Life in New York

by Laura Pedersen

  With steam billowing up from the manholes, sewers, and subway grates the city appears to be one giant percolator. Feel that New York high. It’s real, a result of all the antidepressants and mochaccinos that have leached into the water table. It’s just a matter of time before coffee shops open counters inside of drugstores.

  We’re all merely placeholders, observing while being observed. We’ve learned that you stand “on line” and not “in line,” a person plays “piano” and not “the piano,” Houston Street is pronounced “Howston” Street. Public housing is known as “The Projects.” The Naked Cowboy is not entirely naked and most likely not a cowboy. We understand that when Upper West Siders say the “Met” they mean the Metropolitan Opera, when Upper East Siders say it they mean the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and when Croatians say it they mean Middle European Time. (Under no circumstances does it mean the “Metro,” which is always the “subway” or the “train.”) We’ve stood at the intersection of Waverly and Waverly and we know that the main branch of the New York Public Library doesn’t allow you to take out books. We try to avoid the Long

  Island Rail Road on Memorial Day weekend at all costs. We wonder why New York windows don’t have screens. And where have all the gas stations gone?

  The celebrated tic-tac-toe-playing chicken left the Chinatown Fair arcade in 1998 under pressure from animal rights sympathizers, despite being a consistent moneymaker. The chicken, always a female, won many more games than she lost. Rest assured, the last one (Lillie) did not end up as a local menu item but went to a farm in Massachusetts. Meantime, the Algonquin Hotel cat, who wandered in one night in the 1930s, proves that cats indeed have nine lives. Male replacements are named Hamlet while females are called Matilda. The hotel celebrates his/her birthday with a party on July 10th every year. The current Algonquin cat, Matilda, has her own e-mail address if you’re interested.

  The one constant throughout New York City’s history has been its ability to change, adapt, and reinvent itself. Restless energy is a defining characteristic. When the circus comes to town, there are plenty of residents and tourists to greet it in the middle of the night, and there’s also a bevy of animal rights activists protesting the event. The American Stock Exchange is being turned into a boutique hotel with specialty shops as I write this. It took New Yorkers less than a month to incorporate the city’s bicycle sharing program (aka Mike’s Bikes) into cycle-themed weddings. The Citi Bikes are borrowed, blue, and new, so that’s three out of four right there.

  As old buildings are demolished and rent-controlled apartments disappear, a new real estate controversy has arisen in large part thanks to the Internet. Websites such as Airbnb, which match visitors with tenants willing to turn their apartments into short-term rentals, are getting kudos from New Yorkers who need extra income as well as from travelers on a budget, while landlords, neighbors, and the city’s hotel industry cry foul. This has created a whole new generation of apartment dwellers who are sneaking around, trying not to be found out. No wonder this town has always been such a magnet for talented actors.

  New York has a long history of renaming its roads, theaters, neighborhoods, and airports. Crown Street became Liberty Street after

  the American Revolution. Laurens Street became South Fifth Avenue and then West Broadway. Around 1847 a potter’s field was named Reservoir Square, and in 1884 it was renamed Bryant Park in honor of New York Evening Post editor and abolitionist William Cullen Bryant, and then nicknamed Needle Park when it served as an open-air drug market in the 1970s (though it was far from the only city park with that designation). Today, Bryant Park is a convivial urban paradise and home to wholesome square dances, carousel rides, holiday fairs, a free ice-skating rink, outdoor movies shown on a supersize screen, and an open-air library with Wi-Fi access. Best of all, they have fabulous free restrooms with mosaic tiles, mirrors framed in cherry wood, fresh-cut flowers, and electronic seat covers. Longacre Square became Times Square in 1904. Being that a world record was recently broken in Herald Square it will surely be rechristened Twerking Square in the near future.

  The area known as Little Germany is now the East Village. The Gashouse District became Stuyvesant Town. The San Juan Hill neighborhood was demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. Hell’s Hundred Acres is now SoHo. The Number 7 train line to Queens has been dubbed the Orient Express due to a recent surge of Asian immigrants. The Globe Theater on West 46th Street became the Lunt-Fontanne. The Virginia Theater was renamed the August Wilson. There’s a Facebook page called “Tennessee Williams Deserves to Have a Broadway Theater Named after him.” And why not? As his most famous character Blanche DuBois famously said, “I’m only passing through.” We’re all just passing through. The stately brownstone that was Edith Wharton’s childhood home on West 23rd Street is now a Starbucks. Mafia don John Gotti’s headquarters in Ozone Park, Queens, has become a pet-grooming salon.

  The largest of the new buildings on the 9/11 site was originally called the Freedom Tower. But in 2009 it was rechristened One World Trade Center for one of the two towers destroyed in the terrorist attack. So that address lives on for another day.

