Eddie Izzard @ Madison Square Garden

The Reservoir in Central Park

Right in the middle of Central Park is a body of water commonly called "the reservoir." Officially it is known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onanssis Reservoir, named after the late First Lady, and it supplied the city with lots of its drinking water until 1991.

It really is a sight to behold. The reservoir covers 106 acres and stretches from 85th to 96th streets, more than half a mile. At whatever angle you view it from, you see a gorgeous lake with a forest of trees behind it, then the buildings of the city rising behind them. It really is the ultimate meeting of Mother Nature and Mankind, the best that both can produce. An amazing site.

So why is it, every time I see the reservoir, I get scared? What is it about the reservoir that almost fills me with dread?

Simple. In high school, during gym class, we were sometimes forced to run around the reservoir as part of the "President's Physical Fitness" program. We would go out there dressed in our sweats and sweatpants, usually in cold weather, and have to run for thirty minutes around the damn thing THREE TIMES A WEEK! By the end of each "session", I would be so tired that I was practically falling down. Our gym teacher would run ahead of us, yelling at us to keep up, yelling at us if we flagged or started walking, and yelling at us at the end of each class that our running times were lousy and we should be embarrassed. Oh, it was fun.

Those are my personal conscious reasons for finding the reservoir a little scary. But another has to do with the movies.

See, I recently saw two movies where nasty things happen at the Central Park reservoir. One is the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate where a character is running around the reservoir and gets beaten to death by two thugs who turn out to literally be demons from hell. Then last night I finally saw Marathon Man, the 1976 thriller about international intrigue. As the title indicates, it is about a young man (in this case, a very young Dustin Hoffman) who is training for a marathon while also pursuing his PhD at Columbia. He gets caught up in all sorts of nasty stuff involving a scary Nazi war criminal played by Laurence Olivier, and the climatic scene between them occurs in the boathouse (although no real boats dock there) on the reservoir. It's a hell of a scary movie and the reservoir has never seemed so frightening.

So now, thanks to my exhausting high school experience and these two freaky films, I have a Pavlovian fear of the reservoir: I see it -- and get scared for no reason. I see what so many New Yorkers see and think "ahh" and instead think "AHHHH!"

Sometimes life just isn't fair.

Time Doth Fly

Oh. My. God.

Has it really been more than two weeks since I last blogged? Guess so. It goes without saying that life has been, in these two weeks, "mad busy, yo." Since my last post, I entertained friends visiting from out of town, then went out of town myself for New Year's, then came back and spent the last week working like a dog, doing shopping and errands galore in between, planning some upcoming trips, and just basically taking care of life stuff. Mad, mad busy.

So what's been going on in and with NYC during my cyber absence? Eh some good stuff, some bad stuff. On January 1st, Mayor Bloomberg began his historic third term, state government continues to implode, and there lots of political jockeying going on. (Will Governor Paterson run? Will AG Cuomo muscle him aside? Will a former Representative from Tennessee challenge Senator Gillibrand? Why is Rick Lazio running for anything again? Why isn't Pataki running for anything? Why is your state a hopeless laughing stock?).

And not to mention that the weather in NYC has been cold, cold, cold. I mean like really, really COLD.

But I'd rather light a candle than curse the darkness. Some good political news: my state State Senator, George Onorato of Queens, is retiring and Assemblyman Mike Gianaris is running to replace him. This is great news! Onorato is a reactionary fossil who voted against marriage equality and is basically on the wrong side of many important issues. Gianaris is a fresh, exciting candidate, a good guy with a strong work ethic, progressive politics, and oodles of charm. I've met him and seen him speak and he's got The Thing. Mr NYC heartily endorses him.

And another piece of good news: the Jets! After lucking their way into the AFC Wild Card game, they went ahead and actually WON IT! I watched the whole game on Saturday and they played a good, steady game against the Bengals, winning it 24-14. Now they go into the AFC Divisional round against the San Diego chargers. And hopefully, after that, the Super Bowl! Mr NYC's fingers are tightly, tightly crossed.

So I promise to blog a lot more frequently in the days and weeks ahead. That is, if you still care. Thank you for your patience.

'Tis the Season

You may have noticed that I haven't blogged much recently and the reason is simple: I've been really, really, really busy. Blogging has taken a back seat lately. The next few days promise to be busy ones too and then the wife and I will be headed off to a sunny place for New Year's.

So this will be the last blog post for 2009.

(I'll give you a moment to dab your eyes and clear your throats.)

This has been a good year at Mr NYC, both online and off. And it's so hard to believe that March 2010, only a few short months away, will mark the third anniversary of this blog. The time it is a'flyin'. And next year promises to be an interesting only. So I wish you all a happy new year and I will see you then.

Please keep an eye on NYC while I'm gone.

Jean Shepherd: A Christmas Story WOR Radio 1974 1/5

Unhappy New Yorkers?

There recently was a survey in the journal Science that reports New York State as the most "unhappy" state in the union. It actually ranks 51st because this survey included the District of Columbia (which clocked in as the 37th most unhappy place in our country, right behind Washington State and right before Missouri). Stuck at the very bottom, only Michigan and Connecticut ranked close to New York's misery.

