“Well, I proved him wrong about the N.B.A., and we laugh about it now. But he was right about school. You have to get a foundation of an education. I loved history, and I majored in history at U.C.L.A.”
A girl asked him about his proudest accomplishment. “Well, there were many,” he said, “but I am very proud that I got my college degree in four years, and made all-American at the same time.”
Between Home and Heaven, A Ball Field
By SARA RIMER | March 31, 1991
THE APPROACH OF SPRING IN WASHINGTON Heights, the Santo Domingo of New York: People fling open their windows, and into their tenement apartments comes the call of merengue, a dozen different variations blasting from speakers in bodegas and record stores and cars cruising Broadway. And they get ready for baseball.
Every morning at about 5, on their way to factory jobs in New Jersey, the neighborhood’s Dominican immigrants see 18-year-old Manny Ramirez—the star of their own George Washington High School baseball team, their own major-league prospect—doing his roadwork on the steep incline of Fort George Hill.
Baseball, with all its fleeting promise, connects all kinds of people in Washington Heights—the commander of the local police precinct, the old man on the corner in the Yankees cap, the coach from Brooklyn, the teen-age girls who call out to Manny Ramirez in the hallways at school.
Last year, the 34th Precinct logged 109 of the city’s more than 2,200 homicides, more than any other precinct except the 75th in the East New York section of Brooklyn. In his office, the deputy inspector, Nicholas Estavillo, points to a wall of snapshots of some of the 2,500 guns confiscated in the last five years. Then, smiling, he shows off a mahogany clock from the Dominican-run F. Alfonso Little League. This is a neighborhood, he says, with four separate Little Leagues.
For fans and players here in Washington Heights, baseball is an escape from the harshness of New York. And it is something else. Dominicans may complain incessantly about the country they left—the disastrous economy, the devalued peso, the lights that are always going out. But they also talk incessantly of going home, where there are long hours working in the sugar-cane fields and factories, and there is baseball.
Javier Del Castillo, 22, is a shortstop from San Pedro de Macoris, a breeding ground for major league shortstops. Mr. Del Castillo is home from college, working at the post office. In free moments at work, he swings a cardboard mailing tube at wadded-up pieces of paper tossed into the air.
“What is there to do on a beautiful, tropical day in the Dominican Republic but play baseball?” he said. “Playing baseball is going to a new world—to paradise.”
Hopper’s Vision of New York
By ALFRED KAZIN | September 7, 1980
IN THE DAYS WHEN MANHATTAN BRIDGE was still open to pedestrians, when you could stroll across the great central promenade of Brooklyn Bridge without being taken hostage, when nothing in this world was such a gift as the light over the East River bursting into a BMT car and breaking up the boredom, I would regularly make my way between Manhattan and Brooklyn with the feeling that these halves of my life were joined not by ceaseless daily travel but by images drawn from paintings of New York.
I did not know there was a New York to love more than a neighborhood, until I saw it in museums.
The trouble with growing up in a Brooklyn tenement was not so much that you were poor—there was nothing but other people’s poverty to compare yours with—but that the struggle for existence made everything else seem trivial, unworthy. I had no genial New York images of my own until I discovered John Sloan in the old American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reginald Marsh in the Whitney Museum of American Art when it was on Eighth Street, forgotten prints of Columbia Heights in the Brooklyn Museum.
But there was one exception to the cozy, picturesque painters of New York: Edward Hopper. Unlike so many American paintings just before and after World War II, “representational” and “abstract” alike, his work was not slap-dash, hurried, theatrically self-conscious. The immensely tall, immensely quiet man I often saw walking in Greenwich Village and seemed tensely alone; he reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s impression of Robinson Crusoe—“a man staring at a pot.”
Hopper for me was like his unprecedented paintings of solitary people staring at the glass in New York bedrooms, coffee shops and offices. Perhaps he had taken the advice of the philosopher Wittgenstein: “Don’t think! LOOK!” Yet you could not have guessed what the handsome man was looking at as he edged his way through Washington Square Park. His figures never looked through the glass they were facing. Their masked, identical, hawklike faces were concentrated in thought unavailable to anyone, perhaps, especially to themselves.
