New York Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff

by Cindy Perman

Overview

Your round-trip ticket to the wildest, wackiest, most outrageous people, places, and things the Empire State has to offer! • Visit the idyllic village whose residents "talk to dead people"; the town where monuments to its most famous daughter, Lucille Ball, abound; America's one-and-only Kazoo factory and museum; and the National Buffalo Wing Festival with its "Running of The Chickens"—i.e., people dressed as chickens.• Learn how abolitionist James Caleb Jackson invented granula, the first cold breakfast cereal; why one of Rochester's favorite eateries is known as the Home of the Garbage Plate; and why the famous negative ions of Niagara Falls feel so good.• Meet the Wonderful Wizard of Chittenango, L. Frank Baum; Panda the Seeing Eye Horse; Brooklyn's "little green invaders"; and the night watchman at the Fallow Hollow Deer Farm—a donkey!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762769841
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	01/15/2013
Series:	Curiosities Series
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,013,154
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Cindy Perman is a journalist and freelance humor writer and a native of Upstate New York who has lived in New York City since 1994. She has always had the knack of finding humor even in a straightforward story. Perman has an innate affinity for offbeat stuff, the knack for finding the obscure, and a flair for telling the story, and for years has been collecting stories for a book about odd jobs (the perfume scientist, the casket designer, the adult toy packaging copywriter).

Perman received her college degree in journalism at Syracuse University and since graduation in 1994 has pursued a career as a reporter/columnist, most recently as the Interactive News Writer for the Wall Street Journal Online, where she worked for nine years. She contributed a weekly humor column to the Queens Alternative newspaper; founded, edited, and produced the Dance Space Center’s newsletter, Pencil Turns, and managed the Center’s Web site; and packaged news content for NewsWork Web site, linking content from more than 130 newspapers. This is her first book publication.

She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 Western New York 1

Chapter 2 Central New York 67

Chapter 3 North Country & the Adirondacks 139

Chapter 4 Southeast, the Catskills & Hudson Valley 207

Chapter 5 New York City & Long Island 285

Index 366

About the Author 372