The American Menu

New York City,  1869-1881  Despite the onslaught of a severe depression, Antonio Sivori got a job in early 1874 as the steward of t...

New York City,  1869-1881  By June 1872, Antonio Sivori was the proprietor of St. Mark’s Restaurant at 27th Street and Broadway, situa...

New York City,  1869-1881  One morning last spring, while combing through a box of old menus, I stumbled across a lost chapter of Amer...

New York City,  1895  Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky is credited with creating the first abstract painting, perhaps as early a...

  New Bedford & Honolulu,  1875  For those of us who live on the Mainland, the words “king,” “palatial residence,” and “Hawaii” ar...

Philadelphia  On Christmas Day in 1864, a special dinner was served to the 4,500 Union soldiers housed at Satterlee General Hospital, t...

Havana,  ca. 1955  During a recent visit to Havana, I hailed a taxi (a 1958 Ford) and rumbled over to the Plaza de Armas to look for s...

Los Angeles,  1938 On a foggy morning in July 1938, a 31-year-old aircraft mechanic named Douglass Corrigan took off in a jerry-built...

Thanksgiving,  1852  Thanksgiving was once regarded as “a Yankee holiday.” In the eighteenth century, the clergy in New England used i...

Washington, D.C. 1846  President James K. Polk was the last of the Jacksonians to sit in the White House. Nicknamed “Little Hickory,” ...