Washington and Water streets in Brooklyn’s DUMBO district is a favorite destination for social media shooters capturing the view of the Empire State Building between the legs of the Manhattan Bridge.
A friend of mine commented recently that this area, now so popular with tourists, was not so long ago the kind of neighborhood where bodies might be dumped. I’m not sure that’s true, but he did prompt me to go back and look at when DUMBO became a thing.
The official story — yes, official, promulgated by the Dumbo Business Improvement District — is that local residents came up with the name in 1978. Some accounts say that the name was meant to be off-putting to real-estate developers who might seek to gentrify the area.
The earliest media mention I can readily find appeared as an item in the Dec. 13, 1981, edition of the New York Daily News:
“First there was SoHo, which stood for South of Houston. Then Tribeca, for Triangle Below Canal. Now an area of lofts and small businesses near Brooklyn Heights that is beginning to attract artist has been unofficially christened the District Underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.”
Note the variation: “District Underneath” rather than “Down Under.” The original name may well have been “district” given the fact residents reportedly considered an alternate name: “District Around the Navy Yard Annex,” or DANYA.
The final resting place of the spectacularly corrupt Boss Tweed, right, and the headstone for New York journalist Pete Hamill, left.
I was in Brooklyn recently and spent most of one afternoon walking around Green-Wood Cemetery. I knew that among the luminaries, scoundrels and common people of New York resting there is William Magear Tweed, better known as Boss Tweed for his corrupt reign as head of Tammany Hall political machine in the 1860s and early ’70s. Tweed’s resting place is marked on a handout map I picked up at the cemetery gate, and after tracking down Leonard Bernstein, DeWitt Clinton and a varriety of lesser mortals, I set out to find him.
Many, many Green-Wood graves declare the importance of the interred with monumental columns and all manner of statuary. Tweed’s is substantial but less than imposing. Standing there taking in the scene, my eye was drawn to another headstone, one just behind and to the left of Tweed’s. It belongs to Pete Hamill, a Brooklyn-born journalist, novelist, raconteur and adviser to Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign.
What’s the story there? Why is Hamill hanging out with Tweed?
Hamill had a lifelong attachment to Green-Wood — he grew up nearby and played there as a kid — and had often expressed a kind of admiration for Tweed, especially his political skills and attention to what politicos now call “constituent services.”
In reviewing a 2005 Tweed biography for The New York Times, Hamill wrote: “Give me Tweed before any crusader for earthly utopias: religious, Marxist, fascist or neocon. Save me from tinhorn messiahs, and from almost every Republican or Democrat now holding public office. In this era of true believers and invincible mediocrity, give me Tweed.”
Sometime around 2010, Hamill asked Green-Wood’s president, Rich Moylan, for a tour.
“Pete said, ‘Rich, I really need to buy a plot in the Green-Wood,’ as he always called it,” Moylan recalled in a 2024 interview. “And I said, ‘Pete, if we drive around, you see a spot you like, let me know, and we’ll try to find something for you there.’ We got to Boss Tweed’s plot, and he said, ‘Rich, stop. There. Can you find me something there?’ I said, ‘We’ll try.’ Called him back a few weeks later, we found him a spot.”
Hamill certainly recognized Tweed’s flaws. His 2005 book review noted Tweed “remains the epitome of big-city corruption.”
But he adds: “Tweed is a wonderfully vivid subject, a man of gigantic, Rabelaisian hungers. He seems always to have wanted more. More food. More money. More power. Unfortunately, for a long time he got what he wanted.”
I don’t think Hamill the crusading journalist wanted a spot near Boss Tweed with the idea of keeping an eye on a larger-than-life ne’er-do-well. Instead, I’m guessing he figured that if there is some sort of bardo-like afterlife, he wanted the most entertaining company possible.
One of the best places in Berkeley to go for a stroll is the big campus a little ways uphill from us, the University of California. Even with round after round of new and ever-more-intensive construction and development, the main campus retains a hint of its original park-like feeling. It’s still has a good number of elegant old buildings that give a glimpse into the university’s past.
Above is Hilgard Hall, designed by John Galen Howard and built in 1916-17, is part of UC Berkeley’s agricultural complex. The full inscription, the work of UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, is “To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life.” I’ve always found the building attractive and wondered about that motto.
The university’s 1981 nomination to place Hilgard and more than a dozen other campus structures on the National Register of Historic Places includes a mini-history of the building and the inscription:
“In addition to its association with Eugene W. Hilgard and its historical importance as the second building to be added to the Agriculture complex, Hilgard is architecturally important as an unusual variation on the Classic theme, an attempt to incorporate Northern Italian Renaissance motifs into an academic, Neo-Classic design.
