Lovely

Here's a lovely article about a wealthy couple with lots of gorgeous art in their Upper West Side apartment that they lend out for all the world to see.

There are lots of secret museums in this city inside the wall of various people's home, so it's great to see when people share what they have with the world.

Sometimes there are nice things in life.

Zohran Mamdani's Scavenger Hunt

Manhattan End-to-End via #1

Let's take a little trip. Let's travel from one end of Manhattan to the other.

Let's traverse this narrow thirteen-mile island that fascinates and captures the imaginations of peoples around the world.

And let's do it via the #1 subway line, noting the most signficant stops along the way, subway stations that are more than just various gateways into Manhttan -- they are portals into American culture, history, and power. 

Now there's something important to remember: Manhattan technically extends beyond Manhattan Island. There is a small neighborhood just north of the island called Marble Hill that is legally part of the Borough of Manhattan. So as we look north from the bottom of Marble Hill, we can look north towards the Bronx.

Then we turn around and see  the northern tip of Manhattan island as well as the bridge with the crosswalk and subway tracks that will take us into it.

Now we'll go upstairs to the Marble Hill 225th Street station and take a look at the subway route on the #1 that we'll be following (as well as map of the geographic route we'll be crossing).

Now the train has rattled into the station, we get on and sit down, and we're off!

After a few stops we hit 181th street street. This is where we'll find the George Washington Bridge. Dubbed "the world's busiest bridge," this northern-most expanse connects the city to the rest of America, with cars flowing in and out of NYC and the rest of the continent. It's also, apparently, a popular place for some lost souls to end their lives -- sometimes to dark, comic effect. 

Few more stops and we hit 137th street and City College. 

This public college in the heart of Harlem is one of the great institutions for American learning. For over a century, poor kids from all over NYC could go to City College and pursue the American dream. The students and graduates of City are extraordinary: ten Nobel Prize winners, mayors, Supreme Court justices, US Senators and Secretaries of State, Oscar-winners, Emmy-winners, Pulitzer Prize-winners, astronauts and founders of big companies, and so many more! Heck, even fictional people have gone to City College: Gordon Gekko from Wall Street and Don Draper from Mad Men most notably.

Also, it's where both of my parents worked for almost 40 years, met, fell in love, and produced Mr NYC.

One more stop and we're in Harlem, above ground, at 125th Street.

What else can I say about Harlem, the capital of the black American experience, where great black artists and pioneers lived and worked. Also, it's also one of the hearts of American culture with Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club.

One more stop and we're at 116th street and Columbia University.

One of the seven Ivy League Universities, this institution of higher learning pre-dates the United States itself, originally chartered in 1754 by King George II (hence the original name King's College). Besides being a great and famous university, Columbia has been a site for brilliance and controversy, where great minds have flowered and fought over decades. 

Now we chug down past several stops on the Upper West Side to 66th street and Lincoln Center. 

Home to ballet, opera, symphonies, musicals and plays, Lincoln Center is the multi-theater complex that, along with Broadway, defines NYC as the cultural capital of America. While encompassing only a few small blocks, its impact across America is massive -- including the many performances that are broadcast from there. I have personal recollections of performing at Lincoln Center and have blogged about it a lot -- including my own experience in partaking in a live broadcast. 

One more stop and we're all 59th Street and Columbus Circle.

The site of the big memorial to Christopher Columbus, it is one of the crossroads of Manhattan, with different avenues intersecting and hugging the lower southwest portion of Central Park. It is also, to my knowledge, the only traffic circle in all over NYC. And these days it is now home to the massive Time Warner building that looms over it.

Two more stops and we're in the most square in all the world -- Times Square. 

Dubbed the "Crossroads of the World" it is the very center of American culture, bedecked with electronic billboards, Broadway theaters, massive chain restaurants -- for many it is New York City, the heart of the heart of it all. And, obviously, it's where the world celebrates New Year's every year.

A quick one-stop and we're at Penn Station on 34th street -- or Pennsylvania Station as it's officlally known.

