Add this to a growing list of exhibits I must check out: Mannahatta, a map of Manhattan as it likely looked in 1609, when Henry Hudson arrived, is on display at the newly reopened South Street Seaport Museum. It was assembled from a blend of historic maps, including one from the Revolutionary War and another of farms from the early 19th century. (There’s still one farmhouse left in Manhattan!)

I missed this map’s original showcase at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009. And even further back, in 2007, I remember reading Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker article about the map. The abstract of that article notes that as late as 1782, “Manhattan had over seventy miles of streams and at least twenty-one ponds. The longest stream was the Saw Kill, which flowed from present-day Central Park to the 71st Street exit off the F.D.R. Drive.”

(link and photo via kateopolis via The New York Times)

In addition to archived legal documents, the Library of the Bar of the City of New York collects general-interest historical ephemera. They have, for example, a collection of ads for patent medicines dating from around the time the government delivered a national dose of huckster-depleting tonic known as the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act. That 1906 law prohibited miracle claims and, often, the foods or drugs making such claims. Among the most entertaining of these was Teutonic, a locally brewed snake-oil (or malt liquor, possibly).

In their Featured Exhibitions section, the Bar explains:

During the 19th century, New York was home to some of the nation’s leading breweries, including Schaeffer [and] Ruppert Liebmann. Most breweries were located in Brooklyn neighborhoods with the highest concentration of German immigrants. Liebmann’s Brewery was established in 1860 and became famous for making Rheingold beer. In 1896, in an effort to expand its business, Liebmann’s promoted a new miracle cure, Teutonic, which claimed to aid nursing mothers and those suffering from insomnia and dyspepsia. Teutonic was a concentrated liquid extract of malt and hops containing a much higher alcohol content than most beers. The success of Teutonic led to similar tonics being offered by Pabst and Anheuser-Busch.

(scan via eBay)

The NYPD has arrested at least five Occupy Wall Street protestors for violating a New York City law banning “masked gatherings.” Last week, Jen Doll of The Village Voice explained:

The anti-mask law goes back to 1845, when tenant farmers used disguises (dressing up like Indians) to attack law enforcement officials, apparently. In 1965 the law was updated to prevent masked gatherings of two or more people, except in the case of masquerade parties.

Meanwhile, uptown, at what Corey Kilgannon of the New York Times today identifies as “perhaps the most lucrative location for selling hot dogs in Manhattan”—directly in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s steps, at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street—Dan Rossi, a former Marine, “invokes a 19th-century state law that allows disabled veterans to sell in some areas of the city where other vendors must pay to occupy.”

The city once charged more than $500,000 for vending rights in Rossi’s spot, where he’d been sitting pretty for the past four years, selling $2 hot dogs and $1 bottled waters. But in July, two additional veteran carts arrived and flanked Rossi’s, to the consternation of him, the museum, and the city.

Mr. Rossi argues that he owns his cart and employs several needy veterans as grill men. The other carts are owned by nonveterans whom Mr. Rossi accuses of simply “renting” veterans to make them legal.

One of the other vendors counters that Rossi is the real rent-a-vet and “a millionaire who wants this whole area for himself.”

Via Wikipedia:

Veronica Foster, popularly known as “Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl,” was a Canadian icon representing nearly one million Canadian women who worked in the manufacturing plants that produced munitions and materiel during World War II. Foster worked for John Inglis Co. Ltd producing Bren light machine guns on a production line on Strachan Avenue in Toronto, Ontario. She can be seen as the Canadian precursor to the American fictional propaganda tool Rosie the Riveter.

(link lead via 19o1)

Since Robert E. Lee’s death in 1870, his family has restricted full research access to his papers. At Salon, Civil War history professor Glenn W. LaFantasie writes that the Lee family may be doing this to perpetuate the Confederate General’s image as a “marble man.”

