I and the public know /
What all schoolchildren learn, /
Those to whom evil is done /
Do evil in return.
-W.H. Auden, poet (21 Feb 1907-1973)
Under the Third Avenue El, New York, Photo by Rebecca Lepkoff, 1947
Rebecca Lepkoff (born Rebecca Brody; August 4, 1916 – August 17,
2014) was n photographer. She is best known for her images depicting daily life
in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City in the 1940s. Fascinated
by the area where she lived, she first photographed Essex and Hester Street
which, she recalls, "were full of pushcarts." They no longer exist
today but then "everyone was outside: the mothers with their baby
carriages, and the men just hanging out." Her photographs captured people
in the streets, especially children, as well as the buildings and the signs on
store fronts Lepkoff died Sunday, August 17, 2014, at her home in Townshend,
Vermont. Two weeks prior to her death, she had turned 98.
Babylon Revisited: When the money runs out. By Azra Raza
One of the finest short stories in the English language, 'Babylon Revisited’, written by F Scott Fitzgerald after the Great Crash, is an intensely personal portrait of a man who has squandered his life. It’s also a perfect tale for the times we live in .
One of the finest short stories in the English language, 'Babylon
Revisited’, written by F Scott Fitzgerald after the Great Crash, is an
intensely personal portrait of a man who has squandered his life. It’s also a
perfect tale for the times we live in .
Today, Francis Scott Key
Fitzgerald may be one of America’s most celebrated novelists, but during his
lifetime, he was best known as a writer of short stories. At the end of the
Twenties, he was the highest-paid writer in America earning fees of $4,000 per
story (about $50,000 today) and published in mainstream magazines such as The
Saturday Evening Post. Over 20 years, he wrote almost 200 stories in addition
to his four novels, publishing 164 of them in magazines.
When Ernest Hemingway first met Fitzgerald, in Paris in 1925, it
was within weeks of the publication of The Great Gatsby; Hemingway later wrote
that before reading Gatsby, he thought that Fitzgerald “wrote Saturday Evening
Post stories that had been readable three years before, but I never thought of
him as a serious writer”.
Gatsby would change all that, of course, so thoroughly that now we
may be in danger of forgetting Fitzgerald’s stories. The haste in which he
wrote them, in order to pay for the luxurious lifestyle he enjoyed with his
wife, Zelda, means that the stories are uneven in quality, but at their best
they are among the finest stories in English. And “Babylon Revisited”, a
Saturday Evening Post story first published exactly 80 years ago next month –
and free inside next Saturday’s edition of the Telegraph – is probably the
greatest. A tale of boom and bust, about the debts one has to pay when the
party comes to an end, it is a story with particular relevance for the way we
live now.
Fitzgerald’s fortunes uncannily mirrored the fortunes of the
nation he wrote about: his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a runaway
bestseller in early 1921, just as America entered the boom period that
Fitzgerald himself would name the Jazz Age. He and Zelda became celebrities and
began living the high life. They were the golden couple of the Twenties,
“beautiful and damned”, as the prophetic title of Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel
suggested, treated like royalty in America’s burgeoning celebrity culture.
Glamorous, reckless and profligate, the Fitzgerald’s were spendthrift in every
sense. Much later, Fitzgerald would have to take account of all they had
squandered – not only wealth, but beauty, youth, health, and even his genius.
In early 1924, the Fitzgerald’s sailed from New York with their
three-year-old daughter, Scottie, for Europe, where they joined the growing
crowd of American expatriates enjoying the comparatively cheap cost of living
in post First World War Paris and the Riviera. There they became friends with
Hemingway, as well as with other writers and artists of the day. Fitzgerald’s
biographers record that while in Paris, Fitzgerald’s routine was to rise at
11am, and begin work at 5pm. He claimed to write most days until 3am, but the
reality was that usually he and Zelda could be found among the cabarets and
clubs of Montmartre and the Left Bank, where they drank, danced, flirted and
fought into the small hours
When the Great Crash came at the end of 1929, the Fitzgerald’s
crashed also, just as they had roared along with the Roaring Twenties. In April
1930, Zelda had a nervous breakdown and was eventually diagnosed with
schizophrenia; she would spend the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric
hospitals.
And in the early Thirties, as America sank into Depression,
Fitzgerald found himself battling depression. His alcoholism was spiraling out
of control, his stories were now abruptly out of key with the mood of the
nation, and he found it increasingly difficult to earn enough to pay for
Zelda’s medical care and their daughter’s education.
