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Manhattan Sinks – A personal account of September 11, 2001

I wrote this the night I got home from Manhattan on September 11, 2001.  I worked in Manhattan at the time, about ten blocks north of the World Trade Center.  The train I took from my home in Jersey City, New Jersey, would arrive beneath the World Trade Center, and I'd walk from there.  I cleaned up the piece a few days after I wrote it, but this is pretty much what I remember. I also remember how we used to refer to what happened on that day.  We called that day "Tuesday" for the first week, because that's what it was.  Then "last Tuesday," once next Tuesday came around, and then "the eleventh".  I don't remember hearing the term "9/11" until almost a month later.  I've never liked the term, and I still refer to it as "September 11".  This might seem like a picayune point, only of mild interest to linguists, but I think it shows how we were trying to sort out what had happened.  It was a tragedy, to be sure, but the

The Midnight Terrors: Baseball's Original Thugs

The St. Bonaventure College baseball team in the 1890s.  How can you play the game without a splendid uniform? Probably the nastiest team in the history of baseball—or in any sport, ever—were the Midnight Terrors.  The Midnight Terrors started out in the 1890s not as athletes but as a teenage street gang, operating out of Manhattan’s First Ward—what’s now known as Battery Park and the Financial District.  Their ages ranged from 11 to 19, and they gave themselves that name because they did their best work at night.  When forming baseball teams got popular, they got the idea to form their own team.  They weren’t allowed to form a team unless they had their own uniforms, which was a problem.  Uniforms cost money, and no one was willing to sponsor them.  Their solution was to start the Midnight Terrors’ Uniform Fund, which was supported entirely by a rash of armed robberies.  They picked pockets, snatched purses, robbed people at gunpoint and knifepoint, and even robbed business

New York's First Subway: The Beach Pneumatic Transit

In 1869, traffic in Manhattan was a nightmare.  It's not so great today, but it could be a lot worse.  Broadway, the main north/south artery, was regularly clogged with horse carts, pedestrians and omnibuses, slowly making their way up and down the island.  The avenues of New York, which also run north to south, weren't much better.  There had to be a better way.  A train would make sense, except that the city was so crowded, there was nowhere to lay the tracks.  An underground train would be great, but the only engines available at the time were steam engines, which give off a lot of smoke.  An underground train would be impossible to adequately ventilate. Alfred Ely Beach An inventor from Springfield, Massachusetts named Alfred Ely Beach thought he had a solution.  He conceived what he called the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which he proposed would be New York's first subway system.  He imagined a series of underground cars that would be rushed along not by steam locom