One hundred years ago today, the third, relatively short, novel by F. Scott Fitzgeral. Titled The Great Gatsby, it got mixed reviews, sold poorly, and was generally viewed a failure.
Now, a full century later, its regarded by critics and generations of readers as one of the greatest novels ever written, and the greatest American novel of the 20th century.
The American dream -- its unending allure and its many dangers -- that the novel explores and lays bare, remains essential, more relevant than ever before.
The green light still shines bright. And tonight, the lights of the Empire State Building will turn green.
I've written a lot about Gatsby over the years so I won't rehash it here. But I always go back to this book, always re-read it, because the of the haunting final line: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Recently the boys did a series of episodes exploring NYC's Dutch roots by actually going to Holland and visiting the towns and areas where so much of this city's history began. It's a fascinating look at how much of the city we know today, the mightiest city in the world, came from this small European country -- and how this town was once a colony of a mighty overseas non-English speaking empire.
America may have been born in the streets of NYC but, before NYC was NYC, it was a small Dutch town in the New World.
After all, New York City used to be New Amsterdam, neighborhoods like Harlem came from the Dutch town of Haarlam and the entire borough of Brooklyn came from a place called Breukelen.
And if you've ever read The Great Gatsby, it's famous last paragraphs, as Nick Carraway stares across Long Island Sound at the huge rich homes and the symbolic green light, he wonders about what it must have looked at, unmolested, for "Dutch sailors' eyes."
I haven't listened to the entire series yet but plan to finish it soon -- and encourage you to do so!
It's been well over fifteen years since I last blogged about Willets Point, the perennially blighted area in Queens, just a stones throw away from the mighty of Flushing-Meadows Park but existing in another world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized it The Great Gatsby as the "Valley of Ashes" -- and that was nearly 100-years ago.
Back in the summer of 2008 there was a massive development plan from the then-Bloomberg administration about redeveloping it -- mostly centered around building a mall and convention center. It turned into a bitter, nasty fight between the city and residents of this area that, while forelorn, was theirs and they didn't want to change -- or get evicted from -- it.
I don't think any blog post I ever did triggered so many heated comments. People were pissed.
Well, malls and retails pace and convention spaces are fast becoming a thing of the past, and now, nearly two decades later, a massive redevelopment project for Willets Point is on the cusp of approval by the city -- and the resistance doesn't seem quite so strong.
The proposed redevelopment will include a soccer stadium, a public school, a hotel, and around 2500 affordable housing units. It sounds like it'll be more mixed-used and community-focused which is a very good idea. Still, I'm sure some long-term residents will resist it changing it all.
But, if this plan comes to fruition, it'll soon become a major new neighborhood and attraction in this already mighty city.
The New York Times has recently published a list of 25 novels set in NYC, published within the last 100 years, where the city is more than just a backdrop or even a "character" in the story -- it is the story, NYC is intertwined with the plot.
These are books that, simply put, couldn't have taken place anywhere else.
Believe it or not, some big titles are missing -- no Gatsby, nothing by Edith Wharton. Sadly Slaves of New York was not included either but the author, Tama Janowitz (a previous Mr NYC interviewee) was mentioned (with a photo) since her 1980s Brat Pack colleagues Jay McInery's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City was included (my review of the movie version of it can be found here).
This list is very interesting, and it includes commentary by the various critics who chose the titles. Lists like this are inherently flawed and infuriating, but at least they remind you that there are lots of good books about NYC that you should put on your shelf -- or load onto your Kindle.
One big inclusion is Don DeLillo's 1997 masterpiece Underworld. That is a great NYC novel but so much more -- its an epic sweep of an Everyman living through the second half of the 20th century while history unfolds around him and occasionally touches him. For me, it's not just a novel, or a great novel, or a great NYC novel -- it's a state of mind, a raising of consciousness, a story that makes you look at the world and history differently. I'm glad to see it on this list but Underworld is sui generis, like all great work. The same way that NYC is a city bigger than its population and its borders, Underworld extends beyond the story on its pages.
Last year saw the release of two movies based on musicals -- In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tick ... tick ... BOOM!by Jonathan Larson (the movie of which was actually directed Miranda) -- that would never have been made had their respective creators not then, for their next shows, created arguably the two greatest musicals of the last 25 years -- Rent and Hamilton.
Call them precursors, forerunners, warm-up-acts, playing in the minors before the majors, what have you -- the small things that came before the big things, the good things before the truly GREAT things. Their first shows got them attention and acclaim. Their next shows vaulted them into cultural history.
Think Reservoir Dogs before Pulp Fiction, War of the Worlds before Citizen Kane, Llewyn Davis playing before Bob Dylan at the Gaslight, you get the idea. Before something really great, you have to have something pretty good -- but the pretty good won't get remembered unless followed by something really great.
Got it?
Between 1919 and 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote four novels (plus one uncompleted one) and numerous short stories. The voice of his generation, doyen of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald would be remembered today as a talented writer who was a product of his era had he not written what is arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century -- The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's legacy towers over American literature, it's themes of the emptiness of the American dream, the false promise of wealth buying love and happiness, and how we can never recreate our idealized pasts even though we are haunted by them have made it truly timeless.
Every time I read Gatsby I'm just amazed by what a perfect, gorgeous, and powerful story it is -- and how its creation was nothing short of a miracle.
So what came before it? Even Fitzgerald had to have his own warm up act -- in this case, two novels: his youthful 1919 debut, This Side of Paradise, and his 1922 dark satire The Beautiful and Damned.
When Gatsby turns 100 in 2025, there will doubtless be myriad articles, documentaries, think pieces celebrating its greatness. It'll be a Gatsby melee. There will probably be a deluge of analysis of this seminal American work, this forever masterpiece. As well there should be!
But The Beautiful and Damned is being, no surprise, critically overlooked, ignored, on its 100th anniversary. It's like the ugly sibling being slighted for the gorgeous one.
Thus it's left to yours truly to celebrate the 100 anniversary of Gatsby's precursor -- call it the Great Precursor -- The Beautiful and Damned, the novel you read constantly thinking, "And right after this book, he wrote The Great Gatsby!"
The novel is about married couple living a dissolute life in nineteen-teens NYC. Although Fitzgerald is mostly associated with the 1920s (and this novel was published in March, 1922), it's story is set between 1913 and 1921, bookending the First World War. The orphaned Anthony Patch is the grandson of a wealthy, irascible industrialist who spends his days sleeping and his evening partying -- and waiting for his grandfather to die so that he will inherit tens of millions of dollars (essentially the equivalent of a billion or more today). Anthony meets, through his friends, a debutante named Gloria from Kansas City. They marry and, together, they spend their days drinking and spending money they don't really have, alienating people and getting into trouble -- before Anthony is drafted and heads south for basic training for the First World War. Adultery and hangovers ensue, and a couple ugly twists rob Anthony of his inheritance -- and sanity. The ending is a real shock.
It's an ugly, tragic tale but it's also a darkly funny book. Where Gatsby is elegiac, Beautiful and Damned is nasty. Fitzgerald does not get sentimental or deep here -- it's almost documentary like in showing and mocking the bad behavior of the ideal, mindless rich (who are never as rich as they think).
When I read this book in college, my professor said, "It's a very bad book." That took me by surprise since, in school, we're supposed to read the great works by the masters -- not one of their minor, or even bad, works. I didn't think the book bad at all -- it's entertaining, amusing, and quite appealing to the sarcastic mind, but it's also overlong and overwritten, clearly the work of a young writer trying to prove himself, favoring verbosity over restraint.
Still, I recommend reading The Beautiful and Damned on its centenary year since, while it's a product of its time, it's a time that reverberates today -- and, yes, because it's the one that came BEFORE, the Great Precursor to The Great Gatsby, the seeds of the timeless greatness that flowered afterwards.
P.S. I hesitated making this comparison earlier but here goes now: another way to put it is, The Beautiful and Damned is like the person you seriously dated before you met your spouse. Barack Obama, who lived in NYC during law school before making his career in Chicago, once called our city "The great love of your life that you never married."
Continuing my catalogue of oft-forgotten NYC movies, my latest is Bright Lights, Big City from 1988. It's based on the 1984 debut novel by Jay McInerney who was one of the era's "brat pack" authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz who published popular novels that were quickly made into movies.
When the book came out it made quite a splash due to the youth of the author, the zeitgeisti-iness of the story (a young man, like the author, navigating the world of NYC media, money, club culture, and drugs), and the fact that it was written in the second person (the narrator refers to "you" instead of the first-person "I" or third-person "he/she"). The plot concerns a guy named Jamie who lives in NYC and works as a fact-checker at a magazine that's basically supposed to be the stodgy and boring pre-Tina Brown/David Remnick version of The New Yorker (it had yet to transform itself into a media powerhouse). Jamie is trying to write a novel and live out his fantasies of being a literary star but he's been side-tracked by the recent death of his mother, his wife who has suddenly and inexplicably left him, and his growing drug addiction fueled by a sleazy guy named Tad. When not working and struggling to write, he spends his time snorting drugs and hanging out in clubs with Tad, processing his anguish over his marriage and mother. Eventually a series of events leads him to realize that he needs to change. And that's basically the whole story.
So is it a good movie?
Eh ... it's okay. The main problem is that Michael J. Fox, who plays Jamie, is totally miscast. Don't get me wrong, I love Fox in just about anything but he simply wasn't the right choice for this part. He was cast, I assume, because he was a massive star at the time, still riding the success of Back to the Future (this movie actually came out just before the two sequels and was part of Fox's dramatic interregnum) and he was still being watched by tens of millions of people a week on TV in Family Ties. (Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr. were considered for the part at the time and would have been much more believable as cokeheads because, well ...). Actually the best and most compelling performance is by Keifer Sutherland as Tad -- he's perfectly cast -- and you almost wish the movie was about him! The rest of the cast -- Swoozie Kurtz, Phoebe Cates, the late great John Houseman and Jason Robards -- are fine but they have little to do (Robards is only in a couple of scenes and is drunk in both of them). The movie was directed by a man named James Bridges (who died in the early 1990s) and who had earlier directed the classics The Paper Chase and Urban Cowboy. This did not have the same success as those.
But it's still worth seeing for a couple of reasons.
