Several months back, I determined that, were I to get a dog, it would be a beagle.
At the time, I promised to give the issue of prospective names some serious consideration, and I’m pleased to say I’ve now come to a definitive conclusion: when/if I get a beagle, I’m naming him Darwin.
Shortly after moving to the City, I went on a date with a girl I had picked up at a gallery in SoHo. Naively, I had reasonably high hopes, as it was a second date, and the first (a safe early evening drinks date) had gone remarkably well.
We went to Zocalo, a trendy Upper East Side Mexican joint, and the evening actually started off fairly smoothly. Until, that is, the waiter didn’t bring chips quickly enough. (Shock! Horror!) The girl proceeded to not only bitch out the waiter, but actually yelled at the manager as well. The manager. Over chips.
Clearly, there was no relationship potential with a girl this incredibly high maintenance. But I figured I could be mature and polite and make it through an otherwise relatively pleasant dinner. Wrong. Things went from bad to worse, as apparently a few margaritas were not a good way to calm the girl down. By the end of the evening, we were actually asked to leave the restaurant. That would be a first – I had never been thrown out of a restaurant before.
Of course, I had also never been at a restaurant with a girl who threw a plate of beans at the waiter’s face. Dating in New York is never dull.
A new addition to ‘troublemaking’ in the ‘plus’ section of the site, covering how to live the good life in the Big Apple, on the cheap.
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As Times columnist Charlie LeDuff famously observed, “New York is a lot like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you taste.” Sadly, with the cost of city living perpetually on the rise, that observation holds now more than ever. Which isn’t to say, however, that our fair city can only be enjoyed with a wad of $100’s in your back pocket. With a bit of ingenuity, and a willingness to depend on the proverbial kindness of strangers, anyone can live the good life in New York for essentially no money at all. ‘How?’, I hear you ask. Read on.
“A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”
– Roald Dahl
About two weeks back, I bought a Treo 600, a giant dorky combination phone/PDA. And, despite the hard time I’ve been getting about it from friends (Sarah Brown: “Ooooooh! A refrigerator phone!”), I’m a huge fan. On-the-go access to email, my address book and calendar, and Vindigo’s location services, all make my life immeasurably easier.
But the real bonus is, I now have a way for the drunk version of me to leave notes to my more sober self. This morning, for example, I awoke to find a task titled ‘Allison’ added to my to do list, with an attached note reading:
Hot, blonde Mt. Sinai med school student you met at John’s party. Call her: [phone number]. Also, sister’s name is Callie, sister’s roommate’s name is Dianna; you signed Dianna’s breast.
This is the sort of thing that leads me to completely swear off drinking, at least twice a week.
For years, parallel to this blog, I’ve maintained an offline journal. In part, it’s filled with trains of thought too personal for mass consumption. The remainder, however, consists of observations of the world, discourse on physics, economics, biochemistry, art and literature – any number of topics on which I’m completely unqualified to pontificate.
This morning, for example, I woke up suddenly and inexplicably fascinated by the apparent similarity between adjacent underwater and above-water ecosystems. Pen in hand, I scrawled down a solid page and a half on “wet/dry biomatching” (to coin a phrase), contemplating the Monterey Bay (its tall kelp forests mirrored by the evergreens of the surrounding hills), or the islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago (whose thriving coral reefs match well the dense low scrub that covers the majority of the islands themselves).
This is the sort of stuff my brain pops out if left to its own devices, and I’m never sure what to do with it. Were I a biology grad student, I could construct a PhD thesis around the observation, fleshing out the strength of the correlation, honing in on causative factors (available sunlight or nutrients, weather patterns). Instead, I simply jot my thoughts down amidst any number of others, hoping that one day my thinking will become useful – either to me, in a future endeavor, or to whomever discovers the journal, once I’m gone and pushing up daisies.
Growing up, I always wondered why Da Vinci (a personal hero), who (obviously) journalled far more insightfully than I, followed through on so few of his fantastic inventions and groundbreaking observations. Over time, I’ve come to believe the answer lay in Da Vinci’s reliance on apprentice painters – once he had sketched out a work, fleshed out the tough spots and carefully lit segments, the rest was handed off to his assistants, to people whose talent and passion was directed more towards coloring between the lines than to drawing lines to begin with. Not, I don’t think, because Da Vinci believed himself to be too important to do such work himself, but because he realized he would only be happy when doing something new, rather than expanding and improving something pre-existing.
Watching friends and colleagues at work and play, I’m convinced that distinction holds just as much today as it did in Renaissance Italy. People break down into two groups – pioneers and settlers – and very few people are as unhappy as those inadvertently trapped in the wrong camp.
Someone made it to this site yesterday with the Google search query “ninja spoon kill whole village diner movie”. And I’m really sorry I don’t have a copy of that movie, because goddamn would I like to see something like that.
Welcome to the Hell’s Kitchen Museum of Curious Deaths! Or, at least, to the online version of it. In fact, the HKMoCD initially existed in the real world, in our fair apartment at 360 W. 51st St., New York City. It was located there for just one evening, as the backdrop of our Halloween shindig, the Hell’s Kitchen Museum of Curious Deaths All Hallows Eve Tour and Punch Party. We went full out for the event, repainting walls, removing all the furniture, tweaking every detail possible for the most complete transformation.