Although Lee apparently did keep many of his personal feelings bottled up, LaFantasie suspects that some of the correspondence locked-down by the Lee family would reveal him as more a man than a myth. He cites a letter compiled by Lee’s son, Lee, Jr., on Lee’s defeat at the Battle of Cheat Mountain:

The younger Lee excised the final lines of the original letter, now located at the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) in Richmond, and indicated the deletion with ellipses. From the son’s perspective, the omitted lines had no inherent importance. They read:

Custis [Lee’s eldest son] writes the girls [Lee’s daughters] have gone to Carter’s. They did not get your letter in time. I hope I may be able to get there before you leave. I may have to go to the Kanawha & if so will write you from Lewisburg. Fitzhugh [another son] is very well. Charlotte [Fitzhugh’s wife] writes the baby is better. Love to Daughter [Mary Custis Lee, his eldest daughter].

Below his signature, Lee added a postscript:

I am much obliged to you for your offer of socks. I should like to have ½ dozen good thick cotton socks if you could get them knit & have the cotton.

If you’re primarily interested in Lee’s role as a Confederate general, the final sentences of this letter probably seem irrelevant, with their references to family members and cotton socks. But if you want to understand Lee not only as a military leader, but also as a man, the last lines of his letter are revealing, if only because they do mention such mundane matters.

The last part of this quote resonates with me as I dig deeper into my family’s genealogy. A biographer must round out his subject with small details of surroundings and workaday life or he’ll write a curriculum vitae or a rehashed hagiography.

Director and writer Errol Morris, via Twitter this morning:

WHY I LIKE THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS: It exists on the border between mythology and fact. (Is it like all history?)

Detroit. Camden. San Diego. Cash-strapped cities want to close their libraries, scale back their operational hours, or cut their budgets. Do we need libraries?

Of course we do, dumbass.

Like everyone else who loves libraries, I wrote a little thing already on the knowledge, access and media that people with little money, such as students or the middle class, can get for free at their local library. Those reasons should be enough to keep libraries open.

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately: Libraries have stuff you can’t find anywhere else. Literally. That’s right: Not even on the internet. (I know, right?)

Simply put, not everything gets scanned. As Google Books digests every book and periodical ever published, the printed word has appeared and continues to appear in many forms other than books and periodicals. Who collects this stuff? Libraries.

Earlier this week, Salon senior writer Laura Miller noted that the main branch of the New York Public Library owns museum-quality printed items like a draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. But it also collects countless ephemera, including pamphlets, tracts, and lapel pins.

...these are once-mundane objects you’d never find in a museum, but they’re an important part of our written culture and well worth saving. The library collects millions of such items — things, and to store and properly display things, you need a place in the world (preferably climate controlled), not just bytes in the cloud. Every human community creates such materials, and they all need libraries to preserve them.

Yesterday, a friend who’s a university librarian listed some of the things she’d cataloged or ordered that morning for her library’s special collections: a pulpy Ace paperback from 1990, a book about drag races in the 1950’s (self-published by an African American drag racer), a dozen church histories, a dozen archaeological surveys, and an exhibit catalog of photos from the Great Depression. None of these things is ever going to be digitized, she wrote.

Collections like these aren’t limited to big libraries, either. During my genealogical research, I learned that the Asbury Park Public Library holds probably the world’s most extensive collection of printed material on Bruce Springsteen, including “books, song books, tourbooks, magazines, fanzines, Internet articles, academic journals and papers, comic books, selected printed items, and newspaper articles.”

More pertinent to my family’s history, I’ve been tracking down obituaries of relatives who lived in New Jersey. The best source for these is the Newark Evening News, which folded in the early 1970s, but for the preceding three-quarters of the century served as the state’s newspaper of record. (The late journalist and Newark historian Nat Bodian wrote that many considered it “the New York Times of New Jersey.”) Where can one access this resource? Only at a library. In fact, unfortunately for people who live elsewhere or fear Newark, only at the Newark Public Library.

They own the paper on microfilm and, crucially for research purposes, indices of the paper’s articles from 1914 to 1972. For every year in that span, the index has three components, in alphabetical order: general topics, people’s names, and New Jersey towns and cities. These indices haven’t been transcribed, scanned, OCRed or otherwise archived. They aren’t online. They exist only as handwritten pages in beautiful hardbound ledgers, each the size of a shoe box. And they’re available only in a library.

