It’s been a glorious week!!
Jake and Shea blessed me with a visit.
We were able to spend five days wandering around the boroughs of New
York and enjoyed eating and laughing and talking.
Monday was the usual with FHE. Tuesday was temple day so the sister
missionaries whose companions were at the temple came over to keep me
company. We played games, baked cookies
and had lunch (leftover taco soup from FHE).
It was a fun day.
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| Sisters Hilliard and Fitt playing Quiddler |
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| I was up at 5:00 AM to take another senior couple to the airport. After lunch, I crashed to the amusement of my dear sisters. |
Wednesday was trainer/trainee meeting. I forever enjoy being with and
teaching/helping the missionaries. That
afternoon, Jake and Shea arrived. We
went to Flushing and had dinner at Mizumi and then to Bayside to the French
Workshop Artisan Bakery for the world’s best chocolate dessert, The Duke.
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| The food at Mizumi is really varied. Everything from sushi to octopus.
This is Jake's plate. I can't believe he ate an octopus!! He hates fish. |
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| The Duke |
Thursday we went back to Flushing for Korean chicken noodle
soup at Arirang. And then next door to
the restaurant, to a new Korean bakery for some pastries. Among other delights, we had a red bean
doughnut. It was good but not a favorite
for Jake. He ate the doughnut part and I
ate the red bean part. Yes, I’m
weird. Jake took most of the food
pictures so I don’t have them to add but the doughnut was a round ball filled
with the red bean paste. Not the typical doughnut with the hole in the middle.
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| We were all so hungry we didn't get pictures of our soup. The noodles
for this Korean chicken noodle soup are handmade. There are two types: regular long noodles and square or "pan" noodles. I asked for both. This is a picture of what I brought home. The noodles are thick. It reminds me of the noodles my Grandma Terry used to make. Thick and a little chewy. Every time we went to St George to see her she would make this soup. Fond memories. |
Thursday evening I went with Anthea to a BYU Alumni
Association banquet sponsored by New York Latter-day Saints Professionals Association
at the Catholic Riverside Church in upper Manhattan. Elder Holland was the guest speaker. He came to present a Visionary Leadership
Award to His Eminence, Timothy Cardinal Dolan.
We had a dinner and several talks and scholarship presentations. It was a pleasant evening.
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| Anthea Pierre |
Friday Shea, Jake and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge
and had pizza at a renowned pizzeria, Grimaldi’s. Good stuff!
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| Train to Manhattan |
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| Statue in City Hall Park. I giggle at the expression on his face and the bird on his head. |
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| Black squirrel |
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| Brooklyn Bridge Shea & Jake |
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| Grimaldi's |
Here is some information about Grimaldi’s:
“Grimaldi's Pizzeria is an American pizzeria chain from the New York City area with several restaurants throughout the United States. Its most famous restaurant is under the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn at 1 Front Street, next door to its original location. It does not sell slices, only whole pies. The pizzas are renowned for being cooked by coal-fired brick oven.HistoryPatsy Grimaldi, the founder of Grimaldi's Pizzeria, learned to make pizza at age ten at Patsy's Pizzeria, his uncle Patsy Lancieri's restaurant in Italian Harlem in 1941. Decades later, Grimaldi decided to go into business for himself and originally planned to his own restaurant in Manhattan. However, Grimaldi believed coal-fired brick ovens produced the best pizza and new coal ovens were illegal in Manhattan. As a result, Grimaldi opened Grimaldi's Pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York in 1990.
In the late 1990s, Patsy Grimaldi retired, selling the Grimaldi's name and franchise (except for the Hoboken locations) to restaurateur Frank Ciolli. In 2011, the building's owner declined to renew Ciolli's lease, so he renovated an abandoned bank next door and moved the restaurant over. The next year, Patsy Grimaldi came out of retirement and opened a new pizzeria called Juliana's Pizza in the original building, resulting in considerable enmity between himself and Ciolli.”
I have eaten at Juliana’s too a few
weeks ago. Both are delicious. There are always long lines in front of each
restaurant, so the moral is, stand in the shorter line. Both are excellent pizzas.
Friday evening we had to experience
another Duke so we drove back to Bayside and then because we were so close, we
found our way to Great Neck on the north shore of Long Island to look out over
the sound to Connecticut. Gorgeous
sunset.
Saturday we planned to go to the
Montauk Lighthouse but we got a later start than planned so we opted for the
Fire Island Lighthouse. I know I told
you about Fire Island a couple of blogs ago but this time I actually walked out
onto the island and into the ocean. Fun
day!!!
