Avik Roy hits the nail squarely on the head during a discussion on repealing and replacing Obamacare with John Podhoretz and Peter Robinson.

[T]his is the problem with the failure of imagination of conservatism. It’s that we’ve conflated a policy outcome, more people having health insurance, with the process by which we achieve that outcome. And the point I’m trying to make is that we conservatives, we have always known that less government leads to more abundance, more wealth, more prosperity. We would never say we need more government so that every American can have a smartphone. We would never say we need government so that every American can have a job and yet we’ve accepted the left wing narrative that the only way to make sure that more people have the economic security of health insurance is through more statism. Why do we accept that narrative in healthcare when we accept it nowhere else in the economy? And this has been the failure of imagination of conservatism.

Why hasn’t Trump hired this guy?

RTWT

“Shelley Garland” — Not a real person

Not surprisingly, the recent HuffPo South Africa editorial calling for white men to be denied the vote was pulled, Milo Yiannopoulos reports, apparently because HuffPo finally figured out that Google turned up no such person and the alleged photo of “Shelley Garland” didn’t look like a real human being at all.

The Huffington Post has retracted a column suggesting white men should not be allowed to vote, claiming the piece’s author “appears not to exist.”

…[T]he original article (archived here), titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?” was credited to a HuffPo contributor by the name of Shelley Garland.

Garland’s profile – which has since been deleted – described her as an “activist and feminist” who is “working on ways to smash the patriarchy.”

Her article suggested denying “toxic white males” the right to vote for 20 to 30 years as a means of “seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.”

Describing the article as “extremely sexist and racist,” Breitbart’s Oliver JJ Lane states that it quickly received backlash from several people. …

Huffington Post SA [South Africa] has removed the blog ‘Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?’ published on our site on April 13, 2017,” it reads.

“We have done this because the blog submission from an individual who called herself Shelley Garland, who claimed to be an MA student at UCT, cannot be traced and appears not to exist.”

The statement goes on to declare that the Huffington Post has now “strengthened” its standards related to identification.

HuffPo goes on to state that it will be submitting the problematic article to an ombudsman for analysis of its opinion.

The statement also includes an excerpt from the South Africa Press Code decrying the use of “discrimination and hate speech,” although the Huffington Post’s statement does not explicitly describe the problematic article as such.

“We apologise [sic] for the oversight,” the statement concludes. “We welcome further discussion. Please email blogs@huffpostsa.com.”

This retraction comes following Huffington Post South Africa’s Editor In Chief Verashni Pillay actually defended the article’s place on the site.

Verashni Pillay, Huffington Post South Africa’s Editor In Chief

Pillay stated, “we hope, as reads continue to rack up on this blog, that those who are tempted to fire off an angry email to us would first engage with the underlying analysis in Garland’s blog.”

Pillay also declared that “Garland’s underlying analysis about the uneven distribution of wealth and power in the world is pretty standard for feminist theory.”

Despite SA HuffPo’s Editor-in-Chief’s agreement with the editorial’s thesis, my own guess is that the editorial was written by some Alt-Right troll to pull HuffPo’s chain.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Brown Admissions Office has lost its marbles.

Brown University in Providence, R.I. houses one of the country’s most selective undergraduate colleges. The Brown Daily Herald, a student-run newspaper, cites Dean of Admission Logan Powell in reporting that the school received a record-high 32,724 applications this year, and admitted just 8.3% of applicants.

Among those lucky few is the daughter of a Journal reader who is still trying to make sense of a letter the family received this week from Mr. Powell. Our reader’s bright daughter had already received news of her acceptance when a letter arrived that was addressed to her “Parent/Guardian.”

Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”…

It turns out that the errors were intentional. Brown spokesman Brian Clark writes in an email that “our admission office typically refers to applicants either by first name or by using ‘they/their’ pronouns. While the grammatical construction may read as unfamiliar to some, it has been adopted by many newsrooms and other organizations as a gender-inclusive option.”

RTWT

Peter Paul Rubens, The Resurrection of Christ, 1611-1612, Vrouwekathedraal, Antwerp

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

Easter

Easter, the anniversary of our Lord’s resurrection from the dead, is one of the three great festivals of the Christian year,—the other two being Christmas and Whitsuntide. From the earliest period of Christianity down to the present day, it has always been celebrated by believers with the greatest joy, and accounted the Queen of Festivals. In primitive times it was usual for Christians to salute each other on the morning of this day by exclaiming, ‘Christ is risen;’ to which the person saluted replied, ‘Christ is risen indeed,’ or else, ‘And hath appeared unto Simon;’—a custom still retained in the Greek Church.

