HJ post

It’s Alive!

December 6, 2016 — by Harald 1 Comment

Frankenstein at operating table — “It’s alive,” I say, “it’s alive!” (*Frankenstein*, 1931)

Do you know the scene in the 1931 movie Frankenstein? The one that includes the famous line uttered by mad scientist Henry Frankenstein, who exclaims ghoulishly when his creation of a monster starts to move: “It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!” Well, except for the mad-scientist part, and the part where the monster (Boris Karloff) hurls Frankenstein off the top of an old mill, that’s how I feel now that my first creation in the book series The Manhattan Novellas — 1609 — is out in the world. It’s alive!

But a lot of things went on behind the scenes before this book’s release. Here’s a peek behind the curtain…

[Read more…] about It’s Alive!

New York, New York – Final Research

November 7, 2016 — by Harald 11 Comments

hat across — Calculating the distance across. In bow shots.

So there I was, standing on the north shore of Governors Island and looking over the water to the tip of Lower Manhattan. It seemed so close. Even though I knew that the original shoreline on September 12, 1609 (when Henry Hudson sailed right past where I stood) was about a block inland, I figured that it was about 4-5 bow shots across. That’s assuming I was a Munsee-speaking, Algonquin native in 1609 calculating the distance. That’s how they did it back then.

Walking Back in Time into New Amsterdam

October 3, 2016 — by Harald 3 Comments

Tour guide Justin Rivers explains the 1660 map at Peter Minuit Plaza.

On September 18, 2016, I joined a walking tour of Lower Manhattan on one of my research trips to NYC. A very specific tour. A history tour. It was hosted by a tour group called Untapped Cities and called “Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam in NYC.”

My Connection to Manhattan

September 30, 2016 — by Harald 10 Comments

firstview — My first view of Manhattan came from the deck of our ship from Bremerhaven. Translation of my mother’s writing (from German): “Arrival in New York on the 15th of June, 1953. Morning.”

A curious thing happened recently. I was going through an old family photo album my mother had just sent me. The kind with the black pages and little B&W prints with the cute scalloped edges. I had carefully placed the crumbling pages with mother’s handwritten notes in white ink next to a binder I had opened earlier. The binder held my clippings from the day I won the second annual Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in 1983. (I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account of that eight-hour, 30-mile circumswim around the island here; you can read more about it on Quora.