Written in December 1930, just eight months after Zelda’s
breakdown, the elegiac “Babylon Revisited” is Fitzgerald’s exquisitely painful
meditation on what he had wasted, his recognition that the cost of living it
large is not just financial but emotional, psychological and spiritual – and that
one can’t live in arrears forever.
That Christmas, Fitzgerald brought Scottie to visit her mother in
a Swiss sanatorium, but Zelda’s erratic behavior frightened the nine-year-old
girl; Scott took his daughter skiing for the rest of her school holiday.
“Babylon Revisited”, written just as Fitzgerald faced the prospect
that Zelda might be lost to him for good, and in fear for his ability to care
for his daughter, is itself a kind of reckoning of the price one has to pay.
Financial debts, paying the price for past extravagance, becomes a metaphor for
moral debts, the loss of one’s sense of character or one’s personal credit with
the world.
The tale of a man who has lost everything but is fighting to
redeem himself, “Babylon Revisited” concerns Charlie Wales, an American
expatriate who lives a profligate life in Paris during the Twenties. One night
during a bacchanalian spree, he quarrels with his wife, Helen, and she
retaliates by kissing another man. Charlie storms home alone and Helen arrives
home an hour later, too drunk and disoriented to find a taxi. She dies soon
after; Charlie has a breakdown and is institutionalized before losing all his
money in the crash.
Their daughter, Honoria, goes to live with Helen’s sister Marion.
As the story opens three years later, Charlie has returned to Paris sober,
financially successful again and determined to pull his life together. He has
come to reclaim his symbolically named daughter: if honor is restored to him
perhaps he can salvage something from the wreckage of his life.
“Babylon Revisited” clearly chimes with Fitzgerald’s own life in
late 1930: the extravagant dissipation of life in Paris during the boom years;
the wife lost to illness; a fortune frittered away in the confidence that “even
when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money,” as Fitzgerald later wrote
about the rampant spending in the Twenties, “because it was in such profusion
around you.” And it is a story about a father’s recognition that, especially in
the absence of her mother, his daughter needs him to face up to his
responsibilities.
Fitzgerald carefully patterns the story so that it comes full
circle, and Charlie ends where he began, in the Paris Ritz Bar. The setting is
emblematically appropriate, suggesting Charlie’s twin crimes: his careless
squandering of wealth and his drinking. But beginning and ending in the same
location also hints at one of the story’s deeper themes: Charlie will end up
where he began, borne back ceaselessly into the past, as Fitzgerald wrote at
the end of The Great Gatsby. For Charlie Wales revisiting Babylon does not
bring closure; coming full circle merely creates a spiraling sense of loss.
Throughout “Babylon Revisited”, Fitzgerald uses economic metaphors
to underscore the idea that debts must be paid. The story reverberates with
uncanny echoes – or rather, anticipations – of our own era, the way in which we
trusted that living on credit could last forever. What Fitzgerald shows us is
the effects that this mistake has not only on our economy, but on our characters:
that money is the least of what we have to lose.
The poignancy of the story derives from its sense of injustice: a
recovering alcoholic is trying to prove that he’s reformed and if we feel from
the outset of the story a sense of impending doom, we might predict that
Charlie will fall off the wagon. But Fitzgerald twists the knife by making
Charlie’s reformation authentic: he has accepted his responsibilities by coming
back to face the past, own up to his mistakes and remedy them by repairing what’s
left of his family. But that may not be enough.
At one point during his stay in Paris, Charlie revisits his old
haunts on the Left Bank and understands at last: “I spoiled this city for
myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and
then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” He has got
himself back but the question the story poses is whether everything is gone for
good.
Wandering through Montmartre, Charlie suddenly realizes the extent
of his wastefulness in what is perhaps the most superb passage in this tale:
“All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he
suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate’ – to dissipate into thin
air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every
move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for
the privilege of slower and slower motion. He remembered thousand-franc notes
given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed
to a doorman for calling a cab. But it hadn’t been given for nothing. It had
been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that
he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he
would always remember – his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a
grave in Vermont.”
The idea of “dissipation” as an active loss is perhaps the story’s
central insight, and it is one to which Fitzgerald would return again and again
in his fiction of the Thirties. The passage evokes the sense of vanished and
wasted time, the remorse that characterizes the morning after the night before,
the sense of everything being spent.
