Tip-Top Diner

[Tip-Top Diner, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The archives have the address as 2448 Prospect Avenue, which can’t be right: no. 2448 is at one end of a row of rowhouses. Looking at Street View of 1940s New York makes me think that this diner resided on Crotona Avenue, next to what is now the Grace H. Dodge Career and Technical High School. There’s a fenced lot where (I think) the diner once stood.

Tip-Top is a lovely name for a diner: it suggests, at least to my ear, a modest spiffiness. The plates and coffee cups shine. The water glasses gleam. The counterman is wearing a bowtie. No cigarette dangles from his lips.

I would have guessed tip-top to be a nineteenth- or twentieth-century invention. But no. The Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1702. From its beginnings, it had both literal and figurative meanings: “the very top; the highest point or part; the extreme summit”; “highest pitch or degree; extreme height; acme.” The earliest citation, from a translation of Cicero: “When a Wise Man is at the Tip-top of all Felicity, can he wish Things were better with him?”

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[Beer and ale? That’s a Ballantine billboard.]

System of laundry

Downstairs: folding, with two episodes of Lassie.

Upstairs: storing, with one side of the English Beat’s first LP.

[Whatever works.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell, whose name is roughly synonymous with “rough Stumper” (forty-one minutes for me). This Stumper has plentiful helpings (hinderings?) of the oblique (60-A, five letters, “Unavailing ID”), the obscure (15-A, nine letters, “TV debut of ’75”) and the “Huh?” (22-A, letters, “Penetrating”). I was surprised that I got the whole thing.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

9-D, six letters, “High point of the National Park Service.” I’m pleased with myself that I know how it’s spelled.

10-A, five letters, “Home worker’s activity.” KInda forced. I’d think of the answer as a state, not an activity.

12-D, letters, “Most-played artist on Canadian radio in the 2010s.” It’s trivia night?

13-D, four letters, “Not in a long time.” Sneaky.

14-D, four letters, “Event to be found on active.com.” An arcane way to clue a familiar bit of crosswordese.

17-A, nine letters, “When the going rate’s reduced.” Almost a giveaway; the start might mislead.

27-D, ten letters, “What may end up on the cutting room floor.” More than slightly preposterous.

31-D, four letters, “City ___.” Where's my fedora?

35-A, fifteen letters, “Rap-battle venues.” Just a fun answer.

41-A, nine letters, “Captains’ commands.” Tricky.

51-D, four letters, “Fit to finish.” Stumpery.

56-A, nine letters, “Second restraining order.” Very clever.

59-A, nine letters, “Hong Kong medium of exchange.” Also very clever.

My favorite in this puzzle, just because the answer is so unusual: 11-D, eleven letters, “Global perspective.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

John Alton’s Painting with Light

From John Alton’s Painting with Light (1949):

Where there is no light, one cannot see; and when one cannot see, his imagination starts to run wild. He begins to suspect that something is about to happen. In the dark there is mystery.

The book is available from archive.org.

Related posts
A delirium of shadows : One more from John Alton

One more from John Alton

[From The Crooked Way (dir. Robert Florey, 1949). Click for a larger view.]

John Alton’s cinematography: even the page gets its shadow, though it’s a bit bright to have a place in a delirium of shadows.

It’s not a page in a real directory: if you look closely, you’ll see that the names, addresses, and numbers repeat in the left and center columns.

More telephone EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Angel : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Crime and Punishment U.S.A. : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : The Dark Corner (again) : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dial Red 0 : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story : Kiss of Death : The Life of Jimmy Dolan : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Mr. District Attorney : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Nocturne : Old Acquaintance : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : She Played with Fire : Shortcut to Hell : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Slightly Scarlet : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Till the End of Time : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

A delirium of shadows

I like delirium as a collective name for film-noir shadows. Here is a small delirium from The Crooked Way (dir. Robert Florey, 1949). The cinematographer is John Alton, a master of film noir. Click any image for a larger view.

[Sonny Tufts and goons.]

[Even the cops work in the dark.]

[And even radio dispatchers work in the dark.]

[John Payne as Eddie Riccardi/Eddie Rice.]

[Payne with Ellen Drew as Nina Martin.]


Here’s a post with a delirium of shadows from Suspense (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1946), cinematography by Karl Struss.

A letter to Mary Miller

Yet another one. You might enjoy reading it.

[Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

“High time” to “help”

“Things were increasingly expected of me that I found impossible to understand,” Arthur Grumm writes.

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Mary Miller, going places

“My” representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, IL-15) — and how I tire of having to type the quotation marks — is headed to Chicago — a city she has often reviled — for a fundraiser. It’s hardly coincidental that she just announced the creation of Congressional Family Caucus.

And here I have to take issue with a nearby NPR affiliate, the same one that last February described Vladimir Putin as beginning “peacekeeping operations in Ukraine.”

From the station’s news item:

Miller says she believes Congress has a moral obligation to protect the natural family from what she calls the radical left, which wants to destroy it.

A possible revision:

Miller says she believes Congress has a moral obligation to protect what she calls “the natural family” from what she calls ”the radical left,“ which she says wants to destroy it.

As I’ve already suggested to the station, it’s not appropriate to repeat Miller’s language as if it has an obvious, uncontested basis in reality. I e-mailed; they said they’ll change their report.

Miller’s recent tweets refer to “the natural family” and “the traditional family, ordained by God,” and she invokes Deuteronomy 6 as a model for parent-child relations. Nice work of cherry-picking, Mary. Deuteronomy 21:18–21 has some interesting guidance for parents. In the King James Version:

18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: 19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; 20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. 21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

And there’s lots more.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Expectations

The BBC program Desert Island Discs has some of the best interviews I’ve heard. Here, Michael Parkinson interviews Maya Angelou (August 2, 1987). I can’t imagine that this exchange was rehearsed:

I want to ask you a question that might sound silly, but it’s serious actually. Have you ever wished you were six foot, white, and male?

No, God no. [Laughs.] I wouldn’t want all that, oh my God, all those unfortunate, unachievable expectations. My expectations are just beyond my reach, and they have to do with me, not with the world. I hope to become a better human being, a kinder, wiser, funnier, more courageous human being, for me. I think a number of white males have the expectation of making other people conform for them. My fantasy is to be six foot tall, Black, female, American, a writer, successful, who laughs a lot and drinks just enough Dewar’s White Label Scotch and a little white wine [laughs] and goes to church on Sunday and really means it.

And loves her mother.

Yes, and who loves her mother.

Two other Angelou-related posts
Our state rep refers to “Mayor Angelo” : A tribute in dubious taste

[Context: Maya Angelou was six feet tall.]