The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-05-26

' aires; purchased the sumptuous palace at the corner of Sixty eighth street prosaically known as 7s1 Fifth Avenue, he smiled contemptuously and dis missed with his accustomed breyity or speech the warning of his friends that it was a house of doom. It is recalled that six times have death and disaster stricken those who have lived in the house or been connected with 1t, the last of them silent" Smith. Long before the house was finished, the original owner Howard G. seward. was found hanging from rafter in an unfinished room. William C. Whit ney built new house about the old. enclosing 1t as a large shell encloses small one, but without removing the hoodoo which has chung to it since that first tragic event; for scarcely had the fairyland of Italian Renaissance been completed within the brownstone walls, when the bride for whom Whit ney had designed it was brought in to die from the effects of hunting acci- dent at Aiken, s. C. Then one day the report reached the financial dis trict that it's leader lay i'll in his mag nificent home. Many-tongued rumor expanded the report into story that the illness was no natural one. but the result of a shot fired by an enemy from ambush However that may have been, MT. Whitney died and gossip forgot the curse until the 25th of last June, when Stanford White, who had helped to build and decorate the house. was shot down by Harry K Thaw' Business adversities and ill-health have overtaken Amzi l.. Barber and they call him the Asphalt King" no longer, ex- cept in derision. Now J. H. smith, the last owner of the house is dead. The hoodoo has struck again.
 This week sees the opening of the series of free open-air concerts with which Father Knickerboeker enter tains his citizens on the public recre- ation piers. There are now seven or these piers scattered along the water front between Harlem and the Bat tery and one in Brooklyn where both the old and the young of the city most congested districts gather night ly throughout the summer for a mu- sical entertainment which thoroughly attests tn. generosity of the taxpay- CTS and the excellence of New York s brass bands None of the bands hired for these concerts number fewer than fourteen pieces and some of them ln- clude tw -nty-five. At each of the eight piers these concerts will be given nightly until the second week in September, Including 112 concerts each, or nearly 4 thousand in all. Last year the cost to tn. city of this series of free entertainments was S51,34S, and this year the figures will not be less. But they include only a portion of the aggregate of New York's free summer concerts which far exceed those of any other city in the world. There are two free concerts weekly in Central Park and a dozen or so of the smaller parks will share a hundred or more concerts among them. Altogether the net total outlay for this species of free entertainment for the mass of New York's residents will be not far from s10o, 900 and the free concerts of the other half of the year cost at least as much more.
 The man with the bale hook is not the unskilled Iaborcr of popular esti- nation That Is why the big steam shin companies have had so much diff ficulty in handling freight during the strike which has already cost them several millions of dollars, and why so many liners have sailed away with holds half empty or still filled with the same goods which they had brought across the sea. For practically all ships, New York Is final destination, where one entire cargo onmes out and another goes In. A cargo all of one commodity, like the sugar bags and four barrels which are handled by Ital- fans at the Brooklyn docks IS compar- atively simple; but to stow cargo of