The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  The Natives Don’t Go There

  By MICHAEL COOPER | January 1, 1997

  THE NEW YEAR’S EVE COUNTDOWN IN TIMES Square is another example of the cultural divide between New York City and the rest of the country. While millions watch the ball drop on television each year and hundreds of thousands make the pilgrimage to Broadway to see it in person, all the revelry and whooping and hollering tends to send many native New Yorkers running for cover.

  “Being from New York, it’s not that appealing,” said Greg Colbert, 24, a stockbroker trainee who fled Midtown before the hordes arrived, the streets were closed, the beer started to flow, the noisemakers began to bleat and the ball dropped. “I don’t want to spend New Year’s Eve packed like a bunch of sardines in the freezing cold.”

  But as 1996 gave way to 1997, visitors still found New Year’s in Times Square irresistible, as close as one could ever come to the center of the action. “We’re from Alaska! Are We On TV Yet?” asked the sign held up by Gabe Layman, 18, who had timed a trip to look at colleges in the east so he could ring in the New Year in Times Square.

  The celebration’s popularity among out-of-towners is a testament to the power of television. Just as tourists are drawn to Rockefeller Center these days less for the ice skaters and the statue of Prometheus and more for the chance to watch the “Today” show being broadcast live, many revelers from elsewhere went to Times Square with hopes of being part of a party that they have seen, on television, back home.

  “This is something I’ve always dreamed of being a part of,” said Glenda Jones, 38, who moved to New York from Columbus, Ga., last year, “and now I’m in it, in it.’’

  This time around, the crowds were illuminated by the lights of the neighborhood’s new arrivals: the Disney Store, the Virgin Megastore, the All Star Cafe. And if there seemed to be less flesh around, with the once-ubiquitous underwear advertisements disappearing nearly as fast as the pornographic stores and theaters, visitors could at least take in a giant billboard of a nude Howard Stern (obscured partly by the Chrysler Building).

  1907 Comes In Noisily; Moon Scatters Fog

  January 1, 1907

  WITH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE THE LENGTH OF the Broadway in the Tenderloin provided not only with horns, ticklers, cowbells but with umbrellas as well, the New Year was ushered in in a fog, the presence of which had been vaguely noticeable during the early evening, but which had increased to almost a London thickness in the upper air. Five minutes before the midnight whistles sounded the hour, the fog was quite thick, and the searchlights could not penetrate it for more than half a mile.

  Almost at the moment the midnight hour struck and the whistles began to blow their greeting to the new year, the clouds parted, and a brilliant moon, almost full, shone directly over the Times tower. It was a transformation so sudden and unexpected that almost everyone in the streets looked up at what was apparently a happy augury for the new year. The gloom faded away, the fog and haze lifted, and the Times flashlight shot its beams across the sky to the east and the Jersey hills on the west.

  In Times Square, when the Times tower searchlight shot out a glowing “1907” and told of the passing of the old year, the tumult of horns, cowbells and noise machines which had died down in anticipation burst forth again, and joined a steady chorus of screams of whistles from the east and west where factories are.

  All of the hotels and big restaurants along Broadway in Times Square and its vicinity did a tremendous trade. Despite the weather conditions, the crowds which had engaged seats in the better-class dining rooms and restaurants were not deterred from occupying them, in order to usher in the new year with festal merriment. At nearly all of the hotels, large-sized men were posted in front of the doors to see that no one who had not already engaged a table was permitted to enter. In one case, where there was a little bit of a squabble, the decision of a municipal judge was quoted showing that it was quite legal for restaurant men to reserve tables if they wished.

  Four-Mile Party, Sweaty Guests

  By LYNDA RICHARDSON | December 16, 2005

  CHAMPAGNE IN A FABULOUS PARTY SPACE or a bottle of Bud in a rock club? In a city that is party central on New Year’s Eve, there can be something artificial, even pathetic, about an evening of obligatory revelry. How about taking a different path, the one in Central Park where the annual midnight run is held? Feel virtuous. Feel healthy. Sweat a bit. What better way to spend the night and to end up with something truly worth gloating about later?

