Stacy Horn's Blog

I took a picture from my roof yesterday and thought, “There’s a lot more buildings around the Empire State Building, isn’t there?” This is a view from my roof in 2012. The picture I took yesterday is right below it. I wish I could make them same size but I forget how. If you scroll down I included a fuller view of what I see when looking uptown.

There are a few movies I watch when I’m having trouble falling asleep. Not because they’re boring, but because they’re comforting. The Portrait of Jennie is one of my favorites. A vaudeville theatre called Hammerstein’s is a key part of the movie and I’d always assumed it was not a real place. But it was. I was just going through my book records and came across the Hammerstein’s flyer below, featuring mystics John T. and Eva Fay and something called thaumaturgy.

Ever since researching Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory I’ve developed an interest is parapsychology history. So here I am, 15 years later, looking up John and Eva and thaumaturgy, because I love going down a good rabbit hole.

Why do those rabbit holes so often lead to something sad? Thaumaturgy refers to the ability to produce miracles, to change the physical world in some supernatural way. It has a long history, but I was more curious about John and Eva. The first thing I find is that he shot himself in 1908, when he was around 32. His wife was 25.

According to the New York Times he was a Harvard graduate. But they also said “Mr. Fay was one of the wealthiest men on the American stage, and had a splendid home at Melrose Highlands, near Boston.” His mother, Eva Fay, was a famous medium, who was repeatedly exposed as a fraud, once by Houdini, and I wonder where the money came from, and how he went from Harvard to vaudeville.

But something made him miserable enough to take his life. A few years before he’d tried to stop the production of a play that was going to expose him as a fraud. He took the producer to court and lost, but I didn’t find any evidence that the play was ever performed, or gave him any trouble if it was. He suffered from what was then called nervous dyspepsia, which was not understood in the 19th century, but it can lead to depression, for which there was little effective treatment.

I’ll bet if I started researching former Hammerstein’s acts I’d find a lot of sad stories like this. It’s a sad world, but some worlds within the world are sadder. In addition to a picture of the flyer is a picture of the real Hammerstein’s and John T. Fay’s mother.

If you can’t make my virtual book talk tomorrow, you have options! There is one on Wednesday, the day after, at 6pm! Also virtual.

February 4, 2026, 6:00PM
Book Talk, Untapped Cities New York (Virtual Event)
Details and registration here.

The photograph of East New York was taken by Larry Racioppo. Kids in East New York couldn’t afford basketball hoops. So they cut out the bottom of milk crates and used those for hoops.

February 3, 2026, 6:30PM
Webinar, Gotham Center for New York History (Virtual Event)
Details and registration here.

On 2/7 I’m doing an in-person/livestream event at Tom D’s Big New York Show, & this one involves prizes! Buy tickets before 1/31 to get a discount. Tom Delgado is a certified NYC tour guide and comedian whose shows involve “history, his comedian friends, trivia with prizes, and special guests.” Get tickets here!

When I read about Bob Weir’s death I saw that he was 78, and I immediately flashed back to a pivotal moment in my life involving my friend Chris Hegarty. And Bob Weir.

I was a Deadhead when I was in high school, so this was in the early 1970s (I graduated in 1974). I went to every concert when the Dead were in town (NYC and Long Island) with my closest friends, Chris Hegarty, who just died last August, and Adrienne Turyn. That is Adrienne dead center, and Chris is to her left, leaning back and smiling. More below …

It was at the end of the concert and Chris had written a letter to the Grateful Dead about a plan she had for writing about them. She couldn’t have been more than 16 years old. She threw her letter up towards the stage and Bob Weir caught it. I hadn’t read the letter, but Chris went on to become an accomplished poet, so she could write. I’m sure it was a great letter. But she was only 16, and I didn’t think they would take her seriously.

We were hanging around the stage, and Chris was hoping one of them would come out after having read the letter. I didn’t think there was a chance in hell of that, but I admired her bravery and for taking a shot.

