Black Diamond: A Retrospective — Seph Murtagh
We begin this story with the Alexander, a pre-prohibition cocktail made from gin, creme de cacao, and cream. The Alexander belongs to a class of three-ingredient cocktails whose chief characteristic is that its parts are blended in equal amounts. Unlike say an Old-Fashioned (in which the bitters play the role of seasoning), or a Manhattan (in which the vermouth is handmaiden to the whiskey), cocktails in this class are composed of three ingredients that are balanced in equal proportions, producing a triptych, which, like the Holy Trinity, is both equal to and grander than the sum of its parts. The Negroni is probably the most famous cocktail of this class; the Boulevardier, the Bijou, and the Old Pal are other notable examples. The Alexander differs from these again, however, in that it is essentially a dessert drink, being rich, chocolatey, and creamy. The texture is like a White Russian, but unlike the White Russian, which took off during the vodka craze of the 1970s, The Alexander is a cocktail that evokes an earlier era, of glittering mid-century suburban dinner parties, of frosted coupe glasses served under candlelight, of backyard swimming pools and freshly cut grass, the sort of upscale locales portrayed in Mad Men or Cheever stories. As with most drinks, there are many explanations as to its origins, but my personal favorite and perhaps the most plausible is that the Alexander was invented by a New York City bartender named Troy Alexander who created the cocktail in the early 1900s to celebrate an advertising campaign featuring a fictional character named Phoebe Snow. Phoebe Snow was the invention of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad company. A young woman wearing a spotless white dress, she was meant to portray the railroad’s ideal passenger, and from around 1900 to the start of WWI, she was the centerpiece of a promotional campaign intended to raise the flagging fortunes of the passenger train industry, which at the turn of the century was suffering from public controversy over railway deaths, unsanitary conditions, and labor strikes. In particular, the ad campaign apotheosized the exceptional whiteness of her dress, as a way of signaling the virtues of clean-burning anthracite coal. Train journeys in the 19th century were very dirty affairs. Before the advent of anthracite, trains were run on wood or bituminous coal, which coughed up voluminous clouds of ash and soot that would coat the clothes of the passengers. Anthracite coal, on the other hand, was a cleaner burning fuel, and it held out the promise of a new age of civilized and elegant travel. Phoebe Snow was its radiant symbol, and what better celebration of this miraculous new era than an immaculate silk-white cocktail to go with the immaculate silk-white woman.
A white drink for a white woman in a white dress with the surname Snow: in common with the advertising of that era, the Phoebe Snow campaign pursued, with the precision of a scalpel blade, a politics of erasure, an earnest and eviscerating blandness, masked by a veil of playful whimsicality. Phoebe strolled Broadway. Phoebe went camping. Phoebe was courted by a young man, also dressed in white. Her storyline unfolded in a series of colorful illustrations, accompanied by poems written in a jaunty iambic dimeter, meant to imitate the cadence of a train on the tracks:
Says Phoebe Snow,
About to go
Upon a trip
To Buffalo:
My Gown Stays White
From Morn to Night
Upon the Road
Of Anthracite.
Phoebe was a hit. In addition to the new cocktail, her campaign spawned fashion trends, a board game, a silent movie. One way of understanding the Phoebe Snow phenomenon is that it’s a window into how greatly trains were valued at the beginning of the 20th century, not just as a means of getting around, but as symbols of national prosperity. Why, for instance, in 1904 in Binghamton, New York, did 10,000 people gather to watch an actress impersonating Phoebe Snow disembark from a passenger train and parade through the city in a carriage drawn by four white horses, if not to tell themselves, collectively, that they were citizens of a great nation, with its best days ahead? I grew up not far from Binghamton, in Ithaca, in the heart of the Finger Lakes, and it’s often said about Ithaca that it’s “centrally isolated,” that is, not located close to a major highway. But one hundred years ago, Ithaca lay at the center of a vast network of railroads that connected the cities of the Northeastern United States, large and small. Throughout its history, Ithaca was served by no fewer than fifty railroad companies and seven railway lines. Far from a periphery, Ithaca was a terminus: chances are, if you arrived in Ithaca back then, to attend Cornell, to conduct business, to visit relatives, or just to pass through, you were arriving by train. But it wouldn’t last. World War I came, and anthracite was diverted to the war effort; the automobile came, and Americans discovered they preferred private travel. In 1942, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad discontinued passenger service in Ithaca; in 1959 the Lehigh Valley Railroad followed suit. By the 1960s, the train era was essentially over. All over Upstate New York, rail lines fell into disuse, tracks were torn up, and stations were converted into bank branches and insurance offices. Soon people would forget there ever were trains. Occasionally as a kid, tramping through the woods (the one habit, through a lifetime of mercurial obsessions, that I have kept up incessantly) I would come across an old railroad embankment, overgrown with briars, running like a ribbon in a perfectly straight line between the trees, and I would wonder who had built it, and for what purpose. Or exploring the bottom of a ravine, I would suddenly discover, suspended in the air high above me, the decaying remains of a trestle bridge, its rusty black skeleton seeming to speak to some ancient, mysterious engineering, and I would gaze at it in stupefaction, like a Saxon tribesman standing awestruck before the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Even as a kid I could grasp, however imperfectly, that a whole order of things had vanished.
Let us imagine then, on a hot July day in 1910, at the pinnacle of the locomotive era, a great passenger train, the Black Diamond Express, flagship of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, thundering up the west side of Cayuga Lake, trailing a white plume of smoke and casting flickering shadows across the landscape. Unlike the wide clearances of modern highways, the train makes its way along a narrow corridor bound on either side by fields, shrubs, and hedgerows, a great swath of vegetation which has been pushed back by civilization but which at certain points along the track seems to be threatening a revanchist counterattack on its surrendered territory. The original forests of Upstate New York had been cleared by European settlers throughout the 19th century to make space for farmland, but in 1910 the forests are beginning to stage a comeback, prompted by a decline in agriculture; increasingly, throughout the 20th century, farm fields will be abandoned, and they will quickly be overrun by grasses and studded with saplings of maple, ash, and aspen. It doesn’t take long for the growth to reassert itself, for this is a land where water is abundant, lying motionless in vernal pools and glacial lakes, moving swiftly in creeks and waterfalls and rainstorms, sucked up by roots and arboreal systems, lending the woods an aggressive resplendency. Phenophase is the scientific term given to those periods in a plant's life cycle when change is rapid and discernable, and in the Finger Lakes, when warm weather descends, it takes the form of a wild burst of kinetic energy. Watching the blossoming of apple and cherry trees here, for instance, one thinks of Lenin's quote, that there are weeks when decades happen. A thing that visitors from drier regions will note, when they travel to this part of the United States from Colorado or Arizona or even California, is the miraculous lushness of summer. There is water everywhere, in the lakes, in the creeks, water bursting from cliffs, water falling from the sky, and this great deluge of water, timed with the warming of spring, results in a pace of vegetative growth that is so fast that you can almost observe it happening in real time. Around these parts, if you're like me and you revisit the same hiking ground obsessively, it inevitably happens say after a thunderstorm in late May or early June that you are confronted by an impudent shockwave of green that you swear wasn't there twenty-four hours earlier. You marvel at the luxurious, almost obscene, pace of this growth. Where did they go, the delicate little flowers of spring? You are approaching the summer season, when the forest explodes with riotous greenery, choking off the sunlight to the forest floor and causing the fragile little flowers, Hepatica, Bloodroot, Trillium, to wilt and disappear. There is something tender and almost magical about these early spring flowers that blossom when canopies are thin, a quality noted in the evocative names which European settlers gave to them—Wake Robin, Squirrel Corn, Dutchman's Breeches, Lady Slippers—as if the settlers were trying to capture in words the spirit of a childish delight bursting forth out of the darkness of winter. Observing their sly beauty, their tiny displays of color peeking through a brown carpet of decaying leaves at a time of year when ice can still be found in the lee side of the gorges, is to know that a spirit of warmth and promise is at work in the land. A fleeting period, a few shy weeks in April and May, and then they are gone, ephemeral, to be replaced by an impossible mass of matter: tangles of honeysuckle and chokecherry, bright green mosses covering the trunks of fallen trees, towering oaks and maples that spread their canopies like wings over the darkened earth, soaring vines of wild grape and Virginia creeper, fat sycamores that look like they have been cut whole out of the sides of mountains, chaotic rivulets splashing down the sides of ravines and gullies, and everywhere the air is hot and sweet-smelling and buzzing with insects, a scenery so confident in its lushness that it feels prehistoric. Winter is forgotten. You can hardly recall that this forest has ever been anything other than a dense green wonder in the throbbing heat of July.
