BROWDERBOOKS
Forbidden Brownstones has received its first review.
If you love historical fiction, as I do, and the opportunity to learn more about a different time period, different social mores, and the struggle for acceptance when you are different, you will absolutely adore this story. I learned so much reading this and enjoyed the plot and its characters immensely. I can highly recommend this read. -- Five-star editorial review for Readers' Favorite by Grant Leishman.
It is available from Amazon for $16.95 (paperback) or $5.99 (e-book). And from Barnes & Noble for $16.95 (paperback), and from WiDo Publishing for $15.75 (paperback).
NEW YORK WON'T DIE
Yes, it's smitten by the pandemic, frozen in lockdown. Yes, residents have fled, some of them vowing never to return. Yes, tourists are staying away, with disastrous results for travel agencies, hotels, and restaurants. Yes, small businesses are failing; RETAIL SPACE AVAILABLE signs have proliferated, and my barbershop and Philip Marie, one of my favorite restaurants, are gone. Yes, the city and state -- like all cities and states -- are in dire need of federal aid, without which they will have to reduce essential services. All in all, a grim situation, worse than any I that I have personally experienced, and my experience goes back decades. But New York won't die. It's tough, resourceful, resilient, and has survived a lot of crises in the past. Consider:
Cholera, 1832
Businesses shut down, the middle class fled, the slums suffered, and coffin-laden carts rumbled through the streets. Steamboats refused to dock in the city, dumped New York-bound travelers in the wilds of Westchester county. Cholera was a mystery and a terror, with no known cause or cure. But at the summer's end mortality declined, the city reopened, steamboats returned, business recovered. Cholera hit again at intervals, but never so disastrously.
The Civil War, 1861
"Grass will grow in the streets of New York!" So warned the leaders and merchants of the South, convinced that, once the Southern states seceded, the loss of their business would cripple the city's economy. Yes, the city lost their business, but the government needed supplies --food, tents, rifles, ammunition -- and the city's economy boomed, merchants profited, Wall Street flourished. Like it or not, war is good for business.
Influenza, 1918-1919
Like cholera before it, flu hit the city hard, starting in August 1918, and there was no known cure. The sick and their homes were quarantined, but there was no general lockdown. Schools stayed open, but at the end of the day pupils were told to go straight home and not mingle with crowds. Schoolchildren were safer in school than on the streets or in crowded tenements, the health commissioner insisted. Theaters and stores stayed open, but with strict regulations regarding ventilation and other sanitary conditions, and with hours staggered and reduced. Masks were not obligatory, but coughing or sneezing without covering your face was made a misdemeanor. By November the epidemic was beginning to decline, restrictions were removed, and the city celebrated the end of World War I on the eleventh, when the mayor led a parade down Fifth Avenue that was showered with confetti. The health commissioner insisted that New York had done better than other big East Coast cities, and he may well have been right.
Near Bankruptcy, 1975
In the mid-1970s the city faced a crisis of a different kind. It was debt-laden, dirty, crime-ridden, with middle-class residents fleeing to the suburbs. Like mayors before him, Mayor Abrham Beame had indulged in financial gimmickry that simply postponed for a while the inevitable reckoning. In April a crisis had been avoided, when the state gave financial aid to the city, but on condition that the city hand over its financial management to the state -- a loss of independence that would plague the city for years. Then on October 19, 1975, another crisis loomed: at 4 p.m. that day the city risked falling into default; in short, it would be bankrupt.
New York City bankrupt! Hundreds of banks financially tied to the city would fail, said some, though others thought the city should be allowed to fail and experience the penalty for its misdeeds. "You New Yorkers..." intoned a friend of mine in Washington, indignant that New Yorkers expected others to bail them out. He was convinced that New York would, and should, be permanently reduced to minor status as a city.
"New York City is not going to go bankrupt!" So an employee at my bank assured his friends, as he told me years later. "Buy the city's bonds at these prices," he urged. "They're the bargain of a lifetime." With risk of default, the bonds were selling at an all-time low. Investors were desperate to get out of them.
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