Tribute to Joel Siegel

I was reading at the Huffington Post Harry Shearer's tribute to his friend Joel Siegel and thought to write this bit about him. One of the most important facts I found about him, in that it directly affected me, was a New York City calendar he had printed, which I found in the Student Union book store at Stony Brook University where I was an undergraduate and graduate student in Anthropology in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the calendar, there was an important event in the history of New York City described for different days. I found later some of this information encyclopedic in I.M. Phelps Stoke's five volume "Iconography of Manhattan" (at Grossman and Associates, Inc.) who also wrote the official paperback guide to the history of New York City for the 1939 World's Fair, complete with pictures and reproductions of paintings. A copy is in the Huntington Free Library at Westchester Square in the Bronx, which once held the Heye Foundation's ethnology collection, since moved to Washington, D.C. in the move of the foundation over to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, part of which is in the Old Customs House at the "foot" of Broadway across from Battery Park where I once worked on the "swing shift" (3:30pm to 12:00am) in archaeological monitoring for the excavation of the new subway "tunnel" to the new station at the new Staten Island Ferry Terminal. That's another story herein. As I began way back then working in NYC archaeology his calendar meant a lot to me, as did Ms. Callender of the Heye Foundation, a fellow grad student.

I was recounting a memory of Joel Siegel when he finally got East with a woman archaeologist friend. His cousin I think she said worked as an archaeologist in Israel on Masada (metzuda, "fortress" the human remains there recently re-interpreted) and he came down to a NYC urban archaeology site we worked on with Nan Rothschild, Ph.D., where the Livingston and the "Captain" William Kidd's family had been, then across the street from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park in lower Manhattan, where we'd spend lunch that summer by the falling water, reading the memorialized letters from Vietnam, since redone. Called then the "7 Hanover Square Site" which historically was the site of the King George statue, torn down and melted in Connecticut for Revolutionary War musketballs, its near today the recently opened garden commemorating the British victims of the attack on the "World Trade Center". She said he had a close-up of her hand and a few artifacts they had been finding on an earlier site in search of the "Stadt Huys".

One of the descendants of the Livingston family was visiting too. A politically powerful family whom had also tried to establish iron-making in the English colony but had failed from poor resource and regulation, restricted to anchors, for example by the mother country. Captain Kidd had given a large gemstone ring to his neighbor Mrs. Livingston to curry favor in his upcoming trial which resulted in him hanged in London for "piracy" when his London privateer backers didn't come forward, though he originally thought he was to be tried in the accidental killing of a young crewman by a thrown bucket in a tense almost mutiny. He's cited as perhaps "the most maligned character in history" in "A New American History" by the popular 1930s historian of American history, W.E. Woodward. Robert Gardiner, of Gardiner's Island, NY where the treasure was dug up in the 1880s and used for a large "Seamans Home" in London I've heard, replied when I once asked him on the phone, that he had done some research while there and a map to the treasure apparently was on his person when he was hung and as all property belonging to criminals becomes the property of the Crown, and since there was no "US of A" then, the British claimed that the treasure, an Indian raja's daughter's dowry, "rightfully" belonged to the Crown. Lady Diana I think was related to the Kidd's through her mum.

I will miss Joel Siegel's humor and most of all the intelligent acumen he brought to the tube. I would have liked to thank him for the calendar, on behalf of NYC.