Easter in New York
Easter was a big deal back in the middle of the twentieth century, bigger in many ways than it is today. And Easter 1946 was especially festive since it was the first Easter since the end of the war. Easter as it was celebrated in New York was not an ancient custom, but rather dated back, like modern Christmas, to the Victorian era when sentimentality and commercialism trumped Calvinist objections to the observation of the liturgical year. The Calvinists did not hate all holidays or festivities: they were fond of parades, speeches, fireworks and rallies for civic occasions but they did not find any mention of Easter or Christmas celebrations in the Bible and found the rites and customs of the liturgical year to be a semi-pagan invention of the Papists. The Calvinists celebrated Christ's death and resurrection every Sunday. Not everyone in early New York was a Calvinist. Easter had been quietly observed as a religious holiday by the city's Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholics and some of its Methodists, and some of New York's ethnic communities had preserved their secular folk customs.
Modern Easter emerged in the decades just before the Civil War. The city's elite congregations began to compete with each other over their holiday floral displays. The Presbyterians relented and joined in the celebration with other denominations following. City folk went from church to church to see the displays. Soon the Easter promenade became a ritual of its own, a time and place to display fashion and finery. The city's merchants quickly recognized the commercial possibilities and promoted the purchase of flowers, chocolates, extravagant hats and holiday dinners while decorating their windows and sales floors with symbols of the holiday. Family gatherings and holiday feasts became the norm. Even secularists celebrated the Resurrection with candy, toys and Easter baskets for the children, bonnets for the ladies and new clothes for one and all, making this the biggest retail season after Christmas.
The business columns of newspapers and magazines reported that customers were out in force, setting Easter sales records despite continued clothing shortages. The plaza at Rockefeller Center again was lined with thousands of lilies. Radio City Music Hall presented its annual pageant and for the seventh year also was the site for The Greater New York Federation of Churches Easter sunrise service, now in its 27th year. The minister of the venerable Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church preached on “The Dawn of Hope” and the 165 members of the Radio City Choristers sang hymns for the event. The Churches of God sponsored an early morning non-denominational service at Central Park Mall. Biggest of all the sunrise services was the 6:30 AM gathering in Queens, the borough where the city’s still numerous but dwindling Protestant middle and lower-middle classes formerly ensconced in Brooklyn, were now most concentrated, although interspersed and increasingly intermarried with Irish and German Catholics. This sunrise gathering was at Maple Grove Memorial Park in Kew Gardens under the auspices of the St. George Association of Civil Servants of Queens. The Rev. Richard Pitman Mallery of the First Community Reformed Church spoke on "The Victory of Peace." and the Westminster Choir and a Salvation Army band performed. A justice of the state Supreme Court, who also served as the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Masons of the City of New York, read the lesson. All three of these sunrise services were broadcast on radio.
There were smaller sunrise services throughout the boroughs and many churches added services to accommodate the customary holiday overflow. The city’s Episcopal bishop, the Right Reverend William T. Manning, who had recently announced he would be retiring at the end of the year, was conducting his last Easter service at the Cathedral Church of St. John Divine. In 1941, he had led the consecration of the massive Gothic cathedral, which had been under construction for 50 years and remains unfinished to this day. The joy of the holiday was tinged with sadness for worshipers at Christ Church Lutheran on East 19th Street. The former Gashouse District had been cleared of its residents, demolition had begun and the church was scheduled to become victim of the wrecking ball to clear space for the construction of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The blocks surrounding the church already looked as if they had been blitzed. But the congregants, most of whom had moved to Queens some years earlier, gathered for one last Easter in the chapel.
The city’s millions of Catholics streamed into stone, stucco and brick churches for Easter mass. At St. Patrick’s, Cardinal Spellman conducted high mass while popular radio priest Fulton Sheen led two of the low masses. This year Orthodox Easter also fell on April 21 and traditional, elaborate midnight vigils in Greek and Slavonic were held throughout the city.
For the secular minded, and for many churchgoers as well, the big deal was the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. This year it would draw a million marchers and spectators, noticeably fewer of them in uniform than in recent years. It was be a festive occasion with the latest of fashion; stylish, extravagant and downright ridiculous chapeau; dogs dressed in hats and the return this year of the publicity stunt: a cowboy in red chaps riding a spotted horse down the avenue and a parade of vintage automobiles.
The Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus was in town at Madison Square Garden, taking advantage of the spring school holiday. The American Cancer Society had launched its annual Easter fund-raising drive and was sponsoring a benefit concert Friday night at Madison Square Garden featuring many big name stars. Hall Johnson's "famous Negro Choir" was performing a new Easter cantata, "Son of Man," at the New York City Center on April 15. The Easter flower show at the Prospect Park Greenhouse was opening on Palm Sunday, with more than 200 varieties of flowers on display; the main feature was a 20-foot high cross of Mexican lilies with an edging of blue cinerarias.
The magazines were touting the return of the traditional ham or lamb Easter dinners after a wartime absence but by the time the holiday rolled round it had become apparent that severe meat shortages would mean that unless you had planned ahead, had a Black Market connection or lucked out, you would be celebrating the holiday with a turkey or chicken.
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