The common name of this festival in the East was the Paschal Feast, because kept at the same time as the Pascha, or Jewish passover, and in some measure succeeding to it. In the sixth of the Ancyran Canons it is called the Great Day. Our own name Easter is derived, as some suppose, from Eostre, the name of a Saxon deity, whose feast was celebrated every year in the spring, about the same time as the Christian festival—the name being retained when the character of the feast was changed; or, as others suppose, from Oster, which signifies rising. If the latter supposition be correct, Easter is in name, as well as reality, the feast of the resurrection.

Though there has never been any difference of opinion in the Christian church as to why Easter is kept, there has been a good deal as to when it ought to be kept. It is one of the moveable feasts; that is, it is not fixed to one particular day—like Christmas Day, e. g., which is always kept on the 25th of December—but moves backwards or forwards according as the full moon next after the vernal equinox falls nearer or further from the equinox. The rule given at the beginning of the Prayer-book to find Easter is this: ‘Easter-day is always the first Sunday after the full moon which happens upon or next after the twenty-first day of March; and if the full moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-day is the Sunday after.’

The paschal controversy, which for a time divided Christendom, grew out of a diversity of custom. The churches of Asia Minor, among whom were many Judaizing Christians, kept their paschal feast on the same day as the Jews kept their passover; i. e., on the 14th of Nisan, the Jewish month corresponding to our March or April. But the churches of the West, remembering that our Lord’s resurrection took place on the Sunday, kept their festival on the Sunday following the 14th of Nisan. By this means they hoped not only to commemorate the resurrection on the day on which it actually occurred, but also to distinguish themselves more effectually from the Jews. For a time this difference was borne with mutual forbearance and charity. And when disputes began to arise, we find that Polycarp, the venerable bishop of Smyrna, when on a visit to Rome, took the opportunity of conferring with Anicetas, bishop of that city, upon the question. Polycarp pleaded the practice of St. Philip and St. John, with the latter of whom he had lived, conversed, and joined in its celebration; while Anicetas adduced the practice of St. Peter and St. Paul. Concession came from neither side, and so the matter dropped; but the two bishops continued in Christian friendship and concord. This was about A.D. 158.

Towards the end of the century, however, Victor, bishop of Rome, resolved on compelling the Eastern churches to conform to the Western practice, and wrote an imperious letter to the prelates of Asia, commanding them to keep the festival of Easter at the time observed by the Western churches. They very naturally resented such an interference, and declared their resolution to keep Easter at the time they had been accustomed to do. The dispute hence-forward gathered strength, and was the source of much bitterness during the next century. The East was divided from the West, and all who, after the example of the Asiatics, kept Easter-day on the 14th, whether that day were Sunday or not, were styled Qiccertodecimans by those who adopted the Roman custom.

One cause of this strife was the imperfection of the Jewish calendar. The ordinary year of the Jews consisted of 12 lunar months of 292 days each, or of 29 and 30 days alternately; that is, of 354 days. To make up the 11 days’ deficiency, they intercalated a thirteenth month of 30 days every third year. But even then they would be in advance of the true time without other intercalations; so that they often kept their passover before the vernal equinox. But the Western Christians considered the vernal equinox the commencement of the natural year, and objected to a mode of reckoning which might sometimes cause them to hold their paschal feast twice in one year and omit it altogether the next. To obviate this, the fifth of the apostolic canons decreed that, ’ If any bishop, priest, or deacon, celebrated the Holy Feast of Easter before the vernal equinox, as the Jews do, let him be deposed.’

At the beginning of the fourth century, matters had gone to such a length, that the Emperor Constantine thought it his duty to take steps to allay the controversy, and to insure uniformity of practice for the future. For this purpose, he got a canon passed in the great Ecumenical Council of Nice (A.D. 325), that everywhere the great feast of Easter should be observed upon one and the same day; and that not the day of the Jewish passover, but, as had been generally observed, upon the Sunday afterwards. And to prevent all future disputes as to the time, the following rules were also laid down:

‘That the twenty-first day of March shall be accounted the vernal equinox.’

