Losing Our Democracy

While the GOP sold the Gubmint to the Corps for cash and rubles, the Dems gave it away by default while sipping PC caffeine free Tumeric Ginger iced teas at sidewalk cafes on the upper west sides of Manhattan, Berkley, etc.


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2020 - Not just another year?

A year in which classic (not zero sum) balance and sanity to be restored ?


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Some of my Broadway Memories from an Audience POV

The Gin Game - John Golden Theatre - 1978 - Tandy and Cronyn

A touch of the Poet - Helen Hayes Theatre - 1978 - Robards and Fitzgerald

A Duet for One - Royale Theatre - Dec. 1981 - Bancroft and Von Sydow

You Can't take it with You - Plymouth Theatre - 1983 - Robards

The Ice Man Cometh - Lunt Fontaine Theatre - 1985 - Robards

Les Miserables - Broadway Theatre - 1988

Into the Woods - Martin Beck Theatre - 1988

( In high school I can remember three productions that were outstanding in terms of Broadway Theatre quality works. One was Freshman year at my high school of "Finian's Rainbow".  Don't remember the other performances except Junior year with a West Side Story that did not impress me and I left at intermission. Of the other performances, one at fraternal H.S. Father Judge of "Little Me". And last, the most impressive one of all them, that would rival anything on Broadway, was "The Music Man" performed at the girl's high school attached to Holy Name College up on Torresdale Ave. near the county line. )

[may 6, 2020 - also on broadway - "Da" with Bernard Hughes around 1979.]



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Actor's Fund Fair - Madison Square Garden NYC - May 1892

Muddy Construction Site - World Financial Center NYC - 1980s

200 Vesey Street, called American Express Tower when built in mid 1980s, part of world financial center, across west street from World Trade Center, the old one, built by construction company Olympia and York, out of Montreal, now defunct. Also built Canada Plaza, Canary Wharf London. Similar exterior, only 42 feet difference in heights, 739 and 771 respectively. Worked in a complex of trailers, accounts payable, for Amex Building, in a muddy, muddy lot at Vesey and West Streets, now site of Goldman Sacks HQ, for about six months in 1985. O&Y owned then by Orthodox Jews. No work on Saturday allowed on site. Had to work Sunday if I had to work weekends. 16 hour days and an experimental PC that lost and scrambled its exterior "grasshopper" brand main drive every time a cement truck passed by drove me up the wall. Company, a sub construction shell co of Amex. trying to invent and copyright new accounting software for PCs in construction etc. Overtime for clericals like me straight time even if I worked 80 hours a week or "sundays" on "weekends". Screw that. Quit. 


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Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary - Way Station for Irish Immigrant Girls - 7 State Street NYC - Illustrations by Miss G.A. Davis - Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper - 8 Aug 1895

# 7 State Street - Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary - (image date, late nineteenth century)

Across the street from various ferry docks, "South Ferry" Manhattan, first stop in America passing first through Ellis Island, in view of New York Bay/Harbor, next to the Statue of Liberty Island, three charitable organizations, way stations to find work, safe clean housing, set up to cater to individual immigrant groups, newly arrived, and some alone, like Irish girls, making their way to America alone or hoping to join, connect to relatives already here in the promised land at the height of immigration to America at the end of the 19th century.

Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary at # 7 State Street (below), the middle building of the three structures on an irregular lot at the turn/bend of the street - two full facades but more like 1-1/2 houses in terms of space with irregular shaped rooms within. At one time these structures were right on the docks since pushed back by landfill.

Building on left (below), Number 8 State Street, site of at one time the home of Elizabeth Seton around 1800, born in Staten Island in 1774 in her family's summer home. That lot, Number 8 New York structure from when she was a married woman and mother and Episcopalian, before she was widowed and converted to Roman Catholicism and founded the Sisters of Charity religious organization.

# 8 State Street - Lutheran's Pilgrim House

# 7 State Street - Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary

# 6 Leo House - for German Catholic immigrants

King's Handbook of New York, 1893

A Party (of immigrant girls) for Father Callahan.

About the Artist - NY Daily Graphic - 25 Apr 1876.
Artist exhibited at the Women's Pavilion, Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876.

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Jumbo the Elephant Killed by Train At St. Thomas, Canada - Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 26 Sept 1885

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