New York Moon

Walking Through a Ghost Town By Alexandra Atiya Most of the...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:21:00 -0500

Walking Through a Ghost Town

By Alexandra Atiya

Most of the photos of downtown New York in Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath show deserted streets.

My neighborhood is normally characterized by honking taxis, overflowing sidewalk restaurants, and partygoers who spill out of the hotel bars and onto the cobblestone streets of the Meatpacking district. On a typical Saturday night, I wake up once or twice to the sound of blaring horns or I crawl over to the window to watch drugged-out, drunken women screaming at their lovers.

But electricity in my neighborhood fizzled out on Monday night. After a few days without power, the crowded nightlife and commercial world of the Meatpacking district had given way to emptiness.

The neighborhood was dead. The only human forms I saw on Greenwich Street were the mannequins in the shop windows. I walked down West 13th Street. The Standard Hotel came into view. The street was empty. I saw no one. But then suddenly one man, dressed in a white kitchen uniform, emerged carrying a large black plastic bag of garbage. He stared at me and I stared at him.

The Standard Hotel rises above the High Line — New York’s new narrow, elevated park that borders the Hudson River. I wondered how the Standard’s guests were managing to enter and leave the building because the hotel looks like it was built on stilts. The building’s appeal is its height over the High Line. It did not seem to have a generator. The rooms were eerily dark and its revolving door was shut with a piece of rounded yellow metal. Yet, I could see a lit chandelier on the top floor.

1

On Monday, before the power went out, I stayed home and read and watched a movie. The light bulb above my bed died but I didn’t bother to change it. A friend who lived in an evacuation zone had come to stay with me and we started to realize that we might be stuck in my small apartment for longer than we had anticipated.

At some point I heard the sound of police radios and walkie-talkies in the hallway. I went to the window and saw an ambulance parked outside the front of the building. I opened the door and I saw a few cops congregating in the hall. A neighbor appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs. I asked him what had happened and he said that our elderly neighbor, who had been ill for a long time, had died. The hallway filled with a putrid smell. I felt awful — I had meant earlier in the day to check to see if my elderly neighbor had needed any food, but then I heard a woman banging on his door and shouting his name, so I figured that he had had someone looking after him. Now I realized that she was looking for him.

My friend and I went out for a walk. The hallway smell was powerful. I said “Let’s take the stairs,” but my friend pushed the button to call the elevator. I did not want to wait for another moment in that smell. A police officer was still standing outside the door. The cop warned us: “I wouldn’t take the elevator now. The power could go out any minute. You don’t want to end up stuck in there.” It was still sunny outside, and only slightly windy, but Con Edison had robo-called to announce that they might cut our power preemptively.

I started down the stairs. It’s my habit anyway to take the stairs. “See“, the cop said, pointing to me, “she knows what I am thinking…”

2

I came back later in the day and the police were still in the hallway. They placed a green sticker over my neighbor’s door to seal the premises.

The power went out that night. It died after dark, while I was cooking some pasta on the stove. I finished making the pasta in the dark. I lit a few candles, but realized I had no candlestick holders, so I kept them inside coffee cups. An espresso cup makes a funny candle holder. It looks like the portable, nighttime candle holders you see in period films about the 19th-century, usually being carried by a man in a white nightgown and pointed sleeping cap. I looked out the window and saw people walking down my street in spite of the punishing winds. I saw what looked like a family: A tall woman in a raincoat with two little girls in matching raincoats walking beside her. The woman carried a crate for their pet and they seemed to be walking toward the river.

The police drove around the neighborhood with large, flashing lights and they started to shout something over their loudspeaker. It was mostly unintelligible, but I believe that they were shouting at people to “get back in their homes!”

Even after the police left it wasn’t that dark. A pale white light filled Greenwich Street and illuminated the darkened buildings. I wondered if it was some kind of artificial light supplied by the police, or if it was simply the moon.

3

The next morning the weather was fine. It was a bit drippy, but there was not much wind. Power was off throughout my area but I saw people carrying paper coffee cups. On Washington Street, the deli had remained open without power. The deli owners had brewed enormous urns of watery coffee the night before and the coffee was still hot. People lined up outside the door to get a cup of it and add in some old milk. People grabbed food and toothbrushes (and cigarettes) off the shelves and paid cash.

Suddenly a huge downpour hit and then quickly disappeared. I stood under an awning to wait it out.

4

Over the next few days I walked around the powerless downtown. I spent my nights uptown, at my parents’ apartment, where there was food and hot water. But during the day I walked around Bleecker Street and saw the fallen trees:

The city looked almost normal at first, but after a few minutes’ observation everything seemed strange. The dead walk signs and the slow uninterrupted glide of cars, bikes and scooters through the intersections made the city look like a small, deserted town.

I went to Canal Street to visit a secure center that houses computer servers. The center was still running on a generator; when I entered the building I was hit by a powerful smell of diesel fuel. Only one elevator still worked. The rest were shut down and blocked by Wet Floor signs. On the floor housing various companies’ servers, the lights were still on and the loud, screaming sound of dozens of cooling fans filled the space.

Outside Canal Street was quiet. Two Con Edison trucks (decorated with happy advertisements) were parked on the corner of Canal and Sixth Avenue, blocking the way to an open hole in the ground.

Walking up through SoHo, I found the streets empty. I heard the hum of generators but I only saw a few men with black garbage bags tied around their shoes sweeping some kind of mud and rotted food and debris out of their building.

Later, I walked around Eighth Avenue and 14th Street, where there was more activity. A group clustered around the bus stop. I saw a congregation gathered in the middle of the sidewalk on the east side of the avenue. Many were looking upward and many more had their cameras out. I wondered what they were looking at and then I turned and saw the now-notorious building whose facade had collapsed during the storm. It was like looking into a dollhouse. I could see a framed picture on the wall, a bed, little white radiators, dangling lights, and what looked to be the open door to a closet.

I started to walk up Eighth Avenue. City life on Eighth seemed more normal than it had just a few blocks away in the Meatpacking district. Traffic guards in neon-yellow vests had taken the place of the traffic lights, and so the cars were moving smoothly. The shops were closed, and the lights were dead, but at least people filled the sidewalks. I started the slow walk uptown.

Remapped Hurricane marks the beginning of a vulnerable era by...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:03:18 -0500

Remapped

Hurricane marks the
beginning of a vulnerable era

by Editors of the Moon, Illustration by John Lee

On October 29, Earth’s full moon brought tides to their highest levels in New York harbor.

Fatefully, on the same evening, a tropical cyclone, Sandy, slammed into the coast. Hard rain and 80mph wind pushed the churning East River over its banks, inundating the canyons of downtown Manhattan, The Rockaways, Staten island, Red Hook, and Coney Island.

In 24 hours, the city remapped itself. Drowned subways returned to primordial underground waterways, prompting the MTA to issue revised maps of a disturbing new topography. The dark-zone of lower Manhattan stood dully against the light of the city, its precincts emptied out. New neighborhoods emerged in evacuation centers. Overnight, the seamless flow of people, capital, and information faced the isolated reality of island geography.

At worst, these dislocations have had mournful consequences: businesses, homes, people were erased in the flood. Thousands in Brooklyn and Staten island are still without power, even as Manhattan shudders back to life. Yet, we recognize that dislocation also reframes, challenging our understanding of the old condition.

We urge our readers to help with the effort not just to return, but to renew and rethink this city’s way of life in what is likely to be a new era of extreme weather:

Donate to the Red Cross
Volunteer through Occupy Sandy

Music and photo by Brian Green

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:03:04 -0500

Music and photo by Brian Green

The New Landscape Photos by Blaine Davis Last Wednesday, we rode...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:03:00 -0500

The New Landscape

Photos by Blaine Davis

Last Wednesday, we rode our bikes over the Williamsburg Bridge to visit some friends and their son in the Lower East Side. As we crossed over the center of the bridge into the darkened half, which ordinarily draws power from Manhattan, we could see the shrouded shape of downtown through a stream of cyclists and pedestrians.

At street level, bright traffic still flowed on Delancey. I was struck by the fact that I had never considered what would happen to traffic in a blackout. Many of the useless traffic lights had been replaced by police officers directing cars.

The light of the automobiles gave way to darkness and silence on normally busy side streets. A few flashlights glimmered here and there in building lobbies.

In a candlelit apartment without power or water, our friends were calm. But after days without power, their son was learning a higher meaning of boredom — tormented by the fact that his neighborhood was missing Halloween. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had just seen children trick or treating in their costumes less than a mile away on the other side of the bridge.

