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FT correspondent’s warm memories of difficult days in Madrid

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I arrived in Madrid in December 2012, in time to celebrate the bleakest Christmas the city had seen in a generation. Capital and country were reeling from a series of shocks that had brought Spain to the brink of ruin. Six months earlier, a slow- burning banking crisis had blazed out of control, forcing the government to request billions in rescue aid from its European partners. Spain was in recession and suffering an unemployment crisis that would see the jobless rate peak at 27 per cent a few months after my arrival. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were everywhere. On days when I took my son to kindergarten we would pass a long line of people — not all of them poorly dressed — waiting outside a church- run soup kitchen . Walking to my office in the morning, I would find more and more shops boarded up. Inexplicably, the tiny store that sold and repaired mechanical typewriters held out, defying both the economic downturn and technical obsolescence. Then, one day, I found that ...

Saturday Morning Quilt Break: A Quilter’s Origin Story

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Good morning and welcome to the Saturday Morning Quilt Break ! Today I’d like to tell you a story, one that I’ve wanted to tell almost since the day I started working here seven years ago except I didn’t have an ending until a few months ago. If I were the hero of a quilting comic book series , I believe this would be considered my origin story. So settle in with your beverage of choice because I’m going to take you back a ways. A long time ago, during my senior year of high school, my parents offered to allow me to take a gap year between high school and college as long as I spent my time doing something worthwhile. As they put it, “You can live at home and volunteer at a homeless shelter if you want, but you can’t just spend a year working at Robinson’s-May,” which is where I was working at the time. For almost my entire childhood, my parents, younger brother and I lived in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom condo in Van Nuys, which is smack-dab in the middle of the sprawling San Ferna...

River Terrace Apartments

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Quizzes Lists Topics Save The River Terrace Apartments is an apartment building located at 7700 East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. [1] River Terrace Apartments was one of the first two garden apartment complexes built in Michigan which used loan guarantees from the Federal Housing Administration , the other being Hillcrest Village in East Lansing. [2] History By the late 19th century , the corridor along East Jefferson Avenue had become a prestigious residential neighborhood . As the automobile age dawned in the twentieth century and Detroit's population boomed, large upscale apartment buildings were constructed along the Avenue. However, this boom in apartment construction collapsed at the start of the Great Depression. However, in 1939, Wesson Seyburn, along with Leonard P. Reaume, of the property management firm of Holden & Reaume, applied for a building permit to construct this apart...