heroic displays of courage and kindness by average citizens, while assistance arrived from all over the globe in the form of person power, financial aid, volunteerism, moral support, and blood donations.
When we’re not busy dealing with real tragedy, Hollywood has always had a particular affinity for decimating New York in order to cream it at the box office. There’s an earthquake in Deluge; a tsunami and a comet in Deep Impact; a rogue planet in When Worlds Collide; a meteorite in Armageddon; rampant crime in Escape from New York; a monster in King Kong, Godzilla, and Cloverfield; aliens in War of the Worlds and Independence Day; and global warming in A.I. and The Day After Tomorrow. On this one I think we’ll have to defer to former mayor Koch, who turned to movie reviewing in his later years, and declared that when it comes to New York City the rest of the country has “edifice envy.” I’d venture to say that the five unadorned, brown brick, 10-story apartment buildings containing 400 apartments in Flushing, Queens, known as the Bland Houses are a safe bet.
My grandfather was working at a Midtown restaurant in 1930 and always in the market for free entertainment, so standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and “Toity-Toid Street” during his lunch hour he’d watch the Empire State Building go up. Mohawk Indians known as “skywalkers” worked fearlessly along narrow steel beams fifty stories in the air. These Native American ironworkers also played a large part in the construction of the Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge, and the World Trade Center. Grandpa asked one of them why he wasn’t afraid to be up so high. The man claimed to be as afraid as the next guy, but explained that he took pride in his work. Then he pointed up to a woman disguised as a man who was filling in so her husband wouldn’t lose his job while he was out. Talk about devotion. For more stories about the world’s first vertiginous metropolis one can visit the Skyscraper Museum in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City.
I certainly wouldn’t suggest visiting New York for its amusement parks, especially since riding elevators, subways, and taxis can be excitement enough, but Coney Island in Brooklyn has recently been given a facelift. Gone are the roving gangs of hoodlums, skittering hordes of
vermin, and ramshackle rides operated by half-asleep men who reeked of beer and Limburger cheese. Nathan’s Famous, home of the July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest, is a survivor along with the historic wooden Cyclone roller coaster that opened in 1926. You can be the judge of whether you want to ride anything that’s old enough to have been declared a New York City landmark. Otherwise, there’s a new steel roller coaster called the Thunderbolt that boasts a 90-degree drop from 115 feet and speeds up to 55 miles an hour. (Native New Yorkers who spend their lives stuck in gridlocked traffic love feeling what it’s like to travel 55 mph.)
However, this big boy is designed for “modern Americans” and therefore skinny people get banged around a bit. Nothing serious, but enough to justify loading up on fried clam strips and funnel cake beforehand. Film buffs might like to know that the original Thunderbolt was featured in the movie Annie Hall. And that actor Walter Matthau requested in his will that Nathan’s hot dogs be served at his funeral – they were. Now, I can already hear first-time visitors fresh from Six Flags shouting, “You call this place renovated?!” Well, let’s just say that after undergoing major upgrades in safety, service, and cleanliness, the area has managed to maintain some of its gritty charm and plus-size rats (“Brooklyn bred, Coney Island fed”). But above all that you can enjoy a wonderful view of where city meets sea from the top of the 150-foot-tall Wonder Wheel.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the world under a single roof, so you should stop in even if it’s just to wander through the statue gallery, sit by the Pan fountain, check out the Temple of Dendur, and have lunch at the terrific but reasonably priced (for the Upper East Side) cafeteria. It’s worth visiting the Chinese Garden Court because the museum is so large most people never find it and you’ll have a measure of solitude there. On the way to the Garden Court, a copy of Washington Crossing the Delaware is a must-see picture. Oddly, it was painted by a German-born artist living in Germany. Stranger still, the original was destroyed in Bremen, Germany, during a British air raid in 1942. But what the heck, the Statue of Liberty was
made by a French sculptor in Paris. I hope we sent them some subway-token jewelry, pastrami sandwiches, and a case of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda in return.