Cannabis sativa plants, some “as tall as Christmas trees,” once grew both wild and cultivated in the vacant lots of New York City, according to research by Brooklyn Public Library librarian Ben Gocker.

In the summer of 1951 alone, sanitation workers uprooted and destroyed 41,000 pounds of pot. Taken that August, the photo above, captioned Plenty of Dream Stuff, shows the General Inspector of the city’s Sanitation Department, John E. Gleason, with Denis Healy, Sanitation District Superintendent for Greenpoint and Williamsburg, measuring a tall specimen. Gleason headed up the “White Wing Squad” of garbagemen (named after their original white duck cloth uniforms) charged with destroying the plants.

(link via Daily Intel; photo via Brooklynology)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 5 in a series.

You may think this one’s easy—it’s called Water Street ’cause it’s near the water. Well, slow down there, chief. It’s called Water Street because some of it used to be under water. In fact, 400 years ago, nearly a third of Lower Manhattan was under water. Or, rather, the land didn’t technically exist yet. Stating in the 1650s and lasting through the nineteenth century, landfill, typically made of logs thatched together, extended the city's edge. Sometimes this was done creatively. During excavation at 175 Water Street in the early 1980s, archaeologists uncovered the remains of an early eighteenth-century merchant ship that had been scuttled there as a wooden retaining wall. Egbert L. Viele identified landfill like this “Made Land” in the keys of his Manhattan maps, which were famous for illustrating the differences between the island’s original shoreline and subsequent landfill. You can view one in detail here.

(info via Archaeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America; detail of the Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York (1865) by Egbert L. Viele via the David Rumsey Map Collection)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 4 in a series.

Dutch colonists developed a narrow, cobblestone alley in 1658 that was maybe one of the first paved streets in New York City and definitively one of its oldest roads of any type. Shortly thereafter debuted the first potholes in New York City, several of which I imagine still await repair by the New York City Department of Transportation. The alley wasn’t named Stone Street until 1794, though. It was first named Brewers’ Street, then High Street, then Duke Street. Designated a historic landmark in 1996 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Stone Street today is surfaced with faux-vintage granite paving blocks, bordered by new old-looking bluestone sidewalks, lit by replica gas lamps and bishop’s crook lampposts, and lined with mostly obnoxious bars and restaurants. People often apply the Disneyesque modifier to Times Square but it’s most disquietingly appropriate regarding Stone Street. I avoid it whenever possible.

(info via Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center and “Commercial Real Estate; Turning an Alley Into a Jewel” by David W. Dunlap in the December 6, 2000 New York Times; Stone Street photo by wallyg on Flickr)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 3 in a series.

Get your mind out of the gutter. (Or take it uptown.) Beaver Street’s name honors New Amsterdam’s first major export¹, the trade for which was once centered on its blocks. Folks back then enjoyed beaver hats. Concurrent with the burgeoning beaver-fur trade, John Jacob Astor made himself the richest man in America. There’s a wee beaver hiding on the city seal. And the beaver has been the New York state animal since 1975. You must agree: it’d be cooler to have a giant bronze beaver representing New York City’s Financial District than a charging bull. Sort of like how Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to represent the U.S. instead of the eagle.

(info via Jim Naureckas for New York Songlines); beaver engraving (circa 1806/1807) via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery

¹ Beaver. [back]

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 2 in a series.

The Lenape people who lived in what’s now Manhattan ate oysters. Lots of oysters. They left behind piles of oyster shells, sometimes four feet high, which were noted by early-seventeenth-century Dutch settlers. The settlers passed along their infectious diseases and confusing concepts of property rights, relieving the Lenape of both their land and lives. But they kept the oyster-eating tradition alive. After the Revolutionary War, in a fit of cartographic regicide, Queen Street was renamed Pearl Street with a nod to those pearlescent mountains. The street was later paved with oyster shells. There were oyster stands on the streets like there are hot dog stands today. As New Yorkers continued to enjoy their oysters, they dumped toxins and raw sewage into New York Harbor. This was fine for the bipeds but less so for the bivalves. By the 1970s, the oysters were gone.