“Babylon Revisited” is at once timeless and startlingly modern in
its evocation of a single father struggling with alcoholism and trying to care
for his daughter and coming to terms with the costs of extravagance. Part of
the tale’s poignancy is Fitzgerald’s recognition that the tragedy is not just
Charlie’s: it is also his daughter’s. When Charlie comes to ask Marion to
return Honoria to him, he realizes Marion is bitter, particularly because of
Charlie’s easy acquisition of wealth.
Marion says she is “delighted” that Americans have deserted Paris
following the crash: “Now at least you can go into a store without their
assuming you’re a millionaire.” Charlie’s response is revealing: “But it was
nice while it lasted… We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort
of magic around us.” Only it didn’t last long: they wasted their “sort of
magic” in search of a life that could never be as magnificent as their hopes,
just as surely as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did.
Nine years after the publication of “Babylon Revisited”, less than
a year before he would die at 44, Fitzgerald wrote his daughter Scottie a
letter about the story: “You have earned some money for me this week because I
sold 'Babylon Revisited,’ in which you are a character, to the pictures (the
sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story – neither of you nor of me
– however, I am accepting it).”
Like Charlie, Fitzgerald learnt
the hard way that loss is remorseless, absolute; what has been wasted is
irrecoverable. But as “Babylon Revisited” also shows, even out of the wreckage
some things can be salvaged, if not everything: what Fitzgerald retrieved he
bequeathed to us, the hard-won lessons of his life transformed into
heartbreaking art.
Dina Vierny
Dina Vierny was a muse to French sculptor Aristide Maillol and model for painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. Vierny, who began modeling for Maillol at age 15, was his greatest fan and a leading force in making his acclaimed figurative bronzes available to the public.
(From The Guardian)
When an artist refers to his
model as his muse, it is usually his way of dignifying their joint extramural
activities. But in the case of Aristide Maillol's model Dina Vierny, who has
died aged 89, she genuinely was his muse, not his mistress. She met him in
1934, when she was 15 and he was 73, and inspired a fresh direction in his
sculpture - most evident in The River, one cast of which is on display in the
Tuileries gardens in Paris, while another sprawls on the ledge of a pond in the
garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Her death breaks the living link
through Maillol with the Nabis, a short-lived group of 19th-century artists
inspired by Gauguin's Tahiti paintings that included Pierre Bonnard and Édouard
Vuillard as well as Maillol.
She was, besides, a remarkable
woman in her own right. Her attributes were perhaps best caught by Françoise
Gilot, not yet Picasso's partner, who met Vierny at Picasso's Paris studio in
1945. Maillol had died the previous year in a car accident, and yet Vierny had
blossomed. "Her bearing was regal," said Gilot. "More than a
muse, she was a priestess of art." As for Picasso, Gilot wrotes in
amusement: "He was deferential and attentive... as if beguiled by her
charm and mastery. If he had not been afraid of being pursued by Maillol's
ghost [Picasso was notably superstitious], he might have expressed his
admiration more openly." And Gilot said of herself: "I would have
loved to befriend Dina, but her triumphant femininity made me shy."
All of this goes some way to
explaining how this young, untutored immigrant model for a sculptor of nothing
but female nudes was able to tackle the legendary André Malraux, by 1965 De
Gaulle's minister of culture, and persuade him to take a gift of 18 of
Maillol's sculptures and put them on permanent display in the Tuileries - thus
fulfilling, in her role as an executor of Maillol's will, the sculptor's dying
wish.
Vierny was born in Chisinau, the
capital of Bessarabia (now Moldova). Her father knew Trotsky, but made no
attempt to hide his own social-democratic inclinations, and by 1925 it became
apparent that the new Russian hegemony was not good for their health. They fled
from Odessa in Ukraine and fetched up in Paris without a rouble in their
pockets. However, they survived, and Dina, a dutiful student, seemed destined
for a conventional career until Jean-Claude Dondel - later one of the four
architects of the Palais de Tokyo - met her and wrote to his friend Maillol,
saying that she was a walking Maillol sculpture. He persuaded her to visit
Maillol's Paris studio.
There was a double irony.
Firstly, Maillol's ideal was not a Jew from the Soviet Union, but the typical
peasant girl of Banyuls, his Catalan home town close to the border with Spain.
Secondly, the sculptor felt no need to acquire a model. In a journal entry,
Gide reported Maillol saying: "A model! A model! What the hell would I do
with a model? When I need to verify something, I go and find my wife in the
kitchen, I lift up her chemise, and I have the marble."