  I did. The run, four miles, is big fun. At least this is what I recall, though the exact details are more than a bit hazy. Blame it on that nonalcoholic champagne at the midrace mark. It was cold but I was snug in Polartec fleece, joined by a friend, a veteran of the New York and Boston marathons, who good-naturedly slowed his pace.

  We registered at the New York Road Runners building at 9 East 89th Street. The run goes off at the stroke of midnight with fireworks. But there’s also a prerace masquerade parade and D.J. music that gives you dancing feet.

  I didn’t stumble into the New Year.

  We ran alongside runners dressed in tuxedos, and others in wackier costumes from comic books. I liked Father Time and Baby New Year, and I didn’t feel like mugger bait. The park is well lighted and patrolled, and it was filled with 3,000 to 5,000 of us running revelers—or reveling runners, depending on your take on things. The crowds cheered us on, and there was the exuberant feeling of crossing the finish line. I didn’t stumble into the New Year. I sprinted.

  Live From New York, It’s Cold People Waiting in Line

  By BEN SISARIO | February 16, 2007

  Louis Klein waits for “Saturday Night Live” tickets, which he has done every week since the show began in the 1970’s.

  THE HOUR AND A HALF I SPENT ON WIND-whipped 49th Street in, hunched in the predawn freeze with 100 other people, turned out to be a weak, amateur effort. That kind of commitment may be enough—barely—to get into a taping of one of the daily comedy shows on cable. For those of us in the shadow of 30 Rockefeller Plaza that morning, however, it would take a much more punishing, more frigid, more sleepless dedication to get what we wanted: a low-numbered standby ticket to “Saturday Night Live.”

  Studio-audience tickets are free, but free almost always comes with qualifiers, of course. The price for those free seats is time. In deep winter there is another cost: the price of long johns. And something to protect ears from bitterly unfunny gusts.

  Each year thousands of organized, forward-planning people arrange for tickets months in advance. The rest of us have standby lines. That, at least, was what I was counting on with “Saturday Night Live.” Its procedure is somewhat cruel. Numbered tickets are handed out on Saturday at 7 a.m., and suppliants return that night to await the possibility of getting get in. Standby does not guarantee it.

  I set my alarm for 5 a.m. and headed for Rockefeller Center. My confidence sank when arrived and I saw the masses huddled beneath the “NBC Studios” marquee on West 49th Street. At 6:57 a perky woman from NBC came out and explained the deal: We had a choice of standby tickets to either the dress rehearsal or the live broadcast. One ticket per frozen nose.

  I chose the live show, got a nicely printed blue card bearing No. 41 and headed home to thaw.

  That night we queued up according to number—inside, thankfully—and waited for orders from the young women who mind this line. Around 11:15 one explained with a smile that we could still be let in until just before the broadcast began. It was 11:26 before I learned that I would not be so lucky.

  So I tried again the following week. This time, I decided to go at 3 a.m. I was 17th in line. At 7 a familiar face came out holding two stacks of tickets. I took No. 8 for the live show, a big improvement over 41 but still no sure thing.

  Fast forward to 10:55 p.m. The first 12 of us were screened by security and then lined up, tantalizingly, in front of the elevator bank. By 11:15 I was starting to lose hope when a woman with a clipboard leaned around the corner and
told the guard, “Let ’em up.”

  It wasn’t the funniest episode I had ever seen, but I contributed my quota of laughter and applause.

  As I left 30 Rock, the barriers were up on the sidewalk again and new lines were forming, this time to spot celebrities on their way out. I was tempted to join them. But I decided instead that it was time to head for what was clearly the best seat in the house: my couch.

