by Pete Hamill
There is a photograph by Weegee, taken on V-E Day, 1945, that shows a man working at a newsstand. We can see three daily newspapers: the Journal-American, the World-Telegram, and PM; the magazines are Liberty, Air News, Argosy, Song Parade, American, Judy’s, Crack Detective, Phantom Detective, Cartoon Digest, American Astrology, White’s Radio, Magazine Digest, Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated, Die Hausfrau, and Die Welt (must’ve been a Yorkville newsstand). We cannot see some other New York dailies that were publishing that year: the Herald Tribune and the Mirror, and in the outer boroughs, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Times-Union, the Bronx Home-News, the Long Island Press, the Long Island Star-Journal. They are now all dead, as is every other publication on that newsstand except Popular Science and American Astrology. It’s one of the saddest photographs I’ve ever seen.
Around the time the newspapers began to die, the older New York started giving way to the new. Television was changing everything. Within a decade of its triumph in the mid-fifties, it killed the nightclubs and supper clubs: the Latin Quarter, the Stork, El Morocco, the Copa, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, the Astor Roof, Ben Maksik’s out in Queens, the Elegante in Brooklyn (where I once saw a smashed Judy Garland perform for a roomful of gangsters), the Château Madrid, Sammy’s Bowery Follies (which biographer Herbert Lottman tells us Albert Camus enjoyed so much, on his only trip to New York, that he had A. J. Liebling take him back twice), Nick’s in the Village, Tony Pastor’s, all the West 4th Street strip joints like the Heat Wave (run by Tony Bender), to mention only a few. Lindy’s, made famous by Damon Runyon, wasn’t a nightclub, but it was a night place, full of columnists (the old three-dotters), press agents, gangsters, and show-business people, and it survived into the early sixties. For a while near the end, I worked for the Post outside the place in a radio car with photographer Artie Pomerantz and once saw Walter Winchell do a tap dance on the sidewalk. The old bebop palaces on 52nd Street turned into strip joints (Ah, Lily St Cyr! O, Winnie Garrett! And where is Evelyn West and her Treasure Chest?) and then fell before the developers. Bill Miller’s Riviera, across the North River under the George Washington Bridge, was locked up one morning, then had its doors nailed shut, and was finally torn down. Even Birdland closed. Many of these places were velvet-roped dives, run by wiseguy veterans of the Prohibition wars; to drop into the Copa upon a winter’s eve was to risk an arrest for consorting. Some peddled junk and women; a few provided floating crap games in nearby hotels; they clipped customers, abused or exploited too many of the performers. But they had energy and color and a certain brutal style, and when they vanished, something went out of New York.
But television didn’t just shutter nightclubs. The movie houses began closing, too. In my neighborhood, we had the RKO Prospect, the Venus, the Globe, the 16th Street, the Sanders, the Avon, and the Minerva: all gone. In downtown Brooklyn, the RKO Albee died along with the Fox (where Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper played in the first huge New York rock-and-roll shows), the Brooklyn Paramount and the Duffield and the Terminal up on Fourth Avenue, beside the Long Island Rail Road, where you could see three movies for a half-dollar. Wandering through the souk of the Lower East Side, you could find the Palestine, the Florence, the Ruby, and the Windsor (among many others, most of which were nicknamed The Itch); they, too, died, driven into the Lost City with the great Yiddish theaters: the Grand, the Orpheum, the Yiddish Arts. Out in Queens, around 165th Street, the Loew’s Valencia closed, along with the Alden, the Merrick, the Jamaica, the Savoy, and the Hillside. On East 14th Street in Manhattan, there was a place called the Jefferson, where we went to see the Spanish movies and vaudeville acts, improbably trying to learn the language from Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, lusting for Sarita Montiel, laughing at the comedy of Johnny El Men, while ice-cream vendors worked the aisles. Gone. In Times Square, the Capitol disappeared, the Roxy, the Criterion, the Strand. The Laffmovie on 42nd Street played comedies all day long, but now, where Laurel and Hardy once tried to deliver Christmas trees, the movies are about ripped flesh. Who now can verify the existence of the old Pike’s Opera House on 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue (converted first to vaudeville and then to movies after the Metropolitan Opera established itself at 39th Street and Broadway)? It was torn down to make way for the ILGWU houses, thus eradicating the building where Jay Gould once had his office and where Fred Astaire learned to dance. And most astonishing and final of all, the Paramount itself was murdered in its sleep.
