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!
As congestion pricing takes effect in NYC, we may very well be seeing the eclipse of the car in NYC -- or at least in lower Manhattan. Less cars, more money to public transit it music to the ears of any real New Yorker.
Take that Robert Moses!
But people still loves their cars -- I get it.
And even if you don't love cars (like me), you might have enjoyed theSaturday morning NPR show Car Talk (like me) that ran from 1986 to 2012 -- syndicated nationally from Boston and broadcast locally here on WNYC.
If you want to listen to some old Car Talk episodes, WNYC has a massive archive of old shows that are a pleasant diversion from the miseries of our time -- and love letter to the all-American automobile.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's brilliant book about the career of NYC master builder Robert Moses.
I've blogged A LOT about Robert Moses over the years and you can find it all, including my own review of The Power Broker, right here (there's also a big exhibition about it at the New-York Historical Society).
When Caro wrote in the book in the last 1960s and early 1970s, he was a young man looking to reveal the story behind how Moses built NYC. By this time, Moses himself was an old man, looking back at his controversial legacy.
Now, fifty years later, Moses is long dead and Caro himself is an old man, looking back on the legacy of his book about the man and what he did to NYC.
Below you can see a 1977 interview that Moses gave to publica television about his career and the book that made him infamous. And then you can watch a very recent 2024 interview with Care reflecting how his great book came to be.
I'm a lover of history, not just because it's the greatest story ever told, but because it links to and tells us so much about our present -- and where we're going in the future.
When you link past, present and future in something, you get a sense of timelessness, a touch of the infinite.
The ultimate links can be several things -- including documents or records of events created in real time in the past or of places where history has happened.
You might not think that a Greenwich Village political club would be a fascinating hub of history -- but it is. The Village Independent Democrats is more than 70 years old and has been responsible for producing very important New York politicians including Mayor Ed Koch. The club is now archiving its records, which include meetings with Jane Jacobs when she was fighting Robert Moses's Lower Manhattan Expressway and documents about other important political events both from Greenwich Village and NYC history.
Also, a piece of NYC history that will hopefully see new life is the Metro movie theater on 100th street and Broadway. I remember this place as a kid and saw lots of movies there. It's a beautiful, unique, art deco theater with a beautiful stone insignia above it's huge marquee, the quintessential movie palace (it was even in a movie itself -- it's where Woody Allen goes to see a Marx Brothers movie at end of Hannah and Her Sisters, where he learns the meaning of life). Sadly the Metro has been closed since 2005 and multiple attempts to reopen it (including as an Alamo Drafthouse) have failed. However, there are currently negotiations to reopen it as a move theater/community space and it could be a great new addition to the Upper West Side which has, sadly, become something of a movie desert in the last several years. If it reopens, it will be a piece of NYC movie history living again.
When past, present and future link together in NYC, you see and feel how truly timeless this city really is.
"Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives ..."
Thus spake Saint Augustine. Or an old soap opera. Either way time has been passing quickly lately because life has been quite hectic lately and blogging has gotten away from me lately -- until now!
But as I compose my first real post in over a month, the passage of time is very much on my mind -- and a couple recent events and remembrances have focused my mind on how people and things come and go, and either leave a lasting impression ... or don't.
First, a passing: the brilliant screenwriter and movie director Robert Towne recently died at the age of 89. He wrote and directed several films but the movie that catapulted him to cinematic greatness was his script for the 1974 classic Chinatown (which I've blogged about here several times). Besides being the most perfect screenplay ever written, Chinatown is also probably the best American movie ever made about the dark soul of a city and the forces that shape it. While it's about LA and not NYC, the movie has echoes of the real-life works of Robert Moses in NYC and how, to quote Chinatown, "he made this city." Towne understood the giant, secretive, menacing forces that surround and suffocate us, how cities are largely the products of deeply corrupt and powerful men, and how all of us are subject to their will and live within their warped creations. Hence the movie's iconic final line "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." But we'll never forget Robert Towne, his great legacy, and what "makes" our city.
