The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  One driver, Richard Fisher of Staten Island, thought the authority had things backward. “Why don’t we send the passengers to courtesy class instead of us?” he asked.

  “But there is a courtesy class for passengers,” the instructor, Donald Gaffney, said firmly, and the room quieted down. “And you know who the teachers are? You! You are the best public relations we have.’’

  If there was a theme to the classroom instruction, it was that drivers should do their jobs safely, efficiently and politely, but, in the words of Mr. Gaffney, “never try to be a policeman.’’

  The lesson was carried out on the second day of the course, when the class went out on the streets of Manhattan in a shiny, new General Motors bus. As it turned from a side street on to Riverside Drive—wham, wham, wham—three snowballs hit the windshield.

  Nobody flinched. There was a time when a driver would stop his bus and give chase; but then there was a time when youngsters would run. The three snowball-throwers stood their ground on Riverside Drive and laughed.

  The course was set up in response to complaints from the police, who said drivers were violating traffic regulations, and from the public, who said operators were violating common courtesy. One student, Mr. Fisher, said he thought the course was a good idea.

  He said, “It sure beats driving a bus.”

  Last of the Checker Cabs

  By JODI WILGOREN | July 27, 1999

  THE LAST DAY OF THE LAST CHECKER CAB IN New York should have been full of nostalgia and romance, the storied retirement of a much-loved machine integral to the city’s lore and lure. Instead, it was filled with hassles.

  There was the awkward moment when Mr. Johnson stopped abruptly at a Jamaican restaurant and his fare, a woman late for work, followed him inside to find out what he was doing (every cabdriver has his favorite pit stops).

  Having decided that the cab had become too expensive to fix to meet the city’s standards, Mr. Johnson spent the day juggling interviews so that each journalist had a solo ride-along, artfully avoiding questions about how much money he had made in the Checker or might make selling it.

  There were lovely moments, too: the fares who shared poignant childhood memories. The drivers who leaned out of their windows to shout good luck and God bless. The comrade cabby who stopped at three successive stoplights for her own snapshots of history.

  And two hours with Roberta Horton and James Donnelly, social workers who rode in Mr. Johnson’s Checker to their wedding and who spent his last day celebrating their second anniversary in the back of the cab.

  “The Checker is the ultimate urban luxury,” Ms. Horton, 47, said as she held her beloved’s hand during the drive up the East Side of Manhattan to the Conservatory Garden in the park. “It’s a vehicle that belongs to New York.’’

  Not anymore. The Taxi and Limousine Commission says his Checker needs a new chassis. Mr. Johnson says the car is fine, the commission’s requirements too strict, and it’s time to fold up his jump seats.

  “I’m not looking for handouts,” he said as he limped around, shaking hands and posing for pictures, “I’m finished.”

  Homeless, but Far From Friendless

  By DAVID GONZALEZ | April 20, 2004

  WHEN ONE PERSON IS KIND TO MANY strangers, people make a big deal of it, heaping praise and talking about canonizing the do-gooder. But when many strangers are kind to one person—a homeless one who lugs his life in two bulging plastic bags on the subway—the upshot is a quick shrug of disbelief, and not the admiring kind.

  Yet in his 53 years on earth, a chunk of it spent riding the rails, Tony Butler, the homeless man, brought around him a random clan who gave him food, money and friendship. The motormen and car cleaners who keep the subways running were a large part of that circle. But so, too, were riders who befriended him at the Broadway-Lafayette station, where he had taken it upon himself to announce system delays or route changes as a “volunteer transit associate.’’

  They knew him as a subway philosopher and chess fiend in dark glasses. Some said he chose to be homeless, others said homelessness chose him. Whatever the case, their lives came together and stayed that way until he died last month from what doctors said was an overwhelming infection.

  “He saw himself as a beacon of freedom,” Steve Zeitlin said. “Someone once described street performers as instilling a homesickness for freedom in the lives of ordinary men. Tony prided himself on living in total freedom.’’

