Stacy Horn

Every time I go to the Municipal Archives I pass by the old clock on the former New York Sun building. It makes me sad, because I miss the time when newspapers ruled, and were fiercely competitive with each other, and how when I’d go to bars it always felt like they were filled with newspaper people getting drunk. And because I want this clock to work. Is there a reason why no one fixes it? Maybe I should go inside one day. Why oh why isn’t time travel real??

I once made an effort to find out everyone who ever lived in my building. It’s amazing what you can discover. For instance, I learned that my building was built in 1894 by Joseph Mandelbaum on farmland that was once owned by Abigail Hammond. From there I was able to find out the name of every landlord and of many of the tenants. It all started because several of my friends told me there was a ghost in my apartment. I thought I would try to find out everyone who had lived in my apartment, and who that person might have been, but then I got curious about everyone else who once lived in my building.

One of the things I did was try to find out the story behind the name plates on my floor. There are three apartments on my floor and beside each door is a very old name plate. They are decades old and do not reflect who lives inside. The names are: Crabtree, (at the far end of the hall) Hudson, (next door to me) and Conway (the name attached to my apartment).

Here is a picture of the name plate next to my apartment. It has since been painted over and I had to scratch the paint away to reveal the name. (More below.)

I tracked down a former neighbor who was now living in a nursing home (this was over 15 years ago), and she couldn’t tell me anything about Crabtree or Conway, but she did tell me a story about Hudson. The head of the family was a cop, she said, who’d been killed in the line of duty sometime in the 1950’s or 1960’s. When that happened his young wife took their child and fled and never came back. Someone continued to pay rent on the apartment but no one lived there and when I moved there in the early 1980s it remained empty for years. A while back I posted about going inside with the super and what we found.

Anyway, fast forward to this week when I realized the 1940 Federal Census was available now and maybe Crabtree, Hudson and Conway would be listed (they weren’t in the earlier census years). Crabtree wasn’t there, but Hudson and Conway were. Conway turned out to be Robert E. Conway, who worked at a bank, and his wife Minnie, who was a clerk for a jewelry company.

The Hudsons were Joseph and his wife Julia, and Joseph’s profession is listed as a patrolman for the NYPD! At least part of what I was told was true. Even better, an Ancestry.com user posted pictures of Joe and Julia (see below). It doesn’t say much about him in the Hudson Family Tree, except that he died before 1958, so it looks like the other part of the story might be true as well. And because his shield number is clearly readable in this photograph it should be possible to find out what happened to him. I hope it’s alright that I posted these pictures. If not I will take them down immediately. But thank you for your service, Joseph Hudson, and my sympathies to your family for their loss.

Crabtree is the only mystery left now. The 1950 census will be released on April 1, 2022, only seven years to wait! For the record, the census wasn’t the only place I checked, I looked through a ton of sources and archives, guided in part by a GREAT article written by Christopher Gray. Here’s an adapted and updated version of his original article. AND here’s a link to a ton of tips and resources put together by the New York Public Library. Thank you Christopher Gray and the New York Public Library.

It’s a fun and interesting search, I promise you. In my building I turned up a movie star, a Russian spy, a college professor who was a Holocaust survivor, and a few crimes! (Okay, they were minor crimes.) And now Joe and Julia Hudson.

I heard on the news last night that another prisoner in the van with Freddie Gray said that Freddie Gray was crashing around inside the van, intentionally trying to hurt himself. Very weird, but okay, maybe he was out of his mind due to mental health issues or drugs. We need the truth, whatever it turns out to be. But then I read this morning that the other prisoner didn’t actually see this happen, he was in another part of the van that was blocked by some sort of divider and he only heard the crashing. He had no way of knowing what was really happening.

Why then are journalists giving this any credence at all? Why are they treating this like breaking news? I should say tv journalists, I don’t yet know how the print journalists are treating this information. Also, a Baltimore Police captain announced that no report would be given tomorrow. Why is this piece of information suddenly available and no other? You often hear journalists bemoan the fact that people reporting via tweets and other sources are slowly replacing professional news sources. This is a serious problem, they say, because these people don’t have their professional standards when imparting information. Perhaps in an effort to compete they are relaxing their standards as well. Again, at this point I am only talking about some tv journalists, and sadly, CNN is among them. (I say sadly because years ago CNN was a serious news organization.)

I followed the Millions March last night for a little while. Apparently it got quite violent, with police throwing people to the ground, including a journalist from Gothamist, and so marchers split off into different groups. I followed the one that ended up in Times Square, except I left before they got there. This was the scene at Union Square where the protest began.

I’ve started re-reading When Wanderers Cease to Roam, by Vivian Swift and I’m even more blown away than I was the first time. I know Vivian personally, we’re represented by the same literary agency, but I’m not saying this because I know her!

This book is so charming, so moving, and so interesting it should be a best seller, and it does sell very well, thank you very much, but it should be on everyone’s bookshelf. It’s like wandering into an enchanting and secret garden (and she talks about secret gardens!) of heart and facts—of all the information there is in the world, she sprinkles the most perfect pieces of it throughout the book.

I was going to quote one of them, but you have to see it in context so I will only post a snippet:

“July is a lightning brew. Hot air currents, low pressures rising and falling, all those 100,000,000,000 electrons rubbing up against each other, the agitated particles striking the earth in bolts that kindle the molecules that lie on the surface of this planet. Everywhere you go you get the feeling that the ground you walk on is not at rest, and the sky above is not at ease …”

This is surrounded by stunning and always endearing water colors, thoughts about the month, and pieces of her life that anyone can identify with regardless of how different your life might be. It puts you in a dream-like state while at the same time making you feel so alive.

Read this book. You must. I really do very seriously insist. I swear to God you will thank me. You will give this book to all your friends as a gift. I was re-reading it because I needed to get to just the place where I knew it would take me, which reminds me, because of Vivian I want to explore tea. I want to sit in one of my favorite spots in the city with a cup of tea with drops of vanilla extract in it, just as she does in her village.

As far as which water color of hers to use for this post, I didn’t know where to begin so I chose this one. It’s touching. Who doesn’t understand the loss of a pet. Except, when you read the book you’ll learning that the little grave represents something even sweeter and more touching than that.

“There are no valid arguments against physician-assisted suicide when a patient is terminal and suffering. There are people who think killing yourself is simply wrong, but that’s not an argument, it’s a feeling, a stance …”

My friend Howard Mittelmark has written an essay about suicide titled The Right to Kill Yourself. He addresses every possible problem/objection and proposes a solution. Someone who read it made what I thought was a very important point about changing our attitude towards suicide: “the survivors would not be left as victims and possibly blamed for the persons death.”

It’s sad and it’s terrible when life comes to this decision, I have nothing to say to that, I wish life didn’t come to this for some people. And pardon me while I say a prayer to the universe for a long healthy and reasonably happy life. Which I’ve been so lucky to have so far.

I passed by two movie shoots yesterday on the way to the Municipal Archives. Not only do I get to do this amazingly fun thing for a living, but I have a good time on my way to doing it! I don’t know what this shoot was for, but the second one was for Law and Order, which is pretty much always shooting around the archives (all the courts are in that area, and the headquarters for the NYPD).