First, flawed as this movie is, it's interesting to see because it's the kind of earnest, humane, character-driven sort of movie that the big studios hardly make anymore. It's an attempt to do something more interior, more emotionally complex, even if it doesn't entirely succeed and the result is mostly just depressing. Second, it's a fascianting piece of late 1980s NYC slife-of-life, of a world that's both recent and hopelessly in the past, of a city that feels so close but also so far away.
If you want to know what NYC in the 1980s was like, this is the movie to watch.
P.S. It's hard to remember now but, at the time, the author of the book, Jay McInerney, was being heralded as a 1980s F. Scott Fitzgerald. The big success of "Bright Lights, Big City" led many to believe that literary greatness awaited him, that this novel was a solid start and that even better ones would come along ... Yeah, not so much. He wrote several more novels, some better received than others, but none had the success or acclaim of his first one. These days he's better known as a Man-About-Town (he married a Hearst) and a wine critic. But who knows ... maybe one day he will produce his Gatsby but we're still waiting.
I blogged once before that Mr NYC is an underworld, an underground, a secret thing all its own. This blog remains totally uncorrupted, pure and free from any ties that bind. It floats through time and space, hurtling like ... a basebell .. forever into the infinite. In my mind, I combine the notions of the underground and the underworld into the "underwelt."
Allow me to expound.
Recently I decided to re-read Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a massive novel about the second half of 20th Century America. It follows two people, Nick and Klara, who used to live in the Bronx. After a short affair in 1952, their lives go in dramatically different directions until they meet again, briefly, in the Arizona dessert in 1992. As we follow their paths over five decades and 800+ pages, we also encounter their various friends, lovers, and family members, we hurtle through some of the most dramatic events of the Cold War, and we literally end inside the place that would come to rule the incipient millennium -- the Internet. The novel's various plots and touches with history are held together by one thing -- a baseball, the very homerun ball hit by Bobby Thomson on October 3rd, 1951, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World." Tracking that ball over these decades becomes the thread that holds the whole unwieldy empire of the novel together.
So what's the underworld part? How does that relate?
Throughout the novel there is this recurrent theme of trash, of waste, of buried nuclear weapons and radioactive debris, of discarded objects and people, of loss. The threat of nuclear annihilation hangs over the novel, the Cold War ruling it completely, married to the irony that a baseball is roughly the same size as the uranium found inside a nuclear weapon. This is the "underworld" of the novel, the stuff we want to forget, the stuff that falls away (it is also literalized as an early 1930s German movie called Underwelt that, at one point, Klara watches -- as ominous a piece of media as ever existed).
The underworld, the underground, the underwelt, defines itself in opposition to the above ground, outside world. It is a constant friction, a perennial resistance. Like the aforementioned trash -- we want to forget it, we want it out of our lives, but it never goes away.
Quite simply the underwelt is anything buried, anything like ...
... secret worlds, worlds within worlds, worlds not easily found or accessed, worlds that both tempt and repulse us, worlds that can trap or set us free, worlds with no rules, no laws, no obligations, no reason, no compromise, worlds of pleasure and pain and big messes and invisible orders, worlds free of logic or logics that exist on their own terms, worlds that only a chosen few can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, taste, worlds that we create, that belong to us, at odds with ... the outside world.
And what brings these underworlds above ground into the outside world? What makes the imperious ... pervious? What kills the resistance, ends the frictions?
The Media. The Law. Money. Time. Mother Nature. Death.
They exist to root out anything buried, to burrow into these undergrounds, to conquer these underworlds -- to corrupt and change them, to make them public and own them, to put them on display, to disrupt the "underwelt."
So where does the underwelt exist? Where do we find it?
Some are literal, physical, or spiritual, or "other": travel, sex, crime, excitement, horror, secrets, memories, trash, fringe culture, back alleys/basements/attics/hallways. Any place where we believe we can go and do and see and feel and touch and taste and hear whatever we want, all personal inhibitions and societal strictures disregarded.
Now more than ever the Internet is the ultimate "underwelt" as well as the ultimate "underwelt" disruptor -- a paradox that our society struggles with every day and that rips it apart.
But those are not the only underwelts we live in. There is one ultimate underwelt one we all wish we could travel to, one that is forever out of reach -- the past.
The final sentence to the prologue of DeLillo's masterpiece is, "It is all falling indelibly into the past." It can't help but remind me of the final sentence of another 20th century American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." This underwelt exists everywhere, around us and inside us, and yet ... we can't go there. We want to, desperately, we all want to hide away inside it, we all want to, as vernacular of this particular present goes, "quarantine" there.
Yet we can't. We try and fail constantly, it's the most quixotic of quixotic undertakings. Pointless.
The past is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. The past exists but we can't possess it. The past is forever conquered by the future.
This blog explores the underwelt of NYC. It is both within and outside it, both its captor and its hostage. It's part of the present, even the future, and yet ... it is borne back ceaselessly into the indelible past, into the NYC underwelt, both drowning and unable to swim in this empty, overflowing pool.
If you want to explore the Mr NYC underwelt, what it means in general and what it means to me, go here.
Believe it or not, I haven't been watching much TV during this pandemic -- I spend so much time working at my job, taking care of my kids, keeping my house in order, cooking, and occasionally blogging, that my TV time is severely limited. When I do watch something, it's usually for only an hour or so before bed, usually some show that I've recorded or get off a streaming service.
