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.
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.”
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.)
Conor McGregor, as seen in central Derry, May 2025.
What’s going on here?
Conor McGregor, the former cage-fighting champion and Irish whiskey entrepreneur, has become de facto leader of an Irish anti-immigrant campaign with strong echoes of the U.S. MAGA movement. Further MAGA parallels: McGregor, who lost a civil suit alleging sexual assault earlier this year, has announced he’ll run for the Irish presidency. See: “Conor McGregor, MMA fighter, alleged rapist, Ireland’s next president?“
The first day of our trip to Ireland, back in late April, we ran into the aftermath of a McGregorite anti-immigrant rally in Dublin. It was staged just two days after the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which opened Irish nationalists’ initially failed, ultimately victorious effort to end British rule. Rally participants wrapped themselves, literally, in the Irish tricolor, and some chanted slogans like “Ireland for the Irish.” In Trumpian fashion, McGregor claimed a vast throng of more than 100,000 people turned out. Having been in the area where the rally was held, there ain’t no way a crowd anywhere near that size was present. Most sources estimated it at about 5,000.
The anti-immigrant gathering was followed immediately afterward by a smaller anti-racist rally and march that began in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, hallowed ground in modern Irish history as the site where the Easter Rising of April 1916 began. We walked alongside the march a few blocks to its end point outside the Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to the memory “of all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom.”
Why were we seeing a sign mocking Conor McGregor and his followers in Derry, a place where he won’t be running for anything? I think it’s because McGregor’s rhetoric touches a nerve in a place that at least outwardly is still closely linked to the struggle for Irish independence and the associated fight to achieve civil rights for the minority Catholic population.
The city is part of the six counties partitioned from the rest of Ireland in the early 1920s, which remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The very name of the place is contested; in United Kingdom parlance, the town is called Londonderry. It’s famously divided along sectarian and the associated political lines, Protestant/Loyalist and Catholic/Republican. In Catholic/Republican parts neighborhoods, which is mostly what we saw, the ideology expressed in street art is still strongly, even radically, Republican, and embraces other liberation causes (Palestinian nationalism, for instance) and rejects McGregor’s narrow, reactionary, anti-immigrant nationalism.
Newly painted Palestinian nationalist/Irish Republican mural in Derry’s Bogside neighborhood, May 2025.
Hussey’s Folly, Dingle Bay, County Kerry, Ireland. May 2025.
“If you ever find yourself in Dingle” sounds like the start of a joke. I don’t know what the rest of it would be, but if you do ever find yourself there, there’s a beautiful walk out from the town’s harbor, past this tower, and then to the cliffs beyond.
The date given for the tower, called Hussey’s Folly, is 1845. That was the first of Ireland’s devastating famine years. The construction was a make-work project, something devised by a local landholder for the poor and hungry to do in return for wages or food. Similar projects, often involving exhausting physical labor like road-building, were carried out all over Ireland as the country starved. Here’s a decent writeup on the “famine roads,” some of which are still used as part of the national road network: www.frrandp.com/2025/01/famine-roads.html.
We’re staying tonight in Independence, the seat of Inyo County, along U.S. 395 near all sorts of history. Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp for Japanese-Americans, is just to the south. We’re in the middle of the Owens Valley, a place defined in modern times by the loss of its water to sharp operators from Los Angeles.
More immediately, one thing that strikes me about staying along U.S. 395 is the all-night truck traffic. It’s not a constant, relentless parade. But every few minutes or so, an eighteen-wheeler rolls through, either headed north to connect with Interstate 80 in Reno or south toward Los Angeles or maybe the desert routes to Phoenix.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS seen from Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Nevada.
We started the day by driving down to O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the facilities that impound the Tuolumne River in a once pristine Sierra valley and bring water to 2.5 million people in the Bay Area (and as part of a larger system including hydroelectric facilities also supply power to some city operations in San Francisco and elsewhere). I hadn’t intended to spend much time there, but we got to walking the trail on the north side of the reservoir and pretty soon it was early afternoon.
We took our time driving over Tioga Pass and down to Lee Vining and checked into a motel and had dinner at the local Mobil gas station — it’s actually a well-known eatery and just what you need if you’ve spent a long day hiking or driving or both. Then we headed to the south shore olf Mono Lake to see whether we could sight Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS again. There was a nearly full moon lighting up the tufa formations along the shoreline, but yes, the comet was still clearly visible naked-eyewise and more so with any kind of camera. I didn’t bring a tripod on this trip, so I have to resort to handheld phone-camera shots. There were several guys along the lakeshore shooting the spectacle with professional gear — I imagine we’ll see some of those shots soon.
Along the road to Hetch Hetchy, snags still stand eleven years after the Rim Fire swept through Stanislaus National Forest and parts of Yosemite National Park.
To keep it short and sweet: We’re taking a quick trip over to the Eastern Sierra. The past few years, this has involved a drive from Berkeley and a sunset stop along the road near Tioga Pass. This time we splurged and stopped at one of the lodges west of the park. We got here in time to take a quick before-dinner walk — a walk, not a hike, since it was along the road toward the long-drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (drowned by San Francisco, but that’s another story).
Highway 120, the main road into the park from the Bay Area, goes through part of the area that burned during the Rim Fire in 2013. Much can be said about that — I happened to be up in Yosemite on a quick trip with my nephew Sean the day the fire really blew up, and we had to get home by way of Fresno. The fire burned for a very long time and at the time became the third largest fire by area in California history. It was an epic. Just eleven years later, it ranks as the state’s twelfth largest fire — nine bigger ones, including a couple about four times as large, have occurred since 2017. The point of mentioning that is that even though the Rim Fire has probably faded from most people’s memory in the wake of all the large, destructive and deadly fires that have occurred since, the evidence of the blaze is all around us in this area.
After our walk and before dinner, we went out to try to find evidence of another spectacle, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. I was really kind of blown away by it.. Reasonably bright as the dusk deepened, with a fantastically long “tail” (or so it appeared to me). Looking forward to more sightings.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over the Tuolumne River canyon, October 14, 2024.
