Galleria Borghese “pound for pound” might be the best art museum in Italy and maybe Europe! Well worth your time and money to visit.

I tend to agree with this. I will read the book! I never trusted Haig. His later antics when Reagan was shot seemed to confirm my general distrust of the General.

Sadly, this is true! I feel fortunate to have lived through the "Rax Romana" of dive bars and greasy spoons in Jersey City! The Tube Bar here on the Concourse in Journal Square being the "King" of dive bars! Red, the owner of the Tube was the inspiration of Moe the bartender!

Any conversation on a tax abatement at Canal Crossing should be an open book, including what the developer is paying for this property. The clean up argument doesn’t make any sense to me. PPG is turning over clean property! That is what the courts mandated! What other subsidies is this the developer requesting?

For many older Italian Americans who came from the south San Gennaro is an important patron saint, but for many Italian boomers and older Padre Pio, who died in 1968, is someone they or family members knew personally. How many pizzerias have his photo behind the register!

Yea, bodega cats and their owners would never let this happen! Never!!

You can see these guys above the entrance! Great to see them up close and looking like they are still standing guard on 7th Ave!

Forget starbucks, buy a Moka pot, buy good beans from a local roaster. Thank me later!

Always an annual holiday growing up. My father always made it special driving into the city for the feast. Many fond memories of attending the Feast on Mulberry Street in the city!

retriever heaven!

The ruling separately states that the decision of the city’s Zoning Officer and of the Zoning Board of Appeals denying the demolition permit was “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable and therefore reversed.”

There is an iconic mural of Jackie Robinson and Grampa Yogi on the side of a building on North Broad Street in Philadelphia. Last spring, a big chunk of the stucco fell off. Huge thanks to the folks at @muralarts for repairing it yesterday! It looks great!

Benjamin Clark was a chef in the South Tower. On 9/11, he got hundreds of people to the exit door. Then he turned around and walked back into the fire. He was not a firefighter. He was not a police officer. He worked for Fiduciary Trust on the 96th floor, cooking gourmet meals for corporate executives. He was also an ex-Marine. At 9:03 AM, United Flight 175 tore into the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors. The building shook violently. Fire poured through the elevator shafts. People panicked, screaming in the pitch-black smoke. Clark didn’t flinch. He took off his chef's apron. He stood in front of his kitchen crew and executives and shouted in a voice trained on the drill fields of Parris Island: "Do not run. Take off your high heels. Hold the handrails. We are leaving together." He didn't take an elevator. He took the narrow emergency stairs. For 96 floors, Benjamin Clark became their shield. Every time people froze in terror, he shouted: "Keep moving!" When a woman in a wheelchair was stuck on the 78th floor sky lobby, Clark didn't step over her. He picked her up. When people collapsed from asthma and smoke inhalation, he pulled them to their feet. Step by step. Floor by floor. He escorted dozens of his colleagues all the way down to the concourse. They could see daylight. They could feel the fresh morning air coming through the shattered doors of the plaza. Safety was twenty feet away. Clark’s coworker, Ethel, grabbed his arm, crying: "Ben, we're out! Come with us! It's over!" Clark looked at the exit. Then he looked back up the pitch-black stairwell where smoke was pouring down like a waterfall. He pulled his arm away. "I can't," he told her. "There are still people up there who don't know the way." He didn't run outside. He turned on his heel and walked straight back into the concrete tomb. A few minutes later, at 9:59 AM, Tower Two collapsed in ten seconds flat. When rescue workers finally reached the rubble weeks later, they didn't find Benjamin Clark near the exit door. They found his body deep in the interior ruins of the tower, still surrounded by the people he was trying to guide down. No general gave him an order. No camera caught his face. Nobody ordered an ex-Marine chef to climb back into hell. He saw the light. He had the door. He chose the stairs.

We loved him so much. So blessed to have been there to see this and to be in Three Rivers Stadium for his 3,000 hit.

💯, put Jersey first!!

One of the great things about this park, was the annual summer ritual of Miss Teen America held at the park. It seemed every year one of the local girls made it into the competition. This was a great excuse, to get a parent or aunt to fill the car and take us to the park!

