Port Jefferson in New York

27 January 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  7 minutes

Danfords Hotel & Marina © Iracaz/cc-by-sa-3.0

Danfords Hotel & Marina © Iracaz/cc-by-sa-3.0

Port Jefferson (informally known as “Port Jeff”) is an incorporated village in the town of Brookhaven in Suffolk County, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island. Officially known as the Incorporated Village of Port Jefferson, the population was 7,962 as of the 2020 United States census.   read more…

East Hampton in New York

27 May 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  12 minutes

Montauk Manor hotel © Beyond My Ken/cc-by-sa-4.0

Montauk Manor hotel © Beyond My Ken/cc-by-sa-4.0

The Town of East Hampton is located in southeastern Suffolk County, New York, United States, at the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. It is the easternmost town in the state of New York. At the time of the 2020 United States Census, it had a total population of 28,385. The town includes the village of East Hampton, as well as the hamlets of Montauk, Amagansett, Wainscott, and Springs. It also includes part of the incorporated village of Sag Harbor.   read more…

Oheka Castle in West Hills

12 January 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Hotels Reading Time:  8 minutes

Oheka Castle and Gardens © OhekaCastle/cc-by-sa-3.0

Oheka Castle and Gardens © OhekaCastle/cc-by-sa-3.0

Oheka Castle, also known as the Otto Kahn Estate, is a hotel located on the North Shore of Long Island, in West Hills, New York, also known as the “Gold Coast,” a hamlet in the town of Huntington. It was the country home of investment financier and philanthropist Otto Hermann Kahn and his family. The name “Oheka” is an acronym using the first several letters of each part of its creator’s name, Otto Hermann Kahn, which Kahn also used to name his yacht Oheka II and his ocean-front Villa Oheka in Palm Beach, Florida. The mansion was built by Kahn between 1914 and 1919, and is the second largest private home in the United States, comprising 127 rooms and over 109,000 square feet (10,100 m²), as originally configured.   read more…

Lower New York Bay

7 December 2020 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City Reading Time:  7 minutes

Brighton Beach © Billy Hathorn/cc-by-sa-3.0

Brighton Beach © Billy Hathorn/cc-by-sa-3.0

Lower New York Bay is a section of New York Bay south of the Narrows, the relatively narrow strait between the shores of Staten Island and Brooklyn. The southern end of the bay opens directly to the Atlantic Ocean between two spits of land, Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and Rockaway, Queens, on Long Island. The southern portion between Staten Island and New Jersey, at the mouth of the Raritan River, is named Raritan Bay. The Hudson Canyon, the ancient riverbed of the Hudson River which existed during the last ice age when the ocean levels were lower, extends southeast from Lower New York Bay for hundreds of miles into the Atlantic Ocean. The nearby part of the Atlantic Ocean between New Jersey and Long Island is the New York Bight.   read more…

Portrait: Investor and philanthropist George Soros

26 August 2020 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  21 minutes

© flickr.com - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2011/cc-by-sa-2.0

© flickr.com – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2011/cc-by-sa-2.0

George Soros is a HungarianAmerican billionaire investor and philanthropist. As of May 2020, he had a net worth of $8.3 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations. Born in Budapest, Soros survived Nazi Germanyoccupied Hungary and moved to the United Kingdom in 1947. He attended the London School of Economics, graduating with a bachelor’s and eventually a master’s degree in philosophy. Soros began his business career by taking various jobs at merchant banks in the United Kingdom and then the United States, before starting his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969. Profits from his first fund furnished the seed money to start Soros Fund Management, his second hedge fund, in 1970. Double Eagle was renamed to Quantum Fund and was the principal firm Soros advised. At its founding, Quantum Fund had $12 million in assets under management, and as of 2011 it had $25 billion, the majority of Soros’s overall net worth.   read more…

Portrait: Carl Graham Fisher, the man who built Miami Beach

25 September 2019 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Miami / South Florida, Portrait Reading Time:  9 minutes

Carl Graham Fisher memorial at Fisher Park in Miami Beach © Tamanoeconomico/cc-by-sa-4.0

Carl Graham Fisher memorial at Fisher Park in Miami Beach © Tamanoeconomico/cc-by-sa-4.0

Carl Graham Fisher was an American entrepreneur. Despite severe astigmatism, he became actively involved in auto racing. He was a seemingly tireless pioneer and promoter of the automotive industry and highway construction, and of real estate development in Florida. He is widely regarded as a promotional genius.   read more…

Theme Week New York City – Queens

23 November 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City Reading Time:  14 minutes

Long Island City © King of Hearts/cc-by-sa-3.0

Long Island City © King of Hearts/cc-by-sa-3.0

Queens is the easternmost and largest in area of the five boroughs of New York City. It is geographically adjacent to the borough of Brooklyn at the southwestern end of Long Island, and to Nassau County further east on Long Island; in addition, Queens shares water borders with the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx. Coterminous with Queens County since 1899, the borough of Queens is the second-largest in population (after Brooklyn), with a census-estimated 2.3 million residents in 2015, approximately 48% of them foreign-born. Queens is the fourth-most densely populated county among New York City’s boroughs, as well as in the United States. If each New York City borough were an independent city, Queens would also be the nation’s fourth most populous city, after Los Angeles, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Queens was established in 1683, as one of the original 12 counties of New York and was named for the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It became a borough of New York City in 1898, and from 1683 until 1899, the County of Queens included what is now Nassau County.   read more…

Montauk on Long Island

24 August 2015 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Montauk Lighthouse National Historic Site © Anthony Montemurro/cc-by-sa-3.0

Montauk Lighthouse National Historic Site © Anthony Montemurro/cc-by-sa-3.0

Montauk is a census-designated place (CDP) that roughly corresponds to the hamlet with the same name located in the town of East Hampton in Suffolk County, New York, on the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. The population is at 3,300. Montauk is a major tourist destination and has six state parks. It is particularly famous for its fishing, claiming to have more world saltwater fishing records than any other port in the world. Located 20 miles (32 km) off the Connecticut coast, it is home to the largest commercial and recreational fishing fleet in New York state. Montauk is considered a beach resort, using its position at the tip of Long Island to promote itself as “The Living End” or “The Last Resort” and become one of the busiest tourist locations within the town of East Hampton. The small town is host to many restaurants, bed and breakfasts, and hotels, and is a popular vacation spot in the warm weather months. Such accommodations are rarer elsewhere in the Hamptons. Many of the Montauk hotels are only open April through November, some for shorter time periods, while a few serve fishermen and other customers year round, including the famed Gurney’s Inn.   read more…

The tall ship HMS Bounty

21 January 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Tall ships Reading Time:  7 minutes

Belfast Lough - Tall Ships 2009 © geograph.org.uk - Aubrey Dale

Belfast Lough – Tall Ships 2009 © geograph.org.uk – Aubrey Dale

Bounty (popularly HMS Bounty) was an enlarged reconstruction of the original 1787 Royal Navy sailing ship HMS Bounty, built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in 1960. Her homeport was Greenport, Suffolk County on Long Island.   read more…

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