If the George Washington Bridge is the city's businest car-route into America, Penn is the easily the busiest railway route. Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad all go through it, a central hub that connects the outer-edges of Long Island to the West Coast of the United States.

Penn Station also has a tortured history -- the once gorgeous station was torn down in the 1960s and replaced by a dingy undeground hovel. In the last twenty-years it has been dramatically rebuilt and re-imagined, a vast improvement of what it was but a sad reminder of what we could have had if we had only preserved the original. Hey, at least the new Penn Station now has a Dunkin' Donuts!

Now we go down several stops and hit Christopher Street -- Stonewall Station. 

Christopher Street is actually a quiet, beautiful area of Greenwich Village but it is now of the iconic birth place of American gay rights movement. On June 28th, 1969, right after the death of gay icon Judy Garland, the Stonewall Inn was raided by cops -- and for the first time, gay people fought back. It took decades for gay rights to be enshrined into American culture and law but it has triumphed mightly. And it all started on this small block of Manhattan.

Our journey is almost over but we have one more stop until the end -- the World Trade Center.

Of course it used to be the World Trade Centers -- until September 11, 2001 when it became Ground Zero, then, after an extensive rebuilding, One World Trade Center. 

The story of this patch of Lower Manhattan is one of great triumph and tragedy in American history, where George Washington celebrated his victory in the American Revolution and where American was also brutally attacked two centuries later. It's the symbol of American financial power and dominance. Its where Manhattan and NYC began and where it grew out from. It is the complicated heart and soul of the world's greatest nation and its greatest city.

 

And now we come of the end of our journey. We reach the South Ferry-Whitehall Station aka. the Battery, and we pop up out of our seat and go upstairs into the very southern edge of Manhattan. 

We're right across the street from the entraces to the Governor's Island and Staten Island Ferrys, and we can see (and smell) the vastness of New York Harbor, the watery gateway to city and the force that unites the five boroughs. 

And then we walk down a few blocks, turning to look uptown to see where we came from ...

... and then we look down to the southern tip of Manhattan with the rest of NYC and America beyond it.

I hope you've enjoyed this trip along the #1 subway line, seeing the amazing stops and spots of Americana along the way. You can do it yourself in just under and hour. And I hope, maybe, that you learned something!

Review: "Don't Drink the Water" (1994) & "Die Hard with a Vengeance" (1995) -- Two Mid-1990s NYC Oddities

In the mid-1990s two very different NYC-related movies graced movie and television screens that, looking back, seem truly bizarre that they were ever made. 

The first is a TV movie that aired in December, 1994. It was written and directed by Woody Allen called Don't Drink the Water. It was based on a play that Woody had written and was produced on Broadway in the mid-1960s. It then became a lackluster movie starring, of all people, Jackie Gleason. Woody didn't like the movie version (he had nothing to do with it) so, thirty years later, he directed it for television.

Don't Drink the Water is about a Jewish caterer from New Jersey who is on vacation with his family in an unnamed Communist country in Eastern Europe. The country has been consumed by chaos, so the caterer and his family seek refuge in the American embassy. But things in the embassy are wacky as well, and hilarity ensues. In the meantime, the young American consult running the embassy falls for the caterer's daughter -- and romance ensues. And all the usual Woody humor is there, including lots of jokes about deli foods. 

Woody made this film at a weird time in his life and career. He had just gone through the whole break up scandal with Mia Farrow and his reputation had been dinged -- but he had also just released the great movie Bullets Over Broadway, and was riding high on critical acclaim and strong box office. This TV movie was therefore something of a pastiche, a little side-project. Many Woody fans might know even know it exists. 

Woody stars as the caterer in the film, his wife is played by the always wonderful Julie Kavner, and the daughter is played by Mayim Bialik who was finishing her run on the TV show Blossom. Others in the cast include the great Edward Herrmann (pre-Gilmore Girls) and Dom Deluise but the real surprise is that the American consul is played by Michael J. Fox.

Yes, Marty McFly and Alvy Singer were in a movie together.

