cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

Conversation with Steven Hart, author of The Last Three Miles- the Pulaski Skyway & former Mayor Frank Hague

For those history buffs interested in Jersey City / Hudson County politics, hear Steven Hart discuss his book, The Last Three Miles. It's about the nation's first super-highway, the Pulaski Skyway, here in Hudson County. In those days nothing got done unless former Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, a legend in his time, got his piece. Notice the similarities between then and how business gets done now here in Hudson County.... sad but true....

[link] [add a comment]

Gone in 2008.

Pozzo Pastry Shop, WWII-era Hell's Kitchen bakery.
Fazil’s Times Square Studio, legendary hoofer's hall in Times Square. Honi Childs,
Gregory Hinds, Savion Glover, Alvin Ailey, Bill Irwin, Charles Cook, the Nicholas Brothers, Fred and Adele Astaire, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly all practiced their footwork there.
Cafe La Fortuna, one of the last independent cafes on the UWS, and a John and Yoko hangout.
Armando's, aged Brooklyn Heights restaurant and Dodgers haunt.
Ridgewood Theatre, Thomas W. Lamb structure, closed after 92 straight years.
Chez Laurence, old Murray Hill French bistro.
Montrachet, upscale restaurant that opened up eating scene in Tribeca.
Le Figaro Cafe, holdout from heady literary and folkie days of Greenwich Village.
Cafe Mozart, civilized cafe in Lincoln Center area.
Florent, legendary, beloved Meat Packing District eatery, forced out by landlord, who
opened her own diner there, only to see it close almost immediately.
M&G Diner, one of a kind Harlem chicken and waffle joint.
Nikos Magazine & Smoke Shop, classic Village newsstand.
Lehman Brothers, 158-year-old Wall Street institution felled by own greed.
Yankee Stadium (the real one)
Shea Stadium
Long Island Restaurant, never really officially announced as dead, but, after being
shuttered for 16 months, you pretty much figure it's gone.
The New York Sun, not old, though the notion of a daily newspaper is an old one, and
how many do we have left when it comes down to it?
The Donut House, because, I'm sorry, the new coffee shop that replaced it just isn't
the same.
The Green Church of Bay Ridge, perhaps the single most grievous architectural loss
of the year.
Astroland, after years of pain and worry, finally torn down and shipped away.

thx lisa
[link] [3 comments]

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

[link] [add a comment]

clintons cat socks near death


[link] [8 comments]

carol kaye - first lady of bass

via zoller
[link] [add a comment]

manhattan bridge construction

thx zoller
[link] [add a comment]

bp



[link] [add a comment]

wrecking crew movie


[link] [2 comments]

A report released Thursday by leaders of the Senate Armed Services committee said that top Bush administration officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bear major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military detention centers.

[...]


The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own” but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

[link] [add a comment]

2 x 20' container con house


[link] [add a comment]

The auction of Redrock country will take place on December 19. At stake are world-renowned vistas near Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, as well as near Dinosaur National Monument. The highest bidders will earn the right to turn vast tracts of pristine wilderness into industrial wastelands.

It's bad enough that Bush officials went behind the backs of the American people with this disastrous scheme. But what's worse, they didn't even tell their own National Park Service until after the fact.

In my mind, this theft of our heritage goes beyond the cynical -- it's criminal. What will be left to give to our children and their children if we allow this administration, in a parting shot, to destroy our legacy of public lands for short-term gain?

I hope you're as angry as I am about this blatant land grab, because we've got to stop it -- and we have to act fast. The NRDC Action Fund is mobilizing more than one million Americans in an outpouring of protest over the coming days.

Send your own message of opposition immediately. Tell the Bush Administration that you will not allow it to destroy one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

[link] [add a comment]

electric street rods


[link] [add a comment]

Dennis Yost, the lead singer with the rock group the Classics IV, which in the late 1960s and early ’70s challenged the then-ascendant music of drugs and protest with a more laid-back, softer sound in Top 10 hits like “Spooky,” “Stormy” and “Traces of Love,” died on Sunday in Hamilton, Ohio. He was 65.

[link] [add a comment]

10 wall clocks


[link] [2 comments]

Although Polaroid says the film should be available into 2009, this is the final month of its last production year.

[link] [5 comments]

The appeal of regularly relocating where we live probably comes from our nomadic origins as a species, and over the years we’ve thrilled at the possibilities of some remarkable constructs designed to enable just that: the Icosa Pod, miniHome, Free Spirit Sphere, Nackros Villa, LoftCube, Trilobis, Kitahaus, and the relocatable sphere house. New Zealand is one of those countries where its near-to-no-one geographic location has created a hotbed of innovation through necessity and the Kiwi-produced Port-a-bach is particularly inventive because it is based around a remanufactured shipping container. As such, the NZD$100,000 (US$55,000) fold-out dwelling is not just rugged due to its natural steel exoskeleton, it’s as easy to transport internationally as it is to transport locally on a standard container truck. It has low environmental impact and can connect to local utilities or be entirely power, water and sewer independent.

[link] [add a comment]

the street corners of alphabet city

thx vz
[link] [2 comments]

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

“It’s awful,” said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization’s quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence.

“Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money,” Ms. Sternberg said.

[link] [add a comment]

rip studs terkel

Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history. His 1985 book The Good War, which detailed peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book, Working, in which (as reflected by its subtitle) People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, also was highly acclaimed. Working was made into a short-lived Broadway show in 1978 and was telecast on PBS in 1982. In 1997, Terkel was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, he received the George Polk Career Award in 1999.
thx stdpm and alex
[link] [1 comment]

hard times


[link] [2 comments]

judit bellostes excellent arch blog


[link] [add a comment]

regular angry mob or inside the beltway villagers?

via zoller
[link] [add a comment]

friends of loews jersey city


[link] [add a comment]

If you’re nodding in recognition, you’re a lucky owner of George Leonard Herter’s farrago “Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices” — one of the greatest oddball masterpieces in this or any other language. A surly sage, gun-toting Minnesotan and All-American crank — the kind of guy who would take his own sandwiches to Disneyland because the restaurants were No Damned Good — Herter wrote books on such disparate topics as candy making, marriage advice, African safaris and household cleaning.

Where could you find these books? Not in any fancy bookstore, friend. No, you needed a Herter’s sporting goods catalog. Starting in 1937 from atop his father’s dry-goods shop in Waseca, Minn., Herter over the next four decades built a mail-order sporting goods juggernaut. The arrival of the Herter’s catalog was like Christmas with bullets. Need a bird’s-eye maple gunstock? Check. How about a Herter’s Famous Raccoon Death Cry Call? Just two dollars. Fiberglass canoes? Got you covered. The catalog, which the former Waseca printer Wayne Brown recalls started as three-ring binder supplements, grew so popular — about 400,000 or 500,000 copies per run, he estimates — that Brown Printing became one of the country’s largest commercial printers.
via vz
[link] [add a comment]