Bob with one of the photos he took on
every street of Manhattan in New York.

Coffeedrome: A virtual restaurant that is open around the clock.

This word will not be found in Webster’s English dictionary. It’s the name chosen by Bob Sheridan for his Web site, which he likens to a restaurant in a railroad station where customers can drop in at any time of day or night for a turn at self-expression. They don’t get coffee but they show old photographs, post recipes, suggest books, recall past experiences, or, most often, strut out their creative work, as does Bob himself.

Bob’s creations are the photographs he took while walking on every street of every block in Manhattan. He started this project in 1988, at the age of 52, during a five-week vacation from his job as a news editor of the New York Times. He walked 310 miles in 20 days with a Canon film camera, covering all the streets of Manhattan south of 42nd Street. After his retirement in 2005 at the age of 69 he took up the task again, this time with a Panasonic Lumix digital camera (Model D80), finishing the rest of the borough in November 2007.

He shot pictures on every single street of scenes, structures and structural details that caught his discerning eye. The streets are all listed on a page of his Web site, with a link to the photographs.

“For the earlier part I did maybe 15 miles a day,” he said. “I was in better condition then. It took two years to do the other half. I got tired. I walked through every neighborhood and I never encountered a threat. I was trying to take pictures of interesting buildings – very old things. Sometimes there were people in them. I took a lot of dogs. There must 30 dog pictures.”

Coffeedrome went online in 1999. Visitors to the site can see postcards from Fred, jokes from Tom, drawings by Devery, quilts by Lois, cake-decorating by Brenda, paintings by Justin and Michael, and a biography of the composer Alexander Scriabin by an enthusiast named George. Julie Shaver, a worker in the graphics department of the Times, shows her photographs of trees, which proved highly popular with other visitors.

Bob works on his Web sites at the PC in his
study, where his many interests are evident.

Earnest Scarborough, a retired teacher and artist from Okanogan, Washington, shows some of the postcards of old America in his collection of 3,000. He started with cards from the years before World War I that his father had collected. Earnest's pictures of "Glacier Girl," a restored World War II plane that was found locked in ice in Greenland in the late 80's, brought traffic to Coffeedrome from all over the world.

Coffeedrome also offers plenty of poetry – from John, Donna, Silvane, Claudia, Paul, Don, Julie, Omar, Nancy, and Carole, among others, including Bob himself. He has collected 923 of his poems, all written when he was over 50, and self-published them in 2007 in a hard-cover book called One Life, Maybe More. The index gives their titles, most of them brief. Among those beginning with the letter D are "Date," "Day," "Dear Mom," "December," "Despair," "Don't," “Doors,” "Dreams,” “Drink,” "Dust,” and “Duty.”

One of his shorter poems is called “Safe.” Here it is in its entirety:

Coffeedrome has attracted visitors from over 50 countries and every state in the union, according to a tracking service Bob subscribed to until it became too expensive, because the more traffic the site got, the more the service charged. Building on Coffeedrome's success, Bob began another Web site, Rumbledrome, this one dedicated to racing cars and meant to appeal to other devotees. The site has links to numerous sites relaing to auto racing, and Bob has an extensive collection of miniature racing cars.

Bob with the home page of www.coffedrome.net
showing links to different "rooms" and features.

Robert Emmet Sheridan was born on June 21, 1936, in Milwaukee. He graduated from the College of Journalism at Marquette University in 1958. In college he thought he wanted to be a photographer, but a year after graduation he went to the Cape Cod Standard-Times in Hyannis, Massachusetts, as a reporter. From there he went to the Hartford Courant, in Connecticut, and then back to Milwaukee to work at the Milwaukee Journal, eventually as the head of its copy desk.

One day a top editor of the New York Times passed through Milwaukee, met Bob, and suggested that he try out on one of the copy desks of the Times. Bob came to New York for that tryout in 1972, and not only passed it but also found the five-bedroom house in Yonkers, New York, that he bought the week he tried out and has lived in to this day.

In that house Bob and his wife, Margaret Morin Sheridan, a nurse, have raised seven children, four girls and three boys, ranging now in age from 36 to 45. Three of them work in journalism. One became a teacher, another a chef, and the others are in nursing and office work. The Sheridans have eight grandchildren, all boys.

Working as a deskman, or copy editor, at the Times gives a man odd hours. In the beginning Bob worked on the desk that edits national news, starting at 3 p.m. and ending at 10 p.m. In 1991 he was assigned to the news desk, which oversees and coordinates the activities of the other major desks – foreign, national and metropolitan. That shift began at 7 p.m. and ended, on a normal night, at 2:45 a.m. He worked it for 14 years.

As the editor in charge late at night Bob sometimes had to make spot decisions on major news. When the news of Richard Nixon’s death broke during Bob’s shift he stopped the presses to catch this news in late copies of the Times. On another occasion he slowed the presses at 2 a.m. on a tip from a reporter that the ailing Shah of Iran had been transferred secretly from the United States to Panama. The normal 3 a.m. closing for the final edition was delayed by an hour and a half and the Times was able to get the news into the late copies. Stopping the presses was rare at the Times. Bob says it happened maybe 10 times, tops, during his 33 years there.

“People don’t realize how hard people have to work to get in the latest news,” Bob said.

Bob's other Web site, rumbledrome.com, which
has pages for just about everything about racing.

An episode that occurred in a morning news conference of the top editors 30 years ago lingers in Bob’s memory. The next morning’s paper had to report as major news the arrival of Pope John Paul II in New York for a visit, but the story lacked any strong news element. What could a large headline on Page One say? “Pope Arrives in New York”? Never. The editors were stumped.

Bob piped up with an original idea. Why not forgo words entirely and make the Pope’s picture the headline? It had never been done, but A.M. Rosenthal, the paper’s executive editor, took to the idea immediately. The result, on October 3, 1979, was a six-column picture of the Pope, arms extended, across the top of Page One. Bob himself chose the picture from the wide assortment offered by the photo desk.

Like many in his profession, Bob is worried about the future of print journalism.

“My concern is that the printed daily newspaper will eventually disappear,” he said, “replaced by the Internet or probably some technology that hasn’t even been invented yet. The Times has been able to keep up with current technology through an exceptionally strong Web site, but it will have to develop creative revenue sources if it intends to keep all the ‘old’ and still expand into the ‘new.’” Lesser publications have even darker prospects, Bob said.

Bob takes a great interest in auto racing and
shows it in his large collection of model cars.

The “revenue” that Coffeedrome provides for Bob, in contrast, is substantial, but it is entirely psychological. To make this point Bob cites the time that Karl Scarborough, of Winlock, Washington, the son of the postcard collector featured in Coffeedrome, submitted several of his photos. One, taken in 1979, shows a small wistful-looking girl sitting on a stoop in Rota, Spain, elbows on her knees and hands on her cheeks. Karl was in the Navy at the time and was in town on liberty from his ship, the USS Nimitz.

It is an affecting picture, and a year or so ago the subject herself saw it on Coffeedrome. Now living in New York City with her two children, she got in touch with Karl to recall the event.

Bob does not disguise the satisfaction he takes in telling this story.

“You do this stuff and you think it’d be for just your own enjoyment,” he said. “And then you find you’re reaching people and something unbelievably joyful and unexpected happens, and you get rewarded in a way you never imagined.”

To visit the Coffeedrome, click here.

To check out the Rumbledrome, click here.

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