Second, another passing but one nowhere near as sad. As I've also blogged about several times, one of my favorite shows ever is the early 1990s sci-fic drama Quantum Leap -- about a brilliant scientist who travels back in time, "leaping" into the life of various people and "putting right where once went wrong," changing history "for the better." It had many great episodes, including several in NYC. A couple years ago it had a reboot that I had high hopes for -- only to see them dashed. The show was a mess. Instead of focusing on the humanity of the characters who were to be saved, it chose to be some kind of weird thriller with numerous and confusing storylines, too many poorly developed characters, and no real chemistry between the actors. It failed completely. Now it's been cancelled, put out of its misery, and hopefully it will be forgotten -- while the great original show will hopefully be remembered and rewatched for decades to come.
Third, it's hard to believe but it's been over a quarter of a century since Sex and the City first hit our airwaves. It's now become a part of NYC's culture and identity but, back in 1998, it was just a little show struggling to find an audience. The pilot was directed by Susan Seidelman who also made the funky 1982 NYC movie Smithereens which I reviewed back in 2017. In this recent big interview, Seidelman remembers the making of Smithereens, the S&TC pilot as well as her classic 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan. In many ways these movies and TV shows define late 20th-century NYC -- and Susan Seidelman's vision made them happen.
Fourth, an anniversary, a big one: WNYC radio is 100 years old! Yes, broadcasting in this town has existed for more than a century. Probably the most powerful public radio station in the country, WNYC has had a tremendous legacy -- and present day relevance -- to the life of this city. Besides going back and reading my numerous posts about WNYC, you can also listen to a history of the station here and also a recreation of the station's first July 8th, 1924 broadcast here.
All things and people pass, come and go -- but so much else lasts (like this blog!). And, for that, yours truly is truly grateful.
For the first time in way too long, I was able to do something I had done many times before kids and COVID took over my life -- go to a movie at Film Forum. And nothing could have been a more quintessential NYC experience that seeing a documentary there about two titanic New Yorkers, Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, called Turn Every Page.
For those who don't already know, Robert Caro is the author of the 1974 classic book The Power Broker about the NYC "master builder" Robert Moses who shaped this city in ways beyond comprehension. I've blogged a lot about Moses and this book over the years to the point of absurdity.
I haven't done so about Gottlieb but he is no less a legend -- he is not only a book editor but is probably the most successful book editor of the late 20th, early 21st centuries. Since the 1950s, he's edited books by the likes of Michael Crichton and John la Carre, he edited all of Toni Morrison's novels, he not only edited but also came up with the title for Catch-22 (which has become a cultural catchphrase), he edited President Bill Clinton's autobiography in 2004 -- the legacy of the authors he's worked with and the books he's worked on is immense. And he's edited each of Robert Caro's books, starting with The Power Broker and then, for the last 40+ years, his multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson, the last book of which they're still working on together.
Turn Every Page is about the working relationship of these two men over the decades, and how it's evolved but also stayed largely the same. They love each other dearly but aren't afraid to fight or disagree about their work, their passion for it being so great. Directed by Gottlieb's daughter Lizzie, it's a very affectionate portrait of these two men but also a very detailed, sober look at the extremely hard work of writing and editing -- they even spend time talking about semi-colons and stuff like that.
And that's what I loved about this documentary -- it's about the work just as much as it is about the personalities. It's about how these men actually get these books written, about how hard it is, about how exacting and time-consuming it is to create great, memorable books. It's also wonderful to see the story of two NYC boys who dreamed big and achieved greatness. But most of all, it focuses on the work, the toughness and demands of the work, and how there are no shortcuts.
The documentary's title, Turn Every Page, is based on something that Robert Caro's boss told him when he was a young reporter at Newsday and was starting out doing investigating work: "Turn every page, turn every goddamn page!"
If you pay attention to the news, the media is full of hysterical fearmongering, trying to convince the denizens of this 8.8 million strong burg that it's a crime ridden hell-hole, a dystopia of sorts.
This, of course, is nonsense -- crime remains WAY lower than it was even twenty-years ago, the city is quite safe -- but fear sells, helps otherwise unpopular (i.e. Republican) politicians get elected, the media does everything to help them, and they use it to pursue an agenda in government that no one actually likes.
It's happened before and will go on and on, ad infinitum.
New York City is in no ways a dystopia but the image of the city as some kind of scary place persists. Obviously this has been captured in movies such as Taxi Driver and The Warriors from the 1970s, at a time when the city really did seem to be verging on the dystopic.
Two other movies, very different in premise and plot, show another way that NYC might be dystopic. They couldn't be more different in story and tone, as one is totally surreal and out-there while the other is disturbingly believable and possible -- and something some New Yorkers have really dealt with.
