The Reverse Mayflower

As some readers know, I'm beginning research for a new book, which is going to branch out beyond New York City to other locales and time periods. While the exact structure of the book is still gelling, the first section is going to be about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower; in preparation, my wife and I are about to commence on a "reverse Mayflower" expedition, tracing the path the Pilgrims took, but going backwards from Massachusetts to the U.K. to the Netherlands.

I'll be posting various images, short movie clips, and various musings as we go.

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On a related noted, today marks the day 395 years ago that the Mayflower reached Cape Cod. As Edward Winslow (or another, anonymous author) wrote in Mourt's Relation, one of our only primary sources for the Pilgrims:

image courtesy of Thomas D. Brown Real Estate

[A]nd after many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length by God's providence upon the ninth of November following, by break of the day we espied land which we deemed to be Cape Cod, and so afterward it proved. And the appearance of it much comforted us, especially, seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea, it caused us to rejoice together, and praise God that had given us once again to see land.

Not the Mayflower. But a nice ship.

A Year on Curbed

In 2014, I had a number of pieces published by Curbed NY, the city's leading online source for real estate journalism.

In case you missed any of them, here's a look back at those pieces.

How Gracie Mansion Became New York's "Little White House"

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/01/03/how_gracie_mansion_became_new_yorks_little_white_house.php

See 11 Centuries-Old Remnants of New Amsterdam in NYC

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/05/05/see_11_centuriesold_remnants_of_new_amsterdam_in_nyc.php

The Dramatic History of Gramercy Park's National Arts Club

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/05/27/the_dramatic_history_of_gramercy_parks_national_arts_club.php

The Controversial Origins of New York City's Frick Collection

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/07/29/the_controversial_origins_of_new_york_citys_frick_collection.php

Mapping Central Park Architect Calvert Vaux's Other New York City Work

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/08/07/mapping_central_park_architect_calvert_vauxs_other_nyc_work.php

The Strange History of the East Village's Most Famous Street

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/09/04/the_strange_history_of_the_east_villages_most_famous_street.php

Tracing Three Centuries of Williamsburg's Bedford Avenue

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/06/tracing_three_centuries_of_williamsburgs_bedford_avenue.php

Mapping 13 Surviving Civil War Sites Across New York City

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/25/mapping_13_surviving_civil_war_sites_across_new_york_city.php

Bleecker Street Evolution from Sleepy Suburb to America's Left Bank

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/12/19/bleecker_streets_evolution_from_sleepy_suburb_to_americas_left_bank.php

AND STAY TUNED.... I will have a featurette on the oldest buildings in New York City running soon, followed by an examination of forgotten real estate mogul Thomas E. Davis.

Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln's Funeral

Are you watching The Roosevelts: An Intimate History on PBS? In typical Ken Burns style, it is both fascinating and dense and I find that I have to watch it in snippets in order to take it all in.

In the first episode, Burns briefly showed a still image of Teddy Roosevelt and his brother, Elliot, watching Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession through Union Square.

Here's the photo:

The building on the upper left side of the image was Roosevelt's grandfather's house. It's hard to make out in this copy, but Teddy and Elliot are hanging out of the open window on the second floor.

We mention this moment in Footprints in New York, along with another picture taken around the same time: the only photo of the president in his coffin. I'll post that on this blog or over at blog.insidetheapple.net soon.

My first record player....

Over at the Inside the Apple blog today, I write about Thomas Edison and the first wax cylinder phonograph.

My first record player was this:

I can remember my brother cutting out cardboard discs from the back of cereal boxes and poking holes in them so that he could make his own "records" that would play on it. He probably had the patience to actually make his discs play tunes. I'm sure when I copycatted him, mine were John Cage-ian random conglomerations of discordant notes.

But my first real record player was either this model or something very similar to it:

And here's the weird part. If you look closely at the 45 on the turntable in this photo that I found on the Internet, it's Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life," which was also the very first record I ever owned. Coincidence?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL7xrYWReis]

"So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy...."

Advice I still use -- and teach -- to this day:

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”

—  John Keating, Dead Poets’ Society

RIP, Mr. Keating and Mr. Williams.

Searching Your Own Collection on Google Books

A lot of virtual (and real) ink has been spilled over the question of whether or not it's a good idea for Google to digitize all the world's books. I will not weigh in on that, except to give this example of how it has been helpful to me.

If you are a researcher, or just the curious sort, you know well that a book's index is an invaluable tool that often falls short. As Michelle and I have found out in each of our three books, only so much can fit in an index, and it can be a painful process deciding which important terms end up on the cutting room floor.

Enter Google Books.

Even a book that's available only as a preview at books.google.com will be fully searchable. I often find myself half-remembering a fact from some obscure New York City reference work on our shelves. I plug in the name of the book and the information I want to find and -- presto -- Google Books more likely than not tells me exactly what page its on. I go to the shelf, pull down the book, and read the passage I want. Without a digital index, this would have been impossible.

Now, if Google Books could only tell me how to actually find the books in my over-stuffed personal library.....

The Mimeograph

Where would we be without Thomas Edison? The light bulb, the record player, the movie projector -- just to name three.

Well, here's a fourth: the mimeograph. On August 8, 1876, Edison received a patent for "autographic printing."

Long before photocopiers became ubiquitous, we had a mimeograph that I would monitor as my father struggled to produce the church bulletins every week. The smell of freshly printed paper coming out of the "ditto" machine is a distinct touchstone of my childhood.

Did anyone else have to use one of these machines way back in ye good olde days?