I was surprised by a feeling I often get when travelling through a city for the first time: Looking carefully at every new street and building, and trying to make sense of all the new shapes and spaces. It’s one of the pleasures of travel — the rush of your brain keeping up with all the new input. It’s something that quickly fades away in any city where you live.

For the first time in years, I was looking at familiar spaces in Manhattan as if my eyes had never seen them before.

After Sandy: Extreme weather requires seriously rethinking...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:02:00 -0500

After Sandy:

Extreme weather requires seriously rethinking transportation in America

By Seth Ullman

On the Thursday after Sandy, with subways still flooded, evening commuters waited uncertainly for a B62 bus in front of the Department of Health building in Long Island City.

Over the course of half an hour, five buses arrived and went out of service: it was the end of the line.

The city had run out of gas, and the few cabs that passed refused to go to Brooklyn. As we waited, a stream of private vehicles emerged from a city-run garage. Without exception, they had one occupant. Many of these drivers were passing coworkers waiting for the bus.

After the third bus, an older woman with a British accent snapped at no one in particular, “Forget this pitiful city. I’m going to walk.” A group rushed onto an arriving bus and demanded that the driver take them. They were shouted off, as another group waited in front of an unlit bus up the block making dark jokes about who would be the first kicked off the island if people did not stop pushing toward the door. People were trying to regain a sense of control after the apocalyptic weather, the busted transformers, and the unsympathetic bus drivers had made it clear just how contingent that sense is.

When our bus arrived, we pressed together for an hour as it wound its way through Brooklyn’s bumpy streets. We looked down as the full bus shot past prospective passengers, and then waited ten minutes at an intersection behind a truck that failed to fully make a turn. Passengers removed and then wriggled back into heavy coats as the heater fluctuated between full blast and exhaustion. The six-mile journey took over an hour and a half, or four miles an hour, a walking speed.

Though amplified by the effects of the storm, this is a typical commute for many New Yorkers, especially those who rely on buses. It was unreliable, long, unpleasant, and per a friend, “just didn’t seem worth it.” The average public transit commute is 47 minutes, compared to less than 32 for solitary drivers, and a third of transit riders commute for over an hour each way.

This could change, making commutes like these unusual save for times of emergency.

Our transportation networks in New York City — and around the country — need to be remade. We need transportation that is inclusive, and redundant, so that when one part of the network is crippled (flooded subways, gasless stations, snow-buried bike lanes, freezing sidewalks), other transportation can pick up the slack. Buses are particularly flexible. We need faster and all around better bus systems to support all members of our communities, not just in emergencies, but daily.

New York City has slowly rolled out Select Bus Service, a sort of Bus Rapid Transit-light. But we need widespread separated bus lanes that are enforced by design, cameras, and culture. The temporary buses that ran in largely dedicated lanes to replace subways from Brooklyn to Manhattan indeed were almost as fast as subways once boarded. We need to keep improving bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. We need to think about private vehicles not as the default, but as one transportation option among many, not just in New York City, but across the nation. Our streets can be arranged to account for all users in a more equitable fashion, and to adjust to a changing climate and an unequal economy.

To do this takes will and public support. We need policies at every level of government that adequately fund and consider this vision. This is about resilience and about democracy. It is not about dismantling our infrastructure for private cars, but about allowing other modes to thrive.

Many politicians, community groups, and transportation planners around the nation are trying to address transportation equality and global climate change, but the inertia of the past seventy years of transportation policy holds them back. The bus driver, the MTA, and Bloomberg’s emergency management team did the best they could with a bad situation, just as the city does when there aren’t emergencies, but simply slow, arduous commutes on a chronically underfunded system. New York City buses go about eight miles per hour on average. The administration’s foreknowledge of the storm’s likelihood and potential effects, combined with the tepid politics of global warming, were insufficient to create the political will to undertake the grand efforts necessary to prevent Sandy’s damage. The administration admirably, but slowly has implemented efforts to improve transportation and limit emissions. More should be done, starting with the way transportation dollars are raised and spent.

Over the past several generations, the bus networks and other transportation systems that serve the urban, the poor, the elderly, those with disabilities, and the young, have been systematically underfunded while our nation has poured our riches into promoting and enabling private surface transportation, which disproportionately helps the suburban and rural, the relatively wealthy, the adult, and the able-bodied. I understand that these people (I am one) happen to be those who make our policies, who vote, who donate, who pay the most taxes, and I believe they are absolutely important in our consideration of public spending, but I propose that they are not on-face more important than the rest of our nation.

Yes, buses and subways are government-subsidized, but so are streets and highways and airplanes, freight, and energy in all its forms. All transportation is subsidized - if you’re walking on pavement, it’s almost certainly a public transportation trip to some degree. However, not all transportation equally supports all members of our community. And certainly not all transportation warms our planet equally, or is equally supported by public policy. Yes, we have a federal deficit to attend to, but we also have democratic ideals, an increasingly unequal class structure, and an ever more terrifying climate.

In New York, Hurricane Sandy comes after Hurricane Irene about a year earlier, and a nasty tornado in my neighborhood the year before that. It comes in the same year as the hottest July on record nationally, the worst drought in fifty years nationally, and the second warmest winter ever in New York City.

As New York City moves forward, and the nation thinks more seriously about both responding to and preventing further climate change, we can spend money to protect our cities as they are, or we can use some of that that money toward creating resilient systems that solve other problems simultaneously. Global warming and growing inequality are not unrelated. Their solutions shouldn’t be either.

Cairo 1974 and 2011

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:11:54 -0400

A father’s visit reveals the devastation of Egypt caused by decades of neglect

By Farah Halime

The author’s father, Aziz Halime, photographed in 1974 in the Palestinian refugee camp, Shatila, in Beirut.

My father has been to Cairo twice. The first time was 37 years ago, en route to Beirut, from Moscow — a treacherous journey punctured by thoughts of returning to Lebanon, where war was rampant.

The second time was a visit to see me in 2011 after I moved to the city as a journalist.

Cairo had by now transformed into a heaving metropolis, with a labyrinth of highways exhaling a continuous cloud of black smoke.

Aziz Halime, a Palestinian, had been studying mechanical engineering in Russia in 1975, but decided the country wasn’t for him after a year of study. Meanwhile, tripartite battles between the Israeli, Lebanese and Palestinian armies had erupted in the city of Beirut, where our family are still exiled from Palestine.

Born and raised in the temperate climate of the Middle East, Aziz found Moscow too cold. He yearned for the colorful Mediterranean cuisine of his heritage.

“Russia only eats potatoes. For a whole year you eat potatoes; you dice them, boil them, fry them, cook them with eggs, if you find eggs,” he said. ”I just couldn’t picture myself there for another four years.”

So in 1975 he decided to make his way back to Beirut. The only route he could find was through Cairo because the Lebanese airport was closed due to the ongoing civil war. Egypt’s weather and food was a blessing for my dad, he says, despite the ongoing violence at home.

Arriving one summer evening with three friends, Aziz relished the balmy weather of the capital. At the time Cairo was a glamorous getaway for the rich. For decades, the world’s elite made their way to Egypt to digest and relive the history immortalized and celebrated in art and literature.

My father absorbed a little too much of Cairo, however, and ate at a local Lebanese restaurant in the downtown district until he was sick. (“Seriously! We literally became sick!”).

On his second trip to Cairo in 2011, Aziz was still in awe of Cairo.

This time my dad was surprised to find so many cars and people. Crossing the street had become a dangerous affair.

It was on this trip that I learned of his first experience of Cairo. He introduced a new dimension to my perspective of the country in a way that only his experience could.

Scanning the dense skyline, he saw how decades of rule by the former president Hosni Mubarak had ravaged the country, leaving the poor even more neglected and the wealthy with a dangerous power.

“It was my first experience of real poverty,” he said. “I saw it in terms of Lebanon when people [the Palestinians] became displaced because of civil war. They lived in tents and they had food, but you could tell they wouldn’t be like that forever. In Egypt, it’s permanent and it’s been happening for decades.”

Our family are among thousands of people who were displaced by Israel’s 1948 invasion of Palestine. My grandparents, expelled from what is now officially Israel, fled to Beirut and have been living in the Shatila refugee camp, one of a smattering of settlements set up by the United Nations to house Palestinian refugees. My father, born in this camp, grew up around massacres, food shortage, lack of proper infrastructure, violence and war.

Poverty is even more frightening when it isn’t caused by war, my dad reckons. Egypt’s deteriorating economic situation and its sheer magnitude as the Arab world’s most populous country has created a menacing challenge for the new president.