Escape from New York (1981) by John Carpenter is about how Manhattan island, in the year 1997(!) has become a literal wall-off prison where the most dangerous criminals have been sent to live out their lives in an abandoned urban jungle. When Air Force One crashes into the island (thanks to terrorists from the Soviet Union which the USA is at war with), a prisoner named Snake (Kurt Russell) is sent-in to rescue the President in 24-hours -- or he'll literally die. Along the way, he recruits a bizarro cab driver played by Ernest Borgnine and a man from Snake's past played by Harry Dean Stanton. There's also a hot chick and lots of weirdos who follow Snake on his mission, trying to free the president from the crime lord who rules this hell-hole played by, of all people, Isaac Hayes (he of "Shaft" fame). While the premise from Escape from New York is insane, it's a remarkably straight-forward and smartly paced action movie -- and unlike movies today that are non-stop action sequences with tiny bits of plot, in this movie the plot drives the action, and there actually isn't that much violence. And Kurt Russell shows what a great leading man he is, and why he's had a very long career. If you want to see the ultimate NYC as dystopia movie, this is it.
Then there's Single White Female (1992). Now this is a scary movie -- it should have been called These White Bitches Are Crazy! This is a believably dystopic story -- in fact, the only unbelievable thing about it is that two underemployed women could afford a huge apartment in the Ansonia. This is about how the greatest danger you can find in this city might literally be in your own home! Bridget Fonda stars as a woman named Allie who finds out that her handsome fiance is cheating so she kicks him out and gets a roommate named Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, brilliant as always). At first Allie and Hedy get along great, become friends, and life seems good. But when Allie gets back together with the fiance, all goes wrong -- Hedy becomes jealous, starts to pretend to be Allie, tries to seduce the fiance, tries to take over herself and become Allie -- and all hell breaks loose. This is the NYC dystopia in the form of the roommate from hell, how our worst dystopia isn't a city full of criminals but a house full of craziness. It's also just a really good mainstream thriller, the kind of movie they don't make anymore.
Of course, if NYC had someone who helped to make the city a transportation dystopia that persists to this day -- Robert Moses, the 20th century "master builder" who rammed highways all over town and starved public transportation. There's a new play about him on Broadway played by, of all people, Ralph Fiennes called Straight Line Crazy. Believe it or not, even though it's about a famous New Yorker, this play is a fully British production -- Brit actor, writer, and director, first premiering at the National Theater in London. This news story about the play is fascinating -- watching Ralph Fiennes describe how Robert Moses wanted to thrust a highway in Lower Manhattan is bizarre and amazing to watch.
You might not have realized it but quietly, diligently, for the last fifteen years, roughly the lifespan of this blog, tunnels have been dug under the East River and East Side of Manhattan. Also, a brand new train terminal has been built underneath Grand Central Central that, in December, will open and be known as Grand Central Madison.
Grand Central Madison (I assume it'll become known as GCM), will connect all 11 lines of the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Station. This means that commuters from Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island who work or want to visit the East Side of Manhattan, now won't be forced to go to Penn Station on West 34th Street and then tack east.
Instead ... they'll be right there, able to get out and walk to their desired location or hope on the 4/5/6 subway lines.
This is, in a word, huuuugggeee -- this is the most massive transformation of NYC transportation in the last century. It's a bigger deal than any of the bridges that Robert Moses built because it will greatly reduce commuting times in and out of Manhattan and will, no doubt, transform the economy of the city.
Private corruption leads to public corruption -- the personal venality of those in power is inflicted upon the masses in terrible ways. We are seeing this in extremis with the morally rotten and massively corrupt presidency of Donald Trump. Although this reality horror show will end a week from today, its stench will linger over us for a long time afterwards.
And that's the overarching problem -- even when bad powerful men go away, we the people remain stuck with their corrupt works for years and decades to come.
If you've ever read The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of NYC "master builder" Robert Moses, or seen the movie Chinatown, a fictional retelling of engineer William Mulholland bringing water to Los Angeles, the central concept within both is that the personal corruption of these powerful men fueled and warped the development of our nation's two biggest cities -- and, even now, decades after their deaths, we are literally living in the crime scenes i.e. the cities they made.
