It was the last day of the Bloomberg era, the end of a time of enormous change in the city. Mayor Bloomberg had taken office on January 1st, 2002, just months after 9/11, and the city was in full-recovery mode. By the end of his time in office, the look, feel, and life of the city had changed -- in many ways for the better -- but it had also become more expensive and difficult to live here, the city feeling more and more like any big international city around the world.
For the last ten years -- from December 31st, 2013 to December 31st, 2023 -- the city has been mostly the same as the Bloomberg era, except for the massive disruption and trauma of COVID.
In many ways, the last ten years can be divided into 2014-2020, and 2020 to 2024. COVID did something to the city's spirit, it enervated it, it seemed to bring up the decades of buried traumas of the past. Fear returned. Fears about crime, dislocation, seeing the city as failing. These fears are not in any ways borne out by reality -- NYC is booming more than ever. But these fears, exacerbated by the media and a new incompetent mayor, in this era of anti-progress, have had their impact. We haven't returned to "funky town", we've entered some new odd phase but I hope it ends soon -- and our city's great optimism returns.
It's hard to imagine but once upon a time, back in the 20th century, orchestra conductors used to be actual celebrties. Arturo Tosconini lead the NBC Orchestra and Lawrence Welk had his own popular TV show.
But no conductor was more famous, or more acclaimed, or left a greater legacy, than Leonard Bernstein.
Leading the New York Philharmonic for many years, Bernstein was the most famous conductor in America between the 1940s until his death in 1990. He was so famous that he was constantly on television, including with the "Young People's Concerts" series, and he also composed the scores for symphonies and requiems such as Mass. And his impacted popular culture too, writing the gorgeous scores for such musicals as On The Town, Wonderful Town, and, most historically, West Side Story.
And he was a true blue New Yorker, a keeper of the cultural flame at time when people loved to hate the city, and (even though he was a Massachusetts transplant), the spirit of his work -- as those three musicals prove -- was imbued with NYC.
Bernstein is the subject of a big new movie about his life called Maestro that was written, directed, and stars Bradley Cooper. It's an extraorindary movies but focuses mostly on his fraught relationship with his wife and the fact that he was a deeply conflicted bisexual. You should also listen, after watching this movie, to this Bowery Boys podcast episode about Leonard Bernstein's life in, and work about, NYC. His career could never happened without NYC, and NYC is a better place because of his work.
Before the 21st century Golden Age of Television, the 1970s through the 1990s was the Golden Age of the Television Mini-Series.
Whenever regular TV shows went on vacation, the networks would broadcast these multi-episodes series that were a little less than a movie but a little more than a regular TV show. Some of these mini-series, like Roots from 1977 or the 1980s civil war drama North & South, were great, classic TV. But a lot of it was stuff like the 1987 soapy mini-series I'll Take Manhattan, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Judith Krantz (who wrote a lot of these kinds of books that then became mini-series).
The show's IMDB description tells you everything you need to know about it: "Maxi Amberville tries to save the magazine empire her father built, but her treacherous uncle stands in the way." The Amberville's are supposed to be a Murdoch-like, more like Sy Hersch-like, family running a magazine company very much like Conde Nast. The spirit of this show -- family members battle for control of a media empire -- is basically Succession thiry-years earlier, although nowhere near as funny, well-written, well-acted or well ... everything ... as the HBO show. The story is formulaic, the acting hammy, the dialogue stupid, everything's predictable and dopey.
So why does Mr NYC choose to remember it?
Because it's a relic,a time-stamp, of its age -- the Go-Go 1980s Reagan-era business drama that was very popular at the time. And because it's a very NYC story -- Money! Sex! Publishing! Betrayal! Donald Trump! Lots of shots of the World Trade Centers! Lots of music with saxapohones! Secretative calls being made in phone booths in the pouring rain in at nighttime! It's all there.
The most interesting thing about it is the cast -- it's truly a time capsule of actors and actresses whose careers were either on the way up or on the way down.
Valerie Bertinelli plays the heroic Maxi. She had just finished her long run on the hit TV show One Day At A Time and this show, one gueses, was supposed to demonstrate her great acting chops. She is a great actress but this show was clearly not the right vehicle in which to do so.
The always wonderful Barry Bostwick plays her father, the company's founder, and he's probably the best thing in it. A just-about-to-be James Bond Timothy Dalton is in it as are veteran TV actors Jack Scalia and Perry King who plays the no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle as a no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle.