None of this was new. In Nathan Silver’s elegiac 1967 book, Lost New York, we can see photographs of many of the vanished ornaments of our city: the beautiful Produce Exchange at Beaver and Bowling Green, destroyed in the mid-fifties; the three Brokaw mansions at 79th and Fifth, two of which were smashed into rubble in 1965, to be replaced by an ugly high rise; Rhinelander Gardens on nth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, with their cast-iron filigreed balconies and deep front gardens, demolished in the late fifties; the splendid Studio Building at 51-55 West 10th Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, inhabited by a string of artists, including John La Farge and Winslow Homer, until it was demolished in 1954; the elegant, high-ceilinged cast-iron buildings on Worth Street between Church and Broadway, torn down in 1963 to make way for a parking lot; the old Ziegfeld Theater at 54th and Sixth; the Astor Hotel on Broadway between 44th and 45th; dozens of others. A city is always more than its architecture, but to destroy the past that is expressed by enduring architecture is an assault on history itself. Growing up here, you learned one bitter lesson: Whenever something was destroyed for the crime of being old, what replaced it was infinitely worse.
All along, there were complaints from architects, historians, and a few concerned citizens about this municipal vandalism. Usually, they were dismissed as the sentimentalities of cranks. But after a group of dreadful men ordered the destruction of Pennsylvania Station in 1963 to make way for the equally dreadful new Madison Square Garden (they subsequently brought their gift for ruin to the railroad itself), there was a widespread sense of horror and fury. Outraged citizens fought for and won the establishment of a Landmarks Preservation Commission. Many buildings have been saved, including Grand Central Terminal and Radio City Music Hall. But when it was decided to slam the Marriott Marquis Hotel into Times Square a few years ago, it was still impossible to save the Astor theater (opened in 1906), the Bijou (1917), the Gaiety/Victoria (1909), the Helen Hayes (1911), and, most heartbreaking of all, the Morosco, which had survived wars, depression, and turkeys since 1917. They’re gone. Forever.
But listen: someone out in the street is playing an old tune. We are in a white, silent house in Gramercy Park in winter or out upon the granite cliffs of Fort Hamilton. Snow is falling. It is almost midnight. Listen: It’s the sound of an organ-grinder. And if you surrender to the sound, you can go back.…You can still call down to a neighbor through the dumbwaiter shaft. You can go to Grand Central and pick up the 20th Century Limited for Chicago on Track 34. You can sip coffee at the Cafe Royal on 12th Street at Second Avenue and listen to the sound of Yiddish. You can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at Moskowitz & Lupowitz. You can gaze up at the Stuyvesant building at 142 East 18th Street and know that here Richard Widmark kicked that old lady down the stairs. You can go to a rent party on a Saturday night and then go to Minton’s Playhouse and hear Art Tatum. You can shop at the Hester Street market or at Wanamaker’s, at Namm’s or Loeser’s or Mays or Martin’s in Brooklyn, at Gertz in Jamaica, at Best and Company or Ohrbach’s, at Masters or Korvette’s. You can still go to Gimbel’s. If you are poor, you can go to S. Klein on Union Square and battle for bargains with the toughest women in the history of New York.
If it’s very late and you are hungry, you can take a cab to the Belmont Cafeteria downtown or the Garfield on Flatbush Avenue. Better: Wait till tomorrow; there’s a 99-cent hot lunch at the Tip Toe Inn on 86th and Broadway. Have the brisket and then drop a nickel in the subway and go downtown and take a walk. The old socialists are still discussing
the imminent collapse of capitalism with the writers from the Forvetz at the Garden Cafeteria. In Union Square, they are arguing about surplus value, the Spanish Republic, and the true meaning of Marx’s Grundriss.
Or wander through midtown. That’s Frankie Carbo, the gangster, at the bar of the Neutral Corner, up the block from Stillman’s Gym, and if you don’t like his company, and you’ve already seen the fighters work out at Stillman’s, you can go up to Harry Wiley’s in Harlem and catch Sugar Ray Robinson or go down to 14th Street, where Cus D’Amato has a kid named Patterson in the Gramercy Gym. You can get into a big old Packard, as I did with my father and his friends once during the war, and ride out to the Gym at Georgia and Livonia in Brownsville, where Bummy Davis trained under the agate eyes of the hoods from Murder Incorporated. You can see fights at the St. Nicholas Arena on West 66th Street, at the Eastern Parkway Arena, the Ridgewood Grove, the Coney Island Velodrome, Fort Hamilton Arena, the Broadway Arena, the Star Casino in the Bronx, or the Jamaica Arena. Or if it’s a Friday night, you can go through the lobby of the old Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, past the detectives and the wiseguys and the fight managers, past the bronze statue of Joe Gans, and into the great smoky arena.
