Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where one of the Strange Company staffers shares our HQ's usual motto.A "lost" manuscript about King Arthur has been discovered.A cow that loved sausages not wisely but too well.The London that never was.The theory that our names can shape our appearance.Meet what might be the weirdest animal in the world.The Zambia rock revolution.A brief look at life from
Included in yesterday’s trip to Fall River was a stop at Miss Lizzie’s Coffee shop and a visit to the cellar to see the scene of the tragic demise of the second Mrs. Lawdwick Borden and two of the three little children in 1848. I have been writing about this sad tale since 2010 and had made a previous trip to the cellar some years ago but was unable to get to the spot where the incident occured to get a clear photograph. The tale of Eliza Borden is a very sad, but not uncommon story of post partum depression with a heartrending end. You feel this as you stand in the dark space behind the chimney where Eliza ended her life with a straight razor after dropping 6 month old Holder and his 3 year old sister Eliza Ann into the cellar cistern. Over the years I have found other similar cases, often involving wells and cisterns, and drownings of children followed by suicides of the mothers. These photos show the chimney, cistern pipe, back wall, dirt and brick floor, original floorboards forming the cellar ceiling and what appears to be an original door. To be in the place where this happened is a sobering experience. My thanks to Joe Pereira for allowing us to see and record the place where this sad occurrence unfolded in 1848. R.I.P. Holder, Eliza and Eliza Ann Borden. Visit our Articles section above for more on this story. The coffee shop has won its suit to retain its name and has plans to expand into the shop next door and extend its menu in the near future.
Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 19 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge)
oapy Smith begins an empire in Denver.Operating the prize package soap sell racket in 1884.This is page 19, the continuation of page 18, and dated April 14 - May 5, 1884, the continuation of deciphering Soapy Smith's "star" notebook from the Geri Murphy's collection. A complete introduction to
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading →
National Police Gazette, June 1, 1889.On May 12, 1889, the janitor of the Clifton Boat Club on Staten Island found the body of a young woman floating in the water. Though badly decomposed, Dr. S.A. Robinson identified her as Mary Tobin, who had recently resigned from her job in his office. Mary Tobin’s life was clouded with mysteries and contradictions. She had come to Staten Island from
There’s a stone fortress with a battlement-like central tower and a double staircase entrance at the corner of Riverside Drive and 140th Street. As striking as this fortified castle is when you encounter it from the sidewalk, viewing it from the West Side Highway helps you truly absorb its out-of-place Medieval feel. Five stories high […]
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
A gang of female rogues, of the East Side, New York, work a little racket of their own.
A New York reporter, while at Seventy-first street, between First and Second avenues, almost lost his eye-glasses and his composure when a girl accosted him and said: “Hey, there cully, chip in wunst for the beer.” She was backed up by half a dozen other amazons, all of whom wore their hair in straight bangs. “Hurry up, now. Chuck in your dust.” The girl took an affectionate grasp on the reporter’s coat-collar and the others closed around. Then the scribe went hurridly into his pocket, flashed up his second last quarter and gave it the female rough. Then they all scattered suddenly in answer to a signal, and a moment later the graceful outlines of Detective Salmon, of the Twenty-eighth precinct, loomed up. He laughed hastily. “You’ve been caught by “Lena’s gang,” he said, “and I suppose they saw the color of your coin. It’s just as well you did give them something, because they use their hands vigorously. Their leader in their neighborhood is a rather pretty Polish Jewess named Lena Meyerheimer, who works when she is not idle at one of the cigar factories up on First avenue. She and her younger sisters are about as tough as young girls can be. The congregate with and emulate the boys of the Sylvan Star gang. Most all her followers are cigar makers, too. That trade seems to have especial attraction for bad girls.”
Reprinted from the National Police Gazette, October 18, 1884.
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841