Monday, August 29, 2011

A Visit to Seneca Village

My old friend, historian and educator Cynthia Copeland now works at NYU and is co-director of the Seneca Village Project, and we have her to thank for a pleasant and informative outing last week. Readers of Kevin Baker's Paradise Alley know of this bygone hamlet, formerly located between 82nd and 87th Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues. The town of about 260 people, the first area in New York where African Americans owned property, was razed to make way for Central Park. (Atlantic Yards opponents should be both comforted and discomfited to know that eminent domain struggles have been going on forever in this town, almost always ending in defeat for the previous property owners). At any rate, this summer, archaeologists from the project have been excavating on the site, locating the foundation of the home of the sexton of one of the settlement's three churches, and all kinds of detritus, such as the remnants of clay pipes and meat bones. The team held an open house on the site last week to display their finds, and my boys and I went up to check it out and learned much. (My main takeaway: though the town was 2/3 African American, and the rest mostly Irish, the inhabitants were mostly middle class. For some illogical reason, I anachronistically picture a shantytown, even though the area preceded Central Park. Instead, it was actually what the name implies: a nice little village in what was then the rural landscape above New York City.)
Want to learn more? You'd better! To do so, go here.

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Three Grand Slams for the Yankees

My sports writing, such as it is, is generally reserved for either quirky, weird or historical sports, or for athletes who have some connection to show business. However, we happened to be at a history-making MLB game the other day, and it seems worth recording.
We seem to bring good luck to the Yankees. On the previous game we attended last season, the team got two grand slams, which is rare. On the game we attended last week versus the Oakland As, the team got THREE grand slams, which is unprecedented in the history of the entire league. The moment was all the more exciting given the fact that we'd waited an hour and a half in the rain for the game to start, and the Yankees were several runs behind for the first few innings.
I assure you these two photos are every bit as staged as the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. But like that famous photo, these re-create history a second after it happened.

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