Fox had been a huge star in the 1980s with the show Family Ties, the Back to the Future movies, and some other notable films. But by the mid-1990s his star seemed to be waning so that's why, presumably, he agreed to do this TV movie with Woody. A couple of years later he starred on the TV show Spin City, cementing a comeback -- and then years later he disclosed a devestating Parkinson's diagnosis. 

It's not a great movie but it's still amazing to realize that there was a time when Woody Allen could actually get a movie made and broadcast on ABC, a big TV network -- and that people would watch it! How times have changed. 

Then, a few months later, Die Hard with a Vengeance hit 1995 summer movie theaters. 

It was the third in the multi-part Die Hard movie series starring Bruce Willis. Where the first one took place in a huge office building in LA, and the second took place at an airport in Washington, DC, this third flick takes place all over Manhattan. Willis's John McClane cop character is at home in NYC this time when things start blowing up around town. A mystery man named Simon contacts McClane and forces him to play a serious of dangerous games around Manhattan in order to prevent future explosions ("Simon says" -- Get it?). It turns out that this is all a distraction so that Simon and his goons can rob the $104 billion dollars in gold that are stored under Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Simon declares that it makes Fort Knox look like something for tourists.

And lots of violence, car chases, shoot-outs and one-liners ensue.

Willis is at his charasmatic best in his film and his side-kick is played by the brilliant Samuel Jackson. They had just starred in the now-classic Pulp Fiction (although shared no scenes together) so they were riding on this juice of that movie. The villian, Simon, is played by Jeremy Irons, and he really hams it up here, a mustache-twirling bad guy. Iron was about four years removed from his Oscar win and although his days as a big movie star were coming to an end.

And the big secret is that we find out he's the brother of Gruber, the villian from the first Die Hard movie played by Allan Rickman. "He was an asshole," both Simon and McClane agree.

The plot and action in this movie are idiotic in the extreme, and the idea of terrorism in NYC seemed much more far-fetched in 1995 than it did six years later. However, it's a real NYC eye-candy movie -- not only do we see great shots of Lower Manhattan, we also go to Harlem, the ports, and even the subway stop at 72nd Street and Broadway. 

Again, getting actors of the caliber of Willis, Jackson and Irons in a movie together that was this wild -- as well as the biggest box office hit of 1995 -- seems crazy today (this movie spelt "big pay day" all over it). And making a movie where NYC gets mostly blown up would not be PC today. Also, I actually remember going to see this movie in theaters right before I went to college -- and then totally forgot about it until now. 

So there's a look back at two movies from 30 years ago that, in today's NYC and entertainment environment, would be unthinkable of getting made today. 

Close Encounters with Infamy: Foley, Weiner, Fleiss & Strom

One of things that I enjoy watching on YouTube are short videos about the "Scandalous Life" of this, that or another historical character. Usually these "scandalous" people are just women who dared to have sex with more than one man.

Hadly scandalous.

But as I've progressed through this badly written dark comedy called life, I have either encountered -- or been adjacent to -- people who might be called Infamous. People whose names have became synonymous with scandal, disgrace, and overall moral turpitude. Truly scandalous people. 

Let me be clear: I never knew these people, never was intimate. I just happened to be either in their presences, shook their hand, or knew someone who knew someone.

I briefly met Anthony Weiner, the once-brilliant Congressman who was brought down by texting his nasty bits to ladies. Before all that I shook his hand at a fundraiser when he was running for mayor. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "You shoook his hand? Ewwwww!"

But wait! That's not the only congressman with a nasty sexting habit whose gross hand I shook: in 1997, when I was interning in DC, I briefly met Mark Foley. This was years before he was exposed as another gross sexter (this time to underage kids, really vile stuff). 

So yes, I had the (dis)honor of shaking the hands of America's most famous, infamous Congressional sexters -- one a Democrat, the other a Republican.

And yes, I've scrubbed my hands thoroughly. 

