Bethesda Fountain - Central Park - NYC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Terrace




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Life Above and Below Base Pyramid of Life - White Male Privilege

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American Corporate Lawyer in a Blue Suit - circa 1864

http://twistedsifter.com/2012/12/colorizing-historic-photos-gallery/

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Sandusky Penn State Style Locker Room Football More Popular Than Ever? - Sayreville New Jersey

http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2014/10/sayreville_football_players_charged_in_hazing.html

The players taken into custody — who ranged in age from 15 to 17 — were at home with parents or guardians when police arrived, law enforcement sources told NJ Advance Media. Those sources, who were familiar with the arrests, asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The charges were brought by the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s office, which confirmed the detentions after they were first reported on NJ.com.

According to Prosecutor Andrew Carey, three were charged with aggravated sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual contact, conspiracy to commit aggravated criminal sexual contact, criminal restraint, and hazing for engaging in an act of sexual penetration upon one of the juvenile victims. One of those defendants and four others were charged with various counts including aggravated assault, conspiracy, aggravated criminal sexual contact, hazing and riot by participating in the attack of some of the victims.

According to the complaints filed in the matter, one or more of the players held victims against their will, while others improperly touched victims in a sexual manner. In one case, one of the victims was kicked during an attack, said the prosecutor's office.

Prosecutors said the events took place in four separate incidents at Sayreville War Memorial High School, between Sept. 19 and Sept. 29.

Festival of Light - Berlin

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The Guastavino Arch – Vaulting – Cathedral of Saint John Divine – Temporary Gaustavino Dome - 1909

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/03/the-soaring-and-nearly-forgotten-arches-of-new-york-city/

Beautiful arches, like the art deco skeletal system of a lost urban era, can be found throughout New York City, from Grand Central Terminal to bars and restaurants. Created with tiles by the Spanish father-and-son duo, Rafael Guastavino and his junior namesake, these structures were also marvels of artistic engineering, combining intricate brickwork with functional arrays of vaults and pillars, all leading to a kind of Mediterranean dreamworld of colonnades “hidden in plain sight,” as a new exhibition suggests, around the city.

Indeed, in some cases, these extraordinary arches form almost entirely unnoticed and even somewhat surreal ceilings for such mundane facilities as supermarkets and zoos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Guastavino

The largest dome created by the Guastavino Company was over the central crossing for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan: it is 100 ft (30 m) in diameter and 160 feet (49 m) high. This dome was intended to be a temporary structure, to be replaced by a high central tower. In 2009 this "temporary" fix celebrated the 100th anniversary of its construction. In large part, Guastavino received this contract due to the much lower price he could quote because his system served as its own scaffolding. This was an extreme test of his system, however. The masons had to work from above, each day adding a few rows of tiles, and standing on the previous day's work to progress. At the edges, many layers of tile were laid, and the dome thins as it rises toward the center.

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“Cardinal Quinn” of “Gotham” aka “the diddling priest” Being Killed by Vigilante Justice in this Batman Inspired TV Show

Dig the crazy way vigilantes kill corrupt officials of Gotham, a new TV show on FOX TV, before Batman arrives on the scene – by handcuffing the murder victims to weather balloons that disappear into the horizon and pop at high altitudes. Bizarre.

http://moviepilot.com/posts/2014/10/07/the-penguin-shines-in-our-gotham-episode-3-easter-egg-roundup-2323908?lt_source=external,manual

"Cardinal Quinn may not have appeared in the comics, but could his...departure lead to the arrival of Cardinal O'Fallon, who had some trouble with The Scarecrow back in Batman: Gotham Knight?"

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Too Much GOP Government Can Be A Good Thing

Too much republican bred government (GOP Tea Party Statehouses) can turn around and bite you in the ass anti-LGBT Red States. Okla Utah LOL

— Mike McShea (@mcshea33) October 7, 2014

Jeff Lynne - Blown Away

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ebola

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Julian Assange in 3-D

Who Needs (a) God When They Can Afford an iPhone 6 (Rhetorical ?).

I could die and go to heaven when I get my iPhone 7 !  (trash cult talk)

Made in the image and lifeness of god Steve Jobs…….lol

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Top Favorite Baby Name in Israel – Mohammed – Mazel Tov

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/israel-cant-decide-its-top-baby-name-is.html?mid=google&google_editors_picks=true

But what the incident does reveal is some long-standing anxiety about birth rates. Israeli Arabs — that's citizens of the state, not those living in the West Bank or Gaza — make up 21 percent of Israel's population. Though they're still substantially smaller than the Jewish majority, it's not surprising that Mohammed's victory makes some Israelis antsy about a potential future demographic shift.

