"I Will Counsel You With My Loving Eye On You"

(Photo I took at the US/Canada border last April, 2015)

Psalm 32:8

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Infused With Beauty

The last time went to the Fraunces Tavern Museum website (only about a week ago), I didn't notice this new acquisition:

Fraunces Tavern Museum is proud to announce the most recent acquisition, a terra cotta bust of George Washington. This bust is a 19th century draped a l ‘antique unsigned copy of the original bust made by Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1785.

I've written about this bust here and here. And, Larry Auster, whose admiration of the bust I shared, wrote about the bust, and made a post here on my commentary on the sculpture.

I wrote in the commentary Auster/Asrat: Interaction on Beauty:

Although Larry Auster didn't directly write about beauty, his work is infused with the desire to bring beauty back into our world.

One of the most memorable posts he did on art (and beauty) was his reaction to a bust of George Washington. The image of the bust he has posted is huge and takes up the whole screen, so that we, like him, can have as close a look at it as possible. [the rest of my post is here]

So, it is a nice surprise that a museum is bringing this piece into its collections.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

"Dogs, I Am Confident, Would Have Arranged Many, Many Things Better Than We Do"

First, I Do An On-Line Search
Cartoon by Arnie Levin
Published in the New Yorker October 5, 1998
I went to my (second) favorite spot to read - the Whole Foods Market cafe - my newly acquired (for TEN dollars, down from FORTY EIGHT dollars!) book, The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.

Here is what the reviewers say about it:

...the amused insouciance, the self-deprecation, the gentle unfolding of a structural irony, the skip and reveal of the final sentence, the knowledge of Not Too Much that seems intrinsic to the New Yorker. And cartoons.”—Edmund De Waal, The Spectator

But, above all, it's funny, in that canine way, where all things are about the dog.


Thurber Dog With Butterfly for Nora, 1937
Illustration by James Thurber

Dogs, I am confident, would have arranged many, many things better than we do. They would have in all probability averted the Depression, for they can go through lots tougher things than we and still think it's boom time. They demand very little of their heyday; a kind word is more to them than fame, a soup bone more than gold; they are perfectly contented with a warm fire and a good book to chew (preferably an autographed first edition lent by a friend).
James Thurber, from "Dogs I Have Scratched"

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Circles

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[Photos By: KPA]

America's the Greatest Land of All

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

George Washington: The World Historical Figure in the Quintessentially American Tradition

George Washington, 1780
Charles Willson Peale (American, 1741–1827)
Oil on canvas; 95 x 61 3/4 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Part of what makes his live story so gripping is that he shaped himself into the world-historical figure he became, in the quintessentially American tradition of men who spring, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, from their own Platonic conception of themselves. But his self-conception was extraordinary: it began as a worthy ideal and evolved into a magnificent one. In his fiercely ambitious youth, he sought to win acclaim for his for his heroism and savoir faire. In his maturity, he strove to be, in his own conscience even more than in the eyes of others, virtuous, public-spirited, and (although his ethic wouldn't allow him to claim the word (noble). He did hope, however, that posterity would recognize and honor the purity of his motives; and Americans, who owe him so much, do him but justice in understanding not only what he did for them but also what greatness of soul he achieved to do it.

From: The Founding Fathers at Home (p. 94)
By: Myron Magnet

.
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The New York Dog

I browsed through the books at my local Chapters bookstore, and I found this: The New York Dog (not The Dogs of New York) by Rachael Hale McKenna, going for a mere $21 online ($32 in-store).

Here is one dog:


Bonga Loves New York

Image from: Rachael Hale McKenna: Photographer
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Pink Peonies

Pink Peonies
[Photo By: KPA]

Pink peonies from my local market.

This was taken with my tablet. I didn't carry my camera with me for some (strange and unusual) reason - actually I simply forgot. But, I always carry my tablet, which acts as a back-up.



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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Busy Sparrows

[Photos By: KPA]

Here are busy house sparrows setting up their nests above a small store. The male's colors are a combination of brown, grey and white, while the female's are shades of brown. They seem unperturbed by the human traffic. The only thing they object to is if said humans stands too long under their abodes. I've done this, trying to get a photograph, and what I get is an earful of the territorial claims by the feisty males.