  The Serious Business Of Comedy Clubs

  By STEPHEN HOLDEN | June 12, 1992

  “THERE ARE TOO MANY COMEDIANS,” RITA Rudner declared recently. “Pretty soon the government is going to pay you not to be a comedian the same way they pay you not to grow wheat.” Ms. Rudner, who is one of the country’s four or five most successful young female comics, was commenting on the glut of performers in a field that until Eddie Murphy’s ascent to superstardom and the proliferation of comedy on cable television was difficult to break into.

  Then in the early 1980’s, comedy became “the rock of the 80’s,” as Caroline Hirsch, the owner of Caroline’s—New York’s most prestigious comedy club—called it a decade ago, and the stampede began.

  “Nowadays, when children tell their parents they want to be lawyers, their parents say, first learn how to be a comedian so you’ll have something to fall back on,” Ms. Rudner said.

  Her comedians-are-a-glut-on-the-market observations join a long list of jokes about the profession’s overcrowdedness that some trace back nearly a decade to Randy Credico’s quip: “Every time a steel mill closes in Pittsburgh, another comic joins the work force.” But there is a painful side to the jokes about the superabundance of stand-up comedy. Although the comedy boom hasn’t exactly gone bust, the bubble has burst. Around the country as well as in New York City, comedy clubs are struggling for survival.

  “Although there are still more than 400 full-time comedy clubs around the country, people are selling cut-rate tickets, papering the house, anything they can do to stay in business,” said Campbell McLaren, a television producer of comedy specials who has been affiliated with several New York comedy clubs. “People are telling me they have to work twice as hard to stay even.”

  Although female comedians are flourishing, she sees the slump in the club business and cable television’s demand for comedy as helping to lower the standards of professional humor.

  “When I was starting out, people had to work very hard to get a shot on television,” said Ms. Rudner, who took up stand-up comedy after working as a professional dancer for 10 years. “Now because of all the cable channels, people only have to get five minutes together, and all of a sudden they’re on TV, and they think they’ve made it. Then they don’t have another five minutes, and then they’re gone.”

  Starring New York, City of Grit and Glamour

  By CARYN JAMES | May 25, 2007

  Tiffany’s on 57th Street and 5th Avenue was immortalized in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  Dennis Farina on the set of “Law and Order.” The series has been filmed in New York since 1990.

  TO WALK THROUGH GRAND CENTRAL Terminal is to step onto a real-life movie set. Cary Grant passes through it while escaping his would-be killers in “North by Northwest.” Jim Carrey grabs Kate Winslet’s hand and dashes across it in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” watching people vanish as his memory is erased. And it is the site of a pivotal moment in “The Fisher King,” when Robin Williams, as a pure-hearted, emotionally unbalanced man, spots the quite plain woman of his dreams heading for her train. Suddenly everyone in the room breaks into a waltz, and this grimy, everyday place becomes a scene of glittering romance.

  James Sanders’s 2001 book “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies” shrewdly observes that two New Yorks—the real city and the screen fantasy—feed each other in a never-ending circle. Film has made New York a communal experience, familiar even to people who have never been here.

  But what is a New York film? It’s not one that simply happens to be set here; whether it’s shot here doesn’t matter either (though that helps). In a genuine New York movie the characters and their stories can’t be separated from the life of the city. There is a dynamic between character and place like the one that makes Mr. Williams in “The Fisher King” insist that no threat of criminals will chase him out of Central Park because “This park is mine just as much as it is theirs.”

  Mr. Sanders is right to point out how reality fuels the movies’ fantasy of New York, which in turn helps shape real New Yorkers’ perceptions of the city. Push that idea further, and you see that those fantasies are almost always close to the soul of the city, to what New York is or wants to be. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through a city of dazzling, black-and-white Deco elegance. The changing, freewheeling 60’s saw the tawdry street hustlers of “Midnight Cowboy,” as well as the glamorous Holly Golightly (a more refined hustler) in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  Today the bracing, multiethnic realism of Spike Lee make him the pre-eminent New York filmmaker. He doesn’t romanticize the city as Woody Allen did in his classic comedies from the 70’s, “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” but obviously loves New York every bit as much. Mr. Lee, like Martin Scorsese in 70’s masterworks like “Taxi Driver,” depicts it without sugarcoating.

