• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

Well, the Great Transit Strike of 2005 is over with the Transport Workers Union having succeeding in winning for themselves the enmity of the entire city. The Trinidadian Roger Toussaint was elected head of the TWU on a radical platform and radical is what they got. And boy did it blow up in their faces! Listening to the radio the other day I heard stories of decent hard-working people who were waking up at 3:30 in the morning so that they could walk to their jobs and get there on time. Others were sleeping in impromptu locations at their place of employ. All this hassle just because Roger Toussaint wanted his pampered transit workers to retire at 55. Well boo hoo!

One Knickerbocker said: “Roger Toussaint gave up a life of hard work picking sugar cane down in the islands to come up to New York and pick the pockets of decent, hard-working Americans instead!” Well at least it’s all over now, so I can finally catch the Prague exhibit at the Met (oh and the Fra Angelico). I still curse myself for missing the Byzantium exhibit they held; I turned up a day late so I and the young lady who accompanied me assuaged our ire at J.G. Melon’s.

Whilst perusing the British corner of the Hudson Newsstand in Grand Central, waiting for a train home last Sunday after hearing Mass at St Agnes and then attending the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Thomas, I chanced upon a copy of This England, a splendid and reactionary quarterly from that green and pleasant land. It was something of a rediscovery as I have somewhere two copies of This England from 1983 and I am happy to report that the magazine has changed very little. It is a wonderful collection of little articles, stories, anecdotes, and charivari about the Mother Country and doesn’t give the slightest hoot for political correctness. A cozy and comfortable quarterly which I believe any traditionalist from the English-speaking world will enjoy. Irritatingly they did not have the Christmas double edition of the beloved Spectator, so I fear I must do without it this year. (And there was much gnashing of teeth…).

The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was superlative as always. It was interesting to note that in the program/weekly bulletin the word ‘Episcopal’ was nowhere to be found, nor any indication that St. Thomas is a parish of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and likewise the Episcopal Church of the United States of America except a very brief statement mentioning that the parish is “in the Anglican tradition”. A parish in denial? Perhaps, but if you were in their situation would you want to face facts? Ignorance is bliss, and it was a blissful service after all. Much enjoyed. My only complaint was that I thought the choir could’ve put a little more oomph in the final verses of Once in Royal David’s City and O Come All Ye Faithful, perhaps with a little help from the organ, but oh well, I’m no choirmaster, deo gratias.

Almost everyone in our little arrondissement of the web has been chiming in with their thoughts on the recent Chronicles of Narnia film, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I have little to contribute other than to say I found it an enjoyable film which I warmly encourage others to see. We found Father Christmas’s lack of headgear disappointing. A mitre would’ve been most appropriate, but his head was bare; perhaps Saint Nicholas should look to the much-vaunted final word in matters sartorial currently sitting on the throne of Peter.

Speaking of matters sartorial, a kerfuffle recently erupted in Missouri when some Communist enemy of all that good and holy banned a kilted student from a high school dance on the grounds that he was not properly attired. If I can trust my profound study of Scottish history (which consists mostly of the first few minutes of that 1959 biopic of John Paul Johns in which Robert Stack plays the title role) then we recall that the boorish Hanoverians banned the kilt for reasons I have forgotten. (I haven’t seen the film in years, and Robert Stack is dead, r.i.p.). I am certain that my readers and I are united in scorn.

I called up the folks at the New Criterion yesterday and Cricket Farnsworth, that hilarious and ever-charming daughter of Connecticut, answered the phone. I asked if there were any commuting woes and Cricket, the token liberal on the staff, just said “Well of course everyone here thinks the union leaders should all be shot.” “Then all is as it should be, Cricket,” I replied, “all is well in the world.” Happily, they have put one of the Jacksons’ Roger Kimball gingerbread men (or ‘Kimballbreadmen’ as they are calling them) to the side for me to consume when I pop down and visit next week. All is well indeed.

