Welcome to my Blog! I’m very excited to have you on board! Central Park Story is a young adult adventure series whose main character is a sixteen-year-old boy named Christopher Middleton. It’s also a treasure hunt/romance/historical adventure/fantasy/humorous tale all rolled into one! I put a lot of time researching the backdrop to the series which […]
In my young adult adventure series, Central Park Story, the main character, Christopher Middleton, comes across the Swedish Cottage in Central Park and jumps to the conclusion that the Scandinavians were the first to discover North America. In a sense he was right. It is well documented that that the Vikings were the first Europeans […]
The answer isn’t as simple as you might think. President Washington proclaimed the first nationwide thanksgiving celebration in America by marking November 26, 1789, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God”. However, from the time of Washington until […]
In my young adult adventure series, Central Park Story, Ashley Ferguson is dying for her boyfriend, Christopher Middleton, to take her to a show of Russian Imperial dresses at the Met. Maybe your first thought is the same as Christopher’s was: boring. . . boring. . . boring! But whatever you happen to think about […]
The New-York Historical Society (not to be confused with the Museum of the City of New York) at the corner of 77th Street and Central Park West is the oldest museum in New York City and predates the founding of the Metropolitan Museum by nearly 70 years. Its art holdings comprise more than 1.6 million […]
George Washington Vanderbilt, the youngest son of the railroad magnate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fell in love with the magical mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, on a visit there with his mother, and commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to build a 175,000 square foot home on the banks of the French Broad River (yes, those are three zeros!). […]
In the original plan for Central Park (called ‘the Greensward Plan’) Olmsted and Vaux’s desire was that visitors would feel as though they were walking through a gallery of images, not unlike a series of paintings. This was no accident. It ran in tandem to what was already going on in the art world since […]
The World’s Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The iconic centerpiece of the fair, the large water pool (to the right), represented the voyage Columbus took to the New World. The Exposition was an influential social and cultural […]
The landscapes of Jervis McEntee are known for their melancholy and poetic mood. The sky is often cloudy, the season autumn with the leaves faded and falling from the trees. “Some people call my landscapes gloomy and disagreeable,” McEntee wrote in his well-kept journal. “They say I paint the sorrowful side of nature…But this is […]
Olmsted’s only brother (and closest friend) John died of tuberculosis in 1857, the same year that Olmsted won the competition to design Central Park. Two years later, on June 13, 1859, Olmsted married Mary Cleveland (Perkins) Olmsted, the widow of his brother. Mary was a practical and simple woman and the decision to marry appeared […]
Anyone who has read up to books Three and Four of my young adult adventure series, Central Park Story, will know that Christopher Middleton, the main character, goes in search of a key that is buried where ‘the eight gates meet’ (something that he reads in his great grandfather’s diary). But are there really eight […]
