Friday, July 29, 2023 – SHE WENT OVER THE FALLS********AND SURVIVED

By admin

FROM THE ARCHIVES

FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2023

ISSUE#  1046

Annie Edson Taylor:

Over Niagara Falls
&
Into The Poor House

NEW  YORK ALMANACK

JACK KELLY

Annie Edson Taylor: Over Niagara Falls & Into The Poor House

July 26, 2023 by Jack Kelly 

Advancing into the later stages of life, some turn their thoughts to immortality, whether through achievement, offspring, or religion. Many more focus on simply having enough dough to sustain themselves with dignity to the end. Annie Edson Taylor took aim at both goals.

In 1901, she was approaching her sixty-third birthday. She had long fended for herself, an adventurous entrepreneur in an age when most women were still locked into dependency. But life offered scant opportunity for an aging free spirit.

“If I could do something no one else in the world had ever done,” she said to herself, “I could make some money honestly and quickly.” She had lost the slim figure and light step of youth, which had allowed her to get by as a dance instructor. She sat alone at her home in Bay City, Michigan, and mulled her prospects.

“The idea came to me like a flash of light,” she remembered. “Go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”

The feat has become a cliché, but to this day only sixteen individuals have gone over — eleven survived. Even the great showman P.T. Barnum, who first thought of the stunt in 1856, never had the nerve to try it. At the dawn of the twentieth century, no one had yet dared take the plunge.

Niagara sang a siren call to daredevils. They walked across the gorge on tightropes and rode rafts and barrels through the fearsome rapids below the cataract. Niagara was nature stripped naked, a torrent where all the water of the Great Lakes heaved over a drop of more than a hundred fifty feet and crashed to the bottom in a swirl of mists and rainbows.

Growing up in a middle-class family in Auburn, New York, Anna Edson had loved to read adventure stories. At eighteen, she married David Taylor, but he died soon after the wedding. She studied to be a teacher, one of the few professions open to women, and landed a job in San Antonio, still the wild west. She was the victim of a stagecoach robbery there. The thief said if she refused to hand over her money, “I’ll blow your brains out.” Reluctant to part with her savings, she claimed to have answered, “Blow away!”

She moved to the city of New York and remade herself as a dance, physical culture and etiquette instructor. Afterward, she lived a restless, nomadic existence teaching in various cities around the country. She seemed to attract adventure, surviving an earthquake in Charleston and a fire in Chattanooga.

Now she would undertake her greatest adventure, defying death. Niagara had long attracted honeymooners, but it also drew the suicidal. More than a thousand people had ended their lives there. Taylor admitted she preferred to die rather than enter the poor house. She knew that ”it would be fame and fortune or instant death.”

She designed her barrel herself and had a cooper construct it — four and a half feet tall, built of heavy oak staves bound with ten iron hoops. She hired a carnival promoter as manager and announced that she would make the attempt in October 1901. She cut twenty-one years off her age, insisting she was forty-two.

She would take off from an island about a mile above the Falls. She climbed into the barrel with a couple of cushions for protection. A boy attached a bicycle pump to one of the narrow air holes and soon asserted that he had crammed in enough air to “last her for a week.” The holes were corked, and Annie Taylor began to speed down the channel, alone and in darkness.

The rapids above the falls were rugged enough, dropping forty feet over one precipice, flipping and turning the barrel, which had a hundred-pound anvil attached to the bottom for ballast. Rocks along the Canadian shore threatened to smash it to pieces. As she approached the precipice, Annie heard the thunder of the mighty Horseshoe Falls. The barrel seemed to hesitate, she said, then plunged.

She lived. Her manager arranged for a two-hundred-dollar appearance at the Pan-American Exposition, which was going on in nearby Buffalo (President William McKinley had been assassinated there a month earlier). She sold photos of herself with her barrel.

But her income from the spectacle soon dried up. She was no Barnum. She refused to appear in tawdry dime museums. “If she had been a beautiful girl, why we could have made thousands,” her manager said before deserting her, taking her iconic barrel with him.