‘That the full moon happening upon or next after the twenty-first of March, shall be taken for the full moon of Nisan.’

‘That the Lord’s-day next following that full moon be Easter-day.’

‘But if the full moon happen upon a Sunday, Easter-day shall be the Sunday after.’

As the Egyptians at that time excelled in astronomy, the Bishop of Alexandria was appointed to give notice of Easter-day to the Pope and other patriarchs. But it was evident that this arrangement could not last long; it was too inconvenient and liable to interruptions. The fathers of the next age began, therefore, to adopt the golden numbers of the Metonic cycle, and to place them in the calendar against those days in each month on which the new moons should fall during that year of the cycle. The Metonie cycle was a period of nineteen years. It had been observed by Meton, an Athenian philosopher, that the moon returns to have her changes on the same month and day of the month in the solar year after a lapse of nineteen years, and so, as it were, to run in a circle. He published his discovery at the Olympic Games, B.C. 433, and the cycle has ever since borne his name. The fathers hoped by this cycle to be able always to know the moon’s age; and as the vernal equinox was now fixed to the 21st of March, to find Easter for ever. But though the new moon really happened on the same day of the year after a space of nineteen years as it did before, it fell an hour earlier on that day, which, in the course of time, created a serious error in their calculations.

A cycle was then framed at Rome for 84 years, and generally received by the Western church, for it was then thought that in this space of time the moon’s changes would return not only to the same day of the month, but of the week also. Wheatley tells us that, ‘During the time that Easter was kept according to this cycle, Britain was separated from the Roman empire, and the British churches for some time after that separation continued to keep Easter according to this table of 84 years. But soon after that separation, the Church of Rome and several others discovered great deficiencies in this account, and therefore left it for another which was more perfect.’—Book on the Common Prayer, p. 40. This was the Victorian period of 532 years. But he is clearly in error here. The Victorian period was only drawn up about the year 457, and was not adopted by the Church till the Fourth Council of Orleans, A.D. 541.

Now from the time the Romans finally left Britain (A.D. 426), when he supposes both churches to be using the cycle of 84 years, till the arrival of St. Augustine (A.D. 596), the error can hardly have amounted to a difference worth disputing about. And yet the time the Britons kept Easter must have varied considerably from that of the Roman missionaries to have given rise to the statement that they were Quartodecimans, which they certainly were not; for it is a well-known fact that British bishops were at the Council of Nice, and doubtless adopted and brought home with them the rule laid down by that assembly. Dr. Hooke’s account is far more probable, that the British and Irish churches adhered to the Alexandrian rule, according to which the Easter festival could not begin before the 8th of March; while according to the rule adopted at Rome and generally in the West, it began as early as the fifth. ‘They (the Celts) were manifestly in error,’ he says; ‘but owing to the haughtiness with which the Italians had demanded an alteration in their calendar, they doggedly determined not to change.’—Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. i. p. 14.

After a good deal of disputation had taken place, with more in prospect, Oswy, King of Northumbria, determined to take the matter in hand. He summoned the leaders of the contending parties to a conference at Whitby, A.D. 664, at which he himself presided. Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne, represented the British church. The Romish party were headed by Agilbert, bishop of Dorchester, and Wilfrid, a young Saxon. Wilfrid was spokesman. The arguments were characteristic of the age; but the manner in which the king decided irresistibly provokes a smile, and makes one doubt whether he were in jest or earnest. Colman spoke first, and urged that the custom of the Celtic church ought not to be changed, because it had been inherited from their forefathers, men beloved of God, &c. Wilfrid followed:

‘The Easter which we observe I saw celebrated by all at Rome: there, where the blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, lived, taught, suffered, and were buried.’ And concluded a really powerful speech with these words: ‘And if, after all, that Columba of yours were, which I will not deny, a holy man, gifted with the power of working miracles, is he, I ask, to be preferred before the most blessed Prince of the Apostles, to whom our Lord said, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; and to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven” ?’

The King, turning to Colman, asked him, ‘Is it true or not, Colman, that these words were spoken to Peter by our Lord?’ Colman, who seems to have been completely cowed, could not deny it. ‘It is true, 0 King.’ ‘Then,’ said the King, ‘can you shew me any such power given to your Columba? ’ Colman answered, ’ No.’ ‘You are both, then, agreed,’ continued the King, are you not, that these words were addressed principally to Peter, and that to him were given the keys of heaven by our Lord?’ Both assented. ‘Then,’ said the King, ‘I tell you plainly, I shall not stand opposed to the door-keeper of the kingdom of heaven; I desire, as far as in me lies, to adhere to his precepts and obey his commands, lest by offending him who keepeth the keys, I should, when I present myself at the gate, find no one to open to me.’

