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The Miraculous

The Miraculous: New York

86. The South Bronx

The mayor of New York City borrows a life-size fiberglass sculpture of a shirtless young man with a boombox and a basketball (he holds the ball under his left arm, while his right foot rests on the boombox) to place on the front lawn of his official residence on the occasion of presenting a filmmaker renowned for his depictions of everyday urban life with the keys to the city.

The Miraculous: New York

87. East Village, SoHo, Midtown

On November 5, 1969, a Saturday, an artist living at 340 East 13th Street, gets out of bed at 17 minutes after noon. Using rubber stamps, he notes this fact on a postcard that he mails to an art critic living at 138 Prince Street.

The Miraculous: New York

88. A Hotel (now demolished) at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street

A husband and wife, both artists, both Mexican, are living in an apartment at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. Following the politically motivated censorship of a mural commission the husband has been working on at 30 Rockefeller Center, he is frustrated to learn that two other major U.S. commissions have been cancelled.

The Miraculous: New York

89. 2 Fifth Avenue

Before moving into a new apartment building overlooking Washington Square Park, a photographer and his wife, both Hungarian émigrés, go through every apartment in the still-unoccupied building to find the ideal vantage point for the photographs the husband plans to take.

The Miraculous: New York

90. 2 Fifth Avenue, 131 West 15th Street, 200 and 220 West 21st Street

Some six years after the death of his beloved wife from cancer, a photographer asks his assistant to finally take apart his late spouse’s bed. After all, he is nearly 90 and it’s time to put his life in order. In the course of disassembling the bed, the assistant comes upon some boxes of enigmatic black-and-white photographs—many of them depicting old disjointed dolls, possibly happened upon at flea markets or deliberately posed in a studio, it’s impossible to know—credit stamped with a woman’s name.

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The Brooklyn Rail

FEB 2022

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