What It Cost

My favorite thing at the Brooklyn Historical Society was the tile floor. The same people who put in the floor worked on the Capitol. The building also has huge terra cotta busts on the outside, Columbus, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin. The Brooklyn Historical Society is, itself, a National Historic Landmark. For whatever sense that makes. The […]

Merchant’s House

I turned the hottest corner in the world and almost walked past the 1832 home of only one family, ever: the Tredwells. I would like to put in, here, that it is the oldest something or other, but that isn’t really the point of the place. It is very old for a surviving building in […]

Unfinished

The monument is like a ship, a big black marble ship you walk in, can look up to see the buildings that scar the sky, and forward, to see the semicircle of marble where there are symbols. Symbols of various good ideas, from various African cultures, and a crescent moon, and a cross. I […]

Santa Ana

My niece went halfway up the ladder for the high dive and then back down. “You can’t go back down, once you go up, you have to dive,” a kid said to her. Stupid kid. “I think you want to do it,” I told her. She climbed back up. Last year beat me so hard […]