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 […]
‘Now there was at Jerusalem by the sheep’s market a pool having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk: the blind, the halt, and the withered, waiting for the movement of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool and troubled it, and whosoever first […]
If you’ve ever gone to the Central Park Carousel or the Wollman’s Skating Rink, you’ve probably run into the Central Park Dairy along the way. Built in 1870, it’s an exquisite example of Victorian Gothic architecture, with a little bit of gingerbread house thrown in. The loggia (where Christopher Middleton’s Aunt B imagines herself playing […]
When I think of what it might have been like to be a parent in the mid 19th Century, the word ‘indulgent’ isn’t what comes to mind, yet that was exactly what John Olmsted, Frederick Law Olmsted’s father, was to young Fred. Tragically, Fred’s mother died before he turned four, and one might imagine […]
Although it would eventually be razed in 1957, the Mineral Water Pavilion delighted the inhabitants of the city for nearly a century. Clean water was a major problem for New York for much of its history. Several epidemics of cholera swept the metropolis throughout the early 1800s, costing many thousands of lives, so the advent […]
In Book One of my young adult adventure series, Central Park Story, Christopher Middleton, the main character, mentions that it took more gunpowder than was used in the Battle of Gettysburg to construct Central Park. I also have one of the statues (yes, the statues talk in my books) compare Christopher’s personal challenges to the […]
If you happen to be like Ashley Ferguson, one of the characters in my young adult adventure series, Central Park Story, you have a choice of which resort to visit over winter vacation. However, when it comes to skiing the choices narrow considerably, and you are forced to make the difficult decision between Aspen and […]
Today, there are two skating rinks in Central Park, one in the north end and one in the south, but there used to be only one in the middle . . . the Ramble Lake. When the park was first opened to the public in the late 1860’s, skating was a popular sport and brought […]
In order to get a high ranking for a private school these days, you need to offer a low student-to-faculty ratio, a challenging curriculum, and an excellent reputation for college prep. You could say the same about colleges and grad school rankings. Add to this the more general principle that input equals output, meaning if […]
Walden, a book by by noted Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, is part personal declaration of independence, part social experiment, and part manual for self-reliance. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. By immersing […]
More than 100 years ago, Dr. Maria Montessori, Italy’s first female physician, inspired the birth of a worldwide educational movement. Drawing upon her scientific background and clinical understanding, Dr. Montessori observed how young people learn best when engaged in purposeful activity rather than being fed information. She recognized that children’s cognitive growth and development requires […]