“Hilgard was dedicated October 13, 1917. The structure was originally to be sheathed in granite like [the adjoining] Wellman [Hall]; however, economy measures imposed by World War I changed the material to cement-washed concrete. The $350,000 for construction came from a $1.8 million bond issue from the Regents, provided by a 1914 State initiative. Twenty-five thousand dollars of the cost was for equipment. The building was begun August 1, 1916 and completed on schedule in 1917.
‘… The attic of the west elevation was planned to contain an inscription which President Wheeler and Howard at first wanted to apply to the work of Professor Eugene Hilgard who established the first U.S. agricultural experiment station at the University and served as the first Dean of the College of Agriculture (1874-1904), but they could not come up with an appropriate motto. In April, Howard suggested, ‘Given by the People of the State of California A.D. 1915,’ and in May, Wheeler suggested, ‘To bring food for the peoples from the breast of the earth.” Wheeler changed his mind and in September suggested ‘To (help) rescue for human society the moral values of rural life,’ which was changed to ‘To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life.'”
As always, there’s much more history here than meets the eye and more than one way of seeing it. I might be inclined to see the building as a relatively modest monument to John Galen Howard’s Beaux Arts sensibilities and the university’s rather lofty, not to say pretentious, statement of its mission. But what might lie below the surface?
Hilgard Hall — every element, from its namesake to its architectural details to the inscription — was the subject of a harsh critique a few years ago through the lens of critical whiteness studies. Among other things the author brings to light is Hilgard’s earlier career at the University of Mississippi, where he sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War and was an apologist for slavery.
In the author’s view, the building is a text in white supremacy. Describing the building’s inscription, the author writes:
“… We can scratch beneath the surface of the epigraph to hear whiteness speak its name. Without identifying a subject, the root verb to rescue interpellates whites. Domination disguised as saviorism is a classic imperialist move, predicated on the Racial Contract, or set of formal and informal agreements among whites to advantage themselves as a group through domination and exploitation of nonwhites. In naming the reality of the Racial Contract, Mills elucidates that ‘society’ is not made up of free and equal individuals, as European humanism declares, but rather is a divided between white people and racialised subpersons. To rescue is ‘the white man’s burden’ and fits the settler-colonial context of Manifest Destiny. …”
Franklin Treat House (aka Treat/Peirce House) in Frankfort, Maine.
If you head toward the Maine coast from Bangor on U.S. 1A, you come to a hamlet on the Penobscot River called Frankfort. Drivers are forced to slow down to negotiate a sharp lefthand turn, and when they do, they’re confronted with this house. Like many travelers, I stopped to take a couple of pictures. I’m not sure I’m showing the place to its best, or worst, advantage in the image above; there’s much more to take in here than you can capture in a five-minute stop.
Looking at the picture after the fact, I felt sure I could dig up some of the place’s history. I was right. The first thing I came across was a recent real estate listing that identifies the building as the Franklin Treat house, built in 1864. The agent’s writeup is unusually frank:
“The materials used and craftsmanship can still vaguely be seen, but decades of abandonment and lack of maintenance have taken a rough toll on this former beauty. Currently in need of a massive clean out then extensive renovations and repairs, this 4,300 square foot historic icon could offer up to 6 bedrooms and as many bathrooms with its three floors. Bring your safety shoes, flashlight and visions of preservation!”
The former elegance “can still vaguely be seen.” “In need of a massive clean out.” “Bring your safety shoes.” As my dad often said when looking at some lost cause house along the road, “All it needs is a little TLC.”
Listings show this beaten-down wreck and its one-acre lot went on the market for $79,900 in early 2024, eventually selling for $35,000 a year later. From all outward appearances, little or no work has been done on the place by its new owner, whoever she or he or they may be. A stack of books visible in one of the front windows in a Google Street View image from 2023 is still right where it was.