There's also a few actors who went on to greatness: Jane Kaczmarek, thirteen years before Macolm in the Middle, Chris Noth a few years before Law & Order and Sex and the City, a pre-My Two Dads/Step-by-Step Staci Keanan, and, most notably, future Oscar-winner Julianne Moore ten years before Boogie Nights.
Also, future President and aspiring fascist dictator Donald Trump has a cameo because they filmed some of it at Trump Tower and gave him an obligatory cameo. You might otherwise call this show Trump's Bedtime for Bonzo.
It has to be seen to believed. But I'll give this show credit -- 1987 was the era of Bonfire of the Vanities NYC, the start of the crack epidemic, when people loved to hate this city -- and this show, at that time, dared to celebrate it.
Here are a couple of episodes (you can find the rest on YouTube) as well as some clips and promos. It was truly part of a TV era we probably will never see again.
True crime documentaries and podcasts have become a booming business in the last few years -- especially taking decades-old tabloid stories and turning them into a docu-dramas that go below the surface of, and tell more of the story about, once-screeching headlines. These series also try to provide a broader perspective of the times and places these stories occurred in -- and how they relate (or don't) to the present day's evolved sensibilities.
New York City has had numerous tabloid stories over the years and now, courtesy of the TV show Inside Edition, there's a YouTube channel dedicated to them called New York Gritty.
Some of these stories are very well known -- the deaths of John Lennon and Sid & Nancy, Robert Chambers, Bernie Goetz, and the late Mr NYC interviewee Michael Alig; others, like the Rikers Island Art Heist or a murder at the Met Museum, are less well-known.
It's fun to check-out these old NYC stories if you want to remember what the city used to be like -- and how the events of yesteryear were just as crazy (if not more so) than anything else going on today.
When this blog debuted in 2007 blogs were just starting to become a Thing.
By this time of the mid-aughts most people had gained access to high-speed Internet, but most people did not have the time, money, or energy to create totally original websites for themselves. So blogs filled the void since they were these templated and easy to create, easy to manage homepages.
Blogs at the time were competing for attention with the early versions of social media like Friendster and MySpace but they were primitive and cumbersome to use. Eventually, of course, Facebook conquered them, exploding in popularity and usage. Twitter came along on its heals and provided a more efficient, more public way for people to communicate with the world.
So blogs receded.
They were, and still are, around -- like this one! -- but there are way fewer of them and get much less traffic. Their day has passed.
During this aughties blog boom, however, there were a variety of blogs devoted to NYC, some that I even interviewed their creators about. (Some lasted longer than others, although few have lasted or been this active as this one!)
One such blog at this time was called Joey in Astoria, and it was so popular and active that it even got regular media attention (unlike this one!). It debuted in 2005 and published hundreds and hundreds of posts until, in June 2010, it just ... stopped ... and ... never blogged again.
The blog did not, and does not, explain its long radio silence. It has simply remained dormant for 13 years. It's the digital equivalent of a deep freeze, something stuck in time in an eternal present with no growth towards or expectations of the future. It simply exists ... neither changing or improving or decaying just ... there ...
I hope when the day comes that I decide to end Mr NYC that I will post a final valedictory statement, a fond farewell. I certainly plan to do so unless the tentacles of cirumstance snap me up and keep me seperated from a keyboard with Internet access.
So if this blog ever ends like Joey in Astoria you'll know that life simply overwhelmed me. Otherwise, one day, I will give you all a heartfelt goodbye.
Everyone dies eventually but not in the same way. Some people live long lives and die peacefully at a ripe old age. Other people live for a much shorter period of time and die suddenly. There are no good deaths but some deaths are much better or worse than others.
And some people leave huge legacies while others leave some something short of greatness but are otherwise notable.
Two people whose lives and legacies couldn't be more different just died, and I'm surprised how sad I am about both.
Norman Lear is one of the most important contributors to American culture of the last 50 years. In the 1970s he created the sitcoms All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times, One Day at a Time, and others. His shows, many set in NYC, were hilarious -- he gave us Archie Bunker's "YOU ... are ... a MEATHEAD!" and Jimmy Walker's "Dyn-o-mite!" -- but they also forced Americans to look at uncomfortable truths like racism, sexism, single motherhood, broken families, and poor communities. He changed not only American television but American culture, and the legacy of his shows reverberate to this day.
Lear has just died at the awesome age of 101, and it's amazing to realize that he didn't create his most important work until he was nearly 50 years old -- and then got to live another 50 years to see how lasting it was. An amazing man, an amazing life, an amazing impact, he was an American original.
