Clarkson Diner

[152 Leroy Street or 586 Washington Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The employees of T SIDE and WEST SID, otherwise known as the West Side Iron Works, would have had an easy time of it when the lunch half-hour came around: they were just a short walk away from the Clarkson Diner.

The 1940s.nyc website shows this diner facing Washington Street, with Leroy Street to the north, Clarkson Street to the south, and West Street to — that‘s right — the west. The site has three photos, with this outtake showing the diner to best advantage. If you click for the larger view, you can see a Bell Telephone sign, a Schaefer Beer sign, the name Clarkson, and several blurry pedestrians.

In the Municipal Archives the diner’s address is 152 Leroy Street. The 1940 telephone directory has the address as 586 Washington Street. But the diner itself (listen closely) whispers, “Call me Clarkson!”

[Click for a larger view.]

Today there’s a FedEx warehouse.

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

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

I began Matthew Sewell’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper with 1-D, five letters, “Back with bucks,” which crossed with 19-A, three letters, “Feng shui favorite with fins.” A fierce struggle ensued. When I finally read 35-A, thirteen letters, correctly — “What many football fans flourish,” not where, much of the puzzle fell together quickly. Note to self: read clues carefully.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

8-D, five letters, “Hustled.” Tricky.

10-D, six letters, “Particle accelerator?” Good grief.

13-D, seven letters, “Misters do it.” A weirdly good clue.

14-A, eleven letters, “Couldn't be better!” Sounds like self-deception to me.

24-D, eight letters, “Mexican rice milk.” It’s delicious, but I didn’t know it was rice milk.

27-A, letters, “Name on the cover of the history Broadcast Hysteria.” I think it’s easy to guess. Is it?

28-D, four letters, “Its seeds make caffeine-free coffee.” I had no idea. This puzzle is increasing my beverage knowledge.

32-A, four letters, “Paradoxical posing.” Oh!

33-D, four letters, “‘Justice Is Served’ utensil set seller.” Would that it had been served and we weren’t facing a four-or-more-year hellscape.

45-A, seven letters, “Court figures, formerly.” What sort of court? What sort of figures?

46-D, five letters, “Swung around.” Just a strange word, and not nearly as old as I would have guessed.

47-A, six letters, “Tweeted self-publishing.” Is it still happening?

54-A, four letters, “Place cited in Broadcast Hysteria.” Another easy guess, I think.

57-A, eleven letters, “Classy?” Groan.

58-D, three letters, “Half a kid’s meal.” Cute, and I just saw it spoken — caution, spoiler — by a cat.

My favorite in this puzzle: 50-D, five letters, “Email ancestor.” For sentimental reasons.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A nice Englishman

[Nancy, November 21, 1955.]

In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, Sluggo spies a pedestrian: “Here comes that nice Englishman we met yesterday.” And Nancy, from her chair, reading: “Say hello to him
--- make him feel at home.”

Did this Englishman wander in from Moon Mullins ? I see a strong resemblance to that strip’s Lord Plushbottom.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

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Lyonel Feininger, at last

From a 2018 post:

Lyonel Feininger, German-American artist, haunts me. I see a painting of his in a museum, write down his name, plan to look him up, don’t look him up, then see another painting, upon which the process repeats.

Okay, finally: here are some samples of this painter’s work, from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Leicester Museums, the National Gallery, and the Whitney Museum.

Feininger was also a photographer (Harvard Art Museums), and he had a career in comics (MoMA). And lo: this photograph of a photographer holding a camera to his face is by Feininger’s son Andreas Feininger.

Sentimental sap that I am, I especially like this Feininger work in painted wood.

Flooding

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

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be — perhaps forever — an area in which transportation — getting from one place to another — would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.

Everyone calls the book The Power Broker, of course, but I think the subtitle deserves emphasis.

And the population today: 23,500,000.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

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S-O

I was today years old when I reailzed — not learned, just realized — that the name Esso comes from Standard Oil.

These guitars are those guitars

He’s selling guitars. Quelle tromperie!

Lacking the patience to spell out the details, I’ll leave these guitars to your careful eye. I’d wager that this American Eagle electric guitar and its Presidential cousins are versions of this Chinese Les Paul knockoff. The American Eagle and Presidential guitars are going for $1500 each. The Chinese guitar: $144 each if you buy two from Alibaba. And the price goes down from there, down to $115 each if you buy a hundred or more.

I haven’t spotted ringers for the American Eagle and God Bless the USA acoustic guitars, but my guess is that these too are sourced from China.

The website offers fun disclaimers:

In-Stock Guitars:
We respectfully ask that you allow up to a few weeks for shipping due to a high volume of orders and the extra time it takes to ensure each guitar is carefully packed for successful delivery.

Pre-Order Guitars:
Please allow 5-6 months for manufacturing and delivery.

Somehow I get the idea that they’re aiming for that bulk-purchase price.

And as with those watches, what you see might not be what you get:

The images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product.

So these guitars might turn out to be some other guitars after all. But as the song says, you can’t always get what you want from a website bearing his name.

[The URL for the Alibaba guitar is valid, but the company wants you to see it in their app. If you’re on a mobile device, just stay in your browser and you’ll be able to see it.]

“Built on a lie”

Robert Caro knows how to use the occasional short paragraph to advantage. From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.

This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.

Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

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Leonardo, no

I’ve never been much of a Ken Burns fan, and whatever affection I might have had for his work evaporated with Jazz. But I wanted to like his Leonardo da Vinci.

And I didn’t. It’s far too busy: split screens, with art on one side, nature on the other; unidentified artworks, by any number of artists, split-screen or full-, appearing and disappearing rapidly; art historians speaking as music plays behind them, or over them. The presentation defies any contemplation of art and makes it impossible, at least for me, to grasp the chronology of the life. The truly false note: yellow subtitles translate the abundant commentary of French and Italian art historians, but Leonardo’s own words are spoken, without attribution, in a deeply accented English by the Italian actor Adriano Giannini. It’s like listening to a commercial for an upscale fragrance.

And if the e-mails from my PBS affiliate are to be trusted, the fragrance would be called da Vinci. Not Leonardo.

It would be a good thing if this documentary were to bring about in its viewers a greater respect for the work of human intelligence: the eye, the hand, the mind.

[I’ve been grateful for many years now to the unknown hand at the British Journal of Aesthetics who changed my da Vinci to Leonardo, thus in a small way making me look smarter than I had any right to look. Post title with apologies to “Caroline, No.”]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll be on and off one device or another this morning and will drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

*

No hint necessary: the answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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