“Egypt wouldn’t have reached this stage unless the regimes of Anwar Sadat and Mubarak contributed highly to that result,” he said. “You can tell by looking around Cairo that the authorities and the politicians didn’t care.”

My father was astonished to see the volume of slums across Cairo, which are known as “Ashwaiyaat” from the Arabic word Ashwaiya or “Random” that suggests the sporadic building of informal housing around the city.

“It hit me the minute I arrived, when we drove from the airport. Suddenly when you get to the outskirts of Cairo, you come to the shape of these buildings. It’s not from war. It’s poverty and lack of resources. You feel that people inside those houses have nothing. You don’t need to see the people to get the impression; you just feel it.”

My father now works with the British government’s probation service, where he deals with the country’s vulnerable population: drug addicts, homeless people, alcoholics and mentally handicapped people. He said to me later that the only way he’d move to Egypt was to somehow help the country’s neediest.

He inspired me to look further into slum life, which I wrote about in an analysis some months later.

My father also spotted the grave of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the second president of Egypt, on the way from the airport.

Nasser, a pro-Palestinian, had been assassinated a few years before my father first visited Cairo. On his visit 37 years ago, he had visited the grave to pay his respects.

But this time, we zoomed past the grave giving my father just enough time to catch a glimpse through the window. “I immediately remembered and wanted to stop to just pay my respects to him like I did the first time I went there, because the feeling there becomes physical,” he said. My dad said he was nearly overcome with an urge to get out of the car to re-live the same experience he had more than three decades ago.

Nasser was a big supporter of Palestinians, something that resonates deeply with my father. Aziz was heavily involved in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the political and paramilitary organization created in 1964 to push for the formation of a Palestinian state. He became responsible for the youth and students branch of the PLO central Beirut district — one of three districts under the purview of the organization.

Through his PLO contacts, he managed to arrange a ride back to Cairo on a boat. Expecting an old rickety affair, he was instead ushered onto a luxury cruiser equipped with ”brilliant white sheets,” where “the captain and the staff on the boat were absolutely spot-on, dressed in their uniforms,” Aziz said.

It was only halfway through the journey, near Cyprus, that my dad thought he spotted a man that resembled the then head of the PLO and Palestinian National Authority president, Yasser Arafat.

The man was disguised as a father accompanying his daughter who had been studying in Cairo. Aziz recalled attempting to speak with this man, but getting a hushed response. He wondered for years who he was, until it was established some time later that it was in fact Arafat.

Looking for Enzo By Vadim Nikitin We go on vacations in the...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:12:02 -0400

Looking for Enzo

By Vadim Nikitin

We go on vacations in the service of our remembering self”, says Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. “We think of our future of anticipated memories”. Nostalgia sets us off travelling in search of an elusive return. Travelling makes us nostalgic for home.

We had gone to Scottsburgh on the recommendation of South Africa for the Discerning Visitor, a leopard-print pamphlet produced in 1965 by the South Africa Tourist Corporation (265 Pretorius Street, Pretoria) with the motto “A Well Housed and Well Fed Visitor is a Happy Visitor.”

An hour and a half south of Durban, the limp, humid air was suddenly punctured by a sharp, jarring bang. Two seconds later, another: gunshots. An unmistakable smell of gunpowder descended on the dim silence of the commuter train, which had now stopped abruptly on an empty stretch of coastal track. Passengers close to windows slid back in their seats so that their heads might dip below the waterline of the windowsill; two women in the aisle began to rummage through their belongings in anticipation of the inevitable robbery. But it turned out to have been only a railway detonator, placed on the rails to warn the driver about a fault up the line.

It’s only natural that modern-day, crime-weary South Africans would be so spooked by such a gentle 19th century signaling mechanism: there’s nothing intuitive about time-travel.

Strictly speaking, we’d been meaning to go to Umkomaas (pg 76), where “a certain continental atmosphere prevails on account of the large number of Italians in the neighborhood, one restaurant in particular specializing in Italian dishes;” though the identity of this restaurant the guidebook does not reveal, except to say that “many Durban residents drive to Umkomaas to sample the wares of this enterprising restauranteur, who stays open until the small hours of the morning.”

But when I asked a fellow passenger about Italians in Umkomaas, he gave me a bewildered look. So we went to Scottsburgh instead, the next station down, opening out onto the tiled husks of two empty outdoor swimming pools set into the grassy promenade by the beach. Set away from the water was a closed ice-cream store, a Wimpy hamburger place, and behind it, rows of five-story “international modern” apartment blocks with a sign saying “pensioner holiday discount.” A few yards up the street, there is a fish and chips shop and next to it, Enzo’s Pizzeria, which looked like it had been there, unchanged, for decades: red and white checkered tablecloths, Eros Ramazzoti.

Where is Enzo, I demanded. He was having a late lunch at one of the outdoor tables. In idiosyncratic Italian, Enzo explained that his family was in fact from Umkomaas, but he moved his restaurant to Scottsburgh from Johannesburg ten years ago. An unnerving ad for “our world famous, flame grilled ribs” strained authenticity. It was about time to catch the train back to cosmopolitan Durban, where, according to my guide, “one can engage a Zulu rickshaw operator prior to enjoying a luncheon prepared by a continental chef at any one of a dozen first class restaurants.” And if that were not enough, “your Indian waiter will probably know of fire-walking ceremonies at the Hindu temples.”

by Avi Davis Introduction On October 3, 1864, a contingent of...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:12:00 -0400

by Avi Davis

Introduction

On October 3, 1864, a contingent of six British Royal Engineers arrived in Jerusalem. Equipped with tripods, theodolites, compasses and levels, they immediately set to work, as the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem reports, selecting and measuring baselines and establishing the triangulation for a complete survey of the city.

On June 16, 1865, their work complete, they embarked at Jaffa to return to England, without any casualty, and without having suffered much from sickness, as the Ordnance Survey notes. During the intervening eight months they had completed the first modern cartographic and archaeological survey in Palestine, at the time a dusty province of the Ottoman Empire so underdeveloped that it entirely lacked roads and was rarely visited by Europeans, most of whom knew its geography only through the words of the Bible. In addition to their surveying mission, one of the engineers, Sergeant James McDonald, had been outfitted with a photographic apparatus, so that the architectural and archaeological details of the city could be documented by the cutting-edge technology of wet collodion glass-plate photography.

The Royal Engineers were sent to Jerusalem because of water. At the time of their expedition, Jerusalem obtained its water from a series of cisterns located under the city’s houses, which during the rains from December to March were frequently tainted with rainwater that first ran through the city’s filthy streets. One could only drink with safety after the water had been filtered and freed from the numerous worms and insects which bred in it. In 1864, an article in the British Journal of Sacred Literature shocked religious-minded Britons with its descriptions of the Holy City’s unsanitary water system and the regular and devastating outbreaks of cholera and plague it caused. Lady Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, the richest woman in England after the Queen and a well-known philanthropist, soon organized a group of concerned citizens into a Water Relief Committee to rectify the situation. The philanthropists who comprised the Water Relief Committee acted on a sentiment felt by many Victorians and perhaps best expressed by Sir Thomas Huxley, an important 19^th century scientist, who considered it a “great historical fact that [the Bible] has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history, that it has become the national epic of Britain,” and that Palestine was Britain’s spiritual homeland. Thus tasked with arresting this crisis in the birthplace of Christianity, the Committee’s first step was to commission an accurate survey and excavation of Jerusalem. It was suggested that a team of Royal Engineers, regarded as the finest in the world, be hired for the task. To this end Colonel Sir Henry James, Director of the Ordnance Survey, recommended the six-man contingent of Captain Charles Wilson, Sergeant James McDonald, Lance-Corporal Francis Ferris, Lance-Corporal John McKeith, Sapper John Davison, Sapper Thomas Wishart. Lady Bernadett-Coutts undertook to pay the entire cost of the proposed survey, which was estimated at about 500 pounds.

The result of their expedition, the three-volume Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, was published in late 1865. Its maps are to this day considered the authoritative source on the location of the city’s ancient structures. And because of Sergeant McDonald’s attention to architectural detail, the Survey’s images are counted as one of the most important achievements in Holy Land photography. But the survey expedition was to have even more far-reaching consequences. The maps and photographs alerted Victorian scholars and explorers to the Holy Land’s rich archaeological potential, at the same moment that British political interest in the region was on the rise.

