(image / Liljenquist Family collection, Library of Congress)

I was off today and took it as a chance to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because they are doing limited ticketing due to the pandemic, I booked my reservation ten days ago. I was the third person in line and, as you can see from this image, had the place essentially to myself for a brief period. This is the facade of the Branch Bank of the United States, later the Assay Office, that stood on Wall Street next to Federal Hall until the 1910s. When the building was torn down they boxed up this exterior, put it in storage for several years, and in the 1920s repurposed it as the entranceway to the American Wing. How one walks through the enclosed atrium with its natural sunlight into the doorway adds to that ambiance. Immediately inside are portraits of Alexander Hamilton and DeWitt Clinton, a nice touch by someone at the Met who obviously knows the facade’s provenance and connection to where it once stood in Lower Manhattan.

I was telling a friend earlier that The Met is one of those places, like Gettysburg or the old Yankee Stadium, where when you’re there time seems to have stopped. The last time I was here was Lincoln’s Birthday 2020, fifteen months ago. I had an brief talk with one of the guards who was telling me about what the shutdown was like for those who work there. Returning was a sign that in the coming weeks and months things may be returning to a semblance of normalcy.

Have a meaning Memorial Day Weekend.

I worked much of the morning and early afternoon on the draft of a project that hopefully will get published sometime in late spring. I intend to submit said draft, about 2,200 words, tomorrow after one final edit and fact check. I took a break around 1:30 for a walk and some fresh air in Green-Wood Cemetery, whose fields are still covered with snow. I saw these tracks and stopped to take a picture. I texted a friend to ask what he thought they might be, and he guessed wild turkeys.

I did a Trader Joe’s run this morning, which meant a rare pandemic subway ride with full shower and scrubbing when I arrived home. Now I’m settling in to work on a small project that hopefully will find a home this spring or summer. I know the image quality is not that great but I wanted to share the above scene that took place in Brooklyn seventy-five years ago today. My colleague and I spend a lot of time in our class about the history and evolution of New York City discussing the housing shortage in the five boroughs in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. As the caption notes the retrofitted quonset huts were converted into temporary housing as millions of GIs came home from Europe and the Pacific. In other civilian uses Quonset huts were used for schools as well, including Queens College. The corrugated aluminum structures were a newish invention in the early 1940s and massed produced for military use, especially in the Pacific. I would go more into the history of how they came to be used for housing but because others already have will not here today. In the image below we see the earliest period of the Baby Boom. A few years after this families would begin moving into new housing subdivisions such as Levittown. It is easy–in some circles seemingly obligatory–to ridicule the rise of postwar suburbia, but one cannot blame young families for wanting their little patch of space after having gone through the Depression and depravities of World War II.

Although we do not have a view of the Flatiron where we are here in Brooklyn, the view from our window is very much the same this February morning as it was 115+ winters ago. Wherever you are, stay safe and warm.

(image/NYPL)

It was been an unseasonably warm weekend here in New York City. I was in Green-Wood Cemetery earlier today when I saw this headstone. I had seen a few monuments to Man’s Best Friend in this beautiful garden cemetery over the years but had never crossed this one before. Some quick internet searching once I got home revealed that leaving sticks for Rex has become a thing since the onset of the pandemic. The cemetery always provides fresh surprises, which is not surprising given that are nearly half a million stories to tell interred within its grounds.

Today is Canadian Thanksgiving. I have always assumed that it comes six weeks earlier than the American version because the growing season ends earlier north of the border, the holiday being based on the end of the season’s harvest. For this Thanksgiving observation I thought I would share this extraordinary photograph of Canadian troops Cambrai Cathedral (Notre-Dame de Grâce chapel) taken on October 13, 1918. As the image suggests this was in the midst of some of the hardest fighting of the Great War. This was less than a month before the Armistice though these members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force obviously had no way of knowing that at the time, 102 Thanksgiving ago.

(image/Archives of Ontario)

It’s a rainy holiday Monday. I am off but doing a few things in preparation for the coming week, which is filling up quickly. They posted my article at Roads to the Great War about Fiorello La Guardia, the second of two after one I did in April near the start of the shutdown. I wanted to return to La Guardia in recognition of Italian-American Heritage Month. Enjoy the day.

(image/Library of Congress)

(image/NYPL)