Occasionally, The City Desk will present to you a real opinion piece concerning the cities in which we live. Maybe it’s because I was a failure as a bohemian (one has to be a true bourgeois to become a true bohemian), but all this hipster wank about how “authentic” New York was in the...
:: A City Council ordinance passed on this date in 1975 expressly prohibited the “display of images of a licentious, erotic, salient or pornographic nature, or which otherwise arouse the prurient interest for the sole purpose of titillation” on children’s metal lunchboxes. :: The Seventh of the Eight Great Zoo Hoaxes was committed on...
The old Central Depot, which sat across across Ludlow Plaza from Old City Hall from 1896 until its demolition in 1968, was a wonderful, massive gothic structure, covered in ornament and decoration which one doesn’t find much in today’s construction. It certainly isn’t found in its replacement, the City Centre Square building, a long...
An occasional survey of jobs both unusual and extraordinary, and the people who make them happen. The company which employs Torbjorn Bruhn keeps this bookish, blond-haired, forty-two year old lawyer hopping - even though it hasn’t produced a single product in more than thirty years. As the official “copyright bulldog” of the Hearth’s Delight...
An eight-foot-tall fiberglass doughnut was stolen from a billboard in the 2200 block of Baleson Avenue sometime Thursday night, the fifth such large representation of a foodstuff stolen over the past month. The doughnut, decorated with foot-long multi-colored fiberglass sprinkles, was part of an advertisement for Do-Or-Do-Nut, a Star Wars-themed drive-through doughnut stand. Lt....
Mayor Maribeth Cosgove’s offer to the Obama administration to accept Guantanamo detainees has been rescinded by an angry state governor’s office. In a press release, Governor Allen (D) chastized Cosgrove for her rashness, and reminded her that the Ostahanoc River Maximum Security Prison is a federal,...
An occasional survey of jobs both unusual and extraordinary, and the people who make them happen. It’s an exciting time at Ridley Motors, headquartered in the Howard Street Anchor Architecture and Engineering Building just south of 63rd Ave. And no one knows it better than Departmental Head of Engineering (and great-grandson of Ridley Motors...
“Nobody writes letters anymore,” or so the saying goes. But for over one hundred years our city was home to thousands of letter writers and the nation’s fifth largest post office branch (after New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit, Michigan). Around the turn of the 20th century, postal usage increased so rapidly that available...
:: 565-acre Pratt Park disappeared into a sinkhole on this day in 1905. :: Number of people who showed up for the ceremony and forum commemorating Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday at Bowman House (the city’s longstanding Republican club): 470 :: Number of people who showed up for the ceremony and symposium commemorating Charles Darwin’s...
It’s for no small reasons that our fair city is often called “The Home of Zoo Hoaxes.” What follows are the Eight Great Zoo Hoaxes, as determined by the Board of Directors of the Zoo Hoax Historical Society, an informal group that keeps track of this odd aspect of our city’s heritage. A Zoo...
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