Moses and Dressler

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Now Robert Moses’ eyes were turning again to the city around which, as a youth, he had wandered “burning up” with ideas for its improvement.

I never thought to think about it before, but I would wager that Steven Millhauser read The Power Broker in doing the research that went into his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996). Martin Dressler walking around the city and imagining its possibilities is a nineteenth-century version of Robert Moses walking around his New York. The difference is that Dressler imagines the vertical possibilities; Moses, the horizontal ones.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Raindrop.io)

Moses Mongol

[Click for a larger view.]

Robert Moses with a Mongol pencil, as seen in “City of Tomorrow,” the sixth episode of Ken Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film (2001).

From childhood’s hour, the Mongol has been my favorite pencil — and remains so, even if Robert Moses used one.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Raindrop.io)

16h 57m

[No. Just no.]

Here’s what the Screen Time widget on my iPhone was showing last night. A quick search for ios screen time wrong showed that a wildly wrong time is a common problem. Turning the phone off and back on didn’t help. Nor did deleting the widget, turning Screen Time off and back on, and re-adding the widget. After trying that fix, my phone showed a never-changing 30s in the widget and 14h in the app.

What finally worked: turning Content & Privacy Restrictions on and back off.

Through it all, the bar graph kept looking realistic.

A 2025 calendar, last call

Free: a 2025 calendar, in large legible Gill Sans, licorice and cayenne and tangerine (as Apple would have it), three months per page. Minimal holiday markings: New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Halloween (rhymes with tangerine) , Thanksgiving, Christmas. Readable from the other side of the room, depending on the room.

As the print-center person said last year, “It looks like an old-fashioned calendar.” Because it is one, made in the new old-fashioned way, with the Mac app Pages and tables.

You can download here (via Google Drive): a 2025 calendar.

[Vignette effect not included.]

Censor Breath

[Yours for the Asking (dir. Alexander Hall, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

The joke fills the screen — perhaps a joke on the Code, but certainly a joke on Sen-Sen, which masked all sorts of stuff on one’s breath. (Ida Lupino’s Gert Malloy is three sheets to the wind.)

Here’s more than anyone needs to know about Sen-Sen.

Related posts
Sen-Sen movie dialogue : Sen-Sen and Zippy

Dr. Max Korowitz

[“Druggist Is Mayor, Judge, Boss and Prof at Times.” The Brooklyn Eagle, November 4, 1936. Click for a larger view.]

An indefatigable reader tracked down the pharmacist whose pharmacy was destroyed to make way for the Gowanus Parkway: Dr. Max Korowitz, who bought the pharmacy at 4523 3rd Avenue in 1916.

Thanks, Brian.

There is no there there

[4523 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“When Commissioner Moses finds the surface of the earth too congested for one of his parkways, he lifts the road into the air and continues it on its way”: thus gushed The New York Times in 1941 on the creation of the Gowanus Parkway (later Expressway), a six-lane highway that wreaked havoc in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Robert Caro tells the story in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pages 520–525.

This building, at the southeast corner of 46th Street and 3rd Avenue, was one of many that were destroyed to make room for the parkway. The first rowhouse that followed this corner building was also destroyed: the block now begins with the rowhouse with the bow window. Look at this corner in Google Maps and you can see that it’s as if buildings have been sheared away.

I think of the kid in knickers as a silent witness to a neighborhood’s destruction.

*

A reader tracked down the pharmacist: Dr. Max Korowitz, who had been at this address since 1916. In 1936, he was the subject of an article in The Brooklyn Eagle.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives posts (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, started out so easily: 1-A, letters, four letters “Personal magnetism, these days.” I know that word, if only from my reading. With 1-A in, the top-left corner came together in no time. And then I spent nearly an hour finding an answer here, an answer there, followed by a visit to our favorite restaurant. Back at the puzzle after eggplant with beef and pad ped with chicken, I began to see answers right away, and the whole puzzle fell into place. What had been so difficult about it anyway? Nothing that “spicy number three” couldn’t overcome.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-A, five letters, “Light measures.” Evidence of this puzzle’s trickiness.

5-D, five letters, “Less likely to pack it in.” See 5-A. The first letter of these answers was the last letter I wrote in.

9-D, nine letters, “Inexpensive lockout insurance.” I thought at first that it might have to do with management and labor.

10-D, ten letters, “Salsa ingredients.” This one fooled me for a while.

11-D, nine letters, “Patronizing instruction.” Cleverly clued.

24-A, six letters, “Doctor without borders.” Really cleverly clued.

26-D, ten letters, “Offer homage.” I think the pad ped helped with this one.

31-D, nine letters, “Without compunctions.” I don’t know why this clue uses a plural.

32-A, three letters, “Tee-vee connection.” I was wrong before I was right.

34-A, fifteen letters, “Without restriction.” A lively answer.

34-D, four letters, “Galaxy cluster.” Maybe the best clue I’ve seen for this answer.

36-D, five letters, “‘The Father of ____’ (Edmond Hoyle).” CARDS? GAMES? What?

41-A, five letters, “Alien power plants.” Please, Leon, go to Mars to look. And don’t come back. (Leon: sic .)

46-A, five letters, “Divine water.” I was a bit awed when I saw the answer.

49-A, four letters, “Tree hugger.” Long time ago, I’d say.

54-A, ten letters, “Fanfare orchestra participant.” Pretty arbitrary if you don’t know what a fanfare orchestra is, and I didn’t. The clue I’d prefer: “Miles alternative.”

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-D, nine letters, “What some desks and dungarees are made with.” Like, crazy, man!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Discouragement

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road’s proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently “dirty,” there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses’ beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using “white” beach areas — the best beaches — by a system Shapiro calls “flagging”; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that “Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks. ” Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently — and the Governor never raised the matter again.

In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear. If you plan to read The Power Broker, you may want to wait to click on that link. It gives away the book’s final sentence.

Related reading
All OCA RobertCaro posts (Raindrop.io)

[Sidney M. Shapiro: one of Moses’s engineers. Roosevelt: Franklin Delano, then governor of New York.]

Hands and AI

I realized last night while watching The Late Show that when I see ordinary human hands on a screen, they’ve begun to look like the work of AI.

[The hands in the screenshot are real and belong to Timothée Chalamet.]