In Upstate New York in 1910, however, farmland still would have predominated, intermixed with the occasional meadow or young forest, and that’s the landscape I'm imagining the great train barreling through on a hot summer day, along a track that seems like it was cut by a cosmic knife blade. And staring out the window, wearing a white dress kept clean by the wonder of anthracite and in the act of lifting a Alexander to her lips (perhaps an anachronism, as in 1910 the Alexander was likely still a few years off, but bear with me)—lifting an Alexander in a tin goblet to her lips, made cool by the miracle of ice: Phoebe Snow, up from New York City, on her way to visit her relations in Buffalo. Technically a fiction, but we can be confident that a woman very much like Phoebe did ride this train and did stare out this window on a July day in 1910. And what was our hypothetical Phoebe thinking of, as she gazed out the train window, watching the tall elms and flickering wood shadows go racing by? The rocking coach, the cry of the whistle, the steady iambic rhythm of the wheels on the track, they would have spoken a message to her, spoken a message to all the passengers aboard that train, a message not subtle in its musicality, that here was power. Nearly everywhere Phoebe looked, she would have seen visible expressions of this power. In the train itself, the famous Black Diamond Express, inaugurated as the “Most Handsome Train in the World” upon its unveiling in 1896, the cylinders and driving wheels of its 4-6-2 Pacific engine propelling its 600,000-pound bulk along the track at an average speed of 44 miles per hour. In the sumptuous elegance of the coach where Phoebe sat, lit by Pintsch gas and heated by direct steam from the engine, walled by panels of polished Mexican mahogany and topped by a ceiling in the Empire dome style, finished in white and gold. In the provisions of its dining car, where passengers could help themselves to porterhouse steak, cold beer, Welsh rarebit. In the train’s astounding trajectory, transporting passengers from New York City to Buffalo in a span of twelve hours, a marvel of modern technology, collapsing space and time.
But the power was also marked by what was absent. For the landscape rushing past the train window was not merely the “Switzerland of America” as boasted about in the advertising brochures of the railroad companies; this landscape, which to Phoebe’s eye would have been little more than a perspective—pretty and picturesque as it flitted by, but essentially unknowable—was the homeland of a people who had painstakingly mapped its ecosystem, its roots and barks, its flowers and leaves, into a vast body of knowledge, of how to treat wounds and stop toothaches, of how to construct homes and weave baskets, of how to dye animal hides and season wild game. A science passed down through the generations, but which, by the time Phoebe came to be staring out the train window, was in danger of being lost. Gazing at the landscape rushing past, Phoebe would have seen nothing to mark the existence of the Gayogohó:nǫˀ people, nor especially the scenes of appalling terror that had befallen them in the summer of 1779 at the hands of General John Sullivan on the orders of President George Washington, their villages and orchards burnt, their populations scattered and starving, their lands violently seized and rewarded to their enemies, the woods that had sustained them now redefined as a wilderness to be cleared, surveyed, parceled, and taxed. The creeks dammed, the trees felled, the heavy stones stacked into walls to mark the boundaries of landholdings. Frequently the thicket of greenery racing past would have yielded to farmland, and from her seat on the train Phoebe could have let her eye wander over bright fields of rye and barley before alighting on a farmhouse in the distance, its pilasters and gables and stately white columns recalling the architectural splendor of classical Greece, which, along with the placenames of the new townships, Ithaca, Ulysses, Hector, Homer, Athens, Sparta, sought to erase, by the violent imposition of an ersatz democratic ideal, the memory of a people whose practice of democracy was so notable that no less a personage than Benjamin Franklin could report that “having frequent occasions to hold public councils, they have acquired great order and decency in conducting them.” Meanwhile, in seminar rooms and libraries, a subtler, if no less powerful, form of erasure was taking hold, as the plant and animal species of the newly occupied land were classified into scientific taxonomies, granted new names in a Latin vocabulary as remote from the Gayogohó:nǫˀ language as the sun is from the moon. The animal we know in English as the white-tailed deer, for instance, what had been called for millennia dewáhǫhde:s, literally “It Has Two Long Ears,” now labeled odocoileus virginianus, from the Greek “ὀδούς” for “tooth” and “κοῖλος” for “hollow,” i.e. “Hollow-Tooth of Virginia.” A transition, from a living, breathing language with powers of description as swift as a swallow in flight, to a language as static and emotionless as a museum display: the same plants, the same animals, but a total revolution in interpretation, in systems of understanding, in attitudes towards the natural world. And of that natural world, the newspapers read by Phoebe’s fellow train passengers would have told stories of how it was being bent and prodded, twisted and forged, into spectacular shapes that thrilled the imagination. January of 1910 saw the world’s first public radio broadcast, a live performance of the New York City Metropolitan Opera; March saw the first filmed version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; June saw the world’s first commercial airflight, a Zeppelin that carried 19 passengers on a 9-hour voyage. It was an age of wonders, of scientific discoveries that to the untrained eye would have appeared like magic, but which elicited a bright and optimistic faith in American progress. In 1910, America was at the height of its imperial ambition, a young superpower whose holdings stretched from the Phillipines to Panama to Guam to Puerto Rico; fittingly, the Black Diamond Express joined together the two largest cities of a state whose literal nickname was Empire and whose motto, Excelsior, invoked a spirit of limitless striving. Everywhere Phoebe looked she would have seen evidence of a destiny as manifest as the magnificent black machine, chugging through the woods.
One wonders, not just what the passengers on that train would have made of a century that began with childish glee at the launching of a dirigible and ended with the testing of weapon systems that can incinerate whole cities in the time it takes me to write this sentence, but what they would have thought if they knew that the track along which they rode with such power would, only sixty years later, be lying forgotten in the woods, a ruin, haunted by songbirds and coyotes. I was in high school when I first heard about the plans for “the trail,” a local effort to reclaim the former route of the Black Diamond Express from its wilderness state and clear it as a corridor for walkers and bikers. Even to me as a teenager, it seemed, frankly, like a quixotic idea. Growing up in the rural outskirts of Ithaca in a manic periphery where hippie blends seamlessly into redneck, I was used to adults behaving in startling ways: an acquaintance of my parents might suddenly announce he was getting into koi fish farming, or he might set out to navigate to Lake Superior entirely by canoe, or he might break his leg falling from his bed in the upper reaches of the grain silo he had repurposed as a living quarters. It was impossible for my feelings about the trail not to get mixed up in the atmosphere of general kookiness that surrounded me as a kid. But I also had more specific reasons to be skeptical. The trail was supposed to “link” our quiet village with the City of Ithaca, but to my teenage brain, Ithaca seemed very far away. Among my rural neighbors, Ithaca drew strong reactions, conflicting emotions. It was the home of Cornell University, which sat on a hill overlooking the town, seeming to project an imperial disdain towards everything that surrounded it. Ithaca was filled with strange ideas—veganism, alternative currencies, politically suspicious loyalties—and it wasn’t hard to know which side of the cultural divide you sat on, contrasting the wide lawns and ornate stonework of the Cornell campus with the trailers and dilapidated outbuildings that lined our road. But (and this was true especially for a teenager) Ithaca also carried an exotic appeal. On our road, the most exciting thing to happen was the annual reappearance of the combine harvesters, whereas Ithaca was a cosmopolitan center filled with tobacco shops, punks, a video game arcade, a movie theater, a music store, a pool hall. The trouble was that, for a kid, it was difficult to get there. To ride my bike, for instance, would have entailed cycling to the end of our country road, a mile-long journey; then, for the next eight miles, battling grumpy commuters and heavy truck traffic along a winding state route; then, navigating a narrow arterial road with no sidewalks and barely any shoulder; finally, traversing a five-way intersection whose traffic snarls were so legendary that it was nicknamed, locally, The Octopus. As the crow flies, Ithaca wasn’t far away, but the physical infrastructure that lay between me and it caused a notion to be formed in my mind of an epic, unassailable distance. Biking the country backroads to my rural high school was one thing, but the idea that I might bike all the way to Ithaca was unthinkable. The only classmate I can remember who successfully made the trip would spend study periods snorting PCP in the catwalk of our high school auditorium and lost his virginity to a Cornell sophomore; that seemed like the right personality to brave all those miles of snaking asphalt. For the rest of us, we relied on our parents to ferry us, or we rode the bus. An impossible distance, to be traversed by motor vehicle, but never by a bike: if the notion of the trail made no sense to me, it was because my standard for imagining a journey across great leaps of space and time was the automobile.