Before the Ordnance Survey had even been published, a group of Britons established the Palestine Exploration Fund to continue to the task of surveying, mapping and excavating the lands of the Bible, and Captain Wilson was chosen to head its first mission. When General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem in World War I, he depended on maps created by the Palestine Exploration Fund. This inaugurated the era of the British Mandate in Palestine, which in turn led to the Balfour Declaration and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Thus, paradoxically, the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem set in motion a series of events that modernized the Holy Land and erased much of the ancient landscape — yet it is also our best, last picture of that pre-modern world.

Plates:

“An excavation was carried to a depth of 37 feet, in search of one of the piers, without much result, except to impress still more on the mind the magnificent effect which must have been produced by a solid mass of masonry rising sharply from the valley to a height of probably not less than 80 or 90 feet, and crowned by the cloisters of the Temple.”

“Immediately north of the lintel is the Wailing Place, which has always been considered as part of the original sustaining wall of the Temple area, but the carelessness of the building, and the frequent occurrence of coarse open joints, makes it doubtful whether the stones really are ‘in situ.’…”

“In Christian Street is seen a doorway, now closed and partly hidden by the arch which spans the street, which formerly led from the street direct to the triforium [of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a chamber behind a mezzanine-level arcade].”

“The level of the street is now up to the springing, and only half the arch can be seen; it is semicircular, and looks very old…and the masonry is more like that of the entrance to some vault than that of a city gateway”

“It is absurd to attribute any great antiquity to the sites shown in the Via Dolorosa… The oldest monument on the road is the Ecce Homo Arch [the arch traditionally identified with the one at which Pontius Pilate presented Jesus to the angry mob and declared “ecce homo,”]… The Via Dolorosa is much visited by pilgrims at Easter time, when a little circle kneeling devoutly in the dirty street and offering up prayers in front of this piece of stone makes one wonder at their credulity and the implicit faith they place in everything told them by a set of uneducated priests.”

Back To Voyager One

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:12:00 -0400

Back To Voyager One

Continue To Voyager Three

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:12:00 -0400

Continue To Voyager Three

Dust Photographs by Xenia Nikolskaya “Dust” explores the...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:12:00 -0400

Dust

Photographs by Xenia Nikolskaya

“Dust” explores the conditions and relevance of empty architectural spaces in Egypt, presenting an entwined dualism: dust as materiality that layers the city, literally tracing the passage of time upon urban objects – but also as a temporal metaphor that registers these changes on the level of memories, both past and present.

Architecture constructed in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – usually referred to as ‘Cosmopolitan Architecture’ – is rapidly succumbing to neglect, a real estate frenzy and the overpopulation of the cities. These factors lend particular urgency to Nikolskaya’s documentation of these spaces. Since she first initiated this project in 2006, a number of the locations depicted in her work have been demolished, while others have gone through a process of renovation and modernization.

On view at the Townhouse First Floor Gallery (Hussein El Me’mar Pasha St, off Mahmoud Basyouni St, Cairo, Egypt) from May 6 through June 13

Wrongosaurus ‘Dinosaurs’ at the Crystal Palace By...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:11:50 -0400

Wrongosaurus

‘Dinosaurs’ at the Crystal Palace

By Levi Stahl

By 1854 dinosaurs were, in one sense, old news. Amateur naturalists had been finding inexplicably large bones around the world for centuries, imagining them as the skeletons of everything from biblical giants to legendary dragons.

But as the 19th century wore on, bringing with it a growing acceptance of the concept of extinction, scientists began to conjecture that these fossils might be the remains of long-lost creatures of which we’d previously been wholly unaware. After French naturalist Georges Cuvier’s 1806 drawing of a mastodon skeleton, followed by English paleontologist Richard Owen’s coining of the term “dinosaur” in 1841, the idea of these giant prehistoric monsters was reasonably well established with the general public.

As any visitor to a contemporary natural history museum knows, there’s a world of difference between grasping a concept and standing in its fully embodied, fleshed-out, giant presence. And that’s what the impresarios behind Crystal Palace Park on Sydenham Hill in South London were counting on when, to accompany their relocation of the famed Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, they commissioned sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to create thirty-three life-size dinosaurs for their Dinosaur Court.

The Extinct Animals’ Model-Room, from the Illustrated London News

In consultation with Richard Owen, Hawkins set to work. The problem, from our vantage, is that Owen simply didn’t have enough fossil evidence from which to extrapolate. For the iguanodon, the largest and most impressive of Hawkins’s sculptures, Owen had little more than a handful of teeth and a few bones, so, he had to make up the rest — which, frankly, was fine by him. As Martin Rudwick explains in Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World,

The boldness of this reconstruction was powered by theoretical, even ideological considerations. Owen was determined to turn the fossils into authoritative evidence against the rising tide of evolution in the Lamarckian mode, which he regarded as deeply threatening to both science and society… Only if this relatively ancient reptile had had a more “advanced” anatomy and physiology than living reptiles such as crocodiles— indeed, as advanced as living mammals such as elephants and rhinoceroses — could it refute the intrinsic progressiveness that Lamarckians claimed to see in the history of life.

In order to refute the nascent stirrings of evolutionary theory, Owens pressed Hawkins to transform the iguanodon from the huge, low-to-the-ground lizard that scientists had guessed at since its discovery nearly twenty years earlier into a majestic quadruped that walked rather than slithered, built like a grotesquely oversized dog or pig.

Ultimately, Hawkins’s iguanodon was so large that its open mold accommodated a New Year’s Eve dinner for Hawkins, Owen, and twenty other scientists in 1853.

Mistakes of that sort abounded in Hawkins’s models, driven in most cases less by ideology than by understandable lack of knowledge. As any contemporary visitor to Dinosaur Court will instantly grasp, these dinosaurs are … off. Awkwardly, humorously so. They look far too much like alterations and extensions of extant creatures than like the dinosaurs we’ve come to know (and emotionally domesticate) in the past century and a half.

At the time, however none of that mattered. Forty thousand people showed up to see Queen Victoria open the new Crystal Palace Park, and the dinosaurs were key to the park’s appeal. Punch, the establishment voice of gentle English satire, featured a cartoon of a young boy being terrified by the monsters, their educational value trumped by their sheer size and menace. Rudwick notes,

The fame of Hawkins’s display, as the first major three-dimensional reconstruction of its kind, spread quickly throughout Europe and North America… [I]ts obvious parallel to the living exhibits at the Zoological Gardens a few miles away in Regent’s Park must surely have brought the spectacular otherness of “the ancient world” vividly to the public imagination.

Hawkins’s subsequent fame led to what could have been a spectacular commission: to create a set of dinosaurs for Central Park. Starting in 1868, he spent three years working in a studio in the park, where he created a number of plaster casts — but the dinosaurs fell victim to the rapacity of Boss Tweed: seeing little profit in the idea, he ordered the project scrapped, the studio broken into, and the models destroyed. According to Steve McCarthy and Mick Gilbert in The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs,

The moulds of the animals were dumped into a pond in Central Park. These were recovered not long afterwards, but being made of soft casting plaster they were ruined. The remains of the models themselves were buried in the park and though numerous construction projects have taken place in Central Park in the intervening years, no trace of the smashed models was ever found.

Instead, all we’re left with is a dazzling what-if.

The Central Park Palaeontological Museum As It Might Have Looked.

Over the course of a century after their heyday, the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs would come close to suffering the fate of their originals: rejected by science, neglected by park officials and the public, they languished in increasing decrepitude until the mid-1990s, when the Borough of Bromley begin investigating the possibility of restoration. Four million pounds of grant money later, the dinosaurs are Grade I listed structures, as protected from depredation and decay as any buildings in Britain. Today, the Crystal Palace itself is long gone, destroyed by fire in 1936, but the dinosaurs survive, ranged about a quiet lagoon, their physiological flaws politely corrected by informative signs that do little to detract from their air of toothy menace.

Continue to Voyager Two

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:11:00 -0400

Continue to Voyager Two

Archaeology of an Archaeologist

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:11:00 -0400

1929-1957

By Emily Nemens
Illustrations by Angela Dominguez & Emily Nemens

Karl Katz (b. 1929, New York) made a fifty-year career as a museum director, designer, and documentary producer, but his first, brief career was that of an archaeologist.

1957, Teheran, Iran

Katz receives a call at the payphone of his Iranian pensionne. The president of the board of the national collection in Jerusalem is on the phone. The museum’s director, Mordechai Narkiss, has fallen ill, and the board member requests that Katz oversee the institution during his recovery.* Within two months Narkiss is dead and Katz is the director of the Bezalel National Museum, effectively ending his archaeological career.

*Katz’s prior experience at the museum was curating a small show on Iranian ceramics. The show was well received within the local ceramics community.

