Mysteries of Yorkville
The culprit, if culprit he be, appears to have been George Patullo, a Saturday Evening Post writer who heard a great story that two corporals told him at a first aid station. Shortly before, on 8 October 1918, they and another corporal, Alvin Cullum York, of Tennessee, had taken out a band of German gunners who stood in the way of the Allied advance, in a French valley near Châtel-Chéhéry. By the time Patullo filed his story, York had achieved victory single-handedly.
Mr. Patullo chose to focus on Sergeant York, presumably because of the tighter, richer narrative his story allowed. The article, titled "The Second Elder Gives Battle" in a reference to his position in his Tennessee church, tells the story of an uneducated backwoods Christian who reluctantly goes to war and reconciles his religious beliefs with his sense of duty to his country.
York became a celebrity overnight and was promptly promoted to the rank of sergeant. In 1941, Warner Bros released Sergeant York, for which Gary Cooper received an Oscar. There were always murmurings, however, that York wasn't the only hero of Châtel-Chéhéry, and now as Craig S Smith reports ("Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall") in the Times, two forensic teams are trying to establish the facts, with metal detectors and GPS. There is no doubt of York's valor - just of the extent of it.
And my point was? For I don't know how long, I've understood that Sergeant York gave his name to my neighborhood, and I was just investigating the matter when I found that the evidence has disappeared. I didn't make it up, but neither the Internet nor the (far from exhaustive or comprehensive) Encyclopedia of New York, Kenneth T Jackson, editor, explains how an area that used to be known as "Germantown" - settled by Central Europeans long before the land to the south was developed - came to be called "Yorkville." I can't even find out when the nomenclature was changed.
I do know that York Avenue started out as Avenue A. It is a geometric continuation of the street with the same name in Alphabet City, and this is chiseled into the cornerstone of PS 158, on York between 77th and 78th Streets. At some point, the name was changed, and the high noon of Sergeant York's celebrity, at the end of World War I, would have been around the right time. Heavily German, the neighborhood had spent the war under a cloud, and it would have made a lot of sense for local worthies, wishing to dissociate themselves from the Kaiser, would have seized upon the vanquisher of a unit of German snipers as a rousing sign of their loyalty to Uncle Sam. There would have been the coincidental advantage that "York" was already a familiar word to non-Anglophones. I am fairly sure that this is what happened, and I'm also sure that I learned it from a Web site some years ago. But now there is only silence.
Alvin York declined to take advantage of his fame, and retired to the obscurity whence he came, in Pall Mall, Tennessee, and where he remains something of a local hero. One of the several Web sites devoted to him shows the picture atop this entry and labels it 'With the Tennessee Society of New York in 1919 at the welcoming home ceremonies."
An information brownout - ahimè.
