That’s a picture of a cast-iron fence post on a 1910 apartment house in Manhattan. The form inside the outer cage is a lictor’s symbolic weapon. Lictors were low-level civil servants in the Roman Republic and acted as bodyguards to high-ranking officials. The symbolic weapon was an axe with bunch of sticks bundled around it, …
Two years ago, I looked at a picture of the Murray Hill Hotel taken at a time of great change in midtown Manhattan. Here’s another view of the area from a little bit earlier, in 1908. The title of the photo is “Belmont and Murray Hill Hotels, New York, N.Y.” and that is what we’ve …
This a nice picture of Morningside Park from the Detroit Publishing collection. Given the notable lack of drone technology in 1904, it was probably taken from an apartment house at the south end of the park, on 110th Street. The park has a reputation of being built on a cliff between Morningside Heights (to the …
Because of the American insistence on three-day weekends, Juneteenth has joined July 4th as a national holiday named after a day but not necessarily celebrated on that day. Maybe this post should have been yesterday, which was actually June 19th, but the holiday is today. The holiday is named after the day that slaves in …
Take a look at that picture and guess where I am today. C’mon, guess. That’s a woodcut of the New York Metropolitans playing at their last home, the St. George Cricket Grounds in State Island, having moved out of the [first] Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. I am today, possibly as you read this, at …
