“I sure love garlic”

[Nancy, November 11, 1955. Click for more garlic.]

Me too, Nancy.

Yesterday’s Nancy is also yesterday’s Nancy.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[This week is shaping up as a very long week. Come Tuesday!]

A WPA Halloween poster

[“Halloween Roller Skating Carnival.” Poster by Martin Weitzman. Federal Art Project, New York, 1936. From the Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

I know that M&Ms are reported to be the most sought-after candy this year, but we could find only variety packs, with plain, peanut, and peanut butter varieties. No thank you. We are prepared instead with fifty “fun-size” Milky Ways and Three Musketeers. There’d better be kids showing up.

The WPA Poster Collection resides here.

An honest editorial

From a Las Vegas Sun editorial, “Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becoming a troubling concern” :

Donald Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia and penchant for corruption have long made him unfit for any public office, let alone the presidency. But as he continues his bid for a second term in the White House, there is an unsettling and undeniable shift that is leading many experts, observers and even some Trump supporters to conclude that the former president’s mental acuity and sharpness are also in decline, that his physical health and stamina are waning and that his frustration and anger are boiling over.

Americans from both sides of the political spectrum should be alarmed by Trump’s words and behavior. The nation must confront the fact that beyond his hateful character, he is crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.

[The URL appears to be working only occasionally, even if one clicks from the paper’s front page. Maybe too many people clicking from too many links. Or maybe there’s been a denial-of-service attack.]

An apostrophe in the news

Here’s a Washington Post gift link: “Did Biden call Trump supporters ‘garbage’? It comes down to an apostrophe.”

My 2¢:

If Joe Biden was speaking of the infamous comedian’s remark, supporter’s, the singular possessive, would make the most sense. If he was speaking of various vile things spoken by various vile speakers at Madison Square Garden, supporters’ would make sense.

Or Biden could have said something like this instead: “The only garbage I see floating out there is the demonization of Latinos. It’s unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” And that would have been that.

Gift links will continue until they don’t. I have ’em, so I’m gonna use ’em. I have about six months left on my subscription.)

Related reading
All OCA apostrophe posts (Pinboard)

“A child's stupid longing”

Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts. 1890. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

Related reading
All OCA Maupassant posts (Pinboard)

A musical Illusionist

Or an Illusionist musical: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s next musical is titled The Illusionist, inspired by the movie The Illusionist, itself a very loose adaptation of Steven Millhauser’s story “Eisenheim the Illusionist.” Not clear how much of Millhauser’s story will remain — the musical, like the movie, seems to lean heavily toward love story.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

To-do

I like the prospect of a president with, as Kamala Harris says, a to-do list. Not an enemies list. And certainly not a Project 2025.

Related reading
All OCA list posts (Pinboard)

Truncated? No

On NBC Nightly News tonight, Lester Holt spoke of Kamala Harris’s “truncated campaign.” No. Truncated is about the end, not the beginning. If you start late and run the course, your effort has not been truncated.

Merriam-Webster defines truncate: “to shorten by or as if by cutting off.”

The Harris campaign has been a shortened campaign.

Thanks, Elaine, for having your radar on while the news played.

Goodbye, George Washington’s signature

Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland is changing its logo to something more readable. So it’s goodbye to George Washington’s signature. The school’s vice president for marketing and communications explains:

Because cursive writing is no longer taught universally in K-12 education, the script — especially this highly stylized version — was difficult to read and not immediately recognizable for many prospective students. This was counterproductive when it came to name recognition and identity.

Granted, the signature logo is not especially venerable — it’s been in use since 2013. And granted, it might not be easily readable at reduced size. But still. It think it looks, or looked, pretty cool.


Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[Follow the link above to see the new logo.]

How to hibernate

An illustrated guide.

Things I learned on my summer fall vacation

[I’ve traveled any number of times since 2019, but I last wrote this kind of post in 2019, pre-pandemic. I am out of practice.]

It is possible to pick up Dallas-Fort Worth AM stations in Indiana before sunrise: 820 and 1080.

*

“Sturrl”: Texan for “sterile.”

*

There is no tax on gum in Ohio.

*

It is possible to pick up polka music and doo-wop in Pennsylvania in the afternoon. The polka host avows that the music he plays will put “a hop in your step.”

*

“Beechwood 4–5789” is a song by the Marvelettes. An EXchange name hearing.

*

To borrow an appellation from the story of Milarepa, the Google Maps lady is a Demoness Equal of Tigers. Once again she promised a faster route and once again she surprised us with US 30, a two-lane road with super-sharp curves, appallingly steep climbs and drops, and runaway-truck ramps that shoot up into the sky. In 2019 we drove it in the dark on the way back to Illinois. At least we were in daylight this time.

*

Rural Pennsylvania has some feral folk. A dirty stare (not a mere look) from a driver who wouldn’t let me into his lane. The words DON’T THREATEN ME, upside-down on the front windshield of a Jeep. I wondered if that might be something like a bad tattoo, with the letters upside down instead of backwards.

*

The Google Maps Lady raises difficult questions about objects in space and time: “There’s a stalled vehicle ahead. Is it still there?”

*

A gap of four years in seeing old friends can feel like no gap at all.