(info via articles by Mark Kurlansky in The New York Times: an editorial from 2005 and an excerpt from his book, The Big Oyster (2006); photo Oyster Houses, South Street and Pike Slip, Manhattan taken April 1, 1937 by Berenice Abbott, via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 1 in a series.

In 1653, the citizens of New Amsterdam, a settlement clustered in the very lower tip of what’s now Manhattan, worried that the English might invade by land from the north. So they built a wall, stretching from river to shining river, all the way across the island, out of logs that were 12 feet high and 18 inches thick. The British didn’t attack. The path running alongside the wall took its name. In the summer of 1791, brokers congregated under a sycamore tree there and began trading shares of stock. Early the following year, the first Stock Exchange Office opened at 22 Wall Street. The rest is crisp suits, crisper money and vicissitudes on a really long line graph.

(info via The New Netherland Institute; illustration via A Landmark History of New York by Albert Ulmann (1903))

I live here so I think about it: Old New York. Not the one that was once New Amsterdam; that’s slightly too far removed. I’m talking about the one from the year I moved here. Or even the one from last year. An A.P. article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ticked off a few examples of the disappeared: CBGB, Shoot the Freak, “anything-might-happen” Times Square and Off-Track Betting parlors.

I of course prefer my list—my memories of places and things that have stuck around and slip out when I get wistful or curmudgeonly. I hadn’t realized until checking just now that I included so many of them here. They include:

• Cha Cha’s on the Coney Island Boardwalk
• (and old Coney Island in general)
• the High Line (an illicit journey, pre-conversion; I can show you the photos sometime)
• the Roxy rink
• Freddy’s bar in Brooklyn, which I lamented only during my stint on Facebook, although here’s Brooklyn Vegan’s appreciation
• pre-regulation Red Hook Park vendors
• the 9 subway line

I miss also those friends—those truest New York instutions—who were once here, and seemingly would be forever, but now are far away. My own Old New York even includes things I never experienced but sort of wished I had, like, say, the Automat or the way the city seemed so much more spiffy in the ’50s, even though of course that’s not true.

All I needed to have done here was throw up a quote by New York novelist Colson Whitehead: “No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.... You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

(link via Laughing Squid; Whitehead quote via his book, “The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts” (2003))

Most Americans haven’t read it and those who have likely don’t understand it, stumbling over its leagalese and obsolete language. But despite this density, the U.S. Constitution’s vagueness has made it durable, writes Jill Lepore in her New Yorker article “The Commandments,” which I only got around to reading on my subway ride home from work yesterday.

One of the more popular interpretations of the Constitution now is originalism. Its advocates argue a strict reading of the document, “as originally drafted and popularly ratified.” Pinko liberal legal scholars counter that the people the Constitution originally protected have been dead for two centuries and are just as removed from our current racial, ethnic, sexual and cultural makeup.

Another argument against originalism is that it’s based, ironically, on modern ideals, specifically those from the 1970s and 1980s. I didn’t know this, and I’m fascinated by the following passage from Lepore’s article about the most popular interpretation of the Second Amendment:

Consider the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Historical evidence can be marshalled to support different interpretations of these words, and it certainly has been. But the Yale law professor Reva Siegel has argued that, for much of the twentieth century, legal scholars, judges, and politicians, both conservative and liberal, commonly understood the Second Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form militias—as narrow a right as the protection provided by the Third Amendment against the government’s forcing you to quarter troops in your house. Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, lawyers for the National Rifle Association, concerned about gun-control laws passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, argued that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms—and that this represented not a changing interpretation but a restoration of its original meaning. The N.R.A., which had never before backed a Presidential candidate, backed Ronald Reagan in 1980. As late as 1989, even [Reagan’s failed Supreme Court nominee Robert] Bork could argue that the Second Amendment works “to guarantee the right of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms.” In an interview in 1991, the former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

So the N.R.A., its pen much mightier than a sword (or a Glock 19 semiautomatic handgun), literally rewrote history and the definition of the Second Amendment? Well played, N.R.A. Originalists, know thy history—not just the old kind, but the newer stuff, too.

