Mr NYC in Paris

Recently yours truly went to Paris for a week.

We did so much, saw so much, went so many places, that the idea of recapping it all in one post is exhausting. So ... I'll simply publish several posts with a lot of pictures — and a tiny bit of commentary — about everywhere we went and everything we saw.

Enjoy!

Mexican Navy Sailboat Crashes into the Brooklyn Bridge

Old & Interesting NYC Maps

James Foley RIP

The movie director James Foley has died at the age of 71. You might not have heard of him but he made the movies At Plain Sight, Glengarry Glen Ross, as well as the last two 50 Shades movies. Born in Bayridge, raised on Staten Island, he was a New York boy who made his mark as a journeyman Hollywood director. He also directed several of Madonna's music videos at the height of her fame in the late 1980s -- including the famous, groundbreaking "Papa Don't Preach" video.

RIP.

Interesting sidenote: I was recently talking to a family friend who was in high school in the late 1980s. She liked to sneak away from school during free periods to smoke -- and one day she left school to light up and stumbled upon the production of the movie Who's That Girl? (also directed by James Foley). Long story short: my friend gave Madonna a light for her cigarette. And then, the next day, another one, and so on for a few more days. Small town. 

Citi Field, Flushing, Queens -- May 10th, 2025, 9:35 PM

Remembering "Night After Night with Allan Havey" (1989-1992)

The late night television talk show has been a staple of American life ever since Steve Allen launched The Tonight Show in NYC in 1954. Over the decades the names of late night hosts became staples of American culture: Carson, Letterman, Leno, and Stewart ruled the late night airways collectively for over half a century, and their replacements -- Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, and ... Stewart -- have all dominated late night TV for over a decade now. 

In those same decades there have been lots of other talk shows that have come and gone -- Merve Griffen, Dick Cavett, Conan, Corden, and many others. Up until a few years ago there was a glut of late night shows until economic pressures led to many of them being cancelled. Even the big late night shows are in decline -- their ratings are way down, their doing fewer shows per week, their losing their bands, and they no longer have the kind of agenda-setting, social currency that they used to have.

But thirty-odd years ago, the late night landscape was very different. It was the time of the big transition from the 30-plus year reign of Johnny Carson to the duopoy of Leno and Letterman.

It was also the time when Arsenio Hall -- young, loud, black, and wild -- challenged the white-guy late night establishment and created memorable TV moments, including then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton playing the saxaphone and then getting elected president. Late night TV was a hot place, and it seemed like it was the pulse of American culture.

One totally forgotten late night show from that time was Night After Night with Allan Havey. It ran on Comedy Central (first called the Comedy Channel) from 1989 to 1992 and was really different and quite original. 

Coming several years before the start of The Daily Show, Night After Night was a largely tradditional talk show except for some big differences. Allen would begin each show sitting at his desk and, instead of the regular monologue, he'd just talk and riff. It was more like the opening to a radio show than a TV show but he did it really well and was very funny. Then he'd interview his guests and the conversations were much more interesting than anything you'd hear on the late night shows. This show obviously ran many years before podcasts but his interviews were more in-depth and podcast-like than anything else at the time. Also, he played a constant gag on the audience -- his studio audience literally consisted of one person, his "audience of one", usually someone visiting NYC.

Night After Night was a calm, smart, funny show that was, quite frankly, a relief from the raucous, loud, and sometimes quite dumb late night shows. And it was really New York, almost like a late-night Manhattan cable access show brought into the mainstream. 

I remembering watching this show in high school and enjoyed it a lot. I remember on the night that Johnny Carson retired in 1992, they simply paused the show so that everyone else could watch it, and instead just showed an advertisement for Tabasco the whole time. I remember he interviewed the lady who played (and still plays) Lisa Simpson who talked about how many times she had turned eight on the show. And I remember this episode from 1992 when he interviewed an actress/comedien named Stephanie Hodge who was the star of a Saturday night sitcom on NBC called Nurses (a spinoff of another show called Emptyness that was itself a spinoff of The Golden Girls). It aired in the summer of that year, just before I started 10th grade -- and just months before Night After Night was cancelled, and Stephanie Hodges was fired from Nurses. 

Many other late night shows have obviously come and gone since Night After Night was cancelled -- and Allan Havey has gone on to have a great career as an actor, including appearing on Mad Men. But there's never quite been another late night show like this, a really funky NYC show, and so Mr NYC is happy to remember this little piece of NYC late-night culture from a very different time.

Inside Riverdale

Here's a look at the quiet bedroom community just north of Manhattan in the Bronx that many quiet, rich New Yorkers call home:

"Bad Lieutenant" (1992) Car Warning Scene

Remember, folks, always drive with your license or registration or else ... well ... it could get messy.

Remembering "Trinity" (1998)

Back in the day, when working class families still lived in Manhattan, it wasn't a crazy idea to make a TV show about them.

Thus was born the very, very, very short-lived series Trinity, about a working class Irish-Catholic family in Hell's Kitchen that ran for less than a month in the fall of 1998.

I vaguely remember when this show aired because it was during my senior year of college and I was living away from the city, pining for it from afar. If I'm correct, it aired on Friday nights so I wasn't really watching TV then but I think I caught a little of it once. It seemed like a heavy, intense drama about miserable white people and, apparently, it completely turned off audiences and was cancelled after only four episodes.

So why remember it? A few reasons.

First, it was a show about working class NYC, the kind of thing you don't really see today. It was about real people living real lives and, if it was airing today, I'd give it a chance.

Second, it was created by John Wells. He was the guy who created the massive TV hit ER just a few years earlier, and this show seemed like it could be another big, popular, and critically acclaimed success. Sadly it was not to be -- but years later he'd create (or re-create from the British version) the show Shameless that ran on Showtime for many years about another working class family (this time in Chicago).

Third, the cast. The patriarch of the family was played by the wonderful actor John Spencer who had appeared on LA Law a few years earlier -- and then, a year after Trinity was cancelled, would return in triumph with The West Wing, staying on it until his untimely death in 2006. Then there was Sam Trammell who, about a decade after this, would appear on the big vampire show True Blood. And yet another actor on the show who would go onto greatness was Bobby Cannavale who would later on appear on Boardwalk Empire and in lots of Marvel movies. 

So here's to Trinity, a forgotten NYC that had a brief, moment before its creators and stars went onto big things later on. 

Pope Francis RIP

Pope Francis has died. I blogged about him a little over the last 12 years, including his 2015 visit to NYC. You can find the archive here.

And here is what NYC St. Patrick's Cathedral Cardinal Dolan is saying and doing about this big moment.

He was a great pope, a really inspiring and compassionate figure, a moral beacon and we needed him more than ever in these dark times. I guess God needed him more.  

Rest in Peace. 

And soon the conclave to elect his successor will begin!