Reader “Leonard in Florida” writes with another memory triggered by reading The Strangler: My father played the numbers with a guy by the name of Brownie in the West End for years. He naturally had a formula for figuring the number. One night he came home with a paper bag with $4,000. He had hit [...]
Categories: Boston
Tags: The Strangler · West End
A reader, Leonard in Florida, emails a memory of Boston’s old West End, which figures so prominently in The Strangler. When I was a kid in the 1940′s, my grandfather and father had an egg store at 203 Chambers Street in the West End. It was a landing spot for refugees. There were all types [...]
Categories: Boston
Tags: Boston · The Strangler · West End
The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, where I often go to write, is running an amazing year-long exhibition called “Cool + Collected: Treasures of the BPL” which highlights some of the rare holdings in the library’s collection. The contents of the exhibit rotate every few months, and the current crop is truly remarkable. It [...]
Categories: Boston · Writers
Tags: Boston Public Library · Henry David Thoreau · Walt Whitman
A trove of remarkable photographs of Boston during the Strangler siege. The photos, which are eerie and beautiful, were taken by Arthur Rickerby for Life Magazine. View the whole collection here. Above: A woman wears a hatpin in her sleeve to defend herself against the Strangler, 1963.
Categories: Boston · Crime · Photography
Tags: The Strangler
It is strictly forbidden to fall asleep at the Boston Public Library. I presume this policy is intended to keep the homeless from camping out here, but the homeless know the rules because, well, they camp out here, so it is not the homeless who are primarily affected. It is everyone else. Like me. Unfortunately, [...]
Categories: Boston · Odds & Ends
Tags: Boston Public Library · writing life
I stopped by the new exhibit today at the Howard Yezerski Gallery on Harrison Avenue, “Boston Combat Zone: 1969-1978.” The gallery and the show both are small but well worth a visit, even on a raw, rainy day like today. The exhibit gathers together black-and-white photographs by Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt, and John Goodman. The [...]
Categories: Boston · Photography
Tags: bookfour · Combat Zone
There is a new exhibition at the Boston Public Library of the street photographs of Jules Aarons. The exhibition is located in the Wiggin Gallery in the old McKim Building, just one flight up from the main reading room where where I have been writing every day. The gallery is secluded, and you won’t find [...]
Categories: Boston · Photography
Tags: Boston Public Library · featured posts · Jules Aarons · The Strangler
One of the frustrations in writing a historical novel like The Strangler is that so much of your research never sees the light of day. When the book is done, all those index cards so lovingly compiled get wrapped up in a rubber band and tossed into a drawer, and the reader is left to [...]
Categories: Boston · My Books
Tags: Inside "The Strangler" · The Strangler
Ask a Bostonian to name the ugliest building in the city, and nine out of ten will say “City Hall.” (The tenth will say something rude to you. If he does neither of these things, he is no Bostonian.) But architects love the building as much as everyone else hates it, and in this case [...]
Categories: Boston · My Other Writing
Tags: architecture