But ever sensitive to the whims of my elders, I signed up to help bushwhack the trail. I was working at the time as a camp counselor at a local nature center, and I recruited a group of our campers to volunteer on the project, assuming it would be a fun educational experience for them. Over the course of two hot summer days, our work crew, which consisted of a seventeen-year-old overseeing a group of ten-year-olds, armed with machetes (writing this now, more than twenty years later, this detail seems unbelievable to me, but yes, it did happen) and weighed down with camping gear, hacked through a two-mile stretch of overgrowth along the abandoned railbed of the Black Diamond Express. We scarcely knew what we were doing, or why. The lofty vision of the trail was abstract to us, but what was not abstract, what was in fact simple and direct, was the task of cutting into the thicket that lay before us, clearing a straight line. Our machetes bit into sumac, raspberry, box elder. We worked all day with the sweat pouring from our brows, and when evening fell, we camped next to the railway embankment, pitching our tents in a clearing where the train had cast its shadow a century earlier. Over a glowing campfire, we ate jerky and told ghost stories, and the next morning, we pulled up our tents and went back to work. Progress was slow. At points along the railroad bed, the vegetation was so thick that our machetes were useless, and we were forced to crawl on our bellies, thorns worrying our exposed flesh. It was more than I gambled on. There were tears, temper tantrums, yellowjacket stings, bloodied knees, torn clothing, heat exhaustion. This was in the era before cell phones, so we essentially were on our own: I have a distinct memory of knocking on a farmhouse door at one point, begging the household for water. But finally, we reached the end of our assigned section of the track, and our weariness was momentarily forgotten as we stepped forth from the trees and gazed in mute wonder at Taughannock Falls, a slender white column of water in a wide bowl of grey rock, the largest straight-drop waterfall east of the Rocky Mountains. We had seen it many times before, but our ordeal in the wilderness endowed it with fresh splendor.
But then I moved on: I went to college, grad school, got a job. The trail was the last thing on my mind during these years, but all the while, the work continued. New volunteer crews moved in to bushwhack and clear brush. Grants were awarded, easements were secured. Bridges were built, culverts were repaired. Finally, sixty years after the last passenger train disappeared from Ithaca, the trail was opened. My first trip up the trail on a bicycle was a riot of bewilderment and shifting memories. Where once there had been a wall of overgrowth, there was now a clear path through the woods, covered in a thin layer of stone dust. Over the exact ground where, twenty years earlier, I and my work-crew of ten-year-olds had painfully inched our way through the torrid heat, I now raced with a cool breeze against my cheek. But the biggest surprise was to grasp how greatly a change in infrastructure had reordered my entire universe: the distance that had struck me as so insurmountable as a teenager, the vast miles that lay between my childhood home and Ithaca, I now discovered was a bike trip of less than hour. And what a way to spend an hour: there were waterfalls, cool dark gorges, woods filled with birdsong, a sunny hillside where bison grazed. There were no cops. You could, within reason, do whatever you wanted. Lock your bike into top gear, grip the handlebars and slip into a crouch, speed down the trail like a Tour de France competitor. Or saunter along, take breaks, birdwatch, pick raspberries, wade in a creek, sit against the trunk of a budding cherry tree and reflect on the strange contours of history. It struck me that, for the better part of two centuries, this narrow corridor through the woods had been outstripping human expectations, creating radical new possibilities for movement. To a generation that was not far removed from the settlers who had hacked through the forest to make paths for drays and pack animals, the power of the train, its demonic force and speed, its ability to transport people quickly and comfortably through the wilderness, must have seemed like a miracle. But for me as well, who had been raised on the power of the internal combustion engine, the realization that through a simple act of physical exertion I could cover such an astonishingly vast distance—that I too could collapse space and time—seemed, likewise, a miracle.
