August 16, 2007
Winston Churchill's dangerous New York mistake
If you were to visit the Churchill Museum in London, you'd be reminded of the fact that one of the British prime minister's most painful mistakes happened in New York City.
At about 10:30 p.m. on December 13, 1931, Winston Churchill was hit by a cab while crossing Fifth Avenue, landing him in the hospital for a week with an additional two weeks of bed rest at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The incident occurred on Fifth Avenue between 76th and 77th streets, map, according to the December 14, 1931 edition of the New York Times (available in pdf format with Times Select.) His intended destination, according to the same story was 952 Fifth Avenue.
Churchill was headed over to the home of financier Bernard Baruch, a place he had been two years earlier but on the night in question couldn't recall the exact address, according to Martin Gilbert's book "Churchill and America," which describes how the accident happened, still 10 blocks from Baruch's: After riding up and down Fifth Avenue for nearly an hour, after what should have been a ten- or fifteen-minute journey, Churchill asked the driver to stop on the Central Park side of the avenue and to wait for him while he crossed the street to the building on the opposite, which he hoped was Baruch's building. Getting out of the taxi in the middle of the street, he looked left instead of right, forgetting that American cars drove on the opposite side to British. Looking left, he saw the headlights of an approaching car more than two hundred yards away, and feeling quite safe, made for the sidewalk. Suddenly, from the right he was struck by an oncoming car and thrown to the ground. Churchill, who acknowledged the accident was his own fault, suffered a severe scalp wound, two cracked ribs, and then developed a case of pleurisy.
Churchill was certainly no stranger to New York. His mother, the American Jennie Jerome, grew up in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood in a house that's still standing at 197 Amity Street, map.
It's often confused with a house at nearby 426 Henry Street, which was the residence of her uncle's family but bears a plaque claiming to mark her birthplace. (Charlles Higham's Jennie Jerome biography "Dark Lady" alternately lists the addresses as 8 Amity Street and 292 Henry. Wikipedia, for its part, says that the address 8 Amity Street was at some point changed to 197 Amity.)
New York is also home to Chartwell, the Winston Churchill bookshop, located at 55 E. 52nd St., map. Among their offerings is a vintage picture of a still-bandaged Churchill in a wheelchair leaving the hospital.
Earlier: Digging up Brooklyn Heights' preservationist roots
Waldorf-Astoria's private rail platform forever closed
Enabling the book junkie: a 'Literary New York' map
August 16, 2007 08:51 AM in History, Midtown, Out of Manhattan, Shopology, Upper East Side
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