In the top photograph, the male is inside the nest, but he is holding a piece of straw, building the nest. In the bottom, is is the female, who is normally hidden in the nest, who has flown out. I haven't yet seen any chicks yet.

Here is the sound of the male:



And information.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Positively 44th Street

I first came upon West 44th street between 5th and 6th Avenues in 2009 when I went to New York and Princeton to participate in my first anti-Jihad event. I met the (now dormant) International Free Press Society's Bjorn Larsen outside the Harvard Club, where there was a private luncheon for Muhammad Cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. A small group of us, including Bjorn, Lars Hedegaard (who was at one time after this event confined to his house in his native Holland to protect him from Muslim antagonists for his negative commentary on Muslim immigrants), Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal, and Westergaard traveled to Princeton University for a presentations by Westergaard, and later that evening, to attend a private reception for Westergaard at a mid-town New York apartment. The day after the event in Princeton, I met Larry Auster for the first time, at The Red Flame Diner in New York on 44th Street. I had been communicating with Larry for a few years as a commentator on his website The View From the Right.

Below is an interesting article about this one-block strip, with its various intellectual and literary clubs. One is the Alogonquin Hotel, where the infamous Round Table met. I went inside the restaurant on another trip, to see the menu, and realized that I could afford one item (say the shrimp cocktail for $20). I also mentioned the prestigious Harvard Club after visit in that block in 2012.

It is amazing that so much happened (and happens) in such a tiny, hidden, part of New York.

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Waiting on The Algonquin
[Photo By: KPA]

Positively 44th Street
By: Alex Shoumatoff
Vanity Fair
June 12, 2014

Room 2806, the presidential suite in the Sofitel at 45 West 44th Street, goes for $3,000 a night, which is not out of line for a suite in Midtown Manhattan. The Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle has one for $18,000. But three grand is a lot more than the seedy Hotel Seymour, which occupied the Sofitel site until being demolished in 1983, used to charge for a room. The Seymour was one of the three welfare or S.R.O. (single-room occupancy) hotels, as they were also called, on the block—44th between Fifth and Sixth—where retired theater people had been living for years at reduced rates. In the 70s, I remember, I met one Broadway widow—a heavily rouged woman in her 80s who smoked cigarettes through a long black holder and called me “Dahling,” à la Tallulah Bankhead—at the Teheran, the bar down the block from the Seymour that everybody went to after work; it, too, is gone. The two other residential hotels were the Royalton, at 44 West 44th, and the Mansfield, at 12 West 44th, which were both renovated in the late 80s and 90s when the Times Square district was “Disneyfied,” as critics called the process. They are both now boutique hotels, though not as luxurious or pricey as the haute Euro Sofitel.

The Royalton was resurrected in 1988 by the hotelier Ian Schrager. In 1992 he brought in the downtown restaurateur Brian McNally, who had opened a string of hot spots the previous decade, including Indochine, the Odeon, and Canal Bar, to run its restaurant. McNally made the restaurant—called Forty Four—and the Royalton’s Philippe Starck-designed lobby the place to eat and meet and be seen, particularly for the literati, as the Algonquin Hotel across the street had been 60 years before, when the roués of the Round Table had their famous drunken luncheons there.

On May 14 of last year, between 12:07 and 12:13 p.m., Room 2806 in the Sofitel acquired a place in the annals of tawdriness and in the rich social history of the block, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who was leading the polls for France’s forthcoming presidential election, had a hurried sexual encounter with the Guinean housemaid Nafissatou Diallo as he was preparing to vacate the suite. The circumstances—whether it was consensual or an assault—are disputed, but after Strauss-Kahn was taken off a plane to Paris later that day and imprisoned on Rikers Island on charges that were later dropped because of issues with Ms. Diallo’s credibility, a female journalist in France came forth with a similar account of having been attacked by D.S.K. eight years earlier. His career at the I.M.F. and his French presidential aspirations were finished.