*

The Great Falls in Paterson, New Jersey, look exactly as they do in every drawing and photograph of them I’ve seen. The Falls and Garrett Mountain: William Carlos Williams’s mythic landscape.

*

A bird stood still on a post jutting up from the water behind the Falls. And lo, that post, with a bird atop, appears in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson.

*

Hinchliffe Stadium was a home of Negro Leagues baseball. The name is pronounced “Hinchcliff” by locals. The Charles J. Muth Museum, on the stadium grounds, is devoted to the history of the Negro Leagues. I found the display of old mitts (so small) strangely moving. Thank you, Leon B. Moses.

*

The Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, like the Muth Museum, is worth a visit even if you don’t follow baseball. Berra was a mensch. I didn’t know that he was mocked in his early baseball years for his looks and short stature. I have yet to find the PSA he did for young people about the importance of writing.

*

Garden State Plaza, the ur-mall of my teenagerhood, is becoming a multiuse development.

*

George Washington was/is all over New Jersey. In the Dey Mansion, for instance. And at Washington’s Rock.

*

The American Museum of Natural History has a new dinosaur, the Patagotitan mayorum, which has a claim to be the largest species discovered (122-feet long). The museum also has a new wing. Among its delights: a huge array of insect specimens, and an ant environment, encased in glass, with an overhead walkway, across which ants carry bits of leaf to their building sites. In the older areas of the museum, the dioramas with human figures are gone (rightly so), but the dioramas with animals remain, dimly lit, with extraordinary painted backgrounds. Very museum-y, in the old way. Not a single button to push.

*

The momentousness of New York City no longer seems real to me. For the first time I didn’t feel the usual You are now entering New York and You are now leaving New York feelings.

*

But still, the Beresford, at 211 Central Park West, is a mighty imposing building.

*

Aldo’s Cucina serves totally great southern Italian fare. Younger eaters apparently avoid Aldo’s because it has no liquor license and, thus, no cocktails. Silly eaters. You can have a cocktail anytime. You won’t always have a chance to enjoy food as good as Aldo’s. And besides, you can bring a bottle of wine.

*

Like Aldo’s, Jackie Smalls is evidence for the claim that strip-mall restaurants offer excellent eating (because money that might have gone into rent can go into food). And the restaurant (American and Mediterranean, breakfast and lunch) has a charming logo.

[That’s a chickpea.]

*

Green Papaya is an Asian fusion restaurant. Malaysian curry is markedly different from Thai curries. And like Thai curries, it’s delicious.

*

Stephen Colbert lives on a grand street. But not on the grander side of that street.

*

At Bob Slate Stationer, I asked the clerk if he knew where in Harvard Square it might be possible to find an unbranded baseball cap. (I had left mine in the car.) A bearded customer, hands full of stationery items, exclaimed, “Unbranded!” He showed me his unbranded baseball cap, and said that he had had to go online to find it. And it was cotton, not polyester — because you don’t want polyester on your head if you’re bald. “My brother!” he said. What did I learn? That the possibility of human connection is all around. But I already knew that.

*

There’s one public bathroom in Harvard Square: in the Smith Campus Center. There will be a line.

*

The Harvard Coop has sunk mightily since I last visited in 2019. Merch, merch, merch, and fewer books. The shelves devoted to fiction now have many feet of space for a romance section. The philosophy section had just three books by Wittgenstein, two of them misshelved (and no great gap where a dozen more Wittgenstein books might have sat). I found Private Notebooks: 1914–1916 at the (unrelated) Harvard Book Store.

*

Dumpling House is still in Cambridge, still popular, still delicious.

*

Officious has two different meanings: “volunteering one’s services where they are neither asked nor needed” and “informal, unofficial.”

*

Life can and does go on. It really can.

*

The sequel to Sideways — the novel, not the movie — is titled Vertical.

*

If I had been after a Leuchtturm A6 Daily Planner, I would have been disappointed. They were nowhere to be found.

*

“As well.” “Of course.”

*

“I Like Jersey Best” is a song written by Joe Cosgriff, heard in Pennsylvania on the way back home.

*

“We may be lost, but we’re making good time”: Yogi Berra.

*

2301 miles : 49.8 MPG : 56 MPH

More things I learned on my vacation
2019 : 2018 : 2017 : 2016 : 2015 : 2014 : 2013 : 2012 : 2011 : 2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006

An October surprise

In today’s installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about Madison Square Garden rallies, past and present:

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.

It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.

The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.

Read it all.

Richardson points out something I’d missed — a surprise within the surprise, the “little secret” that Trump said he and Mike Johnson share.

Here’s a compelling use of sound and image

“You’ve heard Trump say these things before. But not like this”: an ad from the Lincoln Project.

Base indeed

Watching choice clips from today’s Madison Square Garden gathering, I can reach only one conclusion: Donald Trump suspects that he’s going to lose the election and is thus doing all he can he to stoke the rage of his base so that violence may follow. Base indeed.

Zoom!

[36, 38, 40 White Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I found this photograph by chance (swear), closing my eyes and clicking the mouse. Was the photographer more deliberate, wanting to catch this car in motion? Or did the driver just zoom into the frame?