But there is more to learn and appreciate about this house. In 2022, Down East magazine ran a beautifully wrought short feature about the house. The very best part of the piece is the story of how the writer, Michele Christle, got to know the home’s owner, a man named Dana who bought the place years ago with a notion to turn it into a bed and breakfast:
“Dana purchased the forsaken mansard in 2013, sealing its fate in his once-capable hands,” Christle wrote. “I have now passed countless hours on the porch with him, our conversations often obliterated by Jake Brakes. I learned that he oversaw the renovations of four historic bed-and-breakfasts on Mount Desert Island, where he was an innkeeper for 25 years. The mansard is the sixth house he’s owned. Now 72, he enjoys entertaining, company, and surprises. The yard sales keep him going. Some days, however, his tone shifts. ‘This house is killing me,’ he’ll say. He’s survived two heart attacks; his kidneys aren’t functioning well. Doctors estimate that he has two years left to live. But he’s accomplished almost everything he set out to do in life, he told me. He doesn’t have regrets, except, perhaps, that he hasn’t been able to ‘do’ the house.”
The Down East story carries an editor’s note that Dana died shortly after the piece was published. On her own site, Christle called him an “incredible human.”
“I learned so much from Dana during the many hours I sat with him on his porch during his yard sales over the years—he was a magnanimous human, a showman full of generosity and hospitality,” Christle wrote. “He was kind, gentle, hilarious, and brimming with ideas for projects and a deep appreciation for spontaneity. I continue to learn from Dana (and his family and friends) even after his passing and am grateful for all he and the Treat Peirce house have given me to think about.”
“Elias Vance,” a fictional Georgia high school history teacher created by artificial intelligence. (Why is he walking toward the wall instead of the door?)
A while ago, a friend reposted an appealing little essay she’d come across on Facebook. The piece told of a Georgia high school history teacher who’d done his best for more than three decades to show his students the complex reality of the United States’ past.
“… My classroom was a living thing,” the essay said. “History there wasn’t a series of sterile, polished dates; it was loud, complicated, and often painful—just like the country itself. I taught the brilliance of the Constitution alongside the brutality of the Middle Passage. I wanted my students to feel the gravity of our past, to recognize the ghosts that still haunt our halls.”
The piece was attributed to an Elias Vance, and I have to say, he sounds like my kind of history teacher, telling it like it was (and is). But all was not well in his world, he wrote. His teaching had come to the notice of local school officials, who deemed his insistence on teaching the truth “divisive.” Faced with a demand to “soften the edges” of his lessons, to use dumbed-down textbooks and to emphasize America’s “positive heritage,” he walked. Now, he said, he spent his days posting occasionally on “the local community pages”:
“Just brief reflections, sharing the narratives the new books want to omit. I write about the unsung figures, the hard-earned victories, and the complex, tragic, beautiful story of us. The comment sections are a sea of former students—some now parents themselves—and total strangers. They all echo the same sentiment: “Don’t stop, Mr. Vance. We need the truth.”
Of course, when I went looking for more about the heroic Elias Vance, the story immediately fell apart. Our high school history hero proved to be an AI creation (as Snopes later confirmed ). Oh, the irony: an essay extolling the virtue of truth, the necessity to honestly appraise our history, that was a total fabrication.
Is there any harm in that? As my friend said when I pointed out the Elias Vance story was made up, the tale does point to a real issue — the push by Trump and his movement to sanitize, rewrite or deny key aspects of our history. The AI-generated story happens to present the issue in a way with which lots of people will sympathize: those alarmed by our president’s totalitarian impulses; those appalled by the denial of the nation’s legacy of racism and racist violence; those disgusted by attempts to erase the memory of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election.
It’s true that our history is full of fables and too-good-to-be-true tales of virtue and heroism going back at least to Parson Weems’s invention of the George Washington cherry tree myth. Some of the stories are even based in fact. Abraham Lincoln really did have a nearly universal reputation for honesty. John F. Kennedy really was decorated for heroism for saving his PT 109 crew after it was struck by a Japanese destroyer and sank during World War II.
But it’s important to know the difference between pure invention and narratives based in fact, even when some of the facts may be disputed (some point to Lincoln’s penchant for political calculation as undercutting his “Honest Abe” image; naval experts are still debating the role Kennedy’s command decisions played in the sinking of PT 109).
So yes, in a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to retain a grip on what’s real and what’s not, the “Elias Vance, Honest History Warrior” hoax is damaging. It further erodes the boundary between reality and fiction. It also exposes a related problem: the tendency of large segments of social media audiences, even really smart people, to uncritically accept much of what they read and see.
To be honest, when I first saw the Elias Vance story, I was thinking of reposting it myself. But first I wanted to know more about Mr. Vance. Within a couple minutes of searching him online, it was apparent he didn’t exist. Within 10 minutes, it was obvious the story came from a Facebook account that has churned out multitudes of inspirational, AI-generated stories about people doing good deeds for the less fortunate. It was also clear that the account is just one of many — thousands? tens of thousands? millions? — doing the very same thing.