If anyone on the block was scandalized by this bit of Euro-loucheness, it would have been farther down toward Fifth Avenue, in the stately neo-Georgian Harvard Club, at 35 West 44th, and next door in the beguiling Beaux Arts New York Yacht Club, at 37, whose windows look like they were plucked from a galleon. But it would be a bit of a stretch for these bastions of the old East Coast Wasp imperium, or what is left of it, to feel like their escutcheons had been besmirched. They probably don’t bear much scrutiny themselves these days, the noblesse oblige and ethos of service and stewardship of the old blueblood ruling class having been hemorrhaging since the presidency of Nixon and being, at this point, pretty much gone. Plus, this block has seen it all. The illicit trysts that have taken place on it would be impossible to chronicle. Back in the 20s, the playwright George Kaufman, who was a member of the Round Table and one of the progenitors of situation comedy, ran into an old flame in the elevator of the Algonquin Hotel, on the arm of a new beau, whom she introduced as being “in cotton,” and he came out with a memorable one-liner: “And them that plants ’em is soon forgotten.”


Inside the Algonquin, 1986
By Peter Freed/The New York Times
(From the online slideshow on Vanity Fair's June 2012 article Positively 44th Street)

Many completely different worlds, many different cultures, networks, and scenes coexist on this one block of West 44th Street. You could spend your life trying to find out what happened and what is happening along this 250-yard stretch of pavement and not begin to scratch the surface. Its baseline component is the local Midtown culture, which is New York melting pot flavored with the flimflam of Tin Pan Alley and Times Square, both within spitting distance. In fact, the Hippodrome, the largest and most successful theater in New York in the first part of the 20th century, was right on the southeast corner of 44th and Sixth Avenue. Before that it was a carriage house and stable for the trotting horses of wealthy sportsmen of the Vanderbilt-Rockefeller set. Houdini made a five-ton elephant disappear before a crowd of more than 5,000 at the Hippodrome. The site today is occupied by a nondescript glass office tower.

But the indigenous Midtown culture is still alive and well, I was glad to find, in the arcade of the old New Yorker building, which runs from 28 West 44th Street to 25 West 43rd Street. From 1935 until 1991, The New Yorker magazine had its “Dickensian” offices, as they were invariably called, on the 18th, 19th, and 20th floors of this building (which was then known as the National Association Building). I had one of them when I was a staff writer at the magazine, from 1978 to 1990. It was tiny and spartan, with just enough room for a table and a chair, a bookshelf, and an ancient black Royal typewriter probably used by its previous tenant, a revered “fact” editor and reporter named St. Clair McKelway, whose demise had made it available. (A tall man who mumbled in his mustache and was given to bouts of paranoia, McKelway, who served as a public-relations officer for the military on Guam in 1944, is most remembered for firing off a telegram to the Pentagon accusing Admiral Chester Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific Fleet in World War II, of high treason.) “Fact” was the quirky New Yorker term for journalism, as opposed to fiction. It avoided being defined by what it wasn’t: nonfiction.

The arcade of the National Association Building was like a little self-contained global village where your basic necessities were taken care of. There was a barber, a tailor, a coffee shop, a newsstand, a watch-repair shop, even a post office. To me this arcade is the very omphalos—the navel—of Gotham. The guy at the Arcade Hair Styling Salon for Men and Women who cut my hair 30 years ago is still there, I noticed when I was passing through at the beginning of last December. His name is Aldo Nestico and he’s 67 now. Half a dozen old-timers, longtime customers from the neighborhood, were sitting in the salon’s waiting section in Miami Beach leisure suits. One of them was wearing a loud plaid golf cap. None of them looked like they particularly needed a haircut. But I did, my last cut being a three-dollar job in Borneo three months earlier. I booked a cut with Aldo for the following afternoon.

Aldo came over from Calabria in 1955 on the Andrea Doria, a year before it went down, “or I wouldn’t be here,” as he points out. He has cut a lot of famous people’s hair, including the Beatles’. But the guy with the stories, with the gift of gab, is snipping away at the next chair—Andreas Pavlou, who has been cutting hair in the neighborhood since 1964 and is originally from Cyprus. Having a captive audience who is all ears, he uncorks the following classic New York yarn.