But Vierny's figure was a
revelation; broad hips, big thighs, high breasts. By 1934, when they met,
Maillol's career was running out of steam. All his work, whether war memorials,
monuments to heroes, allegorical figures for city centres, consisted almost
without exception of female nudes. The massive dignity of the calm,
Mediterranean classicism that came easily to Maillol, a reaction against the
vivid movement of Rodin's work, was beginning to bore the public. Vierny's
dynamic personality changed all this and inspired the approach that produced
The River, a figure with the usual Maillol characteristics - the fully rounded
and hollowed-out forms - but in vivid action, sprawling full length, Vierny's
wavy hair a metaphor for the running water.
During the second world war,
Vierny helped European intellectuals, including a son of Thomas Mann, to avoid
the Nazis by escaping to Spain along a rocky, tortuous path through the Pyrenees
shown to her by Maillol. She was arrested on suspicion and then sprung by a
lawyer paid by Maillol, whereupon she departed for Nice with letters of
introduction to Matisse and Bonnard, suggesting they should "borrow"
her.
She was only one of a bevy of
Matisse models, but the admiration between the artist and Vierny was mutual,
and although she had to remain still when she modelled for his drawings, he
allowed her to talk. By contrast, Bonnard, living at nearby Le Cannet,
instructed her to strip off but not to pose, and to forget that he was there.
"He didn't want me to keep still," said Vierny. "What he needed
was movement. He asked me to 'live' in front of him. He wanted both presence
and absence." Bonnard's 1941 painting Le Grand Nu Sombre was the fruit of
this association.
With Maillol, Bonnard and Matisse
all dead within a few years of the war's end, Vierny set up her own
well-regarded art gallery where, as well as her collection of modern, western
art and temporary shows, she exhibited the work of dissident Soviet artists.
But she continued to carry a torch for Maillol and established the Dina Vierny
Foundation, which led to the creation in 1995 of the Fondation Dina
Vierny-Musée Maillol in the left-bank rue de Grenelle. Maillol's former home in
the family vineyard above Banyuls is now another Maillol museum.
The two sons who survive her,
Olivier and Bertrand Lorquin, run the Paris museum, but Maillol's great
monument, the Tuileries gardens display, immortalises her as well.
• Dina Vierny, artist's model and
art dealer, born January 25, 1919; died January 21 2009
Betty Carter
Betty
Carter (born Lillie Mae Jones; May 19, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an
American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and
other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and
imaginative interpretation of lyrics and melodies. Vocalist Carmen McRae once
remarked: "There's really only one jazz singer—only one: Betty
Carter."
Carter
often recruited young accompanists for performances and recordings, insisting
that she "learned a lot from these young players, because they're raw and
they come up with things that I would never think about doing."
Betty
Carter is considered responsible for discovering great jazz talent, her
discoveries including John Hicks, Curtis Lundy, Mulgrew Miller, Cyrus Chestnut,
Dave Holland, Stephen Scott, Kenny Washington, Benny Green and more.
Utopia by Jongsook Kim
Jongsook
Kim, born in South Korea, received her BFA, MFA and PhD from Hongik University
in South Korea. Her works have been widely exhibited both nationally and
worldwide, and a part of them is housed in the permanent collections at the
Mogam Museum of Art and The Hoseo National Museum of Contemporary Art.
The
artist reinterprets traditional Korean ink-brush landscape paintings, giving it
a modern vocabulary by incorporating Swarovski crystals into it. Her father,
who ran a mother-of-pearl workshop, used traditional landscapes and motifs as
prototypes for the objects he made. This early memory influenced her to create
artworks of her own, onto which she incorporated the iridescence of Swarovski
crystals, combining it with Korean tradition.
Photo by Art Shay
I had the pleasure to know Art Shay. he was a fine and a generous man who lived to be near 100.
The Kiss of the Muse, 1860, Paul Cezanne
There are days, sometimes months, when my Muse is off making out with someone else
The United States Capitol Building Ghosts
“One
soldier is known to have undergone excruciating pain one night during surgery
and he died on the operating table,” said Wallis. “So Capitol Police swear that
they hear moaning and see figures walking across the Capitol Rotunda, because
it was used as a makeshift hospital during the Civil War.” Rep. José Serrano (D-N.Y.)
“A
lot of Capitol Police swear they see and hear things, and it doesn’t surprise
me. The Capitol is a really old building. There’s been people who have been
shot in the building and it’s been a pretty violent place over history.” Anthony Wallis, research analyst, House
historian’s office.