And that's the basic idea behind Edward Norton's 2019 movie Motherless Brooklyn: the city is a crime.
A very liberal adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn is Norton's attempt to take the basic framework of Chinatown (a private detective investigating a weird crime) and marry it with the facts in The Power Broker (an unelected master planner who builds in NYC with dictatorial power) to make a 21st-century fable about the corrupt shaping of our city.
A thumbnail of the plot: a private detective with Tourette's syndrome named Lionel Essrog investigates the murder of one his partners. His investigation leads him to Harlem where he meets a woman named Laura Rose who works with someone named Gabby Horowitz (based on Jane Jacobs) who is fighting the redevelopment plans of city commisioner Moses Randolph (based on you-know-who). Essrog eventually meets up with a man named Paul, another brilliant but failed city planner, who turns out to be Randolph's brother and who knows a dark secret that could bring him down. Essrog discovers that Randolph's redevelopment plan is just a scam to kick poor black people out of their homes and sell their property to private developers. Paul explains to Essrog how Randolph's power is beyond anyone else's in government and how, as the head of an unelected public authority, he is totally unaccountable to anyone. Events ensue and Essrog comes to realize that Laura's life is in danger -- unless he can somehow get to Randolph and blackmail him with his secret. There's lots of double-crossing and complexity that makes this a very noirish yarn.
It's a story about the power behind the power, the secret history of NYC, and the darkness behind it all. Also, it's a tale about the basic evils of gentrification and how the "public good" is often a cover for private greed.
The cast is excellent: Norton is compelling as Essrog, Alec Baldwin is ominous as Randolph, and Willem Dafoe is the standout as the tortured Paul. The cast includes Michael K. Wiliams, Bobby Cannavale, a cameo by Bruce Willis, Cherry Jones as Gabby, and a very good actress named Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Laura.
Norton is a fine director and the movie holds your attention to a point but, ultimately, the story feels slight in relation to the heights of its ambition. You can tell, in a way, that Norton is suffering from the classic "anxiety of influence" -- he is cleary in awe of, and has great reverence for, Chinatown and The Power Broker and the original novel, that his efforts with this film feel stunted, as much as influenced, by them. Also, I think there's an inherit problem when you're trying to make a movie that's partly inspired by a novel but also trying to incorporate plot lines and factoids from another movie and another book. It's just too much -- and while a noble attempt it makes the story and its themes feel more jumbled than inspired.
Still, it's an interesting concept for a movie -- and it's more of a concept than a movie in my opinion -- but that's why I recommend people see Motherless Brooklyn along with enjoying it's wonderful cast.
In the movie Chinatown, the evil Noah Cross says this twice about his former business partner Hollis Mulwray. Cross both loved and hated him. Mulwray built a dam that brought water to LA and made them rich. But when Mulwray refused to build another dam -- as part of a dark plot to steal water and land in the Valley, and to make LA even bigger -- Cross murdered him. Still, even after that, Cross pays tribute to his victim's great legacy.
Cross and Mulwray are entirely fictional, obviously, but Mulwray is based on the very real William Mulholland who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, bringing massive amounts of fresh water to the young desert city. Within a decade its population has tripled -- oh yes, Mulholland made that city.
New York City is, of course, much older and not on a desert. And if you asked most people today who "made" NYC, they might point to Robert Moses or argue that no one person is responsible for "making" NYC in its 400-something year history.
But they would be wrong. One man did make NYC, at least the city of five boroughs we live in today: Andrew Haswell Green.
I blogged about him briefly a few years ago, specifically citing a Bowery Boys episode about the man. Yet I realize that I have not really given him his due: Green truly is the "Father of Greater New York." His vision, his efforts, his ideas, were resposible for: Central Park, The New York Public Library,The Metropolitan Museum, The Bronx Zoo, The American Museum of Natural History, Riverside Drive, Morningside Park, Fort Washington Park. And Green chaired the committee, and had the vision, to consolidate the five counties of Bronx, New York, Queens, Kings, and Richmond into one city -- Greater New York.
So yes -- he made this city! The NYC we live in today was Green's vision.
And the reason, I think, I never properly gave him his due it because our city, his city, hasn't done it either.
Remember in Godfather II when Hyman Roth says about his (also) dead former partner Moe Green that he was responsible for creating Las Vegas? And remember when Roth yells that there isn't even a signpost or plaque commorating this "great man"?
