Blog Archives

The Evolution of Our Oddest Holiday   I had a much more serious subject in mind for this month’s column, but couldn’t find the data I needed in time to complete it. To make a serious point, you need to […]

Some people and things you might have seen one century ago, at Christmastime   It had been a dramatic year, one that had seen perhaps the only racially prompted lynch-mob riot in American history in which the only people injured […]

The doctors and patient who pioneered a new surgery on Gay Street If you browse around 19th-century graveyards as much as we do, and do some quick math, you’ll find an alarming number of untimely deaths of young married women. […]

And the Electrical Wizard of St. Charles Avenue Ayres Hall is a century old this year, and maybe, finally, it’s as old as people always thought it was. Actually, some newcomers, innocent of the challenges of the frontier era, see […]

  A sexual assault, a downtown lynch mob, and a sheriff’s forceful response One century ago this month, an angry crowd gathered on Gay Street at Hill Avenue. Their objective was the old fortress-like jail known as the County Bastille. […]

This is a story of a kid who was scared of a graveyard. It’s also the story of the founder of a major American institution, a cultural leader who changed a whole profession, established a landmark, and introduced a new […]

We will remember this. Sixteen months after we began canceling events, we’re coming back out. The virus is still afoot, and nightclubs and festivals aren’t fully booked yet, but enough people feel safe that we are emerging from our cocoons, […]

This summer marks the 130th anniversary of a civil-rights convention that was decades ahead of its time—and helped introduce some charismatic Black leaders of the future.   In 1891, a national conference of African American civil-rights activists, recently organized in Chicago, chose to […]

The obscure and contradictory story of Haywire Mac   In that interesting masonry peninsula where southern Old North narrows to a point as Broadway encroaches on Central, there, off Irwin Street, is a large, colorful mural on the back of […]