A while ago I bought this old postcard of Franklin Park at a flea market. I loved the layout, it’s a rare card with two images! The top shows the Carriage Bridge over Scarboro Pond, near the Rock Morton (or is it the Rock Milton?). The bottom image shows a romantic moment between a bicycling couple, […]
In my previous two posts (here & here) about the history of E.C. Comics, I have discussed the value of these comics as a form of nostalgia cannibalism and the ways in which nostalgia and consumer culture overlap. As an important part of the Baby Boomer childhood experience, the various comic titles published by E.C. Comics from […]
Sorry about the silence on the blogging front. A lot has been going on and I’ll have some updates about the film soon. One of the things I’ve struggled with in my research about Franklin Park is how to convey the way I feel about the place. Sure, the Park is currently a wild place, […]
I meant to post this a while ago… anyway, here it is. In the summer of 2014 I was honored with an invitation to speak at the Flash Forward Festival hosted by the Magenta Foundation. Here is the full video of my talk: An Idiot Makes A Move: How I Learned To Love My Accountant […]
Last summer, after my film 16 Photographs At Ohrdruf was released, I received a phone call from Ernie Bartels who fought in the war with the 282nd Artillery Battalion. He was a witness to the atrocities of the Ohrdruf camp and we spoke for a while about his experiences and it was amazing to hear […]
It’s been a while since I last wrote about Franklin Park in Boston, but the weather has been so cold and miserable that I haven’t had any chance to wander in the Park and find new things to rant about. So I thought I’d share a few old photographs I found in my online meanderings […]
When Frederick Law Olmsted was planning Franklin Park in Boston, he decided to divide the park into four sections. Two of these sections, the Country Park (now the golf course) and The Wilderness, were for enjoying nature. The other two sections, The Playstead and The Greeting (now the Zoo) were for public events, sports and more […]
While it is true that I read a lot about U.S. politics on a daily basis, I often struggle as I try to understand the underlying geographic and historical context of the post/modern fights. This is where maps are so handy. First, look at this map from Wikipedia about the Black Belt. The Black Belt is a […]
A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a great trip up the west coast. We started in San Francisco with a few days of tourism (history nerds + Golden Gate Park = awesome) and then took the train to Seattle. If you ever get the chance to take the Coast Starlight I highly recommend […]
Do you like my rants about Franklin Park? Do you like maps? Well, then I’ve just put chocolate in your peanut butter because I’ve now added an interactive map that shows the locations in the Park of each of my posts! I whipped this up a few weeks ago but have been remiss in sharing […]
For the last year I’ve been writing here about my explorations in Franklin Park in Boston, Frederick Law Olmsted’s last — and often considered his greatest — urban park project. I walk through the Park nearly every day, and I started writing about the bits of history I found because they were interesting, because they […]
Walking along the path in Franklin Park, there is a stretch of densely wooded area between the Resting Grounds1 tennis courts and Scarboro Pond that I pass through frequently. It runs along the base of Scarboro Hill, and from a Park-history perspective I’ve never paid much attention to it. No maps show any buildings or […]
One of the most memorable features of Franklin Park is Scarboro Pond on the southwestern corner of the Park. Two stone bridges cross it, making for picturesque views. There are herons and geese and ducks on the little islands, and turtles sun themselves on the rocks. It’s hard to believe that the pond is man-made, […]
In 1995 I was living on Glenside Ave, a small side street off Glen Road and right next to Franklin Park. At the time, the Park didn’t have the best reputation — the word “stabby” comes to mind — so it wasn’t until late winter that my roommate and I made our way up the […]
One of the things I wanted to leave people with at the end of “16 Photographs At Ohrdruf” was the idea that uncovering history is possible for anyone. Sometimes it happens when you aren’t expecting it, or when you don’t know how to interpret what you are looking at. Sometimes it happens when you think […]
Today my city suffered a tragedy. It’s easy to see these things on the news and to become detached, but tonight watching TV I keep seeing the library I visit weekly, the streets I walk every day and the city skyline that I call home. I don’t know what to say except that my heart […]
In November of 1944 the Nazis created a sub-camp of Büchenwald called SIII near the town of Ohrdruf to dig tunnels into the mountainside at Jonastal, about 6km from the Ohrdruf camp. In April of 1945 the camp was uncovered by American soldiers of the 89th Infantry and 4th Armored Divisions. Ohrdruf was the first […]
Today I was walking in a light snow past The Monument near my home in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston. I’m sure it has a formal name, but to everyone I know it is just The Monument. For years I’ve walked past it and looked at it as a glorification of the Union victory […]
When I was a kid, I liked to skip school. I’m about to turn 37 and I can admit to this. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to skip school to do drugs or vandalize churches… nope, I wanted to read books and watch tv. Around Christmas of 1987 my parents split, and I […]
I’ve never had much cause to hang out in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Arriving from Boston (or, for a time, Chicago) by train I end up in Penn Station; by bus at Port Authority. My infrequent LIRR trips to visit my grandparents departed from Grand Central, but I was a poor college kid and […]
Throughout the 3 years of creating “16 Photographs At Ohrdruf” I kept extensive notes about the process and my ideas for the film. There are four notebooks total. These are the last 2 pages of the second notebook, from December 2011.
In my previous piece, I looked at how the Baby Boom generation is both endlessly nostalgic for its past, and driven by a consumerist philosophy that encourages businesses to make products that capitalize on this nostalgia. Using the example of E.C. Comics, who published great titles such as Tales From The Crypt from 1950-55, I […]
Previously: The Cutting Room Floor, Lt. Johnson’s Letters #1 & A P-51 Saves Ralph Rush from Nazis In January of 1945, reinforcement divisions arrived on the coast of France at the port of Le Havre. This city, just east of the beaches attacked six months earlier on D-Day, was famous as the site of the Henry V‘s siege […]
For any of this to make sense, I need to begin with three generalizations about the Baby Boom generation: they are the largest generational cohort in history1; they were raised in post-war consumer culture, and view most of life in consumerist terms; they are incredibly nostalgic. The first of these is a verifiable fact, and […]
A week ago I announced two screenings of my film “16 Photographs At Ohrdruf” at Lesley University on April 4, 2013. You can read more here, and I’ll have some specifics regarding times very soon. April 4 is the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Ohrdruf concentration camp. Today I’m excited to announce that we’ve confirmed […]
Today, my wife Nicole and I were talking about television and movies from our childhood (a popular topic; we were both born in the mid-1970s) and how pervasive the Vietnam War was in the media. It seemed that there was barely a TV show or movie in which a main character was not a veteran, […]
Read Part One: The Cutting Room Floor Read Part Two: Lt. Johnson’s Letters #1 One of the most memorable parts of filming “16 Photographs At Ohrdruf” was my trip to Seattle to meet Ralph Rush. When he invited me to stay with him on a small island at the northern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, I was […]
Part Two: Raccoon Cage Read Part One: The Origins of the Search I had not planned on writing today about my wanderings in Franklin Park, because I still have a lot of work ahead of me and I want to post a second introductory text before getting into the details of the various sites and […]
Click here to read Part One – Ohrdruf Extended: The Cutting Room Floor In my documentary film “Sixteen Photographs At Ohrdruf” I present the story of a small stack of photos found after my grandfather died. As often happens when making a film, many interesting parts of his story were left out, including large portions of his […]