Category Archives: Found Objects
All that remains….
Embarked on another difficult voyage, I thought I finally spied land from afar, in a quest to repatriate to its rightful heir yet another found object, in this case a trove, rescued from the trash, of family pictures and memorabilia. I’ve searched for Kathy Denton Saville for a good four years, my only clues […]
A Tribeca Palimpsest from Days Gone By
New York’s City Hall has stood, majestic, since the start of the War of 1812, its design by Green-Wood resident John McComb, Jr., little changed save an Alabama limestone cladding added in the mid-1950s over the original buff sandstone rear facade and the front of Massachusetts marble. McComb’s name is seldom recognized today, his only other surviving creations in Manhattan being Gracie […]
Sol Goldberg and A Sow’s Ear in The Bowery Boogie !
http://www.boweryboogie.com/2012/04/recap-found-objects-forgotten-stories-at-the-eldridge-street-synagogue/
A deed, now done…
My Skype screen glowed and there he was, his 66-year old voice as clear as a bell, a bald head with a kind face beaming at me. Bob Newmark looks a bit like a kind-faced Kojak, or perhaps Yul Brynner in his prime. Once again my friend Roger Joslyn, genealogist extroardinaire, plucked an arrow from […]
Dumped
Driving east on a mid-town street in the mid-1980s, my acquaintance Andy W. spotted a bronze plaque in a pile of demolition debris. Intrigued by the shiny item, he stopped and rescued this memorial plaque, dumped on the street at the start of renovation of a former union headquarters of the millinery trade. How in heaven’s name could […]
A Sow’s Ear…
“You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse” goes the popular refrain. I beg to differ, though. Sometimes one may. Browsing among the vast piles of bric-a-brac in a Chelsea flea market right before Hannukah, a tiny leather change purse caught my eye. Sifting through piles of dust-covered junk, golden lettering on the […]
I’ll Take the Portobello
Famously mad for most of his adult life, scholars have long attributed George III’s apparent mental illness to repeated bouts of porphyria. Frequent incapacitations blackened his 60-year reign, and the ardent efforts of the royal physicians with what today seem dubious remedies probably only worsened the sovereign’s health. Towards the end of his life, legend […]
A Miner’s Lantern
***** Why? People constantly ask me this question: Why are you learning modern Hebrew? Why did you learn Yiddish? Why is it so enticing to you, that old newspaper article, that strange lantern slide? I listen, and then I stare off into space, speechless. All I can think of is that corny phrase my superannuated […]