But on the rare occasion when I do catch the news, I've noticed a trend: people who are broadcasting or being interviewed from home, a bookcase behind them, with a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker prominently displayed on a top shelf. Just last night I caught two minutes of Erroll Louis on NY1, and there was the mighty tome looming over his shoulder.
I'm not the only one who's noticed this -- today there's a big article about how numerous politicians, journalists, and other assorted NYC bigwigs who appear on TV regularly are making sure that The Power Broker can be seen by the audience. Some politicians, like Congressman Max Rose of Staten Island, downright admit that they put it there just be seen. Displaying this book so clearly to the public is an perfect example of what we might call "intelligence signaling" -- it says, "look how smart, informed, sophisticated, and New York I am. Oh, and I really, really like to read."
Unlike many of these people who've probably never actually read The Power Broker, yours truly has -- I even blogged about it twelve yearss ago. So there! Other suggested big NYC books to have on your bookshelf to show what a super-sophisticated New Yorker you are: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Underworld by Don DeLillo (might want to throw in White Noise or Mao ii for good measure), maybe some older books like The Great Gatsby, Sister Carrie, and The Age of Innocence, and anything by Vonnegut. And here's 1977 interview with the "power broker" himself, Robert Moses!
On January 1st, 1920, the legal prohibition of alcohol went into effect. Known as Prohibition, or the 18th Amendment, or the Volstead Act, it outlawed the production and sale alcohol to all Americans.
We are still living in the wake of this misbegotten social experiment.
To say that Prohibition failed is an understatement -- along with the Vietnam War, it's one of the most disastrous events in American history. Even though it was fully repealed in 1933 (via the 21st Amendment), Prohibition turned organized crime into the big business that lasts to this day. Suddenly, thanks to bootlegging, mid-level gangsters were multi-millionaires (like Brooklyn-born Al Capone), the tentacles of organized crime invaded every neighborhood in NYC and America, it infiltrated and corrupted government at the local, state and federal level, it turned America upside-down, and Americans on themselves.
Popular culture was also deeply impacted -- The Great Gatsby and The Godfather Saga were inspired, in part, by the culture and legacy of Prohibition. Movies like The Roaring Twenties and The Untouchables, plus TV shows like Boardwalk Empire, are all about Prohibition. More broadly, they are about how American life was corrupted, and continues to be, by this massive mistake.
Here in NYC, New Year's Eve 1919 was one a huge party as people got in their last (they thought) legal drinks. Times Square, in particular, was a hopping place. Naturally, once 1920 hit, speakeasies began popping up all over the city. People (like my own grandfather) learned how to make their own bathtub gin.
Like Vietnam, like Trump, Prohibition wouldn't be the last time Americans got together to make a huge, decades-ruining mistake.
The great cultural radio show Studio 360 (hosted by Mr NYC interviewee Kurt Anderson) has a recurring segment called American Icons that reviews important works from our nation's culture. These include things like the classic novels The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick, special moments like Jimmy Hendrix's performance of the "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, the Harley Davidson motorcycle, even the old TV soap Dallas. The segments look at why these various creations, from different points in American history and in radically different art forms, made a lasting impact on not only American culture but also the American psyche. These American Icon segments are some of my favorite things to listen to.
But wait, 'dere's more!
Recently Studio 360 launched a new New York Icons series that does the same thing for distinctly NYC-centric works. So far: the classic salsa album Siembra, Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", and the musical West Side Story. There are lots of classic movies and books and shows that could qualify as New York Icons, as well as moments like 1951 "Shot Heard 'Round the World", or Mayor LaGuardia reading the comics on WNYC radio, or Studio 54. The possibilities are endless. May I make one suggestion to the creators of the New York Icons series? Maybe you should include blogs. And, if you're including blogs, maybe you could include, oh, I don't know, Mr NYC!
If Little Orphan Annie is NYC's favorite fictional un-parented child, then Eloise is NYC's favorite parent-ignored child. Eloise lived in the Plaza hotel, the legendary home to NYC glamour and sophistication, with her nanny. Her parents were forever traveling, doing everything but raising their child.
The Plaza was the stuff that dreams were made of. Eloise was its spirit.
The Plaza Hotel is so famous, so legendary, so beloved, that just the mention of it makes people feel classy. Besides Eloise, other great works of American culture have taken place there: a pivotal scene in The Great Gatsby and Neil Simon's play Plaza Suite are just a few of them.
Several years ago the Plaza was ruined. It was bought by some sleazy investors who turned it into condos that almost no one lives in. Today the Plaza is a shell, it's glamour and sophistication severely diminished, almost gone. Like NYC itself, everything great about it has been gutted.
But the Plaza's long downfall began in the last 1980s when Donald Trump bought it. In a now legendarily bad deal, he paid too much for it, made all kinds of dumb changes to the characters of the hotel, turned it into a joke, and bankrupted it before selling it at a huge loss. The spirit of the hotel died.
Eloise, in a sense, died.
Much like America now, Trump took something great, turned it into an embarrassing joke, and sped up its reputational descent. Reading this long history of Trump's ownership of the Plaza is a long depressing reminder of how the Plaza, along with America and NYC, have gone on a downward trajectory.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and Pete Seegar taught us well: "To everything there is a season ... a time to live, and a time to die ... a time to break down, and a time to build up ... a time to mourn, and a time to dance ... a time to keep, and a time to cast away ... and a time to every purpose ... turn, turn, turn ..."
