From Pastoral to Urban: The Meyer Farms of New Springville, Staten Island, New York, 1903–late 1950s
For anyone curious about what underlies the metropolitan landscape as we experience it today, Emilie Clothier Harting’s history of her ancestors’ farms offers a vivid portrait of Staten Island’s past.
From Pastoral to Urban: The Meyer Farms of New Springville, Staten Island, New York, 1903–late 1950s shows the transformation of land from agrarian to suburban in the least populated New York City borough—in microcosm, what was happening across the country.
After twenty years of farming various lots in Jersey City, New Jersey, the prescient Henry H. Meyer bought over two hundred acres of farmland in the middle of Staten Island and, with his sons, he ran one of the three largest agricultural enterprises on the Island. Each day carriages with teams of horses, and later motorized trucks, made trips to the Washington Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with vegetables and herbs that were then sold to hotels and restaurants.
Henry’s great-granddaughter has combined family legend and extensive research to tell the story of immense success and searing loss. The Great Depression of the 1930s, mortgage foreclosures on farms, and family dynamics all contributed to the downfall.
A Literary Tour Guide to England and Scotland
“I always felt that I knew literary England like a book. But not this book. A Literary Tour Guide to England and Scotland is much more than a guide. It is a graphic account of the wheres and whens and hows of the Great Whos so made our culture what it is. It’s an invaluable companion.” — Louis Untermeyer
A Literary Tour Guide to England and Scotland, published by William Morrow and translated into Japanese, gives personal descriptions of the almost one hundred homes and haunts of writers in England, Scotland, and Wales open to the public. The book is listed in bibliographies of literary travel books in The New York Times and other sources.
A Literary Tour Guide to the United States Northeast
A Literary Tour Guide to the Northeast: U.S., also published by William Morrow in hardback and paperback and translated into Japanese, takes the reader on a personal journey to locations associated with writers in New England and the Mid Atlantic States. The book has a separate chapter on Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts lived and worked in the mid-1800s.