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Peter Kehoe Murderer Gets Ten Years - Jersey City NJ 1891

Detective William Dalton was born in Ireland in 1846 and was brought to Jersey City when a child. He served for nine months in the 21st New Jersey Infantry. After the war he was in the sail making business until he was appointed on the force in May 1871. He served as Patrolman until May 1 1887 when he was promoted Detective Dalton has a record as a detective officer that cannot be beaten. He has made many important captures of criminals amongst which are the arrest of :

Proctor Denning and Foley the first National Bank robbers who were sent to prison for fifteen years

Girloff the sandbagger who got ten years

Blinkey Reilly and Hop up Langtry the post office burglars who got five years

Patrick Doyle a professional swindler one year

Maria Kelly a notorious dishonest servant five years

Joseph Kirwin for the murder of Frank Fernando ten years

Jack Gill the coiner two years

John Romenillo for the murder of Michael Storolice in Brooklyn

John Miller for burglary five years

Victor Turo for murder of Peter Kehoe ten years

Big Dick Morris pick pocket five years

Herman Zrecker burglar five years

Frank McCabe pennyweight man five years

Mike Noonan for the murder of John Carroll twenty years

Belch Harney for burglary three years

Big Jim Montrey and Charles McKelsy for burglary ten years

Frank Clayton burglar five years

James O Brien and James McNulty masked burglars five years

Finger Morrison burglar five years

George Neisenger and Max Featherstone Lava Bed gang five years and

Anton Bertrand alias Frenchy burglar five years.

History of the Police Department of Jersey City...1891:

Killed For A Nickel - 1890 - NYT

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Killed For A Nickel - 1890 - NYT

Peter Kehoe Fatally Stabbed

"Peter Kehoe of 137 Laidlaw Avenue, Jersey City, who was stabbed Saturday night by Peter Tolo, an Italian bootblack of 37 Colgate, will die. His ante-mortem statement was taken declared positively that Tolo stabbed him. He said he was quietly walking down Laidlaw Avenue, when he was suddenly confronted by Tolo, who, without saying a word, plunged a knife into his abdomen and fled.

"Kehoe said the only quarrel he had ever with the Italian was two weeks ago, when Tolo charged him ten cents to black his boots, and he only paid him 5 cents. Tolo then swore in a rage that he would have revenge. Kehoe did not see him again until he was stabbed. The police believe they can find Tolo."

(The New York Times – Published: July 28, 1890)

Moral of the story: definitely learn to shine your own shoes.

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90 Fifth Avenue NYC - Arthur and Countess Annie Leary Cottage - 1890

This a rough sketch of one of the lesser known members of Mrs. Astor’s 400 Society types from the late nineteenth into early twentieth century gilded era New York.

I began, out of curiosity, a search for existing records and images on the Internet for a picture of 90 Fifth Avenue in 1893, the year of death of Arthur Leary, one the extremely few Roman Catholics on “The” Mrs. Astor’s “400” society list. He made the cut not I think by social graces as much as by sheer wealth and having gone to school as a child with “The” Mrs. Astor’s husband, William B Astor Jr..

That personal and probably business as well  connection of Arthur’s was in imitation of the original part of Arthur’s inherited wealth of his father James, who in turn was a business client and associate of William B. Astor Jr’s grandfather, John Jacob Astor, the German born immigrant that founded the American Astor family dynasty line. 

James Leary had been a hatter, using the infamous Astor monopoly controlled beaver pelts, in a shop in the basement of the original luxury hotel “The Astor House” in downtown NYC across from City Hall and before the Civil War.

The three older Leary brothers Arthur, Daniel and George seemed to have made a fortune off of shipping during the Civil War and beyond which ended up being invested soundly in Insurance Companies and Banks by Arthur.

Arthur was unmarried and so his old maid sister Annie Leary usually accompanied him to society balls and to Newport in summer to visit with their peers, the gilded age rich in their million dollar plus “cottages” on the ocean.  After Arthur's death, sister Annie spent the next twenty six years giving much of his estimated anywhere from seven to twenty million dollar fortune away to charity, mostly to Catholic related charities and building projects. 

