Author: Stacy Horn

I took these pictures years ago at the Hartsdale Canine Cemetery. It says canine, but they bury all pets. They’ve been burying them since 1896.  I went to look up something in the Times about it and saw that they’ve been writing about the cemetery for over a hundred years.  A selection of headlines and the beginning of the first paragraphs (I would have to go to the library to get the full articles). The last two are the saddest.

“PLATE IN POODLE’S SKULL. Miss Sheehan’s Pet, Caught In a Door, Has Its Head Trepanned. There was much joy in the household of Miss Ida Sheehan at 214 Park Place, Brooklyn, yesterday when the news came from the hospital that “Baby Boy” was doing well and would probably recover from the delicate operation performed upon him.” May 13, 1907.

“Where Dog Friends Rest Under Marble Stones; More Pets Have Been Buried in the Westchester Cemetery Since War Began Than in All the Previous Eighteen Years.” August 19, 1917.

“ANIMALS OFTEN MENTIONED IN WILLS OF LOVING OWNERS; Despite Nine Lives, Woodrow, the Cat, Did Not Live to Claim $300 Bequest — French Court Decides Dog Can Have $18,000 Monument. WOODROW, as the docket shows, left no heirs of record, and so the $300 that his mistress bequeathed him was divided not long ago among her relatives. Woodrow was a cat.” May 11, 1924.

“FINDS EMPTY BOX IN HER DOG’S GRAVE; Woman Disappointed When She Seeks to Have Body of Pet Disinterred. An empty grave in the Hartsdale Canine Cemetery at Hartsdale, N.Y., was found by Mrs. M.E. Green, 110 West Fiftfy-fifth Street, yesterday afternoon when she went to the cemetery to disinter her pet Boston Bull to rebury him in a larger plot. News of the discovery quickly spread to other plot owners who regularly visit the graves of their pets.” August 31, 1924.

“Toodles, Bellevue Cat, Is Buried.” January 25, 1929.

“Music Composed in Memory of a Pet Dog To Be Played on the Radio by Dr. Damrosch. Barney, a fox-terrier that died seven years ago, will enter the dog hall of fame this week with the playing of his “epitaph” over the radio.” February 7, 1939.

“Teddy, Pet of South Jamaica Neighborhood 18 Years, Gets Unusual Tribute. South Jamaica, Queens, buried a friend yesterday and 500 persons came to the funeral. They attended services for Teddy, a brown and white setter-collie, who had run and played in the neighborhood for eighteen years, since he was a pup. July 8, 1948.

“Woman to Get Her Final Wish: To Be Buried Next to Her Dogs.  Brigite Riffaterre will, as she requested, be buried with her pet dogs.” September 30, 1976.

“Where Animals Rest in Peace.  The trip had not been easy. As is his custom each Sunday, regardless of the weather, he had traveled by subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, by railroad train to the Hartsdale station and by taxi the rest of the way. He had taken his lunch with him, as usual, and, as usual, he had bought some fresh flowers on the way in. Now, as he sat there at the gravesite, he was content.” December 18, 1977.

“Man Seized in Wave of Killings and Robberies. A Staten Island man was charged today with murdering a 65-year-old homeowner in April …

Mr. Stevens’s prints were found on a Packard hood ornament that was used to bludgeon Daniel Ptacek, a 65-year-old groundskeeper at a pet cemetery in Hartsdale, whose body was found in the basement of his Hartsdale home on April 26.

Mr. Ptacek, a mildly retarded man, had remained in his parents’ house after their deaths and kept it virtually unchanged as a kind of memorial to them. He not only collected old-fashioned automobile ornaments, but also displayed a child’s menagerie of decorative objects like a plastic German shepherd and an Easter bunny. Neighbors on his secluded lane recalled that he often gave their children rides in his wheelbarrow, which he called his Cadillac.” June 21, 1996.

“Sirius, a Port Authority explosive-detector dog, was the only service dog to die in the World Trade Center attack, said a Port Authority officer, Pete Combariati of Yonkers. The yellow Labrador retriever was cremated at the cemetery …

Sirius’s remains were found beneath debris in the Port Authority basement kennel at the World Trade Center. The dog’s handler, Officer David Lim, had secured him there moments after the first plane hit, intending to help people evacuate. But his plan to return dissolved when he himself became trapped.” June 30, 2002.

I was scanning some pictures for my Huntington friends, and decided to scan a bunch of others while I was at it.  I’ll post them over the next couple of days.  

Recently I posted about going along with Aly Sujo to interviews to take pictures for him and how the photographs didn’t come out.  The pictures were too under-exposed to use. Here is the second time, when he was interviewing Panamanian singer, actor, politician Ruben Blades, who was also very good looking and charismatic.  He had a bit of a player-vibe to him, but I developed a crush nonetheless.

Some friends of mine are discussing how much they hate Facebook, meanwhile last night I met a couple of people I knew in high school at the Rubin Museum of Art (one of them works there).

So for me, yay Facebook!  Woohoo Facebook! I had fun.  Plus, that thing on inauguration day, the way cnn.com had the Facebook status reports running alongside their streaming video was perfection, and one of the things I always imagined the internet could be.  

I have always loved what I called the MSTK3 aspect of the internet, although that is a dated reference.  But I love how on the internet we can all group-critique the world, life, news, etc.  And that Facebook set-up was a perfect use of this very thing. Perfect.  I hope they and others continue to do things like that.

Anyway, I had great fun Eline and Mark, I loved seeing you both.  And the exhibits at the museum were fabulous.  I tried to find a picture of my favorite piece (the Loving Kindness 3rd/4th century piece, which was Eline’s favorite, and she might have influenced me!) but I couldn’t grab the picture from the website.

A friend sent me a link to an AM Law Daily interview  of a lawyer who was on Flight 1549, the plane that landed on the Hudson.

It goes into more detail about what it was like inside, and man oh man. Scarier than I thought, and I already thought it was scary.  It kills me how he got right back on another plane.  And he was so no-nonsense about it.

Some people are so resilient.

This is a picture of the B-25 bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building on the morning of July 28, 1945.  They got lost in the fog apparently, and went lower to where it was clear and this is the result. 14 people died. The description I read here sounds so 9/11 and so sad. The part about Joe Fountain:

“The plane exploded within the building. There were five or six seconds—I was tottering on my feet trying to keep my balance—and three-quarters of the office was instantaneously consumed in this sheet of flame. One man was standing inside the flame. I could see him. It was a co-worker, Joe Fountain. His whole body was on fire. I kept calling to him, ‘Come on, Joe; come on, Joe.’ He walked out of it.”

But died several days later.

Oh wow.  I’m reading one of the forums on the Empire State Building website and picking up some fascinating tidbits like:

“My mother worked for the University of California at the time of the plane crash. They were on the 67th floor (I think) and under tight security as this was an R & D office for the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb). They thought they were personally under attack because of their work and were rushed out, with everyone else, by what was then the Secret Service. Everyone working in the offices had top secret clearance. She saw parts of the plane drop from above into a flower shop down below. According to what she heard at the time the plane was NOT off course but simply on a joy ride to tour manhattan when they got lost in the fog.”

There are more posts from relatives of people who were there, including relatives of Joe Fountain.

God I love the internet.

As I say in the description on YouTube, I sound exactly like Chad/cwdressen talking to Ramsey and Pablo. (I apologize to Jim Tucker. That’s your book Buddy was eating.)