These White Street addresses are found between Church Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, in an area once devoted to trade and now known as Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal). The first floor of no. 36 today houses a neon store. The first floor of no. 38, a purveyor of axes, knives, and camping gear. No. 40? No idea. What do the lofts on the upper floors go for? You can imagine.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Recently updated

“Do not obey in advance” Timothy Snyder posted a short video in which he comments on the Los Angeles Times and Washingon Post in light of this first lesson.

Amazon for searching

Post by @gtconway3

View on Threads

That’s our household’s thinking too.

Zounds

I just figured out what my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions have been costing me:

Times: $325 a year.

Post: $120 a year.

[Calculating.]

That’s $445 a year. I will be giving a chunk of that sum to The Guardian.

“Do not obey in advance”

It’s everywhere right now, and it’s been here before, but I want it here again. From Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017):

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

You can find all twenty lessons in condensed form at Snyder’s Substack.

*

Timothy Snyder posted a short video (3:40) in which he comments on the Los Angeles Times and Washingon Post in light of this first lesson.

A handful of passages from On Tyranny
“Believe in truth” : Distinguishing truth from falsehood : “Do not obey in advance” : Nationalism, patriotism, and possible futures : “Nay, come, let’s go together”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as “Lester Ruff.” As with other LR puzzles, I didn’t find this one especially easy. But it was crunchy, flavorful, and full of fun. Toughest area: the upper left. But not especially tough.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, seven letters, “Montreal newspaper.” One of the clues that made the upper left difficult, at least for me. Quelle langue?

2-D, seven letters, “Public art.” GRAFITI? Another clue that made the upper left difficult.

13-A, six letters, “Most famous grandson of Josiah Wedgewood.” And one more. I had no idea.

17-A, eight letters, “News of interest.” Rather Stumper-y.

23-D, three letters, “Exclamation coined for Buck Rogers.” See? Full of fun.

30-A, six letters, “Combination plate?” More than more than a bit of a stretch.

36-A, eight letters, “Covered, as mysteries.” Tricky.

43-D, seven letters, “Union tune sung by Baez at Woodstock.” Remember the triple album?

54-D, four letters, “‘For ____’ (Contact dedication).” A vague memory, and it worked.

61-A, eight letters, “Film in which Dean Martin sings ‘My Rifle, My Pony, and Me.’” I don’t think Stan Newman expects anyone outside the Martin family to just know the answer. I take the clue as an amusing way to get the answer into the puzzle. Here’s the song, without a spoiler.

64-A, five letters, “Schopenhauer called him a ‘clumsy charlatan.’” Oof.

My favorite in this puzzle: 6-D, fifteen letters, “Idly.” Yep, just because.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

An editorial cartoon

[Anne Telnaes, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The Washington Post, October 25, 2024.]

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the newspaper’s motto, appearing on the masthead.

Before my subscription runs out, here’s a gift link to the cartoon.

No endorsements

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, nixed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

And now Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has nixed that paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Shameful. And shameful.

*

I unsubscribed from the Post after writing this post.

[But the real trick will be trying not to buy from Amazon.]

Duce redux, redux

From a post I wrote in October 2016:

I said in a letter to a friend today that Donald Trump has reinvented American presidential politics as neo-fascist entertainment.

I remembered that post today: Duce redux.

Related reading
All OCA fascism posts (Pinboard)

Extraterrestrial replaces Anderson Cooper?

[Anderson Cooper? As seen on CNN, October 23, 2024. An unaltered photograph, with my phone close to the TV.]

I passed up watching Kamala Harris’s town hall on Wednesday night, but I watched a few clips yesterday, including one in which Anderson Cooper pressed Harris again and again and again about her changed position on fracking. Yes, she changed her position. How remarkable. Get over yourself, Anderson Cooper.

But wait a minute — is that Anderson Cooper? I know it sounds fantastic (as they say in old movies), but I think he’s been replaced by an extraterrestrial of the sort that once haunted the pages of the Weekly World News. Those ETs, or “space aliens,” could not be reached for comment. But consider the fellow who took Bill Clinton on a ride in a UFO, as reported in the WWN in December 1992. The resemblance to Wednesday night’s “Anderson Cooper” is remarkable.

[I couldn’t make this resemblance into a “separated at birth” post, for an obvious reason.]

“I’m listening”

[Photograph by me.]

Related reading
All OCA pareidolia posts (Pinboard)

Donations by ZIP code

From The Washington Post (gift link), a ZIP-based guide to online donations to the Democratic and Republican candidates for president. In my little town: 312 donations to Harris ($60K), 55 to the other ($9K) 125 ($20K) to the other.

[The Post corrected its numbers.]

“The Department of Everything”

In “The Department of Everything,” Stephen Akey writes about working in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library:

“How do you people know all this stuff?” a caller once asked me. “What are you, some kind of scholars or wordsmiths or something?”

“No,” I replied. “Just us libarians.”

[Yes, that must be a joke.]

The Gospel of Thomas and John Lee Hooker

A saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, as given in Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels (1979):

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

John Lee Hooker, in “Boogie Chillen No. 2” (1970):

I was layin’ down one night
An’ I heard mama an’ papa talkin’
I heard papa tell mama
Let that boy boogie-woogie
It in him, and it got to come out

And so it did.

See also the 1948 original, “Boogie Chillen’.” I’ve quoted the Hooker and Canned Heat version of the tune because it’s one of my favorite recordings, from one of my favorite albums.

