By Caitlin Hawke

A big thank you to Ozzie Alfonso for the three local images below.  The first attests once again to that spontaneity and community and wonder we felt last Monday.  The second two show that Ozzie is a real photographer with equipment that enabled him to get a decent shot. And he shot it coming and going.  The shot at bottom right is prize worthy.

Got any more?  Send them along: [email protected].

By Caitlin Hawke

This one speaks for itself, and it's relatively local.  Check out "Harlem in the 1960s: Civil Rights & Black Power" on Saturday, September 9th at 11 a.m. at the Harry Belafonte branch on 115th Street.  Find details in the flyer below. Hope some of you get to go!

Reason #973 to love the NYPL would be this month's announcement that the library is now streaming a huge back catalogue of films.  Learn more here.  You need a library card and an internet connection.

By Caitlin Hawke

But not these guys. These neighbors viewed the galactic event from the NW corner of W. 105th Street and Broadway and were captured by shutterbug Bob Lejeune who kindly allowed me to post this shot.  My favorite thing about it -- other than the optical illusion that everyone is looking straight at the verboten partial eclipse -- is the woman second from the right who is, herself, eclipsed.  Not to scale of course.  But here goes.  Guy in white? A metaphor for us all looking up from the earth. He is our planet. Guy in blue? The moon. And young woman behind...well she's the brilliant sun semi-eclipsed star that all the others turn their backs to so powerful is her partial light. 

This is typical Lejeunian photography.  And I am always grateful when he turns his lens on us.

If you have any good shots of that phenomenal ambiance we all felt out there on the street in our child-like wonderment, send 'em along. I will post anything related to the eclipse that is nearby.

It was a good week that reminded me of how puny the third rock from the sun is. And of the majesty of our central star.

By the way, you'll thank me for the outro. Scroll down. And remember if you are reading this in an email subscription, you have to click through to the blog by clicking on the blog title above for my lagniappe du jour.  Try not to smile!!

By Caitlin Hawke

Who can forget where they were when their first solar eclipse occurred?  Memories of admonitions not to look skyward and of instructions on how to make a pinhole viewer on the playground macadam came flooding back these past weeks as eclispe-mania ramped up to fever pitch.  I tried to resist the hype but then I realized there might not be many more to behold.  We have to wait 'til 2024 to top this one in NYC and after that I can't say.

Nostalgia really came home to roost when every radio spot about the upcoming eclipse recalled Carly Simon's immortalization of the 1970 eclipse in her 45-year old and still inscrutable hit "You're So Vain":

That got me leafing through pages and pages on the internet. It's actually sort of fun to look at old eclipse coverage.  I turned up the March 1, 1970, New York Times front page piece that made me chuckle about the math. You might enjoy it, too.

I'm not the only one thinking back to bygone solar blackouts. In an excellent blog post on the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group's site, Pam Tice unearthed some local history about the 1925 eclipse, also known as "The West 96 Eclipse."  It seems the edge of total darkness was miscaluated and that, in fact, W. 96th Street was the cut off, not further south as predicted.  Bedeviling azimuths! I recommend reading the post in full here.  While you are on the group's site, take a noodle through it. It's a remarkable achievement to have all this neighborhood information in one place.

And today, August 21, 2017, we get to make new memories, with five-year-olds just starting kindergarten who now have their chance to learn about DIY pinhole viewers on the playground macadam, to return to a bit of much-needed innocence, and to experience the wonderment of our mind-boggling galaxy. 





And now for a hidden track.

Totally of its era and sticking with my 70s lookback, the video below by Manfred Mann serves as a nice outro today.  A lagniappe for readers of a certain age who remember the zeniths and nadirs of the 1970s.

Be careful out there.  Ours is one hot star.

If you are receiving this by email, the video will not load; to view it, you must click on the title of this post -- "Azimuth to Zenith" -- to go to the blog page.

By Caitlin Hawke

I got the message at far bottom today from ConEd.  So this explains the decibels I endured this morning, despite the rain that you'd think would put a damper on things.

Thinking about electricity and what at times seems like our city's crumbling infrastructure, my thoughts jumped to a charming tidbit I'd unearthed a while back when researching the history of a building in these parts.  It comes from the March 6, 1897, edition of The Electrical Age (Volume 19, No. 10, p. 148):

It seems that 855 West End Avenue, then just constructed and known as The St. Andoche Apartment House -- a name lost to history -- was way out in front when it came to electrical equipment. Thanks to Thomas A. Edison, the incandescent bulb was born in 1879.  And just 18 years later, the invention and ensuing applications were still fresh enough to make a new building's electrical technology worthy of noting.

Ok, so no one irons anymore, and we don't have gas lamps, but it's sort of incredible to think how little the technology has changed in the 12 decades since this tidbit ran.  The lesson that comforts me is how quickly a new technology can be adapted and applied to benefit all.

Let's see where is all goes.  Fiat lux, ConEd.  Fiat lux!