  From Mean Streets to Clean Streets

  By JOHN CLARK | April 30, 2006

  OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, NEW YORK has become a kind of permanent film set, a glorified back lot, replete with enormous trailers, groaning craft-services tables, blazing lights and barking production assistants. A partial list of coming films that were shot or are scheduled to shoot in the city includes “Che” (Benicio Del Toro), “American Gangster” (Russell Crowe), “Michael Clayton” (George Clooney) and “The Nanny Diaries” (Scarlett Johansson).

  It’s a far cry from the lean days when the director Sidney Lumet shot Times Square through a car windshield for “Stage Struck” (1958) and filmed street dancers for the shattering finale to “Fail Safe” (1964). “I grabbed those shots at the end of ‘Fail Safe’ from streets around the studio, on 10th Avenue and 54th, where the Puerto Ricans sat on the steps in the summertime,” he said in a recent interview in his small theater-district office. “We didn’t have any money.”

  Now, of course, entire blocks would be shut down to film those exteriors. The city has changed along with the budgets and scale of today’s studio films. Times Square, once home to drug dealers, prostitutes and beleaguered theaters, has morphed into a Mickey Mouse mall. The West 50’s, formerly part of the notorious Hell’s Kitchen, have sprouted condos, fancy restaurants and the Comedy Central studio.

  Even as more and more movies and television shows are being shot in New York, the city that turns up on the screen is far more likely to be the teeming, terrifying, exhilarating, unforgiving New York of the popular imagination. Kevin Lima’s coming film “Enchanted,” for example, is about a peasant girl who is banished from her fairy-tale world to a New York that is both gritty and romanticized. As Mr. Lumet put it, “If a director comes in from California and doesn’t know the city at all, he picks the Empire State Building and all the postcard shots—and that, of course, isn’t the city.” To many filmmakers, the postcard is all that’s left.

  To a large extent, the driving force behind the flood of productions is less creative than pedestrian: New York offers competitive logistics and cost efficiencies. There has been a big expansion of studio space, thanks to facilities like Silvercup Studios in Queens and Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, and the state and city offer tax rebates of 15 percent to filmmakers who shoot at least 75 percent of their movies in New York City.

  Times Square, once home to drug dealers, prostitutes and beleaguered theaters, has morphed into a Mickey Mouse mall.

  James Sanders, editor of “Scenes From the City: Filmmaking in New York, 1966-2006,” foresees a new crop of filmmakers who will chart new territory in movies about the crosscurrents emanating from ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. “We
are going to see the story of a Pakistani kid meeting the Hindu kid,” he said. In fact, he added, because the very nature of the city forces people into close contact with one another, New York still transcends the malls, the box stores and the coming of Trader Joe’s. “There is no rival for the life of the street,” Mr. Sanders said. “You run into lovers, ex-lovers. There are so many ways for different kinds of people to meet each other. That has never changed.”

  The Business of New York

  BUSINESS

  “Who knows what to expect of a financier who just saw the Dow drop 777 points?” Eduardo Porter wrote in The Times after a random walk on Wall Street on September 29, 2008, the day of the single largest point loss in history. Outside the New York Stock Exchange, he saw some long faces, but mostly the same crowded, noisy scene you’d see there at the end of any trading day. Brokers and investment bankers headed home, jabbering to each other, jabbering into their cellphones. “The sense of everyday bedlam did impress upon me just how many conversations can be going on at the same time. And they are all going on here.”

  New York has been at the center of the nation’s financial conversation for so long that you could almost forget that the hoopla on Wall Street—the order-barking traders, the big-money deals, the bonus-happy investment bankers—started under a buttonwood tree. Five stocks changed hands on May 17, 1792, opening day at the forerunner of the New York Stock Exchange. The trading floor was an eighteenth-century sidewalk.