Also, in 1997, I was part of a team that was showing Japansese politicians around DC. And in that exercise I got to be in the office of Strom Thurmond. (If you're under the age of 75 you might not know that name but he was an evil, racist segregationist Senator from South Carolina.) Ol' Strom was about 95 years old at the time, and I saw him sitting behind his huge desk, a gorgeous view of the Capitol building behind him. He looked like an animated corpse. His staff was telling him everything he had to to, he was totally out of it. But he did say that he loved Japan because it was a great "military" power. Yeah, that wasn't weird -- and the Japanese folks were polite enough not to correct him. Btw Strom served in the Senate for 48 years, a quite damning thing to say about our country.

Finally, Heidi Fleiss (she's back in the news because a new movie is being made about her). The Madame to the Stars, in the early 1990s it was revealed that she was pimping women to half of Hollywood. I never met her but my mom worked on a project with her father (a pediatrician) around the same time her daughter was going to jail. So that's my "adjacent" story to that particular scandal.

So those are my somewhat close encounters to the truly scandalous, people whose names will live in infamy.

My Jennifer Aniston Story

Okay, it's not really a story -- I've never met Jennifer Aniston -- but several years ago I was going through my old school yearbooks and, curious, I thumbed page after page of the class photos. And I stumbled upon one page where -- guess what? -- a teenage Jennifer Aniston appeared.

Apparently, for one year in the 1980s, we went to school together although she was several grades ahead of me. I also saw that she was, unsurprisingly, in the drama club, and that year there was a school production of You Can't Take It With You and, I'm guessing, she was in it -- but this was obviously several years before she became a big star.

So that's my story, really more of a anecdote, about our Friend. 

Garbo Forever

Over the years I've blogged about the late actress Greta Garbo, who was the biggest movie star in the world in the 1930s -- then vanished, living as a recluse in NYC until her death in 1990.

You can access the Mr NYC Garbo files here.

And read about her long years of self-imposed exile from the movie business here.

Remembering CD 101.9 FM

Certain radio station frequencies, like Z100 or Q104 or Life FM 106.7, are hardwired into the NYC radio identity.

And when a radio station, or frequency, changes, it's usually a big deal.

That's not really been the case with 101.9 FM which seems to have had the most format changes of any prime frequency on the NYC dial. These days it's now a simulcast of WFAN 660 AM, a example of how FM radio is withering away. 

But for many years it was a "smooth jazz", really a lite pop, station. It was the kind of station you'd hear in doctor's office waiting rooms or department stores.

I never listened to it myself but I recall that they had some really cool TV advertisements over the years -- and you can watch them here for a little NYC audio-visual nostalgia.

And, in case you were wondering, CD 101.9 was very "cool."

"Gods of New York: 1986-1989"

The years 1986 to 1989 were quite formative for me: I was a kid becoming more aware of the wider world, I was switching schools between elementary and middle, I was doing The Nutcracker and other ballets at Lincoln Center -- and NYC was in tumult.

Crack, crime, corruption, and big personalities ruled the town -- Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump and others were in the news every day ... and even though Koch is long days, the others still (obviously) haunt us.

This moment in time is the subject of a new book by Jonathan Mahler called Gods of New York. Mahler wrote the classic early-aughts book Ladies and Gentleman the Bronx is Burning and he is a great NYC historian.

You should listen to this great conversations between Mahler and Chuck Todd about how late 1980s NYC seems to be more relevant than ever in 2020s America.

And while yours truly wasn't a "God" of New York at that time, I was, in a way, a very minor princeling. 

Jeffrey Epstein: The 21st-Century Rasputin

The Jeffrey Epstein saga never ends.

The mysteries around this dead pedo -- gone but not forgotten (nor mourned) -- seems to become bigger and bigger as time goes on. We appear to know so much more yet so much less at the same time.  

It's been hopelessly politicized, and I won't get into that miserable drama here. But what fascinates me about this whole saga is who Epstein was -- and why the media and public hunger for him can never be sated. 

Then it hit me: he's Rasputin!

