As if it’s not enough that New Yorker Peter Cooper came up with Jell-O, a few other creative natives gave us modern-day Christmas. Washington Irving Americanized the Dutch Sinterklaas as a potbellied philanthropist in a horse-drawn wagon in his 1809 satirical history of New York. A local bookseller named William Gilley published a poem in 1821 about Santa along with an illustration of a sleigh on a rooftop being pulled by a single reindeer. Two years later, Chelsea author Clement Clarke Moore added seven more reindeer, the chimneys, and the bundle of toys in his famous poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” However, airborne Santa is a tough sell in New York. There aren’t many working chimneys, so theoretically St. Nick needs to use the fire escape or get a master key from the superintendent. The reindeer would have to land between satellite dishes and water tanks. For all that effort his
snack is going to be a hotdog and pineapple juice from Gray’s Papaya or else almond milk and carob cookies.
Santa’s trademark red suit with white collar and cuffs was created in the nineteenth century by Thomas Nast, a New York cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly magazine. In addition to starting the tradition of extravagant holiday window displays, Macy’s department store further jollied up Nast’s image of Santa Claus. And if anyone was still doubting Santa’s existence by then, the issue was put to rest once and for all when eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote to the New York Sun from her home on West 95th Street in Manhattan to ask if Santa was real. On September 12, 1897, veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church replied in no uncertain terms, “Yes, virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus.” As for Virginia, she earned a master’s degree from Columbia University, a doctorate from Fordham University, and went on to become an educator and school administrator.
Finally, along came poor Rudolph, the alternatively nosed ninth reindeer. He was created in 1939 by Robert L. May, a New York–born advertising copywriter for retailer Montgomery Ward, as part of a Christmas coloring book. And while “White Christmas” might be about spending the holiday in sunny California, the song was written by Israel Isidore Beilin, who moved with his family from Russia to New York’s Lower East Side when he was five years old and later changed his name to Irving Berlin. In the 1947 perennial Christmas favorite Miracle on 34th Street the real Santa has to step in because the one playing him in the Macy’s Parade is drunk. In a typical New York twist, the real Santa Claus must undergo a psychological evaluation in order to prove his credentials and avoid being committed to Bellevue Hospital. This was several years before the invention of antipsychotic drugs.
Happily, churches and community centers provide plenty of good music throughout the holidays, most of it at no cost. Otherwise, free-range caroling is a challenge in New York. Apartment dwellers think you’re trying to deck the halls with take-out menus. Since 9/11,
big signs in the subway say, “If you see something, say something.” The Boston Marathon bombing confirmed the fact that it’s now up to the populace to catch terrorists. Imagine looking out your window and spying people ganged together wearing wool hats, chanting from little books, singing praise to God. I hope they know the words to “Police Navidad.” It’d be better for them to haul their holiday self-expression off to a karaoke bar.
New Yorkers try to embrace the holidays by removing their black Christmas and Hanukkah sweaters from the oven. However, it’s stressful knowing that you won’t get another cab until after New Year’s Eve and that buying a tube of toothpaste will mean standing in line for an hour. Advent, the traditional December holiday season, means “something about to arrive.” It’s about waiting. We are indeed accustomed to waiting for subways and buses to arrive, traffic lights to change, and food delivery (unless it’s Asian), but so as not to punish locals, I’ve long been an advocate of express lines in December for those buying staples such as juice and toilet paper on the way home from work. Also, just as Amtrak and Metro-North have “quiet cars,” there could be special subway cars to separate tired working stiffs from excessively cheerful tourists and showgoers gleefully swinging oversize shopping bags and loudly humming “The Carol of the Bells.” This would go far in fighting “holiday rage.” As the curmudgeon H. L. Mencken so delicately put it, “People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.”
New Year’s Eve is, of course, when the ball drops and hordes of out-of-towners stand freezing in Times Square. Many large cities offer free public transportation on subways, buses, and commuter railroads on New Year’s Eve in an effort to discourage drunk driving. New York experimented with free rides from eight p.m. to eight a.m. in 1984 and 1985, and the result was a surge in muggings, attempted stabbings, vandalism, and disorderly displays involving public intoxication. Roving bands of teens designated the subway cars as their pop-up party sites, and this further increased the number of felonies and arrests. Nowadays the thinking is that if you can afford to go out on New Year’s Eve, then you can afford to go home. Which leads us to my favorite joke. Two
fleas leave Times Square after watching the ball drop. One flea says to the other, “Should we walk or take a dog?”
As for Presidents’ Day, what better way to honor the founders of our country than go to Macy’s or Bloomingdales and buy linens on sale? Unitarian Universalists are trying to have “Founding Fathers” changed to “Founding Parents,” as we know a number of women did some of the heavy lifting (aka “womanual labor”) behind the scenes. We considered fighting for “Founding Persons” but we’re also engaged in trying to get “person” changed to “perself” to render it completely gender neutral.
