Creative History

“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 ...

“Anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, bursts of orange shrapnel.” -from The Los Angeles Times February 25, 1942 The city descends into darkness.  It is a complete blackout.  Sirens wail; pedestrians hurriedly scamper for the nearest shelter and motorists turn off headlights then anxiously speed through unregulated intersections. Soon searchlights can be seen criss-crossing the night sky making luminescent X’s across the high wispy clouds on the horizon.  Sounds are heard approaching from somewhere to the west--droning sounds growing louder and louder; getting closer and closer by the minute.  Engines? Hastily trained civilian radar operators see blips begin to appear--multiple hazy dots across their tiny screens--and they begin to wonder what they are.  Are they enemy bombers?  Weather balloons?  Flocks of seagulls over the Pacific ocean? Soon, everyone hears the distinct pop pop pop sound of anti-aircraft art...

The stands are packed with fans literally hanging from the rafters and ledges and sitting on the concourse steps.  The air is thick with cigarette smoke.  The grandstand is littered with peanut shells and puddles of stale beer. Entering the fourth quarter the game is knotted in a scoreless tie.  Despite the fact that it’s been a sloppy, even a poorly played game, the atmosphere is nonetheless palpable with tension and excitement. The visiting team, the Portsmouth Spartans clad in purple, are about to kick the ball off to the heavily favored Chicago Bears.  The local Chicago fans are waiting in hushed expectation for their hometown Bears to receive the ball and to finally break through the Portsmouth defense and score--in this the waning moments of the game. All the fans know that it is only a matter of time before their imposing six foot three inch tall two-hundred and sixty pound fullback, Bronko Nagurski--the best player in all of pro football--punishes the P...

“They were merely walking skeletons without clothes to cover their nakedness...covered with lice and vermin from head to foot.” --Captain Alexander Coffin prisoner aboard HMS Jersey 1781 As day breaks you can see it rising like a flat-topped hill in the distance.  The gutted hulk sitting there motionless and sunk in the mudflats of Wallabout Bay that you’ve heard about in rumors, the most infamous of rumors, among men in the army.  Your heart rate quickens as your footsteps take you closer. While you’re still over two hundred yards away from it, already, you can smell it.  The stench of the combined filth and decay of over 1,000 starving and dying men being lifted to your nostrils as it’s borne aloft by the early morning breeze. Your knees tremble.  You feel faint and think of running away.  But one glance to the right and left and you see the Redcoats standing guard over you and you realize that any attempt at escape will end either with a British b...

Nearly 100 years ago in his Postmodern poetic masterpiece The Wasteland T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month”.  Little did he know how prophetic his words would become for all of us less than a full century later. We face an April, as baseball fans, during which the baseball season has been indefinitely put on hold for the safety of the nation.  We, as Americans, face an April without our national game being played professionally for the first time since 1883.  We face the possibility of a long hot summer, a chilly darkening fall, and a barren stark and freezing winter all without baseball. But take solace baseball fans because it could be worse. I’m not talking about worse in the sense that a thermonuclear war, living through the Black Death of the 14th century or a War of the Worlds type extraterrestrial invasion could all be worse than the current Covid-19 pandemic that we are going through at present because, sadly, it remains to be seen how t...