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| Started the day at a Colombian bakery. We agreed it all looked delicious
but was lacking in flavor. The fillings were made of agave. Jake has decided that "cactus pastries" are not high on his "let's go get some" list. |
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| Yummy looking pastries- false advertising. |
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| Walking out across the marsh on Fire Island toward the Lighthouse. |
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| Fire Island deer. Last trip I saw a fox. |
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| Deer watchers. |
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| Fresnel lens. (Info at end of blog.) |
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| They are trying to restore the beach so there is a walkway through the sand. I liked it. No sand in your shoes! |
Saturday evening we hopped on the
train and went into Manhattan for pizza in Hell’s Kitchen. Info at end of blog on the area.
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| Only pic I took in Hell's Kitchen |
Yesterday was the frosting on the
cake. Ten days ago, the mission sent out
an announcement that there would be a mission wide conference on October 16th. No other information. A mission wide conference is normally held
only once a year at Christmas, so this abnormal announcement had everyone
buzzing and wondering what was going on.
Elder Holland came and talked to our
mission. It was a special spiritual
occasion. He shook hands and looked into
the eyes of every missionary before the meeting began. As he got up to speak, he explained that he
does that because he NEEDS to. He said he needed to interview each missionary.
He explained that he wanted something approximating one on one time with each
and every one of us. He said that he doesn't really care too much about our
names or where we came from because he will forget it a few minutes later...but
what he wanted was to just look into our eyes and "interview" us. He
said that is all it takes, shaking our hand and looking into our eyes. With
that he looks into our souls.
He
complimented the spirit he found in our mission. He said that if he had found that our mission
was not ready spiritually to learn what he had to teach he would not have given
the talk he had prepared. He spent an
hour and twenty minutes at a chalk board right down on the floor talking to us
about the Book of Mormon. (It was like being in a Sunday School class.
Amazing!) He reminded us that it is the
most perfect book on earth and a testament of Jesus Christ. He showed the missionaries ways to teach
investigators and to get people to listen and to read the Book of Mormon. We all left on a spiritual high.
I
would encourage each of you to read and re-read the Book of Mormon. That is the only real way to learn about our
Savior, the things we must do to return to live with our Father in Heaven and
to become truly converted.
I
love you my family and friends.
The Fire Island Lighthouse is
a visible landmark on the Great
South Bay, in southern Suffolk County, New York on
the western end of Fire Island, a barrier
island off the southern coast of Long
Island. The lighthouse is located within Fire Island National Seashore and just to the east of Robert Moses State
Park. It is part of the Fire Island
Light Station which contains the light, keepers quarters, the lens building
containing the original first-order Fresnel
lens, and a boat house.
The current lighthouse is a 180-foot (55 m) stone tower that began operation in 1858 to replace the 74-foot
(23 m) tower originally built in 1826. The United States Coast Guard
decommissioned the light in 1974. In 1982 the Fire Island Lighthouse
Preservation Society (FILPS) was formed to preserve the lighthouse. FILPS
raised over $1.2 million to restore the tower and light. On May 25, 1986 the United States Coast Guard returned the Fire Island Lighthouse to an active aid to
navigation. On February 22, 2006, the light became a private aid to navigation.
It continues to be on the nautical charts, but is operated and maintained by
the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society and not the USCG. It was added
to the National Register of
Historic Places in 1981 and a boundary increase for
the national historic district occurred in 2010.
It is listed as Fire Island Light,
number 695, in the USCG light lists.
When the lighthouse was built it was
on the edge of Fire Island Inlet
and marked the western end of Fire Island. However Fire Island has extended
itself through accumulating sand so that the lighthouse is now nearly five
miles (8.0 km) from the western end of the island at Democrat Point.
The Archives Center at the Smithsonian National
Museum of American History has a collection
(#1055) of souvenir postcards of
lighthouses and has digitized 272 of these and made them available online.
These include postcards of Fire Island Light with links to
customized nautical charts provided by National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
The lighthouse celebrated its 150th
Anniversary in 2008, the same year as the 100th Anniversary of Robert Moses
State Park.
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| How a spherical Fresnel lens collimates light |
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1: Cross section of a spherical Fresnel lens
2: Cross section of a conventional spherical plano-convex lens of equivalent power |
A Fresnel lens (/freɪˈnɛl/ fray-NEL or /ˈfrɛznəl/ FREZ-nəl) is
a type of compact lens originally developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel for lighthouses.
The design allows the construction
of lenses of large aperture and
short focal length
without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of
conventional design. A Fresnel lens can be made much thinner than a comparable
conventional lens, in some cases taking the form of a flat sheet. A Fresnel
lens can capture more oblique light from a light source, thus allowing the
light from a lighthouse equipped with one to be visible over greater distances.
Once a bastion of poor and working-class Irish Americans, Hell's Kitchen's location in Midtown has changed its personality since the 1970s. The 1969 City Planning Commission's Plan for New York City reported that development pressures related to its Midtown location were driving people of modest means from the area, and the gritty reputation that Hell's Kitchen developed afterward kept real estate prices below those of most other areas of Manhattan. Since the early 1990s, the area has been gentrifying, and rents have risen rapidly. Located close to both Broadway theatres and the Actors Studio training school, Hell's Kitchen has long been a home to learning and practicing actors.