  The infamous Flatiron District disco/drug den the Limelight was originally built as the Church of the Holy Communion in 1844, counting John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould, and Cornelius Vanderbilt among its

  parishioners. A century later a commune called the Lindisfarne Association took up residence, only to pack up for Colorado after a few years. The Odyssey Institute, a drug-counseling organization, bought the property from the Episcopal Church and sold it to nightclub operator Peter Gatien in 1983, one assumes without the drug counselors. After Gatien’s Limelight nightclub closed in 2001, an investor who’d taken a stake in the club when Gatien fell behind on his mortgage payments gained control of the property, and it’s since been transformed into a mini-mall (with restrooms on the third floor!). One can buy a Lacoste shirt on the same spot Andy Warhol, Elton John, and Madonna did the Hustle (and heaven knows what else), and where robber barons once prayed that it would be easier for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

  While some buildings have undergone several name changes over the decades, there are others such as the longstanding Broadyke at the corner of Broadway and Dyckman Streets that probably should. Perhaps the nearby Broadyke Meat Market feels like it’s time for a transformation as well.

  New York is famous for comebacks. If we’re going to have a motto on city license plates it should be: The Bigger the Setback, the Greater the Comeback. The 1970s hit movie Saturday Night Fever returned as a 1990s Broadway musical. Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which fled midtown Manhattan in May of 1972, returned to the place of its birth in February of 2014 with new host Jimmy Fallon, after almost forty-two years in Los Angeles.

  Bedbugs were common in New York until the 1950s, when fumigation, better hygiene, and improved sanitation made them a rarity in all but the most squalid settings. People used to coat their bedposts and headboards with petroleum jelly or soapy water to stave off the advancing army. I grew up hearing my father warn me, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” despite my never having encountered such a creature. Well, they’re back, in housing projects, hospitals, posh townhouses, and swank department stores. And so lots of bedbug-sniffing beagles are hanging out their shingles. Grandpa loved saying, “A recession is bad for the shoe salesman but good for the shoe repairman.”

  In March 1925, construction workers digging a building foundation near Broadway and Dyckman Streets, just blocks from where my dad was born, discovered the jawbone of an American mastodon that included fourteen teeth. Paleontologists believe that mastodons, saber-toothed cats, and woolly mammoths were quite prevalent in the area during the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, but abruptly disappeared a few thousand years later. Maybe they’re preparing for a comeback too.

  Richard Nixon came to New York to rebuild his image following his resignation after the Watergate scandal. After a life of p
olitical upheaval, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, one-time first lady of the Republic of China, landed on the Upper East Side, where she died in 2003 at the age of 106. New York was where Judy Garland would have numerous “comeback concerts” in the 1950s and ’60s. (“And to hear the press tell it, a comeback every time I went to the powder room.”) Famous silver-screen icon Greta Garbo retired to Manhattan, which might be considered an odd choice considering she said, “I want to be alone” or “I want to be left alone” or both. But you can be alone here, and also never feel lonely. In 1949, E. B. White famously wrote that New York City bestows “the gift of privacy, the jewel of loneliness.” Were apartment walls, ceilings, and windows thicker back then?

  There are 20,000 people buried under Washington Square Park. We come and work and play, and they build over us. We are beings in our time. We live surrounded by history, knowing that generations have walked these same streets before us and generations will follow, God willing as the Irish like to say, or goddess willing, as the New Agers like to say.

  The cosmopolis remains forever a mystery and a marvel, inspirational and infuriating, arousing both loathing and longing. Whether you’re a resident, visitor, or commuter, your New York is different from everyone else’s. If you’ve come here to find yourself, they say to see who everybody else is and you’re what’s left over. Henry Hudson was one of the few people to not find what he was looking for and leave New York dissatisfied back in 1609. I guess that everywhere is always going to be someone’s nowhere. Meantime, the Pilgrims were

  aiming for the mouth of the Hudson River but went off course. We could all be wearing big hats, rectangular white collars, and buckles the size of Bibles.

  What have I gleaned from this amazing adventure? It was told to me by an airline counter attendant at JFK Airport during the blackout of 2003. She said, “I’ve learned that the only thing I can control is my own behavior.” And surely philosopher William James was thinking about New York when he wrote, “Wisdom is learning what to overlook.”

  Old Lady Life is what’s happening right now on our native clay. The sirens, the jackhammers, the garbage trucks at four a.m., the ferret devotees, the breathtaking sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, the jaw-dropping view from the Brooklyn Bridge of imperious steel and stone fortresses with gleaming glass and delicate silvery spires where heaven meets earth. As purple dusk rises from the sidewalks the stars overhead are splashed by the vaporous glow of streetlamps and a radiant Times Square. Wayfarers from around the world saunter out in search of a dream, an answer, a fix, or someone to hold.

  Is the past what we take with us or what we leave behind? Either way, nothing will ever be like it used to be. And it’s all over before you know it. The city rushes to cover our tracks. Too bad and thank goodness.