One example relates the story of a 72-year-old high school custodian who dies alone during his overnight shift and posthumously turns out to have been a mentor and benefactor to generations of students. It’s hard to do the story justice, really — ancient, kindly Mr. Vance, who to the teaching staff was merely “the invisible old man in the grey uniform who unclogged the toilets,” was running an all-in-one tutoring, crisis counseling and nutrition support service. He taught calculus, bought clothing for kids in need and was a reassuring ear to students facing crises like how to come out or deal with teen pregnancy. He even talked a student out of downing a bottle of pills to end her life. The story is chock-full of details like this:
“Elias’s daughter, Brenda, flew in from Chicago. She stood by the casket, looking overwhelmed and expensive in her designer suit. She told the funeral director she expected maybe ten people. She told him her father was a ‘distant man,’ a workaholic who cared more about his job than his family. ‘He never called,’ she said, adjusting her glasses. ‘He was always “working late.” I never understood why he loved mopping floors so much.’ “
There are probably dozens of other AI-generated Elias Vance stories floating around out there on social media. He’s a hero in some, a villain in others. Unlike the story of Elias Vance the history teacher, most are pretty obvious fictions.
Maybe the “Elias Vance History Teacher” tale reflects something real about our times, and that’s something that needs to be said. By the same token, though, it’s more important than ever to know what’s “real” in terms of events that have actually transpired and what’s invented to make a point about events. “The Grapes of Wrath” is an amazing and truthful document of its times, but it wasn’t a documentary.
The stairs from BART’s 16th Street/Mission station and Burger King Plaza.
For most of the last two decades, I’ve climbed these stairs at BART’s 16th/Mission station in San Francisco with the non-reassuring sight of a Burger King at the top of the stairs. The place actually closed and was boarded up a few years ago; a mural replaced the old BK signage. Once you reached the top of the stairs, you were greeted with a more or less chaotic scene: a decrepit, badly kept-up plaza, residents of nearby single-room-occupancy hotels hanging out just to get some outdoor time, and several regulars I’d see every morning who appeared to be dealing drugs.
But recently, I turned a corner to climb up to the street and was shocked to see that the Burger King of Burger King Plaza is no more. The dingy edifice at the top of the stairs had been replaced by a beautiful slice of sky. The old BK and several adjoining businesses — a produce store, a Chinese restaurant, a tough-looking bar called the City Club — have all been demolished. Construction is already well under way on a complex of new apartment buildings that will eventually provide 380 new units of housing.
Foggy Interstate 40 on the western outskirts of Amarillo, November 2025.
Kate and I stopped overnight in Amarillo, on the plains of the Texas Panhandle, a few nights before Thanksgiving last fall. Fog descended on the area just after we got to our motel on the city’s western outskirts. The misty scene along Interstate 40 demanded an attempt to try to capture it, and the best camera I had for an immediate shot was my cellphone. I’m not unhappy with the result, though as usual I think about what I might do differently next time. For instance, I might make sure to charge the batteries in my “better” camera. Maybe someday I’ll remember to check before hitting the road.
What the picture makes me think about now, though, is the first and only previous time I happened across this stretch of highway during a trip that sounds a little crazy from the safe perspective of now.
It was in late December 1974. I had taken it into my head that during Illinois State University’s holiday break, I’d visit friends in Berkeley and San Francisco. Furthermore, I’d decided to hitchhike from the Chicago area, where my family lived, to Northern California. My concession to winter weather and the possibility of freezing to death while waiting for a ride somewhere along Interstate 80 was to take a southern route that followed the old path of U.S. 66, the “mother : first along Interstate 55 to St. Louis, then Interstate 44 through Tulsa to Oklahoma City, and from there along Interstate 40 to California. About 2,400 miles from door to door.
My mom drove me the first 30 miles or so from our place on the southern edge of Chicago’s south suburbs to Wilmington, a town on the Kankakee River and I-55. She didn’t say anything, or anything that I remember, to try to discourage me. I’m trying to imagine what she was really thinking as I climbed out of the car late on the afternoon of the day after Christmas. By this time, my brothers John and Chris and I had each done at least one long hitch-hiking trip, so maybe she was thinking, “Well, I guess he knows what he’s doing.” Just as likely, she was saying a prayer that I’d come back in one piece.