Several explanations exist for the
original name. An early use of the phrase appears in a comment Davy
Crockett made about another notorious Irish
slum in Manhattan, Five Points.
According to the Irish Cultural Society of the Garden City Area:
When, in 1835, Davy Crockett said,
"In my part of the country, when you meet an Irishman, you find a
first-rate gentleman; but these are worse than savages; they are too mean to
swab hell's kitchen." He was referring to the Five Points.
According to an article by Kirkley Greenwell, published online by the Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood
Association:
No one can pin down the exact origin
of the label, but some refer to a tenement on 54th Street as
the first "Hell's Kitchen." Another explanation points to an infamous
building at 39th as the true original. A gang and a local dive took the name as
well.... a similar slum also existed in London and was known as Hell's Kitchen.
Local historian Mary Clark explained
the name thus:
...first appeared in print on
September 22, 1881 when a New York Times
reporter went to the West 30s with a police guide to get details of a multiple
murder there. He referred to a particularly infamous tenement at 39th Street
and Tenth Avenue as "Hell's Kitchen," and said that the entire
section was "probably the lowest and filthiest in the city."
According to this version, 39th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues became
known as Hell's Kitchen and the name was later expanded to the surrounding
streets.
Another version ascribes the name's
origins to a German restaurant in the area known as Heil's Kitchen, after its
proprietors. But the most common version traces it to the story of "Dutch
Fred the Cop," a veteran policeman, who with his rookie partner, was
watching a small riot on West 39th Street near Tenth Avenue. The rookie is
supposed to have said, "This place is hell itself," to which Fred
replied, "Hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's Kitchen."
Hell's Kitchen has stuck as the
most-used name of the neighborhood, even though real estate developers have
offered alternatives of "Clinton" and "Midtown West", or
even "the Mid-West". The Clinton name, used by the municipality of
New York City, originated in 1959 in an attempt to link the area to DeWitt Clinton Park
at 52nd and Eleventh Avenue, named after the 19th century New
York governor.
There were multiple changes that
helped Hell's Kitchen integrate with New York City proper. The first was
construction of the Hudson River Railroad, whose initial leg – the 40 miles (64 km) to Peekskill –
was completed on September 29, 1849, By the end of 1849, it stretched to Poughkeepsie and
in 1851 it extended to Albany. The track ran at a steep grade up Eleventh Avenue, as far
as 60th Street.
The formerly rural riverfront was
industrialized by businesses, such as tanneries, that used the river for
shipping products and dumping waste. The neighborhood that would later be known
as Hell's Kitchen, started forming in the southern part of the 22nd Ward in the
mid-19th century. Irish immigrants – mostly refugees from the Great Famine –
found work on the docks and railroad along the Hudson
River and established shantytowns there.
After the American Civil War,
there was an influx of people who moved to New York city. The tenements that
were built became overcrowded quickly. Many who lived in this congested,
poverty-stricken area turned to gang life. Following Prohibition, implemented in 1919, the district's many warehouses were
ideal locations for bootleg distilleries for the rumrunners who controlled illicit liquor. At the start of the 20th
century, the neighborhood was controlled by gangs, including the violent Gopher
Gang led by One Lung Curran and later by
Owney
Madden. Early gangs, like the Hell's Kitchen Gang,
transformed into organized crime entities, around the same time that Owney
Madden became one of the most powerful
mobsters in New York. It became known as the "most dangerous area on the
American Continent".
After the repeal of Prohibition, many of the organized crime elements moved into other rackets,
such as illegal gambling and union shakedowns. The postwar era was
characterized by a flourishing waterfront, and longshoreman work was plentiful.
By the end of the 1950s, however, the implementation of containerized shipping led to the decline of the West Side
piers and many longshoremen found themselves out of work. In addition, the
construction of the Lincoln
Tunnel had split Hell's Kitchen in the
Lincoln Tunnel ramp area at 39th Street, and anything southwest of 39th Street
and Tenth Avenue was virtually condemned. -
In 1959, an aborted rumble between
rival Irish and Puerto Rican gangs led to the notorious "Capeman"
murders in which two innocent teenagers were killed. By 1965, Hell's Kitchen
was the home base of the Westies, an Irish
mob aligned with the Gambino crime family. It was not until the early 1980s that widespread gentrification began to alter the demographics of
the longtime working-class Irish
American neighborhood. The 1980s also saw an
end to the Westies' reign of terror, when the gang lost all of its power after
the RICO convictions of most of its principals in 1986.
Today,
Hell's Kitchen has become an increasingly upscale neighborhood of affluent
young professionals as well as residents from the "old days", with
rents in the neighborhood having increased dramatically above the average in
Manhattan.
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