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Part 5: Making room for our home’s hiding places

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As we put the finishing touches on the plans for our home, our dreams of dinner parties in the finished open kitchen , of repurposed original sconces and refurbished original details , gave way to a less sexy obsession. The mop, the vacuum, our winter coats, the laundry. Specifically: Where would they all go and how could we banish them from sight? In the New York prewar apartments we’d lived in for years, closets were strictly optional and washer-dryers were nonexistent. What made glossy interior photos appealing , I came to realize, was what you didn’t see, because it was tucked into a hidden closet or built-in cabinet. Renovating our house gave us a shot at discreet convenience. Entering the first-floor apartment, pre-renovation, meant coming face -to-face with a faux-wood- grained cabinet door —in actuality, a false front. It was an arguably clever way to bump out the bathroom on the other side to make room for a turquoise jacuzzi-shaped tub. Otto’s initial plan for the enlarged ...

Battle of the Hot Springs Gamblers

By Orval E. Allbritton 8/18/2017 • Wild West Magazine Major S.A. Doran’s gang ambushed Frank ‘Boss Gambler’ Flynn and two of his brothers in February 1884, triggering an exchange as deadly as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Most people who traveled to Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1880s did so to soak in the mineral baths in hopes of improving their physical health. Not so Samuel Alexander Doran , native Kentuckian and ex-Confederate major. In late fall 1883 Doran , who seldom visited a place without having some kind of confrontation (often deadly), was en route from New Orleans to the spa town in the Ouachita Mountains in hopes of improving his financial health. A dishonest gambler willing to back his card play with gunplay, Doran had broken the law in a string of towns from Kentucky to Texas. He had left more than a few places on bad terms and was lucky to have spent relatively little time behind bars. It was in New Orleans that Doran had met Jim Lane. Lane had owned and operate...