Sunday, February 27, 2011

A Story Of A Shirtwaist Fire Witness

cuneo-podesta
from Maria Blank:
"My grandmother was born in 1894 in New York City and she lived near Washington Square Park. She died in 1995 when she was 100. She was a witness to the fire. The images haunted her for the rest of her life. I feel that she would want everyone to know how awful and tragic it was.
I have attached some very old pictures that my mother gave me. I think the most interesting one is a picture of my grandmother's grade school class. She is in the second row standing fourth girl in the row. It looks like she is the shortest one in the class. Do you think that some of the girls in her class worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory? The other picture is one take of my grandmother when she was about seventeen (around the same time as the fire). The last picture was taken much later. It's one of Lorenzo Cuneo's stores. My mother said it's on one side of Washington square park but I'm not so sure of that. She also said that this is the parking garage which is supposedly the first one in New York City. Hope you find the pictures interesting."
Maria's grandmother was Mildred Cuneo. Her great grandfather was Lorenzo Cuneo. In the 1910 census she was living at 12 E. 8th Street, two blocks from the Asch Building.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Thursday, February 3, 2011

A Black History Month KV Special Edition: John Coltrane and Edward Strickland on Coltrane


Edward Strickland is famous in Knickerbocker Village history. He lived at 10 Monroe Street. Here's another posting about Strickland
below is an excerpt from an article Strickland wrote about Coltrane in the Atlantic in 1987
What Coltrane Wanted
The legendary saxophonist forsook lyricism for the quest for ecstasy
by Edward Strickland
JOHN COLTRANE died twenty years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work. In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms--blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works.
The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane's relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane's journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues.
from Strickland's 1998 obituary
Bay State Banner
09-24-1998
Edward Strickland, 68, educator, artist, writer
Edward Strickland, professor of the psychology of visual arts, a friend to artists, and himself an artist and writer, died in the early morning of Sept. 16 at Deaconess Hospital. He succumbed to respiratory failure due to lung cancer. He was 68.
Throughout his life, in his painting, as an arts administrator and critic, and as a individual, Dr. Strickland sided with those who were struggling to achieve equity in society. He was generous with his time on behalf of such efforts, even though it took him away from his studio where he took an intense pleasure in immersing himself in the …
A woman stands among a smother of foliage, and the leaves around her stir, responsive to her voice. "It's as though she's singing a linden tree into existence," says Edward Strickland, the painter of the scene.
Strickland, through December, is presenting a 40-year retrospective of paintings and drawings in the handsome AAMARP Galleries on the fourth floor of the Ruggles Building of Northeastern University, at 11 Leon St. The retrospective represents the broad scope of his interests built on the dual foundations of psychology and the visual arts. An associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and former chair of the black studies department, …

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Meyer London: A Socialist Elected To Congress 1914

London makes it clear that he is not about to start a revolution but to begin formulating and introducing social legislation.