The Long Forgotten Love Story of the Titanic’s Interracial Couple

We Know Jack and Rose but what about Joseph and Juliette? The Titanic was the greatest shipwreck of the 20th century and most of us grew up with the love story of the James Cameron film. He built one of the world’s most iconic affairs with fragments of real stories from the passengers on board,…

Meet America’s Lost Wonder Woman

The personification of countries is nothing new. For years artists have used the personification of countries to make make a point about the country’s political actions, its history, and at times to inspire hope during the most trying of times. From the 1800s and to the early 1900s it was popular for countries to have…

What’s the Paris Opera House Doing in New York City?

Paris, is that you? All signs would point to yes in this building, a bite sized double if ever there was one for the Opéra Garnier. Y’know, the one of Phantom of the Opera fame? With a dramatic double staircase made for cape swooshing, cinematic lamp posts and marble for days? Although the Beaux Arts…

Let’s Window Shop for French Fairytale Homes Again

I’m in that mood again. Is there ever a bad time to go window shopping for French fairytale homes? The allure of quitting urban life, recruiting your best friends to go all in on the adventure and living out the rest of your days fixing up your French fortress with an endless supply of wine…

Building Mr. Eiffel’s Penthouse Apartment: A Tower Under Construction

A Parisian friend dropped some very interesting photographs in my inbox this week, some that I’d never seen before of the Eiffel Tower in its earliest days. I had previously come across time-lapse photographs of the Eiffel Tower in its various stages of construction, but none like this; none that went behind the scaffolding, right up close inside the growing skeleton…

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Biblical Bad Girls and Their Ancient “Time’s Up” Scandal

Welcome to Rouen, France, a city where the cider flows freely (it’s a Normandy thing), and the streets are lined with crooked, half-timbered houses that send a singular, ye-olde message: you’re on some seriously ancient stomping grounds. Rouen’s power and influence can be traced from its founding by a sturdy Celtic tribe, to its pivotal…

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The Not-So-Straightforward Story of Women and Trousers

Not-so-fun fact: Until January 31st of 2013, it was illegal for women in France to wear trousers. It made headlines at the time when a 200 year-old law requiring women to ask police for special permission to “dress as men” or else risk being taken into custody, was finally revoked. The law had been kept in place…

Ode to the Ice Man

In his autobiography Timebends, Arthur Miller recalls an occupation lost in time – that of the ice man, who wore “leather vests and a wet piece of sackcloth slung over the right shoulder, and once they had slid the ice into the box, they invariably slipped the sacking off and stood there waiting, dripping, for their money.” From…

The First Parisian Skyscrapers were also a Notorious World War II Jewish Camp

A relatively austere low-income housing complex in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, the Cité de la Muette is not a remarkable collection of buildings. At first glance, it’s a council estate like any other, where residents go about their daily business seemingly unfazed by the history that lies both within its walls and beneath them.…

Mumbai’s Time Capsule Cafés

Peeling walls, chipped ceilings and old, kitschy furniture, Mumbai’s grand old Parsi cafés haven’t changed much in over 100 years. Parsi, means Persian, a once thriving community in Mumbai that emigrated to India in the 19th century to avoid religious persecution in their homeland. Many of the settlers opened Iranian cafés, family-run businesses which became a symbol…