Ralph Cirella is someone you'd only know if you are, like me, a huge fan of radio icon Howard Stern. Ralph was his stylist, his friend, his flunkie, and a lot of people loved to hate him because he had a great talent of pissing of just about everyone. But Ralph was a colorful, interesting character who created some great moments for the show. And he was on the show for almost 40 years! I grew up listening to him on Howard so Ralph's death feels like the death of a friend I never knew.
While Ralph didn't leave some kind of huge cultural legacy he was a part of something, a supporting player, for someone who did. The show wouldn't have been the same without him. Sadly, Ralph died suddenly at age 58 after his heart gave out during a procedure to treat a rare lymphoma. It's a tragedy, and great loss.
So one guy lived until 101 and left a huge legacy while another lived much less long and basically left a dent. But they led interesting, impactful lives -- and we should all be so lucky.
Lin Manuel-Miranda is probably the most famous son of Washington Heights.
The other is Henry Kissinger.
The 1970s US Secretary of State, who died at age 100, was a refugee from Nazi Germany when his family settled in Washington Heights in 1938. Henry only lived there a few years, going to George Washington High School (other alumni include Alan Greenspan, Harry Belefonte, Maria Callas, Ronnie Spector, and Manny Ramirez) before heading off to Harvard and foreign policy fame and fortune.
Amazingly, Kissinger's mother lived in Washington Heights until she died in 1998!
After Kissinger's historic run as Presidents Nixon and Ford's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State from 1969 to 1977, Kissinger returned to NYC and lived in style as a foreign policy "consultant" and advisor, a sort of international wise man. He was capital-R Respectable, an icon of the high society circuit, and consulted by Presidents of both parties for his foreign policy wisdom -- mainly due to his role in opening US relations with China in 1972.
Of course, during his time in power, Henry also oversaw the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the defeat in Vietnam, and encouraged right-wing coups in Chile and Argentina that led to decades of dictatorship -- he was responsible for an incalculable number of deaths. His fans say that he was simply a practitioner of realpolitick, seeing the world as it is, not as we want it to be, and acting accordingly. His detractors say he was a war criminal who should have stood trial.
Well, whatever his legacy, Henry Kissinger was a child of NYC who made good in order to do bad.
The short, bizarre congressional career of George Santos has come to its predictable, ignominious end. He should be proud -- he's made history! -- only one of six members of congress in 234 years to be ousted prematurely from the US House.
We should all be so memborable.
Earlier this week, outside Santos' district office in Queens, news crews lined up outside on multiple days, waiting for this moment.
I don't know what kind of news they thought they'd find there but, down in DC, news -- and history -- was most assuredly made: Santos is now doomed to become a curiosity of history, a weird factoid and abberation of our times.
He'll probably go to jail but get out relatively soon, wind up working in right-wing media, spend the rest of his miserable life claiming that he was the target of a dark, vast, nefarious Deep State/Uniparty/Swamp/Establishment -- pick your favorite GOP buzzword -- conspiracy that directly targeted a gay, "Jew-ish" dark skinned immigrant Republican and his deep conservative values. He'll basically be a lifelong professional victim -- and not just the sleazy conman who lied about everything to everybody, broke the law, got caught and rightfully paid the price.
Before the Internet, before blogs and YouTube and social media, if you were a lonewolf amateur artist -- or, as we'd say today, content creator -- you had limited options to get an audience for your work.
For aspiring cartoonists this created a whole subculture of "zines", underground cartoon books, usually with outrageous and adult content, that got passed around by friends or sold directly by the artist.
Now zines, like all underground art of yesteryear, are finally respectable. It's finally gone from being alternative to the establishment. The Brooklyn Museum has a new exhibhit called "Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines" that displays more than 800 zines from the last 50 years and analyzes their cultural impact.
I really want to see this exhibit because I'm old enough to remember zines -- I even had a family member who created one and found them fascinating.
Hopefully, one day, there might be an exhibit on underground blogs -- and, needless to say, I have a suggestion for one that might be included.
So this will be a twofer today for "Mr NYC Ahead of His Time."
In 2011, and in the years since, I blogged about the great 1930s movie star Greta Garbo who moved to NYC in the early 1950s and spent the last decades of her life living as a recluse.
My first blog post about her was called Garbo Walks, and was about how for years on end it became a sport for people in Manhattan to spot the great star walking the streets. (She died in 1990.)
Well, it was a great to see the wonderful NYC podcast The Bowery Boys now do a podcast episode about this very subject called Garbo Walks: A Tale of Old Hollywood in New York City. It's a great piece of city nostalgia that looks at the contradiction of someone who many viewed as a goddess of cinema, a living silhouette of beauty and talent -- but who was in fact just an eldery retiree who kept to herself, who "'vanted to be alone."