I HEART NY -- not, I guess.

However, this survey does not say anything about NYC. On the one hand I can totally understand why New York State might be the biggest sad sack state. After all, the upstate economy is miserable with high unemployment, it freezes most of the year up there, and the state government is more corrupt than Louisiana in the 1930s and only slight less comical than a Monty Python sketch.

But the State of New York is not the state of NYC. Our city has certainly been hit very hard by the economic crunch but we have a dynamic service economy where new jobs are always being created. Plus Wall Street is doing much better these days so the tax revenues should be a little bit better in 2010. Crime continues to go down, down, down. And even though the city remain expensive, home prices have stabilized a bit.

So I hope the city is a little happier than the rest of the state. And actually New York City is better off in the long run than supposedly "happy" states like Florida and Arizona. Those states exist purely on housing and government support. If people and money keep coming in, they do great. If not, they die. This year the New Yorker dubbed Florida America's Ponzi State.

Our only Ponzi scheme here is (was) Madoff. Not the entire economy.

Now no one should ever live in NYC for that thing called "quality of life." People live here for other reasons -- like the reason this whole blog exists. But I think this survey shows something that's perennial about New York: in tough times, New York gets hit REALLY hard but in good times we prosper more than anywhere else. Right now we're obviously going through very tough times. But one day soon ... New York will be the happiest place in the world -- again.

The Jazz Loft Project

One of my biggest hopes is that someone someday invents a time machine so that I can go back to see first hand what New York City was like in the years, decades, centuries before I was born. High on my list of temporal destinations would be the 1950s, a time when New York City was a living dream, when Frank Sinatra was literally singing its praises, when its government was corrupt, its apartments were cheap, its nightclubs were swinging, its public schools amazing, when this town was the center of the world at a time America was taking its place as the great world superpower after World War II. Basically, when New York was at its most New Yorkish -- before the dark days of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

In this mix of 1950s New York City was the Jazz Loft. This was literally a loft, an apartment located on West 28th street in the Flower District, where jazz greats and wannabes came and jammed into the wee hours of the night. A man named W. Eugene Smith took a vast number of photographs and made numerous recordings of the jam sessions, enshrining the incredible music and personalities of this particular time and place.

WNYC and NPR got access to this amazing archive and have turned it into a radio series called The Jazz Loft Project. Broadcasting the original recordings and interviewing many of the participants, this series is a wonderfully nostalgic look at a slice of New York Americana, and of time that was both great and not so great but something that we are all the richer for remembering.

Blizzard Conditions in Times Square, New York City

New York City is always beautiful, rain or shine -- or snow.

We've had a number of blizzards in the last few years and this weekend we had a big one. The city woke up this morning to a beautiful white blanket covering their streets, truly making this a winter wonderland.

Feeling brave, my wife and I went out last night during the height of the blizzard and had fun kicking up the fresh white powder and making snow angels. This morning, I popped out and saw people operating shovels and snow blowers full blast.

The streets are gradually clearing and the city seems to have done a good job keeping things moving. Soon it will melt away, becoming but a memory, doubtless to be replaced by another snow storm sometime later this season. But this particular snow storm has been so beautiful that I think myself and others will remember the blizzard of December '09 has a happy memory.

Happy 110th Birthday Mr. Bogart

He was one of the greatest actors who ever lived and uttered some of the cinema's most classic lines: "Here's looking at you kid." "It's the stuff ... dreams ... are made of." And so many more.

Humphrey Bogart made great movie after great movie in the 1940s and 1950s: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, To Have and Not, The African Queen. And many more.

He was married four times, drank like a fish, smoked himself to death at age 57 -- and yet he burnished an enduring image in the America psyche. He epitomized cool before we even know what the concept meant.

Humphrey Bogart was also a native New Yorker and, on December 25, Christmas Day, it will be his 110th birthday. He also grew up only about ten blocks from where I did so (he and George Carlin both grew up in my neighborhood so I'm kinda like them. Right? Right?)

When it comes to Bogey greatest movie, there are too many classic lines to remember but one in particular is relevant to this blog: "I was born in New York City ... There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I would advise not even you to invade."

Hard Times

Remember a few months ago the MTA averted doomsday when the state bailed it out? Well, it turns out it wasn't enough. Revenues have come in well below expectations and now doomsday is back. There will be nasty service cuts in 2010 and there's basically nothing that can be done now to avoid it.

But it's not just straphangers who are having it rough. As I accurately predicted right after his narrow re-election, things aren't going so smoothly for Mayor Bloomberg. His proposal to turn the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx into a shopping mall was overwhelmingly defeated by the City Hall. He was threatening to sue the Manhattan DA over money in its accounts it says needs to go into the city's coffers -- and then had to retreat. And there have been other setbacks for the man who has it all.

So it looks like 2009 is going to end as one of the roughtest years for NYC in recent history -- rich and poor alike. Let's wish all of us a better 2010.