The "Blue Highways" of NYC

I just finished reading the amazing book Blue Highways, a travel memoir by Missourian William Least-Heat Moon.

A contemporary classic, the book chronicles a three-month cross-country odyssey that Moon took in 1978 after he had lost his job and wife. Armed with little more than some savings and a truck that he owned call Ghost Dancing, Moon drove a circle around the southern, western, northern, and eastern parts of the USA on the "blue highways" -- the secondary highways on the maps shown in blue that were distinct from the main highways marked in red. 

Published in 1982, the book spent 42 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. And it holds up as a deep, profound tale about this country more than 40 years later. 

On his adventures, Moon encounters brutal racial segregation in the south, monks in the desert, the small towns of the west and northwest -- including several spots where Lewis and Clark once roamed -- the absolute blankness of the Plains and Prairie states, and the bustling seafaring and fishing life of New England.

And he even makes it to NYC -- briefly.

In his travels, Moon was determined to avoid going into any major cities. He wanted to visit the towns and places that were, we would say today, "off the grid", away from the cosmopolitan bustle of a metropolis. He was fascinated by people who made their lives away from the main arteries and gathering places of American life -- and, as you might imagine, he encounters some really interesting characters in these places.

Moon didn't stop for long in NYC but he did manage to capture the equivalent of the city's "blue highways", the places in the five boroughs where most of the city's residents and visitors never travel to -- or through. He writes about driving into southern Queens and Staten Island from Long Island (after having taken a ferry across the Sound from Connecticut): 

    "... Things raced past like the jumpy images of a nickelodeon: abandoned and stripped cars on the shoulders, two hitchhiking females that nobody could stop to pick up, a billboard EAT SAUSAGE AND BE HAPPY, low-flying jumbos into Kennedy International, the racetrack at Ozone Park, bulldozed piles of dirt to fill the marsh at Jamaica Bay, long and straight Flatbush Avenue, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, the World Trade Center like stumps in the yellow velvet sky. Then a windingly protracted ascent up the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the Silver Gate of the East coast) with its world longest center span, and below the bay where the Great Eastern, the Monitor, the Bonhomme Richard, and the Half Moon sailed. 

    The low sun turned the Upper Bay orange. Freighters rode at anchor or headed to the Atlantic, and to the north, in the distance, a little glint of coppery green that was the Statue of Liberty. I slowed to gawk and got a horn; the driver passed in a gaseous cloud and held aloft a middle digit opinion.

    The lanes descended and shot me across Staten Island; just before it was too late, I pulled out of the oppression of traffic and drove down Richmond Avenue to find the bridge across Arthur Kill into Perth Amboy, the city (if you follow your nose) that gets to you before you get to it. I don't know how I lost my way on a thoroughfare as big as Richmond, but I did. I could smell Perth Amboy, but I couldn't find it. Instead, I found Great Kills, Eltingville, Huguenot Park, Princess Bay, and Tottenville. I asked directions from a nervous teenager who was either turning his engine or stealing someone's distributor.

    Just as darkness was complete, I reached New Jersey ..."

As you can see from this passage, Moon is a great writer and wordsmith. Even though his time on the NYC "blue highways" is brief, he brilliantly captures the "other side" of NYC, the more obscure, ignored, downtrodden parts of the five boroughs, far away from the glamour of Manhattan, the bustling hives of Brooklyn, the leafy suburbs of the Bronx and northern Queens, and the so-called "inner cities" (It's just a shame he didn't make it to Broad Channel!) He finds not "the real NYC" as some might call it but the NYC of the fringes, the other NYC that people who rather not travel to and forget. 

Obviously his observation of the World Trade Centers makes you shudder a bit but it's still beautiful how it existed and is forever burnished this is beautifully captured moment in time.

Read Blue Highways and you'll encounter many other such moments -- an amazing read! 

Scorsese & Lebowitz Talk "After Hours"

If you love the movies of Martin Scorsese and the comedy of Fran Lebowitz, then check out their conversation from 2022 about what might be Marty's least known NYC movie -- After Hours from 1985 (I blogged about it very briefly in 2008).

Even hardcore Scorsese fans might have missed this one -- unlike his crime movies or period pieces, this is a wacky surreal comedy about a guy who gets lost in Soho at night because of some broad.

That's it, that's the movie.

But it's still worth seeing -- even though you should expect it to be a typical Scorsese movies. I love it, not only because it's a Scorsese movie or an NYC movie but because it's a night movie, a movie set in world of NYC all its own.

As I said in my 2008 post, Mary made this movie after his early Golden Age (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and before his platinum age (Goodfellas, The Departed, etc.). He had just made King of Comedy which was a big flop and he was on the outs with the big studios -- so he made this little independent movie (without regular star Robert De Niro) to show that he was still in the game, still a great talent.

And the rest his movie history. He ended up winning Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this and soon it was onto The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, etc. 

After Hours might not be Scorsese's best or most beloved movie, but it's certainly one of his best NYC movies and it's the movie that saved his career. 

Remembering the Greaseman

Back in the 1990s my go-to radio station was 92.3 K-Rock ("Howard Stern All Morning, Classic Rock'n'Roll All Day). I even blogged about what was a kind of radio golden age back then -- Howard Stern, Allison Steele, and other great DJs of the day who were all on the station at the time.

The only exception to this was the bizarre presence of the Greaseman who broadcast at night from 6-10 PM on the station. It's hard to describe the Greaseman's DJ act -- it was all wild shtick, all over-the-top babble. He couldn't speak clearly or complete a comprehensible sentence, and he'd spout gibberish like "Waddle-doodalay, its da' Grease!" or "Hahahha Bone-Dry!" Weird. He'd burst into song (I remember one about the OJ Simpson trial done to the tune of "Georgia on My Mind" -- that was ... odd) and he'd take calls where he'd give shticky answers -- the whole act was a mess.

The thing about the Greaseman was that he wasn't actually broadcasting in NYC -- apparently he was in Los Angeles doing an afternoon show that was simulcast into other markets in the evenings (his humor was decidedly not New York-ish humor, it was some kind of redneck/middle America stuff that's beyond me). The idea, I suppose, was to have him on nights in NYC and make him a kind of evening bookend to Howard Stern in the morning -- but it didn't work. Howard ruled the NYC morning ratings while "da Grease!" was a ratings flop at night. And Howard haaattted him, ranting about how embarrassed he was to be on the same station as Grease ("I am steak and he's ... a paper cup!"). 

Still, as awful as his show was, he was a part of something great -- and then it all came to an end.

Eventually Greaseman lost his syndicated show and was off the air in NYC. This was clearly the highpoint of his career and it's now long in the past. "Da Grease!" wound up in Washington DC doing a local show -- and got fired there when he made a joke about how if more black people were killed by being dragged from the backs of trucks, we'd get more national holidays. Yeah, that was a baaaaddd and he's bounced around the radio dial from tiny station to tiny station ever since.

So that's the (short) story of when the Greaseman graced the airwaves of NYC, a bizarre moment in time that only Mr NYC could possibly remember. 

Mayors Abroad

Currently Mayor Adams is in Israel to visit the nation's leaders -- and help cement support from Jewish voters in his expected reelection effort in 2025. 

As this article explicates, mayors have been visiting foreign lands with large diasporas (i.e. voting blocks) in NYC for a long time. Back in the day, it used to be the three Is -- Ireland, Italy and Israel. This coincided with the immense power that the New York Archdiocese used to wield in the city, with mayors or candidates for mayor sucking up to the Cardinal in St. Patrick's of the day. But as the city's demography as changed, and as the Catholic church has gone into sharp reputational and temporal decline, this obeisance from mayors has declined with it.

In recent years, mayors have been visiting Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as well, places which also are strongly represented in NYC's population and politics. Increasingly, it would not surprise me to see mayors going east -- especially to  China and Korea and India -- since the Asian population is sharply on the rise and more and more Asians are exercising their political clout in the city.

When you're the Mayor of NYC, the world's greatest international city, you don't just need to mind the five boroughs -- but also huge swaths of the globe.

Queens Man in Even Lots More Trouble

Showdown at Creedmoor

I've blogged over the years about the bizarre persona that is Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and all around wild NYC media character. He's been bopping around the city ever since my childhood and, as I wrote about in 2018, I've seen him around town more than two or three times. 

In 2021 he ran for mayor as the Republican candidate and got clocked by Eric Adams. That's right -- in 2021, Eric Adams was the sane, reasonable candidate even though he says he's a lion like Ghandi or something like that -- I'm not kidding -- and hangs out with criminals.

Yes, that's right, Curtis Sliwa is even crazier than that.

Anyway, since he doesn't have a real job, Sliwa was apparently at Creedmoor out in northeast Queens leading a protest against the migrant tent city -- and he got arrested. Apparently this was a planned stunt, something the original troll Sliwa does well (unlike making child support payments). Imagine being so much of an asshole that you're protesting against helping people, you're protesting in support of hurting people? This is so important to him that he was willing to get arrested for it. 

Sad Day

This is very sad -- going from being a US Attorney and two-term Mayor of New York City, the chief executive of the nation's and the world's greatest city, leading it with acclaim during its darkest moment in history, going from that great height ...

... to being a indicted felon in Georgia.

It's been 20+ years since he left office but Giuliani had an opportunity like no other mayor in this city's history to be one of its greatest elder statesmen, a mandarin of sorts, it's greatest power broker. Instead ... he chose this dark, worthless path, debasing himself to serve a conman. It's like a piece of bad fiction, a depressing potboiler. Sad! 

Hip Hop 50 -- Live @ Yankee Stadium

Mr NYC in St. Louis

This is going to be an odd entry in my travel blog posts because St. Louis, the "Gateway City" in the "Show Me State" of Missouri, is the only city besides NYC that I've lived in for any length of time. I recently went back for a short visit, and it was more like a weird kind of homecoming than a regular trip. It was like putting on a pair of old, familiar, worn-out shoes that you know you should really throw away. 

So this won't be a comprehensive recording of either my trip or the city itself -- if you want to know more about the history, culture, and vagaries of City of St. Louis, the same town that produced TS Eliot, Tina Turner, Josephine Baker, Nelly, Chuck Berry, Scott Bakula, Jon Hamm, Maya Angelou, Andy Cohen, Yogi Berra, William Buroughs, John Goodman, Red Foxx, Betty Grable, and Fred ReRun Berry (amongst many others), go here.

That said, during this trip I discovered some gems in St. Louis that I didn't know existed before and that I'm happy to share. But first ...

There are two important things to understand about St. Louis, particularly for New Yorkers, something that makes it typical of most American cities and something quite unique to it.

The typical thing is that St. Louis is, like most towns, a highly segregated place where the vast majority of the white and/or wealthy people don't actually live -- the city has numerous rich suburbs and exurbs like Ladau, Town and Country, Chesterfield and others that are gorgeous, rich, and very conservative. Then the city is mostly poor, black, and left behind -- the typical American racist urban nightmare/tragedy (remember, this is the same place as Ferguson). People from the other areas commute into downtown St. Louis to work or see shows and then, at night, the downtown area clears out. If you drive around St. Louis at night you might think you were in a ghost town or that a zombie apocalypse had hit it -- it didn't need COVID to become completely empty. So there's that.

But the a-typical thing about STL is that, as its nickname connotes, it is the "Gateway City", its iconic arch symbolizing the gateway to the west. Nestled against the mighty Mississippi River, St. Louis is really the last midwestern, or even Eastern city, in the United States. Once you cross the Mighty M into STL, and certainly if you go west of the city itself, you are in the capital W WEST, the Plains and Rockies and Coast beyond it. It is a city betwixt and between the expanse of not only a country but an entire continent.

Like NYC, STL is a place in the American journey -- if NYC with its Statue of Liberty is the entry point into America, then STL with its Arch is an entry point into its Manifest Destiny.

In short, both cities with their symbolic structures are basically glorified welcome maps. 

So what about my trip?

Well, besides visiting some familiar haunts, I did what I most enjoy doing during travel -- eating well and looking at interesting architecture.

St. Louis actually has a thriving Italian American neighborhood called The Hill. A neighborhood where the descendants of immigrants still live and preserve their culture and history, it is full of Catholic churches and good restaurants. We actually ate lunch in a sandwich store called Adriana's that had AMAZING fresh made sandwiches. There were several varieties of hot roast beef sandwiches with au jus available but I actually got the below ham and salami hero with vinegar and oil dressing that was amazing. It was called the Carlo.

Hello Carlo ...

And here's a statue of anonymous Italian immigrants to St. Louis that you can find in the Hill.

Just so you know, just about every business in the Hill, or ON the Hill as they say, is called "Whatever, whatever" ... "on the Hill." There's a restaurant called Charlie Guido's on the Hill, and one time a friend of mine was told by the maitre'd, "YOU are ... TOTALLY underdressed for Charloe Guido's ... on the Hill."

Anyway ... 

I also drank well, visiting a couple of bars that couldn't be more different. One is called The Vandy, a specialty cocktail join with low lights, sleek surfaces, and you have to scan the menu with your phone comme ca: 

The exact opposite of that is the Venice Cafe and, despite its name, it's cash only bar that's a cross between a honky-tonk and crazy aunt's apartment (there is no Venetian influence aparent). It has bands playing, lots of noisy crowds, and a whole wild scene going on. And they mostly just serve lots and lots of beer.

My final night in STL I ate at a restaurant in the residential downtown neighborhood called Benton Park with cute buildings such as this:

The restaurant, however, was also AMAZING. Called the Sidney Street Cafe, I had one of the best meals I've had in any city anywhere ever. From the veal dumplings and seafood pastries as appetizers, to my gourmet corned beef entry (yes, you read that right) to my bizarre granola yogurt dessert ...

... it was a delectable, wonderful gastronomic experience.

So those are the parts of the STL trip that I wish to share and greatly enjoyed. St. Louis is a city worth visiting, if only to see a unique, quirky city that is an essential part of the American landscape and story -- and that resonates in the aforementioned strange way with NYC.

P.S. My short return to St. Louis coincided with the death of another St. Louis icon Beatle Bob. Who was he? He was a social worker from St. Louis with a 1964 Beatle-like haircut who, from the mid-1990s until a year or two ago, went to a concert almost every night in town and could be seen dancing around. During my time back in the day in STL I saw him many times -- in fact, it so that he would introduce bands sometimes and rev up the crown. Along with other icons of my younger years, like Paul Reubens, Beatle Bob has gone to the great concert in the sky. RIP.  

The Band - Live at the Academy of Music, NYC (1971)

Robbie Robertson RIP.

And how Robbie Robertson got his big break ...

Eric Adams: The Secrets of His Success

The vision-less, incompetent mayoralty of Eric Adams is now getting more and more attention from what some might call the "elite" media -- specifically, The New Yorker, whose big new article on him, "Eric Adams' Administration of Bluster", goes into a mayoralty that's long on narcissism, short on accomplishment. The New York Times has run a few articles on his empty yet braggadocious tenure -- as well as the fact that, while many want to see him defeated for reelection in 2025, who the Adams-slayer might be remains frustratingly unclear. 

