller Senior was unhappy with this work however and assumed control of the design himself, transplanting whole mature trees, designing lookouts and the several scenic winding roads. In 1906, the further

design of Kykuit's grounds was undertaken by the architect William Welles Bosworth, who designed the surrounding terraces and gardens with fountains, pavilions and classical sculpture. Comprising some 52,000 acres (81 sq mi) of land, it was bounded by the Spuyten Duyvil Creek,

the Croton River, the Hudson River, and the Bronx River. Philipse was granted a royal charter in 1693, creating the Manor of Philipsburg and establishing him as first lord.

Dobbs Ferry was named after Jeremiah Dobbs, a descendant of William Dobbs, of Swedish and Dutch ancestry

whose family ran a ferry service[9] that traversed the Hudson River at this location.[10] Dobbs was a fisherman and settled near the southern part of what is now Dobbs Ferry, and he "added to his meager income by ferriage of occasional travelers across the Hudson.

Hyatt's other patented inventions include the first injection moulding machine, sugarcane milling, juice extraction, roller bearings, and a multiple-stitch sewing machine. John Wesley Hyatt founded the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company in 1892 in Harrison, New Jersey.
In 1895 he

hired Alfred P. Sloan, son of a major investor in the company, as a draftsman. In 1905 he made Sloan president. The company was sold to General Motors in 1916, and Sloan went on to become president of GM.

Hyatt was born in Starkey, New York, and began working as a printer when

he was 16. Later, he invented plastic, receiving several hundred patents. Among the most well-known of his inventions was that of a substitute for ivory to produce billiard balls. An award of $10,000 had been instituted by Michael Phelan in 1863 due to the cost of ivory and

concerns on its shortage.
Aided by his brother Isaiah,[1] Hyatt experimented with Parkesine, a hardened form of nitrocellulose.[2] Parkesine had been invented by the Englishman Alexander Parkes in 1862, and is considered the first true plastic, although it was not a success as a

commercial or industrial product.

Parkes' material was developed later in improved form as Xylonite by his associate Daniel Spill, who brought a patent infringement lawsuit – ultimately unsuccessful – against John Wesley Hyatt, developer of celluloid in the US. In 1870,

however, the judge ruled that Parkes was the true inventor, owing to his original experiments. Alexander Parkes was born at Suffolk Street, Birmingham, the fourth son of James Mears Parkes and his wife Kerenhappuch Childs. Samuel Harrison, described by Sir Josiah Mason as the

inventor of the split-ring (or key-ring) and widely credited with the invention of the steel pen, was his great-uncle.[6] Parkes was twice married. By his first marriage, to Jane Henshall Moore (1817–50), he had four sons and two daughters (the cricketer Howard Parkes was a

grandson), and by his second marriage, to Mary Ann Roderick (1835–1919), four sons and seven daughters. Parkes' younger brother Henry (1824–1909), a trained chemist, who was married to Fanny Roderick (1837–97), a sister of Alexander's second wife, assisted him in many of his

experiments during a collaboration lasting more than fifty years. It was once the world's largest pharmaceutical company and is credited with building the first modern pharmaceutical laboratory and developing the first systematic methods of performing clinical trials of new

medications. The Parke-Davis Research Laboratory is a National Historic Landmark. The production facility on Parkdale Road in what was then Avon Township, Michigan (site now in Rochester, Michigan) was also a landmark in that vicinity and is now used by PAR Pharmaceuticals.

In the 1950s, Parke-Davis employed Jonas Salk as a consultant on vaccine adjuvants. Parke-Davis was also involved in manufacturing the polio vaccine. It took Salk much effort to convince Parke-Davis to follow his production protocols exactly. Also, Parke-Davis distributed Coley's

toxins, the first cancer vaccine, which was developed by William Coley to treat osteosarcoma.

