My favorite memory of Ed Rutsch is of him in a film at the Neighborhood House in Setauket, NY, after the Bi-Centennial showing him digging in a railroad turntable in Paterson, NJ, where Lou Costello had a gym years ago ("Abbott and Costello" hounded by IRS Feds) and later meeting him and visiting Paterson. I once lived in the Patterson Houses, projects in the South Bronx near where the cast iron Capitol Dome was forged.

Saturdays seemed to be different in the New York Times newspaper, printed for the "locals" then perhaps. I recall there was an article in that newspaper about the Federal site, which made no mention of it's "impending" significance. As covered by the TV press later, the site was cast in a "cover-up" kind of reporting. My grand dad was a real estate reporter and lost his wheelchair assistant, his son, in a Hall of Records elevator accident during the last World War. 

Two of the contract projects in that neighborhood involved the transportation of yards of excavated dirt to other locations to be screened by screened by volunteers (or paid?) of schools after classes. One went to the newly opened replacement Stuyvesant High School another to Bridgehampton, NY. I am not sure whose policy this represents, archaeologists or bureaucracy around City Hall. I recall being asked about that time about the location of the "Negroe Burying Ground" next to the "Collect Pond" site of potteries and water springing still in basements on Chambers Street, once flooding "The Tombs" former gaol, next to the "Rope Walk," a long shed where hemp and "manilla" were woven into long ropes for ships. A similar one was in the Cooper Square neighborhood, Peter Cooper, important for laying the second trans-Atlantic cable which succeeded after the failure of the first. 

As a researcher at Grossman and Associates, Inc., back in 1989, I was involved in a test excavation of a location in City Hall Park, the location of a purported "First Almshouse" which I would question, this "first" appellation, something history has ascribed, other wards of the early City may have contained others. That test was near it's cemetery. I also worked later on the re-excavation of the "power conduit" between the Surrogate Court and the Tweed Courthouse in City Hall Park later with Linda Stone, MA, RPA. Further, as an employee of Parsons, Inc., I was involved in the clearance excavations of the "Almshouse Cemetery" location again in City Hall Park, as the park was combined into a "New York City Commons and African Burial Ground" historic district, which in my opinion should be expanded to include the location of Janes and Kirtland, Inc., iron foundry which in the Bronx, forged the Civil War era US Capitol Dome, and assembled it in Washington, D.C., with scaffolding and horses, for a little over $1 million.

My thoughts,
George Myers