Greater Astoria
Historial Society
35-20 Broadway, 4th Floor | L.I.C., NY 11106
718.278.0700 | www.astorialic.org
Gallery Hours:
Mondays & Wednesdays 2-5 PM
Saturdays 12-5 PM
Exhibits ~ Lectures ~ Documentaries ~ Books
Walking Tours ~ Historical Research
Unique & Creative Content
For more information visit us on the web at
www.astorialic.org
This image adapted from an invitation to the
Long Island City Athletics 33rd Annual Masque Ball, 1909.
32 JULY 2017 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
Legends
Five Degrees of Separation
BY GREATER ASTORIA
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Think back when you were a little
child and met someone who was
in their 90s. Now think about
when they were young, and met some-one
of equal age. Repeat that cycle three
times more and it takes you so far back
in time that you are at the period when
New Amsterdam was first settled in
the early 1600s. There are exactly five
degrees of separation between today
and the time of our city’s infancy.
The subject of
our sketch, Grant
Thorburn, lived from
1766 to 1863, an
epoch that strad-dled
the precise
center of our city’s
history.
There are yet
many people alive
today who remem-ber
meeting people
who lived during the
period when he
lived. Now, if we go
back in time even
further, Thorburn
himself wrote of
conversations with
those born in the
late 1600s. They told of a town where
a solid field of corn ran between Nassau
Street and the East River, of a water
spring that flowed near the Battery, and
of fishermen drying nets on the Hudson
shore - on what is now Greenwich Street.
Grant Thorburn was the most fa-mous
Astorian in his lifetime. He was
both recognized on the streets of New
York as well as in his native Britain.
Popular novels of the time borrowed his
persona (with his approval). He once
had the opportunity to meet the King
of England but declined because he
couldn’t be bothered to spend money
for a suit of clothes acceptable to court
protocol.
It is our good fortune that he was a
prolific writer. A biographer wrote of him:
“with an easy and somewhat loose but
energetic and pointed style, Thorburn
won attention by his originality, strength,
and candor. His quaint discursiveness,
his allusions to contemporaries and cur-rent
affairs, his somewhat egotistical
garrulousness, his confessions, descrip-tions,
and reflections, besides illustrating
his own character throw light on the
condition of America, and even of the
civilized world.”
The “Windows Through History” blog
states that “Thorburn’s contemporaries
wrote in a style that “often seems imper-sonal,
formal, even characterless by mod-ern
standards. The worst examples are
comprised of little
more than descrip-tions
of landmarks,
of little interest to
posterity.
“However the
very best of them
wrote with hon-esty
and human-ity.
Thorburn, for
all the criticism and
sarcasm his writing
received, wrote in a
way that is still ca-pable
of connect-ing
with a reader
on an emotional
level nearly 200
years later. He
published several
books and left a detailed account of life
in post-colonial New York. His autobi-ography
that sketched life during the
first decades of the 19th Century are
among the finest.”
Thorburn straddled many worlds
and was to play an important role in
our community. He founded its second
oldest church, the Reformed Church of
Astoria (and may be buried there), our
first commercial enterprise with clients
in Europe and America, Thorburn’s
Nursery, which prompted, through
its volume of business, Thorburn to
assume the office as Astoria’s first
postmaster.
Over the next installments of “Leg-ends”
we will share with you our past
through Thorburn’s eyes – and reveal
an artifact recently unearthed in Astoria
that may be related to him.