Well, in Mr NYC's opinion, the memorials to Green NYC are extremely insufficiant. There's a small park on the Upper East Side and a bench in Central Park. There's also an island up in the Niagara River named after him. But these minor memorials don't seem to, in any way, really give the man his due. He doesn't even have a street or a building named after him! Ed Koch has a friggin' major bridge named after him -- but not this guy? Green needs to have a massive memorial named after him, a huge tribute.
As great as NYC is, it’s important for New Yorkers not to get too arrogant – sometimes other cities beat us in certain things. One of them is Kansas City – and I’m not talking about the 2015 World Series where the KC Royals demolished the Mets in 4-to-1 games. No, KC is superior not only to NYC but just about every other American city when it comes to one of the best things to exist in any city – public fountains.
I love fountains. They provide such great psychological comfort, a momentary reprieve, from the concrete density and madness of the city. The water gushes up and out of a specifically designed structure, teasing the other manmade creations around it, tempting the people walking by with the inherent freedom, mystery, and sexiness that water provides. They also make for great meeting place, spaces where people can congregate, hang, commiserate, read, just feel better about themselves – the soothing sites and sounds of the water in the background permeating their minds and souls with residual comfort.
So what makes for a great city fountain? Why does KC do fountains so well? And what can NYC and other cities learn from KC about becoming a great fountain town?
I posed these vital questions to Kansas City blogger Ben Johnson, who wrote a great post about the fountains of his town. He was kind enough to answer these questions as well as provide even more great insights on the beauty, power, and meaning of city fountains.
For me, fountains – i.e. water spraying out in the middle of the metal and concrete city – is kind of magical. They seem to fuse the natural world with the man-made world. What is it that you love about public fountains?
Fusing of the natural and man-made is certainly part of it. They also can also signal in a very visible and audible way that a space is a gathering place. That’s an important thing, especially given the ways that this country has sought to undermine and destroy every conceivable public good over the past forty years, parks included. A few weeks ago I went to read on a bench next to a fountain about half a mile from my house, and as I was reading some folks were sitting on their lawn across the street having a drink, and some kids were playing a bizarrely lopsided game of hide-and-go-seek in the trees nearby (one kid was as bad at hide-and-go-seek as I’ve ever seen anyone be at anything; I wish I could have somehow placed bets against him). Regardless, without talking to anyone, I felt like I was part of a community—it was a really nice, low-stakes moment.
What makes for a good public fountain? The design? The way the water sprays? Something else?
I suppose “the way the water sprays” is pretty important—KC calls itself the city of fountains, but more than we would like to admit, it’s the city of out-of-order fountains. Beyond that, I guess context is a lot of what matters. There is a really lovely gently burbling fountain in a small courtyard in the back corner of the Kauffman Gardens in KC, while on the other hand that giant fountain out in front of the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas is pretty badass, but if those fountains traded places they’d both seem ridiculous.
How many fountains does KC have, and how did it become the city of fountains?
The “City of Fountains Foundation,” which is an organization dedicated to keeping the most prominent fountains in the city running, claims there are more than 200 “registered fountains” in the metro, which is a lot for a not-especially-big city. I suspect the actual number is higher. As far as how it came to be, while there are fountains in KC that date to before WWI, the real push for fountain-building came from JC Nicholls, who was a private land developer whose company designed a huge swath of the city from the 1910’s to the 1930’s. The commercial and residential areas he developed are very fountain-dense, and he definitely made fountains a “thing” in KC. Nicholls is a fascinating figure—he’s somewhat like Robert Moses in that he profoundly shaped the geography of his city for generations to come, and did so in very damaging ways. In the case of Nicholls, the damage specifically has to do with developing aggressively segregated neighborhoods.
What are some of your favorite fountains in KC?
The Romanelli Fountain is the one I discussed above—it’s a really wonderful example of the little fountains tucked into residential neighborhoods that can be found around KC. It’s also a clear example of the fact that little fountains tucked into residential neighborhoods cost money—the houses around there aren’t cheap. The Westwood Park neighborhood fountain is a relatively humble affair, but it’s a couple blocks from where I lived when I first moved to KC, so I’ve always been a little attached to it. The Plaza (the shopping area Nicholls developed in the 1920’s) is filled with lots of weird little statuary fountains. I’ve always really liked the Poseidon Fountain, especially in the fall when they put a red football jersey on the old bastard. Beyond that, there are some really beautiful fountains at Powell Gardens out on the edge of the metro, and the fountains at Kauffman Stadium are always fun to see.