To consider American history is to be hemmed in on all sides by the ghosts of unspeakable horrors. The massacres and coffin ships, the whips and shackles and auction blocks, the gaunt spectral figures cast out of hovels and tenements, the burned and mutilated bodies, the battlefield moans of the dying: it’s a crisis that carries such a peculiarly sadistic weight that I sometimes wonder if the famous American appetite for individual uplift and maximalist growth is in fact a strategy of avoidance, a ruse, to forestall an honest reckoning with our demons. More and more, it seems like an act that is getting played out, tinny, desperate, locked in a race with forces (historical, global, ecological) that it cannot possibly outrun—clownish, but no less deadly for being clownish (regimes in the throes of decline have a habit of growing most deadly when they grow most ridiculous), flailing this way and that like a monstrous child, as if even the prospect of a limit is too much to bear. Fifteen-year-old girls in Tik-tok videos posing with AR-15s next to dollhouses in their childhood bedrooms, garish suburban houses swollen with useless rooms in gated communities sealed up like compounds, pickup trucks as big as elephants that can squash a kid riding a bike like a bug, the super-rich bankrolling vanity expeditions into outer space, invoking Magellan over flutes of Dom Perignon, dreaming of new realms of conquest, of colonizing Mars as an escape from our collective disasters. How do they imagine it ending, one wonders: in a hermetically sealed capsule, marooned on an inhospitable planet, while the earth writhes and burns? Corporations maximizing shareholder value as bridges collapse and children go hungry, data mining centers consuming a small European country’s share of energy so that bored office workers drowning in college debt can go even more broke, gambling on pointless currencies. Maybe I’m being naïve in thinking that a critical juncture is being reached, a line so tenuous that one hesitates to know what to call it: more than a mood, but not quite so grand as a spirit of the age. A disturbance perhaps, rippling in from the margins, carrying with it the conviction that our salvation, if it ever comes, will not come from the main edifice, but from the cracks in the temple floor where wild blooms spring up, awakening the past that we have buried or forgotten to new attitudes and possibilities. It’s a feeling that I get, say, on a late spring evening, cycling past hickory and black walnut, a glimpse of an osprey through the trees, the air perfumed with the scent of Dame’s Rocket (was there ever a flower with more protean names? Summer Lilac, Mother-of-The-Evening, and my favorite of all, Good and Plenty, for indeed it does look like candy, tossed scattershot on fields and roadsides), the gentle whirring of wheels on gravel calling to my mind the specter of a locomotive in the early twentieth century traveling along this path at a speed not too much faster than the speed I’m biking at now, the great train rolling north past gorge and sun-streaked meadow, edging ever closer to that oblivion where the trestles will rust and the stations will be forgotten, and all that remains will be this trail, the white and pink flowers dancing in the breeze and the anthracite ghosts whispering in my ear as I downshift to adjust to a change in grade: in all those miles of hollow space, they seem to be saying, how could there be anything to compare with this abundance? Prove to us that this world isn’t enough.
REFERENCES
I consulted several sources in the writing of this essay. I am particularly indebted to the following:
On Phoebe Snow, the locomotive industry in Upstate New York, and the Black Diamond Express:
Gomez, Sarah. “Meet Phoebe Snow, the Fictional Woman Woman Who Gave Glamour to Train Travel— and Coal?!” New York Historical Society. April 4, 2019. https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/phoebe-snow-train-coal-glamour
Lee, Hardy Cambell. Revised Winton G. Rossiter and John Marcham. 3rd edition. A History of Railroads in Tompkins County. History Center of Tompkins County. 2008.
“The Black Diamond on the Lehigh.” Railway and Locomotive Engineering. New York: Angus Sinclair Co. 20 (12): 525-526. December 1907.
On the history and language of the Gayogohó:nǫˀ and the Sullivan Expedition:
Jordan, Kurt. The Gayogohó:nǫˀ People in the Cayuga Lake Region: A Brief History. Tompkins County Historical Commission. 2022.
“About the language.” The Gayogohó:nǫˀ Learning Project. https://gayogohono-learning-project.org/language
On the history of New York State forests:
Smallidge, Peter. “New York’s Forests—Then and Now.” Cornell University Extension News Service. December 1996.
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Seph Murtagh is a writer living in Ithaca, New York. His essays have appeared in the Missouri Review and the Mid-American Review. You can find him on Twitter.