Author Archives: Ben
FULL CIRCLE
It was June 1st, 1971: still 18 years old, I’d signed a lease with no guarantors for a four room tenement apartment at 505 West 122nd Street, complete with mice and roaches just off heroin-ridden Amsterdam Avenue. Dormitory life was not for me at Columbia College, where I’d matriculated almost two years before. I had […]
Making Moxie from Misery With a Pit Stop in Between
Here at the northeast corner of 36th Street and 7th Avenue, the massive structure at 485 Seventh Avenue is undergoing yet another transformation, and a sorry one at that. The entablatured M (see below) memorializes a benevolent history, one that slowly deteriorated after War II, and then sank into the swamps of capitalistic greed and […]
Posted in Lost New York, Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Among the Stones
My friend Russell shares my taste for all things historical, but he’s a hard man to visit, in the recent past working two jobs to pay the rent. Notwithstanding the pressures of his life, his brain remains as big and always open as a barn door. A complicated relationship he has, with memory and honor, […]
Posted in Lost New York, Uncategorized
Leave a comment
A SAD GOODBYE [First published in The New Partisan 2006]
After a years-long adieu, the last major food exchange in lower Manhattan disappeared. some 11 years ago. The Fulton Fish Market is no more, moved lock, stock and barrel to a barren industrial park in the East Bronx. A site that nourished our souls for generations has vanished. The loss in incalculable. No longer […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Oradour-sur-Glane
Visits with my younger daughter who lives in France are fewer than I would prefer: once or, if I am lucky, twice a year. We plan our time together when I arrive serendipitously, choosing local sites, repairing things in her house side-by-side, doing laundry, cooking together and enjoying a normal and pleasant adult relationship. But […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Picking a Beautiful Bronx Mansion’s Lock
[Acknowledgement: The author graciously acknowledges being introduced to the Keil Mansion described below by Frances Stern, some many years ago.] On a chilly November morning I knocked on the door of 381 East 165th Street in the Bronx, a short walk from the busy, modern stretch of the Bronx Judicial Center complex on 161st Street, […]
On the Wings of Angels
During the weeks after my mother’s passing on December 4, 2016, I was particularly comforted by the invitation of my friend Abe, the bal koreh (official Torah reader) at Park Avenue Synagogue on 87th Street and Madison Avenue, to attend Shabbes (Sabbath) services and recite the mourner’s kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead that […]
Posted in Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
Leave a comment
A Widow’s Mite: Virginia Penny and the Struggle for Equal Employment and Pay for Women in the USA in the Late 19th Century
Well-known social reformers of many a stripe are interred in Green-Wood Cemetery. Single Taxer Henry George, anti-slavery leader Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, (known in his time as The Great Divine for his oratory and inspirational skills), and Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA and The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
In Charles Yerkes’ Corrupt Footsteps: The Trilogy of Desire, Philadelphia Version: 2016
Walking down Broadway a few weeks ago, my cell-phone rang, and despite the caller’s number being unknown to me, and suspecting a sales call of some sort, I answered and was rewarded in spades. Visions of time-share re-purchasers and other cons jumped to mind, and I was far but not so far from wrong. An […]
Posted in The Trilogy of Desire, Uncategorized
Leave a comment
The Measure of a Man
The size of a funeral is the measure of a man, and in 1932, Upper West Sider Sol Brill’s departure from this earth was larger than life. An, honest, dignified, gentle soul was cut down by cancer at age 54, at the height of his career as a movie-theater builder and operator. Brill’s funeral was […]