Note: This post is not meant as a joke. As Henry Rollins once told Rolling Stone,

Music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at McDonald’s?

How to remove Blogger comment justification

I’ve wanted to remove the ugly full justification that Blogger applies to embedded comments. So I asked about it in the Blogger Community Forum — and I got the answer. One small improvement in daily life. Thank you, Adam!

And now I’ve figured out that I can change the line height for comments in the same manner. All that remains: figuring out how to remove the massive left margin and change the line height for the short comment-moderation message. Dig we must.

*

Dig we must — or not. I’ve switched back to the full-page format for comments. I just cannot change the embedded format enough to make it into something I like.

A related post
The Blogger comment form

“Contempt, rage, parsimony, racism”

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg writes at length about Donald Trump and the military: “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had.’” Many familiar anecdotes, but also a new one about Trump’s offer to help the family of murdered Army private Vanessa Guillén with funeral expenses, and his response when he learned the cost: “contempt, rage, parsimony, racism.”

You’ll have to read the article to see what Trump said — I can’t bring myself to type it here.

Prophecy

On MSNBC earlier today, Chris Jansing posed a question to Ann Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission: “When will we know the results, and will it be on election night?”

I always dislike it when newspeople ask their guests to prophesy. But Jacobs gave a considered answer: “It will be very early in the morning on November 6th. If past is prologue, it’ll be somewhere around 2:30 or 3:30 in the morning.”

Autumn leaves

Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts. 1890. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

It’s a story of obsession and attempted possession, at once tragic and comic.

Related reading
All OCA Maupassant posts (Pinboard)

New directions in nomenclature

In some American classrooms, pipe cleaners are now known as chenille stems. For, I suppose, obvious reasons.

The OED covers chenille :

A kind of velvety cord, having short threads or fibres of silk and wool standing out at right angles from a core of thread or wire, like the hairs of a caterpillar; used in trimming and bordering dresses and furniture. Also attributive, as in chenille-work, chenille-carpet, chenille-machine.

The Google Ngram Viewer shows pipe cleaner still far out in front, though plumbing might have something to do with that.

Trump, running as a fascist

In The Bulwark, Will Saletan offers eighteen reasons to say that Donald Trump is running as a fascist:

A president who tried to impose elements of fascism in his first term — and who then deployed mob violence in an attempt to stay in power — is seeking a mandate to go much further. And half of the electorate is on the brink of giving him that mandate.

Read it all.

Sesquipedalian Sluggo (with liverwurst)

[Nancy, March 6, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

This strip reminds me of a Bryan Garner story that explains his interest in guides to English usage:

When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.

Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.

It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.

I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had.

I like that half of Sluggo’s big words are food-related.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Academic payphone

“Here’s the college campus --- let’s go to the phone booth.”

“Why do you always go to the phone booth here?”

[Nancy, April 20, 1978. Click for a larger view.]

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[The Bushmiller dash is always made of three hyphens. Though he was done drawing Nancy himself fby the time this strip appeared.]

Kids making the scene

[1013 38th Street, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I always like seeing kids in these tax photographs, standing around while the WPA fellows take their pitcher. This photograph struck me because of the words written on the door: NO KIDS UNDER 16 YR ALLOW. The sign above the building reads JUNK SHOP. I can understand why a junk-shop proprietor would keep the younger set out. But that hasn’t stopped these kids from making the sidewalk scene.

What happened one day on 38th Street: those three kids followed the photographers down (or up) the block. These kids would not be denied, though I doubt that anyone was trying to deny them. Click any image for a larger view.

[1001 38th Street.]

[1003 38th Street.]

[1005 38th Street.]

[1013 38th Street.]

[1023 38th Street.]

And down at the end of the block, still-younger kids have taken over.

[1071 38th Street.]

The three stars of these photographs appear only on the north side of 38th Street. Why? No doubt because they were too young to cross the street by themselves. If they’re still around, they’d now be close to or over ninety, and perhaps too old to cross the street by themselves. Who knows? My wild hope is that someone with an older relative who lived on this block will go browsing at 1940s.nyc and see someone they know. You never know. That kind of thing does happen. More than once.

“And that's why I have a blog.”

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Frank Longo. Sigh: it sparked no joy. Too much trivia. I give you 12-D, nine letters, “Pair on Namibia’s coat of arms.” And 18-A, five letters, “Metropolis on the Ganges.” And 34-D, nine letters, “1930s Safety Director of Cleveland.” C’mon, man. And with a printer out of ink, I had to solve online (here). Cursor-cursor-cursor-touchpad, et cetera.

My favorite in this puzzle: 1-A, nine letters, “Left-leaning member of the board?”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[Pressed for time, minimal commentary.]

Joan Crawford at the Automat

From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). Alone in the city and down on her luck, Sadie (Joan Crawford) visits the Automat. Click any image for a larger view.

[Unless you have the free time and financial wherewithal to track down an original, this is as close as you’ll ever get to an Automat coffee spigot.]

[Coffee cost a nickel.]

[And the twin spigots dispensed both coffee and cream.]

[Civilization = cup and saucer.]

[I like that lettering. And I like the pedestals. I think that they were still around when I made what I remember as my one and only visit to an Automat, in the early 1980s with my friend Aldo Carrasco.]

