Kenneth McKenzie Murchison, Jr. (1872-1938) was the architect of PRR Baltimore and Johnstown stations, LIRR Jamaica and Long Beach stations, DL&W Hoboken, Scranton and Buffalo stations, LV Buffalo station, Jacksonville Terminal and Havana Central Station in Cuba. A graduate of Columbia University and the Beaux Arts school in Paris, he had some other talents: musician, composer, radio personality, amateur tennis player (and architect of Forest Hills tennis stadium) writer and architectural critic, and, on April 30, 1932, George Washington impersonator.
Mr. Murchison certainly had an uncanny resemblance to the General, but for those like me who remember the 80’s miniseries, Barry Bostwick IS George Washington!
I rode one of Ross Rowland’s C&O 614 / Jersey Transit steam excursions out of Hoboken Terminal, and spiffy place is just putting it mildly.
I almost swooned considering all the history that place has seen.
NJT used to hold yearly rail festivals there as well, the last one being in (I think) 2003. They don’t do them anymore citing expense, which is too bad. I’ve got a video of one of them and it looks like they threw one hell of a party!
Favorite Amtrak stations thread somehow caused me to learn that the architect of the Baltimore station eventually played the First President. President Obama’s inaugural train stopped at Baltimore a while, in order for him to make a speech at Memorial Plaza, and next month he has a chance to see another great Murchison station. Doubt he will, but it’s there.
Mike, thank you for finding and sending the above on. It may take a little thought for the matters to be fully comprehended, but it does explain two things: the difference between Julius Caesar’s calendar, which most of Europe abandoned several years before the end of 1751, and Pope Gregory’s (I do not remember which number he was) calendar, which was adopted earlier by most of Europe–and the reason why, until the change, early dates in each year were indicated by the use of the numbers of two years. I have the impression that some people have thought that writing the year with a slash showed that there was uncertainty as to just what year it was.
A note: you may have noticed near the bottom of the piece is “ye year…” The first word began with a letter that we do not use anymore; it looked somewhat like a “y”–but it was a different letter (I have forgotten its name–“thorn,” perhaps? which was pronounced as “th.” So, “Ye Olde Chemist’s Shoppe” is pronounced “The Olde Chemist’s Shoppe.”
Incidentally, if King George V sent a letter to his cousin Nicholas, Czar of all the Russias, and the mail service was swift enough, Nicky received the letter before it was written, for the Russians, the same as certain oth
Ah–my memory was not faulty as to the name of the letter “Thorn.”
Now, another (off-topic) oddity: in writings earlier than about the middle of the 18th century, the letter “s” when within a word resembled the letter “f”–one not really familiar with the styling has to look closely to see that it has no crossbar; the bar is on one side only of the verticle stroke. When we were readng a portion of Treasure Island in 9th or 10th grade English, at least one of my classmates, when looking at the map of where the treasure was located pronounced “treassure” (sic) as “treaffure.”
That “s” that looked like an “f” in 18th Century manuscripts was called the “long s” and was used only at the beginning of a word or the middle, but never as the last letter. Use of the same slowly began to end by the end of the 18th Century and was gone by the end of the War of 1812, except by some older folks who couldn’t break the habit.
Why’d they use it? That’s fomething I’ve never been able to afcertain. Just the ftyle of the times I fuppofe.
It’s the same thing as the mathematical symbol for the integral sign, a long s (think of summation, sigma, with an infinite number of steps…) except that the descender is truncated to make the thing fit in a normal font cabinet.
The ligature for double ‘s’ survives in German as the ess-tset (not sure how it’s actually spelled) which when you look at it carefully is the long ‘s’ and trailing normal ‘s’ together.
As it turns out, what the letterform actually represents (as preserved in the name) is a long-S-to-z ligature, not a double S which is what it now usually represents.
See the discussion of Heyse near the bottom for what the schluss-s use is.
(Personally I’d love to hear schlimm’s and Juniatha’s opinions on the finer use of this.)
