From the category archives:

Old Haunts

Pristine Abandonment

by kara on January 19, 2014

This is too much, I almost can’t take it. I am a sucker for urban archeology, it makes me faint with joy. There’s something chillingly fascinating about an abandoned building and the way it acts as a time capsule for life ways past, or a sit, shuttered and stopped in its tracks in time. I […]

We get it, he’s OLD.

by kara on September 1, 2011

Google Jamie Moyer and up pops “Jamie Moyer old” followed by “Jamie Moyer is old”. Old Man Moyer’s relative old age has been the object of ridicule for years before he was even as old as he is now.”Jamie Moyer is so old that he intentionally walked Adam in order to pitch to Eve”, blah, […]

Christmas Back in Grandfather’s Time.

by kara on December 15, 2010

Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1970s, the post-Phillies-let-down/holiday season began at 5AM Thanksgiving morning whether you liked it or not. We would snowpants-up and trudge down to the Gimbels Thanksgiving Day Parade. Bringing up the rear of the parade was Santa Claus, protected by beleaguered postal workers who all us kids would bum rush […]

  100 years before the Hiltons, the Trumps and the Spellings desecrated America with their gross junk, a Chicago utility czar named Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, gave the most ridiculous dinner party ever recorded. In 1901, the 40 year old President of the People’s Gas, Light and Coke Company of Chicago retired, pulling up stakes and […]

La Guardia Airport Before it was a Nightmare.

by kara on November 5, 2010

Pipsqueaky, Depression Era New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was the one who made sure this airport, New York’s smallest, got built. The tiny Tammany Hall foe famously refused to exit a plane that had landed in Newark, insisting that his ticket read New York, not New Jersey. He demanded to be taken to New York, […]

In May I took my nephew to a Phillies game and a tour of Citizen’s Bank Park for his 8th birthday. Having practically grown up at “The Vet”, it was a pretty unsettling experience, unleashing a wave of characteristically overly complicated ponderings. The paradoxical equilibrium between past and present, the slowly unfolding reality of the […]