If Vaux could talk
Considering the other half of the Central Park design team.
The Dead Beat
Dispatch from Death’s door
Having been dead, I can’t testify to exactly what happened as I lay on my back.
The Schindler of Kingston
Part mischievous trickster, part Old-World aristocrat, László Ocskay saved over 2000 Jews from the Holocaust. But because of Cold War politics, few in his native Hungary knew about it. He lived his last years quietly in Kingston. Recognition came later.
Harvey G. Eastman: College founder, mayor and assemblyman who cured ‘the sickly city’ and got the railroad bridge built
One newspaper of the time described thriving but cholera-ridden Poughkeepsie as, “A fine place to live, with fine schools and churches and railroad accommodations, well governed but oh, how sickly.”
The Dead Beat: Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest who tried to reconcile science and religion
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is buried in a small cemetery at the Culinary Institute in Poughkeepsie. “It is doubtful,” Flannery O’Connor wrote, “if any Christian of this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has seen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has cast upon it.”
How a Kingston-born lawyer became the Civil War spymaster
Sharpe’s approach to intelligence-gathering was praised by the CIA more than a century after his death. One writer said if it had been employed pre-911, that attack may never have happened. What might have been…