All Things Holland

This morning I was linked to a page about a crazy guy dangling himself from the Tappan Zee bridge. You can find more of his story here . Here is my summary; around 10:40 am, Michael Davitt, 54, of West Haverstraw, NY staged a protest on the bridge. Davitt drove his van onto the center of the bridge and lowered himself off the bridge using a rope ladder. Davitt had a sign, which said "Rockland Executive Legislative Cover up Retaliation" along with food, hanging at the midpoint between the bridge and the Hudson River. This protest was in response to his wrongful firing when he worked for the county in 2008. Davitt "was separated from the County service in 2008 because he was no longer able to perform his essential job functions as a Substance Abuse Counselor 1" as stated by the Rockland County Executive's Office. Davitt was employed from 1991 to 2008 by the Department of Mental Health in Ponoma. As a result of the protest, traffic came to a slow to a standstill. T...

September 27, 1778 After 4 days of assisting the local militia in driving cattle out of reach of British foragers, Colonel george Baylor moved his troops north and located quarters for them throughout barns and homesteads in what is now River Vale, NJ near Tappan. To keep their position secure in such proximity to the enemy, Colonel Baylor positioned 12 men on the only bridge across the river, so as to provide sufficient alarm of an approaching enemy. According to Blauvelt tradition, this guard near the bridge was stationed at the Cornelius Blauvelt farm just above the bridge with the officers stationed in the house itself. The Blauvelts recalled later that the men positioned on the bridge left their positions early on the evening of the massacre to rejoin their companions in the barn saying that it was useless for them to keep watch as the night was so dark that the enemy could never find their way about. The captain upon hearing this ordered them back to their posts only to have them...