‘It was around this time of year many years ago, a few weeks before Christmas. I am finishing a haircut at the shop across the street and suddenly the guy starts sweating and it’s cold outside and I says to him, ‘You don’t look so good. Maybe we should call an ambulance,’ and he says, ‘I’m O.K. I’m just coming down with a cold. I’m going to go home and kill my wife for giving me this virus.’ But when he gets up he starts staggering and asks if he can sit on the couch for a minute, and while he is lying there on his side he has a heart attack. I call an ambulance and by the time it arrives the guy is dead. The paramedic gives him CPR, but it’s no use. It’s 11 in the morning and everybody is starting to come. The paramedic says, ‘I have to leave him here so the police can come and make sure you didn’t do it.’ I says, ‘You can’t do that. It’ll be the end of my business.’ So we sit him up on the couch and cross his legs and put a New York Times in his hands and spread it out so nobody can see he’s dead. All day long customers come and sit right next to him and nobody notices. At five o’clock a huge guy comes and sits on the couch, and the corpse slumps over onto him, and I says to the corpse, ‘Look, if you want to take a nap, why don’t you get a hotel room,’ and I prop him back up and everything is still fine. Finally at 7:30 the cops come and one of them asks, ‘O.K., where’s the stiff?,’ and I says, ‘Over there on the couch,’ and he asks, ‘Well, did he pay you?,’ and I says ‘No,’ and the cop shakes his head and says, ‘The things people will do to get out of paying. But this is a new one,’ and I says to him, ‘Well, there’s a first time for everything.’ ”


The New York Yacht Club
Photograph By: Jonathan Becker
(From the online slideshow on Vanity Fair's June 2012 article Positively 44th Street)

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Memorial

Below is the beautiful Saint Peter and Saint Paul Cemetery near Philadelphia, where Larry Auster is buried. I took the picture in August 2013, and posted it, and several others I took, at my post Like as a Hart and a Cacophony of Cicadas.

I labeled the image: American Flags, Waving in the Veterans Section

American Flags


[Photo By: KPA]
And I posted a Yeats poem, but had some words I thought I could substitute:

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.

[From “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” by W.B. Yeats]

I could substitute the American flags, right across in the Veteran's section, for the daffodil and the lily, which were gently waving in the breeze.

So, for Memorial Day, I will substitute those words for Yeats':

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where Flags of America will wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Behind the Scenes

These are the hard-working men behind the scenes of Mississauga's revival. And they were all set in place by the city's last mayor, Hazel McCallion.

The question is of course if this is a real revival, which I think it has the makings of, or if it just adding infrastructure to accommodate the unmentionable: increased immigration.

I think it will in some way sort itself out. If the city revives itself in a true sense: higher quality buildings, a "luxury mall" as Square One is being structured, improved landscaping and surroundings with better parks and recreational areas, but above all a with a Canadian perspective, then it will attract for a longer term those that can afford to stay not just for quick real estate flips (buying and selling), but those who would stay to buy good homes for their families.

I am seeing more of the latter, which to my observations looks less Asian (Chinese and Indian) and more white (possibly those attracted from nearby cities, including Toronto).

Let's hope so.


The Jubilee Garden is full of magnolia trees.


The C-Cafe, which is adjacent to the Jubilee Garden, has two industrious chefs, cooking up their appetizing meals on a daily basis. Here is one, barely visible, preparing a dish.


I keep thinking they're brothers. "Cousins?" I asked, but not even that. "Then they must be from the same Welsh town," I joked. They looked Welsh to me.


These are the groundsmen preparing the area for a new addition in the Jubilee Garden: The Hazel Tree, in honor of the former (last) Mayor Hazel McCallion. What an apt recognition. A tough nut to crack! I asked them what they were working on, and it seems they were told only a few days ago the nature of the project. "I got the scoop!" I joked.


And Andrew Wickens, Parks Manager for the City of Mississauga, was in the garden discussing with other officials some details ont he tree, and the surrounding magnolia trees. He was kind enough to stand for a photograph.

He will be responsible for the Hazel Tree.

Hazel McCallion as mayor of Mississauga, sitting in a council session

Hazel McCallion on Mississauga's growth:

Growing up:
Growth is good, says Mississauga’s Hazel McCallion - within limits

Full article at: Toronto Star, Mar 27 2013

Facing pressure under Ontario’s Places to Grow Act to house more of the GTA’s population boom, Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion is pushing back.

At city council Wednesday, McCallion said Mississauga has accepted the province’s mandated growth targets but will not accept decisions by the Ontario Municipal Board that allow developers to build beyond those targets. The spurt of highrise construction is hurting the city’s already overstretched infrastructure, she said.
“They can’t be playing around with our land use like they do,” McCallion said of the province and the OMB, which rules on municipal and planning disputes.