The yin and yang, the ups and downs, the hopes and dreams realized and dashed, the constant churn -- or turn -- of existence is something that you only begin to fully appreciate as you age. Life is never a permanent up or down escalator. In fact, as we get older, accepting this constant "to everything there is a season" fact of life -- and not just accepting but cherishing it -- is what makes the craziness and vicissitudes of aging bearable.
It's a basic tenet of survival -- things happen, things change, sometimes for better, often for worst, but they are inevitable. Accepting them with grace is a greater part of wisdom.
Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of people who either can't or won't accept what the Bible and our greatest folk singer taught us. They go in the opposite direction -- trying hopelessly, miserably, quixotically to reclaim their youths, reclaim their pasts, reclaim times gone by. They express this in both harmless and harmful ways, like reveling in cultural nostalgia (harmless) or voting for Trump (harmful). F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this yearn for regression in his last, brilliant line of The Great Gatsby: "So beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
In NYC, we see this "turn" all the time, in ways both big and small. Concurrently, we also see the desire, in varying ways, to recapture the city's past.
For example, the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn: this area has a rather bi-polar identity, as both the ultimate liberal hipster mecca and the home to the very conservative Orthodox Jewish community. But did you know there is highly Italian part of it? It's fading away, and the people there seem to accept that their neighborhood and the times have changed, as this article and its amazing photographs demonstrate.
Two recent deaths also show how people in our past made the city's present and future turn for the better. I love reading about New Yorkers like this because, without them, our city and its culture would be poorer. Genevieve Oswald created and curated the dance archive at the public library for more than 40 years. And Henry Stern was the Parks Commissions off and on for almost 20 years (from 1983-2001), the longest serving and probably most imaginative commissioner since Robert Moses.
*Side note: I tried interviewing Henry Stern for this blog several years ago. I emailed him at an organization he ran, and got a rather weird message in reply that I didn't understand -- it wasn't an outright rejection but it certainly didn't read like an acceptance. It was more like, "If you call this number, something might happen but don't expect it." I never did call. His was one of a few interviews that just never quite happened.
Anyway, they were both great New Yorkers, they made it "turn" for the better. May they RIP.
Moving on ...
I was a teenager in NYC in the 1990s. As much as I'd like to say it was a special time and place to be young, it sure didn't feel that way at the time. Honestly, I was a complete loser (unlike now, where I'm only a partial loser), and back then I had no money, no girlfriends, few real friends, and lots of school work. Le ugh.
However, as the 21st century so far has given us 9/11, two endless wars, more and more mass shootings, more and more man-made natural disasters, the financial crises, and Trump, it's easy to look at the last decade of the 20th century as some of kind of "end of innocence" even though it really wasn't. In recent years, there have been movies about being a teenager in the 1990s, both in NYC and elsewhere, including The Wackness from 2008 and more recently one called Landline (I actually went to high school with the person who made it but didn't know her). This article is about these movies and their 1990s nostalgia is both misplaced and yet totally understandable (also, this year is the 30th anniversary of the classic NYC romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally which, in many ways, was a '90s movie even though it came out in the last year of the 1980s).
Things in NYC and the world have "turned" since the 1990s -- in some ways for better (the smartphone, the smoking ban, lower crime, Barack Obama) and, obviously, for worse. I know for me things have actually "turned" for the better, but even I sometimes looked back misty-eyed at the Clinton era.
And in understanding how the times "turn", no New Yorker explains not only history but power -- and how people in power made history -- than Robert Caro. Author of the Robert Moses tome The Power Broker and the Lyndon Johnson series, Caro has just published a book about his working life (literally titled Working). His advice to aspiring historians? "Turn every page." Turn over the pages, the materials, the people, the metaphorical rocks of the past to understand how our present was formed and how we are forming our future.
NYC, like the world it exists in, turns forever -- and it is we who do the turning.
Wherever you grow up, wherever you spend your formative years from birth to adulthood, it stamps you forever -- no matter how far you may run away from it.
Think of Gatsby. The Long Island millionaire bootlegger is revealed to be, at the end of The Great Gatsby, what he always really was -- a poor boy from North Dakota trying to make good. Think of Ronald Reagan -- yes, he was a Hollywood movie star and US President but he never really stopped being the poor boy from small town Illinois whose dad was a drunk. It haunted him and his years in power, informing his dark view of the world.
You might not be able to "go home again" but your childhood home never leaves you -- no matter how old you get, no matter where you move to.
Being a kid in New York City is something special -- this city is so unique, so weird, so crazy, that growing up here defines you forever. You may move far away, you may grow old -- but NYC kids are always NYC kids no matter where they live or whatever age they are.
Here are two amazing examples of kids from NYC who grew up to define the culture: the movie director and author Peter Bogdanovich and the writer Diane di Prima.
Bogdanovich grew up on Riverside Drive (like me), fell in love with the movies as a kid and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the NYC art house movie scene. Eventually he moved to Hollywood and became a successful (and then not so successful) director of movies like The Last Picture Show and Mask. He had a wild life, dating Cybill Shepherd and Playboy playmates, being best buddies with Orson Welles, acting on The Sopranos -- just an amazing ride. He's an old man now but, as this big interview shows, despite all his successes and failures, despite all his adventures, he's still just the kid from NYC who wanted to be in the movies. And he did it.
I had never heard of Diane di Prima until now but I wish I had: she was the leading female member of the Beat generation. A child of Greenwich Village, she wrote books and poems, taught school and college, and was an innovator in what today we'd call "confessional memoir." She's over 80 now and has had a crazy life but, you get the sense from this article, that Diane is still a young girl from the Village who just wanted to write.
And here's something that all kids in NYC and their parents have to struggle with: at what age can they be allowed to ride the subway alone? Believe it or not, this is a matter of great debate. Honestly, I don't recall how old I was when I started riding the subway by myself (I was 10 when I started riding the bus by myself) but it's one of the "only in NYC" things that defines being a kid in NYC.
" ... gradually I became aware of the old island here
that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new
world. Its vanished trees ... had once pandered in whispers to the last and
greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have
held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time
in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." - F.
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Over the years I've blogged about my love for F. Scott's Fitzgerald's novel 1925 The Great Gatsby.
Yes, it's the Great American Novel, one of best in all of American and world literature.
Yes, it's a beautifully written snapshot of life in Roaring Twenties NYC -- the parties, the bootleggers, the indulgent affluence leading to the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Yes, almost everyone reads it in school and either loves it or hates it (or, more accurately, either "gets it" or doesn't).
Yes, it's been made into movies, including the 1974 version with Robert Redford and the 2013 with Leonardo Di Caprio, two of the biggest stars ever.
Yes, it's the final word on the promise and tragedy of the American dream.
And that's where the novel's "greatness" lies. It shows that the American dream lies betwix and between tragedy and promise, between hope and loss, that both are true at the same time. After all, we're the same nation that declare freedom and human happiness the keys to human dignity in our nation's founding documents -- yet affirmed slavery at the same time.
Jay Gatsby, poor boy from North Dakota, reinvents himself as a Long Island millionaire (thanks to bootlegging) in order to win the heart of his lost love Daisy. But it all goes horribly wrong and he dies. He hope, as Fitzgerald writes, to recreate the past and, even though he fails, the hope endures. It is symbolized by the green light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby stares at, night after night, his hope of winning her love back never dying. Love endures, hope endures, even when tragedy is everywhere.
Another thing that attests to the greatest of Gatsby is that you don't have to be an American to appreciate or be moved by it. Australian Baz Luhrman, who directed the 2013 Great Gatsby, writes movingly here about his love for the novel. Best of all, he reminds us that, as free people, as hopeful people, we should all "live for the green light."
F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn't have said it better. And these days, like the novel itself, it's more relevant than ever.
Taking a pause from the political happenings of today, I thought it would be nice to simply appreciate the beauty of NYC -- specifically, the romantic allure that is the 59th Street Bridge (otherwise known as the Queensborough Bridge or the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge. Whatevs).
F. Scott Fitzgerald memorialized it in The Great Gatsby, Woody Allen did so again in Manhattan, and Simon & Garfunkel wrote one of their greatest songs about it. 'Enuff said.
One of the reasons why yours truly hasn't been blogging lately is because I was preparing for -- and then recovering from -- a trip to Louisville, Kentucky. The jaunt was for a friend's bachelor party and, needless to say, much about it cannot be revealed ('cause, you know, me and my boys are real wild and crazy guys) but we did do a bunch of stuff that you, dear reader, might find interesting. So here goes:
First, we stayed downtown at the Galt House Hotel. To say it's big is an understatement. It's a massive two building complex by the Ohio river, and lots of conventions are held there. In fact, when we were there last weekend, there was a Fandom Fest going on. It's basically a big horror/sci-fi convention and it was quite a sight to see all the people dressed at various weird characters -- and I don't think I've ever seen more people with tattoos outside a punk rock club. But aside from that, the hotel was very nice and, for a very low price, you can get a ridiculously big suite. Highly recommended.
Since it was a short trip, and since Louisville is not known as a gourmet capital of America, we did not have a lot of fancy meals out. However, our big dinner was at a place called Proof on Main which is also downtown. While not an incredibly fancy restaurant, it's quite elegant and, more importantly, it has really good food. Their food is grown and brought in from their own farm and I had, easily, the best pork chop that I've ever had in my entire life, along with a delicious octopus appetizer. (Farm fresh food is, truly, unbeatable). What also makes this restaurant a treat are the cocktails. I had a wonderful Sazerac but, best of all, I relished one of their phenomenal in-house cocktails called a Close Call. It was so good that I took a picture of the recipe and post it for you here:
I would strongly recommend making this if you are a cocktail making kinda person. Another interesting thing about this restaurant is that it's attached to a small modern art museum. On your way to and from the bathroom you can view some actually quite good modern art. Also, the bathroom itself is a trip: in front of the urinal is a one-way mirror covered by a waterfall looking out into the halls. It's definitely one of the more interesting bathroom going experiences you could ever hope to have.