Prohibition killed good drinks in a way that reverberates today, claims AlcoholReviews.com editor Kevin R. Kosar. Only the biggest, blandest beverage producers survived the 18th Amendment; our options and tastes have suffered since.

A less-discussed legacy of Prohibition is its dumbing down of the American palate. The early 20th century was a boom time for the American drinks industry. Many states had vineyards. Distilleries were making more and better liquor than ever before. Breweries produced beers for local markets everywhere. With huge numbers of diverse, newly arrived immigrants came new traditions of drink. So it was that in many cities the sufferer of digestive discomfort could visit the local apothecary and walk out with a bottle of the bitter Italian digestif Fernet-Branca.

Prohibition wrecked all of that, severely damaging American’s collective knowledge and experience of drinking.

Without dispute, The Noble Experiment drove alcohol manufacturers out of business. Here’s a local example: by the 1870s, Brooklyn alone had just under 50 breweries. When Prohibition ended in 1933, hardly any remained. World War II briefly revitalized the local booze business but “local flavor gave way to large breweries and national brands.”

But—and Kosar hints at this at the end of his article—what about the many crafted beers and microbrews of today? National sales of craft beer grew more than 10 percent last year despite a decline in beer sales overall.

And what about the recent revitalization of cocktail culture—and the return of the word (and the person) “mixologist”? Cocktail historian David Wondrich says the past 20 years have been a renaissance for American cocktails, a “cocktail culture that’s an alternative to the mass-produced-crap-culture,” from the serious cocktail-book boom of the late ’90s to the spread of hipster cocktail bars during this decade, launched by the opening of Milk & Honey in 2000.

It’s an easy call: now is the best time for great American drinks since before Prohibition.

(Kosar link via The Morning News headlines)

Sam Anderson of New York magazine finds many surprising parallels between the lives of George Washington and Jay-Z. Yes, there are some stretches, but it’s an entertaining read.

This bird’s-eye-view map of Brooklyn, sketched by C. R. Parsons and published by Currier & Ives in 1879, is amazing in its detail. This is the sort of illustration I could stare at as a child, imagining intertwined stories of its people, buildings and boats.

Points of interest include the Brooklyn Bridge (then named the East River Bridge), the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (the building with a crown-like dome on the far left of the full map; it exists today and is still a bank), Prospect Park (12 years young at the time of the map) and Governors Island (then home to a major Army administrative center).

(image link via A Continuous Lean)

Tom Ricks lists his top-10 most obscure American wars in a Foreign Policy post from Tuesday. I immediately wondered (as did, I noticed later, one of the post’s commenters) why the Ohio-Michigan War wasn’t listed. You can read about that boundary belligerence in a bronze-starred featured article on Wikipedia.

Recently released British Royal Navy Medical Officer journals reveal the life of 19th-century sailors via their so-called health-care providers. In short, getting sick in those days was a bad idea.

Many treatments sound as if they’d only make the patient sick in other ways; they included sulfuric acid gargles and strychnine injections for scurvy, tobacco smoke inhalation for hypothermia and bloodletting for pneumonia and other diseases.

Drunkenness is one of the most commonly cited conditions:

On 17 April 1813, John McLean, a sailor on board a Royal Navy flag ship died having apparently spent 10 days drinking gin and rum. The alcohol-fueled death compelled a frustrated William Warner, the ship’s surgeon, to observe in his notes: “Drunkenness nowadays in the Navy kills more men than the sword.”

American Drink points to a scan posted at The Chanticleer Society of a prescription, issued in 1928 by Dr. “Docie” Ballenger of Batesburg, South Carolina, for “some good whiskey.” A number of similar prescriptions were issued during Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933. You can see several handsome specimens on eBay.