This scene comes to a bitter end: Sadie sees a half-eaten piece of pie — food! — and the man who’s leaving it behind crushes out his cigarette in it. Is he nasty, or merely oblivious? Hard to say.


Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

Pancakes

From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). That young couple (Joan Crawford and Gene Raymond): what are they looking at?


They’re looking at food, glorious food.


No restaurant name is visible, but for a Depression audience, the cook in the window flipping pancakes would have undoubtedly meant Childs, a chain that offered inexpensive fare. In Sadie McKee, it’s 30¢ for corned beef hash and poached eggs, 5¢ for coffee.

A related post
Childs

Charles Schulz on what makes a good citizen

From KQED, Charles Schulz, writing in 1970 to ten-year-old Joel Lipton, who asked, “What makes a good citizen?”:

I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen then it has ever been before. Certainly all any of us can do is follow our own conscience and retain faith in our democracy. Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call “American Virtues” who lack this faith in our country. I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities.

[Found via kottke.org. “Then it has ever been”: as in the original.]

Clark Gable

[Click for a larger view.]

Clark Gable as Eddie, in Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). I was tempted to use this screenshot for a mystery-actor post, but I suspect the mystery would be permanent.

Francis Bacon teaches typing

[From Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Click either image for a larger view.]

Mary Martin (Loretta Young) tries to get on the straight and narrow by going to secretarial school. These two brief glimpses of typing show her progress. By September she’s typing a passage from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605):

And to speak truly, “Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi.” These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.

[Post title with apologies to the imaginary Mavis Bacon. “Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi”: the age of antiquity is the youth of the world. “Ordine retrogado”: in retrograde order.]

A Paterson notebook

It was smart to end up watching Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016) for a second time, last night with friends, one day after posting a review of Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. In a closing scene at the Great Falls, a Japanese poet visiting the city of Paterson (Masatoshi Nagase) takes out a bilingual paperback of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and asks Paterson (Adam Driver) if he knows Williams’s work. Yes. Is Paterson a poet? No. (As the viewer knows, Paterson is a poet, but the notebook that held his poems has just been torn to shreds by his dog). After some further talk of Jean Dubuffet and Frank O’Hara, the visiting poet hands Paterson a notebook:

“A gift?”

“Sometime empty page present most possiblities.”

How about that?

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)

[Fun fact: Masatoshi Nagase played the Carl Perkins fan in Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989).]

“Save your wind”

“Save your wind, save your wind. You might want to go sailing sometime”: Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett), in Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933).

Snappy patter FTW.

EXchange names, NOLA edition

[From Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Click for a larger view.]

Mr. Stephen Paige (John Halliday) has no telephone number, so Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett) will call on him in person.

Note the typo: Andobon.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)

Thirteen movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

From the Criterion Channel feature Rebels at the Typewriter: Women Screenwriters of the 1930s

Working Girls (dir. Dorothy Azner, 1931). Sisters Mae and Hune (Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood) arrive in New York City, take up residence in a home for homeless young women, and seek work and romance. Paul Lukas plays a scientist in need of a secretary and a wife; Charles “Buddy” Rogers plays a lawyer in love with a socialite — at least for a while he is. Rigid class distinctions, enforced and overcome. Screenplay by Zoë Akins (friend of Willa Cather). ★★★

*

What Price Hollywood? (dir. George Cukor, 1932). The rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress to movie star, “America’s Pal,” and the fall of Maximilian Carey (Lowell Sherman, who reminds me of Nathan Lane) from witty director to destitute drunk. This movie must have thrilled contemporary audiences with its scenes of work on movie sets. Some remarkable cinematography by Charles Rosher of Sunrise, particularly the desperate montage that comes late in the story. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, and Allen Rivkin. ★★★★

*

Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Constance Bennett stars as Lorry Evans, a prostitute on parole who poses as a journalist in order to seduce a wealthy bachelor (Stephen Paige) and get herself set up in her own apartment, sleeping in, yes, a bed adorned with roses. But Lorry’s heart belongs to a lower-level capitalist, a cotton-barge owner (Joel McCrea), to whom she is afraid to reveal her past. A remarkably frank pre-Code story about sexual autonomy and class, with Pert Kelton (the first Alice Kramden) as Lorry’s sidekick and Franklin Pangborn as a floorwalker. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Gregory LaCava, and Eugene Thackrey. ★★★★

*

Finishing School (dir. George Nicholls Jr. and Wanda Tuchock, 1934). Frances Dee is Virginia Radcliff, of the New York Radcliffs don’t you know, dumped by her mother (Billie Burke) at Crockett Hall Finishing School in New Jersey, where free-spirited roommate Pony (Ginger Rogers) revels in booze, cigarettes, and city weekends with louche Ivy League men. On one of those weekends, meek Virginia meets and falls for Ralph McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an interning doctor and all-around good guy who’s supporting himself as a hotel waiter. The relationship (which includes a night together in a boathouse) meets with the disapproval of mother Radcliff and the witch who runs Crockett (Beulah Bondi), but Virginia rebels, and Ralph tells off the classist authorities with the movie’s best line: “Maybe you don’t realize that the world’s too busy earning its three squares a day to worry about what fork to eat ’em with.” Screenplay by Laird Doyle and Wanda Tuchock. ★★★★

