A blog about New York City, my books, and my cats. Mostly.
There are a lot of empty storefronts in my neighborhood, because the rents are too high to maintain a sustainable business. I keep hoping for the return of laundromats and delis and diners, but that will probably never happen. Unless a longterm depression hits.
But I loved all the loaves of Wonderbread in the window of this recently closed business.
Last night, while in the living room resting, I heard something fall in the bedroom. I wasn’t concerned, because the cats knock things over ALL THE TIME. It’s their favorite thing, knocking things off other things. But for some reason I thought I should check. Thank god I did. One of the panes in my windows was broken and they’d managed to pull in the piece of glass, which I found on the floor. They definitely could have squeezed through the hole that was left, and gotten outside the window. It’s one of their most cherished dreams. Outside that very window is a favorite pigeon hangout spot. The cats sit in this window all the time watching them.
Here is Bodhi sitting in the window with the piece of glass duct-taped back in (and nailed). Please scroll down to see the danger they faced.
There’s only the tiniest of ledges and it’s five flights down. Jesus. I’m losing it just thinking about it. What if I had walked in when they were halfway through?? It would have startled whoever it was and he would have freaked and jumped.
Buy Damnation Island from your favorite bookseller or from: Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Kobo, or Amazon.
“Horn creates a vivid and at times horrifying portrait of Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) in New York City’s East River during the late 19th century . . . Horn has created a bleak but worthwhile depiction of institutional failure, with relevance for persistent debates over the treatment of the mentally ill and incarcerated.” —Publishers Weekly.
“Stacy Horn’s history of Blackwell’s Island is a shocking tale, and an invaluable account that will reward anyone with an interest in the history of New York.” —Simon Baatz, New York Times bestselling author of For the Thrill of It and The Girl on the Velvet Swing.
“Blackwell’s Island’s descent into darkness is chronicled with clarity and conscience by master-story-teller Stacy Horn. No one who has taken that journey with her will return the same.” —Teresa Carpenter, Pulitzer Prize-winner and editor of New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009.
I was on a panel for Claire L. Evan’s new book Broad Band: The Untold History of the Women Who Made the Internet (I’m in the book!) sponsored by the New Museum and Rhizome (thank you!). Jaime Levy was also on the panel. From the website:
“Jaime Levy was an early Echo user—she posted as “Kurt’s Brains”—and a host, in her East Village loft, of the part-rave, part-hackathon “Cyber-Slacker” salon. She went on to become the creative director of Word.com, an influential early web publication that showcased the web’s creative capacities through interactive design: chatbots, games, and graphic hyper-text were fixtures of the site, which would influence a generation of online publishers.”
The panel from my point of view. It was a very nice turnout and I loved their feedback after the panel was over. It was mostly young women which was so great.
Here is the panel from the audience’s point of view. From left to right that’s Claire, me and Jaime.
Bodhi is fascinated by the bubbles that sometime appear in the humidifier. It’s cute, except every morning at 5:30am he starts batting at it, trying to tip it over (to get inside, I guess) and I am woken up by the bat, bat, bat sounds and also the noise of the tank rocking back and forth.