“In
my old hideaway we had ghosts, we had a 300-pound table that we’d come in and
find in different parts of the room that we hadn’t left it in — it had moved
around by itself about every two or three months.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
The United States Capitol is
considered one of the most haunted buildings in Washington. The first
apparition to be seen there was in the 1860s as the Capitol was being
completed. Several spirits are said to haunt the Capitol due to tragedies
associated with its construction. One such ghost is said to be that of a worker
who died via a fall during the construction of the rotunda, and who now is
occasionally seen floating beneath the dome carrying a tray of woodworking
tools.
The Ghost of Henry Wilson
Henry Wilson of Massachusetts was
elected Vice President of the United States on the Republican ticket with
President Ulysses S. Grant. He was brought onto the ticket to replace the
ethically challenged Vice President Schuyler Colfax.
In 1873, Vice President Wilson suffered
a serious stroke but remained in office. Then, on November 10, 1875, he
suffered another attack that eventually killed him on November 22 a t7:00 AM
while he was working in the US Senate in the Capitol Building.
For years, some Capitol Police
have said that they have Wilson’s ghost walking from the old Senators tubs,
coughing and sneezing. Other say they have heard sneezes in the Senate hallways
when they are alone and still others say they have smelled the faint odor of
fresh soap near them accompanies by a cold chill.
The Voices in Statuary Hall
National Statuary Hall is said to
be haunted by a number of former members of Congress. Many politicians with
strong personalities and a powerful attachment to the institution of Congress
may continue to roam the halls of Congress long after their deaths.
Members of the United States
Capitol Police have claimed to have seen Senator (and from 1852 to 1854,
Representative) Thomas Hart Benton (above) sitting at a desk in National Statuary
Hall, although it has not been used as a legislative chamber since 1857.
Some claim that on the statues in
Statuary Hall dismount for their own inaugural ball from their places and dance
and that US Grant and Robert E. Lee have been seen meeting for a reconciliatory
handshake in the Hall.
The Curse of John Lenthall
In 1808 the buildings construction
superintendent John Lenthall disagreed with architect B. Henry Latrobe over the
Old Supreme Court Chamber. When Lenthall tried to remove braces from the
vaults, the ceiling collapsed and crushed him. In his last breath, legend goes,
Lenthall put a curse on the building.
The blue ghost of John Logan
Civil War general and Senator
John Logan is said to return to the old Military Affairs Committee room, with
the door to the room quietly opening and the general appearing, surrounded by a
blue haze. In the 1930s workmen discovered a sealed-up room containing what
many believed was Logan's stuffed horse.
A half hour after midnight on the first Tuesday after a full moon on the
stroke of the clock the door opens and the general appears in a “Sort of blue
haze” and stand there motionless
The Ghosts Joseph Cannon and Champ Clark
The spirits of Representative
Joseph Cannon (above) (R-Ill. and Speaker from 1903 to 1911) and Rep. Champ
Clark (Below) (D-Mo. and Speaker from 1911 to 1919) are claimed to occasionally
return to the dark chamber of the House of Representatives after midnight and,
after a loud rap from a gavel, resume the strong, angry debates they once had
in life.
The ghost of Wilbur Mills
Steve Livengood, chief tour guide
for the United States Capitol Historical Society, says he has seen the ghost of
former Representative Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) near Mills' former office late at
night. Mills, once one of the most powerful men in the world, was pushed from
office due to a sex scandal.
Pierre L'Enfant
Pierre Charles L'Enfant, although
not a politician, was a brevet Major during the American Revolutionary War who
served with George Washington at Valley Forge. In 1791, L'Enfant was appointed
architect and planner of the new city of Washington in the District of
Columbia. Although L'Enfant submitted
grandiose plans for the new capital city, his plans were never fully adopted
and President Washington dismissed him. L'Enfant spent much of the rest of his
life attempting to wrest a monetary payment from Congress, and he died in
poverty in 1825. Eyewitnesses, however, claim to
have seen the spirit of L'Enfant walking through the Capitol, head down,
murmuring to himself, with the plans for the capital city tucked under his arm.
William P. Taulbee
The Capitol has also been witness
to murder and death. Rep. William P. Taulbee had been a congressman from
Kentucky from 1884 to 1888.
Charles E. Kincaid, a journalist
for The Louisville Times, had accused Taulbee of adultery and involvement in a
Patent Office scandal, which had ruined Taulbee's political career.