Then we heard someone calling out “Chris! Chris!” It was Weir. He told her that he loved her ideas and gave her the address for John Perry Barlow. He told her to write him and they’d take it from there. I stood there just stunned. My whole world changed. I know how that sounds but it did. For the rest of my life I used this as the model for how I would live my life. I would go for it. No matter how scared or unqualified I felt I would take a shot. Almost all the best things in my life have come from my ability to do this.

But here’s the thing I only just realized when I read that he was 78. If we were 16 when this happened, that means Bob Weir was 25. At the time I was thinking we were just kids, and we were, but I saw Weir as being so much older and he was essentially still a kid himself. I have always liked him, and especially for how he treated my friend, but now I like him even more knowing how young he was. I’m not sure why yet. It has something to do with how it emphasizes his openness to taking a chance. And his kindness.

Chris wrote Barlow, but he never responded. It was disappointing but it didn’t change anything for me. Chris was still the most fearless person I had ever known, and I was going to be just like her. (I should also remind everyone that this was the 1970s, when women were not encouraged to be bold, making her act that much more astonishing.) God I wish she was still alive so we could talk again about that night, and I could thank her for helping me to become a better version of myself. And I wish I could thank Bob Weir for his kindness and for blowing my mind that night when he showed what can happen when you take the long shot.

Every five years or so I post about this choirboy. In the movie The Bishop’s Wife, the Mitchell Boychoir perform a hymn called O Sing to God. I love the arrangement. But every time I see this movie, and I watch it every holiday season, there’s one boy who always gets my attention. The movie was made in 1947, and I’m guessing he was around 15 years old, maybe a little older. That would make him 93+ now. So yeah, probably no longer with us.

Here’s a few screenshots of him, but you can also see him here. I cued it so when you click on the link it starts at the moment he appears.

As I’ve posted before, I don’t know why, but I just want to know how his life went. What did he do? Where did he go? Did he keep singing? Was his life mostly happy? (Are most people’s lives mostly happy?)

Pictures from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Double Helix Medals Dinner at the American Museum of Natural History (in the squid and the whale room!). Picture 1: The room. Picture 2: scientists from the lab who were asked to stand. Picture 3: Martina Navratilova, who, along with Chrissie Evert, were honored for their contributions to science. Dr. Bob Langer was honored for his contributions in biotechnology. He was such a mensch. Google him, he’s amazing.

I loved how Martina and Chrissie, who were such fierce competitors, came to be true friends. At the dinner, Martina mentioned how nice it was for her and Chrissie to be happy on the same day. When they were competing, one of them would always be happy because they won, and the other would be sad because they lost.

My brother, Douglas Horn, is on the board of the Laboratory, that’s how I got to go! Who doesn’t love celebrating science? Thank you, Douglas!

On November 6, at 6:00, I’ll be talking about my new book, The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood in East New York!

Joining me for the discussion will be: Hailie Kim, Director of Community Organizing, Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, Sarita Daftary-Steel, Co-Director, Freedom Agenda at Urban Justice Center, and Yasmin Schwartz, Division Director
United Community Centers.

The talk is sponsored by the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, The East NY Coalition for Community Advancement, and the United Community Centers.

Place: United Community Centers
613 New Lots Avenue
East New York

Sign up here!

Concidentally, I am on two podcasts this week talking about my book Damnation Island. Philip Yanos, Ph.D., the author of excellent and important book, Exiles in New York City: Warehousing the Marginalized on Ward’s Island, has started a podcast which focuses on stories of banishment. I am the guest in the current episode! From my blurb for Yanos’s great book: “A riveting look at the untold history of the treatment and mistreatment of marginalized groups banished to Ward’s Island. Combining compassionate understanding with clear and informed insight, this account is impossible to put down. The final chapter, with an alternative vision for the island’s future, is positively thrilling.”

I am also on Travis Myers’ podcast, Another Nobody! Myers is a crime author, including the three book series which begins with Sister Margaret, A Tommy Keane Novel. “Sister Margaret is a gut punch of a tale that takes the reader behind the crime-scene tape and onto an exhilarating tour of the streets, drug dens, dive bars, and precinict houses of New York City, with an insiders view that rarely makes the papers.” -Jesse Smith, Crime Journalist, Kingston Times