1957, Teheran, Iran

Katz enters the walled Mahboubians compound in the hilly, affluent suburbs of Teheran. The Mahboubians, cousins of the Rabenou clan [see Spring 1955, Madison Avenue, New York] deal and collect voraciously, and have an entire wing of their home devoted to Iranian art and artifacts.* On this second visit, and all of his subsequent calls, Katz walks by the museum wing and straight to the backyard, where the house’s octogenarian patriarch, Benjamin, waits under a pomegranate tree. Next to him is a heap of broken pottery, one of many such mounds inside the walled yard.

From his chair Benjamin reaches into the pile of half vases, orphan handles, and chipped bowls, picks a sherd, and begins Katz’s tutorial. He raps an object against a convenient stone, cracking it into pieces. Another he nimbly snaps apart along a seam with weathered hands. He explains in casual Persian — translated by an attending son — the properties of the clay’s interior. The ware, the glaze, the firing, the clay’s thickness and composition are all explained in this now-visible cross-section. Pre-Islamic, Sialk, Susa, Nishapur, Rayy, Gunabad-I-Qabus, and Sultanabad; whiteware, pinkware, brownware and darkware. The pair examines sherds from cultures that span three thousand years. Later Katz determines that, in his two years of excavations and explorations, these clay-breaking tutorials are perhaps his best education.

*By the 1970s, the Rabenou’s collection will have 2500 objects, and be valued near $1 billion.

December 1956, Ankara, Turkey

Katz travels to Ankara, Turkey, where in 1920, Ataturk set up his provisional government, laying out wide, European-style boulevards and grandiose buildings, including eventually (d. 1938), his own dominating mausoleum.

Atop the city’s walled acropolis sits the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The museum’s Hittite* collection is unsurpassed. Katz notes he can see his breath inside the museum, and returns the next day in many sweaters. By the end of the first week, the guards are bringing the young researcher hot tea. After two weeks of noticing Katz’s daily presence in the otherwise deserted museum, the museum’s director invites Katz into the museum’s storerooms to look at the most recently unearthed material, works so recent that they have yet to be published.

Taxis are expensive, so upon leaving each night, Katz makes his way down the long hill on foot. There is only a smattering of electricity in public buildings across the city, and the streets quickly grow dark. The smoke of coal-burning stoves fills the air, carrying the ever-present scent of the sweet, bituminous fuel through the icy twilight.

*A note on Hittites: Despite playing a very important role in ancient history — they controlled the region for close to 1000 years and their power struggle with Egypt is well-documented in ancient texts, the culture was all but forgotten for three millennia. Archaeologists began to come across hints of the culture in the 19th century — a cuneiform tablet here, hieroglyphs there — but it was not until the 20th century did excavations of Hittite sites begin in earnest. By then, Turkish nationalism was growing, and Ataturk’s government decided to adopt the Hittites as the early Turkish culture, and protected it as such. The vast majority of the Hittite’s iconic stone men, squat with bulbous noses, are in Ankara.

October 1956, Istanbul, Turkey

Katz arrives in Istanbul on his 27th birthday. He is to reside at the Pera Palas Hotel, a decadent, dilapidated Victorian hotel in the city center.

Katz notes the bath’s claw-footed tub is big enough to do sidestrokes in. Between baths Katz visits the Ottoman Palace Topkapi Sarayi, the Byzantine St. Irene Church, the decadent Dolmabahce palace, the monastery Kariye Djami, the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn, and, time and again, the Hagia Sophia. Katz describes the cavernous, 6th century space:

I felt a visceral change the moment I walked in. Light streamed in from clerestory windows, casting rays on the bejeweled medallions of Arabic calligraphy that lined the walls. Between the twenty-foot medallions, semi-spherical tympanums sat atop hefty vertiginous columns, where they supported a dome that was, in my mind, more impressive than St. Peter’s or the Pantheon. Since Ataturk nationalized the 1500-year-old building in the 1930s, and made it a museum, the space had been cleared, save for a minbar (the pulpit from which the imam preaches), and its emptiness just amplified its magnificent scale.

Despite this wonderment, Katz finds himself unhappy and unfocused in the city. He starts counting the number of words he speaks on any given day, and realizes it rarely reaches more than fifty. He takes a bus trip to Konya, where he looks at Seljuk buildings and artifacts.* Their rugs are magnificent, but he is still lonely.

*The Seljuks had ruled over the Anatolian Plateau for 250 years, and were, in great part, responsible for bringing the Iranian styles of art and architecture to Central Anatolia.

September 1956, Jerusalem, Israel

With little action in Israel during the rainy season, Katz requests permission from the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) to travel to Turkey. Permission is granted, on the condition he “stay out of the New York Times.”

May 1956, potential site of Gath, Israel

A second season of archaeological excavation begins. Katz once again works at Yeivin’s site, this year digging at what the distinguished archaeologist suspects is the ancient city of Gath.* A huge effort is undertaken to excavate the tel. In the adjacent city of Gath, the state of Israel constructs a factory, a school, a hospital and housing for the thousands of immigrant archaeological workers (largely north African) and their families. Katz is assigned 40 men and the task of excavating the glacis, or man-made rampart, leading up to the acropolis. After several months, only one Philistine potsherd is unearthed, and it is concluded that Gath is not Gath, but a contemporary Jewish city named Mamshat.

*Gath is one of the five ancient cities of the Philistines. The four other cities of the Pentopolis — Ekron, Ashkelon, Gaza, and Ashdod have already been excavated.

December 1955, Cairo, Egypt

While living in Cairo, Katz explores the pyramids and socializes with the Rockefellers, but also makes regular visits to the city’s dumps. He writes:

“The children surrounded me almost immediately. I tried to keep from retching, but the stench was overwhelming. I coughed once, explained what I wanted, and pressed a coin into the outstretched palm of one of the local children. He scampered away, the other trailing, and I pulled my handkerchief up to my mouth, waiting for his return. Baking in the Cairo sun, the heaps putrefying around me, I started to get worried — would he return? But soon I caught view of the of boy’s triumphant little head, bouncing towards me.”

The boy, in this instance, hands Katz a battered doll. The ivory figure, about two inches tall, is Coptic, the 3rd or fourth century. Katz gives the boy another coin, and keeps the carved doll for a woman he knows.

September 1955, Jerusalem, Israel

Knowing that his ASOR fellowship is to be renewed for another year, Katz requests, and is granted, permission to travel during the archaeological off-season. He chooses Egypt — an archaeologically significant destination, but one that proves difficult to enter as a Jew who has spent time in Israel. However, while working on FLOB (see Summer 1953, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), he befriended Ahmed Fakhry Bey, one of Egypt’s top archaeologists. Fakhry, responsible for excavations at Giza, writes an official letter of invitation. On the way out of Jerusalem, Katz destroys all evidence of his time in Israel. He is already in Cairo and on his way to the police check-in when he finds a Hebrew dry cleaning bill in his pocket. He tears these last scraps of evidence into tiny pieces and throws them into the Nile.

Later in August, 1955, Negev, Israel

An airdrop falls with news — oil! Glueck decides the trail of ancient Israelis can wait, and the expedition turns determinedly off course — and toward Heletz, the first oil field found in modern Israel. The team is greeted by Teddy Kolleck*, Director General of the Prime Minister’s office, who passes around thimblefuls of the black liquid and leads them in a toast to the new field. On their way back to the Negev the expedition passes a steady stream of Israelis making the pilgrimage, each wanting a first bottle of Israeli oil.

*Kolleck would go on to become the longtime mayor of Jerusalem.

August 1955, the desert outside Be’er Sheva, Israel

Rather than digging in one spot, the expedition of eight travels constantly, scanning the surface of the barren landscape. They go slowly across the desert in two Uzi-protected Jeeps, in search of postherds that have withstood thirty-five centuries in the harsh desert climate. At times, they drive along the sunken, tamped down trails of the wadis, at other points they turn onto Bedouin trails, which trace the ancient Roman highway through the desert. Every so often, Katz spots a cracked, fallen milestone.

Katz learns how to read the blistered expanse of beige and black, and becomes adept at a 170-degree stare, his head constantly sweeping back and forth across the landscape. Encampments, fires, arranged stones — anything that is a variation in the monochromatic expanse merited a detour from the course. The team sleeps under the stars, wakes up to a desert fog, and bakes under the 120-degree heat of midday. The basalt in one of the Negev’s great depressions melts Katz’s shoes, and oftentimes they have to stop and make shade for themselves with a tarp hung between the two Jeeps, waiting for the late afternoon winds in order to continue. Airdrops punctuate their travels, planes dropping tins of sardines and gerry-cans of water.

