The Heart of the World
Page 36
It was a revolutionary concept. But, really, what was there to lose? By 1985, I was back on Broadway again, newly wrapped in silence. Instead of knocking on doors and setting up interviews, I simply sat still. Sat on benches and bar stools, at coffee-shop booths, in flophouse hotels; kept watch, and listened, and spoke as little as possible. In short, I let the stories come to me. And come to me they did, by the multitude. Not all were interesting, and some were flat-out toxic. Still, the need to speak and be heard was overwhelming. All I had to do was plop my arse down, and within a few minutes, guaranteed, some stranger would sit down beside me and start talking. Few held anything back.
The cumulative effect was almost operatic. I began to hear the street life all around me in musical terms, as a collective song of the city, scored for myriad voices. My job was to notate and arrange it, while there was still time. For time was running short. The stories that came at me from every angle were driven, in part, by a new sense of threat. When I’d first come to New York, the general assumption was that Broadway might undergo changes, like anywhere else in Manhattan, but action would always endure. Now all bets were off. While I’d been away, New York’s then-mayor Ed Koch had launched a systematic clean-up campaign. Ostensibly, it was a war on immorality and crime; in reality, it was a land grab. Builders and real-estate tycoons, among them Donald Trump, were wooed with massive tax breaks. Rents began to double and treble; new money moved in. The Broadway of hustlers and scufflers, cigar-chomping shills, hole-in-the-wall agents, transvestites, street-preachers, and the professionally unhinged was on death row. No wonder people needed to talk. It was a matter of bearing witness.
It took four years for me to gather the makings of The Heart of the World and another to complete (or fail to complete) my final walk. I never did decide exactly what I was trying to achieve, but this no longer seemed important. Just leave it that I was a conduit for stories; a scribe in the medina. Never mind if some of the stories were alternative fact, others performance art. It wasn’t my job to nit-pick or fact-check. These were Broadway tales, after all; truth was whatever you said it was.
By 1992, when the book at last came out, the sterilization program was all but complete. Every month another landmark was shuttered or razed, another busload of lifers shipped out. Dick Falk, the seemingly indestructible press agent, barricaded himself in his office when his landlord elected to evict all the tenants in his Times Square building. Most others went quietly. By the end of the millennium, hardly anyone in The Heart of the World remained.
Periodically, I’d retrace my footsteps, searching for holdouts. The last time was on a pitiless summer day, a couple of years ago. Walking seven miles of city sidewalk swarmed by tourists was penitential, and somehow this felt fitting. But why? What was left to atone for, after all these years? The Great White Way was reduced to a glorified shopping mall. Above street level, much of the architecture was as dazzling as ever, but no one looked up. Block after block, boutique by boutique, the blinkered hordes charged along, pausing only to text or take more selfies. I remembered a street trader named Malik Simpson, who used to peddle secondhand clothing, sexual aids, hash pipes. ‘Nobody who’s really Broadway can afford to be on Broadway any more,’ he’d said to me. That was in the late 1990s. His pitch had been outside a magic shop, now a Starbucks. I plodded onward, awash in sweat, obscurely ashamed. Survivor guilt, I guess.
SOURCES
My reading on Broadway was as haphazard as the journey itself. So I will make no attempt at a formal bibliography. There were certain books, however, that I borrowed from quite blatantly. Among them, in no particular order, I owe debts to City for Sale, by Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett; Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, by William J. Riordon; The Streets Were Paved with Gold and Greed and Glory on Wall Street, by Ken Auletta; Wall Street: Men and Money, by Martin Mayer; The Epic of New York City, by Edward Robb Ellis; The Night Club Era, by Stanley Walker; New York Nights, by Stephen Graham; The Empire City: A Treasury of New York, ed. Alexander Klein; The New Metropolis, ed. E. Idell Zeisloft; Lost New York, by Nathan Silver; Incredible New York, by Lloyd Morris; The Great Metropolis, by Junius Henry Browne; The Great White Way, by Allen Churchill; The Palace, by Marian Spitzer; Broadway, by Justin Brooks Atkinson; The Gangs of New York, by Herbert Asbury; Hell’s Kitchen, by Richard O’Connor; Manhattan ’45, by Jan Morris; Show Biz, from Vaude to Video, by Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr; Metropolis, by Jerome Charyn; Crossroads of the World: The Story of Times Square, by William Laas; Times Square: A Pictorial History, by Jill Stone; The Big Drag, by Mel Heimer; The Greatest Street in the World, by Stephen Jenkins; Broadway, by J. B. Kerfoot; Djuna Barnes’s New York; Meyer Berger’s New York; New York, by Paul Morand; Nothing If Not Critical, by Robert Hughes; and McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, by Joseph Mitchell.
Of the volumes and stories that I have quoted directly, I would like to mention again Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in the Gilded Age, by Michael Macdonald Mooney; The Fabulous Showman: The Life and Time of P. T. Barnum, by Irving Wallace; and View of Life and Things, by Ray Crabtree. All three served me faithfully.
Richard Reeves’s New York profile of Matty Troy was reprinted in his collection, The Big Apple. It was Reeves, not myself, who first saw the parallel with George Washington Plunkitt, and I trust he will forgive my thefts.
Tales of Times Square, by Josh Alan Friedman, is filled with lore on Hubert’s Museum, the New Amsterdam, and other Forty-second Street splendors, and provides the fullest portrait extant of the Deuce in its death-throes. Specifically, it includes a chapter on Izzy Grove.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro, taught me more about the city and how it got that way than all other histories combined.
Lights and Shadows of New York Life, James D. McCabe’s immortal survey, is available in reprint. As for the two great nineteenth-century New York diaries, those of Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong, some highlights are collected in The Hone and Strong Diaries of Old Manhattan, ed. Louis Auchincloss.
Two recent books deal specifically with walks up Broadway: Broadway, by Carin Dreschler-Marx and Richard Shepard, which served as Sasha Zim’s Baedeker; and On Broadway: A Journey Uptown over Time, by David W. Dunlap, encyclopedic and indispensable.
Finally, there is A. J. Liebling, and here my dues can never be paid. Many of his books – The Telephone Booth Indian, The Honest Rainmaker, and Back Where I Came From, in particular – helped me shape specific passages. But without The Sweet Science, which I first read when I was fifteen, it is likely that this book would not exist at all.
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Copyright © Nik Cohn 1992
Afterword copyright © Nik Cohn 2017
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1992
Published by Vintage in 1993
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Donald Baechler/ Ajax Press: Excerpt from pamphlet ‘Wasted Time and Money’ by Donald Baechler (Ajax Press, New York, 1989). Reprinted by permission.
Def Jam Recordings: Excerpt from ‘Miuzi Weighs a Ton’ by Carlton Ridenhour and Hank Shocklee. Copyright © 1987 by Def American Songs. Reprinted by permission.
New American Library: Excerpt from The Fabulous Showman by Irving Wallace. Copyright © 1959 by Irving Wallace. Reprinted by permission of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA.
Street News: Excerpt from ‘How to Make Pigeon Stew’ by Cleveland Blakemore. Copyright © 1990 by Street News. Reprinted by permission.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473571709