  He may not have had a job, but he did keep to a schedule. Monday and Friday mornings he would rendezvous with Mr. Zeitlin, who gave him money and food. Other people had other days. He did not like to miss out on connecting with his friends.

  And while he did not envy their schedules, he looked out for his subway worker friends, especially when bosses where on the prowl.

  “He knew when the supervisors got on the train,” said Anthony Smith, a train operator. “You wouldn’t know, but he would. He’d warn you.”

  The Ballad Of Sonny Payne

  By STEVEN KURUTZ | May 16, 2004

  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE MAYOR AND A stray actor or two, the subway trains are generally bereft of public figures. It’s an anonymous journey. This is not the case on the F train, however, where every day a luminary rides alongside the commuters in the form of a small, sweet-natured old panhandler named Sonny Payne.

  Sonny has worked the F train so long and with such success that along the Brooklyn stretch of the line, from Avenue X to the Jay Street/Borough Hall station, he is considered an esteemed part of the commuting. “He’s like something out of ‘Cheers,’” one passenger said. This makes him feel good.

  He is either 65 or 67, depending on his mood when you ask him, and is most famous for his introductory speech, which he recites upon entering each car: “Pardon me, my name is Sonny Payne. I’m homeless and I’m hungry. If you don’t have it, I can understand, because I don’t have it. But if you have a little change, a piece of fruit, something to eat, I’d greatly appreciate it.’’

  So catchy is the speech that it’s sometimes posted verbatim on the Web site Craigslist, and a less imaginative panhandler named Marty adopted it for his own use. Sonny doesn’t feel slighted. “In a way,” he said, “I take it as a backhanded compliment.’’

  For Sonny, the jostling over spare nickels has long passed. He is above the fray. Through salient charm and learned observation, he has solved the mystery of what makes subway riders, already taxed, give to a beggar. He isn’t even a beggar but an old friend, and in place of loose change he is often given bills. One evening not long ago he made $136. He took the money and booked a hotel room for two nights. “I treated myself,” he said. “I really enjoyed it.”

  Sweeping Him Off His Street

  By COLEMAN COWAN | March 18, 2007

  AFTER 13 YEARS OF AVOIDING WHAT HE CALLS the “Giuliani sweeps”—when the streets were emptied of homeless by the police during freezing weather—Cadillac Man is finally coming in from the cold.

  Cadillac Man plans to move into an apartment with the new woman in his life, a computer researcher from Astoria named Carol Vogel. Ms. Vogel, who at 32 is 25 years younger than Cadillac Man, met him a year and a half ago when she passed under the 33rd Street viaduct, his main haunt.

  A tough man who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, he has chronicled his adventures on the streets of Astoria, Queens, in Esquire magazine and is the subject of a 2006 documentary.

  Cadillac Man’s writing grew out of another relationship, with a much younger homeless woman named Penny. They spent only a few months together, but after she left, Cadillac Man began to fill one spiral notebook after another describing his time with her and his life on the street. His gritty, spare prose caught the eye of Will Blythe, a former editor at Esquire who lives in the neighborhood. In May 2005, the magazine published a first-person account of Cadillac Man’s life on the street. Sloan Harris, a literary agent at International Creative Management, noticed the article and brokered a deal for a book.

/>   Ask him about his real name, and he replies tersely, “That’s dead to me now.” Ask him about his nickname, and he speaks of six Cadillacs that ran him down across the city—once sending him to the hospital—during a single month in 1994. These accidents occurred soon after Cadillac Man, who has been married twice and is the father of three, lost his job at a meat market in Hell’s Kitchen and began a downward spiral of what he called “drinking and disappearing.”

  CHARACTERS

  Louis (Moondog) Hardin, 83, Musician, Dies

  By GLENN COLLINS | September 12, 1999

  THE GAUNT, BLIND MUSICIAN KNOWN AS Moondog, who was celebrated among New Yorkers as a mysterious street performer and among Europeans as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty, died Wednesday in a hospital in Munster, Germany. He was 83.

