http://www.cityofsmoke.com New York History, Commentary, and Culture Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:23:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/595 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/595#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:18:22 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=595 Foggy or clear, twenty-four hours a day the ferries toot their diesel horns once as they depart the ferry slips at St. George on their five-mile voyage for Whitehall. The old names remain. Ferrymen are traditionalists. Sailing ferries were traveling the Upper Bay before the War of 1812, long before the five-borough City of New York was even a dream. Hence Whitehall and St. George, rather than Manhattan and Staten Island. Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/595/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1370 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1370#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:32:42 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1370 We must not forget how undistinguished the World Trade Center was. "When completed," the authors of the 2000 edition of the AIA Guide to New York City wrote, "these stolid, banal monoliths came to overshadow Lower Manhattan's cluster of filigreed towers, which had previously been the romantic evocation Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1370/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1352 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1352#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:36:44 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1352 Among the stories recently published in the dailies about past transit strikes, I saw none about the brief strike by motor-men employed by the privately owned Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) in November 1918. It led directly to the Malbone Street wreck, in which a strikebreaker lost control Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1352/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1195 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1195#comments Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:00:31 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1195 Acommercial for the last season of Sex and the City showed Sarah Jessica Parker doing an elegant balancing act in stilettos along old steel rails set in a Brooklyn cobblestone street. I recognized the location: I had been there myself. Around 1994, attending to business down in the old Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1195/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1075 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1075#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:03:42 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1075 Greenwich Village's Sheridan Square is not named for Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who wrote The Rivals. The statue of General Philip Sheridan, for whom the square is named, is around the corner in Christopher Park. And the only nearby battle was the Stonewall Riot at 53 Christopher Street in June 1969. Sheridan's statue, erected in 1936, is so poorly executed one might not know the subject without his name on the plinth. The sculptor was one of those of whom Hilaire Belloc observed, "We dream in fire and work in clay, and some of us puddle in butter with our toes." One can forgive bad public art if it is Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1075/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/868 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/868#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:40:33 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=868 Occasionally, we think about investments we  could have made that might have made us rich. Armed with clairvoyance, who would not have sunk the farm into Microsoft, back when Bill Gates was a nebbish? But we probably would have put our money into AT&T, U.S. Steel or Western Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/868/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/803 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/803#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:14:40 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=803 Walter Francis O'Malley is infamous because he moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. Thirty-six years later, Wilfred Sheed dedicated My Life as a Fan not to, but against, "the villainous Walter O'Malley." According to Peter Golenbock's Bums, one man claimed the best news he Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/803/feed 0 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/579 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/579#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:26:19 +0000 William Bryk http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=579 Phoebe Snow started here. I mean the train, not the singer--although she started here too, come to think of it. Born in New York City, she borrowed her stage name from the premiere express train of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, "The Route of Phoebe Snow," "The Road of Anthracite," which passengers boarded by taking a ferry boat from the railroad's lower West Side ferry terminal to the massive Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey. Read More]]> http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/579/feed 0