Author Archives: Ben
Wasted Lives and Broken Dreams
The whistle wailed my sleep away in the upper berth as the Crescent hurtled towards New Orleans, rolling back the night along its storied route. Into the dim night I peered from the ribbon windows. Deserted main streets stared back at me. Track-side once meant promise: out of town visitors and commercial travelers alike, poured […]
Posted in Essay Categories, New Orleans
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William Niblo Stars at Open House New York at Green-Wood Cemetery
On October 6th, the door to William Niblo’s multi-drawer mausoleum on Crescent Water creaked open for a daylong series of performances by Niblo’s biographer and alter-ego, Benjamin Feldman, with downtown performance artist Alyson Pou portraying Niblo’s widow Martha, come back from the dead…. Take a gander at the video below, as the Niblos sort out […]
Posted in Current Projects, William Niblo biography
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The Way of All Flesh
There he is that “gallus old codger” (thank you, Damon Runyon), front and center at his daughter’s wedding, circa 1934. Shortly before his death, Edward West “Daddy” Browning made a fool of himself one last time as he escorted Dorothy “Sunshine” Browning out of the church doors with her new husband Clarence Hood, a laundry […]
Posted in Call Me Daddy: Essays, Essay Categories
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Toward a Definitive Biography of William Niblo
New York Wanderer Press is pleased to announce its latest project: a definitive biography of William Niblo, celebrated tavern keep and pleasure garden operator in New York from 1814-1861. Niblo’s Wall Street area Bank Coffee House and his uptown pleasure palace, Niblo’s Garden, were both THE places to see and be seen in the first half […]
True Color
It was springtime, 1978, and my girlfriend and I were living in sin. At least we’d kashered our little flesh pot by pledging troths. Now it was time to pick the place for the wedding simkhe. We’d already had fair warning: my late father-in-law had come from Germany as a young adult in 1926. His […]
Peaches Makes the Rounds
“Peaches’ Act Postponed” blares the large-type headline in a New York daily from late march, 1928. Not long separated from her Daddy Browning in one of the most spectacular and widely-publicized marital spats of the Roaring Twenties, 17-year old Peaches was “at it” again with another man much older than she. Nary a penny came […]
Posted in Call Me Daddy: Essays, Essay Categories
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Itka’s sun-tanned left fore-arm stretched out limply from her hospital smock when I visited a few months ago, the five numbers tatooed by the Nazi SS shocking me with their blue clarity as nothing else can. She was in a rehab center near Philadelphia after falling down the stairs in her Northeast rowhouse. Thank G-d she wasn’t hurt worse, but still […]
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 Green-Wood Summer Respite, In Days of Yore
From http://www.green-wood.com/2012/a-green-wood-summer-respite-in-days-of-yore/ April 3rd, 2012 | Originally published in Green-Wood Discovery, Green-Wood Historian Blog by Historian Jeff Richman Ben Feldman is fascinated by Green-Wood’s permanent residents. He has written two books, both of which were about individuals who lie at Green-Wood: Butchery on Bond Street: Sexual Politics and the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-bellum New […]
Posted in Current Projects, Press, William Niblo biography
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Until You Do Not Know, Part II: Ad Lo Yada, Ha’kheylek ha’sheyni
AD D’LO YADA – PART 2 Alone, down a darkened block in Brooklyn’s Borough Park I sauntered past midnight, a few weeks ago, unafraid. Street crime within the eruv, the religious boundaries of this ultra-orthodox nabe, is very low. To boot, I never feel anxious because I know well the local tongue. Speaking to myself in Yiddish […]