This settled the controversy, though poor honest Colman resigned his see rather than submit to such a decision.

On Easter-day depend all the moveable feasts and fasts throughout the year. The nine Sundays before, and the eight following after, are all dependent upon it, and form, as it were, a body-guard to this Queen of Festivals. The nine preceding are the six Sundays in Lent, Quinquagesima, Sexagesima, and Septuagesima; the eight following are the five Sundays after Easter, the Sunday after Ascension Day, Whit Sunday, and Trinity Sunday.

EASTER CUSTOMS

The old Easter customs which still linger among us vary considerably in form in different parts of the kingdom. The custom of distributing the ‘pace’ or ‘pasche ege,’ which was once almost universal among Christians, is still observed by children, and by the peasantry in Lancashire. Even in Scotland, where the great festivals have for centuries been suppressed, the young people still get their hard-boiled dyed eggs, which they roll about, or throw, and finally eat. In Lancashire, and in Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire, and perhaps in other counties, the ridiculous custom of ‘lifting’ or ‘heaving’ is practised.

On Easter Monday the men lift the women, and on Easter Tuesday the women lift or heave the men. The process is performed by two lusty men or women joining their hands across each other’s wrists; then, making the person to be heaved sit down on their arms, they lift him up aloft two or three times, and often carry him several yards along a street. A grave clergyman who happened to be passing through a town in Lancashire on an Easter Tuesday, and having to stay an hour or two at an inn, was astonished by three or four lusty women rushing into his room, exclaiming they had come ‘to lift him.’ ‘To lift me!’ repeated the amazed divine; ‘what can you mean?’ ‘Why, your reverence, we’re come to lift you, ‘cause it’s Easter Tuesday.’ ‘Lift me because it’s Easter Tuesday? I don’t understand. Is there any such custom here?’ ‘Yes, to be sure; why, don’t you know? all us women was lifted yesterday; and us lifts the men today in turn. And in course it’s our rights and duties to lift ‘em.’

After a little further parley, the reverend traveller compromised with his fair visitors for half-a-crown, and thus escaped the dreaded compliment. In Durham, on Easter Monday, the men claim the privilege to take off the women’s shoes, and the next day the women retaliate. Anciently, both ecclesiastics and laics used to play at ball in the churches for tansy-cakes on Eastertide; and, though the profane part of this custom is happily everywhere discontinued, tansy-cakes and tansy-puddings are still favourite dishes at Easter in many parts. In some parishes in the counties of Dorset and Devon, the clerk carries round to every house a few white cakes as an Easter offering; these cakes, which are about the eighth of an inch thick, and of two sizes —the larger being seven or eight inches, the smaller about five in diameter— have a mingled bitter and sweet taste. In return for these cakes, which are always distributed after Divine service on Good Friday, the clerk receives a gratuity- according to the circumstances or generosity of the householder.

Rugby players from Team AIG Japan wearing black tackle people. Surprise ending

Correction: Commenter Larry Cox explains that the Rugby players are the New Zealand “All Blacks.”

The Daily Wire reports that one university is now teaching people that expecting punctuality in the workplace is racist.

According to diversity training materials being disseminated at publicly-funded Clemson University, expecting people from other cultures to show up on time is racist.

Yup, racist.

The university spent nearly $27,000 on diversity training materials from a company called Workplace Answers. …

One of the online slides depicted two groups, which included foreign professors and students, showing up to a scheduled event at 9 a.m.; one group came 15 minutes early and the other came 10 minutes late. The slide made the assertion that it would not be the inclusive thing to do to chastise the group that was late, since people must “recognize cultural differences that may impact the meeting and adjust accordingly.”

The Daily Caller reports:

One slide features a guy named Alejandro who plans a meeting between two groups. Each group contains foreign professors and students. One group shows up 15 minutes early. The second group shows up 10 minutes late.

A question-and-answer section then instructs Clemson’s professors that Alejandro would be insufficiently “inclusive” if he were to “politely ask the second group to apologize.” Alejandro would also be wrong to advise the straggling, late people who aren’t respecting everyone else’s time that “in our country, 9:00 a.m. means 9:00 a.m.”

