Interesting. I worked on an EPA Marathon Battery Superfund National Priority Site in Cold Spring, NY which removed nicad contaminated soils and marsh behind an earthen dam built in the former West Point Foundry environs, said from the NIKE ABM system. We found under the "Bridge Shop" of the Chicago Steel and Bridge Co. remains (ca. 1913 today they've built a gravity wave detector like Michelson-Morley's with lasers, much, much, longer) the remains of the "Swamp Angel" wooden gun platform and iron pintle on wooden grillage. The gun exploded in 1863 during the secret, hidden in a marsh, night-time incendiary bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina. The citizens of Trenton, NJ later bought the broken gun, and S.C. thinks it might know where it was in their swamp. Jules Verne had his buried cannon made by them in "From the Earth to the Moon" and gun-cotton fired from Florida, written in 1865. Iraq was building a "super-gun" after a Vermont inventor, apparently assassinated on a street in Holland in the early 90's. The 19th c. foundry later had one too, used dynamite from bolted together tubular sections. Something like it might make escape velocity.

I was in Woodstock, NY the summer before, 1968 a young dishwasher in Timber Lake Camp near Phoenicia, NY time off a destination for a film or a dinner, so I was surprised that the promoters (NY Times ad: “Three Men With Unlimited Capital…” also title of their book) had chosen it as a name, and fortunate it had not taken place as planned in Walkill, NY that due to an argument over port-a-potties. Standing by the chain-link as it came down, with a ticket, I realized like the later line from “Jaws” they were going to need a bigger everything, i.e., the stage Boston’s “Quarry” played on, the Hogfarm commune were parked at (weren’t they in “Easy Rider” and later smallpox eradication in India?) and where Wavy Gravy camped at and Joan Baez came down to sing was way too small! Though at the time, I thought a good place for me to be.

I hope the museum about to open does well, and I’ve heard from recent concert goers it’s a real treat now to go there and hear some of the best in the business in a nice outdoor setting and a great place to bring the kids. I don’t think they’ll have to worry that the tickets sales were kinda’ low and then have people pouring in from all over the proverbial place!

It’s interesting, a panorama of the city, is stated to have been the first art museum or exhibit in the 18th century in New York City, though one stood in it. It stood near northeast corner of City Hall Park and one could see the cityscape in the round by entering the building I recall not too far from this. It was said to inspire P.T. Barnum, who replaced it with his own idea of entertaining the public before moving to a larger location. Today, near the statue of Horace Greeley and a small monument to Joseph Pulitzer, (across the street, “Newspaper Row”) is another monument I recall, working in the archaeology of the “First Almshouse” cemetery, also once under the city Commons, is an American Engineering monument to the “first fine art museum” in NYC, the city depicted in the round.

Lunar Pioneer: The Pet Moon Rock flies again

I once visited the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, working on the nearby Watervliet Shaker cemetery site for their "Power and Light" research facility then proposed and was amazed, besides the breadth of the exhibits there, the fact that a small piece of the Wright brothers plane that flew at Kitty Hawk, NC, had been left on the Moon as part of the Apollo program. I had met one of the directors of the Long Island, NY "Cradle of Aviation" a former F-14 test pilot when we were to blow all 80 of them up outside Tehran, Iran, where the Grumman Corporation, the LEM builders, had over 3000 employees teaching the Iranians how to fly and service the F-14 back in 1979 under the Shah. I recall they made a bid for the Mir space station before it was forced down. I worked in close-range photogrammetry for a while, and one of the spin offs of the lunar laser measuring project, beside the haze compensation was a 3D application on the desktop that was promoted by the Road Scholar software firm, creating wireframe from photos. A similar though down-to-earth application is the infrared "total stations" surveyors use, that I used in archaeology recording, a "corner prism" application.

July 24, 2009 5:09 PM

Hello. My grandmother Margaret Gregory was said to have been a nanny for the caretaker’s children at the Statue of Liberty and they used call her “Bedloe’s Nanny”. She went on to raise eleven kids on Water St., a part replaced by the City’s first projects, the Alfred E. Smith Houses and they moved to the Bronx. Nearby, where Mr. Smith grew up, across the street, was a Mayflower Society’s monument to Isaac Allerton, who had a warehouse in New Amsterdam and a house in New Haven, CT a major street in the Bronx named after him, and the exit between the Zoo and the Botanical Gardens.

Oops. My question for the “world’s first electrically lit lighthouse” (Snapple cap) is how do the caretaker’s kids get their education today? Do they take a boat to school everyday?

Ask About the Statue of Liberty - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

The Vietnam War Memorial Wall replica is on display in Orlando, Florida. The designer, Maya Lin also designed a newspaper recycling plant for the South Bronx in NYC. Unfortunately politics and the events of 9/11/01 stopped the discussion of what would have been a great "green" project in the currently returning Bronx ecology, i.e., herring are swimming again and a beaver built a lodge in the Bronx River, cleaned every year, and other signs of the what some might consider once the "curse" of the "Official Borough Flower" once the Sumatra corpse flower, has been changed to the "day lily" in 2000. Probably a result of it's popularity at the Bronx Botanical Gardens back at the end of the 19th century?