Council unanimously passed a motion asking that Ontario’s Planning Act be amended so developers cannot appeal city council decisions to the OMB, if the city’s official plan is in compliance with Ontario’s growth strategy. The strategy sets municipal density targets that aim to encourage cities to build up rather than out.

McCallion and other councillors said developers, seeing profits in building even higher, are simply going to the OMB whenever they want densities for projects increased. The OMB then uses the growth plan as the rationale for ruling in favour of the developers. The end result is often more lucrative for builders, but puts pressure on already overstretched municipal services.

For Mississauga’s motion to take effect, it would have to be endorsed by Queen’s Park.

Councillors cited a number of high-density projects in Mississauga over the past few years that residents and council, adhering to the city’s official plan, opposed. But developers eventually got their way at the OMB [Ontario Municipal Board], they said.

“I am really concerned about the increased densities … our (infrastructure) is not designed to take the climate change and the increased densities,” McCallion said.
She said the increased densities beyond what , Mar 27 2013has been planned will cost Peel Region “at least a billion dollars” to take care of the extra garbage alone.

Frakturs, Fotografs, Farmicia, Francois, Flames and Fighting Songs

Here is the packed schedule I had in Philadelphia and New York. Visit these places, if you can...

I already posted on my visit to the Longwood Gardens (but further down in this post, I post a photograph which was on view from the Spring Blooms competition).

The New York Public Library
Exhibition: Over Here: WWI and the Fight for the American Mind





Let's All Be Americans Now
Lyrics and words by Irwin Berlin

[Verse 1]
Peace has always been our pray'r,
Now there's trouble in the air,
War is talked of ev'rywhere,
Still in God we trust;

Now that war's declared,
We'll show we're prepared,
And if fight we must.
It's up to you! What will you do?

[Chorus]
England or France may have your sympathy, over the sea,
But you'll agree That, now is the time, To fall in line,
You swore that you would so be true to your vow,
Let's all be Americans now. now.

[Verse 2]
Lincoln, Grant and Washington,
They were peaceful men, each one,
Still they took the sword and gun,
When real trouble came;
And I feel somehow, they are wond'ring now,
If we'll do the same.

[Repeat Chorus]

All this in the New York Public Library.

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Longwood Gardens
Photographic Exhibition: Spring Blooms
From the Delaware Photographic Society's annual Wilmington International Exhibition of Photography


Ellis Underkoffer

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Philadelphia Museum of Art
Exhibition: Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection


Pennsylvania German
Birth and Baptismal Certificate for Johannes Gass
1790-1800
Pen, ink and watercolor
12 3/4 x 15 1/2
Philadelphia Museum of Art

I got this postcard from the museum's shop. I couldn't find the exact piece on line, so what you see is my photograph (I don't have a scanner) of the postcard.

From what I can find out, the designer of this piece is known as Christian Beschler, the "Sussel Unicorn artist" according to this piece.

In 2007, Dr. Don Yoder identified the words gemacht von CB (made by CB) on two newly discovered "Sussel-Unicorn" taufscheine (birth and baptismal certificates).3 These initials belonged to the schoolmaster Christian Beschler,
[...]
His taufscheine are characterized by a bright orange or orange and yellow central rectangular area that contains the text adorned with compass stars and geometric designs. Whimsical unicorns and birds with manes eating berries, lions with faces, angels, hearts, half circles, compass stars, and pots of flowers fill the colorful documents. There seems to be an obsession to fill all available space. His religious text and drawing share these motifs.

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Farmicia
Food and Tonics

15 S. 3rd Street
(Between Market and Chestnut Streets)
Philadelphia



Here is the menu, but the lentil salad, with baked goat cheese, greens and sherry dressing is more than just a salad!

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The Red Flame Diner

67 West 44th St
New York, NY 10036



Good diner food for a fair price. Here's the menu.

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Plaza Hotel's Food Hall:
Francois Payard Patisserie







The Passion fruit (with a light chocolate) macaron, for $2.50, will take you down a few blocks.

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I didn't make it to the Morgan, the Cloisters, Macy's or Bergdorf Goodman. But, so far, it looks like New York will stand for a while.

Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Hurried Views

I had another whirlwind of a trip to Philadelphia (and New York) last week. I finally arrived at my destination in Philadelphia after a couple of incidents. This seems to be a regular occurence on my trips. The last time involved a Greyhound bus which took me to the wrong destination (see here, where I ended up in Cleveland on my way to Steubenville Ohio). And this time it was a Canada goose.

We got stuck in Mount Cobb, Pennsylvania after a north-migrating (returning to Canada, actually) Canada goose smashed into the windshield on the driver's side. We were ceremoniously escorted to the nearest Burger King, and about three hours later, a replacement bus took us to our final destination of Port Authority.

But the trip was a wonderful respite, and I wasn't going to let a couple of incidents spoil it. I managed to pack in, with the help of my friends, quite a schedule.

We visited Larry's grave in the beautiful St. Peter and St. Paul Cemetery in Springfield Pennsylvania, to commemorate the second year of his death. The statue behind me is St. Paul's. And I am standing under the oak tree, which I write about here.



Below, I've posted the various photographs I took over these five days.

On the Road through Ontario, New York State and Pennsylvania (and New Jersey for a bit)








At Buffalo














That is a small lake in the background, I tried to find out its name, but it was too small to find on my google map.





I finally could see the New York skyline in New Jersey. It was dark, and I would reach the city's bus terminal about an hour later. I would travel to Philadelphia the next morning.

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Pennsylvania

Longwood Conservatory, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania


Glory-of-the-snow flowers blooming in a field at Longwood Gardens



Glory-of-the-snow are "one of the first harbingers of spring," according to this site. We were just about to leave the cold (and long, this year) winter and the snow as I got to Philadelphia, and this field of flowers showed us that spring is ahead.


Star Magnolia tree in bloom


Pierre Dupont Conservatory

DuPont built his home above the conservatory, and could see the plants from his bedroom window!

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Homes near the area where I stayed, a couple of hours from Phildelphia









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New York for a day


Marble floor at the New York Public Library


Portrait of James Lenox, founder of the Lenox Library of the NYPL

I should have got just a close-up of the portrait, but here is one in black and white of I think the same one.


View from the main entrance at the New York Public Library, with 41st Street


Plaque with Yeats Poem in the Library Way, on 41st Street between 5th and Park


Atlas at the Rockefeller

The reflection in the glass in the background is of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. It seems an apt metaphor for the seizure of the pagan, Roman god of by Christians.

I was so busy trying to get the Atlas image, that I didn't even notice the reflection.

As some kind of penance - inadverantly - I went to Saint Patrick's and lit a candle.


Lions at the Rockefeller Plaza" "Arms of England"
Frieze by Lee Lawrie

The 50th entrance to the British Empire building features three walking lions looking out towards the viewer from the building. Below is a row of red Tudor roses. [From this site]

Saint Francis of Assisi with birds at the Rockefeller Plaza
Frieze by Lee Lawrie

More on Lew Lawrie here.

All the Rockefeller friezes are here.


Manhattan Building

I took this somewhere mid-town (between 47th and 59th streets) on Madison or Fifth. I should have written down the street.


Plaza Hotel entrance


Pomona Statue and fountain by the Grand Army Plaza, next to the Plaza Hotel and by Central Park

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Saint Patrick's Cathedral Stained Glass, with Mary

I asked a docent in the cathedral if he could show me any stained glass with Mary, since I didn't have much time.

I lit a candle under the stained glass as I left. The stained glass is near the door (it is the second one in at the right entry), and there are candles right underneath it.

Here is another where in my rush I neglected to take one of the full glass, and instead, I took the bottom half, where the intricate lace-like design caught my attention.


Saint Patrick's Stained Glass

Here is a photo of the full stained glass.

Several sites write that Henry Ely made the stained glass, which they title "Three Baptisms." But they don't reference that information. It is strangely hard to find information on the stained glass online, but here is something in Google Books, under the title: New York City: Vol 1, New York City Guide (page 345):

Forty-five of the seventy stained glass windows are from the studios of Nicholas Lorin at Chartres, and Henry Ely at Nantes. Rich in tone, some dark some of pastel lightness - and combined with elaborate tracery, they glow in the sunshine, but unfortunately, much of the detail in them is too delicate to be legible at a distance. They become simply patterns of red, yellow, green, blue and purple against the framework of the stone walls which, in the dusky night, takes on a tone of deepest gray.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat