Autumn in Northern Central Park

Central Park is probably the most famous urban public space in the world. It truly us a miracle that this oasis exists in the middle of the greatest city on earth.

Most New Yorkers and tourists know the lower part of Central Park very well -- its appeared in many of a movie, TV show, etc. But the northern part is less well-known but just as wonderful. I recently took a stroll through it, entering at 96th street, and here are some of the highlights (use can use this map for reference):

There's a odd pl aque to the late-19th, early-20th century British journalist W.T. Stead. He was a pionoeering social-justice reporter like Jacob Riis, had many American friends, and died in 1912 on the Titanic.

Entering the park, you can walk past the East Meadow and then along the East Meadow Walk. It's a wide, spacious area, lots of people with their dogs, just as nice as the Sheep Meadow further down in the park.

Then lovely stroll through the lovely Conservatory Garden (which I blogged about back in 2010).

And then, getting to the most northern part of the park, a nice walk around the Harlem Meer (that's currently being worked on). It's a lovely body of water and there are ducks -- lots and lots of ducks!

Finally, I strolled past the northern wall, along 110th street, the city and park touching each other, starting at the eastern edge and exiting at the western stroll. A lovely end to a lovely jaunt.

And then I went ...

"The Power Broker": A Marathon Reading

Okay, so I've actually READ (unlike a lot of people) The Power Broker by Robert Caro, his 1974 masterpiece about the NYC master builder Robert Moses. And I've blogged about it, the first time back in 2008!

Anyway, this weekend there is a marathon reading of the whole book going on in Brooklyn. For literally days-on-end people are reading it in 10-minute increments. 

This is really a crazy, historic thing and sadly I wasn't able to sign up in time to do it. But you can watch the livestream here and also watch the completed recorded segments here.

James Bond in NYC: "Live and Let Die" (1973)

 

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Gary Fisketjon RIP & The End of the Superstar Book Editor

Most people probably have never heard of Gary Fisketjon but he was the classic guy-behind-the-guy. He was a NYC book editor during it's last hey-day of publishing glory in the 1980s and '90s, and he edited the novels of some of the biggest writers of that era -- Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt -- as well as some "old pioneers" including Patricia Highsmith, Tobias Wolff and Cormac McCarthy (amongst many others). 

Because of him, novels like Bright Lights, Big City, American Psycho, No Country for Old Men (that became a Best Picture Oscar winner in 2008), and many, many others. 

Fisketjon has died at the age of 72 and we probably won't see the likes of him again. Great writers always, always, always, have great editors. Writers create the clay of a book but the editors help to shape and refine it to become a polished, sometimes classic work. Fitzgerald had Maxwell Perkins, Robert Caro had Robert Gottlieb -- heck, Scorsese has Thelma Schoonmaker (although they're in movies obviously) -- point is, great editors make great writers.

Today there are very few book editors left, and even fewer of Gary Fisketjon's caliber. The culture is pooer for it, and his loss is both personal for his friends and family as well as for the culture at large.

FYI: previous Mr NYC interviewee Ross Barkan has a great article on this called The End of the Editor. As usual he writes about this much better than I ever could.

Andrew Carnegie Mansion -- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

On 5th Avenue and 91st street sits one of the few Gilded Age mansions left in NYC -- the Andrew Carnegie Mansion. Built by the Scottish immigrant and great industrialist in 1902, it is a gorgeous Georgian Revival structure of strong but simple elegance. Amazingly the Carnegie family lived there until 1946 when it turned into a social work school. Then it became the Cooper Hewitt design museum in 1976.

Along with the National Museum of the American Indian -- New York, Cooper Hewitt is one of the only Smithsonian museums not located in the Washington, DC area.

I recently visited it and took a lot of photos.

East 91st Street & 5th Avenue

The mansion has a lovely garden but it was closed on the day I visited. However, I got some really cool pictures of it through the iron fence, including a leaf that blew onto the fence the moment I was about to snap.

In the mansion is rather dark with huge gorgeous wooden walls. At the far end of the lobby is a huge a fireplace along with a wide, sweeping staircase.

The lobby!

On the first floor was a small exhibit called Design Across Time. It's a rather odd hodgepodge collection of items from over the centuries that show how the human imagination has redesigned or re-envisioned various items in every day life.

And if you're like to watch the entire movie of I Shot Andy Warhol, go here!

Then I went up the grand staircase, and it really feels like something out of Gone with the Wind or Downtown Abbey. There are two exhibits on the second floor, one of them called The Substitute. It's a digital reconstruction of a northern white rhino that went extinct in 2018 using its DNA. It's cool, and a little disturbing.