Anne became “Countess”Annie Leary after the early 1900s who had a Papal title bestowed on her for philanthropy and charity work and most notably towards NYCs Italian immigrant community.

“I began, out of curiosity, a search for existing records and images...” because of the Arthur Leary NYT’s Obit in typical effete NYT’s fashion describing his house at 90 Fifth Ave. as “quaint”. It was no doubt a small simple house not reflective of his immense wealth and social standing as compared to the other urban castles of the rich built further up Fifth Avenue. 

Leary NYT Obit 1893

The Leary’s I suspect were very frugal. From what I have read the house at 90 Fifth Ave may have been rented at one time, waiting for its original owner Dr. Thaddeus Halsted (not Halstead) to die about 1870. He has various addresses in various NYC directories for his doctor’s practice and or residence. I suspect that as a rental property, it did not have many changes or alterations along the time line from when it was built around 1835 as three small houses for the children of William Halsted who had a big mansion built there at the same time at 1 West Fourteenth Street and or “84” Fifth Ave on the lot per city lot maps. The three children’s houses were of course “86”, “88” and “90” Fifth Ave.

Fifth Avenue – Old and New 1824-1924 by HenryCollins Brown (Pages 39 and 40)

  

As the other buildings on the block went commercial with rebuilds, upgrades and add-ons I suspect that the Leary Cottage remained a simple house, probably two rooms on two rooms in a house footprint of 18’8” X 100’ on an 18’8” x 199’ lot per the Bromley 1891 Atlas of the City of New York Lot Map.

Papal Countess Annie Leary of NYC
Photo by Theodore C. Marceau 1859-1922
(original copyright expired)

Countess Annie Leary - Find A Grave 

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Arthur Leary - Find A Grave 

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Message of Jesus in a Corrupt Gilded Corporate Age - Father Thomas Ducey, St Leo's NYC, 1 Jan 1900

"I hope that every member of this congregation will realize his obligation to live as the epistle directs him to live, justly and godly, and to protest against the covetousness and luxury of the unjust and tyrannical oppression by the corrupt corporation powers of the times in which we live." ~~ Father Thomas J. Ducey, St. Leo’s Church NYC, New 20th Century Sermon – January 1, 1900

St. Leo's RC Church 11 E 28th Street NYC - 1895
(original copyright expired)

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Haight House Apartments 1870 - Kensington Hotel 1901 - New York City

Hotel Kensington, Fifth Ave. near Washington Square – Photo by Byron Company (New York, N,Y,) – 1904 -From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New Yorkhttp://collections.mcny.org/Collection/Hotel-Kensington,-Fifth-Ave.-near-Washington-Square.-2F3XC53THVN.html

(Kensington Hotel 1901, formerly Haight House Apartments (French Plan) 1870, formerly New-York Club, formerly Private Residences, Southeast Corner Fifth Avenue and E. Fifteenth Street, NYC)

The Haight Mansion, (No. 2 ? E. Fifteenth Street) from the early 1850s. was the original corner part of the Haight House Apartments (1870) of the still fashionable Fifth Avenue neighborhood just off Union Square. The new apartment buildings offered services like a hotel to a perhaps reluctant upper crust who saw the new apartment idea little different than the age old tenements of the poor. 

By the turn of century (1900) the apartment building was a new hotel setup from about 1901 after a fire in the late 1890s at the apartment building setup. The building I believe got torn down in 1906.

Some supporting links for your information:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...B266838A669FDE

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B05E7DD123DE034BC4953DFB766838E649FDE

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=99241792

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http://upcommons.upc.edu/revistes/bitstream/2099/12610/1/C_89_3.pdf

"Only a year later, in 1871, the first apartment building with hotel services was opened. It was an adaptation of an old family home into multi-family dwelling for twenty families and several bachelors. 

The building was situated on the corner of 15thStreet and Fifth Avenue, it was called Haight House and had five floors, four devoted to family apartments and the fifth floor devoted to bachelor apartments. In each floor plant there were five apartments composed by three bedrooms, parlor, living room, kitchen, pantry, bathroom and two bedrooms for the service. 

On the fifth floor there were eleven bachelor apartments, five of them had a parlor and two bedrooms, the rest had only a parlor and a bedroom.

 A laundry and a kitchen sited in the basement could serve through a dumbwaiter the different apartments. Meals were served in the common dining room or in each of the apartments. Pneumatic tubes and electric bells connected the apartments with the kitchen and the reception of the building. 