Looking back from this distance, I don’t remember most of how that trip came together — the relatively brief rides that slowly added up to distance and progress toward my destination. How did I get through Bloomington? Through Springfield? Through St. Louis? I can’t tell you. I’m sure it involved a series of short hops, and I can say for sure I don’t remember a single driver during that stretch.
I do recall riding in the back seat of a 1950s-era Chevy sedan with two couples who liked REO Speedwagon and played it loud. It was near freezing and raining during that part of the drive, late at night, near Joplin, MIssouri. I remember standing along the interstate in Tulsa, late the next afternoon, which had to be about 24 hours after Mom dropped me off.
The next place I see clearly is Amarillo, or rather a spot that was far enough out into the country west of town that I didn’t see any lights except for a gas station just off the interstate.
It was after midnight, moonlit and cold, with virtually no traffic along the highway. Looking out over the countryside, the moonlight seemed to outline ravines stretching off into the distance. The impression that’s always stuck me was of being alone in a vast, silent, mysteriously bleak landscape. I could only guess when the next ride would come.
It couldn’t have been too long. I got to Grants, New Mexico, about 350 miles west, near the Continental Divide, about 7 in the morning, just after sunrise. It was very cold — about 10 below zero. I wasn’t too worried about the chill. I was wearing a big orange down parka that was probably suitable for Everest base camp wear that kept me warm and made me reasonably visible to passing drivers.
I stood on the side of the interstate for all of 10 minutes before a later model Chevy sedan with California plates pulled over. As I climbed in, the driver asked where I was headed.
“Berkeley,” I said.
“I’m going to Oakland,” he said.
All of a sudden, I didn’t have to worry about the next ride for the rest of the trip. What a gift that was. I’m a little embarrassed to say that among the many details that have dropped out of my memory in the intervening half-century is my benefactor’s name. He drove straight through, stopping only for gas and a fast-food stop somewhere in the snowy Mojave Desert. Checking distances now, he drove about 1,000 miles after picking me up in about 20 hours, and he insisted on doing all that driving himself.
He wound up taking me right to my friends’ house in Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood, where I announced my arrival to a sleeping household at 2 in the morning. A voice called out from an upstairs window: “OK! We’re coming! We’ll be right down!”
There are stories to tell about the rest of that night and my New Year’s stay in the Bay Area, which included a rainy backpacking trip to Point Reyes. But they’ll keep. For now, I’ll just say that after a week or so in Berkeley, I flew back to Chicago and returned to Illinois State and another semester of underachievement. I had no idea then I’d be heading back west soon enough.
There isn’t a straight line between that moment of arrival in Berkeley and this one, which finds me living only a mile or two from where that trip ended. But in a way that I could never have foreseen standing in the moonlight outside Amarillo so long ago, that night along the highway, was a step on the path to everything that’s happened since.
“I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues … with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea …. [T]here was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”
That was Coronado in 1541, describing his journey across the Plains in search of nothing that was actually there. Of course, the Llano Estacado — the Staked Plain — is anything but trackless today. I’ve driven through parts of it more than once. But despite all the ranching, farming, fencing, drilling and pumping that’s gone on there and is still going on, it retains a feeling of vast space.
(Here’s an excellent post on a ghost town in eastern New Mexico that talks about the origin of the name Llano Estacado.)
Above: A sighting just after getting off Interstate 5 to cut over to Highway 99 on our way to the desert and (eventually) the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The irony of the sign — one of dozens or maybe even hundreds by this time scattered across the southern two-thirds of the Central Valley — was too good to pass up. The area has had about 2 inches of rain in the past week, benefiting from the big storm that swept through the rest of Southern California.
We’re in Barstow tonight after about seven hours on the road today. Thinking we’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.
A friend shared the video below of Jimmy Kimmel paying tribute to Cleto Escobedo, a lifelong friend and the bandleader on his show who died earlier this week. “I feel like you’ll appreciate this,” my friend said. “It’s apropos of nothing relevant, but I found it pretty moving.”
It is moving, for sure. Kimmel takes 22 minutes to recount his friendship with Escobedo, which started when he was 9 years old, and how they came to work together on late-night television. The story is both funny and wrenching as Kimmel makes it clear how much he loved his friend and how heartbroken he is at losing him.
I wonder whether honest displays of sadness and grieving and genuine expressions of love like this can have a wider impact on our culture, much of which is dominated by phony, ginned-up histrionics designed to provoke outrage and stir our sense of grievance. Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to be outraged by in this world of ours. But we might live in a healthier, more humane world if we learn to talk honestly with each other about all our joys and sorrows, not just the stuff that enrages us.