When New York magazine speculated on the prospects of an independent New York they postulated Woody Allen gracing a “1 York” note with Rudolph Guliani on the “20 York” note. In Caledonia they’re used to dealing with many different varieties of banknotes. In Scotland alone there are three different institutions authorised ot print currency: the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland, and the Clydesdale Bank. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, has four: the Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank, Northern Bank, and First Trust Bank. England and Wales, on the other hand, have but the Bank of England to issue legal tender, that institution having been granted a monopoly so to do in 1921. [More on British banknotes]

Nonetheless, this got me to thinking who and what I would put on New York bank notes if we had them. First of all, none of this “York” business; dollars they are and dollars they would remain in my land of fancy. Anyhow, here’s what I generally came up with: (more…)

A while ago, we reported on the planned expansion of St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, the only Armenian seminary outside Armenia over in New Rochelle. Unfortunately, the seminary’s uppity neighbors got their proverbial knickers in a twist over the expansion and have pressured the City Council to deny planning permission (something that sounds very familiar to any Thorntonian; I guess the City of New Rochelle just doesn’t want outstanding educational institutions). Because of this the Board of St. Nersess met and decided it had to move elsewhere, so anyone who has a cool $15,000,000.00 to spare: it’s yours!

The house, on Stratton Road near Iona Prep, was built in the 1920’s by none other than William Randolph Hearst. He never lived there though, but just had it on hand for friends of his who were visiting New York and needed a place to stay. The building, to my recollection, is in fairly good condition, but the 8.65 acres it sits on seems rather small when you’re actually there.

Back in school we had some random day off that no other school had (Founder’s Day, I believe) and so Lucas de Soto and I, ever the adventurers, decided to pop over to the Armenian seminary to see what it was all about. (A Presbyeterian and a Catholic walk into an Armenian Seminary… sounds like the set-up for a bad joke). We turned up unannounced and everyone there was terrifically friendly. The secretary offered us cake, showed us around a bit and then introduced us to “the greatest expert on Armenian history ever” who was leaving for Philadelphia in under half an hour but would no doubt take a few minutes to answer any of our questions (unfortunately I’ve forgotten his name). He too was very friendly indeed and answered all our questions and told us about Armenia, the Church, the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, and about the Divine Liturgy and how it differs from the Mass. We also got to chat with a few of the seminarians who were mulling about the kitchen. The historian even offered to teach us the Armenian language for free, and I was tempted to take them up on it. Lucas and I found it quite fascinating; well worth a day off from school.

New York University is a very odd fish. It was founded (as the University of the City of New York) in the 1830’s as an academic refuge for the city’s Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians opposed to the very Episcopalian flavor of Columbia College, though it was never officially aligned to either denomination. Around the turn of the century when Columbia moved uptown to a brand spanking new beaux-arts campus NYU decided to follow suit by moving even further uptown and building their own classically-inspired campus. They kept their buildings in Greenwich Village, however, and by the 1970’s found the Bronx campus (University Heights) to be a burden on the old chequebook and sold it to the City.

In the meantime, NYU was known (and pretty much had been since it was founded) as a “commuter school”, which is to say that most (though not all) of its students were from around the metropolitan area who travelled from home to school and back again. This has completely changed in the 1980’s, as graduates who had done well for themselves (and other philanthropists) began donating large sums to NYU and it remade itself in the image of the normal residential university (again, like Columbia). Of course, having forsaken their proper campus they were stuck with a number of buildings around Greenwich Village and so pretty much began to buy up any building of any size that came onto the market in the neighborhood. [A commenter on Curbed.com says that NYU is probably the largest landowner in the City after Trinity Church. The largest landowner is actually the (Catholic) Archdiocese of New York, followed by Columbia University (which happens to own Rockefeller Center, among other things). After that, I’m not sure but NYU probably has more land, while I would think Trinity Chuch probably has higher returns for the particular land they own.] NYU is now an almost entirely residential university in that even if its students are not living in dorms they are almost certainly not living with their parents nearby. Indeed, the proportion of native New Yorkers has fallen while those from other states and countries has risen markedly.

