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The Keys to Everything
I recently watched a strange, little-seen movie by Alfred Hitchcock called Under Capricorn, a melodramatic costume drama which places Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton in 1830’s Sidney, Australia. One plot point comes to a head when a servant in Bergman’s mansion has to hand over the keys to the household linen closets and other locked…
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Snow Now and Then
Three inches of white stuff and only two or three cars on the Thruway. We’ve become Californians, blanching at a bit of snow. One hundred and twenty years ago, March brought New Yorkers the Great Blizzard of 1888. Snow fell to a depth of twenty one inches over three days, paralyzing the whole East Coast.…
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A Question of Birds
This morning I watched a pileated woodpecker carefully but deliberately investigate a hole in a tree just outside my window. A forearm long, it wore its red cap with aplomb. I consulted Mannahatta (2009), the great compendium of information on the natural world of Manhattan circa 1609. The authors designate the pileated woodpecker a “likely” resident,…
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Streets of Yore
Hoogh Straet — who has ever heard of it? Yet it used to run just behind the town hall, the Stadt Huys, on Manhattan Island when the town was New Amsterdam. Slick Steegh, Brouwer Straet, Brugh Straet, all were contained within the warren of unpaved streets between the East River and the Hudson. We don’t…
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America Eats
Reading a book that consists of the unedited manuscript of a WPA guide called America Eats, an in-depth description of the varied cuisines of the country as they existed in the 1930s. The Food of a Younger Land: The Northeast Eats is fascinating, ranging as it does from a discussion of a “C.O. Cocktail” —…
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Snacks in the Dark
I was thinking about the dishes home cooks make, in particular the ones everyone acknowledges as “the best.” My sister-in-law’s butter-and-sugar laden “Mrs. Lemke’s cookies,” say, or my friend Josefa’s lasagna. In any age, I’m sure you could have found women with similar expertise if you just asked around. If we were to travel back…
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Grandeur in Chicago
I am still haunted by the image of the colossal sculpted head of Edith Minturn’s visage, erected in the freezing cold warehouse where Daniel Chester French was assembling the grand Statue of the Republic for the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago. French’s wife said the pieces of the sculpture resembled “mushroom growths all about the…
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They’re back!
She with the sparkling, vivacious countenance, and he in the shadows, rumpled and slightly hangdog. Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes, Newton and Edith, rendered by John Singer Sargent and now hanging proudly in the refurbished American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think the new rooms look wonderful. In this particular hall…
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TWO BOOKS FOR 2012. ONE NON-FICTION, ONE FICTION. If I could dedicate a book to a place, where I live now would be that place. An 18th-century log cabin on six wilderness acres. The logs have been patched many times, the kitchen is in the basement and the outhouse (a two-seater) is crumbling, but it’s the…