The other exhihit was called Frank Church in Jamaica. Church was a 19th American landscape painter who went to Jamaica in 1865 with his wife to recover from the death of their children. He painted a series of gorgeous lanscapes of the tropical island and I really loved them. They were soothing, quietly beautiful, and house in the rooms and in the bookshelves of the home. I stronlgy suggest seeing this, and I'm certainly going to find out more about Frank Church.

This mansion-museum is a realy gem, and you can see the whole thing in about an hour. It's a relaxed, gorgeous environment, and I living piece of history. Go see it!

Memo from NYC

In 1964 three civil rights workers -- including two Jews from NYC -- were murdered in Mississippi. They were killed in a car by members of the KKK while on the way to meet members of a black church that had also been the the target of racist violence.

The murders of these three men -- Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner -- and the aftermath were part of what made the Civil Rights movement explode, and it became the basis for the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.

Mississippi has a particularly ugly racial history, fueld by violence drenched in blood. Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and countless other deaths marked this state as a place where black Americas were regularly terrorized, often by law enforcement itself.

Well now ... Mississippi has a black US Senator. And he's a Democrat -- and not a 19th or 20th century Democrat like John Stennis who was a blatant segregationist -- a young, smart lawyer named Scott Colom. 

And how'd he do it? He used humor, running one of the funniest and smartest ads in US political history. 

There's nothing funny about Mississippi's racial history, and winning a US Senate race is serious business, but the fact that he won using humor and enagement is so great, and this is an amazing moment in American history. 

Just glad that NYC played a small part in it, sixty-two years ago.

Review: Marc Maron -- Yammering into the Void

While I loved to laugh, I've never been a huge fan of stand up comedy. But I'm a big fan of Marc Maron since his days on Short-Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central through his Air America stint, to his groundbreaking WTF Podcast. 

Since retiring his podcast last year, Maron's devoted himself to acting and stand-up. He's like Jerry Seinfeld after ending his sitcom, going back to his core stregnths.

Last night we went to see Maron at the Beacon Theater for his "Yammering into the Void" tour (that's part of the New York Comedy Festival). He was, as you might imagine, brillitantly funny. Thankfully he didn't do a lot of political humor (although he certainly touched on it) but most of material was about the indignities of aging, the broken healthcare system, and being old with even older parents. He did some other stuff Jews and porn and, all in all, it was a good time.

His opening act was a comedian named Emily Wilson and she was okay, funny in parts, but not brilliant. 

But if you can catch Maron's standup, it's a must-see.

PS. Maron wasn't the only one getting laughs in NYC this weekend. On Saturday Night Live the recently-elected Senator from Texas James Talarico joined for the cold open. Really cool!

Stunning Rainbow Paints NYC Sky

Johnny Depp as Ebenezer Scrooge in Bryant Park

Memo from NYC

Much has happened in the last few years but cast your mind back to the halcyon days of 2022. Here's something that happened to NYC thanks to the now-defeated Governor of Texas (courtesy of AI Overview):

Texas Governor Greg Abbott began busing migrants from Texas to New York City in August 2022 as part of a political strategy to protest federal border policies and relieve resource-strained Texas border towns. 

• Origins: Texas launched its migrant busing program in April 2022 (initially sending buses to Washington, D.C.) before adding New York City and other self-declared sanctuary cities. 
  
  
• Arrivals: By late 2023, Texas had transported tens of thousands of migrants to New York City, placing heavy strains on local homeless shelters, social services, and city resources.
  
  
• Justification: Governor Abbott defended the initiative—stating during interviews like one on Politico that federal immigration policies are to blame—and arguing that New York City's right-to-shelter laws and policies made it an appropriate destination. 
  
  
• Rejection: New York City Mayor Eric Adams and other city officials sharply criticized the transports as a "cruel" political stunt that overwhelmed local intake and shelter infrastructure.

It was a cynical game played by an evil man who used desperate human beings as Poker chips. New York City was able to handle it (of course we did, even with Eric Adams as mayor) but it was a sick attempt to fuck with our city and do us harm.

Well ... karma is sweet! 

The Governor fucked with NYC and now he's been fucked back! He becomes the first Republican governor of Texas to lose in over 40 years. He's been humiliatingly defeated by a young Latina woman -- ouch!

So he can go straight to hell, a defeated, disgraced failure.

Don't fuck with NYC!