What are some of your favorite fountains that you’ve seen in other cities?
The one that jumps immediately to mind is the FDR Memorial in DC. That’s a powerful, contemplative place to visit, and the waterfalls add a lot to the effect. The big fountain in Grant Park in Chicago has been somewhat ruined for all Gen Xers by Married...with Children, but it’s nevertheless very cool.
Did you ever see any fountains in NYC that you liked? How can NYC become a better fountain town?
Of course, as with everything about New York, it’s mostly about grandeur—the fountains in at Rockefeller Center are very cool, and the one I can’t help but think of as the Angels in America fountain in Central Park is gorgeous. Bryant Park would be a great space even without the fountain, but still, it adds something. I can’t say that I remember much in the way of “little neighborhood fountains” in NYC from my years on the East Coast, but of course, the nature of New York is to make Midwesterners slack-jawed rather than detail-oriented, so I probably just missed them. Lord knows NYC needs no advice from the likes of me.
Au contraire, NYC needs lots of advice from the likes of you.
Amongst the many worlds contained in NYC, the Rockaways is easily the most beautiful. It really is a world all its own. It's the pennisula of the archipelago that is the city, sprouting out of the southeastern part of Queens into its own magical land.
There are nine neighborhoods that make it up, almost all of them beach communities that feel more like Miami or Southern California than the Big Apple. About 130,000 people live there, enjoying a different kind of life than most of their fellow New Yorkers. The beaches are vast and beautiful, the streets mostly quiet. And, in a city that operates on high octane neuroses, it's a calm, chill, blissed out oasis.
There's A LOT to learn about the Rockaways. In fact, The New York Times did one of their "36 Hours In ..." features on just the Rockaways alone. The history of this pennisula is profound -- it literally began as a vacation resort for many city residents, a relaxed beachy escape contained within the city limits where people had second homes. Robert Moses, of course, got his mits on it, constructing roads and bridges that directly connected it to the rest of the city. And, more recently, it got hit hard by Hurricaine Sandy, and, although it survived, it is still recovering.
So, if you really wanna know more about the Rockaways ...
Read about the experience of a young teacher who worked at a Catholic School there. Read about what you can do there in 36 hours. And read Mr NYC's own past Rockaways coverage and coverage of Sandy back in 2012. New York City is a place you can never stop discovering.
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!
There are many cities within NYC -- the public housing projects, jails, hospitals, public schools, ports, airports -- that, along with NYC's 300 neighborhoods, make you realize that we are many cities joined and commingling together.
But there's one city within NYC teaming with residents that they literally do not live in -- the cemeteries.
The five boroughs are replete with them. Every borough is full of dead bodies under the ground or within the tombs of these places. There's even a big article and new book about these "cities of the dead" in NYC -- and the fascinating stories these corpses tell, the history of their lives, the places they lived, and their final resting places. These people may be dead, they may populate the cemeteries across the city, but their history and impact and legacies are very much alive and well in NYC today. At the moment the cemeteries of NYC are getting a great deal of attention -- but the dead have always been with us and always will be. And the dead don't "only know Brooklyn" -- they also know the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough has multiple cemeteries with a large number of people permanently taking up valuable NYC real estate -- forever. Here's a list of NYC's cemeteries and some of the notable people who are resting for eternity here. In fact, if there's one borough that the dead probably "know" best, it's the Bronx. Woodlawn Cemetary is practically a rioutous party scene of famous dead people, a green carpet for deceased celebrities throughout history -- Herman Melville, Irving Berline, George M. Cohan, Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Charles Evan Hughes, Joseph Pulitzer, FW Woolworth, and many more. They, and everyone buried in NYC, are all equal now.
If you go to Columbus Circle, on West 59th Street next to the edge of Central Park, you'll find the blue twin towers of the Time Warner Center. This mighty structure is the home to numerous high end restaurants and stores and spas, luxury apartments and hotel rooms, the music venue Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the cable network CNN.
It's a true 21st century multi-use, multi-purpose behemoth. It's hard to believe that, twenty years ago, what sat on this very spot was an empty shell, the abandoned New York Coliseum.
