gaynornotification

LOC -- your date is wrong, should be 1913.

Wystan, Thanks for the heads up on the date. We will correct it when we update the record.

Date in caption should be 9/13/13

@swang: you mean 9/3/13.

Yes, of course.

swanq & Wystan: Thanks for the heads up about the date! The caption cards for this group of photographs (often the source for our captions rather than the negatives themselves) surely gave us quite a few different dates. We will correct them all to read 9/3/13.

Years ago, a summer intern at LOC thought he was playing a merry prank when he inscribed different year dates on all those Gaynor Notification caption cards. William Jay Gaynor had served a term as reform mayor of New York. Because the incorruptible Gaynor would not cooperate with the Tammany machine, Tammany (the New York Democratic Party) refused to nominate him for a second term. So Gaynor was renominated by an independent group, and accepted their nomination. In this photo, the independents notify Gaynor of the nomination, just before he sailed to Europe on a vacation voyage. On September 10, exactly a week after this photo was taken, Gaynor died of a heart attack, in his deck chair aboard the steamship Baltic, 400 miles off the coast of Ireland.

Can someone tell me what the Gaynor Notification means?

It seems to be part of the mayoral election campaign of 1913. The notification ceremonies took place on 3rd September 1913. William Gaynor, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gaynor was nominated for mayor by a group of independent supporters after clashing with the Democrats over corruption in office. He died a few days after this on 10th September 1913. The C. F. M. of the placard will be Charles F Murphy, the boss of Tammany Hall.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Murphy

why are there so many shovels on the ground?

Interesting - thanks for the info.