Abby Epplett, Historian

On Thursday, March 20 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., I watched the second Parked at Home webinar of the 2025 season. This is the fourth year of the  Parked at Home series of virtual talks hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BLRV) and other sites in the National Park Service, along with the third year of summaries appearing on my blog. The presentations this year are interpreted into American Sign Language (ASL) by Sherrolyn King. The hour-long webinars will be uploaded to the BlackstoneNPS YouTube channel and available to view at any time. The second installment to this year’s series was Saratoga National Historical Park (SARA) in New York and featured Eric Schnitzer, a park ranger who has worked at Saratoga for almost thirty years.

On October 24, 2023 at 6:00 p.m., I watched a talk hosted by Skyscraper Museum focused on the book Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change by Dr. Lynne Sagalyn , published by MIT Press a few days ago. Sagalyn is a professor emerita and founding director of Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at Columbia Business School . Her latest book is a sequel to Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon published by MIT Press 20 years ago in 2003. Joining Sagalyn were Carol Willis , the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, and Alison Isenberg , a history professor in the Department of History at Princeton University and fellow author who specializes in urban architecture. Willis opened and closed the webinar, while Isenberg acted as a moderator during the conversational second half. Sagalyn began the webinar with a presentation covering the history of Times Square from the 1890s to the present. The area was originally called Longacre Square and served as...

Early tonight — Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. — I watched the latest webinar hosted by the Skyscraper Museum , AT&T Building: Philip Johnson and the Postmodern Skyscraper . Previous webinars hosted by Skyscraper Museum and appear on this blog were The Great American Transit Disaster , CBS Headquarters , and Australia Square . The talk was led by Alan Ritchie and Scott Johnson (no relation to Philip Johnson ), both of whom worked on the AT&T project. Ritchie was picked by Philip Johnson soon after arriving in New York City from England as a young designer, while Scott Johnson went to New York City to be hired by Johnson after seeing preliminary drawings for the AT&T building on the front page of The New York Times . Scott Johnson began the talk by describing other buildings designed by Philip Johnson. For real estate investment company Hines Interests , he designed the “Lipstick Building” at 885 Third Avenue in New York City, which opened in 1986. H...

Earlier tonight — Tuesday, August 15, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. — I learned all about skyscrapers and CBS Headquarters. Hosted by the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan, NY , the talk CBS Headquarters: A Modern Concrete Skyscraper focused on “Black Rock”, a building regarded as the first concrete office tower in New York City, NY . Giving the talk was internationally acclaimed architect Matthys Levy , who assisted with the construction process of Black Rock and boasts an impressive design portfolio. As principal architect at Weidlinger Associates, Inc. (WAI) , an American structural engineering company that merged with a similar but larger firm, Thornton Tomasetti , back in 2015, his influence is evident on several great cultural venues that I have visited, including the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY ; Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA ; and the Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium in Boston, MA . Additionall...

On Thursday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m. I watched a webinar via Zoom that focused on the life and work of American painter George Clair Tooker . The talk, called George Tooker: Modern Life & Magical Realism , was lead by Jane Oneail of Culturally Curious . I last heard Oneail speak a month ago in May when she presented Revolutionary Design: Modern Architecture in New England . Like last time, the event was sponsored by the Greater Manchester Integrated Library Cooperative or GMILCS , which describes itself as “a nonprofit consortium of public and academic libraries in New Hampshire”. The talk began with an introduction to the life of George Tooker. He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1920 to an Episcopalian family. His mother was half Cuban, and Tooker considered himself to be mixed-race but passed as White. He began painting around 1927 at age seven, and by the time he was a junior in high school, he was accepted into the prestigious Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. ...

Yesterday, on May 16, I watched a webinar about The Great American Transit Disaster based on a book written by speaker Nicholas “Nick” Dagen Bloom and published by the University of Chicago Press . The Skyscraper Museum in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City , which is part of New York City , hosted this talk via Zoom with a livestream available on YouTube . Museum founder, director, and curator Carol A. Willis introduced the talk and facilitated the Q & A after the main presentation. Robert L. Fishman , a professor at University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning , joined Bloom and Willis in conversation near the end of the talk. Bloom began his talk with the question, “Was the destruction and subsequent poor quality of mass transit inevitable in twentieth century America?” Some historians believe the rise of automobile culture in the 1940s and 1950s brought the end of mass transit such as streetcars, trolleys, and local trains. This p...

On Thursday, March 9 at 7:00 p.m., I attended the second session of the 2023 Parked at Home series hosted via Zoom by Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park . This webinar was presented by park rangers Allison Horrocks of BRVNHP and Lauren D’Elia of Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration , part of Statue of Liberty National Monument . Horrocks began with an introduction to Ellis Island, describing as an “Island of Hope and Island of Tears” for immigrants coming to the United States. Prior to the opening of Ellis Island, immigrants experienced very different circumstances. English immigrant Samuel Slater, who built the first industrial textile mill in Pawtucket, RI, arrived in the winter of 1789 as a twenty-one year old who could not afford to pay the tax on his trunk. He did not have to pass through a checkpoint, as was the experience of later immigrants. “Slater’s experiment” was a turning point in the young United States, during the country into an industri...