The New York Coliseum was constructed in the early 1950s by the master builder Robert Moses. A huge post-war project, the building was a kitchy, tacky piece of 1950s nightmare architecture. It looked like an old-school television set without a screen, a boring lump of bad design.
In case you were wondering what I thought of it, I thought it was really ugly.
But for decades it thrived as a convention center, with events like the auto show, flower shows, home expos, and many others being held there every year. Then, after the Jacob Javits Center opened in the 1980s, the Coliseum went into a severe decline, closing in 1986 except for the very rare event.
As kid, whenever I passed it by, I was always amazed that this huge space was just sitting there, existing there, empty and largely abandoned. The only time I remember seeing it used was, once a year, when a bunch of bright red neon letters would be put over the entry, announcing the Coliseum as the location for the New York City Firefighters Annual Physical Exam. In the summer of 1996 I went to the Coliseum for the first and last time when there was a small exhibit about the New Deal (I got to see one of the microphones that FDR used for his Fireside Chats behind a glass screen). The exhibit was great but I remember thinking that the Coliseum was a depressing, sad, old building that was more than long in the tooth and probably doomed.
I was right. In 2000, a year before the original Twin Towers were destroyed, the Coliseum was torn down. By 2004 the Time Warner Center had risen to take its place. Columbus Center was reborn.
And another piece of NYC passed into history, as unloved with its creator.
There's nothing better than being out and about in NYC and spotting a piece of history, a living memorial to the city's past. Recently I took my kids to the park and, as they and a bunch of other children ran around and climbed on structures and hit the swings, I noticed this small plaque in the concrete ground.
Nearly every NYC public playground has one of these plaques and it's really fascinating to get a snapshot of who was in charge when these playgrounds were built -- and rebuilt. It's one thing to read the history of NYC and learn about the master builder Robert Moses and the hapless Mayor Vincent Impelliteri -- but it's another thing to see a living piece of their legacy at the very place where your children are blithely having fun. It's also bizarre to see Rudy's name there (the former currently mayor stinking up America) along with the legendary parks commissioner Henry Stern who recently died.
These plaques are a reminder that this city was built and tended to over time -- and that nothing here happens by accident. History, literally, is at our feet.
The great historian and biographer Robert Caro -- he of the legendary Robert Moses and LBJ tomes -- has just donated his vast collection of papers and reporting for his books to the New York Public Library. Some people, if they ever hit the Lottery and never had to work again, would probably spend it on a beach somewhere. I'd spend it in the NYPL reading Robert Caro's papers, devouring the back story to his great books about political power and how it changes American life. Talking about archives, if you want to read the extensive Robert Caro/Robert Moses posts on Mr NYC, go here. And, hey, NYPL, maybe, just maybe, one day in the far, far, future, maybe you'll want to put blogs into your archives? I can think of a couple!
Hard as it is to believe but, as the minutes tick down towards the end of the year, the second decade of the 21st century is ending and the third is about to begin. This very blog will also enter its third decade which, if you don't mind me saying, is something of an achievement.
So what happened in NYC during this past decade, the twenty-teens?
A bunch of stuff, some great, some awful. The New York Times has an interesting list of developments in NYC in the 20-teens that includes the following: the growth of ferry service around the city (good), the dramatic decline of retail stores and the preponderance of empty storefronts (bad), the phenomena of Hamilton that made Broadway relevant again (good), the rise of cashless businesses (neither good nor bad, just reality), the growth of massively tall, skyline-ruining "needle" buildings (bad), universal pre-K (great!), and others.
One thing this list also includes is the sale of the Chrysler Building for $150 million after previously selling for $800 million. It's truly bizarre that a huge NYC iconic building could sell for less than the most expensive apartments in town and lots of other big name buildings. The reason? It's very old and has tons of structural problems, dramatically decreasing the value. This tracks another big-name purchase that was sold for way less money than one would expect -- the radio station WABC, which was sold for only $12.5, much much much much less than most buildings or apartments in this city. The reason? Very low ratings with an ossified, dying listenership, and practically zero growth potential in the age of podcasts and the Internet. The Chrysler Building and WABC, once mighty NYC institutions, were victims of the changes of this decade.