But the world wouldn't leave her alone. Even in 1985, when she hadn't made a movie over 40 years, her 80th birthday became big news! Mr NYC may be ahead of his time, but Garbo is timeless.
Currently there is a swirl of buzz in the NYC media world about the corruption investigation into Mayor Eric Adams -- and whether or not it might lead to his resignation (including the idea that former Governor Andrew Cuomo might run to replace him, that'd be wild).
Now let's not get to hung up on the grammer of this headline ("No mayor" is singular, "they" is plural), and the article does a fine job explaining how the line of succession works per the city charter --- but the headline is just flat-out, historically wrong.
While a mayor, Jimmy Walker, did resign in 1932 another mayor also resigned in 1950 -- William O'Dwyer. I even did a blog post in 2019 about the special election of 1950. I even wrote a blog post about the mayor who was elected in that special election -- Vincent Impelliteri -- all the way back in 2007!
Yusef Salaam, an exonerated member of the 1989 Central Park 5, has now been elected to the City Council. Sometimes there is justice in the world. Congrats!
The thing about New York City is that it isn't a city -- it's several.
The City of New York is basically a holding company, an archipelago of cities, a stuffed box of a municipalities, a necklace wrapped around the throat of New York Harbor -- a true urban empire.
Brooklyn was and, in many ways, remains its own city. Manhattan and the Bronx used to be the entirety of New York City before annexing Brooklyn and the county of Queens in 1898 -- a county that, by the way, had its own cities (Long Island City and Flushing) plus a bunch of towns and villages. The fifth wheel, the "Odd-Man In", was the county of Richmond, a lightly populated island of villages, that today is known as Staten Island.
And in any family, there are tensions.
While most of NYC is urban and racially diverse, Staten Island mostly suburban -- and white. While most of NYC is liberal and tolerant, Staten Island is conservative and angry. And while four of the five boroughs has a population of 1.5 to 2.5 million, Staten Island has around half-a-million. It's the black sheep of NYC.
Because it ill-fits the rest of the city, Staten Island has, over the last hundred years, made occasional noises about seceding from NYC and becoming the independent City of Staten Island. In 1993 there was a non-binding referendum about secession that passed -- and then went nowhere in the state legislature.
But now the seceders are making noise again -- they want to establish a commission to examine the legal, political, and economic feasibility of becoming its own city. This article gets into the dirty details of what this would entail.
Make no mistake -- at the heart of this secession "movement" is racism. It's about a bunch of white people who don't want to be governed by a majority-minority government. And it isn't really a movement -- no one's holding rallies or taking to the streets in support of secession -- it's mostly social media posts and the pontifications of politicians who know it'll go nowhere and don't want it to.
Like Brexit or Roe v. Wade or the Iraq War, people talk a lot of hot air about how great it would be if we just broke away/overturned/invaded this Big Bad Thing and then come to rue. Staten Island secession is just another such fever dream -- they would lose all city monies, their property taxes would explode, all the schools and police stations and firehouses and public services would vanish and have to be replaced overnight, they'd have to pay tolls to take the ferry into Manhattan -- it would be a mess.
I've blogged about this before -- and it remains as true now as then.
There's something fundamentally criminal about America -- we love to steal and con people out of money, we love to grab anything and anyone we want, we love to hoard money or get into debt if we don't have enough of it, we love getting stuff -- in short, we love our hyper-capitalist materialistic society.
It's one of the reason we had the Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Cold War and Vietnam -- how dare anyone envision a society that isn't centered around money or based on greed.
And that's why we love crime bosses -- think Don Corleone or Donald Trump.
In NYC we've had a few colorful crime bosses. Here are two examples, one very well known, another much less known.
There's a new Netflix doc about John Gotti, the late 1980s, early 1990s boss of the Gambino crime family. Gotti's career as the most famous crime boss in NYC - the Dapper Don, the Teflon Don -- was relatively short-lived but he made a memorable impact. (I remember as a kid watching him always get arrested, always standing trial, always getting acquitted until he was finally convicted in 1992 and died in prison in 2002 -- in friggin' Missouri of all places!).
But another NYC crime boss is probably less familiar -- Stephanie St Clair, the young lady crime boss of Harlem who was queen of the rackets. Her story is far less known but no less fascinating. She was African immigrant who fell in love with the American dream -- with a vengeance.
Basically, ever since Labor Day, ever since Fall descended, the city has been bombarded with rain on the very days of the week when we'd all like to be out and about.