August 1955, Be’er Sheva, Israel

Nelson Glueck,* summons Katz to Be’er Sheva, in southern Israel, to join his expedition. Katz has less than a day’s notice, but convinces a city taxicab to drive him from Jerusalem to the southern desert city. They travel along bumpy, back-country roads, through the battlegrounds of the 1948 War of Independence and into the dry, flat desert. The driver’s lunch box and loaded rifle remain on Katz’s lap for the duration. Katz arrives in time for a late dinner, and is greeted by an archaeologist that looks more like Lawrence of Arabia than an academic rabbi.

Glueck’s intention is to find traces of biblical civilization in the expansive desert that makes up the wedge-shaped southern half of the state of Israel, specifically, the trail of the Israelites from Egypt.†

*Dr. Glueck, a prominent rabbi and president of the Hebrew Union College in Ohio, whose dashing likeness would grace the cover of Time, is rumored to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones.

†Glueck’s other specialty is the Nabateans, powerful traders known for their eggshell thin pottery. However, that work was based in Petra, and Glueck’s research on the culture was swiftly curtailed when, in 1947, the UN partition made Transjordan and the famously rock-carved city off limits.

June 1955, Jerusalem and Caeserea, Israel

Katz arrives in Jerusalem and is posted at the Israeli Department of Antiquities*. After an orientation in Jerusalem, Katz is called to the coast and the ancient Roman port of Caesarea, where Shmuel Yeivin, the head of Israel’s Department of Antiquities is excavating a banana field near the shore. Katz observes the following of his first archaeological excavation:

As I neared the field, the first thing that struck me was the large number of workers on site. They looked like a crowd from afar, and up close, I realized there were hundreds of men standing in trenches, and from each trench, a line of stationary men stretched towards the site’s periphery. These men, waist-deep in their pits, were passing baskets of dirt from one to the next until the chain’s termination on the border of the clearing. Peppered amongst the workers were khaki-clad archaeologists. They were perched along the edges of the holes, eyes fixed on the ground. Every so often one would bark orders or scramble down into the pit, but otherwise, the excavation process chugged away without interruption. I watched them work for a minute, fascinated to see the mechanics of a real excavation.

Katz learns how to wear a Kaffiyeh and agal, and gets a deep bronze tan. Late in the summer, he unearths a Roman mosaic about ten miles inland.

*The ASOR building is on the other side of Jerusalem, and cannot be visited by a Jew. A Christian colleague takes the ASOR fellowship for East Jerusalem and Jordan.

May 1955, London, England

During a stopover in London Katz buys a khaki outfit at Lillywhites of London, assuming that will be standard issue for archaeologists in Israel. It is not, and Katz will keep the outfit in his drawer for the duration of his stay.

Spring, 1955, Madison Avenue, New York

After his catalog is prepared and the show’s installation complete [see Fall 1954, Sutton Place and AMNH, New York City], Katz becomes a scout for Alastair Bradley Martin. Martin introduces Katz to his favorite spots, explaining each is a destination for particular thing: Komor, at 71st, has small, refined Asian antiquities, walking across to Third Avenue and Julius Carlebach’s gallery, he finds tribal art. Rabenou is the source for pre-Islamic Persian art; on 68th the Brummer Gallery is the place to buy Egyptian or Classical objects. Blumka is down on 57th Street, as is Kevorkian’s gallery of Islamic work. Most of the dealers are émigrés from old-world Europe or the Middle East, and it is just as likely to hear German, French, Turkish, or Armenian in the gallery as it was to hear New-York inflected English.

After a few group outings, Martin dispatches Katz independently, with the expectation that Katz will keep abreast in developments of each man’s inventory. Katz writes,

“It was an enjoyable assignment: I’d make the loping rounds down Madison and across 57th, stopping by the half a dozen dealers I knew he preferred. When they saw me coming they’d roll out their very best objects, because I was Alastair’s ‘hawk eye.’ Alastair was a bold buyer and his collection was shaping up to be one of the superlatives in America, so they had better show me everything…I got much more attention and respect than the average twenty-five year old from Brooklyn. …The biggest thrill was that I could pick things up! Running my hands over the objects was exhilarating, and informative. Texture and weight, two elements wholly inaccessible through photography, began to play a role in my evaluations, as I thought of what Alastair would want…his taste struck a particular balance of spectacular and idiosyncratic.”

Martin acquired a few important pieces during Katz’s tenure.

Fall 1954, Sutton Place and the American Museum of Natural History, New York City

Katz is referred to Alastair Bradley Martin. Martin, heir with his twin brother to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, is the epitome of old money: he grew up in a Carrere and Hastings-designed, 40,000-square-foot mansion in Old Westbury, went to Princeton, and is champion of lawn tennis. But while his brother, Esmond, pursues the cultivation of orchids on Long Island, Alastair and his wife become significant patrons of the Brooklyn Museum.

Martin needs help assembling his catalog entries for the “Ancient Art in American Private Collections in the United States,” an exhibition to be displayed at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum in December 1954. Katz researches at Columbia and the Metropolitan’s libraries. Once a week he lunches at the staff table of the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History, who are also contributing to Martin’s catalog. Around the table are Junius Bird, a curator of South American anthropology, Gordon Ekholm, an expert on Mayan culture, the sex anthropologist Margaret Mead, Belle Weitzner, who has been at the Museum since 1907, and Harry Shapiro, the museum’s resident “bone man.”

Summer 1953, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Katz is hired by the Metropolitan Museum’s director of education to help oversee the coordination of the exhibition “From the Land of the Bible” (FLOB), presented by the American Friends of Israeli Institutions on the occasion of Israel’s fifth anniversary. The world’s top biblical archaeologists converge on Fifth Avenue and 82nd, as do the Dead Sea Scrolls, in their entirety.

Depending on one’s position, the exhibition is either a tour-de-force, celebrating a half million years of Israeli civilization, or a collection of brown pots. Zionists see the former — the objects in FLOB provide an archaeological record that confirms the events of the Old Testament, a document central to the Jewish claim to the land of Palestine — but many within the museum’s curatorial departments take the latter vantage, as antiquities from Israel are far less glamorous than the archaeological records of Greece, Iraq, and Egypt. To stave off boredom, Katz describes the droll prehistoric sections in rhyme:

There is nothing that I more abhor,
Than the reconstructed bones of a dinosaur.
It’s not that I’m terribly practical,
But I don’t even like the pterodactyl.
Pre-history just goes and goes,
And all that’s left are slow sloth toes.
Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal,
Never really lived at all.
And if they did, and had children by the million,
All that’s left are hand-axes Abevillion

Katz remains with the show as it travels to Baltimore and Washington. William Foxwell Albright, the father of biblical archaeology, is pleased with Katz’s work, and offers him a job as the Archaeological Fellow at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem for the fall of 1955 [see June 1955, Jerusalem and Caesarea, Israel]. In Washington Katz meets then-Vice President Nixon.

January 1953, Morningside Heights, New York

Studying under the tutelage of Meyer Schapiro, one of the world’s experts on manuscripts, Katz researches a cache of illuminated Yemenite Jewish manuscripts at the Jewish Theological Seminary.* His thesis, The Survival of Byzantine Ornaments in South Arabian Manuscripts, explores the color-coding in these thousand-year-old documents. Katz does not finish the graduation requirements for his Master’s Degree (German proficiency).

*The only comparable collection of the rare documents is in a library in Leningrad, Soviet Union.

Fall 1951, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Katz begins watching the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania television show “What in the World” on CBS. It stars museum director Froelich Rainey and a rotating cast of museum curators, archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, scholars, and celebrity collectors, who are tasked with identifying mysterious archaeological objects. The actor Vincent Price appears often, and sometimes even hits a charming, unexpected bull’s eye ID. Jacques Lipchitz is a regular panelist, and is always first to grab the object in his big, meaty, sculptor-hands. More than once, an enthusiastically-handled object almost topples off its pedestal.

Katz is enamored, and watches it regularly on weekend visits home. He finds it reassuring, “to see the same characters, [as his Columbia professors, see January 1953, Morningside Heights, New York] or ones just like them, shooting the breeze with the museum-director-cum-charming-host. It humanized the entire profession.”

1943-1947, Midwood High School, Brooklyn

With more attention on pool tables, girls, and paperbacks than on his grades, Katz graduates near the bottom of his class at Midwood High School. After a semester at Long Island University, Katz enrolls in the Columbia University’s School of General Studies. After trying acting, poetry, and sociology, Katz discovers the history of art and archaeology, and enters the Fine Arts Department, where he will finish his undergraduate degree and begin his graduate studies [see January 1953, Morningside Heights, New York].