The Return Of Andy Warhol
By JOHN LEONARD | November 10, 1968
“Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. I don’t know what anything is about. Like I don’t even know whether or not I’m really alive or—whether I died. It’s sad. Like I can’t say hello or goodbye to people. Life is like a dream.” —ANDY WARHOL
On a Sunday afternoon last month, there was a very nice picnic in a courtyard at 5 Ninth Avenue at the foot of Little West 12th Street. The picnickers roasted a pig on a spit and chopped it up with an ax. They also made wine, removing their shoes to tromp on grapes, then conveying the sludge to a press. Children were present, enjoying themselves. And such stars of the Velvet Underground as Viva, Ultra Violet and Nico (with a black and silver saddle slung over her shoulder). And newspaper photographers, movie cameras, tape recorders, microphones. All thrilled under the Oriental lash of reciprocity: snapshots were snapped of people snapping snapshots; tongues and microphones were intertwined; there were various kinds of mirrors to record the various forms of eating.
At the calm eye of this eating stands Andy Warhol, former pop artist (he “retired” three years ago) and prolific film maker: a Moon-Man, a sort of spectral janitor, silver-haired, deathly pale, oddly angelic behind his shades, inside his zipped-up black leather jacket, looking as though he had dropped from a star. He isn’t doing anything; he hardly even moves. But he is the silent magnetic center around which the particles of the party revolve, reminding you of Ezra Pound’s: “The fourth; the dimension of stillness;/And the power over wild beasts.” At the same time, he seems vulnerable.
Warhol, a child of the media, is unfailingly courteous to their janissaries. Every impertinence, every ghoulish probe, is patiently endured, for he needs us as much as we need him. “Well, really, I’m still too frightened to think about it.” What he doesn’t want to think about is the day last June when Valerie Solanas, a bit-player in one of his movies, entered the Factory—his studio—and shot him.
Warhol is the New Art. Even Norman Mailer in his recent incarnation as a movie maker admits indebtedness. Warhol exemplifies it in the division among performer (for the media) and promoter (that superb entrepreneurial instinct which is responsible for the Electric Circus). The facade is personality, the function is games—play within the permutations permitted by the playthings, which are machines. And he is consistent, from silk-screen to stationary movie camera to tape-recorded novel. His art is an extended commercial for gadgets.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Hazards Of Sudden Success and Fame
By MICHAEL WINES | August 27, 1988
IN A CITY THAT EXALTS SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS in the fashion of rock stars, Jean-Michel Basquiat seemed blessed. When he burst onto the art scene in 1981, his paintings of anguished figures were hailed by some critics as works of genius. Admirers besieged him at Manhattan’s hottest night clubs. Sales of his art grossed millions of dollars.
Mr. Basquiat was 27 years old when he was found dead in his apartment in the East Village two weeks ago from what friends say was an overdose of heroin.
Art experts have called his death a personal tragedy and a major loss to the art world.
Some say he resented being a black man whose fate twisted with the whims of an all-white jury of artistic powers. Others say he pin
ed for fame but was crushed by its burdens. Some friends believe greedy art dealers and collectors exploited him. Some say wealth fed his longtime appetite for drugs.
“One knew from the start that he was going to live out his own time span,” Henry Geldzahler, the former curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum, said. “He lived very high, very fast, and he did a lot of great things.”
Many of Mr. Basquiat’s associates acknowledge that they were aware of his growing drug problems, and some say they had urged him to lessen or stop his use of drugs. But only one friend—Andy Warhol, Mr. Basquiat’s idol—seemed to have had any influence. Friends say the artist dissuaded Mr. Basquiat from using heroin, and that Mr. Warhol’s death last year removed one of the few reins on Mr. Basquiat’s mercurial behavior and appetite for narcotics.