Mondays through Thursday have been, for the most part, pretty nice. But starting on Fridays, through Saturdays, it's been non-stop deluge after non-stop deluge, weekend after weekend after weekend.
It's also having an economic impact: outdoor fairs and festivals are getting cancelled, outdoor dining -- at the very time of year when it's most pleasant -- isn't happening, people aren't going out as much. People are training for the upcoming New York City Marathon and it's hellish for them to run with rain bombarding them in the face.
It's even stopping people from getting laid!
Dear Lord, let the rain stop -- I beg to you on behalf of 8.8 million people.
By the way, I've blogged about other such bizarre rain events, you can read it here.
I've blogged A LOT about my love for the music of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. (You can go back and read my various posts about him and his legendary band if you so wish.)
But in addition to being a brilliant musician and band leader, Lou Reed was an NYC icon, an artist whose work helped to define the city -- or, at least, a certain kind of NYC, that of the counterculture, the artistic and sexual underground, the downtown scene.
As we come upon the 10th anniversary of Lou Reed's death, there's a new book about him coming out that's subtitled "King of New York." He certainly was a kind of NYC "king", a musical and cultural one, a bard of the city, a voice of its dirty streets. (One of his songs is literally called "Dirty Boulevard").
Encapsulating Lou Reed's status as one of the city's "kings" in words isn't easy but it's probably best done in this New Republic review of this new book. The reviewer writes:
"[Lou] Reed was ... a divining rod for New York, tracking and manifesting the city’s raw energies. One subtext ... is the evaporation of New York’s counterculture in the wake of tangled -tions and -isms: gentrification, corporatization, conglomeration, rank careerism, and the ne plus ultra, the internet. Reed’s career arguably parallels the city’s ruthless professionalization—a cultural mode that shifted its calculus from DIY to ROI, from collectivity to the singular ... One other thing Reed has come to embody: a New York that exists only in memory, a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze, 'something like a circus or a sewer,' as he sang. He connects us to a place where degradation was currency but redemption always in the offing—by some measures, the recipe for a perfect rock song. New York ain’t what it used to be. But as long as we pretend otherwise, Lou Reed will be its mirror."
As I get older I find myself fascinated by things that would have bored me stiff as a kid and, if I was a normal adult, would bore me now.
One of those odd things is water -- I'm obsessed with the connection between water and power, how water shapes the destinies of cities and their people, and about the simple fact that irrigation, aqueducts, reservoirs and the delivery of clean water to the masses is one of mankind's greatest achievements.
For NYC, a city of nearly 9 million people, the city delivers gargantuan amounts of water to the populi every day. It comes from reservoirs from upstate, down through water tunnels, into reservoirs, and, finally, into our taps. One of those reservoirs is smack dab in the middle of Central Park -- it's so famous that it's even become a movie star.
The original NYC reservoir was the Collect Pond in lower Manhattan but, by 1838, as the city's population grew, it became polluted. A jail called "The Tombs" was eventually built on top of it. That triggered the building of a new, much better constructed reservoir in the heart of Manhattan -- 42nd street and 5th avenue, right where the flagship branch of the New York Public Library exists today.
Called the Croton Reservoir (because, I believe, the water came from Croton upstate,) it was a massive, almost fortress like thing covering 4-acres and containing 180 millions gallons of water. This reservoir was a fascinating thing to see and it kept the city hydrated until the late 1890s when it was dismantled. By 1902, it was a gone -- and a new public library in the new 5-borough NYC was built in its place.
All in all, the Croton Reservoir's lifespan was short and obviously no one alive today remembers it. But for a time, at a key moment of the city's history, it stood proudly and magnificently at one of the city's most important intersections -- and it literally kept NYC alive.
The year 1980 was a turning point in American history -- the election of conservative Ronald Reagan as President proved that the country was rejecting the progressive ethos of the 1960s and '70s, the white hot flame of disco music was burning out, and the culture was gradually turning away from the dark cinematic vision of the New Hollywood (think The Godfather, think Chinatown) to the more upbeat blockbuster era (think Rocky, think the Star Wars trilogy).
New York City was also recovering from the late 1970s traumas of near-bankruptcy, the blackout, and high crime. Ed Koch was mayor and, such were the times, that he turned being a belligerent, mean-spirited asshole into electoral gold.
This same year saw the release of two movies set in NYC that were very similar and very different -- but that showed that the city and the world were changing, as was the lives of their creators.