Later on, we had drinks in the hotel bar of the Seelbach Hotel. It's one of the old, elegant hotels of Louisville and it is actually immortalized in the greatest 20th century American novel -- and that quintessential New York story -- The Great Gatsby. If you don't recall, the characters Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker are from Louisville (Daisy was "by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisvile") and, in the back story of Daisy's relationship with both Gatsby and Tom, we learn that when Tom and Daisy got married there and he "hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel." By the way, the hotel today retains that some old money elegance although the bar is surprisingly small. Still, it's where the beautiful rich people of that town still hang out (so, needless to say, yours truly was a big out of place).
If Louisville is famous for anything it's probably the following two things: bourbon and horse racing. No trip to Louisville would be complete without visiting either a distillery or Churchill Downs, home of the annual Kentucky Derby and probably the most famous racing track in the whole country.
Our distillery trip was to a place called Buffalo Trace, located in the state capital of Frankfort about an hour's drive outside Louisville. This distillery is something like two hundred years old and, amazingly, they still make bourbon whiskey in much the same way as they did back then. I learned that the reason Kentucky is the bourbon capital of America is because there is a lot of limestone water available that makes the whiskey good. Also, they still to this day store whiskey in wooden drums in wooden warehouses. In hot weather (and it was ungodly hot last weekend) this is quite risky -- especially since a drum of whiskey contains about $6000 of the product and they have hundreds of thousands of drums. If a fire ever broke out, well ... you do the math. However, I greatly enjoyed the visit since it was my first distillery trip and I picked up delicious cream bourbon that is only available in the state of Kentucky. Unlike Bailey's Irish Cream, this whiskey is made with real cream, let's just say, the taste is vastly superior.
Finally, Churchill Downs. Ah yes, a day (or two) at the races. The boys and I placed a number of bets and some of us even made money. I won a few bucks (but mostly did not) but I did enjoy seeing what is probably the most beautiful race track anywhere outside Britain. As the name implies, Churchill Downs is very much a re-creation and continuation of the British racing tradition. Here in the American heartland was little piece of England. The horse race announcers were British. Even better, a few minutes before a race, a guy dressed in an elegant red racing outfit would come out and blow his trumpet. It was quite Edwardian. The races took place every half hour and were thrilling. The track was long and winding and these were the best jockeys in the world. This made betting hard -- you would bet on the horses with the best odds and then they'd lose badly. If you ever visit Churchill Downs, get some good betting advice.
On my last day, shortly before going to the airport, we dipped into the Louisville Visitor's Center. It was very small but they did have this interesting exhibit.
Yes, besides bourbon and horses, Louisville is the home of Kentucky Fried Chick -- and they're darn proud of it!
So, all in all, a good trip. Louisville has a very distinct culture and it probably the most under appreciated party town in America. If you go, you can have a really good time.
New York magazine has an interesting cover feature this week called The Greatest New York Ever. It is trying to determine what were the greatest times, and what were the greatest cultural artifacts to come out of this city, in the last 100+ years? Plus, who was the greatest mayor? There are articles, transcripts of round table discussions, and even charts are graphs all trying to determine what was "great" about NYC in the last century.
This seems like a daunting, impossible task but its worth checking out.
Basically they break things down into various categories (greatest movie, book, TV show, mayor, building, athlete, etc.) and consider various cases for who and what should be considered New York's "greatest." The criteria used to determine this is slippery and totally subjective so, naturally, no one or nothing should be conclusively called "the greatest." But since this is fun, I will take a slab at considering who and what I consider NYC's greatest. Some of my choices might seem boringly obvious but, at the same time, my reasoning it hard to argue with:
Greatest Mayor: LaGuardia. The pint-sized politician guided this city through America's darkest days -- the Great Depression and World War II -- and NYC came out of it on the other end as the world's greatest city. This was no easy task and, considering the obstacles he faced, his achievement was amazing. No one has topped him since.
Greatest Musical:West Side Story. Besides being a collaboration of 20th century musical theater's greatest talents (Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein), this 1950s update of Romeo and Juliet set in the gritty streets of our city still has resonance today.
Greatest TV:All in the Family and Law and Order. All in the Family (no, not Seinfeld) is the most realistic sitcom about New Yorkers in any borough and no show set in this city made you feel it in your bones more than Law and Order.
Greatest Athlete: Babe Ruth. 'Nuff said.
Greatest Building: The Empire State Building. Iconic to its core. built in the 1930s during the Depression, a sign of enduring stregnth at a moment of despair, this great structure encapsulates the romance and grandeur of NYC like no other.
Greatest Novel:The Great Gatsby. The greatest American novel of the last 100 years perfectly captures the restless spirit and sometimes tragic reality of the American dream -- and New York is a vital, almost starring character in the plot.
Greatest Film:Manhattan. No it's not the greatest movie ever (but it's up there) but no other movie makes such unabashed love to the city -- and no other movie captures the New York personality more perfectly.
Greatest Song: "New York State of Mind" by Billy Joel. Combining rhythm and blues and soul, this soaring song about leaving and coming back to NYC puts the city in your soul like no other.
Greatest Artwork: Anything by Andy Warhol. He defined what it meant to be an artist in this city and his work (like the Campbell Soup cans) still resonates and influences to this day.
Greatest Year: 2011. The present is always the best time to be in NYC.
You read that right. Believe it or not, the city has decided to name something after a mayor not named LaGuardia -- in this case, a bridge bearing the name of Mayor Edward I Koch (1978-1989).
