and flounder-foolish

The former St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church for the Deaf has been vibrantly re-portaled by the United Sherpa Association since the last time we passed by. (Here's a wider shot of the building.) Today the sign out front was announcing an upcoming prayer service for the victims of the recent avalanche on Mount Everest that killed 16 Nepali mountain guides, 13 of them Sherpas.

Dhammaramsi Burmese Buddhist monastery, occupying half of a duplex house

Looks like they only have room for one more shoe-company doormat.

of Elementary

Some sort of hideous attempt to keep the birds away from future figs?

This section of the wall (Street View) is made in large part of grave markers and other cemetery stones! You can see that some are lying flat on their sides, while others are standing upright. Many of them look broken, and perhaps the rest were surplus — not a bad way to get some use out of what would otherwise just be a bunch of junk.

Or as Mitch Waxman puts it, much more colorfully:

As one nears Laurel Hill Blvd. and the stature of the masonry wall shrinks back to a human scale, a curious heterogeneousness in its composition is noticed. Suddenly granite and "finishing marble" is noticed. . . . Proceeding up the block, certain familiar shapes become recognizable in the wall, and a cold dread is realized. Tombstones. They used tombstones to make this part of the wall.

of the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, the deadliest industrial accident in New York history, in which 146 garment workers perished. One witness to the tragedy recalled the horrific scene years later:

Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.

The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.

This is the Workmen's Circle section here at Mount Zion. Just to the left is a small monument commemorating those killed in the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire. As we'll see, there's a much larger memorial to the victims located inside this section.