The interactive show at the Met takes place out front where disabled veterans battle for space to operate pushcarts selling food and drink. They’ve turned the museum plaza into the Coney Island board walk much to the chagrin of the trustees. Some of the city’s über entrepreneurs search out disabled vets, who have a special legal right to be there, and pay them to sit in a chair all day in case an inspector comes along while the impresarios do the actual work.
Visiting popular destinations like the Met brings up the subject of living on the other side of the clock in New York. As often as possible in a city of 8 million people, you want to do things when the other 7,999,999 are not doing them, particularly if you work a day job and already have to deal with the madding crowd during the week. Shopping for groceries after work, seeing movies on weekends, and having brunch on Sunday are generally not good ideas unless you enjoy waiting in line. And because of fire codes and limited space, most waiting in line is done alfresco in all kinds of weather, often while being panhandled.
You definitely don’t want to shop for toothpaste and shampoo in a drugstore while all the feverish, sneezing, hacking sick people crowd together in the cold and flu aisle, huddle around the staff to sign Sudafed release forms, and pick up their ampicillin. Honestly, I don’t think a separate pharmacy for healthy people who just want to buy Band-Aids and vitamins is too much to ask for.
In order not to miss enormously popular attractions such as Madame Tussauds, the Guggenheim, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island (be sure to watch the orientation movie first), get tickets early or else arrive early – early as in you have your nose pressed against the glass when the doors open.
If you’re a resident then it’s good to keep a “dream list” handy. The minute the city gets all frantic over an inch of snow, bundle up and dash to the museums, trendy restaurants, Tony award–winning musicals, and Shake Shacks that usually have lines around the block. I’ve
had the Frick Collection and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) all to myself while everyone else was out buying batteries and being fitted for snowshoes. Once while walking through Washington Square Park on a particularly polar-vortexy night I didn’t see any of the usual drug dealers, and then suddenly from out of the shadows came a murmur: “Pot, frozen pot.”
New Yorkers tend not to go to popular attractions unless forced into action by an out-of-towner. Most residents can’t give you directions to the Empire State Building. A couple I know moved to Wilmington and the husband kept complaining that he could no longer go to Broadway shows, art galleries, museums, and the ballet. The wife said he’d never gone to any of those things when they lived in New York. He replied that at least he knew he could. Living in New York you’re going to be surrounded by the arts, just like those who reside in Washington, D.C., are immersed in politics, whether they enjoy it or not.
A main reason that aspiring artists continue coming to New York is there are excellent schools here such as Juilliard, Pratt, Parsons, Cooper Union, Tisch, Columbia, American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the New York Academy of Art. Such a move seems to make sense if you want to dance, paint, act, play music, or make films, but I’m not entirely sure why it’s always appealed to writers and poets, especially since one assumes they’d be in search of a quiet place to work and contemplate. There isn’t really anything like the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop or Yaddo artists’ community, just a few high-powered review outfits such as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, which a writer friend likes to call The New York Review of Each Other’s Books.
One might thin
k that so many scribblers in one place would have trouble finding an audience or be too focused on the same subjects. Yet they keep arriving and thriving. If everyone here decides to become a writer, who will be left to read? As it is now, a book party is judged successful by the number of friends who show up, and a poetry reading is deemed triumphant if the audience outnumbers the poets who are presenting. Being that most of our resident versifiers call Starbucks
their office, the city may have launched what will become famously known as the Caffeine School of Poetry. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before they unionize.
Greenwich Village in particular has been a notable outpost for writers and artists since the nineteenth century. At first it was an elite neighborhood with winding tree-lined streets, fine architecture, and a European sensibility, but in the 1850s wealthy residents began moving uptown and their former homes were either subdivided or replaced with tenements. Along with an influx of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, the inexpensive rents attracted artists and intellectuals. New York University, founded in 1831, not only brought prominent faculty to the area but also other institutions such as theaters, art societies, small presses, galleries, and libraries. The freethinking, free-loving atmosphere also attracted radicals, socialists, bohemians, and sex tourists. And no matter the decade, for some reason perhaps known only to Afro-Cubans, the neighborhood has never been short on open-air bongo players.
