KBH in Providence Journal
I recently spoke with Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal about The King’s Best Highway. Rick writes:
[Jaffe] reveals that the road sprang from the consolidation of several Indian trails and details such developments as railroads and canals, as well as bigger highways to accommodate the explosion of the automobile in popularity, including present-day Route 1.
Jaffe calls it “An outsider’s insider’s history … the history that I would have wanted to know, not being from the Northeast.”
As a sometimes-journalist myself, I was impressed with how Rick made our conversation feel like one I’d have with my editor, or someone deeply familiar with the book.
Read the rest of Rick’s piece here. For more news coverage, click here.
KBH in Boston Globe
A thoughtful review of The King’s Best Highway in the Boston Globe:
Jaffe’s paean to this roadway, which began as a series of Indian paths and over time became a pair of US highways, offers not just a history of an important Northeastern thoroughfare but represents a kind of lens through which the reader can follow the development of America over four centuries.
Read the rest of the review here. (For more reviews, click here.)
I should point out that the Globe reviewer mistakenly calls Mathias Nicolls the country’s first post rider. Actually, Nicolls administered the “Oath of Fidelity” that this rider—whose name I never discovered—took upon leaving Manhattan for the first time, in January 1673.
As I state in the final chapter, the name of America’s first mailman may have been “Edward Messenger.” Messenger is mentioned in a 1673 letter written by John Winthrop Jr., the colonial governor of Connecticut who guided the first post rider during his inaugural journey.
BPR Today
The latest news along the old road…
The great blog “Boston 1775″ published a guest post of mine about Ben Franklin and the mail system.
A bank in Guilford, Conn., bought a 170-year-old historic house on BPR to convert into a new branch.
Metro-North’s New Haven line shut down this weekend, affecting 1,500 passengers.
Former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci remains a major political force on the radio.
Larry David was spotted “just off the Bowery” filming for the new season of “Curb”:
(via DNAinfo)
KBH in Westchester Guardian
Amanda Jane reviews The King’s Best Highway in the July 8, 2010, Westchester Guardian:
On its face, the history of a road hardly seems an engaging topic for a book. Eric Jaffe makes it fascinating.
Can’t argue with that. For more of Jane’s review, download the full issue of the Guardian here. For more reviews, click here.
KBH in NY Post
The July 4 issue of the New York Post included a brief piece of mine about how Manhattan’s first highway led the way toward Revolution:
In Revolutionary days, the Boston Post Road was Manhattan’s main highway. This mail route began at the island’s southern tip, ran along today’s Park Row and Bowery, zigzagged up the east side, entered what’s now Central Park around 97th Street, and followed parts of St. Nicholas Ave. and Broadway toward The Bronx. From there it continued to Boston through New Haven, Conn.
Click here to read the rest of the piece online. (The online version is slightly longer than what appeared in print.)
KBH on Leonard Lopate
Last Thursday I discussed the Boston Post Road on the Leonard Lopate radio show, on WNYC. The show’s site lets you download or listen to the conversation, here.
I was also on the Jim Scott show in Cincinnati earlier today, and will be on Hartford radio tomorrow, bright and early. Links will be posted soon.
BPR Today
The latest news along the old road…
The Hartford Courant announces my upcoming readings in Connecticut.
Officials and consultants discuss “what’s to be done” about congested, dangerous Route 1 in Greenwich, Conn.
The population of Providence is shrinking, while Boston adds residents, according to new Census figures.
An old-fashioned gas station provides some “beautification” of BPR in Orange, Conn.
The Historical Marker Database highlights an 1804 series Boston Road milestone in Pelham, N.Y.:
(image: Bill Coughlin)
KBH on The Infrastructurist
I have a guest post running on The Infrastructurist, an excellent site on all things transportation, about “how bikes saved America’s roads”:
The Office of Road Inquiry, seedling of today’s Federal Highway Administration, emerged from a feverish push to secure federal road reform known as the Good Roads Movement. In 1927, the Ford Motor Company took credit for this movement in the press. Such a claim raised few flags at the time, and it no doubt raises none today. Everyone knows the Model T changed the country forever. The notion that better roads followed a better car makes a lot of sense, which is precisely why it makes a great platform for revisionist history.
Read the rest of the post here.
KBH in Westchester Journal News
Ken Valenti, who writes the “Going Places” column in the Westchester Journal News, spoke to me about The King’s Best Highway last week, for his Sunday piece:
Jaffe looked at [the Boston Post Road] and saw a highway that at times appeared to him “as a character, as a figure almost, in American history.” And it was one that had not gotten a lot of attention.
“There wasn’t that much written about it,” he said. “But there was still a lot of story to tell.”
Valenti also spoke with Barbara Davis, New Rochelle’s city historian, who was a great help to my project, particularly in the early going. I’ll be speaking at New Rochelle Public Library this Thursday.
For more Readings, click here.
KBH in WSJ
Bill Kauffman has kind words for The King’s Best Highway in a Wall Street Journal review:
The “king’s best highway,” later known fondly as the Post Road and eventually as U.S. Routes 1 and 20, began as a series of Indian paths wending their way from Boston to New York City. Eric Jaffe, an agreeable guide, travels this multibranched highway through four centuries to provide an episodic history of roads and their ramifications.
Kauffman seems to particularly enjoy the final chapter, when I take one last spin along the old route:
In his final chapter, Mr. Jaffe rises to poetry. He sets out from the Bronx on the Post Road, or its modern overlay, imagining himself a post rider equipped with a “global positioning saddle.” For hours he motors through “a disinterested forest of franchise stores.” Everywhere he finds “cultural erasures” from the era of urban renewal—the inexcusable vandalism of the 1950s and 1960s. Somewhere, it seems, America took a wrong turn on the Post Road. Whether we can retrace our route and find the better way is a really good question.
Read the rest of Kauffman’s review here, and read this and other Praise here.
Bookshelf
Copyright 2010 E. Jaffe. All rights reserved.
"Kings Highway" image by Elissa Curtis.