Epstein is a 21st-century American version of the shadowy, sexually devious early-20th century Russian figure who seemed to come out of nowhere and became a friend and corruptor of the rich, powerful, and famous.

And like Rasputin, Epstein died under bizarre and shocking circumstances. 

The parallels are not exact: Rasputin was a staretz, a spiritual guide. Epstein was financier, a finance guy. Rasputin came from poverty in Siberia. Epstein came from a lower middle-class background in Brooklyn. He also became super-rich and was deeply vain, while Rasputin, for all his notoriety, did not seek riches, dressed like a slob, and smelled. And while Rasputin actually attained more direct power -- becoming so close to the last Russian Imperial family that he was eventually running the government -- Epstein's proximity to power was much more transactional and opaque.

Yet there is one big, overarching similarity of Rasputin and Epstein -- namely,  they beg the question WHO THE HELL WAS THIS GUY?

Rapsutin was a charlatan, he wasn't even a real priest. He said he spoke to God and could cure diseases when all he really did was utter platitudes, prayed with people, and "laid hands" on them. And yet it led him into the heart of late-Russian nobility and monarchy -- and, with that, he got power and influence and a place in history.

Epstein now has a place in history too, and its all the more remarkable considering that he wasn't really anybody important. He was rich, yes, and that got him access to the famous and powerful (although when you splash around cash its not hard to get doors opened to those kinds of people). But Epstein had no real institutional power nor public-facing career. He wasn't the CEO of a publicly traded or financial company, he didn't run a media or entertainment or real estate empire or any kind of big business, he wasn't a politician nor served in government, and he didn't run or manage or own anything big or well-known. All he did (supposedly) was manage money for rich people. 

And yet Rasputin and Epstein managed to work their ways into the heighest echelons of society and power in two of the most powerful empires on earth.

To a certain extent there's a degree of snobbishness in how people regard them: who are (or were) these people to think they could come from places like Siberia or Coney Island and rub shoulders with the mighty? They were climbers, upstarts, wannabes, who crashed the gates and should have been kicked out by their betters.

That's one way of looking at them.

But another way to view them is as examples of rot -- and how great countries wither and die from the inside. 

In the history of the Russian Revolution, Rasputin and his power and influence have become examples of how delusional, corrupt, and stupid late Imperial Russia had become. And Epstein -- with his private plane, Carribean island, big houses and weird artifacts and pedophilia -- is an example of late-stage capitalism, and how morally bankrupt, debauched, and nihilistic American society is today, fueled by greed, and abandoning the common good.

And in early-20th century Russian and early-21th century America, the public and the powerful allowed themselves to be controlled by gross con artists -- and we have (and will) rue the day.

Rasputin and Epstein are now no longer simply creepy wannabes who died -- they are myths, dark haunting figures that say something damning about our lives and times, about our societies, and what we have all, one way or another,  sadly become.

They are the stench left behind of dead and dying empires.  

cityneighborhoods.nyc

Who put the Throggs in Throggs Neck? 

Answer: Robert Moses, of course! 

The neighborhood was named after an English colonialist named John Throckmorton. When Robert Moses was building bridges and commissioning street signs, he wanted to save money so he renamed the nabe Throggs -- and thus it's been called this ever since. 

That's just one of the fascinating tidbits of NYC lore that I discovered from this website called Cityeneighorhoods.nyc.

This website gives you the history of every single NYC neighborhood with lots of interesting historical trivia like this. Check it out! 

Btw one of John Throckmorton's descendants was, believe it or not, Marilyn Monroe!

Quentin Tarantino on Woody Allen

This is fascinating: Quentin Tarantino talking about how, as a teenager in the 1970s, watching Annie Hall and other classic Woody Allen movies impressed and influenced his cinematic education. 

Quentin is probably the quintessential LA crime director. Woody is probably the quintessential NYC romantic comedy director. As movie directors and auteurs, they couldn't be more different -- but talent respects talent, genius respect genius. And while they occupy different spheres of the American film universe, it's great to her a master talking about another master. No East Coast vs. West Coast beef here!

