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236 Sources the emotions that surrounded the nation’s premier team. And in Sleeping Arrangements , Laura Cunningham paints a picture of what it was like to live almost literally in the stadium’s shadow. As the first and only luxury hotel in the Bronx, the construction of the Concourse Plaza Hotel the same year as the arrival of the stadium was a major story for such publications as the Bronx Home News and the Bronx in Tabloid. The hotel’s own promotional materials, notably a brochure entitled “Thirty Minutes from Wall Street,” captured the excitement that greeted the hotel’s opening. Jill Jonnes, whose affection for the hotel is evident in her book South Bronx Rising, details the Concourse Plaza’s shifting fortunes, and the documents she amassed in connection with her research have been collected in a scrapbook that is at the Lehman College library. The thousands of photographs taken by the Armenian immigrant Kourken Hovsepian that record six decades of domestic and celebratory life in the West Bronx are in the possession of his daughter, Mimi Vang Olsen. It was she who recounted the arc of her father’s career and directed me to the former Betty Kanganis and her husband, Nick Raptis, whose wedding was one of thousands photographed by Hovsepian and celebrated at the Concourse Plaza. The history of the Andrew Freedman Home and its remarkable founder was pieced together from material in a voluminous scrapbook on the home provided by James Crocker, executive director of the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council , the organization that currently owns the building. Freedman’s career and the fortunes of the institution he founded were also well covered by the newspapers of the day, though with less scrutiny than might have been merited. Geoffrey T. Hellman’s article “The Bronx Palace,” published in 1933 in the New Yorker, and Vivian Gornick’s article, “A Splendid and Bitter Isolation,” published nearly half a century later in the Village Voice, when the home still retained elements of its old grandeur, also provided a sense of the institution’s singular role. The rise and fall of Jack Molinas, another fascinating and ultimately tragic figure whose life is threaded through the Grand Concourse, is recounted most completely in Charley Rosen’s biography, The Wizard of Odds: How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball. Edgar Allan Poe’s time in the Bronx is the subject of many biographies, and the history of the cottage where he lived and the park in which the house is located are described in most detail in Irmgard Lukmann’s article “A History of Poe Park,” published in the BCHS Journal. Marty Friedman’s article “The Parkway All-Stars,” published in 1981 in New York, casts a bright light on the generation of gifted girls and boys who came of age during the 1940s and 1950s on Mosholu Parkway, at the northern tip of the Grand Concourse , as did recollections by Bernard Gwertzman, a former New York Times foreign editor and a onetime member of that crew. Sources 237 C h A P T e R 5 : “A n AC R e o f S e AT S I n A G A R D e n o f D R e A m S” Although volumes have been written on the golden age of the picture palace, arguably the two finest accounts are Ben M. Hall’s The Best Remaining Seats and David Naylor’s Great American Movie Theaters. Cinema Treasures: A New Look at Classic Movies Theaters, by Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs, is valuable in its own right and has also spawned a Web site that bubbles with memories of Loew’s Paradise and virtually every other American movie theater of note. The late theater historian Michael Miller wrote extensively about Loew’s Paradise, and his lavishly illustrated articles “Theatres of the Bronx,” published in Marquee magazine, and “Loew’s Paradise in the Bronx,” published in the Theatre Historical Society of America Annual, are essential to an understanding of this particular landmark. Richard Stapleford’s Temples of Illusion: The Atmospheric Theaters of John Eberson, published in connection with an exhibition at Hunter College, is a rich source of information, as is Jane Preddy’s article “Glamour, Glitz and Sparkle: The Deco Theatres of John Eberson,” also published in the Theatre Historical Society of America Annual. Surviving Eberson family members, including Suzanne Callahan and Maury Brassert, provided biographical information about their famous relative. The Eberson archives...