On February 28, 1890, the
ex-congressman and the reporter ran into one another in the Capitol, and
Taulbee assaulted and embarrassed Kincaid by tweaking the much smaller man's
nose. Kincaid ran home, grabbed a
pistol, and when he encountered Taulbee on a marble staircase leading from the
House chamber down to the dining room, he shot him in the face just below
Taulbee's left eye. Taulbee died two weeks later, and
Kincaid was acquitted after claiming self-defense. The steps where Taulbee was
shot still contain the bloodstains. Journalists and others claim, however, that
whenever a reporter slips on these steps, Taulbee's ghost briefly appears.
John Quincy Adams
Former President and then-Rep.
John Quincy Adams suffered a stroke at his desk in the House chamber on
February 21, 1848, and was taken into the Speaker's Room. His physical
condition was too precarious to move him, and he died at the Capitol two days
later.
Many people have claimed to have
heard Adams' ghost denouncing slavery late at night in National Statuary Hall,
and one Congressional staff member claims that by standing in the spot where
Adams' desk once stood a person can still hear the former president's ghostly
whisper.
James Garfield
James A. Garfield was a member of the House
from 1863 to 1881 before assuming the Presidency in March 1881. But Garfield
was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled office seeker, on July 2, 1881,
at 9:30 a.m. as he walked through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and
Potomac Railroad in Washington, D.C.
Charles
J. Guiteau
Garfield died of heart failure brought about
by blood poisoning (itself caused by poor medical care) on September 19, 1881,
while recuperating at a beach home near Long Branch, New Jersey. Witnesses have
seen Garfield's ghost walking solemnly through the halls of Congress.
The Two Soldiers
The ghosts of at least two
soldiers are also said to haunt the Capitol. A few eyewitnesses have claimed
that whenever an individual lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda, a World War I
doughboy momentarily appears, salutes, then disappears.
A second apparition, which
eyewitnesses say is the ghost of an American Revolutionary War soldier, has
also appeared at the Washington Tomb.
According to several stories, the
soldier appears, moves around the Lincoln catafalque, and then passes out the
door into the hallway before disappearing.
The English Soldier
The Capitol building was burned
in 1814 by the British and some have seen a British soldier who runs the halls,
torch in hand.
The Stone Mason Ghast
Construction of the Capitol
building began after President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas
Jefferson chose a winning design in 1792. The Capitol’s history of shootings
and fire apparently invited in some unseen visitors along the way. Legend tells
that during the construction of the Capitol building, an irritable carpenter
smashed the head of a stonemason and buried the body in a wall. The stonemason has
allegedly been spotted walking the halls.
The Black Cat
The legend of the Black Cat (AKA
the Demon Cat) is shared by the White House and Capitol Building, a few blocks
away.
At the White House, the Black Cat
is seen in the basement before various tragic events. But up in the Capitol, it apparently roams
the halls at will. It should be noted that back in the 19th century,
both buildings employed cats to check the rat population, which is numerous in
Washington.
Supposedly (No actual report
exists) A Capital Building Policeman (The Capital has its own police force, as
does the US Supreme Court and the local DC federally managed park system) said
he saw the cat in the very early 19th century and another was said
to have shot at it in 1862. “It seemed to grow” he said “as I looked at it.
When I shot at the critter, it jumped right over my head”
The cat sightings in both the
White House and Capitol Building tend to follow a national tragedy. A White House guard claimed to have seen just
before the Lincoln assassination, a week before the stock market crash of 1929
and also reportedly seen days before the assassination of JFK. The last semi-official
sighting of the Demon Cat was in 1940.
Interestingly enough, a few block
away from the White House sits the Octagon House, which is said to be curse and
haunted.
Legend says that Betty Taylor,
the married niece of the first owner of the house, tripped and fell to her
death by a black cat as she raced down the houses circular stairs. She was
running in the dark to greet her lover who entered the property by a secret
passage that opened on the bank of the Potomac (The river has since been pushed
by, but at one time it did run close to the house)
The Dopey Benny Gang
Benjamin Fein AKA Dopey Benny (Born
1887. Died 1962. ) Lived at 531 Montague
Street in Brooklyn. He was married with three children. The son of a tailor,
his nickname came from an adenoidal condition, which gave him a sleepy look.
When asked to explain the name, Fein said “I don’t know, I never used dope. I
got the title as a nickname years ago” As a teen, he was pickpocket and petty
thief.
