Alphabet City is a neighborhood located within the East Village in the New York City borough of Manhattan.  Its name comes from Avenues A, B, C, and D, the only avenues in Manhattan to have single-letter names.  It is bordered by Houston Street to the south and by 14th Street to the north, along the traditional northern border of the East Village and south of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.  The neighborhood has a long history, serving as a cultural center and ethnic enclave for Manhattan's German, Polish, Hispanic, and Jewish populations.  However, there is much dispute over the borders of the Lower East Side, Alphabet City, and East Village.  Historically, Manhattan's Lower East Side was 14th Street at the northern end, bound on the east by East River and on the west by First Avenue; today, that same area is Alphabet City.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_City,_Manhattan  

See also http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-units-start-to-spell-luxury-in-manhattans-alphabet-city-1423263208 and http://www.thealphabetcity.com/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

bespoke   (bi-SPOHK)  adjective   1.  Custom-made.  2.  Relating to custom-made products.  Shortening of bespoken, past participle of bespeak (to speak for, to arrange), from Old English besprecan (to speak about).  Earliest documented use:  1755.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day from Evan Hazard
Subject:  bespoke  Ursula LeGuin uses ‘bespoke’ to mean communicated with another person using telepathy.  Apparently a person who knows how can teach another person.  In her Hainish novels, normal people cannot lie telepathically, but some nasties called the Shing were able to, and dominated the ‘known worlds’ for a time.  I’ve forgotten how they were eventually defeated.  One of the best living writers.

be-  prefix  1. (from nouns) to surround completely; cover on all sides:  befog;  2  (from nouns) to affect completely or excessively:  bedazzle;  3.  (from nouns) to consider as or cause to be:  befool, befriend  4.  (from nouns) to provide or cover with:  bejewel;  5.  (from verbs) at, for, against, on, or over:  bewail, berate  Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Find more at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/be-

Focaccia is a flat oven-baked Italian bread product similar in style and texture to pizza doughs.  It may be topped with herbs or other ingredients.  Focaccia is popular in Italy and is usually seasoned with olive oil, salt, sometimes herbs, and may at times be topped with onion, cheese and meat.  It might also be flavored with a number of vegetables.  Focaccia can be used as a side to many meals, as a base for pizza, or as sandwich bread.  The common-known focaccia is salt focaccia.  It is typically rolled out or pressed by hand into a thick layer of dough and then baked in a stone-bottom or hearth oven.  Bakers often puncture the bread with a knife to relieve bubbling on the surface of the bread.  Also common is the practice of dotting the bread.  This creates multiple wells in the bread by using a finger or the handle of a utensil to poke the unbaked dough.  As a way to preserve moisture in the bread, olive oil is then spread over the dough, by hand or with a pastry brush prior to rising and baking.  In Ancient Rome, panis focacius was a flat bread baked on the hearth.  The word is derived from the Latin focus meaning "hearth, place for baking.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focaccia  

Focaccia recipe:  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/anne-burrell/focaccia-recipe.html

Olmsted–Designed New York City Parks   Although Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is considered one of America's pioneer landscape architects, he came to the profession only after experimenting and dabbling in many different fields.  A newspaperman, social commentator and sometime farmer, Olmsted had many interests early in life.  In landscape architecture, he combined his interest in rural life with a sense of democratic idealism to create a new kind of civil engineering that synthesized function and beauty.  The era in which Olmsted grew up was transformative for the country–urbanism and industrialism increasing steadily through the middle part of the 19th century.  Although it may seem obvious, Parks developed only when open space diminished.  Olmsted himself straddled the territory between a rural and urban existence.  Although he was born in Hartford, Connecticut and attended Yale (before dropping out due to an eye ailment), he spent considerable time in his early adult life on Staten Island when his family purchased a farm for him in 1848.  (The site, at 4515 Hylan Boulevard, was acquired by Parks in 2006 and will become Olmsted–Beil House Park.)  When his farming experiment failed, Olmsted began traveling in Europe and the American South.  English architect Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) spent 40 years of his distinguished career in New York City, designing private homes, public institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many parks in the city's parks system.  Vaux came to the United States after being recruited by Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) to join his landscaping business based in Newburgh, New York.  Downing, one of the main proponents of Central Park, introduced Vaux to Olmsted after Olmsted wrote a piece in Downing's Horticulturalist journal.  When Downing died on the steamboat Henry Clay on July 28, 1852, Vaux took over Downing's landscaping company until 1856 when he moved to New York City and began working on the design for Central Park.  Through a series of fortunate coincidences, Olmsted acquired the position of Superintendent of Construction of Central Park in 1857.  Vaux and Olmsted worked together on the eventual design for the park, now known as the Greensward Plan, beginning the partnership that generated the designs for Central Park and Morningside Park in Manhattan, and Prospect Park and Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, among others.  Olmsted's legacy can be seen across the country.  The Buffalo, New York park system, the US Capitol grounds in Washington, DC, the 1893 Columbian Exposition grounds in Chicago, and Mont Royal Park in Montreal, Canada are just a few of Olmsted's major works.  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/olmsted-parks  See SECRETS OF CENTRAL PARK (Manhattan’s 843-acre oasis) at http://forgotten-ny.com/2003/08/secrets-of-central-park/