  About the Author

  Laura Pedersen is a former New York Times columnist, the author of fifteen books including the award-winning humorous memoir Buffalo Gal, and a playwright. She has appeared on Oprah and David Letterman, performed stand-up at the Improv, and writes for several well-known comedians. Her award-winning play The Brightness of Heaven ran at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre in 2014. More info is available at www.LauraPedersenBooks.com and Facebook/Laura Pedersen Writer.

  Acknowledgments

  Much appreciation to Fulcrum publisher and Renaissance Person

  Sam Scinta for his continued support and encouragement, resident marketing mavens Melanie Roth and Jess Townsend, editor extraordinaire Alison Auch, editor in chief Rebecca McEwen, and cover designer

  Alex Asfour. A big shout-out to The Elements of the Story author Frank Flaherty for sharing his New York knowledge. Many thanks to the talented Jim Schembari for his keen editorial eye. Also to my early readers and reviewers, Aimee Chu, Judith Ehrlich, Barry Goldsmith, Steve Newman, Neil Osborne, Sophia Seidner, and Willie Pietersen. Ongoing appreciation to publicity prodigies Wiley Saichek and Meryl Zegarek.

  Critical Acclaim

  for Laura Pedersen

  Beginner’s Luck

  “Laura Pedersen delivers…if this book hasn’t been made into a screenplay already, it should be soon. Throughout, you can’t help but think how hilarious some of the scenes would play on the big screen.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Funny, sweet-natured, and well-crafted…Pedersen has created a wonderful assemblage of…whimsical characters and charm.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This novel is funny and just quirky enough to become a word-of-mouth favorite…Pedersen has a knack for capturing tart teenage observations in witty asides, and Hallie’s naiveté, combined with her gambling and numbers savvy, make her a winning protagonist.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Best Bet

  “The book’s laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will find themselves rereading lines just for the sheer joy of it.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  The Big Shuffle

  “Although it’s a laugh-out-loud read, it’s an appealing, sensitive, superbly written book. One you won’t want to put down. I loved it.”

  —The Lakeland Times

  “Be prepared to fall in love with a story as wise as it is witty.”

  —The Compulsive Reader

  “A breezy coming-of-age novel with an appealing cast of characters.”

  —Booklist

  Buffalo Gal

  “This book is compulsively readable, and owes its deadpandelivery to the fact that she has performed standup comedy on national television (The Oprah Winfrey Show, Late Night with David Letterman, Today, Primetime, etc.).”

  —ForeWord Magazine

  “...[Pedersen’s] wicked, sarcastic, dry, self-deprecating sense of humor won me over and I absolutely loved it start to finish.”

  — Printed Page

  Fool’s Mate

  “Fool’s Mate bounces along and then proceeds at a taut, riveting pace as the cast of characters in this cleverly-crafted novel love, learn, and grow in a way that gives new meaning to folly and wisdom! Delightful!”

  —Crystal Book Reviews

  Going Away Party

  “Pedersen shows off her verbal buoyancy. Their quips are witty and so are Pedersen’s amusing characterizations of the eccentric MacGuires. Sentence by sentence, Pedersen’s debut can certainly entertain.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Heart’s Desire

  “Funny, tender, and poignant, Heart’s Desire should appeal to a wide range of readers.”

  —Booklist

  “Prepare to fall in love again because Laura Pedersen is

  giving you your ‘Heart’s Desire’ by bringing back Hallie

  Palmer and her entire endearing crew. In a story as wise as

  it is witty, Pedersen captures the joy of love found, the

  ache of love lost, and how friends can get you through it all—win or lose.”

  —Sarah Bird, author of

  The Yokota Officers Club

  “This book will make you laugh and cry and like a good friend, you’ll be happy to have made its acquaintance.”

  —Lorna Landvik, author of

  Angry Housewives

  Eating Bon Bons

  Last Call

  “Pedersen writes vividly of characters so interesting, so

  funny and warm that they defy staying on the page.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “This book is a rare, humorous exploration of death that affirms life is a gift and tomorrow is never guaranteed. Pedersen writes an exquisitely emotional story. A must-have book to start the new year.”

  —Romantic Times

  Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws

  “Pedersen captures the zeitgeist in exploring the personal side of India.”

  —Buffalo News

  “Deft mixture of facts and humor whets the appetite for

  a visit.”

  —JWR

  Play Money

  “A savvy insider’s vastly entertaining line on aspects of the money game.�
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  —Kirkus Reviews

  (starred review)

  The Sweetest Hours

  “To call The Sweetest Hours a book of short stories would be like calling the Mona Lisa a painting.”

  —Front Street Reviews

  “Pedersen weaves tales that blend humor, sorrow, and

  sometimes surprise endings in the games of life and love.”

  —Book Loons