Down the Rabbit Hole
Taught by Ben Feldman
Benjamin Feldman has lived and worked in New York City for the past forty-four years. His essays and book reviews about New York City and American history and about Yiddish culture have appeared on-line and in print in CUNY’s Gotham History Blotter, The New Partisan Review, Ducts literary magazine, and in his blog, The New York Wanderer, which appears at www.newyorkwanderer.com. Ben’s first book, Butchery on Bond Street – Sexual Politics and the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-bellum New York, appeared in May, 2007, about an infamous unsolved murder case from the 19th century, which, in the words of The New Yorker, is told by the author "like a gaslight-era episode of "Law & Order."
His second book, Call Me Daddy - Babes and Bathos in Edward West Browning’s Jazz-Age New York, appeared in June, 2009. The retelling of a notorious tabloid scandal "captures in delicious fashion the philandering real estate magnate in all his buffoonery" according to Sam Roberts in The New York Times.
Feldman’s ongoing projects involve a biographical work about Henry Knight Dyer, the first non-family member to be president of the Dennison Manufacturing Company, a biography in the works about William Niblo, the pre-eminent theater promoter of mid-19th century New York, and an investigation into the life of an early 20th century New York City Jewish saloon-keeper named Sol Goldberg, whose efforts to forestall economic ruin at the advent of Prohibition ended up as a Broadway show.
Found objects and forgotten stories intrigue us all. Join historian, archivist and raconteur Benjamin Feldman as he shares the stories of four found objects and long-forgotten New York scandals from the 19th and 20th centuries. You'll learn research skills and tons of New York history, all the better to harness your own passion for knowing what came before us, and what we're looking at that we do not see.
Whether it's your grandparents' attic or a promising curbside find, all around us lie physical items, quotidian stuff, whose worthy notice escapes us. The simplest piece of paper or flimsy junk holds a story too rich to imagine, until you start to peel its layers off. From a simple leather change purse to a cheap paper expense book, learn to grasp the gold that's buried just below the surface. Your license to wonder and to create will be granted and learned, post haste.
You'll finish the course knowing where to go and how to do it: old real estate records, genealogical research, resources resources resources, availabe, FREE, right at your fingertips here in New York. Green-Wood Cemetery will be unfolded before your eyes too, as Ben shares his knowledge of this fabulous historical warehouse, just a shot away.
No homework, just yakking and pictures: the class will meet Thursday June 9 at XXXXX (not the Brainery!)