Newsvine - Vietnam War Memorial Wall On Display

In the US they had something similar during WWII. Large tracks of land on Long Island in New York State (currently over 4000 acres as a State park formerly “RCA property”) and others one nearby another large “wireless” array near Princeton, NJ were used to send signals bounced I think off the ionosphere at night to Europe during the war. I think David Saranoff (or Saranov), then promoted to General, the RCA research center in Princeton, New Jersey today was in charge. Nearby Orson Welles landed the Martian invaders at Grover's Mill in the 1938 Halloween radio transmission of H.G. Wells' “War of the Worlds”. The wire arrays, were more like gridded lines between telephone poles and did not stand out like these from what I know. The first “radio fax” of a picture was in 1924 perhaps used that way also. I was told the plans for the D-Day invasion were kept in a safe on Governors Island in NYC perhaps transmitted by ionospheric transmission too over the large networks just above the tops of “pine barrens” today preserved for rainwater recharge of aquifer.

English Russia » Russian Ionospheric Link

"Wright Whirlwind" on the web should by "made in Paterson, NJ" not as it states "Patterson". I once lived in the Patterson Houses projects in the South Bronx where nearby the US Capitol Dome was forged by the Janes and Kirtland firm. The Society for Industrial Archeology is visiting you (Rhinebeck Aerodrome) in October and as a member I received the good news that The Great Falls in Paterson, NJ have become a National Historic Park as of 3/30/09 signed by President Obama. I grew up across the street from Conrad Link in Centereach, Long Island, NY, near Gyrodyne helicopters, who lived to 101 who worked for 40 years in a spring factory in Paterson, NJ. When given the choice the union there voted for a raise instead of providing pensions, then filled with young members. His wife was paraplegic. I also worked next to Long Island Helicopters off and on for UPS in Roosevelt Field where "Lucky" Lindbergh took off. (e-mail)  Wright Whirlwind J-5

An East End synchronicity story came from now deceased Robert David Lion Gardiner of Gardiners Island. During the American Civil War, former President John Tyler was in charge of Richmond, Virginia, under siege by the Union. His young wife Julia Gardiner whom he met when the NYC “Hogg and Delamater” cast “Peacemaker” cannon exploded, on the S.S. Princeton, on the Potomac River below Mount Vernon, killing her father US Senator Gardiner and others. The former First Lady had a dream of Tyler’s death on their plantation in Tidewater Virginia. She got on horseback and rode all night to see if he was alright. She met him and he died that day on the steps of the hotel where he was in charge of that city. The siege hostilities ceased long enough for the grieving former First Lady and her entourage to pass through the Union lines as she traveled back to NYC, where later she was involved in a well-publicized precedent setting “changed will” case involving expensive Manhattan real estate.

Like a bird on a wire...

Many of the old folk and blues music recordings in the archives were done on the wire recorder by Alan Lomax. This is so good to hear. I had a friend who years ago, a woman folksinger, I think told me Mrs. Guthrie had heard the shots from her small apartment in the Dakota that killed John Lennon. I still remember her playing on the Hudson River sailing sloop Clearwater full of pumpkins down at the Seaport. I once sailed on the Clearwater out of Port Jefferson for a sunset cruise on Long Island Sound. We had a concert in Riverhead one summer after selling "Public Citizen" mag subscriptions for NYPIRG in St. James on "water issues" and Pete Seegar and another musician gave us a treat of a concert in the old Riverhead Theater, Gee whiz I hope somebody recorded it! I found my life revolving around the archaeology of the Hudson River after that. I haven't been to the "Tear in the Clouds" though.

#1 - Wed May 6, 2009 9:40 PM EDT  msnbc Rare Woody Guthrie...

I would show him the archaeology of his theatre recently found, and the Globe reproduction helped to fruition by once "black-listed" American film director and actor, credited as the person most responsible for the modern recreation of it Sam Wanamaker. Also, take him to Governors Island in NYC to show him Fort Williams where it's proposed a theater in the round like the Globe be made of the circular brick fortress, where prisoners in the American Civil War were once held and later Walt Disney, AWOL, having just missed the steamboat. It's thought to be a wonderful place to put on Shakespeare's plays, a similar space Castle Clinton, across the harbor, it's "twin" already used in musical performance, it once the port of entry for very early immigrants in NYC once an island now in Battery Park. Then I'd take him to the Statue of Liberty where my grandmother Miss Gregory was once a nanny to the caretaker's kids, the first electrically lit lighthouse in the world.  If Shakespeare were alive today..... - Telegraph 

Then I'd take him to "Guild Hall" in East Hampton out on Long Island where one of three plays "God" by Woody Allen is being read at the "Naked Stage Marathon" recently modernized this Sunday.

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I once used to spend some time down there on Cattaraugus Creek what became “Deer Lick” a large Nature Conservancy holding. What I heard was that species usually found further south were in this niche and trees grow very large. Can’t say I’ve ever been to the Hollywood though, interesting history. I wonder if the former projectionist, Mr. Eastwood was related to Clint Eastwood. Directors Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol left one to them out in Montauk, Long Island.

The Hollywood Happening a Motorcycle Event - Enchanted Mountains - Cattaraugus County in Western New York State