The “inclusive” thing for Alejandro to do, the taxpayer-funded diversity materials instruct Clemson professors, is to “recognize cultural differences that may impact the meeting and adjust accordingly.” Alejandro must understand “that his cultural perspective regarding time is neither more nor less valid than any other.”

In other words, some foreigners are incapable of being on time and Americans need to shut up and accept it in the name of diversity, or something. Of course, such low expectations of those from other cultures is truly infantilizing stuff, but this is how the Left views any minority group.

These ingenuous and expensive slides were reportedly approved by Clemson Chief Diversity Officer Lee Gill. It’s unclear what a “chief diversity officer” actually does, but Gill apparently gets paid big bucks for the position, raking in over $185,000 in tax-payer funds annually.

RTWT

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Automobile and Bicycle Show, Milan 1907 Poster.

“Shelley Garland” looks like a transgender specimen to me.

The South African edition of Huffington Post recently featured an interesting editorial proposal offering a glimpse of just where the radical left will be going in the future internationally.

Some of the biggest blows to the progressive cause in the past year have often been due to the votes of white men. If white men were not allowed to vote, it is unlikely that the United Kingdom would be leaving the European Union, it is unlikely that Donald Trump would now be the President of the United States, and it is unlikely that the Democratic Alliance would now be governing four of South Africa’s biggest cities.

If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened. It would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely – the denial of the vote to white men for 20 years (just less than a generation) would go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world. The influence of reckless white males were one of the primary reasons that led to the Great Recession which began in 2008. This would also strike a blow against toxic white masculinity, one that is long needed.

At the same time, a denial of the franchise to white men, could see a redistribution of global assets to their rightful owners. After all, white men have used the imposition of Western legal systems around the world to reinforce modern capitalism. A period of twenty years without white men in the world’s parliaments and voting booths will allow legislation to be passed which could see the world’s wealth far more equitably shared. The violence of white male wealth and income inequality will be a thing of the past.

This redistribution of the world’s wealth is long overdue, and it is not just South Africa where white males own a disproportionate amount of wealth. While in South Africa 90 percent of the country’s land is in the hands of whites (it is safe to assume these are mainly men), along with 97 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this is also the norm in the rest of the world. Namibia has similar statistics with regard to land distribution and one can assume this holds for other assets too. As Oxfam notes eight men control as much as wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population. In the United States ten percent of the population (nearly all white) own 90 percent of all assets – it is likely that these assets are largely in the hands of males. Although statistics by race are difficult to find from other parts of the world, it is very likely that the majority of the world’s assets are in the hands of white males, despite them making up less than 10 percent of the world’s population.

It is obvious that this violent status quo will not change without a struggle, and the only way to do so will be through the expropriation of these various assets and equitably distribute them to those who need them. This will not only make the world a more equitable place, but will also go some way to paying the debt that white males owe the world. Over the past 500 years colonialism, slavery, and various aggressive wars and genocides, have been due to the actions of white men. Redistributing some of their assets will go some way to paying the historical debt that they owe society.

It is no surprise that liberalism – and its ideological offshoots of conservatism and libertarianism – are the most popular ideologies among white males. These ideologies with their focus on individuals and individual responsibility, rather than group affiliation, allow white men to ignore the debt that they owe society, and from acknowledging that most of their assets, wealth, and privilege are the result of theft and violence.

Some may argue that this is unfair. Let’s be clear, it may be unfair, but a moratorium on the franchise for white males for a period of between 20 and 30 years is a small price to pay for the pain inflicted by white males on others, particularly those with black, female-identifying bodies. In addition, white men should not be stripped of their other rights, and this withholding of the franchise should only be a temporary measure, as the world rights the wrongs of the past.

A withholding of the franchise from white males, along with the passing of legislation in this period to redistribute some of their assets, will also, to a degree, act as the reparations for slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, which the world is crying out for to be paid.

RTWT if you can stand it.

Michael Burden had the answer on Quora.

