Creative History

            Friday morning begins normally enough.  It is cloudy and overcast, a little gloomy with a slight chill in the air but it is nothing that the residents of New England aren’t used to.  After all, this time of year the temperature does fluctuate rapidly, with one day being warm and humid, summerlike, and the next cold and stark almost like winter. It is May 19, 1780 and the New England and Mid-Atlantic states have been in the grip of America’s War for Independence for over five years.  Much of the countryside is ravaged, many of the cities are still under British control, but led by George Washington, the Continental Army of the United States continues to survive and the spirit of American patriotism is proving resilient and indomitable.  There is reason for both hope and despair, but no one expects what this day is about to bring. At around ten in the morning the overcast sky begins to change colors turning from a pi...

“South Street is burned down...exchange place is bured down...Wall Street is burned down.” -from the New York Courier and Enquirer December 17, 1835           The temperature has dropped to a frigid negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit.  It is the middle of the night December 16, 1835.  Gale force winds begin whipping through the meadowlands of New Jersey. The Hackensack and Passaic Rivers are frozen solid.  Only a few hours ago a bright full moon had illuminated the meandering waterways of ice and made them glow like reflective glass serpents as they wound their way through the marshlands. Now, those same frozen rivers are glowing eerily pink in the night like something from a martian landscape, and the moonlight is obscured by dark and ominous clouds of smoke. In New Jersey the sky is glowing red.  All of lower Manhattan has become one solid wall of flame.  The foreboding glowing red sky can be seen as far away as Philidelphia ...