*

Rockabye (dir. George Cukor, 1932). Stage star Judy Carroll (Constance Bennett) is beset by trouble: with a former lover, an adopted toddler, an alcoholic mother, an agent who’s in love with her (Paul Lukas), and a married man she loves (Joel McCrea). A few moments of pre-Code eros, many moments of comedy (mostly via Jobyna Howland as Judy’s mother Snooks) and many moments of great pathos and stoic strength. This movie tears one’s heart out and then plays keepaway with it — just when it seems within reach, it’s gone again. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, from a play by Lucia Bronder. ★★★★

*

Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Loretta Young as Mary Martin, a woman who from her orphan childhood has had nothing but bad breaks, with her life told in one long flashback as she awaits the jury’s verdict in her trial for murder. Ricardo Cortez and Franchot Tone appear as polar-opposite love interests in a pre-Code story full of mayhem and sex. Best scene: the dead body against the rattling door. Screenplay by Anita Loos, Gene Markey, and Kathryn Scola. ★★★★

*

You and Me (dir. Fritz Lang, 1938). A charmingly loopy effort, with Harry Carey is a department-store owner and altruist who employs ex-convicts, among them, one Joe (George Raft), who falls for shopgirl Helen (Sylvia Sidney). All’s well until the old gang wants to bring Joe in on a plan to rob the store. With familiar faces old and new: Roscoe Karns, Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and a young Bob Cummings, who might have been good for a mystery-actor post, save that he already looks like Bob Cummings. Screenplay by Virginia Van Upp, Norman Krasna, and Jack Moffitt. ★★★★

*

Blondie of the Follies (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932). Marion Davies stars as Blondie McClune, who rises from a three-generation-crowded Brooklyn apartment to a Broadway career and swank Manhattan digs. There’s one problem: Blondie and her best pal Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are both after the same fellow, Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), and as with Betty and Veronica, the rivalry goes on and on and on, and on. Weirdest moment, Davies and Jimmy Durante spoofing Grand Hotel (which Goulding directed). Screenplay by Frances Marion, Anita Loos, and Ralph Spence. ★★

*

Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). Ruby (Jean Harlow) and Eddie (Clark Gable) meet when he ducks into her apartment and bathtub to avoid the cops. Ruby and Eddie are instantly attracted to one another, though many complications will follow, and Ruby will be sent off to a reformatory before the story comes to its end. Wildly funny, with poignant moments, slaps and punches, and plenty of snappy dialogue: “I got two rules I always stick to when I’m out visitin’: keep away from couches, and stay on your feet.” Screenplay by Anita Loos and Howard Emmett Rogers. ★★★★

*

Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). “Every gal has her price, and mine’s high”: so says Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), daughter of a maid to wealthy business owners, one of whom, lawyer Michael (Franchot Tone) has been Sadie’s pal from childhood. When Michael fires Sadie’s boyfriend Tommy (Gene Raymond), the young couple flee to New York City, where many challenges await. Wealth comes back into the picture when Sadie meets the kind, shambling alcoholic Brennan (Edward Arnold, in a brilliant performance), but the lasting images in this movie are of deprivation and want: a miserable furnished room for rent, an abandoned piece of Automat pie rendered inedible with a cigarette butt. Screenplay by John Meehan, Viña Delmar, and Carey Wilson. ★★★★

*

Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor, 1929). An all-Black cast in a story of transgression and redemption: Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes, in a role meant for Paul Robeson), the oldest son in a family of sharecroppers, falls in with bad company in the form of Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), shoots his own brother in a barroom fracas, and finds redemption as the preacher Brother Ezekiel — though only for a while. As a story, it’s hackneyed, full of stereotypes and improbability (two stars), but as a record of folk forms on film and with sound, it’s invaluable (four stars): we see dancing, dicing, praying, preaching, mourning, and baptisms. The best scene: the train to hell. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer, and Ransom Rideout. ★★/★★★★

*

Tugboat Annie (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery are Annie and Terry, operators of the tugboat Narcissus; she, a dedicated captain; he, a hapless alcoholic. Their son Alec (Robert Young) grows up to be a dashing young captain, engaged to the pretty cipher Pat (Maureen O’Sullivan). The comedy here is very thin — seeing someone drink hair tonic and stumble just isn’t funny — but the movie is partly redeemed by an exciting ending, when a storm rages and Terry risks his life to make repairs to the Narcissus. Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Zelda Sears, and Eve Greene. ★★

*

Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933). It’s a big picture, à la Grand Hotel: “MORE STARS THAN HAVE EVER BEEN IN ANY PICTURE BEFORE,” screamed an advertisement, with John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke, Marie Dressier, Jean Harlow, and many others on hand. But I found it dreadfully dull: a strained, stagey examination of the problems of the rich and the formerly rich, with some bright moments from John Barrymore, Dressler, and Harlow. Sometimes I felt that I was watching a 111-minute-long New Yorker cartoon: “I particularly wanted the aspic — it’s so dressy!” Screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and George S. Kaufman. ★★

*

The other movies in this feature: ‌Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932), Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937), and Red-Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932). I’ve seen and can recommend them all. Make Way for Tomorrow is the movie that Orson Welles said “would make a stone cry.”

