The 1920′s are characterized as a decade of prosperity. Though initially economic in nature, this prosperity diffused into all other arenas of American life. It was the age of the flapper, of speakeasies, and of trivial spending. It was an era that threatened the image of the Victorian woman – – timid, conservative and polite [...]
1857 lithograph by Armand Gautier, showing personifications of dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotic mania and paralysis in the gardens of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. In an attempt to catalog madness, the artist has created a zoo exhibit for lunacy. They are curious objects, these women who have lost their mind with [...]
Her name was Arline. She was my father’s mother. She died in 1949 when my father was 16. We knew very little about her growing up. In the early 1980′s, after my grandfather died, a letter arrived at the house from my father’s aunt Marie who was six years younger than her sister. My parents [...]
When you felt the red fire Of the forge, as it played, Did you feel, Too, my swordsman’s desire Run like blood on your blade And blue steel? A wonderful set of broadsides from turn of the century Ireland, illustrated by the artist Jack B. Yeats. Each edition was just 300 copies. Art speaks to [...]
An old tree came down at the edge of the property in a windstorm. It sat below the cottage at the edge of the farm road. The base was massive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, making it appear foreshortened against the sky. The trunks and branches [...]
By the beginning of the 20th Century, Brooklyn’s die was cast. A thriving sub-metropolis, annexed to one of the greatest cities in the world, its nexus gravitating inexorably to the three grand bridges that connect it to Manhattan. Brooklyn was a staging point. Ships carried goods into its protected harbors. Produce came in each day [...]
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. Imagine you’d been given a voice that you couldn’t control, [...]
At Christmas we would put silver tinsel on the tree. We’d toss the tree in the woods out back come January. In the Spring thaw, the tinsel would run down the rivulets of snow melt like silver serpents. This picture brings that memory back.
These young men are waving goodbye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pittsburg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Mountains, pass into Tennessee and pick up the Jackson Military Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mississippi Delta and the bayous and great swamps surrounding New Orleans. They are following [...]
The Bowery in New York City in the early 1920′s. Prohibition is around the corner — then the restaurant will move up to street level and the liquor store down below.