On September 11, a police officer looked into the eyes of his dog, closed the kennel door, and made a promise. "You stay here. I'll come back and get you." He came back four months later. His dog had waited. His name was Officer David Lim of the Port Authority Police. His partner was a five-year-old yellow Labrador named Sirius. Badge number 17. Sirius was an explosives detection dog. He and Lim worked the World Trade Center together. Their job was to sniff every truck that came into the loading docks under the towers. If somebody tried to bring in a bomb, they were the ones who would find it. Sirius did not sleep at a kennel at night. He went home with Lim. Lim's kids, twelve and fourteen, played with him. He slept in the living room. When the shift ended, he was not a working dog. He was the family dog. On the morning of September 11, Lim and Sirius were in their office in the basement of the South Tower when the building shook. Lim heard the radio call. An explosion up in the North Tower. His first thought, he said later, was that he had failed. That he and Sirius had missed something. That a bomb had gotten past them. He decided he could move faster up the stairs without the dog. He turned to Sirius and said what he always said when he had to step away for a minute. "You stay here. I'll come back and get you." He closed the kennel door and ran. He got up to the 44th floor of the North Tower. He was pushing people down the stairs. Making them move. At 9:59 the South Tower fell. Sirius was in it. Lim did not know that yet. There was too much smoke, too much noise. He kept moving people. At 10:28 the North Tower fell on top of him. He was buried in Stairwell B. He is one of only sixteen people who were inside the tower when it came down and lived. He and the firefighters of Ladder 6 and a bookkeeper named Josephine Harris, all in the same pocket of surviving concrete. He was trapped for five hours in the dark. Under a hundred stories. Choking on dust. And the whole time, he said later, he was thinking about the dog. They dug him out. He came up into the daylight cut, bleeding, his uniform destroyed. The first thing he said was, take me to the basement. My dog is down there. They put him in an ambulance instead. He had broken bones. He was not walking anywhere. He tried the next morning. He tried to get onto the pile. They stopped him. There was no basement anymore. There was no floor. There were sixteen acres of steel and fire. He waited. For four months. On January 22, 2002, workers digging in what had been the South Tower's basement found a kennel. Sirius was still inside it. He had been killed instantly when the tower came down. He had never left the spot where his officer told him to stay. They radioed Lim. He was there within the hour. Then something happened that had never happened for a dog on that site. Everything stopped. Every crane. Every backhoe. Every torch. All the terrible machines of Ground Zero went silent. Hundreds of workers, men who had lost their own friends in those buildings, formed two lines along the ramp that led out of the pit. They took off their hard hats. Four Port Authority officers carried a stretcher up the ramp. Sirius was on it, draped in an American flag. The same honor given to a fallen officer. They walked him past the lines of silent men, all the way to the top, to a waiting truck. Lim walked behind his dog. He said it afterward, plainly. "I fulfilled my promise to him. I came back. And I took him home." That April, more than a hundred police dogs and their handlers came from across the country to a memorial in New Jersey. Bagpipes. A 21-gun salute. The flag that had covered Sirius was folded into a triangle and presented to Lim. Then they brought out one more thing. Sirius's metal water bowl, dented, recovered from the rubble. They handed it to Lim, and he broke down in front of all of them. Lim served thirteen more years. He retired in 2014 after 34 years on the force. His last assignment was the K-9 unit at LaGuardia Airport. With another dog. A dog run in Battery Park City has Sirius's name on it. A dog trusts you completely. That is the entire arrangement. Sirius was told to wait. He waited. David Lim was buried alive under the North Tower, and what he was thinking about was a dog in a kennel two buildings away. Some promises take four months. He kept it. 🇺🇸

Anyone who has ever had a dog knows this look. It's the one they give you when they can tell something is wrong, and they have decided they are not leaving your side... This beautiful painting is called Fidelity, and it was made by British artist Briton Rivière in 1869. A young man sits in the corner of a cold prison cell, awaiting trial. He is a poacher, caught taking game in an age when that could ruin a life. And pressed against his knee, gazing up into his face, is his dog, who has followed him even here. You cannot see the man's face, Rivière hides it so that the entire emotional weight of the painting falls onto the dog. We are left to read the man's sadness in the animal's eyes. The dog knows nothing of poaching or laws. It only knows that its person is hurting. And anyone who has ever loved a dog knows that look: "I don’t understand what has happened, but I know you are sad, and wherever you go, I will go too." The cold, the fear, the locked cell, none of it matters. Leaving him was never even a choice... That is the meaning of the title Rivière chose for the painting: Fidelity. Faithfulness that asks for no reason and no reward. As American humorist Josh Billings once said: "A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself."