American Urban Form: A Representative History (Urban and Industrial Environments)
(American Urban Form -- the spaces, places, and boundaries...)
American Urban Form -- the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life -- has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes and wires, wharves, railroads, highways, and airports reflect changing patterns of the social, political, and economic processes that shape the city. In this book, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore map more than three hundred years of the American city through the evolution of urban form. They do this by offering an illustrated history of "the City" -- a hypothetical city (constructed from the histories of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York) that exemplifies the American city's transformation from village to regional metropolis. In an engaging text accompanied by Whittemore's detailed, meticulous drawings, they chart the City's changes. Planning for the future of cities, they remind us, requires an understanding of the forces that shaped the city's past.
Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900
(In the last third of the 19th century Boston grew from a ...)
In the last third of the 19th century Boston grew from a crowded merchant town, in which nearly everybody walked to work, to a modern divided metropolis. The street railway created this division of the metropolis into an inner city of commerce and slums and an outer city of commuter suburbs. This book tells who built the new city, and why, and how.
Samuel Louis "Sam" Warner was a Polish-born Jewish American film producer who was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Warner Bros. Studios. He established the studio along with his brothers Harry, Albert, and Jack L. Warner. Sam Warner is credited with procuring the technology that enabled Warner Bros. to produce the film industry's first feature-length talking picture, The Jazz Singer.
Background
Schmuel "Wonsal" or "Wonskolaser", was born in Congress Poland under Russian Empire, possibly in the village of Krasnosielc, He was one of eleven children born to Benjamin, a shoe maker born in Krasnosielc, and Pearl Leah Wonsal/Wonskolaser (née Eichelbaum). He had ten siblings: sisters Cecilia (1877-1881), Anna (1878-1958), Rose (1890-1955), Fannie (1891-1984) and Sadie (1895-1959). His brothers were Hirsch Morris (born in 1881 and later known as "Harry"), David (1893-1939), Abraham (1884-1967), later known as "Al" or "Abe"), Jacob (1892-1978), later known as "Jack") and Milton (1896-1915).
Education
The family immigrated to Baltimore, Maryland in October 1889 on the steamship Hermann from Bremen, Germany. Their father had preceded them, immigrating to Baltimore in 1888, and following his trade in shoes and shoe repair. He changed the family name to Warner, which was used thereafter. As in many Jewish immigrant families, some of the children gradually acquired anglicized versions of their Yiddish-sounding names. Schmuel became Samuel, nicknamed Sam.
In Baltimore, Benjamin Warner struggled to make enough money to provide for his growing family. Following the advice of a friend, Benjamin relocated the family to Canada, where he attempted to make a living by bartering tin wares to trappers in exchange for furs. After two arduous years in Canada, Benjamin and his family returned to Baltimore. In 1896, the family relocated to Youngstown, Ohio, following the lead of Harry Warner, who established a shoe repair shop in the heart of the emerging industrial town. Benjamin worked with his son Harry in the shoe repair shop until he secured a loan to open a meat counter and grocery store in the city's downtown area. As a child, Sam Warner found himself trying to find work through a range of various odd jobs.
Career
Samuel Warner was the first member of his family to move into the entertainment industry. In the early 1900s, he formed a business partnership with another Youngstown resident and "took over" the city's Old Grand Opera House, which he used as a venue for "cheap vaudeville and photoplays". The venture failed after one summer. Warner then secured a job as a projectionist at Idora Park, a local amusement park. He persuaded the family of the new medium's possibilities and negotiated the purchase of a Model B Kinetoscope from a projectionist who was "down on his luck". The purchase price was $1,000. Warner's interest in film came after seeing Thomas Edison's The Great Train Robbery while working as an employee at Cedar Point Pleasure Resort in Sandusky, Ohio. During this time, Albert agreed to join Warner and together the two displayed showings of The Great Train Robbery at carnivals throughout the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania; Sam Warner would run the film projector and Albert would sell tickets.
In 1905, Harry Warner agreed to join his two brothers and sold his Youngstown bicycle shop. Through the money Harry made by selling the bicycle shop, the three brothers were now able to purchase a building in New Castle, Pennsylvania; The brothers named their new theater The Cascade Movie Palace. The Cascade Movie Palace was so successful that the brothers were able to purchase a second theater in New Castle. This makeshift theatre, called the Bijou, was furnished with chairs borrowed from a local undertaker. They maintained the theater until moving into film distribution in 1907. That year, the Warner brothers established the Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Amusement Company, and the three brothers rented an office in the Bakewell building in downtown Pittsburgh. Harry then sent Sam Warner to New York to purchase, and ship, films for their Pittsburgh exchange company, while he and Albert remained in Pittsburgh to run the business.
