movies

This picture is at Mount Loretto, which was founded as Catholic orphanage on Staten Island in the late 19th century. It is still operating today, but it is not really an orphanage anymore; it is more of a social service agency. They recently built a CYO on its grounds and it has become a community center, with inside basketball courts and meeting rooms.

The church in the picture is still standing, but the buildings on either side are gone. In the early 1970's the exterior of the church was used in a scene from the famous movie The Godfather. There was a fire at the church shortly after the filming; only the facade was still standing. The church was rebuilt and was in operation again a few years later.

Mount Loretto is located about a mile from the Tottenville Library.

For more information, check out these two websites:

http://mountloretto.org/document/18621

and:

http://www.miv-mountloretto.org/home.html

My apartment does not contain exquisite little Meissen porcelain figures, or walls full of J. M. W. Turner watercolors, or a locked case full of exotic anthropological artifacts from Papua New Guinea, or even a valuable stamp or coin collection. Instead, I’ve managed to surround myself with many well-loved objects of no intrinsic value: books, CDs, movies. This reflection was inspired by my decision, over the Labor Day weekend, finally to get rid of my personal VHS video library. I suppose I should confess at the outset that my VCR has been non-functional for over a year now, and I was holding onto my collection only as a sort of historical relic while I bored my friends insensible with the question of whether to buy a new VCR or to replace the tapes with DVDs. It’s no secret how much superior a format the DVD is; when I last watched one of those tapes, a year ago, I was well aware that it was like gazing through the surface of a stagnant pond. And how often can you watch the same movie, anyway? Some, if not most, of you will wonder what the fuss is all about. A few, I hope, will recognize the time, energy, money, and love that go into a collecting compulsion. You might even be holding onto similar accumulations yourself.  read more »