Fall 1943, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn

Katz enters high school. After many years of being chaperoned by older brother Elihu, Katz is permitted to visit the Brooklyn Museum by himself. He frequents the Egyptian collection* after school and on weekends.

*The Egyptian collection of the Brooklyn Museum is one of the finest outside Egypt. At its core are the posthumous donations of Charles Edwin Wilbour, objects collected on Museum-sponsored excavations of southern Egypt (1906-8, findings include the famed “Bird Lady”), and long-term relationship with the Egypt Exploration Society. In such archaeological excavations as the EES’s, international teams take a portion of redundant objects—oftentimes one of the discovered pair—back to their home institution, and leave the remainder with the local overseeing body. This process is called partage.

Summer 1937, 22^nd Street, Brooklyn

Katz executes his first excavation, of his neighbor’s trash. Small-boy fistfuls of garbage are spread out on the sidewalk, analyzed for date of consumption, reason for disposal, and indications of character of consumer. Katz can ascertain, by the oozing bag of bones, that the neighbors had chicken in mushroom sauce for dinner on Thursday, and from the empty green bottles, he ascertains the father drank two beers in the previous week. His explorations are concluded at suppertime.

April 1936, Aquarium Store, Brooklyn

Katz, aged eight and one half, acquires his first object: a small, carved wooden African head. The object is on display in the storefront window of the aquarium store across the street from Katz’s barber in Midwood, Brooklyn. Katz purchases the piece with money dispatched by Katz’s mother for the purpose of a haircut. The proud owner of his first ethnographic piece must negotiate with his barber, who eventually agrees to a free trim.

October 22, 1929, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Karl Katz is born at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn. The New York Stock Market crashes one week later. In 1934, Katz starts his elementary schooling at the Yeshiva of Flatbush.

Emily Nemens, a writer and illustrator based in Louisiana, and Katz are working together on a memoir of his museum career. Quotes in this piece are from that book. For more visit nemens.com

Nostalgia

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:10:00 -0400

Returning to Where
We Have Never Been

Editors of the Moon

Nostalgia is one of the most obscure longings of the mind. It sends us paging through old journals and photo albums of our ancestors, on trips to worlds we “remember” as exotic from childhood stories, and into hazy day dreams of past embraces.

The sense most susceptible to nostalgia is smell. A whiff of some passing scent can release a long-trapped memory of a time and place, captured down to the textures of skin and colored light refracting through glass.

It seems like no coincidence that the first syllable “nos” is the Russian word for nose. A Latin interpretation connotes something that is “our.” It’s easy to imagine something that used to be ours, now covered in algae. Our noses and algae: these, however, are false friends. The real meaning of the “nos” in nostalgia derives from the Greek “nostos,” or a return home, while algia means “longing.”

The complexity of the word is accurate because we know it when we feel it, but we can never quite define it.

Newgate: The Prison in the Village By Alexandra Atiya Two early...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:10:00 -0400

Newgate:
The Prison in the Village

By Alexandra Atiya

Two early 19th-century guidebooks to New York City give a detailed picture of New York State’s first prison. Convicts made shoes, brushes, and whips on the four-acre site on the Hudson, and were also dispatched to work on New York’s roads and canals.

I live on the corner of Horatio Street and Greenwich Street, in a yellow-brick building on a cobblestone street lined with trees. The Spanish restaurant across the way from me — El Faro, or The Lighthouse — has been there since 1927, anticipating a wave of immigrants who would one day give the neighborhood the nickname Little Spain.

I live in the same apartment building that my mother lived in 30 years ago, so she’s given me a sense of how dramatically the place has changed in three decades.

Many of the external architectural structures of the Meatpacking district remain, but the nature of what’s inside them has changed. Designer clothing stores occupy the shells of industrial buildings. The High Line — once an abandoned railway — is now a popular and fashionable park, and the original tracks still run through the new design. The former Nabisco biscuit factory, now known as Chelsea Market, is home to the Food Network offices and a series of luxury food shops.

Still, despite the fast-paced nature of New York and its changing neighborhoods, it’s hard to imagine a prison on upper Greenwich Street. Wipe away the picturesque and trendy neighborhood, its small townhouses and tree-lined streets, and replace it with a four-acre prison in which convicts labor in open workshops and sleep in communal cells.

It seems impossible. But there once was a prison in my neighborhood, just south of my apartment. In fact, it was the first New York State prison, and the predecessor to Sing Sing, the maximum security prison now in operation. According to S.L. Mitchill’s 1807 guide book to New York City, “The Picture of New York, or the Traveller’s Guide through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States by a gentleman residing in this city,” a state penitentiary used to stand on Greenwich Street, “near the shore of the Hudson, in one of the most pleasant and healthy spots on Manhattan island.” It came to be known as Newgate.

Mitchill describes the prison as “a spacious, strong, and costly building” and he encourages readers to look up an 1801 account of the penitentiary based on the comments of Thomas Eddy, an early warden at the prison. I later learned (when reading From Newgate to Dannemora: The rise of the penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 by W. David Lewis) that Thomas Eddy was a reformer bent on changing criminal laws and methods of punishment in the US following the American Revolution. Together with others, Eddy founded Newgate in a time of post-Revolutionary rebellion against corporal and capital punishment, so guards were initially banned from beating or flogging any misbehaving inmates. E.M. Blunt’s “Stranger’s Guide to the City of New York”, published a decade later in 1817, gives a fuller picture of the prison on the Hudson.

Blunt describes it as an “extensive, convenient and strongly built structure of the Doric order,” a two-storey structure with a 23-foot wall facing the river. The grounds encompassed a chapel, a dining hall, and a kitchen garden to provide vegetables and medicinal herbs. At the center, he says, rose “a neat cupola, in which a bell is hung.” Blunt says the building had 54 rooms, each about 12 by 18 feet, in which eight prisoners could live together. Blunt’s guidebook describes the prison’s daily routine as follows:

On entrance, a prisoner is immediately stripped, washed, and cleaned, and then dressed in a new shirt, trowsers [sic], shoes and stockings. After a description of his person &c. is entered into the prison book, he is immediately put to work, and kept at hard labour agreeably to his sentence. In summer the rooms are unlocked at 6 o’clock in the morning; in winter at day-light, when the prisoners are called to work, at which they continue till 6 o’clock in the evening, allowing sufficient time for their meals, which are three every day. On the beat of a drum, at 9 o’clock in summer, and 8 o’clock in winter, they retire to bed. Everything is conducted with the greatest decorum and silence, and those who are remarked for good behaviour are allowed many indulgencies.

The daily tasks and hard labor performed by the prisoners included making shoes, brushes, and whips, carpentry, tailoring clothes, painting, and blacksmithing, according to Blunt. He adds that an 1816 law also enabled the city to use prisoners as labor for public works projects, including public avenues, roads and streets. Prisoners ate cocoa sweetened with molasses for breakfast, lunched on “soup made from coarse pieces of beef, shins &c, thickened with rice or beans” and typically ate mush and molasses or bread and molasses for dinner, with certain very industrious prisoners being allowed pints of beer, Blunt says.

Nearly 500 prisoners occupied the space by the end of 1814, two hundred and thirteen of whom had arrived that year. Blunt writes: “Of this number 156 were convicted of grand larceny; 26 forgery; 7 burglary; 6 assault and battery; 2 arson; 1 bigamy; 2 breaking prison; 1 sodomy; 1 felony; 3 highway robbery; 1 misdemeanor; 3 perjury; 3 rape; and 1 robbery.”Mitchill, in his 1807 guidebook, described the prisoners’ crimes — and their punishments — as follows:

By the law of New-York, treason, murder and the procuring, aiding and abetting any kind of murder, are the only crimes punishable by death. The mode of execution is hanging by the neck.Rape, sodomy, bestiality, burglary, house robbery, highway or other personal robbery, arson, forgery, knowing passing or uttering forged documents, counterfeiting gold and silver coin, aiding in the same, and knowingly uttering them for true, and malicious maiming, are punishable both principal and accessories, with imprisonment for life in the state prison; to which sentence may be added at the discretion of the court, the punishments of hard labour, or solitude, or both, as the justices shall decree. For second offences, the convicts are to be imprisoned for life…

This list was considerably shorter than the list of crimes punishable by death in the pre-Revolutionary period, thanks to a 1796 bill reforming criminal laws and enabling the construction of prisons such as the one in the Village. But Blunt, by 1817, has added a few more crimes to the list of offenses punishable by death: Arson of an inhabited dwelling home, and also arson of any part of the prison or its workshops.