The First Deadly Sin is something that I can't believe I'm typing -- it's a gritty NYC crime drama starring Frank Sinatra. Yes, FRANK FRIGGIN' SINATRA! "Old blue eyes", in this movie, plays an aging NYPD detective named Delaney who is, yes, just about to retire to take care of his very sick wife (an always great Faye Dunaway, still riding her post-Network Oscar-winning wave before Mommie Dearest ended it all) but who becomes obsessed with finding a serial killer who has been menacing the Upper West Side -- and, it is later revealed, all of NYC. His investigation takes him into a dark realm of trying to understand systematic but senseless violence all the while tangled up in the bureaucracy of the NYPD and the heartbreaking illness of his wife. It's a tense, well-told story and it was a a rare, late-career movie performance by Sinatra -- long past his glory days as a movie musical star.
Sinatra is, of course, great in this movie, and you can see why he remains a legend 25 years after his death. In this movie, he quietly emotes such pathos, such sympathy, such complexity, that we root for him 100%. This was his last big movie and it's sad, in a way, that Sinatra didn't act more in the later years of his life because this movie proves what a perennial talent he was, what a great actor he was (he doesn't sing this movie so there you go), and how exciting he is to watch in every scene -- even in a dark, disturbing, non-glamorous movie and role like this where he is struggling with the horror of death all around him, in both his city and his marriage. It's about the totality and agony of loss. The movie was not a big hit at the time but it really holds up.
By the way, a totally unknown struggling actor at the time walks around in the background of this movie -- a man named Bruce Willis, also dealing with his own sense of loss right now.
Some might argue that this other movie from 1980 doesn't hold up -- and even the director of it seems to agree. Dressed to Kill by Brian De Palm is about a murderous transsexual menacing wayward women in NYC, and it was highly controversial then and even more so now. I get that criticism and sympathize with it. However, just as a piece of filmmaking, Dressed to Kill is brilliant, an amazing and bizarre thriller that basically takes the story of Psycho (if you know it) and twists the hell out of it. Angie Dickinson plays a rich, bored housewife who's afternoon of passion brings her an untimely death in an elevator, Nancy Allen plays a hooker who sees the murder and becomes the killer's next prey, and Michael Caine plays a psychiatrist trying to help both women -- or is he?
You need to see Dressed to Kill to fully understand it -- trying to describe it with words is hard because, like all De Palma movies, the essence of its storytelling is visual. He doesn't use lots of special effects -- it's his use of the camera that is its own special effect. The movie is highly unconventional, there are whole scenes without dialogue -- including a brilliant 10-minute sequence in an art gallery that makes no sense but that you follow anyway, and that has a a great payoff. Like all De Palma movies, it'll enthrall and repulse you but this may be my favorite of his movies and I'm not even a big thriller fan -- but you should see this!
Dressed to Kill was, shockingly, given both its subject matter and unusual storytelling, a big hit in 1980. It's hard to imagine audiences today going to a movie this dark, depraved, weird, and challenging but they did. It shows NYC as a sexy, glamorous, and dangerous place -- this is not a "gritty crime drama", oh no, it's a sexy, alluring one, and it really gets under your skin. Skin, that you should probably cover up with clothes although please don't, you know, get dressed to kill.
In the late 1980s Howard Stern was exploding on the radio, re-writing the rules of what you could and couldn't say on the public airwaves. Originating on station 92.3 K-Rock in NYC, the morning "shock jock" was getting his show syndicated in markets around the country, entertaining and outraging listeners across the fruited plain.
This also brought his show into the crosshairs of the Federal Communications Commission which started imposing million dollar-plus fines on his company for "indecent content."
Until 2005, when Howard left regular radio for satellite, he would continue to get fined and harassed by the FCC.
But in 1991, Howard did something brilliant -- he took the uncensored segments from his show that had gotten him fined and produced an album of these supposedly "too hot for radio" bits -- including phone sex, people burping, and a man playing the piano with his wiener -- called Crucified by the FCC. The album included commentary from Howard and others about why these bits got them in trouble with the US Government.
Listened to today these bits are totally silly and not even that outrageous -- and compared with what's on social media and podcasts and YouTube, they're downright. But most of all, it's really funny stuff.
If you want to hear the whole album go here -- and watch these TV segments from the early 1990s when this album was released.
I love old movies that give you a real-time window on the past -- of a world both distant and familiar.
Such an example is the 1932 B-movie Big City Blues. It's about a young man named Bud who leaves small town Indiana to start an exciting life in NYC. He connects with his con-man cousin Gibby and a dame named Vida who lead him to a party where things get out of control and someone gets killed -- making Bud hightail it back to Indiana but never giving up his dreams of living and making it in NYC.
