Debuting this Friday, October 20, 2023-Episode 496-David Pietrusza with a guided tour of organized crime in the 1920s in New York City, Gangsterland.

A site by site, crime by crime, outlaw by outlaw walking tour through the seedy underbelly of Roaring Twenties Manhattan—where gamblers and gangsters, crooks and cops, showgirls and speakeasies ruled the day and, always, the night.

Amsterdam underwear played Times Square

by Bob Cudmore

   Visitors to New York’s Times Square a century ago saw the virtues of Amsterdam-made knit underwear up in lights.

   According to handwriting on the back of a picture that hung at an Amsterdam factory, the Times Square sign was in place from 1912 to 1922. The note stated the company paid $3000 a month for the sign, although the sign company wanted $6000 a month. 

   Spelled out in electric lights on the sign was the following—Chalmers underwear, makers of Porosknit, Inrox and Kruco for summer and winter.  A clock was below the sign.

   According to historian Hugh Donlon, Amsterdam visitors never wearied of gawking at the sign. Certainly the sign’s prominent placement was a talking point for company salesmen, who could point out that the Amsterdam company was serious about national advertising. 

   David W. Chalmers and his partners were the last industrialists to start a major knitting mill in the city in 1901. In the next decade, Chalmers built his factory complex, along the south shore of the Mohawk River.

   Long Island developer Uri Kaufman in recent years was unable to convince Amsterdam’s Common Council to give him the opportunity to turn the long vacant factory into apartments.  The structure was slated for demolition in 2010.

   Chalmers sold his mill in 1945 to Lester Martin and Company, which owned manufacturing plants in several cities.  In 1946, Martin company controller Joel Kaplan began making trips to Amsterdam to inventory the Chalmers operation.  In 1955, Kaplan moved to Amsterdam from New York City to oversee the Chalmers plant, which at one time during Martin’s ownership employed 650 people.  Martin died in 1959 and the Chalmers mill closed that same year.

   Kaplan stayed in Amsterdam and became widely known for his service to more than 20 local charities. Kaplan has donated artifacts from Chalmers Knitting to the Walter Elwood Museum. Among them are advertisements for union suits, long cotton underwear for men that was Chalmers’ main product in the old days.  Kaplan said long underwear was popular before central heating and indoor plumbing. 

   Chalmers even made long underwear for summertime, according to a sales brochure: “Here’s a ‘keep cool’ tip for hot weather days.  Chalmers Porosknit underwear is knit to let the air circulate freely through the fabric.  All perspiration is blotted up—no uncomfortable ‘clinginess.’  Porosknit ‘lets the body breathe.’”

   In the days when Lester Martin and Company owned Chalmers, the mill was mainly making ladies and children’s underwear and even handkerchiefs under the Fruit of the Loom label.

CHALM ERS BUTTONS

   Donlon also noted that another family named Chalmers, Harvey and his son Arthur, started a button manufacturing plant on the north side of the river in Amsterdam in 1898.  The Chalmers button plant spanned the Chuctanunda Creek and produced thousands of buttons, originally using clamshells from the Mississippi River area.

   Donlon said, “Employment at peak output was about 1,000, including Amsterdam housewives who added to family income by sewing buttons on cards at home.”  Buttons were so plentiful in Amsterdam that walkways at the Jollyland amusement park—now Shuttleworth Park--were paved with discarded buttons. 

Wednesday, October 18, 2023-From the Archives Episode 175, August 4, 2017, Baltimore sports writer John Eisenberg discusses his book “The Streak: Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken Jr., and Baseball’s Most Historic Record.”  Eisenberg tells the story of baseball’s legendary Iron Men, Cal Ripken Jr. and Lou Gehrig, who each achieved the record of most consecutive games played.

Thursday, October 19, 2023-From the Archives of Focus on History from the Daily Gazette-Amsterdam’s war on alcohol

“I can remember my Dad telling stories of him and buddies running illegal liquor from Johnstown into Amsterdam during Prohibition,” wrote a reader who only identified himself as Ralph.

Friday, October 20, 2023-Episode 496-David Pietrusza on organized crime in the 1920s in New York City, Gangsterland.

Mohawk Valley Weather. Tuesday, October 17, 2023

46 degrees in The City of Amsterdam at 6:18AM 

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