The Village has been home or hangout to such artists and iconoclasts as Thomas Paine (Common Sense), Washington Irving (coined the name Gotham), Walt Whitman (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (General Sherman Monument across from the Plaza Hotel), Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Hart Crane (The Bridge), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, and Edward Albee. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage at 61 Washington Square while working as a reporter. The famous Nighthawks painting by Edward Hopper was supposedly modeled on a diner in Greenwich Village, which was the artist’s permanent home. Literary luminaries such as Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, and E. E. Cummings have lived on the gated cul-de-sac off 10th Street called Patchin Place, which is a magnet for psychotherapy offices and known as “Therapy Row.” The Village was also where Woody Allen and Joan Rivers performed their first stand-up comedy routines, and Hal Holbrooke rolled out his Mark Twain show.
When I first moved to Greenwich Village in 1984, it was untouched by chain stores, superstores, and souvenir shops. Scattered along its cramped sidewalks containing metal trapdoors every few feet, and mixed in with low-slung apartment houses and numerous gyro/souvlaki joints, was a pell-mell collection of cafés, performance spaces, bars, and cabarets. No matter when you arrive everyone likes to say, “You missed it. You should’ve been here ten years ago.”
Still, I was able to see tenor sax star Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard, legendary bluesman Willie Dixon at Kenny’s Castaways, and trumpet great Dizzy Gillespie at the Blue Note (who had airbags in his cheeks before we had them in our cars). I sat at tables with beat legends and rabble-rousers such as Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin. Comedy Cellar presented the waiting-to-be-discovered Joy Behar, Jon Stewart, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Rita Rudner, and a teenage Chris Rock. Traveling a few blocks east, it was possible to enter the punk rock era at the legendary CBGB and see Patti Smith, Television, the New York Dolls, the Dead Boys, and the Ramones. With torn clothes, sculpted hair, Goth makeup, and safety pins as accessories, punk was being manufactured in New York City the way the blues had gelled in the Deep South a century earlier. Stage diving, crowd surfing, and slam dancing had supplanted the Moon Walk, the Robot, and the Electric Slide. The area was also in an uproar over graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s provocative social commentary and Keith Haring’s politically barbed imagery juxtaposed with childlike characters. (Basquiat would die of a heroin overdose in 1988 at age twenty-seven, and Haring would succumb to AIDS in 1990 at thirty-one.)
It’s now being shouted from the fire escapes that Brooklyn is the new Manhattan. Former borough president Marty Markowitz declared his beloved Brooklyn the “Lesbian Capital of NYC and the Northeast” as a way of cementing its LGBTQ cultural currency, and perhaps starting a catfight with Northampton, Massachusetts. Best known in the 1970s for its chop shops and street gangs, these days Brooklyn is the “it” destination for up-and-coming artists and writers the way SoHo was in the 1980s and Greenwich Village before that. Berl’s in DUM
BO is the only all-poetry bookstore in New York City. No doubt that if Shakespeare were working today, even he would decamp to Cobble Hill right behind Martin Amis. Instead of The Taming of the Shrew we’d have She Thinks Who She Is, Henry IV, Part 2 would be Who Died and Made You Boss?, Shylock would be Wisenheimer, and Much Ado About Nothing would be called Fuggedaboudit. But even without the Bard, Brooklyn is pretty confident. There’s a sign in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel that says “Leaving Brooklyn” to make sure that you clearly understand the import of your decision.
And it must follow, as the night the day, that the hipsters who pioneered places like DUMBO and Williamsburg as the next SoHo and East Village are now declaring Brooklyn to be over. They’re busy setting up fusion taco shops and craft ale breweries in Morningside Heights, Jersey City, and Hastings-on-Hudson.
Chapter 23
Treadmills, Trans Fats, and Treatments
New York is not usually listed under retirement communities because no one here wants to admit to being over fifty. The city saves a fortune because so few people ask for discounts. You won’t see any signs in restaurant windows for early-bird specials. There’s a large print edition of The New York Times but it circulates on the black market. You don’t see a continuous loop of ads for motorized scooters on television in New York because with all the dashing up and down subway stairs, running for cabs and buses, and traipsing several blocks to restaurants, stores, and movies, few people are overweight. In fact, New Yorkers weigh on average six or seven pounds less than suburban Americans.