I’ve had a fair amount of experience with NYU. According to facebook.com I have seven friends there, though one spent his freshman year there and wisely thought “This place is for suckers” and transferred to Georgetown, while another friend (now graduated) never bothered to join the Facebook. Anyhow, in my final year of high school I had a good friend who was a year older than me (a Holy Child girl, troublemakers all) who went to NYU. Most weeks I would head down one afternoon after school (always Mondays actually; I’m a creature of habit and it suited her schedule) and have dinner and, to use the parlance of our times, “hang out” and “chill” until heading back up to yonder Westchester around 9 o’clock. As you can imagine, one met a fair number of NYUers during such perambulations and I have to say, though the young lady in question did have a pretty roommate from Connecticut (a ‘Darienfrau’ as Igby Slocum would say, though she was actually from Guildford), I not even once met a single person with whom I might want to voluntarily spend any of my time. They were, to a man, boring, self-obsessed nitwits, completey devoid of anything interesting. Though (I’m told) a number of Columbians were irate at me for having described their academy as “a fallen institution”, fallen though it is Columbia is still better than NYU. I have not nearly spent the same amount of time at Columbia as I have down at NYU and yet I’ve met interesting people from there. Also, my mother works at Columbia and though she likes to tell many hilarious stories of the freaks she has met amongst the studentry, she also tells of a number of very kind, nice, and interesting students she has had the occasion to meet. I very much doubt this would be the case if she was working at NYU. The most interesting people at NYU are actually the security guards who, although they all take their jobs terribly seriously (and rightly so), are usually much better for some decent chat than the students. Of course, Fordham students are superb and beat NYUers and Columbians any day of the week.

But who, then, are the other NYUers whom I count amongst my friends? They still manage to be interesting folks. Strangely enough none of the eight Violets I know are friends with one another. In addition to the Holy Child girl and the wise Georgetown transfer, there is 3) a fellow Thorntonian (guy), 4) a Bronxvillian guy, 5) a hilarious girl from Larchmont whom I’m good friends with, 6) and 7) two girls, both Californian, I know from the summer I spent at Oxford, and 8) a girl who is a member of my Upper East Side circle of friends. The reader will note the preponderance of females. NYU is very much a feminine university these days; I mean, heck, their athletic nickname is the Violets after all, not the Fighting Irish. Of the guys I know, one’s only their because he’s exceptionally talented in the realm of film, another knew well enough to transfer away from NYU, and the third is a fellow Thorntonian (Thorntonians are known for either surviving in adverse situations or cracking up and going loony, so that accounts for his survival to date). Every NYU girl complains about the lack of available men since NYU predictably attracts a large number of men of… err… “alternative lifestyle options”. Naturally this creates a situation, like the Anglican priesthood, where being a male at NYU one might automatically be tarred with suspicions of being “of an alternative lifestyle” and thus a very large proportion of self-respecting young men are deterred from even applying.

But back to Curbed. So NYU is building yet another dorm and many are complaining about their precious neighborhood being turned into the quarter for spoiled students. Ah well. I’m not terribly troubled. Greenwich Village to me is part of Manhattan’s vast underbelly, a term I use only half abusingly. It’s just that most places below Gramercy Park seem either too crowded or too weird for me to live. It’s not that the underbelly is ugly, there are some beautiful buildings and some quite charming parts. But as the Brits say about France, “lovely place, shame about the people”. And you know, if you go for the SoHo/Chelsea/Village scene, then fair enough. Enjoy it all you like. I’m just an Upper East Side kinda guy myself.

Much was made over the recent start of the hunt season here in the United Kingdom in spite of Comrade Blair’s ban, but New Yorkers mount their horses a little earlier. Above, a few members of the Windy Hollow Hunt in front of Old Glory.

The Rombout Hunt, in the Hudson Valley.

This little fellow from Long Island’s Smithtown Hunt wants out so he can hunt down that dagnabbed fox!

The Smithtown Hunt in the field.

Of course not all things stay the same. This year Orange County’s Windy Hollow Hunt got a lady to perform the annual Blessing of the Hounds.

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons has to do with the Blessing of the Hounds. I can’t find it online, so I’ll wait until I’m home and then scan in it for your enjoyment.

Below, the Genesee Valley Hunt.

I’ve never heard of nor seen this house before. Unfortunately NYPL titles it merely as “A Westchester County Country House”. Not very helpful. I wonder if it’s still around. I rather like it. It has a nice simple, warm, cozy feel to it.

Ardolph Loges Kline, one of my grandfather’s predecessors as Commander of the Old Guard of the City of New York, on the 89th Anniversary of the Old Guard, April 22, 1915. Kline was the acting Mayor of New York who started the annual tradition of lighting the Christmas Tree in City Hall Park (or ‘holiday tree’ as it is now officially called). This ceremony has since been eclipsed in popularity by the Rockefeller Center tree lighting, but still takes place every year.

Here we have C.H. Heustis on his 85th birthday in 1922. Heustis served in General Burnside’s brigade during the Civil War, later becoming a broker on Wall Street. He never missed a single meeting or parade of the Old Guard once he joined.

From the Bettmann archive.

Search