In the Lost City of New York, the subway will be a nickel forever, and if you fall asleep and travel to the end of the line, you will still have your wallet and your life. In the Lost City, you can still go to Dexter Park on Eldert’s Lane on the Brooklyn-Queens border and see the amazing players from the Negro Leagues, maybe even Josh Gibson, who once hit a ball out of there that traveled more than 600 feet; you can see the Bushwicks play baseball, hoping for a call from Branch Rickey; you can watch the House of David baseball team and the best of the immigrant soccer teams. We still have the Polo Grounds. We still have Ebbets Field. We still have Willie Mays.
If it’s a sultry August evening, you will be able to hurry down to Sheepshead Bay and step up to the Clam Bar at Lundy’s. Or you can drive out to Rockaway, get on the rides at Playland, drink cold beer and eat pig’s feet at Fennessey’s, Gildea’s, or Sligo House, McGuire’s or the Breakers, and look at the girls outside Curly’s Hotel at 116th and the ocean.
If that is too long a journey, you can ride one of the many ferries that cross the Hudson each day to Jersey. You can swim in the rivers without fear of disease, and even swim at night with the seals in the Prospect Park Zoo. You can trust the oysters from Long Island Sound. You can spend an entire Saturday among the used bookshops along Fourth Avenue. You can watch seaplanes flying down the East River, dipping elegantly under the bridges and out to the vast harbor. Listen: You might even hear the Pan Am Clipper leaving from Floyd Bennett for Lisbon.
The Lost City is full of forgotten common and proper nouns: Red Devil paint, Cat’s Paw soles and heels, Griffin All-Black polish might still exist, but I don’t see them anymore. Nor do I see beers called Trommer’s White Label, Ruppert’s, and Rheingold, candies called Sky Bars, Houten’s, and B-B Bats. And for young men going out on dates, a repulsively flavored package of licorice microchips called Sen-Sen that is guaranteed to keep your breath sweet while kissing. In some lost year, Junior Persico is in Rosie’s Royal Tailors next to the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn, being measured for pants with a three-inch rise, pistol pockets, saddle stitching, a balloon knee, and a thirteen peg. He will walk home looking like an Arabian prince.
Meanwhile, the eternal New York war against the cockroach is being waged with J-O Paste and Flit. The men are smoking Fatimas and Wings. In the candy stores, they are selling “loosies” (2 cents a cigarette, two for 3), mel-o-rolls, Nibs, hard car’mels, Bonomo Turkish taffy, long pretzels, Mission Bell grape and Frank’s orange soda, twists, egg creams, lime rickeys, and a nice 2-cents plain. Everybody knows what a skate key is and what it means when your wheels get “skellies.” A pound of butter is carved from wooden tubs. Here, your only jewelry is a Captain Midnight code-o-graph or a Tom Mix whistling ring. And here you always have spaldeens. An endless supply. Pink and fresh and beautiful. Spaldeens: made no longer by the A. G. Spalding Company; street kids now would rather smoke crack than hit a ball three sewers. But we still have them here in the Lost City. Spaldeens: traveling high into the sky of a thousand neighborhoods in the game called stickball. The game is almost never played anymore, except by aging men. In the Lost City of New York, we will play it forever.
