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 […]
Also posted in Uncategorized
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 […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces, Lost New York
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/
Also posted in Press, Sol Goldberg biography, Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
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 […]
Also posted in Essay Categories
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 […]
Also posted in Essay Categories
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 […]
Also posted in Current Projects, Faves, Sol Goldberg biography
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 […]
Also posted in Essay Categories
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 […]
Also posted in Essay Categories
