Although most of the old Mount Sinai Hospital on Yorkville Avenue is gone, a prominent architectural firm has agreed to restore the only wing of the hospital still standing. The wing, built as an addition around 1928, was used as a nursing home after Mount Sinai moved to its present location on University Avenue in…
At Innisbrook, a Florida golf resort
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“A subtle dog-leg to the left”: that’s how golf pro Matt Hurley describes the 10th hole of Sandpiper — which is to say that it bends ever so slightly. Our golf-cart is idling in a shady grove at Innisbrook, a posh 21-year-old golf resort in Tarpon Springs, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Its well-landscaped 1,000 acres…
Bathurst Manor memory: frog hunting in the creek
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There were bull-frogs in the creek on the other side of Wilson Heights, Jackie told us: monstrous bull-frogs, the biggest he had ever seen. He had brought one home like a warrior returning from battle with a spoil. But he said the granddaddy of them all, the Moby Dick of bull-frogs, was still in the…
Old synagogue one of Curacao’s many attractions
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Situated in the Caribbean some 63 kilometres from Venezuela, the Dutch island of Curacao is a rugged, hilly outcropping with some 160,000 inhabitants. Although most are Catholic, they represent about 80 nationalities and speak four official tongues: English, Dutch, Spanish and Papiamentu, the native lingo that is a smorgasbord of Old Dutch, Portuguese and African…
The Jews of Bangkok, Thailand
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Sam Cohen, a petroleum geologist from Calgary, left Canada to work on a large oil field in the Gulf of Thailand about 1983. When his contract expired during an industry slowdown several years later, he chose to remain in the bustling capital city of Bangkok, where a forest of cranes along the skyline suggests an…
Many at funeral of Flora Draimin (1842-1925)
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This obituary appeared in the Toronto Evening Telegram, November 2, 1925. Many at funeral of Mrs. Draimin Deceased Was One of First Jewish Citizens of Toronto In the death of Mrs. Flora Draimin, aged 83 years, wife of the late Jacob Draimin, who died at the home of her son, Archie Draimin, at 80 Beverley…
Moses Montefiore, a man of his people
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His name was Moses; he was a leader of his people; he spent much time in Egypt and the desert; he wandered incessantly; he is associated with a fiery mountain and the holiday of Passover; and his life lasted longer than a century. These traits describe the biblical Moses, of course, but they also refer…
Intrigue and history at American Colony Hotel
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A few paces over the line between east and west, the American Colony is reputedly the finest hotel in Arab East Jerusalem, and no less steeped in legend and lore than its more famous counterpart, the King David Hotel, in the western, more prosperous section of the city. Part of the exclusive Relais & Chateaux…
Inside Sotheby’s, famous London auction house
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Inside a large public room at Sotheby’s, the famous auction house on New Bond Street in Central London, workers are painstakingly reconstructing another room: an Islamic-style chamber that has been disassembled and shipped here from an Arabian palace. Having once graced the ancestral home of an anonymous sheik, the wood-carved ceiling, walls and floor of…
In the footsteps of Shakespeare of London
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The play is again the thing in the Southwark district of London as a newly-built replica of the Globe Theatre, where some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays debuted almost 400 years ago, is set to open in late August (1997) for a three-week dramatic season. Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,…