Annie Taylor achieved immortality of a sort, but it offered a thin cushion as she bounced through her later years. She had a replica of the barrel made and became a familiar figure on the streets of Niagara Falls, where she sold postcard illustrations and had her picture taken with tourists.

Later, she offered the public quack electrical treatments and, as she went blind, her services as a clairvoyant. Her livelihood dwindled, and she was stunned that someone who had “done what no other woman in the world had nerve to do” should end up a pauper.

In 1921, at age eighty-three, she found herself in the county infirmary — the poor house. “If all my plans materialize,” she announced, “I shall not remain here long.” She died two months later.

Sharon Ann Stern

OCTOBER 2, 1945 – JULY 25, 2023

Sharon Ann Stern, age 77, of New York, New York passed away on Tuesday, July 25, 2023.

This afternoon I learned that Sharon Stern passed away last night.  She was a resident of Goldwater Hospital long before there was a Roosevelt Island.  Sharon was 77 years old and she lived in an apartment in 540 Main Street since the late 1970’s.  Sharon was one of a group of Goldwater residents who moved into their own apartments when the community was built.

I had met Sharon at Goldwater in the 1960’s and from then on we met occasionally and kept in touch when we visited and discussed our cats.

Sharon wrote poetry and published “Armature” in 2002*.  
Sharon struggled with staff to assist her and sadly she only left her home the one or two days a week when she could safely manage.  She had episodes when her wheelchair failed and left her stranded.  She would not travel off the island due to bad experiences.

Sharon would attend synagogue services and wrote extensively using a computer.  She rejected many assistive devices to make her work easier. 

A few years ago she marveled at reaching 75 years of age.

May she be a rest now and we remember her constant  determination.

“ARMATURE’ is available on line for purchase.*

MEMORIES OF SHARON
(PLEASE SEND THEM FOR PUBLICATION
ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM)

Sharon was opinionated. A year ago she told me she didn’t believe in vaccinations and hadn’t received any in decades. As she sat in her wheelchair outside on the plaza by Rivercross, she looked to me as part of the vulnerable population that would benefit from receiving the Covid vaccine.
Hers was a sad life but she wouldn’t like our saying this. Yes, she did it her way.
But that was Sharon. Stubborn, proud, independent, and a survivor.

Robin Lynn

Dear friends,


Tonight begins Tisha b’Av – the fast of the 9th of Av. We intended to send this out earlier today however we were otherwise occupied. Unfortunately, we lost a member of our Roosevelt Island family today; Sharon Stern, obm. Many of you have seen her around – Sharon had polio as a child and has been living on Roosevelt Island since she was 8 year old, first at the then Goldwater Hospital and then in her own apartment in Eastwood. Her funeral was today and her family will be sitting Shiva in Queens.

I would like to share with you the few words we shared at the funeral today:

It is quite interesting that Sharon passed away on Erev Tisha b’Av, as we enter a communal fast. Sharon reminds us very much what a community is, what the core of a community is – כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה. On the one hand, most of her life she was dependent on others, but on the other hand she was very independent. Notwithstanding her physical limitations, she always saw herself as part of the community and contributed to the community.  
On a personal level, I lost a reliable friend, a confidante. I knew I could say whatever was on my mind and she would never judge me. She had infinite wisdom to share on many topics and cared tremendously for myself and my family. There are many things that we strongly disagree on, yet we spoke often and openly about everything. She was always a very proud Jew, proud of her Hebrew and Yiddish language and knowledge of Torah. She always tried to fulfill the Mitzvos to the best of her ability.
She developed a very deep and meaningful relationship with my son, Mendel, who I hope can share with you one day more about it.  
We will miss her tremendously. 
Nechama

FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

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ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM

THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

A SUMMER DAY ON  ONE OF THE MANY TERRACES OUTSIDE
GOLDWATER HOSPITAL
JAY JACOBSON AND GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT RIGHT

THE VIEW OF “DOUBLE TAKE” FROM THE ROOF OF THE SUBWAY STATION.
TO SEE MORE OF DIANA COOPER’S ART AND PHOTOGRAPHS CHECK OUT HER WEBSITE:
dianacooper.net 
 

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Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated

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THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.

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