Here’s a scan of one issued in March 1933 in Cleveland by one Dr. Ralph S. Mann. I poached it from an eBay bid ending October 13 and the seller, ginger.1, noted “It was issued by the Treasury Department and when held to the light, INDUSTRAL ALCOHOL is partially watermarked.”

Prohibition began on January 16, 1920. The following week, a New York Times editorial was already explaining that many physicians of the time gave whiskey to patients in the “wasting stages” of influenza for stimulation, stressing that “the lives of a great many people may hang in the balance if whisky cannot be procured, and whisky of good quality.” Druggists, the editorial concluded, “should put behind them their fear of being ‘identified with the liquor traffic.’”

As might be expected, counterfit and forged prescriptions flooded the city. The government limited physicians to one book of 100 blank whiskey prescriptions every 90 days, each prescription good for a pint. Patients were limited to one prescription every 10 days.

An apparently tongue-in-cheek Time article from April 1933 notes that Congress lifted practically all restrictions on medicinal liquors that month following a long bout of lobbying by the American Medical Association.

The victory outmodes many a sorry practice of the past decade. John Doctor need no longer risk prison by selling his prescription blanks to druggists. The amateur cellarer need no longer cut a pint of genuine, drugstore rye with alcohol, water and sherry to get a gallon of drink with a palatable rye flavor. The druggist may cast off his furtiveness, again function as a respectable businessman.

And by the end of the year, Prohibition had ended.

The name of Cheesequake State Park got its name from the Lenni-Lenape Indians, via either a forgotten word or one that meant “upland.”

Additional, related fact: roughly half of the names of the United States derive from Native American words or phrases (or mispronunciations/bad translations of those).

Boing Boing noted today (via Kottke.org) designer Richard Howe’s photographic documentation of every street corner in Manhattan, “The Manhattan Street Corners.” (Howe’s site was temporarily unavailable with an exceeded bandwidth limit when I tried checking it out.)

It reminds me of Caleb Smith’s resolution (which, like Howe’s project, took two years) to walk every street in Manhattan.

It also reminds me of conceptual artist/photographer Dylan Stone’s plan to photograph not only Manhattan's street corners but the four sides of every block, for a series he named “Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River.”

For comparative purposes, Howe took 11,000 photos covering every corner in Manhattan. Stone, who reckoned he’d need “between one and three rolls of film” per block to accomplish his feat, had taken 26,000 snapshots by the year 2000—and he never finished the project, having covered only the blocks below Canal Street.

“My project, at heart, is about conservation,” Stone wrote. “It is a living, precious photographic archive of an entire city.” And this statement gained resonance after 9/11, as part of his mundane city record included photos of the World Trade Center.

Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been trying for nearly a decade to determine how Manhattan would have looked to its first European explorers, circa 1609, in an effort he’s named the Mannahatta Project¹. When it’s completed, it will include, as a recent New Yorker profile on Sanderson noted, “a virtual re-creation—a three-dimensional computer map—in which you will be able to fly, as it were, above the island, land wherever you want, and have a look around. In place of your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B. parlor, you may see a trout stream, or a black bear browsing amid blueberry patches.”

I’d read this article on my flight to Orlando this morning and was thinking about it after arriving at the hotel here that I’m staying in tonight, the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.

As its centerpiece, the hotel boasts a 4.5-acre, perhaps dozen-story-tall glass-enclosed atrium that includes “a variety of themed environments”: there are streams and ponds and actual alligators and giant lizards in the Everglades section, there’s a giant yacht floating in Key West on which businesspeople can throw parties, and throughout there are towering palm trees, flowers and other plants, pools of koi, waterfalls and rocky outcroppings.

All of it is lit by the sun through the atrium dome, like a biosphere, although the glass is thick enough and angled as such that I couldn’t even hear when it was raining, to the degree that I was startled when I walked outside to find it storming. Indeed, the atrium trumps the outdoors and its swaths of scrub grass run through by highways, new subdivisions and strip malls.