Their business, however, proved lucrative until the advent of Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (also known as the Edison Trust), which charged distributors exorbitant fees. In 1909, the brothers sold the Cascade Theater for $40,000, and decided to open a second film exchange in Norfolk, Virginia; through this Norfolk company, younger brother Jacob (known as "Jack,") following Sam's advice, officially joined his three brothers' business and was sent to Norfolk by older brother Harry to serve as Warner's assistant. In 1910, the Warners would sell the family business, to the General Film Company, for "$10,000 in cash, $12,000 in preferred stock, and payments over a four-year period for a total of $52,000".
In 1910, the Warner brothers pooled their resources and moved into film production. After they sold their business, the brothers lent their support to filmmaker Carl Laemmle's Independent Motion Picture Company, which challenged the monopolistic control of the Edison Trust; the brothers served as distributors for Laemmle's films in Pittsburgh. In 1912, Sam would help the brothers earn a $1,500 profit with his film Dante's Inferno. In the wake of this success, Harry Warner, seeing Edison's monopoly threat grow, decided to break with Laemmle and had the brothers start their own film production company, Warner Features. After this occurred Harry Warner, who now had an office in New York with brother Albert, sent Sam and Jack to establish film exchanges in Los Angeles and San Francisco; Warner would run the company's Los Angeles division while Jack ran the company's San Francisco division. The brothers were soon poised to exploit the expanding California movie market. Their first opportunity to produce a major film came in 1918, when they purchased the film rights for My Four Years in Germany, a bestselling novel that condemned German wartime atrocities. In the wake of the successful profits My Four Years in Germany gave the Warner's, the four brothers were now able to establish a studio in the area near Hollywood. In the new Hollywood studio, Warner became co-head of production along with his younger brother, Jack. In this capacity, the two brothers secured new scripts and story lines, managed film production, and looked for ways to reduce production costs.
Between the years 1919 and 1920, the studio was not profitable. During this time, banker Motley Flint-who was, unlike most bankers at the time, not antisemitic-. helped the Warners pay off their debts. The brothers then decided to relocate their production studio from Culver City to Sunset Boulevard. The studio would also rebound in 1921, after the success of the studio's film Why Girls Leave Home. As a result of the film's success, director Harry Rapf was appointed the studio's new head producer. On April 4, 1923, following the studio's successful film The Gold Diggers, Warner Brothers, Inc. was officially established.
In May 1926, through the company's partnership with Western Electric, Sam formed a subsidiary known as Vitaphone, Through Vitaphone, the studio released a series of musical shorts and the feature-length Don Juan (which had a synchronized music track); upon establishing Vitaphone, Warner was also made Vice President of Warner Bros. as well. Despite the money Don Juan was able to draw at the box office, it still could not match the expensive budget the brothers put into the film's production. These vehicles received further tepid responses, and Harry grew increasingly opposed to the venture.
Around this time, Paramount head Adolph Zukor offered Sam a deal as an executive producer for his studio if he brought Vitaphone with him; during the year, Harry had also become the company president. Warner, not wanting to take any more of brother Harry's refusal to move forward with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer, but the deal died after Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino's death. By April 1927, the Big Five studios (First National, Paramount, MGM, Universal, and Producers Distributing) had put the Warners in financial ruin, and Western Electric renewed the Warner's Vitaphone contract with terms that it was no longer exclusive and that other film companies could test sound with Western Electric as well. Harry eventually agreed to accept Warner's demands, and he pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature, based on a Broadway play and starring Al Jolson. The Jazz Singer broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood, and single-handedly launched the talkie revolution.
In September 1927, Jack —who was working nonstop with Sam on production of The Jazz Singer—noticed that his brother started having severe headaches and nosebleeds. By the end of the month, Sam was unable to walk straight. He was hospitalized and was diagnosed with a sinus infection that was aggravated by several abscessed teeth. Doctors also discovered that Warner had developed a mastoid infection of the brain. After four surgeries to remove the infection, Warner slipped into a coma. He died of pneumonia caused by sinusitis, osteomyelitis and epidural and subdural abscesses on October 5, 1927, the day before the premiere of The Jazz Singer.
(American Urban Form -- the spaces, places, and boundaries...)
Membership
Served as aerial observer, 2d lieut. United States Amry, 1917-1918. Director research American Institute Criminal Law and Criminology, 1922-1926.
Member of staff Harvard Crime Survey, 1927-1935. Member American and Massachusetts bar associations. Member; Clubs: Rotary, Brotherhood of St. Andrews (Washington), Harvard (New York.
Connections
Married Helen Wilson, April. Children: Murray, Sam B., Junior.