Developing an arrest record in
1905 as head of a local street gang. He
served time in prison for armed robbery and was arrested twice for murder but
was never convicted on those charges.
In
1910, he joined Big Jake Zelig’s (Above. Zelig’s real name was either William Alberts
or Harry Morris) gang where he was essentially a strong-arm enforcer and labor
extortionist in the garment district with its predominately-Jewish immigrant
labor force.
When Zelig was killed, Benny struck off on his
own with the garment extortion business and had a long running battles and
feuds Italian labor racketeer Joe Sirroco and Joseph ‘The Greaser’ Rosenzweig
over territory. In 1913, with Jake Zelig dead, Fein tried to break the Romanian
born (1891) Rosenzweig’s iron grip on the garment industry in an uprising known
as the Labor Sluggers War that lasted from about 1913 until 1916.
At the
start of the war, on August 10, 1913, according to Fein, a patrolman named
Patrick Sheridan found him on the Forsyth and Grand (Fein lived at 102 Forsyth
Street) and said, “Come with me Benny”. And they walked to the corner of
Forsyth and Bowery where another foot cop was waiting.
At that point, the two cops took out
blackjacks and in front of 15 witnesses beat Fein and then arrested him for
assaulting an officer. Sheridan claimed that had ordered Fein and his gang to
disperse from the front of bathhouse and they refused and attacked him. A jury
agreed with Sheridan and found Fein guilty of second-degree assault.
Benny proclaimed his innocence and said that for an entire year, the
word on the street was that he would be framed for a crime so that he could be
taken off the streets “I have tried my best to be a good boy and avoid trouble”
he told judge “but the police would not have it that way. I am not without a
heart. I am human”
The judge sentenced him to five years at
Sing-Sing prison. On January 25, 1914, minutes after Benny was placed on a
train to Sing-Sing, his father, Issac came to the Tombs and asked to see his
son. When he was told that Benny had just left, the father burst into tears. On
May 13, 1914, the conviction was overturned by a high court.
In 1914, he was arrested for trying to extort
$500 from a business agent of the Local 509 Butchers Union named Ben
Solomonowitz. Fein had threatened to kill Solomonowitz if the official didn’t
have the money on Benny’s next visit, so Solomonowitz went to the police. The
following week, Fein returned and issues his threat, not realizing that
detectives were listening from the next room.
Fein was arrested and tossed in the Tombs with
bail set at $8,000, an enormous amount of money at the time. Fein waited in his cell for two days,
expecting he would be bailed out by his gang members or his friends in Tammany
Hall, but nothing happened. Certain that he had been sold out to the law, Fein
contacted the District Attorney and started to name names. In all, his
testimony was eighty pages long, detailing every possible aspect of labor
extortion within the garment industry in Manhattan including the history of
Monk Eastman and Big Jake Zelig and how Fein had come to declare war on Rosenzweig
He told the police “My first job as a gangster
for hire was to go to a shop and beat up some workmen there. The man that
employed me, a union official paid me $100 for my work and $10 for each of the
men that I hired. I planned the job and then told my employer that it would
take more men then he figured, and I would not touch it for under $600.00. He
agreed. I got my men together, divided them into squads and passed out pieces
of gas pipe and clubs to them. We met the workmen we were after as they came
from work and we beat them up. I didn’t want to mix up in the work myself and
kept out of it, but I was where I could watch my men work. The man who employed
me said he liked the work fine and paid me $500 as a bonus. That started me at
my work.”
Fein said he charged the unions
$150 to wreck a small manufacturers shop while large shops went up to $600.
Cutting off an ear or shooting an owner in the leg went for $60 to $100
depending on who the victim was. Throwing a manager down an elevator shaft was
$200. and that he earned more than $10,000 a year as an extortionist. He was
twice offered $15,000 in cash to go to work for the bosses instead of the workers,
but Fein turned them down twice. “I was for the working people” he told the DA.
He said he hired strong-arm women
as well as men, and paid them $7.50a day, decent money at the time. (The
average worked earned $19.23 a day at the time) It was also the same amount
that he paid his men. The women were armed with weighted umbrellas and long,
deadly sharp, hairpins.
When a theater on the east side
of New York hired non-union actors, Fein sent in women who feigned fits in the
middle of the performance. Usually six to ten women would suffer screaming and
fainting fits every twenty minutes until the performance was called off. Fein held trails for those accused of
breaking union laws. The accused were invited to attend to defend themselves.