Earlier, I was checking out one of the ballrooms for a meeting my company’s staging here tomorrow and while a hotel staff member was pointing out the grand balcony accessible through a set of double doors, she noticed a ubiquitous-in-Florida small lizard skittering around at the base of the door. She cracked the door, patiently shooed out the lizard and apologized. Gotta keep the environment at a controlled level of reality.

¹ I find it interesting that Inwood, my neighborhood and Sanderson’s favorite part of Manhattan because of its largely unchanged topography and forestry, is one of the few parts of the city where one “can get around successfully with a 1782 map.” [back]

1. *Lydia didn’t leave for a better job as she’d suggested. Her boyfriend, 10 years older than her, made her quit to be with him as often as possible. He made her sell her Jeep, took away her cellphone and carefully monitored her friends. Those friends she had told her to watch out, or else in five years she’d be a stay-home mom with three kids and no life. But she was smitten with the guy. She had a photo of the two of them on her desk at work, he standing behind her, two-feet taller, his large hands over her shoulders. He may have hit her once, a few years back. Or maybe she really did walk into a doorframe, or whatever that excuse usually is. Nobody’s heard from her in awhile.
2. George can’t stay awake at work. His body lolls until his head hangs low, nearly touching his computer’s keyboard. This only happens maybe every other day for a few minutes at a time, then he snaps back up and resumes work like nothing happened. His cubicle is positioned as such that only one person can see him, and she’s being discreet. There’s talk of drugs; he does seem to be in the restroom a lot. Then again he’s young and handsome, muscular. Maybe he only stays out late.
3. Catherine flat out told Bennet that nobody liked him—really, just that: “Nobody likes you.” He was over at her apartment at the time, just sitting on her couch, when she sprung it on him. What his reaction was, I wasn’t told, but knowing him, I can imagine it was one of sheepish resignation. And if that wasn’t enough, she told him that if he really hated his job so much, he should just quit. It’s unclear whether this is a shame of Catherine, Bennet or of them both. But what kind of person tells someone that? And what kind of person wouldn’t know he was despised to that degree?
4. Eliza choked on a piece of chicken at a business luncheon a few years back. She was surrounded suddenly by 300 concerned executives, who had stopped eating to form around her a loose, staring ring. One man stepped forward and performed the Heimlich maneuver, but it didn’t take, and he had to do it all over again before she chucked out the partially chewed meat, 300 concerned executives watching it land on the carpet. She tends to bring this up when someone at a cocktail party spills wine on himself or drags his sleeve over the butter at dinner. “At least you didn’t choke on a piece of chicken in front of 300 strangers,” she’ll begin. So I suppose it’s not much of a secret. But she never told me.

* Names have been changed to ones picked at random from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

A few days ago, walking from my apartment to the subway, I spied this brochure lying on the sidewalk of my street. It’s copyrighted 1957 and in pristine shape, and I can only surmise it was discarded by the Metropolitan Montessori School nearby.

The brochure’s concern is Operation Bootstrap, a campaign founded in the 1940s by Teodoro Moscoso that transformed Puerto Rico from an agricultural to an industrial nation. It’s written in a propaganda-like fashion, proudly boasting of all the “many products being manufactured in Puerto Rico’s new factories,” including:

• Ball-point pens
• Chemicals and pharmaceuticals
• Cigars
• Electric shavers
• Fluorescent lamps
• Home appliances
• Jewelry
• Leather belts and shoes
• Machinery and metal products
• Men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing
• Optical lenses
• Paints
• Plastics
• Radar, radio, and television components
• Textiles
• Tools and dies
• Toys

The operation was a success with the brochure noting that by ’56, industrial production had overtaken agricultural production for the first time in the island’s history, thanks to duty-free access to U.S. markets and tax incentives that attracted U.S. investment. These days, Puerto Rico’s chief exports are pharmaceuticals and other chemicals, electronics, clothing and food, including canned tuna and beverage concentrates.