Diary of a little girl in old New York (1919)

Page 32 has a description of hay fever by a 10 year old girl in 1849. It's really quite interesting.

Page 59 has her hoping that she'll live to see the 20th century in 50 years. Not the year 2000 though, she doesn't want to witness the apocalypse.

Please be the Internet Archive BookReader.

Yes! It's the Internet Archive BookReader!

I loathe, detest, despise, and hate every online application ever created. And several which haven't been.

I LOVE TIA's BookReader. It beats damned near every local client reading interface. At full-screen maximization, it's as close to actually reading a book as you can get, and tied in with TIA's book scans, it's pretty amazing.

It's faster, lighter, more intuitive, and less annoying than any of the half-dozen or so PDF readers I've got -- the simple fact that once you position the readable window of text on your screen it stays put is goddamned golden. UI/UX designers everywhere look at this and bow before your god.

https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader

Much love to the dev crew for this. Oh: it's open source and you can use it on your own site as well.

(Oh, and the diary's pretty interesting as well.)

If you enjoy the place and time of writing like this, and the funny turns of phrases and witty voices of young people, now's a good time to read a story or two by Horatio Alger. They've always been one of my favorite peeks into early 1900's New York through the eyes of small children.

As a bonus, they also give a lot of insight into the origin a common American trope: 'pulling yourself up your bootstraps' and 'fame and fortune can be yours, no matter how low of a post you begin from, with a good work ethic and strong morals.' I won't get on my soapbox about all that right now. Just keep the preaching in context.

"Ragged Dick, Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5348

"Mark, the Match Boy" https://archive.org/details/markmatchboyorri00alge

Thanks!

Might I ask if there are others here who routinely read or search through old texts for interesting finds? I generally prefer this time frame (ie, the late 1800s/early 1900s), and mainly periodicals, but I have yet to dive into anything older or different.

Absolutely fascinating on a number of levels. Thanks for the post.

This is great fun; I live just around the corner from the house she locates on page 8 as being on the south side of 9th Street between University Place and 5th Avenue. Sadly her block was torn down in the mid-20th century to build the Brevoort apartment complex, but most of the townhouses across the street still stand - I wonder which was whose?

Here's an old lithograph of the area: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Union_Squ... - University Place is the broad street leading up (i.e. south) from the right side of the Union Square, and 9th Street is just this side of Washington Square, the treed rectangle at the right.

One curiosity: the date is given as 1849 and on page 17 she says she walks to the House of Refuge on Madison Square; but that was burned down in 1839. Was it still partially standing?

    "My dear, I am very sorry, but our victuals are all hot 
    now, but if you will call in about an hour they will be 
    cold" And [the beggars] went away awfully angry.

Damn her brother is one cold hearted bastard. I had to google what victuals meant.