If they were found guilty, Fein decided on the punishment. Among those he found
guilty included Herman Lieberwitz, a member of the garment workers union who
was moonlighting in upstate New York in nun-union jobs.
On August 10, 1910, Benny tracked
him down to 85 East Fourth Street and cracked his skull open. Lieberwitz died at Bellevue Hospital a short
time later. Next they beat Benjamin
Polar, a union leader who was, as Fein said, “in the way of some other union
people” Then Max Fleischer, a union organizer who had offended some workers,
was beaten nearly to death in a restaurant at 106 Delancey Street. A beer
bottle was broken over his head. They left a written notice on his body that he
was to retire from the union business.
Benny and his men destroyed shops
at 77 Green street that belonged to Max and Joseph Lampert because they refused
to pay a union fine of less than $100.00
Shops belonging to Max Roth at 1115 Broadway and another shop belonging
to Ron Kushin at 41 East Twenty-First Street, were destroyed.
Rather than kill witnesses, Fein offered them
a chance to relocate to Cleveland Ohio. His men all carried guns but were
seldom arrested for possession of a deadly weapon since the gangster were
accompanied by their girlfriends or prostitutes on each adventure where guns
were needed. When the police arrived, they slipped the guns into the women’s
backsides
Fein kept a diary of his life as
a union goon, a dairy that included names, dates, times and places. Based on
those notes, the DA issued 32 indictments against hoodlums and labor officials,
but none of them resulted in convictions. Benny was released without charges on
May 15, 1915.
November 28, 1914, during a clash
between union and non-union help at the S. Feldman Hat Factory at 168 Green
Street, a non-union enforcer named Max Green (146 East Houston) who worked
for Joe Sirroco was shot to death after
he shot Hyman Emmanuel, one of Benny’s men, in the leg. Waxy Gordon was later
identified as the man who killed Max Green.
On December 12, 1914, some men
from Benny’s gang were inside Madison Square Garden watching a bicycle race
when they were surrounded by members of
Joe Sirroco’s gang who challenged them to a fight. Outnumbered, Fein’s
men refused but at some point, Anthony Scantuli AKA Tony the Cheese (165 Hester
Street) one of Sirroco’s men was shot in the hip.
Tony Ross and Frank ”Nigger” Jula were
arrested for the shooting. Later, another fight broke out in front of the
London Theater near Broadway. Looking
for revenge for the attack at Madison Square Garden, Benny and his gang came to
Arlington Hall at 12-23 St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan where the Sirroco gang
was having an annual ball.
They waited outside the hall and when they saw
Charles Piazza, who worked for Joe Sirroco, walking down the street, they shot
him through the left shoulder and then returned to party they were having a few
blocks away. One bullet went wild and killed
a bystander named Frederick Strauss, a clerk of the court in
Manhattan. A witness identified Dopey Benny and his gang members
Little Abbie Beckerman (Born 1888 of 232 East Broadway) and Rubin Kaplan (Born
1888 of 226 Second Avenue) as the shooters. He also identified Waxy Gordon, (25
Delancey Street) and a member of Dopey Benny’s gang as another shooter. Another
witness said he saw a man he later identified as Gordon run up to the halls
bouncer, a character named Edward Morris AKA
Fat Bull and cry out “Fat Bull! Hide me!”
In the end, they were all
released due to lack of evidence. With the end of the Sluggers war and his
reputation in tatters, Benny’s power and influence waned. In November of 1925,
Fein was arrested in case that involved cocaine.
On May 29, 1915, Joseph ‘The Greaser’
Rosenzweig, a tailor’s presser by trade, pled guilty murder of Phillip Pinchy
Paul in 1914. he allowed a gangster named Benny Snyder to murder Paul because
Rosenzweig wanted Paul’s job as an organizer in the Furriers union.
On June 30, 1931, Benny, now 44 years old and
out of trouble for almost 14 years, was arrested on assault charges with
gangsters Samuel Hirsch and Samuel Rubin after throwing acid on local Brooklyn
businessman Mortimer Kahn as he sat in front of his neck tie shop at 124 Allen
street in Brooklyn.
Fein 1935
On February 25, 1942 he was sentenced to ten to
twenty years for trying to fence $250,000 in stolen property, taken mostly from
the garment center in Manhattan. Abe
Niggy Cohen, an old timer from the Lower East Side was convicted with him.
After his release from Sing-Sing, Fein settled down and went to work as tailor.
He died in 1962, from cancer and emphysema.
Fein 1942