Hi Ho, Caro
R r r reading: The Power Broker, by Robert Caro. 1,000+ pages of Robert Moses biography. It hurts my back to hold it on the subway. I'm waiting for the day (June, 2006?) when I'm past the halfway point and the book stays open, instead of flipping into itself due to its own weight as I read.
It's very good, appreciated despite my beyond-conflicted feelings for Moses and his legacy. I'm learning now about Moses' vision for the mud flats and railroad tracks that coursed along the upper west side of Manhattan pre-World War I: Riverside Park, now a startling reality.
Caro talks about how the west side railroad tracks emerged into Lower Manhattan on Eleventh Avenue, running down the center of the street. And how a cowboy with a red flag would ride in front of the coming freight trains, warning pedestrians and carriages to get off the tracks. All day, I can't get the image of that cowboy out of my head.
Eleventh Avenue was known as Death Avenue until the late 1930s. Not everybody paid attention to the cowboy.
Scene from Life of a Cowboy (1906), directed by Edwin Porter.
It's very good, appreciated despite my beyond-conflicted feelings for Moses and his legacy. I'm learning now about Moses' vision for the mud flats and railroad tracks that coursed along the upper west side of Manhattan pre-World War I: Riverside Park, now a startling reality.
Caro talks about how the west side railroad tracks emerged into Lower Manhattan on Eleventh Avenue, running down the center of the street. And how a cowboy with a red flag would ride in front of the coming freight trains, warning pedestrians and carriages to get off the tracks. All day, I can't get the image of that cowboy out of my head.
Eleventh Avenue was known as Death Avenue until the late 1930s. Not everybody paid attention to the cowboy.
Scene from Life of a Cowboy (1906), directed by Edwin Porter.
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