Mr. Basquiat’s angry, primitive figures, boldly colored on canvases and on such everyday objects as doors and refrigerators, were judged by critics to show both an astonishing precocity and an innocence rare among contemporary artists. Basquiats have sold at auction recently for prices between $32,000 and $99,000, and they are “extremely sought after by both European and American collectors,” said Susan Dunne, head of contemporary art sales at Christie’s.
Aura of Whitman’s Brooklyn Lives On
By THOMAS LASK | May 16, 1971
BEYOND A NAME GIVEN TO A SQUARE OFF THE public path, there are no physical reminders of Walt Whitman in the Brooklyn Heights he loved so much. More’s the pity, because Whitman would have loved and reveled in the informality of the Heights today, in the casualness of its people, their tolerance and public concerns.
He would have enjoyed seeing young mothers walking their baby carriages; husky workmen mixing cement for the high-price apartments off Cadman Plaza, high enough to cut off sight of any hills; strings of children shepherded by anxious teachers; older people catching a bit of sunlight; a man reading a paper on the morning stoop.
The silhouettes of the houses along Columbia Heights and Willow and Hicks Streets, among others, would appear familiar. Two houses, 40 and 38 Hicks Streets, between Middagh and Poplar, were there when the poet lived in the area, although 38 looks so shabby he would never know it. The siding, bare and in need of paint, is falling in; windows are barred or broken. And the place looks deserted except the street floor, where the Robert Fulton Civic League has its headquarters.
The poet’s name lingers on in the Heights only in Whitman Close, an interior square of the Cadman Houses project on the site of the shop that published his “Leaves of Grass” in 1855. But of one thing Whitman can be certain: There are probably more copies of “Leaves of Grass” for a square foot of real estate in Brooklyn Heights than in any other part of town.
Although Walt Whitman was quite willing to take on the cosmos (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), he had a close relationship to Brooklyn. He came to it in 1823 when he was 4 years old and lived there more or less until middle age. It was Brooklyn that nurtured his optimism, that provided the feeling of kinship for the dynamic, invigorating humanity that he celebrated in his poems and for the different trades, pursuits and classes of people he encountered.
And it was in Brooklyn that his “Leaves of Grass,” the unique volume that stands solitary in the annals of American letters, was conceived, printed and published.
It was no wonder that he memorialized the beauties of Brooklyn in his poetry (“Brooklyn of ample hills was mine”) and that the poem cited by his biographer Gay Wilson Allen as the masterpiece of the first two editions of “Leaves of Grass” was called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
Putting Poetry Back Into Langston Hughes’s House
By JENNIFER KINGSON BLOOM | April 9, 1995
WHEN ALBERT DAVIS BOUGHT THE FOUR-story brownstone at 20 East 127th Street in 1985, he knew that the writer Langston Hughes had lived there. But he was amazed to find, in the basement and attic, three of Mr. Hughes’s typewriters, his piano and desk, dozens of original manuscripts and historic pictures, even an old tax return.
The cache inspired Mr. Davis, who had only a passing familiarity with Mr. Hughes’s work, to turn the house into an informal museum. The piano, desk and a typewriter—a gray Royal manual—are displayed in a first-floor parlor. By appointment, visitors may tour the upstairs office where Mr. Hughes wrote poetry, plays, essays and nonfiction, and the bedroom where Mr. Davis’s children found a copy of one of Mr. Hughes’s musical plays, “Tambourines to Glory.”
Mr. Davis, an engineer who serves on Community Board 11, said the artifacts led him to create the shrine. “Here you have a landmark building, a famous African-American writer,” he said. “What else could you do?”
Mr. Hughes lived in the house for 20 years until his death in 1967; it was a rooming house then and when Mr. Davis bought it. Mr. Davis, too, has several boarders, one of whom, David Mills, has also been inspired by the legacy of where he lives: in February, he began holding monthly poetry readings in the parlor. The first was on Feb. 5, four days after what would have been Mr. Hughes’s 93rd birthday. It drew 200 people.
