Skip to main content

Sidewalks of New York


This is a marvelous little book by Lewis Mumford.  I thought it would be a good point of departure for those who want to share their observations and book notes on New York, past and present.

Comments

  1. I also recommend Joe Mitchell's "Up in the Old Hotel."

    ReplyDelete
  2. WHAT IS THE FULL QUOTE: We are learning more and more about less and less, until...?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Was this the book that had a brief story where a self styled reformist distributed greeting cards that said,

    HAVE NO MORE CURSING!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't know where the quote originally came from, but I see Flipswap cellphones have co-opted it,

    "Do more and more with less and less until you can do everything with nothing"

    Seems that Harris and Blanck subscribed to the same adage.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It is always appalling to read how greedy manufacturers try to squeeze every last drop out of their workers. The sweat shops in Indonesia, China and Vietnam are no better than what you read in this account. Worse even. All we have managed to do is transport the same attitude abroad, which is why American unions find themselves with the short end of the stick.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Joesph Mitchell's"Up in the old Hotel" is a wonderful wonderful book.I heartily second Rick's thumbs up.And today the 29th would have been Chartres's 61st BDay so Happy BDay Mary!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Did some research and found that it was Mitchell's ''Up In the Old Hotel'' which had the story of that anti-cursing reformer -

    http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1996/winter/carrington-grammar/

    quote:

    ''a man who has devoted his life to the eradication of profanity''


    HAVE NO MORE CURSING

    ReplyDelete
  8. Where has Avrds been of late.Busy with her degree I hope.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...