Quotes from the novel Dust by Patricia Cornwell  "Let's see, rumors and misinformation posted as news feeds.”  "Hate makes you stupid."

To “B” or Not to “B” by Maeve Maddox   English words ending in the spelling mb occasionally give English learners difficulty.  The error arises in trying to pronounce the final b.  Think of four or five words with a silent B at the end--then see a list at http://www.dailywritingtips.com/to-b-or-not-to-b/  See also http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/B.aspx

10 of the world's most stunning bookstores from CBC Books  See remarkable pictures of bookstores around the world at http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/06/10-of-the-worlds-most-stunning-bookstores.html

June 22, 2015  How India Changed the English Language by Rahul Verma   They are in there, often unnoticed.  The words that have become part of everyday English.  Loot, nirvana, pyjamas, shampoo and shawl; bungalow, jungle, pundit and thug.  What are the roots, and routes, of these Indian words?  How and when did they travel and what do their journeys into British vernacular--and then the Oxford English Dictionary--tell us about the relationship between Britain and India?  Long before the British Raj--before the East India Company acquired its first territory in the Indian subcontinent in 1615--South Asian words from languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam and Tamil had crept onto foreign tongues.  One landmark book records the etymology of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases.  Compiled by two India enthusiasts, Henry Yule and Arthur C Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India was published in 1886.  The poet Daljit Nagra described it as “not so much an orderly dictionary as a passionate memoir of colonial India.  Rather like an eccentric Englishman in glossary form.”  The editor of its contemporary edition--which has just been published in paperback--explains how many of the words pre-date British rule.  “Ginger, pepper and indigo entered English via ancient routes:  they reflect the early Greek and Roman trade with India and come through Greek and Latin into English,” says Kate Teltscher.  “Ginger comes from Malayalam in Kerala, travels through Greek and Latin into Old French and Old English, and then the word and plant become a global commodity.  In the 15th Century, it’s introduced into the Caribbean and Africa and it grows, so the word, the plant and the spice spread across the world.”  As global trade expanded through European conquests of the East Indies, the flow of Indian words into English gathered momentum.  Many came via Portuguese.  “The Portuguese conquest of Goa dates back to the 16th Century, and mango, and curry, both come to us via Portuguese--mango began as ‘mangai’ in Malayalam and Tamil, entered Portuguese as ‘manga’ and then English with an ‘o’ ending,” she says.  Read more at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150619-how-india-changed-english

BIG CHEESE  On July 9, the 2015 cheese made in a Kiel, Wisconsin factory began its journey from roughly 50,000 pounds of locally sourced milk to the behemoth wheel, which will roll into Toledo, Ohio in time for the holidays--to be sliced on November 14.  This year’s cheese, weighing in at 4,600 pounds, is larger than last year’s because of the “overwhelming demand” the first time around, said John Hoover, marketing and business development director for The Andersons.  Toledoans bought up last year’s 3,200-pound mammoth in two days.  In Kiel, the low thrum of machinery serenades as Henning’s employees, clad in knee-high rubber boots and hair nets, do things the old-fashioned way.  That includes the cheddaring process, where curds are cut into loaves, repeatedly flipped and stacked to use the cheese’s own weight to push out any excess whey.  The curds are then poured, bucket-by-bucket, into the cylindrical frame.  The casing is made of poplar and basswood, woods with very little sap or odor, which could taint the flavor.  Over the course of the first night, pressure was put on the cheese to further expel residual whey, compressing the cheese from the 78-inch height of the box to the 67 inches customers will see in November.  The cheese will then be cooled, dried, and cased in wax.  Lauren Lindstrom  http://www.toledoblade.com/Food/2015/07/19/Say-cheese-2.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1327  July 19, 2015  On this date in 1848, a two-day Women's Rights Convention opened in Seneca Falls, New York.  On this date in 1900, the first line of the Paris Métro opened for operation.