In this New York, you can still wander through the stalls of the Washington Market. You can get your hair cut for a quarter at the barber schools on Third Avenue and the Bowery. You can watch the leather-workers ply their trade at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge or watch the old craftsmen roll cigars on Astor Place or see an old Italian shoemaker working in a window with his mouth full of nails. You can bring your kitchen knives down to the truck to be sharpened. You can watch the iceman make his deliveries, stronger than any other man on earth. You can wait for the “rides” to come around in the evening: the Whip and the Loop-the-Loop. You can hang out at the pigeon coop on the roof. You can put your groceries “on the bill.” If you get sick, the doctor will come by in an hour. You can sit at the Battery and watch the ocean liners cleave through the harbor, powerful and regal among their court of tugboats, heading for berths on the North River (the reporters have arrived on the launch, with their press cards in their hats, and they are interviewing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or propping a movie star on top of a steamer trunk). You can walk out on the white porch of the Claremont Inn on Riverside Drive and 125th Street and watch the cruise boats move north to Bear Mountain. On Sunday nights, you will almost certainly turn on the radio and hear that staccato voice: “Goodevening Mr.andMrs. NorthandSouthAmerica andalltheships- atsea.…ThisisWalterWinchellandtheJergensJournal — let’s go to press.…”
Or you can meet that girl in the polo coat who is arriving at Penn Station from college in Vermont or Ohio or Philadelphia. And if you’re lucky, if all goes well at Seventeen Barrow Street or the Bijou or the Olde Knick or the Fleur de Lis, if you have enough money and courage, you might succeed in taking her to the old Ritz Carlton and wake up with her in the bright, snowy light of New York. If it isn’t that easy, you will postpone everything. You will take her to Condon’s, Or to hear Miguelito Valdes sing “Babalu” in the club at the Great Northern Hotel, knowing that upstairs in 1939 William Saroyan wrote The Time of Your Life in five days and maybe the two of you could find the room (in the interests of literature, of course). Maybe you’ll get a sandwich at Reuben’s or stroll through Times Square and look at the Camel sign with the guy blowing smoke rings into the night or the two huge nude statues flanking the waterfall of the Bond Clothes sign and then slip into Toffenetti’s for coffee or head east to Glennon’s for a few final beers. Take your time. All of this will be here tomorrow too. Yeah.
I suppose that 30 years from now (as close to us as we are to 1958), when I’ve been safely tucked into the turf at the Green Wood, someone will write in these pages about a Lost New York that includes Area and the Mudd Club and Nell’s, David’s Cookies and Aca Joe and Steve’s ice cream. Someone might mourn Lever House or Trump Tower or the current version of Madison Square Garden. Anything is possible. But if so, I hope that at least one old and wizened New Yorker will reach for a pen and try to explain about our lost glories: and mention spaldeens and trolleys and — if he can make it clear, if he has the skill and the memory — even Willie Mays.
NEW YORK,
December 21-28, 1987
THE SECRET CITY
Every day, we move through the giant city on the sad or preposterous or exhilarating errands of our lives. Most of the time, we see little. We are New Yorkers, after all, and I it is our pride that we think we know the city. Certainly each of us is outfitted with an interior map, a template of the city’s geography. The sun rises in Brooklyn and sets in New Jersey. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. We know where the bridges are, and the tunnels; we understand how they lash together the stony islands of the New York archipelago. We are aware of the great
markers — the Empire State Building and Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall, Wall Street and Yankee Stadium, all those and a few dozen more. We are filled with information about our restaurants, theaters, museums, bookstores, music, scandals, celebrities, gangsters, and home-run hitters. We are from here. We know.
And yet, if we stay around long enough, if we try to see without the blinders imposed by work and fear and habit, we discover one terrible fact: We know almost nothing. New York can serve as home, workshop, prison, or bazaar. It can dazzle or defeat us. But it never yields up all of its secrets. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.
Obviously, all attempts at imposing symmetry are doomed. But it can be said with some modest confidence that for each of us there are two New Yorks: the city we think we know and the Secret City. The first is inhabited by friends and enemies, relatives and acquaintances, and to some extent by the public figures of the time; we understand its rules and protocols; we discuss it at dinner or on the telephone or in bed.
But the Secret City is barely glimpsed. Often it is as different from the familiar city as the New York of Louis Auchincloss is from the New York of John Gotti. There are some doors in this city that are forever closed to strangers; some are among the satrapies of the Upper East Side; some are in Ridgewood. You see a New Yorker who has established dominion over one of the great Wall Street firms; he has done his work with honor and responsibility, and now he and his family lead gilded lives. In the precincts where he works, he is treated with respect, a certain awe, and even, among those who depend upon him for advancement, a small amount of fear. But his accomplishments, his reputation, his existence mean nothing at all to this other New Yorker, a good carpenter from Fort Greene, who makes objects of wood that might be around long after the first man is dead. For each man, the other lives in the Secret City.