Same with our kids – there’s no December 15 National Cupcake Day for young New Yorkers since city schools cracked down on baked goods in 2009. Meantime, there are few elevators or escalators in ancient New York subway stations, so even if you skip the gym you still get a workout. Good balance is involved since you really don’t want to touch handrails or grab bars under any circumstances (remember the disease ads?). Add a baby carriage, luggage, or shopping bags and there’s the benefit of a weightlifting component.
On top of our firearms and cigarettes, Manny Bloomberg took away our trans fats, required restaurants to reveal calorie counts, raised the age for buying tobacco from eighteen to twenty-one, made a hard
run at our sugary sodas, and tried to put a seven-day waiting period on ordering chocolate chip pancakes. I’m surprised the residents of Toronto didn’t attempt to pair up their cursing, vodka-guzzling, overeating, crack-smoking mayor Rob Ford with clean living Manny Bloomberg in a Big Brother program. We’re lucky to still have T-shirt cannons at concerts and fireworks on the Fourth of July. You can buy cigarettes on every corner – you just can’t smoke them anywhere, including offices, bars, restaurants, subway platforms, parks, and public spaces. Working with Javert-like zeal, Manny Bloomberg managed to ban smoking in bars and nightclubs, afraid that it sent the wrong message to the prostitutes, gamblers, drug dealers, and cokeheads. Smoke-easies have since sprung up around the city where no one complains if you light up and there’s a guy on the lookout for approaching health inspectors. New Yorkers are now hoarding chewing gum just in case Manny Bloomberg one day becomes president. The next entrepreneurial breakthrough will come from the person who invents a patch for those having trouble getting off the cronuts.
If it’s any consolation, Manny Bloomberg passed a law to have defibrillators installed in public places such as courthouses, municipal office buildings, ferry terminals, stadiums, nursing homes, large health clubs, and some parks and golf courses.
But are these machines supposed to make New Yorkers more or less stressed?
Thirty years ago, gyms were dingy, sweaty places filled with equal parts body odor and free weights where boxers trained and ex-cons plotted their next heist. Then actor and former activist Jane Fonda pulled on a striped leotard and leg warmers to start hawking workout videos, Olivia Newton-John’s exuberant single “Physical” climbed the charts with the line, “There’s nothing left to talk about. Unless it’s horizontally,” and Calvin Klein’s nearly naked underwear models helped fuel a health craze. In a tank top and short-shorts fitness fanatic Richard Simmons brought us snappy phrases like, “A MOMENT ON THE LIPS; A LIFETIME ON THE HIPS,” “DON’T DIET, LIVE IT!” and “THIGHS, THIGHS, GO AWAY, GIVE THEM ALL TO DORIS DAY!”
Sleek gyms soon appeared on every block, offering juice bars,
piped-in music, and customized workouts, for which New Yorkers gladly shelled out membership fees equivalent to one month’s salary. They were just in time since the advent of the personal computer and the Internet would soon strand everyone on the couch shopping, playing video games, Googling themselves, and having webcam conversations on Chatroulette. When I was young and we played outside all day, children were terrified of the dark, but now that they play video games in dark rooms all day long, kids are afraid of the light.
It can’t be a coincidence that the nation’s first center for headshrinking found a welcome home here when the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute was founded by a group of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s disciples in 1911. Getting therapy is not a source of embarrassment for New Yorkers. There are even signs that warn “Depressed Storm Drains.” In the nice weather it’s not uncommon for lawn chairs to pop up downtown and in the busier parks with average Joes offering free or low-cost advice. There’s usually a line. Local bookstores, especially on the Upper West Side (which could qualify as Psychotherastan on a New Yorker cover map), devote large sections to therapy and self-help, which is either a sign of robust mental health or of serious instability. I’m always surprised there isn’t a bigger market for secondhand therapy. Certainly in a place this populous many folks must be suffering from similar problems. Shouldn’t it be possible to walk out of a session and sell what you just found out at a cut rate? I have one friend who’s been in therapy for more than forty years to the tune of $500 per week, and she said the summation would be: Do the things that you think will make you happy. That’s over a million dollars in free therapy right there and more than covers the cost of this book.
Life in New York Page 17