Stacy Horn's Blog, page 192

New York City’s East Side, I’m Coming Back … Eventually

Probably not until the fall. Last month I tried to walk up the east side along the East River, but it’s not like the west side. There are sections where you just can’t walk along the river, and you have to keep taking detours and coming back. I stopped at 57th Street and I keep meaning to go back and pick up where I left off.

A blog to explore: Quigley’s Cabinet. From her bio. “Chris Quigley has been reviewing morbid books since receiving an MA in 2007 from Georgetown University, where she has worked since 1986. As of June 2009, she is on long-term disability leave. She delivered the keynote address at the first Museum of Funeral Customs symposium (Springfield, Illinois), consulted with the producers of the National Geographic Channel’s Mummy Road Show, and authored 6 morbid books of her own – Death Dictionary, The Corpse, Modern Mummies, Skulls and Skeletons, Conjoined Twins, and Dissection on Display – all published by McFarland & Co.”

The Empire State Building from the east side. I’m mad that the red sign is so soft and blurry. Oh well.

Larry Racioppo Photography

I so envy Larry Racioppo. He’s a Department of Housing Preservation and Development staff photographer and I met him during the recovery effort down at the World Trade Center. I love his photographs, and I love where his job takes him. SO JEALOUS.

But he’s an incredibly talented photographer and he has a website now. (I also have a permanent link to it on the right.)

This is a picture he took of the inside of the old spook house at Coney Island. Don’t you wish you could be him, too?

Bring Music and Life Back to an Elder

I’m not sure why this Kickstarter project to make a documentary called ALIVE INSIDE: A Story of Music & Memory hasn’t done better. Maybe we’re all tapped out?

“Alive Inside is the story of Dan Cohen, a small town social worker who discovers the power personalized music has to “awaken” and regenerate deeply locked memories in patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s.”

You might have seen the video of Henry on YouTube. He’s the alzheimer’s patient who comes to life when someone puts an ipod on his head. “Music is inseparable from emotion,” Oliver Sacks says in the trailer. So I’ve learned after spending the past few years researching the science of singing and music. There is a real physical effect.

For $75 you can “choose to either receive an iPod or have our team deliver an iPod, in your name, directly to an elder who needs it. We’ll also arrange the consultation to set up their playlists with the songs that touch them the most.” You don’t have to give this much, but that’s the one I went for. I couldn’t resist that reward.

Not too long ago I read about a study that found that the happiness from spending money on others rather than yourself is more lasting. I know there are many many worthwhile projects out there, but maybe you might consider contributing to this one.

A doorway to a house on Sutton Place, a very ritzy address in Manhattan, although you don’t hear about it anymore. I wonder why that is. Actually, people don’t say “ritzy” anymore either.

Another Great Video about Happiness and Living Longer

This Ted Talk is technically about living longer, but the key to living longer is living better and having more fun. The first time I started to watch this it lost me early on, because of her focus on games, which I’ve just never really been into.

For some reason though, I tried again. I’m so glad I did. So just watch it. Pay attention. Stick with it to the end. It’s similar to a happiness video I posted last year in that the speaker gives a few simple steps to add to your daily “to-do” list; things that are easy to accomplish and are not a burden and will make you feel better, and live longer. Then she explains the research behind each step she is suggesting. It gave me hope. We could all use a little more hope, couldn’t we?

Give it a try.

I know this shot is not particularly earth shattering. I took it because it was two people as opposite as possible were about to engage in the same action, crossing the street.

Sopranos Live Longer

That means if my choir director ever demotes me in the future, I can say with authority, “You’re killing me!!” According to a recent study, “Life spans of sopranos were found to be significantly greater than those of lower voice registered contraltos, even after controlling for birth year.”

PS: I’m only kidding by my word choice of “demotes,” and I love all the voice parts. I will happily sing alto if the day ever comes.

This guy chose to have a telephone conversation while standing on this … well, obviously this is a Telephone Call Platform, one of the earlier, less successful designs.

Merry Christmas From 1952

One day, a few years ago, I was checking my mail and I looked down and noticed some old mail that had fallen behind the radiator underneath the bank of mailboxes for my building. I reached back and grabbed them. The first thing was a September 4, 1991 postcard about an event at a club called Speakeasy at 107 McDougal Street, NYC (now gone). It was addressed to Karl Rahnberg and although I lived here in 1991 I have no memory of Karl. Next up was another postcard and this one was mailed in 1959. It was for a Mrs. Rose Richter and it advertised a summer sale at “footsaver 34th St.” Rose is gone and so is footsaver.

The last thing was the oldest of all. It was an envelope with a 3 cent stamp and a Flushing postmark dated December 20, 1952, 4pm. Fifty-plus winters of steam had obliterated the name and address of the recipient, but the pre-printed label with the sender’s name was mostly intact:

Richard Farrelly, 15 Schenck Ave, Great Neck, NY.

I still have it and the label has since crumbled, in fact the whole thing is in much worse shape, but you could still read the full name when I first found it. (More below …)

Think about that. That envelope was sitting back there for more than five decades. Year after year after year as it sat there the mailman came and went, the tenants came and went, some of them moving out, some of them getting sick and dying, some had children who grew up here, racing by these mailboxes on their way to school, who then left to have children of their own. All the while this overlooked piece of mail sat back there, undelivered, for half a century, getting older and more fragile, as the sender and recipient themselves grew older and more frail, until the possibility that it would ever finish its journey from Richard Farrelly to whoever was most likely over, because both people are unfortunately but probably dead.



It was a Christmas card. The greeting read:

“To wish you happiness on Christmas and through the coming year.” Farrelly wrote “Sincerely, Dick” at the end.

