Views of Manhattan from the Top of the Empire State Building

Classic Mr NYC

American politics has gotten ugly -- and, as we know, quite violent -- in the last few years. And especially yesterday. 

It's easy to point a finger at you-know-who but really that's the wrong person. 

Point it not at the clown in the White House but at his forerunner, the person who set the stage and made him possible -- Newt Gingrich. The former Georgia Congressman who masterminded the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress is the one who created the ugly political atmosphere that chokes us -- and sometimes kills us -- today.

Believe it or not, I blogged about all this back in ... drumroll ... 2008. The year 1994 was a transformative year in American culture and politics ... and, arguably, not for the better. 

You should listen to Mr NYC interviewee Kurt Anderson (also from 2008) talk about the lasting impact of 1994 on our politics in a recent podcast with Molly Jong-Fast. As always, Kurt is very smart and incisive. And, as always, Mr NYC was and is Ahead of His Time.

A Commie by any other name ... like LaGuardia

As we head into the last two months of the NYC mayor's race, the media and his opponents keep calling Assemblyman and current frontrunner Zohran Mamdani a "communist."

The Republicans, the media and so-called "centrist" Democrats (they're all the same thing really) love calling regular Democrats communists. They've been doing it for decades. Quite frankly, it's boring and unoriginal -- and, if Democrats really were Communists, then the GOP/media/centrist Dems would have suffered the same fate as the Romanovs whenever Clinton or Obama or Biden got into power.

But if Zohran is a Communist, then he's in good company.

I'm currently reading a book about Fiorello LaGuardia, widely regarded as the greatest NYC mayor of all time. And whaddya know -- in reading about the 1933 campaign, the year LaGuardia was elected, the Heart media and Tammany Hall CALLED LAGUARDIA A COMMUNIST! 

Take a look at the excerpt below: "... the little red flower of Communism ..." and so much more. So when you keep hearing this crap about Zohran, just say "Well, they said the same thing about Fiorello and he turned out to be pretty great." 

A Commie by any other name ...

The Giant of Manhattan Retires

After nearly 34-years in office, Manhattan Congressman Jerry Nadler is retiring. 

He's an older guy, and this is the right move -- the next generation of leaders needs to come to power and it's great that Nadler recognizes this fact. He's not going to stay in office until he's almost dead and hold the future back. 

That said, he was and is a Giant of Manhattan and we won't see his likes again for a long time.

Beavis & Butthead in Brooklyn (1997)

 

Flying Home to NYC @ Night

Lovely

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

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

Sometimes there are nice things in life.

Zohran Mamdani's Scavenger Hunt

Manhattan End-to-End via #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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