Blog

It took thirteen years (1870-1883) to build instead of the promised three; compared to six years it took to build the Transcontinental Railroad (1863-1689). Or the nine years it took Keith Godard to put up the plaques. $15,000,000 instead of the estimated $7,000,000. In today’s money, the Brooklyn Bridge cost more than $1,500,000,000 to build….

Once the towers were in place, cabling the bridge became a major event. All river traffic stopped. Huge crowds watched as the workers labored to connect the cables across the East River. On August 14, 1876, the first slender wire was strung from tower to tower. The headline in the Brooklyn Eagle proclaimed: “Wedded!” while…

Fortunately, his son, Washington Augustus Roebling, was determined not only to follow his father’s plans but was flexible enough to modify them as unanticipated problems occurred. And in turn, he had the support and the partnership of his wife Emily Warren Roebling. Together they were able to finish one of the most ambitious architectural feats…

Scott Fitzgerald called Manhattan Island the “fresh, green breast of the New World” that greeted the sailors on Hudson’s Half Moon. The colonists wasted no time in proceeding with an aggressive program of land-clearing and filling. The Brooklyn Bridge IS New York City. More than the Statue of Liberty, which we have to share with…

Eleanor Roosevelt was on the opposite side of the issues of the day. The monument, honoring humanitarian and First Lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), was dedicated at 72nd Street and Riverside Drive inside Riverside Park on October 5, 1996 in the presence of Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States. Penelope Jencks was…

What will be next?   Perhaps, we must remove the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King from the Washington Mall because he an adulterer and plagiarist.  Or perhaps William Tecumseh Sherman, also known as the Sherman Memorial or Sherman Monument, located at the other end of Central Park’s 59th Street traffic circle. It is an outdoor…

The social justice warriors as the snowflakes of the progressive kind, the extreme nuts of the left, the wacky liberals of social justice, have now discovered a new cause.  Once more, history must be corrected; America must be spanked; the imperfect must be destroyed instead of being understood or seen as a step forward to…

Emma Lazarus, the daughter of Moses and Esther Nathan, one of the oldest Jewish families in New York City, was born there on July 22, 1849 and died on November 19, 1887. She was privately educated by tutors and published her first poems during her early teens.  These attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson,…

Washington Square Arch in 1905 Edward Glaeser, a Harvard University economics professor, argues in “Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier” argues cities are economically and culturally better places to live than non-urban areas. Glaeser chastises “environmentalists” who prevented development in temperate areas for contributing to…

In 1972, the New York City Mayor John Lindsey’s administration’s administration funded CityArts, a longtime public art organization that paired professional artists and teenage students to create mosais and murals around New York City. CityArts partnered with Young Israel, a multi-cultural youth group of the Lower East Side, at the Educational Alliance, to create a…

On December 23, 2015 it was melancholy experience to have watched The Golden Bride, a Yiddish operetta, performed by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the world’s oldest Yiddish theatrical organization at the Museum of the Jewish Heritage in Battery Park.  When I saw “The Golden Bride” at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene on December 23,…

It was my privilege to know Rabbi Yaakov Spiegel for several years as a tour guide on the Lower East Side when I gave my Jewish tours of the neighborhood.  I was impressed by his love of Yiddishkeit, the First Roumanian-American synagogue that he served as the rabbi, and his love of the Jewish people.  The book…