Over the years it has come to my attention that people born on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are often called Holly, Noel, or Carol. I’m just putting it out there that perhaps children born on Presidents’ Day weekend could be named after linens, for example, Percale, Satin, Flannel, and Duvet. And why not call children born on Arbor Day Birch, Spruce, Sycamore, and Flowering Dogwood?
Thanksgiving is actually the perfect New York holiday. There are no religious obligations and it’s all about excess. Even the food is stuffed with food. If you don’t feel like cooking, the Chinese restaurants are open for business so the only kitchen accidents to watch out for are paper cuts. It’s amazing how much General Tso’s chicken tastes like turkey.
Chapter 18
Humidity City
There are two basic seasons in New York: Influenza and Allergy. Obviously, the flu is going to find a happy home since public transportation is like a giant kindergarten with too many shared surfaces, too much close contact, and not enough coughing into elbows. It also doesn’t help to go from frigid streets into apartment buildings with antiquated heating systems that are “regulated” by opening and closing the windows to allow the cold air from outside to reduce the Arizona-dry prison climate on the inside. The bed of the average New Yorker usually has a window slightly above the pillow and a radiator slightly below the pillow, which either results in bronchitis or one heck of an immune system. My father’s bed was in exactly this position, and the man was never sick a day in his life. He didn’t even have a doctor. He also used to swim in the Hudson River as a boy, so it’s safe to assume he’d already been exposed to a little bit of everything by the time he got his army vaccinations.
Summer colds are also popular, especially when going from 95 degrees outdoors to subarctic office buildings and then down onto blistering subway platforms. These become incinerators where lifeless baked air is trapped underground only to be rearranged when a train arrives, pushing ahead of it a tremendous blast of even hotter, fustier air that’s been roasting in a tunnel. Then you step into a subway car the temperature of a meat locker. Fortunately, there’s a homeopathic cure for the ills induced by rapid cycling between shiver and swelter – liquor
stores put containers of airplane-size
vodka on the counter and label them “Flu Shots.”
Logic suggests that the concrete jungle would be a safe haven for allergy sufferers. Au contraire. A recent Finnish study says that we city dwellers are more allergic because our urban setting lacks biodiversity. Another problem is our trees. In the early 1900s, the most popular tree planted was the American elm, which shed little pollen. These were killed by Dutch elm disease in the middle of the last century and replaced by several species of trees to which many people are highly allergic. That’s because street trees are chosen for their resistance to disease, insects and drought, and their ability to withstand smog. Basically, city planners take the size, shape, color, and hardiness of the trees into account but not their deleterious effects on about 40 percent of the inhabitants.
What passes for winter in New York is rather laughable to a native Buffalonian. I doubt that my Wall Street colleagues had ever hoarded Wonder Bread bags as kids so they could place them between sock and boot (two on each foot) before heading outside. Still, a few inches of well-placed snow and a couple of fallen tree limbs can practically shut this city down. Newscasters love working themselves and everyone else into a frenzy over approaching storms. They go into grocery stores and film shoppers stocking up on a month’s worth of milk and eggs (largely because the customers panicked after watching the storm coverage on TV). Then the TV cameras go to the Sanitation Department where big, shiny plows are ready to rumble and the road salt is piled high. If only the plows were fitted to move all the parked cars that will be abandoned on the streets and make snow removal nearly impossible.
There are a few New Yorkers who’ve been keeping cross-country skis hidden away for just such an occasion and head straight up Fifth Avenue early in the morning and into Central Park. The snow accumulates so rarely and space is at such a premium that many city kids don’t have sleds, so they use garbage can lids or lunch trays or, they wrap cardboard in a Hefty bag. For a few hours the Frozen Apple becomes a winter wonderland. Then it quickly descends into a slush nightmare,
with street corners that require hip waders to navigate deceptively monstrous puddles and sidewalks heaped with enough superstrength rock salt to vaporize a medium-size goldendoodle compliments of lawsuit-fearing business owners.
Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, “My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.” Miami is often called the last stop on the Long Island Rail Road. When New Yorkers move to the Land of Milk of Magnesia they can become sullen, since there’s not as much to complain about as they sit there eating early-bird specials of skinless, boneless chicken. Their adult children can sometimes be circumspect when it comes to saying the winter is mild in New York, for fear that the parents will return early from the Old Country, aka West Palm Beach.
Spring means that Central Park becomes a dreamscape of frothy pink-and-white blossoms that make the trees look as if they’ve been decorated with scoops of ice cream. The streets fill with babies and puppies. At my Unitarian Universalist (UU) church, my pew mate Mary-Ella and I always make a wager on how many Easter hats we’ll see. Between ten and twenty is usually a good guess. However, some devout Yankee fan usually rocks up in a baseball cap and we’re never sure how to count that.
Daylight saving time is always an adventure in New York. Fortunately, the UUs have a long coffee hour (“coffee cacophony” is more like it) following the service, and in the spring, everyone who forgot to switch their clocks and missed the service can walk directly into that gathering without being too embarrassed. The real problem is in the autumn, when the people who were planning on just going to coffee hour arrive an hour early and end up having to actually attend the service first.
