Monthly Archives: December 2011

A Grant soliloquy

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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I saw this small vignette and thought I would pass along.

Two Grant books are on my short list of Best 2011 Reads. I learned much from Joan Waugh’s U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, even if I did not agree with all of Professor Waugh’s conclusions. Charles Bracelen Flood’s Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s Heroic Last Year is a readable account of, as the subtitle suggests, Grant’s triumph over the health and financial difficulties he faced while toiling on his memoirs in 1884-85. Grant’s death was slow, painful, and very public. Flood is especially strong on the financial shenanigans that cost Grant and his family their fortune. So strapped for cash was Grant that when he left his Manhattan townhouse some mornings the former general and President of the United States often walked twenty to thirty blocks to and from his home to avoid paying cab fare.

A trip to Missouri and Illinois to see the Grant and Lincoln sites is in the early stages. Hopefully this will transpire in 2-3 short years.

MLK Memorial, cont’d

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Monuments and Statuary, Washington, D.C.

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Early last month I posted about the recently dedicated monument to MLK Jr. now on the National Mall. I still have not seen the work created by the Roma Design Group and am still withholding judgment. Reviews, however, have been mixed. Michael J. Crosbie of The Atlantic believes it a failure. Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post is more generous. I’m looking forward to seeing it for myself this winter.

(image/NPS)

A tale of two Brooklyns

11 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in New York City

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Manhattan Bridge, 1974

In October 1997, just before I moved to New York, I was talking to a longtime friend’s mother on the telephone. I told her about my new job working for one on the public library systems in New York City and my new apartment in Brooklyn. To say she thought I was nuts would be putting it mildly; she thought I was Certifiable. It is easy to understand why. My friend and I grew up in South Florida, where we and virtually everyone–and I mean everyone, probably over 90%–our age was from somewhere else. “Where is your family from,” was a common question on the first day of school, and Brooklyn was by far the most common answer. (My family was from Connecticut.) My friend’s family was originally from Brooklyn and had moved to Florida in the early 1970s. Her Brooklyn was the Brooklyn of the 1950s and 60s, a place of increasing violence and seemingly permanent decline. I remember her words that night vividly: “Nobody moves to Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a place you get out of.” Indeed it was, and for good reason. This trend continued through the 1970s and 80s. Miraculously, for a variety of factors, Brooklyn and the rest of Gotham began turning around in the 1990s. Suddenly young, well educated types began moving to the outer boroughs, making the neighborhoods safer and more desirable. Go into any coffee shop in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, or Fort Green and you will see what I mean. That was Brooklyn to which me and thousands of other twentysomethings moved during these years–and are still moving today desoite the economic crisis.

Carroll Gardens, 2008

For the most part the story of Brooklyn over the past two decades has been one of a vitality and rejuvenation that no one could have predicted during the crisis of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The key words are “most part.” The worst of the worst is over, but there are still pockets of the city lagging behind. For every graphic artist who lives in East Williamsburg, shops at the Red Hook Fairway, and jams in an alternative band in DUMBO on the weekends, there is a Brooklyn family living in different circumstances. I saw this first hand in my time at the public library, where I worked in a corner of the borough so far out it wasn’t even served by the subway system. Kay S. Hymowitz of City Journal tells us how this happened.

(images/top, EPA; bottom, Jim Henderson)

Saturday

10 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in Toy Soldiers

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Hey everybody, it is Saturday night. The Hayfoot went to the U.N. to do some work this morning which left yours truly on his own. I went to a smallish toy soldier in far out Queens. As you might imagine the city was loaded with crowds two weeks before Christmas Eve. Here are a few pics.

I love these old gloss sets. The story of these miniatures is as fascinating as the history they represent.

Santa was there in his red coupe.

Playsets from the 1950s and 1960s

The battleship Missouri was built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the ironclad U.S.S. Monitor had been constructed eighty years earlier. I have not yet had a chance to visit the Building 92 Museum, which  opened on Veterans Day. We’ll probably visit this winter. Expect a full report.

It’s all a great excuse to go to my favorite, if out of the way, bakery.

Finally it was back on the train and the city. Overall, not a bad way to spend a Saturday. Now if you’ll excuse us we’re going to cut into that apple crumb pie.

Thank the Great Depression…

08 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Monuments and Statuary, Washington, D.C.

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Geddes’ Mothers’ Memorial

The one good thing that came out of the Crash of ’29 was that it put the kibosh on John Geddes’s Mothers’ Memorial, a proposed monument to moms everywhere that thankfully never reached completion. The Mothers’ Memorial is just one of the many monuments, bridges, and other structures that were under serious consideration but never built in the District of Columbia. It gets worse. Here is what John Russell Pope had in mind for the Lincoln Memorial

Pope’s Lincoln Memorial

Also on exhibit is a London Toweresque bridge honoring Ulysses S. Grant put to consideration two years after the general’s death. The National Building Museum has these and other monuments to bad taste on display through May 28, 2012.