In addition to being used as labor on public roads, convicts could be authorized to work on the state’s “great canals,” and so laws had been modified in 1816 to dissuade runaways: Fleeing the site of the canal’s construction could also get a prisoner a death sentence. Despite the hard labor — and the fact that the canal builders were apparently responsible for some expenses associated to using public prisoners as workers — Blunt says that the cost of the prison was a cause of concern. He estimates the costs of acquiring and constructing the grounds, building and wharf to be about $208,000, not including the large annual expenses of staffing the place. To defray costs, the prison agents were encouraged to keep a separate account for each prisoner, balancing the cost of his or her clothing and food against productiveness and rewarding those who performed well.

Blunt gives this economy a moral character, arguing that the account books will serve “To encourage habits of industry, which the legislature has justly remarked, ‘is the best preventative of vice’…”Ultimately, however, the reform-minded Village prison did not survive.

By 1830, the city government had decided to abandon Newgate, which had become costly, disorganized and overcrowded, and was seen as a failure in its attempt to deter crime without using physical punishments. Most prisoners were moved north to Ossining, site of the infamous Sing Sing, which had been completed in 1828.

More of Alexandra Atiya’s writing can be found at her website.

The Baedeker Project

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:10:00 -0400

Looking Backward to Reveal the Future

By Bradley Hope

Egyptian Museum, 2012 and 1914, courtesy of Mohamed Elshahed at Cairobserver

Almost a century ago, the space now known as “Tahrir Square” was “an interminable, ravelled and twisted string of men, women, and animals, of walkers, riders, and carts of every description”.

Today the Square at the centre of an uprising that toppled an autocrat of 30 years is a mere traffic roundabout. But a glimpse through the brown crinkled pages of my 1914 edition of Baedeker’s Egypt, one of the world’s first practical travel guides, uncovers a different world.

Today’s chaotic frenzy of an intersection was called Midan Ismaileh and it wasn’t a torrent of honking cars but “the cracking of the drivers’ whips, the jingling of money at the table of the changers established at every corner of the street, the rattling of the brazen vessels of the water carriers, the moaning of camels, braying of donkeys, and barking of dogs.”

The travel books were an immediate, must-have travel accessory when Karl Baedeker, a German bookseller who envisioned a more practical guide than the more common memoirs of his era, when he began publishing in 1827. The series eventually included 94 titles, covering 87 countries. The palm-sized books, covered in red cloth with gold lettering, are packed with maps and intricate illustrations of a time long ago.

It shows Egypt and Tahrir Square in a light that will never be seen again.

Today, in the Square, hanging from a street lamp is a corpse made of pillows. Young men with spiky hair and women in brightly colored headscarves wander about, smoking cigarettes. The burnt-out husk of the former regime’s National Democratic Party headquarters looms, covered in black scorch marks. Walls are covered in graffiti, including the grotesquely deformed caricatured-faces of military men.

I strain my eyes, looking for the Baedeker’s “wealthier ladies, who drive in their carriages attended by eunuchs … who veil their faces up to their eyes with thin white gauze after the fashion of Constantinople”. All I find are women with tight jeans talking on mobile phones tucked into headscarves and the occasional silhouette of a woman, clad from head to toe in black.

Ambling toward the Egyptian Museum, one building that has stayed the same in the past century, is what appears to be a Japanese tourist with his wife. Foolishly, they are not outfitted in the Baedeker’s recommendations of a breathable tweed suits, pith helmets or waterproof shooting-boots. Nor are they equipped with a drinking cup of leather or metal, a thermometer, a pocket-compass, a field glass, or a magnesium lamp “for lighting caverns and dark chambers”. I fear they may succumb to the elements.

Cairo, the “diamond stud on the handle of the fan of the delta”, has transformed into a dowdy metropolis.

The once bright facades of Ismailia in downtown, now known as “wust al balad” or the center of the country, are coated with so much dust that it is impossible to see the detailed workmanship.

For most travelers in the 21st century, a visit to Cairo is a stressful affair and mostly limited to a visit to the Khan al Khalili bazaar and the pyramids of Giza (both have changed little since the 1914 Baedeker) before heading for the Nile river cruises in Aswan and Luxor. The smoggy city is a far cry from the health resort of old times, where afflicted Europeans would come for the fresh, dry air.

But that is not to say Cairo is not an amazing and vibrant place to visit. While you may not find a “Rammal or soothsayer, squatting by the side of the road, [offering] to tell the fortune of the passer-by by consulting the sand”, you can find a thousand men, women and children marching toward the Ministry of Interior to demand justice for police brutality.

The ancient monuments of the Pharaohs remain, but even more exciting are the fluid and exciting developments in politics in the most populous country in the Arab World. The intellectual debates unfolding in Egypt about the coexistence of Islam and democracy are among the most important discussions in the Middle East to come since Baedeker’s Egypt was first published. From the huge street uprising last year that toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak, a new country is violently being recreated amid clouds of tear gas, demonstrations and the kind of desperate politics the world rarely sees. Forget the “shadow plays” in the corners of the souq: the truth of modern Egypt is stranger than fiction.

There is, however, no better way to see the world than to bring along a Baedeker and the older the edition, the better.

These dense tomes were needed for explorers who would not think of spending less than a month on what we now call a “vacation”, sometimes sending their grand piano ahead of them along with trunks of clothing before catching a steamer to the Mediterranean.

The books are, of course, at times racist, a reference to the colonial-era ideologies.

One section describing the educational method of Al Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic learning for a millenium, describes the task of memorising Islamic theological texts as lacking “independent thought”.

“Their [the scholars] minds are thus exclusively occupied with the lowest grade of intellectual work, their principal task consisting in the systematic arrangement or encyclopedic compilation of the knowledge handed down to them,” the guide says.

In the section, “Intercourse with Orientals. Dragomans”, the Baedeker explains that “The average oriental regards the European traveller as a Croesus [famously wealthy king of Iron-age kingdom of Lydia], therefore as fair game, and feels justified in pressing upon him with a perpetual demand for bakshish, which simply means ‘a gift’”. Bakshish is really a tip that most tourists often get harangued to pay, until they submit.

This cultural reference is completely accurate today for visitors to ancient sites and mosques. What no longer flies is the the guide’s suggestion for dismissing beggars and wily guides with “imshi (be off!) or uskut (be quiet!) in a quiet but decided and imperative tones.”

“[The traveller] should bear in mind that many of the natives with whom he comes in contact are mere children, whose demands should excite amusement rather than anger, and who often display a touching simplicity and kindliness of disposition,” it says.

These sections should be viewed now with a compare-and-contrast mentality, a perspective that will create a rich experience in using a Baedeker anywhere in the world. In just a few generations, this is how much the world has changed.

Baedekers contain hidden gems about well-covered sites and monuments that have not been written about since. Though nothing remains of the long-lost labyrinth of Fayoum an hour’s drive south of Cairo, it quotes the Greek philosopher and historian Strabo to paint a picture for travelers arriving at the site by donkey:

There is also the Labyrinth here, a work as important as the Pyramids… After advancing about 30-40 stadia beyond the first entrance of the canal we reach a table-shaped surface, on which rises a small town and a vast palace, consisting of as many royal dwellings as there were formerly nomes [administrative districts of ancient Egypt]… On emerging from the covered passages we have a view of them extending in one line, each borne by twenty-seven monolithic columns… At the end of this structure, which is more than a stadium in length, is the tomb, consisting of a square pyramid, each side of which is four plethora [400 feet] in length, and of equal height. The deceased who is buried here is called Imandes. It is asserted that so many palaces were built because it was the custom for all the nomes, represente by their magnates, with their priests and victims, to assemble here to offer sacrifice and gifts to the gods, and to deliberate on the most important concerns.

No modern guide I’ve seen explains the simple wooden panel in the oldest mosque of Cairo, Ibn Tulun, built “by a Christian prisoner, who, in return for his release, constructed the whole of the building of entirely new materials”.

The “frieze of sycamore wood, inscribed with texts from the Koran” is said to be made of wood that belonged to Noah’s Ark. Without the Baedeker’s minute descriptions, this detail would easily be overlooked.

Considering the historic, nation-changing events underway across North Africa and the Middle East, the absence of political discussion in Baedeker’s Egypt, as well as Baedeker’s Syria and Palestine, is one of the most striking things about the guides. Egypt was still occupied by the British in 1914, as was Palestine in 1912.

All the more reason to absorb these antique descriptions on a visit in the first quarter of the 2000s: what has been lost from the olden days has been replaced many times over with the achievements of the last century.

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