This movie has to be seen to be believed -- it's a perfect example of early 1930s pre-code Hollywood with lots of fast-talking characters and hammy acting. It's only an hour long and doesn't have much of a plot but it's a fun short movie that's all about how NYC is a great place to live -- but also with dangers lurking around every corner.
There's a few interesting things about this movie, especially in retrospect.
First, as mentioned, it was made in the early '30s just before Prohibition was repealed so there's a lot of stuff about bootleggers and speakeasies in it.
Second, the cast: it stars a young man named Eric Linden whose acting career was short-lived although he later on had a small role in Gone With the Wind. The "dame", Vida, is played by Joan Blondell who had a long career afterwards -- one of her last movies was Grease in 1978. And in a small part as a guest at the party where everything goes wrong is a young, smart talking Humphrey Bogart -- then just an up-and-coming actor before being lifted to cinematic greatness in the 1940s.
Third, it was directed by a man named Mervyn Le Roy who a few years later would produce a little flick called The Wizard of Oz.
Fourth, there's a lot of references to the then-Mayor of NYC, Jimmy Walker who had managed to become something of a national celebrity of that time. Much like our current mayor, Eric Adams, Walker was a notoriously corrupt party-hound incompetent. Funnily enough Big City Blues was released on September 10, 1932 just nine days after Jimmy Walker had resigned and fled the country due to corruption charges headed his way. Just two months later New York-native Franklin Roosevelt would be elected president.
So this movie captures NYC at a turning point in history, when the anything-goes, criminal culture of the 1920s was slowly being crushed under the heels of the Great Depression and the New Deal.
P.S. There's a great monologue at the beginning of this movie by the Indiana train station master. I can't post a clip of it here but look for it here on You Tube -- it's brilliant.
New York City got a lot of rain on the day of our lord, September 29, 2023.
Like, a lot, a lot 'o rain.
Apparently city officials of all stripes were yelling about it late Thursday night, early Friday morning when the extent of this was becoming clear. If you monitored social media, local elected reps were literally waist deep in water, trying to help their constituents. But the mayor ...
... well, rumor has it that, while Thursday night the city gubment was getting warning of a massive rainstorm headed our way, Mayor Eric Adams was out late at a club. No statement, no press conference, no plan. And he slept in Friday morning while the city was getting hit by a monsoon, the commute disrupted by flooding, all kinds of mess -- and he was nowhere to be seen or heard from for hours.
I blogged in August about what kind of Mayor Eric Adams is -- and, yet again, as this lack of response to this mess proves, I was ahead of time.
In the mid-to-late 1990s the NBC television network was riding high with shows like Friends, Seinfeld, Mad About You, Frasier, ER, Law & Order and others. In an era before streaming and cable "prestige TV", before YouTube and social media, when hit TV shows accumulated literally tens of millions of viewers, NBC was the highest rated network with its Must See TV lineups.
One of those shows was Caroline in the City.
A sitcom about a cartoonist (Caroline) living in NYC with a wacky next door neighbor, an on-again/off-again boyfriend, a wacky assistant who's secretly in love with her, and various other wacky people who drop in and out of her life, the show ran for four seasons from 1995 to 1999. It was kind of like Sex & the City before that show ever aired -- but much, much more sanitized. Often squeezed between airings of ratings juggernaughts Seinfeld and ER, Caroline in the City was the classic "time slot" hit -- a show that got big ratings because the shows before and after it got even bigger ratings.
Unlike several of the aforementioned shows that remain beloved classics today, constantly in reruns or on streaming, or that have even been rebooted (like Law & Order and Frasier), Caroline in the City is completely forgotten today. Set in a fantasy-land NYC about white people obsessing about their love lives, it's the kind of show that, today, most people probably askance at.
Yet I remember the show, somewhat fondly, for a couple of reasons.
First, it starred the wonderful Lea Thompson who a decade earlier had been in the Back to the Future movies (as well as other '80s classics like Some Kind of Wonderful and Howard the Duck). While the show wasn't great, she was ... some kind of wonderful in this show. Second, the show aired during my college years -- in fact, interestingly enough, it premiered a month after I started college and went off the air a month before I graduated. So, for me at least, it's a kind of time-capsule of a very special, very specific time in my life -- even though I didn't watch the show regularly.
So today I remember a show that, while not great, while it might not "totally hold up", hold a weirdly special place in my heart.