(Images/top, Library of Congress; bottom, National Archives)

A magazine of literature, art, and politics

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Media and Web 2.0

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In one hundred and fifty years we have gone from this

To this

Here is something you would not have heard me say six months ago: I just downloaded a magazine to my mobile device. And it wasn’t just any magazine but the The Atlantic’s Civil War Commemorative Issue. I am looking forward to the essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jeffrey Goldberg. Also included are pieces from The Atlantic’s vaults by Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frederick Douglass, and others. President Obama wrote the introduction.

Since August we have added two Kindle readers, a Kindle Fire, an iPad 1, and a Mac Air to our household. To say it has been a lifestyle change would be an understatement. For one thing, there are cords and plugs in a pile on the living room floor; something is always being recharged. I still have a steep learning curve and there have been some frustrations along the way, but I have enjoyed the process. What is interesting about the Civil War Sesquicentennial is that it has coincided with the mainstreaming of the blogosphere, social media, and mobile reading devices. Whether it was 1861 0r 2011 it is still about the content, though. A day hasn’t gone by since the sesquicentenial began where I haven’t learned something. Exciting times.

“Pearl Harbor? Who’s she?”

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Memory, WW2

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Pearl Harbor 2011

A few years ago the father of a good friend of mine happened to be in the food court of a shopping mall on Memorial Day. This is a man, now in his eighties, who served in the Air Force and later played semi-professional football. He still has his leather cleats. Lou is the essence of Old School. Like shopping mall food courts throughout the country, this one was full of teenagers. Striking up a conversation with the 4-5 at the neighboring table he asked them if they knew what Memorial Day was. After the blank stares, one offered that it was a day off from school. My friend’s dad was not impressed.

When I was in school in the seventies and eighties a visit from a World War 2 vet was a HUGE deal, even in the most cynical of times just after Vietnam. (I graduated high school just a decade after the Fall of Saigon.) One vet recounted today that during a recent school visit a girl asked who Pearl Harbor was and why he was there to talk about her.

I offer these stories not to blame our country’s historical amnesia on young people, but to emphasize the educational crisis we face.

I have written about the significance to me of D-Day and aging veterans before. Personally, Pearl Harbor Day 2011 is the end of something tangible, akin to the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg in July 1938 when aged veterans turned out for one final gathering. President Roosevelt was in attendance; three years after dedicating the Eternal Peace Light Memorial in front of the 1,800 veterans and 150,000 citizens that summer day he would tell the country that December 7 would forever live in infamy. Today in Hawaii the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association held its final gathering. There are just too few Pearl Harbor survivors left seventy years later to justify a seventy-first. There will be more World War 2 anniversaries between today and the commemoration of V-J Day in 2015, but for me they will no longer seem the same. By 2015 there will be fewer WW2 veterans, and those remaining will likely be too infirm to participate in any meaningful fashion. Time moves on. It was ever thus.

(image/U.S. Navy)

Unearthing Gotham

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in National Park Service, New York City

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A year and a half ago, on the anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, my wife, some friends, and I took an organized tour of the battlefield. There is little physical evidence left to tell even the most observant that George Washington once led his troops down Flatbhush Avenue; a cannon here and there, a few plaques, and some witness trees are about it. Still, we walked the sites following the chronology of the battle at least getting s sense of the topography. The talk was conducted by an anthropologist–not historian–from Hunter College. It was one of the best and most informative of the dozens of tours I have been on in my years of visiting historical sites. I had always known of course that much history still lies below our feet waiting to be rediscovered. Laborers, most of them immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island, discovered the centuries-old Tijger when digging the 7th Avenue subway line in 1916. Construction workers unearthed the detritus of everyday Dutch colonial life during the construction of the Word Trade Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Last year another ship was found at what is now Ground Zero, this one dating back “only” to the late eighteenth century. Most famous of course is the African Burial Ground, which is now a national monument run by the Park Service. The ABG is commemorating the 20th anniversary of the rediscovery of the 17th century grave. Intellectually I had always known about phenomena like the ones I mentioned above. It is just that it was not until standing there at the entrance to Prospect Park–the very place where we and thousands of other New Yorkers buy their fruits and vegetables every Saturday–hearing this anthropologist talk about the soldiers’ remains likely still present eight to ten feet below us, did it hit home emotionally. It was announced this week that Con Ed workers have unearthed 5,000 new artifacts while digging on Fulton Street this autumn.

Ironically when New York City builds for the future it discovers more of its past.