  Day in and day out, the man who was originally named Louis T. Hardin was as taciturn and unchanging a landmark of the midtown Manhattan streetscape as the George M. Cohan statue in Duffy Square. From the late 1940’s until the early 1970’s, Mr. Hardin stood at attention like a sentinel on Avenue of the Americas around 54th Street.

  No matter the weather, he invariably dressed in a homemade robe, sandals, a flowing cape and a horned Viking helmet, the tangible expression of what he referred to as his “Nordic philosophy.” At his side he clutched a long spear of his own manufacture.

  Most of the passers-by who dismissed him as “the Viking of Sixth Avenue,” offering him contributions and buying copies of his music and poetry, were unaware that he had recorded his music on the CBS, Prestige, Epic, Angel and Mars labels.

  One of his songs, “All Is Loneliness,” became a hit when recorded by Janis Joplin. He wrote music for radio and television commercials, and one of his compositions was used on the soundtrack for the 1972 movie “Drive, He Said,” with Jack Nicholson.

  “He led an extraordinary life for a blind man who came to New York with no contacts and a month’s rent, and who lived on the streets of New York for 30 years,” said Dr. Robert Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, who has just completed a biography of Mr. Hardin. “Without question, he was the most famous street person of his time.”

  His Stage, the Street

  By JAMES BARRON | February 3, 2009

  SOMEHOW, JOE ADES GOT PEOPLE’S ATTENTION as the crowds swirled by at the Union Square Greenmarket, on their way to eyeing and buying the produce. He was the white-haired man with the British accent, the expensive European suits and shirts—the man selling the $5 peeler. For carrots. Or potatoes.

  “He made it look really fun,” said Julie Worden, who dances with the Mark Morris Dance Company.

  “The voice—you couldn’t help but notice it,” said Gordon Crandall, a mathematician who teaches at La Guardia Community College.

  His was a particular kind of street theater in a city that delights in in-your-face characters who are, and are not, what they seem. For he was the sidewalk pitchman with the Upper East Side apartment. The sidewalk pitchman who was a regular at expensive East Side restaurants, where no one believed his answer to the “So what do you do?” question: “I sell potato peelers on the street.”

  Mr. Ades (pronounced AH-dess) died on Sunday at 75, said his daughter, Ruth Ades Laurent of Manhattan. She said he never talked about how many peelers he sold in a year, or how many carrots he had sliced up during sidewalk demonstrations. She said he stashed his inventory in what had been the maid’s room of the apartment.

  There were those at the Green-market who had heard the spiel, and heard the whispers. “Supposedly his wife is mega-mega-rich—we’ve done fashion shoots in that building,” said Rose-Marie Swift, a makeup artist, as she shopped at the Greenmarket.

  The facts? He was a widower. The apartment had been his wife’s—his fourth wife’s. He had followed Ms. Laurent from England to the United States, via Australia. “One of his marriages, I guess his third marriage, had broken up,” she said. Making the rounds of state fairs, “he discovered the peeler—someone was selling the peeler and he saw it as a fantastic item to sell on the street. He loved the street more than anything,” she said.

  My Days Underground

  By KIRK JOHNSON | June 15, 1997

  SHE WORE A BROWN CLOTH COAT AND LITTLE half-glasses, and she emerged from the side of the 14th Street platform with the light behind her, creating a halo effect around her hair, like an angel’s. I never learned her name because she jumped onto an uptown No. 1 local train a minute later, but I will never forget her. She rescued a struggling musician in the grimmest moment of his first-ever afternoon playing for the passing throng of the New York transit system: she listened.

  Every subway musician has a story like that. But how does it happen? How, in this least likely of places—the subway—where New Yorkers wrap their cloaks of anonymity and self-defense more tightly than almost anywhere else, does a subway musician break through? That’s what I went underground with my guitar to find out.

  For a musician, it is a world of soaring emotional highs and plummeting psychic lows, none of which—for better and for worse—lasts longer than the average wait for a train. Luke Ryan, a blues and rock performer who has been playing in the subway for 15 years, calls this effect the “constant audition.” It’s the only environment he knows, he said, where a performer wins hearts instantly, or fails completely, because there is no time for anything in between.