“Howl” was Ginsberg’s Country
By FRANK BRUNI | April 7, 1997
FOR ALL THE WORLDWIDE ATTENTION THAT Allen Ginsberg received, he was a creature and icon principally of downtown Manhattan, his world view forged in its crucible of political and sexual passions, his eccentricities nurtured by those of its peculiar demimonde, his individual myth entwined with that of the bohemian East Village in which he made his home.
“He embodied the East Village and the Lower East Side,” Bill Morgan, a friend and Mr. Ginsberg’s archivist, said. “It affected him, and he affected it. He was a lightning rod for the political activism and social issues that played out here.’’
Mr. Ginsberg died of liver cancer on Saturday in his apartment on East 13th Street near First Avenue at the age of 70. He had lived in this residence for about six months but had previously spent at least two decades in an apartment only a block away, on East 12th Street near First Avenue. Before that, he resided for many years on East 10th Street near Avenue C, friends and associates said.
These were his stamping grounds, the social laboratory he inhabited for the vast majority of his years since the late 50’s, after migrating south from Columbia University. Columbia, which he attended in the 40’s, was where he met Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs and others at the forefront of the Beat Generation.
“He embodied the East Village and the Lower East Side.”
But the East Village and the Lower East Side were where he became a legend. In “Howl!” written in 1955-56, Mr. Ginsberg mined lower Manhattan for such images as people who “walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium.’’
“The whole East Village ferment of the 60’s began with what Allen did,” Tom Savage, a Manhattan poet and longtime friend of Mr. Ginsberg, said. “The way downtown Manhattan evolved would never have happened without Allen Ginsberg.”
Tom Wolfe as Novelist of New York
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN | October 13, 1987
Tom Wolfe in his Manhattan apartment in 1998.
“IT’S OUTRAGEOUS THE WAY PEOPLE CONDUCT their lives in New York,” Tom Wolfe said. “And yet I don’t want to live anywhere else. I don’t despair, because I find the comedy so rich. At the same time that people do vile things, they also create hilariously funny spectacles. The city dominates you if you’re a player, but it never fails you if you’re a viewer. It’s always entertaining, and it’s always funny, even in its grimmest moments.”
Mr. Wolfe has been observing this city for a quarter century, and now he has written a book about it—a novel called “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
There is a Wall Street bond salesman who lives on Park Avenue, gets involved in a strange incident in the South Bronx with two black youths and winds up enmeshed in the city’s criminal-justice system. There are Fifth Avenue social
ites, crooks, cops, a Bronx district attorney, a Hasidic landlord, a politically connected black minister and a white mayor he hates—just about all of whom try to use the bond dealer’s dilemma to their advantage. But the main character, Mr. Wolfe said, is New York.
“It struck me that nobody any longer seemed to be writing novels of the city, in the sense that Balzac and Zola wrote novels of Paris and Dickens and Thackeray wrote novels of London,” Mr. Wolfe said, sitting in his East 60’s town house and wearing his signature white vested suit. “And it was sort of strange to me that in this really bizarre period there are not novels of New York. And I think that although there is a central character, I always wanted in a way for the main character to be New York, and the way the city dominates its players and drives them to do reckless things.”
Hence the title. “It wasn’t a perfect analogy,” he said. “In the real ‘bonfire of the vanities’ Savonarola sent his ‘Red Guard’ units into people’s homes to drag out their vanities—which were anything from false eyelashes to paintings with nudes in them, including Botticellis. This bonfire is more the fire created by the vain people themselves, under the pressure of the city of New York. It may happen in other places, but it certainly happens here. People are always writing about the energy of New York. What they really mean is the status ambitions of people in New York. That’s the motor in this town. That’s what makes it exciting—and it’s also what makes it awful many times.”
One other thing likely to come out of the novel is gossip. The scene is New York, the situations are realistic, and readers are likely to wonder if they can match real people to the characters. They can’t, Mr. Wolfe said—the characters are composites. “In some cases they’re not even composites,” he said. “They’re made up. This isn’t a roman a clef. If I had wanted to write about real people I’d write about them in nonfiction, as I’ve done before.”
The New York Times Book of New York Page 7