This week Prince William of the United Kingdom -- who became Prince of Wales following his father's elevation to the throne last year -- will be visiting NYC this week. He'll be at the UN General Assembly, doing something with his Earthshot Innovation prize, and promoting various environmental causes.
This visit is, apparently, a new phase in his royal career -- now that William is next-in-line to the throne, only a heartbeat away from becoming the next UK Head of State, he needs to develop an image and reputation as a global statesman, a leader, as someone taken seriously by his country and the world as its next sovereign. Being Prince of Wales is a lot like being Vice-President -- being the the person who's there to take over when the top person goes, either suddenly or eventually.
The British royals have long visited our fair city -- as this articles indicates. The link between NYC and the UK is quite strong after all -- this city is named for a city in the UK (York), two of its boroughs/counties are Kings and Queens, the British imprint on this town is quite noticeable. So when they come to America, NYC might feel a bit like home.
You can also read my previous coverage of the royals in NYC here and here.
New York City is, for the most part, a one-party city -- the Democrats control the three city-wide offices, four of the five borough presidencies, the vast majority of the City Council seats, and most of the city's state legislative and Congressional delegations.
But there are red dots in this blue mess, a handful of Republicans in the council and state/federal delegations -- and, of course, for 20 years, we had two Republican mayors.
One of those red dots was Eric Ulrich.
First elected to the City Council in 2009, representing Howard Beach way out in southeastern Queens, Eric was young, smart, fast-talking, and good on TV. He popped up on NY1 and WNYC radio a lot and he always seemed to know what he was talking about, always had a quick answer to whatever question he was asked, always was engaging. He was seemed like a bright-light of young Republican promise in a sea of dull Democratic hacks. His promise was strong, his future seemed golden.
Eric was supposedly that thing the media and too many Democrats wish existed but really doesn't -- the "good Republican", the "reasonable Republican", the Republican who is conservative, yes, okay, but who you could "work with", someone with whom you could "find common ground" with and come up with "common sense solutions."
That kind of crap.
During the De Blasio years, along with most of the media, Eric would rag on the mayor all the time, even though he voted for most of mayor's policy agenda. I remember seeing Eric on TV once complaining about how the sanitation department hadn't plowed his neighborhood fast enough after a snowstorm (because, you know, some people think their neighborhoods get plowed too quickly) and this was apparently proof-positive that De Blasio was a bad mayor. When pressed that crime was low and the city didn't appear to be in any kind of crises (this was pre-COVID), Eric blithered on about how the city was experiencing "a crises of confidence" which is the kind of thing that's obviously impossible to prove.
But Eric also wasn't a big Trump guy so that obviously made him a "good Republican" in so many people's eyes -- that mythical creature like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Eric Ulrich stayed in the council until 2021 when he was term-limited out. Then, Republican though he was, he joined the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, a supposed Democrat. At first Eric was a "special advisor", then he got a big job as the city's building commissioner. As you might imagine, in a city with LOTS of buildings, the building department is a very powerful, very important agency -- it has over 1700 employees.
Then, quite suddenly, after less than a year on the job, he resigned in late 2022.
Turns out, Eric was under investigation for participating in a gambling ring. Okay, that's not great -- but it turns out there was more. Eric apparently used his city elected and administrative offices to help himself get a steep discount on an apartment, Mets tickets, art, and repayment of his gambling debts. He's just been indicted for corruption and is looking at jail time.
I've always been fascinated by the 1930s movie star Greta Garbo, the great Swedish actress who made classic movie after classic movie -- before quitting and remaining a recluse for the rest of her life. Over the years I've blogged about her life in NYC where apparently she became known as the "hermit about town."
Equally intriguing is that apparently, in the 1950s, when Garbo was herself in her 50s, she went to a party one night hosted by the acclaimed playwright and screenwriter William Inge. He held it, of all places, in his apartment on my beloved Riverside Drive.
One of the guests was a handsome young actor, just starting out on Broadway, named Burt Reynolds. The older Ms. Garbo was quite struck by the hunky young thespian and made overture after overture to him to take her home and do the funny business ... and he chickened out.
That's right, "the Bandit" might have shtupped Ninotchka. How cool would that have been? And this meeting happened, of all the square places, on Riverside Drive!
Apparently the divine Garbo didn't always 'vant to be alone.
I'm so sad that NY1 reporter and anchor Ruschell Boone has died from cancer at the age of 48. She was so great on TV, such a magnetic presence, such a smart grownup reporting on a world run by children -- and she also just plain ol' adorable. A great journalistic talent and NYC icon. She'll be greatly missed. RIP.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