Another big-time radio station in NYC that wasn't just sold but vanished altogether was WPLJ, where I used to intern, another demographic/technology victim. One thing about NYC in the 20-teens is that TV about this great city was better than ever: Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, and many others reflected the wild lifes and times, both past and present, of this town. New York City also lost of number of icons, some from death, some from infamy: Ed Koch, Lou Reed, Al Goldstein, and Stan Brooks all died during this decade, representatives, in their very different ways, of this city during the era I call "funky town." Of course, some other NYC icons are still alive but have fallen dramatically from grace: Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner, Louis CK, and Charlie Rose all began the decade in great positions of power NYC only to end it in disgrace and irrelevance. The city also saw some physical transformations: Long Island City went from being a real estate desert to a real estate oasis. Hudson Yards opened, creating a brand new neighborhood in the heart of Manhattan. Pedestrian plazas and bike sharing exploded, literally changing the experience of the city streets. There were obviously political transformations: Occupy Wall Street (2001), a new mayor (2013), AOC and the Democratic takeover of the State Senate (largely due to elections in NYC in 2018), and naturally, a New Yorker was elected President of the United States but, instead of being a great thing, it was a national tragedy (2016). Sports: the Giants won the Superbowl (2012), and anyone remember "Linsanity" (also 2012)? As always, a lot happened in NYC during the 20-teens -- some things historic, some things just moments in time. I have no doubt that NYC in the 2020s will be equally, if not more, memorable. P.S. A couple of non end-of-the decade related stories you might find interesting: one is an obituary for an acclaimed activist-artist and another is a long story about how Robert Moses, in a rare feat of true public service, made the Met into the true "people's museum", marrying elite art with the masses, that it is today.
So former Mayor Mike Bloomberg is running for president and just about everyone in the media and public at large thinks he has no chance of winning. He probably doesn't except for one thing -- he's so mind-bogglingly rich, worth around $60 billion, that he can definitely make an impact on the election -- win, lose or draw.
Bloomberg has the kind of power that no elected office can give.
No mayor of NYC has ever become president. It's kind of amazing to think that being the CEO of the country's biggest city has never been a stepping stone to being the CEO of the country. The current British PM used to be the mayor of London. Former French Presidents have been mayors of Paris. But in these United States we have (until recently) mostly elected Governors and Senators to the presidency. Running a big city -- even the biggest! -- just hasn't been a route to the Oval Office.
If you think about it, there's a reason for this -- this is a country that worships the "heartland", the Norman Rockwell-ish concept of the "small town" (never mind that most Americans don't live in small towns and Norman Rockwell himself was from NYC). Americans like the idea of their presidents representing the "real America." One of our Founding Fathers, and our nation's third President, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, lionized the idea of America being full of "gentlemen farmers", his idea of the rural life being inherently superior to the urban one -- the country was for saints, the city for sinners. The "real" Americans, the saintly Americans, were too be found tilling the soil and plowing fields, not engaging in trade and making money in the streets.
In NYC, we know what people mean by the "real America" -- it means white America. Racism is basically why no NYC mayor has ever been president.
For most Americans, cities are too Jewish, too black, too Hispanic, overall too brown and swarthy, to be, you know, "real." Any NYC mayor running for president carries that kind of "baggage" -- the baggage of being from a place that is majority non-white, that is decidedly non-rural, that has a whiff of sin and sordidness, etc. etc. etc. Even though the current Prez might be from NYC, he presents himself as being a champion of the heartland, a virtual enemy of the very city where he made his name. Yes, he's as big a sinner as this city has ever produced but he's white and a self-proclaimed champion of all white people, sinner and saints alike -- so the "real" America gives him a pass.
But even though NYC is not the nation's capital, even though no NYC mayor has ever ascended to the presidency, this is and always will be a city of power -- financial power, cultural power, media power, and people power. DC might make and enforce our nation's laws but it's NYC that makes our country's magic, that captures and powers the country's information and imagination -- and money.
We New Yorkers love our power. We love our comic-book superheroes and supervillians like Spiderman and the Joker. And we love the power behind the power, people like Robert Moses, currently being resurrected as a fictional character in the movie version of Motherless Brooklyn.
NYC is a city of power. We might not be the "real" America but we possess the "real" American power -- power that comes not from the government but from the imagination, power that comes from money and not from laws, power that comes from culture and not from elections. We are the most important and dominate city in the country, and we weild a power over the vox populi that no president ever will.
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.