Mr NYC Ahead of His Time

Recently I blogged about the decline of late night TV, especially here in NYC.

Now others are doing the same.

Again, Mr NYC is ahead of his time!

In Some Park in NYC -- August 9th, 2025, 12:55 PM

Simon & Garfunkel -- Live in Central Park: September 19, 1981

The NYC Walking Show

This is a really cool YouTube channel that I discovered that captures NYC daily street like. It's called The NYC Walking Show and it's just like its name -- it's a guy walking around NYC, capturing life. You should check it out!

The 60 Best Songs Ever Written About New York City ... Well, not really ...

Yours truly missed this back in 2014 when the Village Voice published this list of the 60 best NYC songs but better late than never.

I read it and had several thoughts.

First, sixty is a rather strange number to limit it too -- why not 50? Or 100? Sixty just seems so random.

Second, while a couple of these songs are obviousy, like "New York, New York" by John Kander or "New York State of Mind" by Billy Joel, the vast majority of them are obscure or more "meta" songs than heart and soul ones. 

Third, there are MANY glaring omissions. No "New York City" by They Might Be Giants. No "Empire State of Mind" by Jay Z. And while there are a few Lou Reed songs on the list, there's no or "New York City Man" and nothing, nothing at all, from Lou Reed's classic 1989 New York album, especially no "Dirty Boulevard"! And no show tunes, nothing from "Rent" or "On The Town" and many others.

This is a perfect example of a list created by people who want to seem "alternative" and "different" and super-hip. I guess I'm a big softy -- I like the fun NYC songs. But to each their own.

Gotta Love New Yorkers

I was at the Mets game this past Saturday (great game btw, another Mets 12-run blowout), and the man in front of me in the ice cream line had the following request: "Yo, gimmee mad sprinkles, yo, maaaaaaaaad sprinkles!"

This was after he and his girlfriend offered my little daughter the blueberries that was in their blue-colored vodka drink. We graciously declined.

Gotta love New Yorkers, gotta love this town.

June 14, 1995

Why am I doing a blog post about a particular date more than 30 years ago?

Because that's the day I graduated from high school.

The ceremony wasn't particularly memorable except that the lights in the theater at Alice Tully Hall were bright as hell, and Bill Cosby was actually there (his daughter was in my class but I didn't know her nor did I meet him, just saw him). 

Later that night I went to the Senior Party in Midtown and hung out, for the last time, with my schoolmates (in my school, no one cared about the prom, the Senior Party was The Thing). While we partied, I started talking with this girl who I barely knew and who was a year younger than me. She had gotten super-crazy-drunk and began talking to me non-stop. Then she started snuggling up to me, hugging me, all over me, it was really weird. This was not a regular occurence in the life of yours truly, most girls at that time in my life regarded my slightly less favorably that roadkill. At one point this girl took one of my hands and started kissing my fingers methodically, slurping on them.

Being a gentleman, and also a total loser who had no game, I did nothing. I might have been able to be a pig and taken advantage but I did not. I was a good boy. Then I went home -- alone.

Anyway, besides those lovely weird memories, I also recall that this was the same night when a big interview with Michael Jackson and his then-wife, Lisa Marie, daughter of Elvis Presley, was broadcast. I remember it was playing on TVs in the bar in the background although I ignored it (I literally had a girl on my shoulder!). This was the interview to prove that their love was real! I guess it turned out not to be and less than 15 years later, Michael would be dead.

Also, earlier that morning, Howard Stern did a show where he talked about the OJ trial, tattoos, air ventilation, and life in general.  

A lot has happened since that day 30 years and 6 weeks ago, both in my life and in the culture and world in general. But ... it's fascinating to remember what I was doing on that life changing day, and what was going on in the city and the culture and the world in general at the same time.

Oh, and as for that girl who slobbered on me? She ended up going to a great college, has a big time career, is happily married with a child, and is crushing life. 

And me? I'm doing pretty good too!

The Great NYC Summer Soak of 2025