With regard to the trains, most local service providers, such as the Long Island Rail Road, enter the Twilight Zone during the autumn daylight saving changeover. For instance, if your LIRR train leaves Penn Station at 1:19 a.m. and is supposed to arrive at Plandome at
2 a.m., it will arrive at 1 a.m. That’s no inconvenience for the customer. However, riders on Amtrak might be surprised to find that trains head
ing to and from the city stop in their tracks, so to speak, during the autumn changeover, entering into a state of suspended animation. At two a.m., Amtrak trains stop and wait an hour for the new two a.m., assuming they were running on time to begin with, which is a big assumption when it comes to Amtrak. As for the subway, those operators needn’t worry about such things since they’re not foolish enough to commit to a schedule in the first place.
It’s true enough that I arrived in New York City in the dead of winter and considered it to be a big joke, but I was not prepared for the summer by a long shot. Buffalo has never even recorded a temperature of 100 degrees or higher with nearby Lake Erie acting as a gigantic air-conditioner. If the mercury did rise to slightly uncomfortable levels during the day it usually cooled down substantially by nightfall. Chocolate didn’t melt in our hands to begin with so we wondered why the makers of M&M’s had to guarantee that theirs wouldn’t. This just wasn’t a problem. And Buffalonians think that all Dairy Queens are closed from October until May. Who goes out for a Blizzard in a blizzard?
It’s officially summer in New York City when you see the newspaper picture or TV footage of kids frolicking in the spray of an open fire hydrant, usually in Harlem or Brooklyn. Soon to follow are the power failures that occur as cranked-up air-conditioners overtax the power grid and too many New Yorkers simultaneously research their cold and allergy symptoms on WebMD.
As summer progresses and the city seems to be slipping toward the equator, the homicide rate always rises. The tabloids like to correlate this to a spike in the consumption of ice cream since Mister Softee sales rise in tandem with stabbings and gunshots. It’s surprising that local weather forecasters haven’t added this Ice Cream Indicator to their tracking of the heat index and the pollen count. However, the police call the rise in murders the “Are you lookin’ at me?” effect from the movie Taxi Driver, which was shot during a New York summer heat wave (and its fraternal twin, the garbage strike). In hot weather people go out more, congregate more, and tempers flare. Most of the violence takes place when the temperature is in the low- to mid-90s. After the
mercury creeps past 97 degrees, the murder rate drops precipitously. Apparently there is such a thing as too hot to kill. I once saw a T-shirt that said, “Here Today, Gone to Maui.” New York should sell ones that say “Too Hot for Homicide.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s murder mystery Rear Window depicts New York during a heat wave. Actor Jimmy Stewart solves a crime by spying on his neighbors out of his tenement-building window. Which begs the question, do New Yorkers really use telescopes to peer into other apartments? Yes, but all they usually see are the flickering lights of computer screens as people research diets on the Internet while eating Funyuns.
By the third day of a heat wave the entire city begins to smell like pee and one understands why the musical Urinetown was such a hit in New York. When it finally starts to rain one assumes the pee smell will be washed away, but for at least a day after a good downpour the city only smells more like pee.
Throughout the sulking haze of a heat wave, air-conditioners remain on high, the power grid hovers near collapse, and blackouts are always a possibility. This is particularly bad for politicians if elections are looming because you can’t be sure whether you’re going to get the Bad Blackout of 1977, when the knives came out and looters were looting other looters, or the Good Blackout of 2003, when neighbors helped one another, citizens voluntarily went into the streets to direct traffic, and people had parties where they pooled and then barbecued all their perishables. Whereas most disasters result in a baby boom nine months later, people were so busy out helping one another there was actually a dip in births following the Good Blackout of 2003. As it happens, New York has just one electric company – Con Edison. And it advertises on TV because why? If we’re dissatisfied are we going to switch to using treadmill power or candle
light or night vision goggles? Meantime, we pay for their service while they try and frighten us into doing all the work. Signs in the subway say: “You thought they reported the gas leak. They thought you did.” Add your own scary music soundtrack.
How to beat the heat is a common topic of conversation during stifling, humid New York summers. As with restaurants, doctors, and
travel routes, everyone seems to have an opinion. In the old days before air-conditioning, people slept on fire escapes and rooftops, and whole families would decamp for the night to public parks. Nowadays, people take refuge in such places as the M5 bus, rumored to be the coldest; the freezer section of Fairway Market; the chilled penguin house at the Central Park Zoo; the New York Public Library; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (paintings need climate control just like humans). Movie theaters tend to be 40 degrees and so they’re a cool haven so long as you plan for pneumonia afterward. Some intrepid New Yorkers set up beach chairs in air-conditioned twenty-four-hour ATM lobbies with their laptops and ear buds. There’s always the old standby of catching a breeze on the Staten Island Ferry, which is free. It was the Staten Island Ferry that Edna St. Vincent Millay was celebrating in her poem “Recuerdo” with the lines:
Life in New York Page 13