New Year’s Eve 1924

[“Many Extra Police for New Year's Eve: 300 Detailed To Handle Crowds.” The New York Times, December 31, 1924.]

It was that final sentence that made me choose this article excerpt. The Oxford English Dictionary has but one definition that seems to fit here: ”a feather brush used to tickle the face of passers, as a diversion at fairs and carnivals.” First citation: 1680. What a strange place the past is.

Happy New Year to all.

TextGrabber

A free menu-bar app for macOS: TextGrabber. Open an image in Preview, and the Mac can scan its text. But TextGrabber lets you scan text anywhere. If you’re looking, say, at old Life advertisements for Quaker Oats, hit ⇧⌘2, and you can scan text from right in the browser:

You know breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Especially a good hot breakfast on those cold winter mornings.

Warm up the entire family with Quaker Oats. It’s the next warmest thing to staying in bed.

[Found via MacMenuBar.]

The “Harlem section”

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

The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes.

Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930’s. He built one playground in Harlem.

Robert Moses built seventeen playgrounds as part of the West Side Improvement. He built one playground in the Harlem section of the Improvement. He built five football fields as part of the Improvement. He built one in the Harlem section. He built eighteen horseshoe courts, twenty-two tennis courts, half a mile of roller-skating paths and a mile of bicycle paths in the rest of the Improvement. He did not build a single horseshoe or tennis court or a foot of roller-skating or bicycle path in the Harlem portion.

When the Improvement first opened, in fact, there was not a single recreational facility of any type in the entire “Harlem section” — not so much as a stanchion with a basketball hoop attached.

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them tie in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves. The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

There are other matters: Moses’s varied efforts to prevent Black people (and carless New Yorkers generally) from availing themselves of Jones Beach; his use of water temperature in city pools to enforce de facto segregation (he believed that Black people did not like cold water). In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear. (Spoiler alert: that article gives away the story behind the final sentence of The Power Broker.)

The monkeys were removed in 2023.

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

Playground design

In the Moses universe, playground design allowed for little variation. From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

These designs were banal, containing for the most part nothing but benches for mothers and standard “active play” equipment — swings, seesaws, jungle gyms, wading pools, slides — for children. The equipment was surrounded by fences that only a mother could love: either dreary chain-link or high, black bars that made the playgrounds look like animal cages. And they were set in a surface that even a mother had to hate — a surface cheap to lay down and easy to maintain (that was why Moses’ engineers had selected it) but hard on the knees and elbows of little boys and girls who fell on it. Comfort stations, squat and unadorned, looked like nothing so much as concrete or brick pillboxes. A neighborhood committee might request some particularly desired facility — a bocci court, for example, for an Italian neighborhood — but few substitutions were permitted.

And one choice detail:

Some playgrounds were situated atop hills and their entrances were set with flights of steps despite the fact that the most frequent users of these parks were mothers with baby carriages, which were difficult to maneuver up steps, and entrance to these playgrounds could have been made easier for them by simply making the entrances ramps instead of steps.

But Moses no longer had much time for detail.

Here, from an episode of Naked City, are some glimpses of Moses’s dystopian playground equipment. Bonus, not from Naked City: a photograph of me, not yet one, in a Moses baby swing.

In my Brooklyn neighborhood, bocci (or bocce) was a game played on (largely) disused railroad tracks.

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

A wood phone booth

From Ephemeral New York, a wood phone booth, complete with phone, in a bar on St. Marks Place.

Two related posts
The Lonely Phone Booth : Five phone booths, 1961

Wordle, oh my

Wordle 1,290 1/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
[Unretouched.]

As I always use the same starting word, this result will almost certainly never happen again.

Jimmy Carter (1924–2024)

The Guardian has an obituary. Nothing in The New York Times yet.

Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for (and the second). He lived a good life, a life of uncommon decency, and there’s probably some grace in its ending before our next national nightmare officially begins.

“It is never too late to change the future”

In today’s installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reflects on the Wounded Knee Massacre:

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future.

Just some guys hanging out?

[285 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the older fellows did their hanging out leaning against or sitting on cars. Maybe these guys are just hanging out. Maybe not. They might be waiting for someone to unlock the garage door so that they can get to work. Notice that the guy on the far right has a newspaper. Is it opened to the sports pages? To Nancy ? Maybe the guy who’s out in front is demonstrating a new dance step. Maybe he’s goofing off for the camera. Is he really that tall? Or is he just out in front?

[Click for a larger view.]

It’s hard to tell what’s at this address today.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, teems with obliquity. I thought it’d be fun to say that. It’s a very difficult Stumper — an hour’s worth for me. It teems with obliquity.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Hoe foe.” There’s an obvious answer to guess here, and it would seem to fit with 1-A, four letters, “Significantly lessen,” but it would be wrong.

10-D, thirteen letters, “Royal news source since 1665.” Whoa.

14-D, four letters, “Virtual reality purveyor.” Interesting to see clues that blur digital and analog categories.

15-D, six letters, “Quick charge.” Really clever.

17-A, fifteen letters, “They say it ain't so, formally.” Great clue and answer.

18-D, thirteen letters, “Seat of power.” Robert Moses’s swivel chair at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority? Uh, no.

20-A, eight letters, “Hand axes?” Obliquity, teeming.

23-D, five letters, “Smart devices.” See 14-D.

28-A, five letters, “Primary course.” I can’t believe I got this one, no crosses.

37-A, three letters, “Galaxy part.” Which kind?

41-D, six letters, “Beatles ‘Be thankful I don't take it all’ tune.” Maybe the only giveaway in the puzzle.

50-D, four letters “Forest* A *___ (online woods management tool).” I’ve seen this strange clue before, with slightly different wording, in a Brad Wilber Stumper. I never thought I’d see it again.

51-A, fifteen letters, “Iconic song on AFI’s 100 list (recorded 1500+ times) named for a ’55 film you've likely never heard of.” You’re right about that. It’s quite a song.

54-A, three “Letter letters more often seen with one S.” Slightly awkward.

55-A, six letters, “Standing trial.” See 14-D.

My favorite in this puzzle: 4-D, eight letters, “Special feature.” My first thought: the goodies the Criterion Collection adds to a DVD.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.