And that, in fact, has been the secret to Adams' mayoral success thus far -- a total lack of credible challengers, a strong alternative to him.

Even though he almost lost the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, Adams' main challengers were the smart but politically inexperienced Kathryn Garcia, the "entrepreneur"/former presidential candidate/con-man Andrew Yang, and others who were either unknown or unimpressive. In the general election, his Republican opponent was Curtis Sliwa who was, and is, in short, insane. The NYC political reporter -- and three-time Mr NYC interviewee -- Ross Barkan asks in one of his latest articles, "How did New York get Eric Adams?" and then answers it in the same vein -- Adams was the best of a very bad bunch, the strongest in a very weak field; in short, he became mayor almost by default, thanks to a process of elimination where he was viewed as the "least-worst" option.

Unlike the big-time media, this blog and Ross have been covering the oddness and misgovernance of Eric Adams ever since he took office. This is yet another example of how Mr NYC has been "ahead of his time."

And, looking ahead, it's important to remember one big thing: political survival comes down to, at the end of the day, who supports you. Political survival, sadly, is not about how good a job politicians are doing, not about whether or not they're delivering good policies or tangible benefits for the public, but whether or not they have the support for the powerful forces that can keep them in office. Besides weak or non-existent political opposition, Adams has had and retains strong support among black and Hispanic voters, the business community, Jewish voters, police and the tabloid press. These are the same constituencies (saving the black and Hispanic communities) who strongly supported Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg back in the day, and who violently opposed Dinkins and DeBlasio -- and it's why those former three mayors remained popular despite their plutocratic and corrupt mayoralties and the latter two became hated.

Eric Adams is mayor -- and may very well continue as mayor until January 1st, 2030 -- since he has probably the most powerful aforementioned group of supporters that any mayor has ever had, he has (for now) no potent opposition, the daily horror show and threat that Donald Trump poses continues to overwhelm and distract the public from Adams's failings, plus the sharp decline in local reporting has reduced the scrutiny that NYC mayors have gotten in the past. 

Adams doesn't really have any secret to his political success, he's no genius or playing some great game, some kind of multi-dimensional chess -- he's just been lucky (so far). He's been luckier than his opponents who are either dumber or weaker or crazier than he is; and if, in 2025 and beyond, his luck holds and his opponents remain imponent and he doesn't end up getting indicted (and it wouldn't shock me if he is), Adams may be able to retire from politics on January 1st, 2030 with NYC thinking he was a successful mayor.    

It will be classic case of failing upwards. 

"The French Connection" (1971) -- Classic Car Chase Scene

Filmed in Bensonhurt, Brooklyn roughly running under the BMT West End Line (currently the D train, then the B train) which runs on an elevated track above Stillwell Avenue, 86th Street and New Utrecht Avenue in Brooklyn, with the chase ending just north of the 62nd Street station

William Friedkin RIP. 

The Nanny Takes City Hall

Queens Man in Even More Trouble

Classic Mr NYC

A few years ago I blogged about the brief mid-aughts existence of JACK FM, the DJ-less radio format that took over the oldies station WCBS 101.1 FM before the owners realized what a huge mistake they'd made -- and "jacked" it.

Therefore I was surprised to find out -- almost 20 years after the ill-fated experiment of JACK FM in NYC and almost 5 years since my original blog post --  that JACK FM is still in existence.

No, it hasn't made comeback anywhere on the NYC radio dial but the JACK FM network (or whatever it is) is still stinking up the airwaves in various radio markets across the fruited plain -- and Canada.

Egads.

What's interesting is that JACK FM was supposed to be an IPod on the radio but, funnily enough, the IPod is now even more of a museum piece than radio (literally, I once saw an IPod in the Smithsonian). Now people stream music via apps on their phones via Spotify, etc. and even stream radio stations.

So I don't know jack about what JACK FM is trying to do these days, and I don't care -- just so long as they keep it out of NYC.