Like Bayer with heroin; before the criminalization of cocaine, the drug was sold by Parke-Davis in various forms, including cigarettes, powder, and even a cocaine mixture that could be

injected directly into the user’s veins with the included needle. The company promised that its cocaine products would "supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and ... render the sufferer insensitive to pain." In October 1915, Aleister Crowley,

author of Diary of a Drug Fiend and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, stopped by Parke-Davis in Detroit, where, according to Crowley, the cooperation was complete. Parke-Davis developed the first bacterial vaccine, and the company was thus known as a pioneer in the field of

vaccinology. It was also among the five firms contracted to manufacture the original Salk killed-virus vaccine.[13] A combination of the DPT and polio vaccines, called Quadrigen, was developed in 1954 and approved in 1959. Quadrigen was later removed from the market in 1968

after a series of lawsuits pertaining to adverse effects in vaccinated children. The Kresge-Hooker Science Library Associates was the successor organiza- tion to the Friends of the Hooker Scientific Library first started by Dr. Neil E. Gordon at Central College, Fayette, Missouri

about 1938. The Associates ceased operations in 1970. The Hooker Library was begun by Samuel Cox Hooker (1864-1935).
In 1942 Dr. Gordon accepted the chairmanship of Wayne's Chemistry Depart- ment. At the urging of Dr. Gordon, he and William Whitehouse, Dean of the College of

Liberal Arts, collaborated with a committee of scientists and in- dustrial leaders to bring the Hooker Scientific Library to Wayne and to enlarge it. The local committee, sponsored by the Detroit Section of the American
Chemical Society, was chaired by Dr. Harvey Milton Merker

of Parke, Davis and Company. The Hooker Library was begun by Samuel Cox Hooker (1864-1935) who was born in England, obtained his Ph.D. degree at Munich and immigrated to the United States in 1885. Hooker began his career as chief chemist with the Franklin Sugar Refining Company

in Philadelphia in 1885. A son of Daniel Parke Custis, a wealthy planter with nearly three hundred slaves and thousands of acres of land, and Martha Dandridge Custis, he was most likely born at White House, his parents' plantation on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County,

Virginia. In January 1759, his mother married George Washington. The Washingtons raised him and his younger sister Martha (Patsy) Parke Custis (1756–1773) at Mount Vernon.[2] Washington became his legal guardian and the administrator of the Custis Estate. Custis was born in

York County, Virginia, on October 15, 1711. He was one of two children of John Custis IV (1678–1749), a powerful member of Virginia's Governor's Council, and Frances Parke Custis. The Custis family was one of the wealthiest and socially prominent of Virginia.[2] Custis's mother,

Frances, was the daughter of Daniel Parke, Jr., a political enemy of the Custises. Following Milner's death in 1925, he became the second leader of Milner's Kindergarten until his own death in 1955. His experience led him to conceptualize his version of a Federal World Government

which became his life work. In pursuit of this goal, he founded (1910) the quarterly Round Table. He was appointed (1912) Beit lecturer in colonial history at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College. The Royal Institute of International Affairs finds its

origins in a meeting, convened by Lionel Curtis, of the American and British delegates to the Paris Peace Conference on 30 May 1919. Lionel Curtis was instrumental in the founding of Chatham House.
Ultimately, the British and American delegates formed separate institutes, with

the Americans developing the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
The British Institute of International Affairs, as it was then known, held its inaugural meeting, chaired by Robert Cecil, on 5 July 1920. In this, former Foreign Secretary Edward Grey moved the resolution

calling the institute into existence:

By 1922, as the Institute's membership grew, there was a need for a larger and more practical space and the Institute acquired, through the gift of Canadian Colonel R. W. Leonard, Chatham House, Number 10 St. James's Square, where the

Institute is still housed. Nos. 9 to 11: Numbers 9, 10 and 11 were built in the 1730s on the site of the former Ormonde House, once the largest house in the square. Henry Flitcroft supervised number 10 and probably also numbers 9 and 11. No. 10 is Chatham House, former home of

British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder and of the Earl and Countess of Blessington.[8] There is a London County Council plaque on Number 10 stating "Here lived Three Prime Ministers WILLIAM PITT Earl of Chatham 1708–1778 Edward Geoffrey Stanley EARL OF DERBY 1799–1869

William Ewart GLADSTONE 1809–1898".