And which bridge will be forced to shed its identity for this new moniker? The victim is none other than the Queensboro bridge itself -- that gorgeous, amazing 101-year old structure spanning the East River, nailing together Long Island City and the Upper East Side, immortalized in The Great Gatsby, the movies Manhattan and Terms of Endearment, and by Simon and Garfunkel (in "The 59th Street Bridge" song).
As Ed Koch himself might have said, I think naming this wonderful bridge after this repulsive man is "OUTRAGEOUS!"
I hardly ever use foul language on here but, if this name change goes through, it should be dubbed "Monument to an Asshole" or perhaps "Monument to New York's Most Corrupt Mayor Since Jimmy Walker."
You heard that right. The Ed Koch administration was so corrupt that several people in his administration went to jail and a Queens borough president committed suicide. It even spawned a book by the great journalists Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield, City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York. When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents used to listen to a news program on WQXR called "New York At 6." Ed Koch's administration was so corrupt that almost every night there was some sleazy revelation of corruption that old Ed always claimed to no nothing about. Eventually my parents started calling "New York At 6", "Who's Indicted Tonight?"
During Ed Koch's reign, the homeless population in the city surged, the squeeze on the middle class began, developers started building huge buildings with apartments no one could afford, and the AIDS crises began -- a crises that Ed Koch, himself a closeted homosexual, totally ignored.
Not a really good legacy. The best thing Koch did as mayor was balance the budget in his first term. After that, his remaining two terms, it was all downhill -- or, when it came to crime, it was up and up. By the time Ed left office in 1989 (thrown out by the voters), the crime rate had spiked way the hell back up ... and for some reason, then and now, it was and is blamed on his successor David Dinkins. It was Dinkins who then dramatically expanded the size of the police force and was responsible for historic plunge in NYC's crime rate. Sadly, when it comes to history and the city's collective memory, its Dinkins who gets all the blame for the rising crime rate, not Koch, and its Rudy Giuliani who gets all the credit reducing crime when it was already falling under Dinkins.
So why don't we name the bridge after Dinkins?
Do you think the fact that Dinkins is black is the reason he gets no credit for reducing crime? "Oh no, of course not," most people will say. (Sort of like a current black president who gets no credit for fixing the economic mess left to him by his white predecessor).
It's amazing to see, when it comes to Ed Koch, how the historical slate has been wiped clean. You never hear about the historic corruption in his administration, about the rising crime rate, about how the middle class in this city began its long, sad decline. Instead, when you hear about Ed Koch today, it's all about what a great "personality" he is, how "lively" he is, and how he saved NYC from fiscal disaster.
It's all a bunch of crap. It was Governor Hugh Carey who saved this city. And, to be fair, Hugh Carey is getting his due -- they're going to name the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel after him.
This just isn't right. A tunnel vs. a bridge. Which would you rather have named after you?
By the way, it's a total political payoff by Bloomberg to name the bridge after Koch, who supported the billionaire's three elections. Disgusting. Pathetic. And business as usual.
I hope to God the city council votes down this name change but you know they won't. After all, they all gave themselves an extra term -- there's no depth they won't sink to.
So farewell beautiful bridge that connects two great boroughs. Your spirit will remain but sadly your identity will be gutted. Ed Koch deserves this city's contempt, not reverence.
When it comes to renaming the Queensboro bridge, Mr NYC is not feeling groovy.
After eighty-six years -- 86! -- New York's favorite orphan is going away. The final Little Orphan Annie cartoon is running today, and tomorrow -- tomorrow! tomorrow! -- her newspaper life will be no more. With the decline of newspapers and the cartoon industry, Annie was currently appearing in less than 20 newspapers. So the end was nigh. But eighty-six years is a respectable, ripe old age and marks an extraordinary run.
And yet tomorrow Annie fans will have to clear away the cobwebs and the sorrow.
The first Annie cartoon ran on August 5, 1924. At that time, Calvin Coolidge was President, the Charleston was the hot dance craze, movies were still silent, F. Scott Fitzgerald was still writing The Great Gatsby, and Adolf Hitler was just some nut hanging around German beer halls. To say it was a different time is a bit of an understatement.
I will admit that I never really read the Little Orphan Annie cartoons. Also, I was a little too young to go to the musical when it was still on Broadway. (The Annie musical ran from 1977-1982 and is now legendary because one of the Annies was a young girl named Sarah Jessica Parker.) Apparently there is a planned Broadway revival for 2012.
However, my first movie going experience, or at least the first movie I can remember going to, was the 1982 Annie movie. It wasn't a great movie in retrospect but at the time I loved it. Even though it was set at the depths of the depression, Annie was such a bright, fun little girl who was so nice to everyone that she was exactly the kind of friend a little five-year boy like me wanted. And the movie presented a romantic, beautiful New York that can only exist in the movies. Thus I've always had a little affection for Annie and am sad to see her go.
So goodbye, Annie. You made generations and generations of people happy. And remember:
"When I'm stuck a day That's gray, And lonely, I just stick out my chin And Grin, And Say, Oh!
The sun'll come out Tomorrow So ya gotta hang on 'Til tomorrow Come what may Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya Tomorrow! You're always A day A way!"