After the construction of the Haight House many similar buildings began to proliferate in New York. Although most of the examples followed the same pattern, the name used to designate them used to change depending on its character or its services. During this first epoch both the used terminology to describe them and the law that regulated them were of a great ambiguity. 

The existing housing law considered only the word "tenement", which defined a building that housed three or more families cooking on their premises. Usually the word "tenement" was associated to low income working class, so new housing typologies targeted the middle class using other terms to be clearly different from them, apartment building with hotel services were usually appointed under the term hotel, family hotel or apartment hotel. During these early years several examples were built around Fifth Avenue, between 10th and 27th Street…"

Advertisement 1901 - (copyright expired)

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Ofensive jokes

Frankie Boyle - Scottish Independence

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Lindsey Graham Mad Hatter South Carolina - WAR - WAR - WAR I SAY!

Lindsey Graham ... remember him? That guy that was always calling White House Officials names, over Benghazi. pic.twitter.com/2JJygYfUaZ
— John Moffitt (@JohnRMoffitt) September 16, 2014

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Celebrity Meme - LeSean McCoy’s Twenty Cent ($.20) bull**** Tip at PYT Philadelphia – Charlie Sheen?

(left image - Google Street Maps - right image - link below)

It all appears to be some sort of celebrity meme – that famous people are not allowed privacy or cannot vote by their wallet for poor service? And then very talented but professional drunk/druggie Charlie Sheen has to get in his Two not Twenty Cents worth ease dropping on social media.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2014/09/lesean_mccoy_20_cent_tip_pyt_philadelphia_eagles.html

…to the backlash he, PYT and Knelly had received. In the statement, he took responsibility for posting the photo, saying "I stand by my actions one hundred percent." He expanded on exactly how McCoy and his group were allegedly rude to the staff:

"He and his group, from the moment they sat down, were verbally abusive to our staff in the most insulting ways. The derogatory statements about women and their sheer contempt for the staff serving them wasn't the end, however. After Mr McCoy and his group left I looked over and saw their server, my friend, with his head bowed down and with a very confused look on his face... Mr McCoy had left a .03% tip for our staff. Our staff that was beyond excited to see him walk into our burger joint and was excited to serve him. That's twenty cents on a tab of over $60. Twenty cents that our server has to split with the food runner and the bartender. Two dimes from an insulting multimillionaire."

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One World Trade Center - Six Views - 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/08/-sp-one-world-trade-center-new-york-rebuild-ground-zero-twin-towers#comment-40682619

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Hiatus.

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The Outrageous Ongoing Maintenance Costs of the Faux European Style Cathedral of Saint Patrick’s in NYC

Saint Patrick's Cathedral Under Repair Again

I have mentioned this here and there and in bits and pieces.

One, they are spending officially something like $180 million dollars to patch up and paint the poorly built to begin with Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.  That to be quite honest, it would be cheaper to tear down the building and build a brand new one.  To build it right the second time without politics, corruption, graft and inferior materials.

But with the RC Neanderthal concept of Sacred Tradition, the old church, built piecemeal over the decades, over the past century and a half, built with cheap inferior dirty white limestone from Westchester County for the exterior and some of the interior bits that are not wood, chicken wire and stucco imitating real stone and a faux vault interior ceiling, the list goes on and on, maybe throwing good money after bad is not the best investment.  This considering that in 15 years, the next half a billion dollar repair job makes me suggest that repair at gold and diamond prices is perhaps only a scam for some sort of money laundering for some and or all of the billionaire contributors, donors, putting Saint Patrick’s through this unnecessary patching up of scabs and bits that in all honesty from the beginning has been an oversized parish church with Hollywood Stage Set hints of European Gothic style and faux European workmanship. 

And with a final cost figure around 1900 hovering at $4 million dollars, one has to wonder how many Tammany Hall kickbacks and how much job featherbedding went on to build the original Saint Patrick’s before it came to anything like a finished stage.

Cardinal Spellman put in a stained glass Rose Window and the “Famed” Spellman Bronze Doors on the Western Entrance in 1949 to finally respond to the 1879 Atlantic Monthly critique of the parish barn doors at the entrance to this pretense European style “Cathedral”.  Kind of like a metaphoric Council of Trent response to Luther's 95 suggested points for reform.

I should note that Frannie Spellman’s dressing up the entrance on Fifth Avenue, with the rose window and Bronze Doors with his Motto emblazoned on them at the back of the doors  “Follow the Money God” in Latin of course - Doors, designed by church architect Charles Maginnis, and British born sculpture John Angel, to give pizazz to the church across Fifth Avenue from the Art-Deco masterpiece of Rockefeller Center or should a dare say it – to give this Catholic mid-town parish church of the local Bishop a bit of sheer fabulous gay-ness.  The doors are stiff in human and divine postures, boring and in need of constant maintenance too. 

"Spellman" Bronze Doors - Saint Patrick's Cathedral - 1949
(Image - Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/highsm.13054/)

The doors were restored recently for half a million dollars to remove half a dozen layers of paint. Hey, you don’t paint bronze btw unless it is faux bronze and faux like the rest of the structure. I think that the bronze doors on the Pantheon in Rome, an official Catholic structure, has not had to remove or paint its bronze doors for something like 1900 years. Like what’s going on here in the maintenance and or out to lunch cathedral management department? Duh!

Below some excerpts from two original Critiques of St. Patrick’s from its official opening in 1879, one from the critic Clarence Cook of the Atlantic Monthly (February 1879) and the other from The American Architect and Building News (May 1879).

"Finished" Saint Patrick's Cathedral 1879 - Without Buttresses or Spires

The New Catholic Catholic Cathedral in New York By Clarence Cook

Of course, it was a subject of no little wonder where the money was to come from, not only to build the church itself, but to buy the land, which under ordinary circumstances would have cost no small part of the whole sum. How this latter feat was accomplished we all know now, and New Yorkers are disposed to say as little about it as possible. The city was jockeyed out of the finest site on the island by a crafty and unscrupulous priest playing upon the political hopes and fears of as base a lot of men as ever got the government of a great city into their power. 

For the consideration of one dollar the Archbishop of New York became possessor of the deed for the whole square bounded-west and east by Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and south and north by Fiftieth Street and Fifty- First Street, a plot of ground four hundred and twenty feet on the cross streets, and two hundred feet on the avenues, situated in the heart of the most fashionable part of the city, and on one of the highest points of the whole island....

No doubt he (James Renwick Jr.) is perfectly competent for all ordinary undertakings, no doubt he could build a cathedral if he would. But Archbishop Hughes wanted a man who would accept the situation as he found it, and would build a cathedral with a constant eye to saving and sparing, so as to produce the maximum of stage effect at the minimum of cost. Stage effect was the one thing absolutely needed…

Plain Wooden Doors of Cathedral's Original Design and Budget
(Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.00299/ St Patrick's Easter1908)

The principal door at the western end is perhaps in design the most discreditable part of the building. All the rest is clumsy repetition and copying of forms and arrangements found here, there, and everywhere in the crowd of Gothic monuments in Europe. But the great doorway came from nowhere, unless from some confectioner's shop. In place of the cavern-like entrances of some of the French cathedrals (Rheims is a notable example), richly molded, and with their thronging saints and angels, each on its pedestal and with its own deep, shadowing canopy, with its sculptured tympanum and its sweet-faced Virgin and child upon the central pillar, we have here a shallow embrasure, conveying no idea of thickness in the wall out of which it is hewn, with coarse and clumsy moldings and engaged pillars, and with a sort of trumpery frill of openwork stone, the beau-ideal of a cap-maker's apprentice, framing in the whole.... 

Rheims Cathedral Entrance - France

And not a sacred emblem, not an inch of sacred imagery, to be found; nothing but the ostentatious display of a cardinal's hat, and the equally ostentatious and equally out-of-place display of the American shield. How many little parish churches there are in England, built at a period when Catholic archbishops knew something about architecture, that have door-ways more noble, for all their smallness, than this cathedral can boast!...

 

Jesus Christ Shrine - "Bin" Niche Chapel - Side Aisle
(Lacking in Space Due to Lack of Flying Buttresses)

Little remains to be added to our indictment, except to speak of the bins which are ranged along the side of the aisles, opening by low, flat arches under the aisle-windows, and which are to be utilized as chapels. Externally they project from the sides of the building, filling up the bays between the buttresses, and give no sign from without of their existence, the roofs being hid by the solid, unpierced parapet of the wall, and no windows being necessary, as each bin is lighted by a small sky -light filled with stained-glass. The effect of this long blank wall is very bad; apart from its clumsiness, it deprives the design of the effective light and shade that should have been got from the buttresses. 

The American Architect and Building News (May 1879)

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