The American Menu

U.S.S. Wilmington ,  1906-1918 Caught in a storm off the coast of Luzon on the night of December 20, 1915, the U.S.S. Wilmington rol...

New York City,  1869-1881  Antonio Savori a chieved some degree of notoriety during his lifetime. He was perhaps best known for the c...

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...