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Review: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (New York: Biblioasis, 2024). 416 pp. $19.95 paper.

        Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!

        Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended
        Mind”

The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, quoted in the final pages of The Notebook, have made a compelling case that the materials of our thinking — say, a calcuator, or a Filofax — are rightfully considered parts of our cognitive processes, parts of an extended mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a similar conclusion sans analytical argument:

“Thinking takes place in the head” really means only “the head is connected with thinking.” — Of course one says also “I think with my pen” and this localisation is at least as good.

And, of course, a pen needs something to think on, or in — say, a notebook.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook is a briskly paced, deeply researched, endlessly surprising account of the ways in which humankind has thought in notebooks. The story begins circa 1305 BCE with a beeswax diptych, and moves to the technologies of codex and paper and what their meeting (in Baghdad, circa 800 CE) made possible: many kinds of notebooks for many uses. Allen’s history includes accounting ledgers, sketchbooks, the bewildering variety of specific-use notebooks found in Renaissance Italy — ricordanzi (home account books), libri di segreti (for confidential business), libri di ricordi (memoirs), libri di famiglia (family books), and zibaldoni (personal miscellanies) — portolans (handbooks for navigators), musical treatises, commonplace books, travel journals, Stammbücher (autograph books), memory-tables (pocket-sized whiteboards), dated diaries (thanks to John Letts, 1811), police notebooks (often used for fiction, not fact), patient diaries (first used in Sweden, written by nurses and family members for those in intensive care, att ge tillbaka förlorad tid, “to give back lost time”), bullet journals, and now-mythologized Moleskines.

Along the way we encounter a variety of unusual characters, both unfamed and famed: among them, Michalli da Ruoda, or Michael of Rhodes, a fifteenth-century mariner who enlisted in the Venetian navy as an oarsman, rose through the ranks, and compiled a 400-page notebook of shipbuilding, navigation, mathematics, astrology, and heraldry; Adriaen Coenen, a sixteenth-century Dutch fish merchant who created an 800-page Visboek, or fishbook, with watercolors depicting aquatic life; and Isaac Newton, whose youthful notebooks included magic tricks and how-tos (e.g., how to make birds drunk), and whose later Waste Book held the seeds of his mathematical thinking. Most endearing is Bob Graham, one-time governor of and senator for Florida, whose habit of recording more or less everything in little spiral-bound notebooks (4,000 in all) became the subject of mockery when he was considered as a vice presidential pick. Most moving is Michael Rosen, the writer and broadcaster, who offers his eloquent gratitude to the medical staff who wrote his patient diary during his long ICU ordeal with COVID.

I find three people conspicuously missing from this book — and yes, I think there should be room for them: Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), whose notebooks of aphorisms, Pensées, are well known; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1798), whose “waste books” or ‌Sudelbücher are also celebrated; and Arthur Inman (1895–1963), mediocre poet and maker of one of the strangest and longest diaries known. I jotted their names in my notebook while reading this Notebook.

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts : Twenty-two Joubert posts : Two Lichtenberg posts (Pinboard)

[“The Extended Mind” appeared in Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19. The Wittgenstein sentences are from Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Wittgenstein makes a number of similar statements elsewhere. Allen explains “waste book”: “for bookkeepers, and therefore for all writers of the period, a ‘waste book’ was the place where you made your first notes, on the fly. Later you would extract what you needed and copy it into the formal ledger.”]

Meta detective

One of several meta moments in this detective story.

Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger. 1971. Trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Two more Sciascia posts
From The Day of the Owl : From To Each His Own

Ladies & Gents Restaurant

[56 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

On the Lower East Side, another 56 3rd Avenue. I was ready to write that as in Brooklyn, a large building now bears the 56, but this Manhattan building and its neighbors are still standing. At no. 56 today (or at least recently), Saki, a “sushi restaurant in minimalist digs.” They’d be unlikely to offer the sauerkraut cocktail that William Lins, successor to L. Reinken, offered. (Look closely.)

At no. 52, Sig. Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. Could this be where Ed Norton bought the spats he gives Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners episode “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”?

[Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Who uses libraries most?

From the Washington Post Department of Data (gift link): “Who uses public libraries the most?”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier Stumper of his own making. Easier it was. I took me twenty-odd minutes, with some difficulty in the northwest that cleared up with 4-D, three letters, “Traffic stopper.” Note to self: read every clue.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Go downhill fast.” Wonderful word.

9-D, five letters, “Tried to keep one’s seat.” Stumper-y.

14-A, eight letters, “One-third power.” POSEIDON would fit (sharing rule with Zeus and Hades).

24-D, seven letters, “Verb coined by Lewis Carroll.” A gift.

26-D, seven letters, “Silhouette border.” I kept thinking of the people with scissors who appear at old-timey recreations.

30-A, five letters, “Pajama-clad title character of a ’51 film.” And look what follows.

31-A, three letters, “Big ape.” Ha!

40-A, eight letters, “Batcave facility.” But of course.

63-A, eight letters, “Sarcastic show of support.” New to me. I’ve seen it but didn’t know the name.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, six letters, “Instrument made from bamboo.” SHAKUHACHI just wouldn’t fit.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Der Deppenapostroph

From The Guardian, “Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval”:

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession....