  For most of my first afternoon on the subway stage, I was firmly in the failed category. I had played for perhaps half an hour without a single person’s so much as acknowledging my existence until the woman in brown changed it all. She stepped out of the light, leaned in, listened, smiled, touched her forefinger and thumb together to signal, “O.K.,” and threw a single quarter in the open guitar case. She brought hope.

  I ultimately played and sang underground on two more occasions over a 10-day period at various times and stations around the city—morning rush hour on the Upper West Side 72nd Street downtown I.R.T. No. 1, 2 and 3 trains; afternoon into evening on Wall Street, uptown No. 4 and 5, as well as that afternoon on the 14th Street platform—and through it all I was always trying to recreate that first moment of victory.

  I played the song she liked, “Maybelline,” by Chuck Berry, just about to death. I did not make a lot of money: $61.39 for more than nine hours of physically exhausting work. Better than the minimum wage, though not by much.

  FAMOUS NEW YORKERS

  Jackie O; Friends Recall A Fighter for Her City

  By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN | May 22, 1994

  NEW YORK, WHICH CONFERS A MEASURE OF privacy on celebrities, counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among its own for many years. Mrs. Onassis, who died Thursday at the age of 64, had spent much of her childhood here, and it was here she returned in 1964 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, here she went back to work in 1975 after the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, and here she fought for her glittering, frustrating city.

  All over town—at a Grand Central Terminal she helped to save, outside her Fifth Avenue apartment building, in Central Park where she jogged—people recalled her campaigns for treasured buildings, her work as a book editor, her affection for art, her quiet presence in church, and mostly her friendship.

  “She had this tremendous enthusiasm—it was almost childlike at times—and when she talked about a book, you knew she was completely engaged,” said Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of Doubleday, where Mrs. Onassis had been an editor for the last 16 years.

  One of her authors, Bill Moyers, for whom she had edited three books, recalled her yesterday in similar terms: “As a colleague, working closely on my books, she was as witty, warm and creative in private as she was grand and graceful in public.”

  Nancy Tuckerman, a lifelong friend and confidante who had been Mrs. Kennedy’s White House social secretary, recalled roller-skating with Jackie Bouvier as children in New York in the 1930’s, when they were fellow
students at the Chapin School.

  “She was always drawn back to New York,” Ms. Tuckerman said. “She chose to bring up her children in the city. She got into publishing because she knew it would be an educational experience—she would learn something every moment.”

  Kent L. Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, recalled how Mrs. Onassis was instrumental in persuading legislators in Albany to block the construction of an office tower beside St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. “Jackie got on the train to Albany, met with assemblymen and senators and the governor all day, gave testimony and at the end of the day, when the rest of us were exhausted, she stood for well over an hour while virtually every important legislator had a picture taken with her,” Mr. Barwick remembered.

  Like many New Yorkers, Mrs. Onassis got away occasionally—on weekends to her horse farm in New Jersey, in the summer to her estate on Martha’s Vineyard, where she and her companion of recent years, Maurice Tempelsman, entertained President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, last summer.

  But her friends said she was always glad to come home to New York.

  Eleanor Roosevelt Warmly Remembered In Her Hometown

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | October 5, 1996

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS BORN AND DIED IN New York City, and spent big intervals of her life here. Today, she comes home—as a statue in Riverside Park.

  History’s longest-serving First Lady returns to a city where she was a rich if exceedingly uncomfortable debutante, a tireless worker for social causes, a newspaper columnist and a delegate to the United Nations. She comes to a place where she was so revered cab drivers would ask her to sit in the front seat so they could better converse.

  It was here she fought Tammany Hall, the Catholic Church on aid to parochial schools, and the sweatshops on the Lower East Side. There are still people who remember seeing Mrs. Roosevelt run for a bus, ride a horse in Central Park or dance elegantly.