https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Fri, 25 Dec 2015 00:49:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1195 Sun, 08 Feb 2015 03:00:31 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1100 Sat, 07 Feb 2015 01:42:46 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1100 Acentury ago, the railroad was the cutting edge of practical technology, moving freight and people as the Internet now moves information and thought. One of the last and most spectacular railroad promoters was Arthur]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/868 Tue, 03 Feb 2015 21:40:33 +0000 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]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/579 Sat, 31 Jan 2015 20:26:19 +0000 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.]]>