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

The article notes that a spelling guide used in schools and public institutions gives “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as acceptable spellings but proscribes “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”). Because Brille is plural?

*

October 12: There’s now an explanation in the comments that seems right: “Eva’s Blumenladen” is a proper noun, the name of a particular shop, but “Eva’s Brille” isn’t. Thanks to Cassidy Napoli for bringing things into focus.

[And it has to be said: the apostrophe is not a matter of grammar. I agree with Geoffrey Pullum that it’s not even a matter of punctuation. It’s a matter of spelling.]

ColorNoise

As I discovered this morning, the Background Sounds feature in macOS Sequoia shuts off for no apparent reason. At least I know it’s not just my problem.

An alternative: the free app ColorNoise: white, pink, and brown noise, available from the menu bar. But you won’t see that Neapolitan ice-cream icon in the menu bar: up there it’s just in black and white.

Note: this app works only from the menu bar. The icon in the dock won’t do a thing. So add the app to your login items and you can then run ColorNoise (and hide the dock icon) via the menu bar.

Thank you, Peter Hafner!

A related post
Noisy macOS, noisy iOS

Overheard

[In a grocery aisle.]

“I’ve heard of those Oreos.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The Guardian on Milton

From an editorial:

What marks Florida out is the disparity between the concern rightly given to the consequences of the storms and the widespread unwillingness of many there to acknowledge the causes of extreme weather – still less the role in it that the US plays. It has the greatest planet-heating emissions per capita of the top 10 emitters. Global heating makes preparing for such events, and recovering from their consequences, more essential than ever. But it is ludicrous to take such steps without also addressing what is making them more extreme and more frequent.

Clarity itself. Nothing yet from The New York Times editorial board.

“The padlock knocks”

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).

This image of an empty house being done in by the weather makes me wonder if “Time Passes,” the middle section of To the Lighthouse, owes something to this novel. And Deephaven has a lighthouse. But I see no evidence that Deephaven ever came to Virginia Woolf’s awareness.

Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts

“Unflavored dulness”

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).

I can understand why Truman Capote told Willa Cather that Sarah Orne Jewett wrote “one good book,” The Country of the Pointed Firs. But Deephaven is a remarkable book: a picture of female friendship — partnership, really — in a faded fishing village.

Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts

[Cather thought that The Country of the Pointed Firs was one of three American works of literature likely to have a long life. The other two: The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.]

WARNING

[As seen on a walk. Couldn’t get any closer.]

I like seeing this sort of notice. Some people might find it intrusive. To me, it’s a sign (sorry) that humans have been here. The (syntactically awkward) text reads

UNDERGROUND CABLE
BEFORE DIGGING TRENCHING OR
PUSHING PIPE IN THIS VICINITY
CALL BEFORE YOU DIG

Dug.

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

University commas

From xkcd: “The Oxford one is the most famous, but many major universities have their own comma.”

*

I was won over by the joke. But as shallnot points out in a comment on this post (and as I should have remembered), the Oxford comma takes its name from the press, not from the university.

Related reading
All OCA Oxford comma posts (Pinboard)

Noisy macOS, noisy iOS

Did you know that you can get distraction-covering noise from macOS (Ventura and above) and iOS (15 and above)?

In MacOS, go to System Settings > Accessibility > Audio > Background Sounds.

In iOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds.

You’ll find the same choices for each: Balanced, Bright, and Dark Noise; and Ocean, Rain, Stream, Night, and Fire. That’s a campfire — no sirens.

In macOS, you can add Background Sounds access to the Menu Bar or Control Center. Go to System Settings > Control Center > Hearing and and choose Show in Menu Bar or Show in Control Center. In iOS, adding a button to the Control Center offers similar ease.

I’ve used a variety of noisemakers on Macs. And a dozen years ago, I relied on an hour-long .mp3 of pink noise. I will quote myself from my teaching days: “Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.” Times change. The need for noise remains.

Blogosphere, alive, well

In The Guardian, John Naughton writes about blogging and the thirty-year effort of Dave Winer: “The blogosphere is alive and well and thriving. In fact it’s where much of the best writing — and thinking — of our era is to be found.”

I know I’ve “seen” Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News every now and then (via someone’s link). It’s not really my cup of Irish Breakfast (it’s a lot of tech), but it’s now in my RSS — a technology that Winer helped develop.

Voter registration deadlines

Voter registration deadlines are approaching soon. Find them at https://vote.gov/register.

“Primary rules”

From the latest installement of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, someone’s “primary rules”:

Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sounds like Donald Trump, but it’s not. Can you guess who?

NYT, finally, sort of

At The New York Times, they’re finally willing to say something, sort of: “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”

But as the clinical psychologists Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal have pointed out week after week on the podcast Shrinking Trump, it’s not really, or simply, a question of age. Joe Biden’s brain, they have said, is aging. But Donald Trump’s brain, they have said, is dementing.

Jack’s Diner

[56 3rd Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like seeing a diner wherever there’s space for one. Yeah, it oughta fit. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, and the Unique Diner.

At this address today: a large building. (What did you expect?)

[From the 1940 telephone directory. Click for a larger view.]

The WPA fellow at the placard looks as if he might have time-traveled in from the Nouvelle Vague. But I could be wrong.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) ]