Motel (n.) an establishment which provides lodging and parking and in which the rooms are usually accessible from an outdoor parking area. First used in 1925, coined from motor + hotel. Originally a hotel for automobile travelers. For those of us of a certain age, the sight of an orange roof, cupola, and weather vane […]
Women's fashions may have stolen the headlines during the 1920s, but men's wear flourished nonetheless. In 1818, Henry S. Brooks opened a clothing store on the corner of Catherine and Cherry Streets in Manhattan, which was the early 19th century garment district where some of the first textile wholesalers in Manhattan were located (Lord & […]
During the 1920s motion pictures played a huge role in social life for people of all ages but especially those in their teens and early twenties. The first public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before sound motion pictures were made commercially practical. Reliable synchronization, […]
Brownstones are an essential part of New York's DNA. From the mid-1900s all the way to today, New Yorkers have enjoyed a special relationship with these stately single homes and their special architecture. Way back when, my grandparents owned a NYC brownstone, as did their parents. In fact, my mother was born in my great-grandmother's […]
Oysters Rockefeller was created in 1889 at the New Orleans restaurant Antoine's by Jules Alciatore, son of founder Antoine Alciatore. Jules developed the dish due to a shortage of French escargot (snails), substituting the locally plentiful Gulf Shore oysters. The dish was named Oysters Rockefeller after John D. Rockefeller, the then-wealthiest American, for its extreme […]
As a writer, typewriters have a mystical allure I can't resist. I played on my mother’s clunky Remington and, as a journalism grad student, learned to type on an IBM Selectric. And now I save my money to buy antique machines. In 1714, a patent for “an artificial machine ... for impressing ... letters ... […]
Consider the case of Little Lord Fauntleroy — not the English one, but the unidentified American boy found murdered in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 1921. That’s not his real name, but the one given to him by the press. On March 8, 1921, the body of a boy were found floating in a pond near a […]
Many of the foods we love today (and some we hate) debuted or had their hay-day in the 20's. Marketed as innovative, thrifty, and time-saving, these foods promised to revolutionize family life. Gelatin dates back to the 17th century and was traditionally made by boiling the bones and hooves of large animals for long hours, […]
Plus les choses changent,plus elles restent les mêmes. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Two pandemics, one hundred years apart, and masking is still the order of the day. In 1918, it was the Influenza Pandemic, and masks — fashioned from gauze and cheesecloth -- were called muzzles, germ scarers and […]