The following afternoon, as we slowly sobered up, we began to realize that, at some point, we’d probably need to put back our couches, beds and bookshelves. Having expended too much time and energy to simply scrap the Museum’s content altogether, however, we decided to recreate the experience online. That’s what’s going on here.
Even More Introduction
The Museum was in large part modeled after the New York Tenement Museum, so it depended significantly on the atmosphere of the apartment itself, rather than simply upon the exhibits presented. Sadly, given the limitations of the web medium, we can’t recreate that here. We have, however, as a bare minimum, included below the floor plan of the Museum, as posted near the Museum’s entrance:
In the real world, the Museum’s exhibits were broken down by room, with each representing a major inhabitant in the apartment’s history: first the McGuinn family (from 1856-1906), then Joseph Leibenz (1907-1954), and finally “Gay Johnny” in the modern era. Online, mainly due to laziness, we’ve lumped the exhibits together as one unmanageably long page of text.
None the less, we hope you’ll enjoy the show.
McGuinn Family; The Builder of 360 W. 51st St., 1856-1906
Seamus McGuinn was born in 1810 on the southeastern coast of Ireland in the small town of Kinsdale, near Cork. McGuinn first came to the states in 1830 as a deckhand on board the Caelan Kavanaugh, a merchant ship that regularly sailed the north Atlantic route. In 1834, he married a woman in Newton, Massachusetts, though she died just seven months after their marriage, in the cholera epidemic that swept through Boston that year. McGuinn later joined the Royal Steam Packet Company of Dublin and was promoted to boatswain, sailing the charter voyage of a new route to New London and New York.In 1846, McGuinn became captain of the Fiona Iverna, a clipper with regular service between Dublin and New York. At that time he was nationalized as an American citizen, and moved into a shared townhouse on the corner of Bethune and Washington in the far West Village. He was a popular fixture of the neighborhood, as his name was listed on the register of several private drinking establishments, one of which, on the corner of Perry and Bleeker, was known to be a brothel.In 1852, a disagreement over a cockfight sent McGuinn looking for housing in the area outside of what was then the city. He built a large wood-frame structure on a parcel of land on the current 50th street and 10th avenue block. The area was still being used as farmland at the time, but as the streets were laid out, businessmen bought up parcels of the land. McGuinn settled there with a group of seamen who were eager to purchase land and establish homes away from their work. They purchased a small farm from a Dutchman named Dekker and subdivided the property. McGuinn lived in a wood frame structure he built there, until it burned in 1855.During that time, McGuinn fell in love with Dekker’s daughter, and on his 45th birthday, he married the 17 year old girl, Wilhemina Dekker, known as Winnie. He wrote of her often in his diary and bought her fine items of clothing.
1856: Movin’ on Up
When, in 1855, their home was destroyed by fire, Seamus and Winnie decided to build a multi-family dwelling for upper-class Irish nationals. They constructed the building currently located at 360 West 51st Street and moved into the first floor apartment. Winnie soon insisted that they move into an apartment further from the street noise, but not so high that they would have to walk up many flights of stairs.Soon after the building was completed, Winnie gave birth to two twin girls, both of whom were stillborn. Seamus insisted on a male heir, and though he believed his wife to be hysterical with grief over the deaths of the twins, he insisted on a male heir. Subsequently, Winnie gave birth to two daughters, Rhiannon and Treasa and a boy, Hamish.In 1867, Seamus was murdered under unusual circumstances. Suspects were numerous, as many in the community resented his wealth and prosperity, rare for an Irishman at the time. Among the suspects were his own wife, who resented both her servitude to him and the age difference between them, and his son Hamish, who cared deeply for his mother Winnie, and loathed his father’s tyrannical dealings with her. Seamus was murdered with the spindle of a spinning wheel, gouged through his skull, between the eyes
1878: Movin’ on Out
Following his father’s death, Hamish took ownership of the apartment, where he looked after his aging mother. His sisters moved into a residence nearby, and Hamish purchased a dry-goods store with part of his inheritance that all three children helped run. Hamish began taking classes at Columbia College, preparing for a degree as an accountantAfter a torrid affair with a Barnard student, who later committed suicide, Hamish dropped out of classes. He subsequently squandered his inheritance in the bars by the port, seeing his sisters increasingly infrequently. In 1874, his mother Winnie died of neglect. Hamish became a drifter, finding his way to the American/Canadian border, then vanishing completely.
Caoilainn and Fionna McGuinn, 1857
The twin daughters of Seamus and Wilhemina McGuin were stillborn in 1857. Wilhemina insisted on naming the infants Caoilainn and Fionna, claiming that
Breaking briefly from the pleasure (rather than business) related nature of my blogging, today I link to a new addition to the ‘work’ section of the site: an interview I gave yesterday for a New York Times article about what it takes to do something extraordinary as a student.
Evite archaeology: digging through the invite list on a electronic invitation in an attempt to figure out how you know the sender.