Not a lot of warmth or effort there, but Dick was a man of the 1950’s, and this was not the most expressive decade for men. Who was he? Who never got his card? What if it would have been their only Christmas card that year? What if it was to Peter Tessa?  I wrote about Peter Tessa in my book Waiting For My Cats to Die. Peter Tessa lived alone in my building for many years.  Twenty years ago he died in his apartment one floor below me and no one noticed until the smell reached the halls days later.  He was 83.

I will never ever forget walking by the next day, and the door to his apartment was wide open and the place looked ransacked.  I walked in and saw a very old high school yearbook on the floor.  I opened it up and found Peter Tessa. Underneath his picture there was all sorts of predictions for him.  I don’t remember what, just the kinds of happy, wonderful things high school kids predicted for each other (not dying alone, unnoticed for days).  I sat there for the longest time staring at his high school picture. I also found a framed picture which seemed to indicate that he had a family at one point. Sad, sad, sad.



Anyway, I looked for Richard Farrelly, the sender of the 1952 Christmas card. For the next few days I made phone calls, checked libraries, went online. But I never found Richard Farrelly.

I’ve talked about this before, but I have always loved finding things like this, these traces of forgotten people, and then recovering their history. I used to go to used bookstores (when there were TONS of them in the city) and I’d shake out the oldest looking books for the cards or letters that would sometimes fall out. Those were the books I’d buy.

I had to make myself stop looking for Richard Farrelly. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s been more than a few years and I know a lot more about tracking people down, and there’s also a lot more resources online for searching. Maybe I could find him now.

Sigh. If only I could find someone willing to pay me to do stuff like this, like tracking down the forgotten senders of 50 year old Christmas cards. I need a day job! (A nice morbid day job … with health insurance.)

Gun Control — Enough Already

A friend of mine (Mikal Gilmore) tweeted: That old line that if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns is, in fact, an ideal we should consider aspiring to. I’ve never heard this point made before, and now I’m surprised I haven’t. If only outlaws had guns, would more lives be saved or lost? Here are the figures I found:

- Every time a gun injures or kills in self-defense, it is used:

11 times for completed and attempted suicides (Kellermann, 1998, p. 263).

7 times in criminal assaults and homicides, and

4 times in unintentional shooting deaths or injuries.

- Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings (Harvard Injury Control Center).

- In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States. [The year for those figures is 2008.]

I got these facts from the .

In the upper-right hand corner of the website there’s a live update of shootings in America. Right now it says 54,455 were shot so far this year in America—it went up three as I typed that!! It’s now 54,458! By the time I finished uploading the photographs below it went up to 54,464. Now 54,466. 196 people have been shot so far today in America. Christ.

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Shots of helicopters from my Audubon cruise last weekend. Between the boat I was on and the helicopters, I couldn’t get anyone to stop moving long enough to get the shots I wanted.

National Science, Math, Technology, and Engineering Master Teacher Corps

From the White House website:

“Today, the Obama Administration announced the President’s plan to create a national Science, Math, Technology, and Engineering (STEM) Master Teacher Corps. The STEM Master Teacher Corps will begin in 50 locations across the country, each with 50 exceptional STEM educators. Over the next four years the Corps will expand to include 10,000 of the best STEM teachers in the nation. In joining the STEM Master Teachers Corps, these educators will make a commitment to champion the cause of STEM education in their respective communities, and will receive additional resources to mentor math and science teachers, inspire students, and help their communities grow.”

This won’t make the news of course, but more here.

Signs in windows.

All Hail

There was an incredible storm last night; monsoon rains, lightening that looked like it was going to slice the building across the street in half. But the most dramatic was all the chunks of hail that came down in such numbers I was sure all my windows would shatter. It was like machine guns spraying my apartment from all sides.

The cats were relatively calm until a particularly big one hit, which was every few seconds, and then they’d look up, all “WTF??” For the most part they were, “Why are you running around with your camera? Is something happening? Because we’re cool.”

This is looking out the window over the airshaft. It doesn’t capture the excitement, but I like the dark, dreary, New York City tenement look of it.

Bunheads and Summer TV

It’s crazy, I suppose, how attached I get to tv characters. I still miss everyone from In Plain Sight, which ended its run last summer. (Sob.) But Warehouse 13 starts up again on Monday, July 23rd. One of the funniest series on tv.

Even better, we now have the thoroughly charming Bunheads. If you loved Gilmore Girls (same creator) you’ll enjoy Bunheads. Sutton Foster, the lead, is completely lovable, the girls are great, and the relationship between Sutton Foster’s character and Kelly Bishop’s (from Gilmore Girls) is … I hate to say it because I think it might turn some people off, but … it’s … oh, I’m just going to say it, it’s heart-warming. Okay? Sue me. It’s heart-warming. I like heart-warming. I miss this kind of smart dialogue, welcome back Amy Sherman-Palladino.

In other words: tv life is good.

Update: I forgot, Political Animals. It’s got my attention. I hope it gets better, but so far, I’m in. Weak link, the squandering of the great Ciarán Hinds. Strongest link, the relationship between Sigourney Weaver and Carla Gugino’s characters.

Also, Newsroom. I don’t hate it as much as everyone else. I’m still in. But I do hate what Sorkin does with all his female characters. And apparently he still hasn’t recovered from the internet shellacking he was subjected to all those years ago (it was when he won an Emmy for the West Wing episode, “In Excelsis Deo,” and he was less than gracious toward the co-author of the script). The Social Network didn’t sufficiently neutralize the narcissistic injury and he continues to nurse it in this show.

Every day, on the way to swimming, I pass by this fantastic 70′s style poster. Takes me back.