The elderly Prussian army captain marched smartly up to a platoon of soldiers on a Berlin street and began to bark orders imperiously. He stopped a bus bound for the outlying Kopenick district and hustled the men abroad. There, as shown in the picture below, he marched them briskly to the office of Kopenick’s mayor and snapped: “You are under arrest !” Intimidated by the authoritative overbearing manner of the army officer, the mayor managed to ask timidly “Where is your warrant ?” “My warrant” roared the captain “is the men I command.” The mayor, himself a reserve officer, was curious about the captain’s appearance at the time, but he kept his curiosity to himself. The captain then ordered the borough treasurer to hand over all of the cash in the treasury, just over 4,000 marks, and issued an “official” receipt. The mayor, his wife, the treasurer and the deputy mayor were then marched outside the town hall and held under guard. The captain ordered his men to stay at their posts for half an hour and marched away with the 4,000 marks.

The captain was in fact Wilhelm Voigt, a cobbler and ex-convict who had exploited the Prussian awe of uniformed authority to rob Kopenick of its petty cash in October 1906. Ten days later, when the police arrived at Voigt’s attic home, they found the uniform wrapped in a bundle. He did not resist arrest but asked only to be allowed to finish his breakfast. Voigt, who explained that he had learnt to mimic the speech and mannerisms of Prussian officers while mending their boots as an apprentice, was jailed for four years.

His exploits had attracted great public sympathy and affection, however, and he was pardoned by the Kaiser after serving half his sentence. Voigt retired in comfort to Luxembourg on a life pension, given to him by a rich Berlin dowager who had been impressed by his sheer audacity.

The Times reports:

Paul Novograd, whose reluctant decision to shutter his family’s century-old Claremont Riding Academy in 2007 turned Manhattan into a no-horse town, died on Friday. He was 73.

His death, in Manhattan, was confirmed by his daughter Sasha Brown, who said doctors had not yet determined the cause.

Claremont’s sudden closing left New Yorkers without what had been billed as the oldest continuously operating stable in New York City and Manhattan’s oldest riding school and last public livery.

Claremont had been home to countless horses since it opened in 1892 on the Upper West Side, had trained generations of riders in its arena, and had supplied equine cast members to the Metropolitan Opera and other cultural institutions.

Riders boarded their mounts in stalls that rented for hundreds of dollars, or what people in other cities would pay for apartments. Horses could also be rented for upward of $55 an hour, to hoof it one block north and two blocks east from the Claremont stables, at 175 West 89th Street, to Central Park’s four-and-a-quarter-mile bridle path.

Mr. Novograd saw the deterioration of that path — caused by joggers, bicyclists and others who rediscovered the park after it was rehabilitated — as one reason for the decline in ridership that led him to his painful decision to close Claremont.

“Even if the Parks Department wanted to make it horses only, it’s just too inviting to pedestrians and dirt bikers and people throwing Frisbees and people pushing strollers, and it’s a zoo out there,” Mr. Novograd told WNYC radio in 2007. “And our horses are, thank you, just too polite for zoos.”

What was more, renovations of his 19th-century stables — “what I call woefully authentic,” he said — left him deep in debt.

Designed by Frank A. Rooke as a public livery, the five-floor beige brick Romanesque Revival stable was once sold to the sugar fortune heir Charles F. Havemeyer, who leased it out to West Side families as a place to board their horses and store their carriages. It became a riding school in 1927. …

Paul Novograd, who had learned to ride there as a child, went to work at Claremont only grudgingly in 1972. At the time, as a student of East Asia, he had recently returned from Japan, where he had been studying Zen gardens under a Fulbright scholarship. (He remained an avid gardener.)

Instead of pursuing his dissertation, however, he agreed to help his ailing father run the riding school as well as battle neighborhood decline and the New York City bureaucracy.

The city had in 1961 condemned the property as part of the West Side Urban Renewal Area, and for the next 37 years, the Novograds lived in the building as month-to-month tenants as it crumbled. Paul Novograd maneuvered to preserve the building by placing it on the National Register of Historic Places. Finally, in 1998, the city sold it back to the family after the urban renewal plans were abandoned. …

Paul Jonathan Novograd was born in Manhattan on Dec. 4, 1943, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother was the former Bernice Landau. He graduated from the Horace Mann School and received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, where he also nearly completed his doctorate in East Asian studies. He spoke eight languages.

I used to be a customer. Molliter ossa cubent.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

NYM article on the rise and decline of riding in Central Park.

Edward Hopper, Bridle Path, 1939, formerly San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, now privately owned. Sold for $10,386,500 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2012 to allow the SFMOMA to purchase a different Hopper.