Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on The Bronx When It Felt Like Paradise)

“In photographs of the Bronx from that period [the 1920s], the new pavements gleam, mostly car-free. So much in the borough was new and splendid and gleaming. In 1923, Jacob Ruppert, the brewer, and his partner, Cap Huston, built Yankee Stadium on 161st Street by the Harlem River. No other ballpark in America was called a stadium or rose to its nosebleed altitude of three tiers. About Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and their fellow-Yankees of that heroic era, the poets have already sung. And at the Kingsbridge Armory, then the largest indoor space in the city, you could see car shows or boat shows or rodeos—bucking broncos and steer ropers in the Bronx! Just a five-cent bus or streetcar ride away! Meanwhile, on any day, you had your local movie theatre. Everybody, practically without exception, went to the movies. You could bowl a few frames at the Paradise Lanes, on the Grand Concourse at East 188^th Street, and then cross the street to see a double feature at Loew’s Paradise Theatre, which seated four thousand dazzled moviegoers. After the evening's feature ended and the lights came up, a date night could adjourn to Krum's, the chocolate shop also known for its delicious sodas, which also was on the Concourse, just one block north.”— American essayist and humorist Ian Frazier, “Our Local Correspondents: Paradise Bronx,” The New Yorker, July 22, 2024

Periodically, my mother’s twin brother would pull out a book called The Beautiful Bronx and peer lovingly at its abundant photos, recalling the borough that meant so much to him and his family in their youth and early middle age.

The New Yorker, the magazine to which Ian Frazier has contributed for half a century, ran an excerpt from his just-published book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. How my uncle and my mother would have loved that subtitle!

I wish that this excerpt might have talked about how, attracted by the extension of subway lines to the borough, immigrants and their children—mostly Germans, Italians, Jewish, and my mother’s family, Irish—made The Bronx their home. But perhaps the full book has more on that story.

Frazier has nicely complemented what he picked up from 15 years of walking a cumulative 1,000 miles around the borough with the kind of historical research highly in the above passage.

The Bronx might have been, as he emphasizes, originally shaped by its unique geography (“The Bronx is a hand reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea”). 

But it was mis-shaped by the erroneously titled “master builder,” Robert Moses, whose mad road-building project, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, ended up displacing thousands of families, at a cost of millions in compensation and far more in mourning for their short-lived urban Eden.

Photo of the Day: Moth Orchid, New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

I took the attached photo in mid-June, when, for the first time, I visited one of the true treasures of New York-- The New York Botanical Garden.

The formal name of this specimen from the plant kingdom is phalaenopsis, but that’s a mouthful, and most people simply prefer “the moth orchid.”  It’s considered the best orchid for growing at home, for a variety of reasons:

*Average home temperatures are usually right for it;

*It grows easily in a bright window; and,

*If it needs it, artificial lighting can be provided.

This type of orchid is especially popular in my neck of the woods, the Northeast. My guess is that Nero Wolfe, the corpulent but brilliant detective created by Rex Stout, took special care with this in his West 35^th Street brownstone.

Photo of the Day: Himalayan Pine, New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

I came across (and took this photo of) this unusual 100-year-old tree—which, an accompanying sign states, might be “the largest of its species in cultivation”—while visiting, at the start of this summer, the New York Botanical Garden, the wonderful National Historic Landmark in the Bronx.

Photo of the Day: Maui Wormwood, NY Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

The formal scientific name for this flowering plant from the aster family is Artemisia mauiensis. Whatever you want to call it, I thought it was striking enough to photograph it when I went to the New York Botanical Garden over a month ago. 

It must have struck Georgia O’Keeffe with special force when she visited Hawaii on a nine-week journey in 1939. Everything in the world was farther apart and so much more exotic back then, an impression reinforced through every image and every letter from the artist in the Botanical Garden’s fascinating exhibit about it.

Photo of the Day: Cuban Thatch Palm, NY Botanical Garden, Bronx NY

I took a picture of this (formal name: Coccothrinax fragrans) a month ago at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

This is not the first picture I have posted from this venerable treasure—and, given the wonders within its boundaries, almost certainly not the last.

Photo of the Day: ‘Pinstripe Calathea,’ NY Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

I photographed this unusual perennial plant while visiting the New York Botanical Garden a month ago.

Native to South America, Calathea Ornata, as it is formally known, can be seen in a number of tropical climates, even as far away as Thailand. Its large leaves exhibit an unusual pattern and effervescent colors. As the plant ages, its pinstripes will turn white.