Old Timers

New Yorkers are a multifaceted breed, many coming here from around the country and around the world to live and work and transform their lives, turning themselves into New Yorkers.

Then there's the natives. Those of us born and bred here, and who never left. 

This charming piece is about a seventy year old man from Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn who has lived in the same neighborhood his whole life and is beloved by his neighbors. He seems to define old time New Yorkers, who have seen the city evolve over the years but who never sough to flee to the suburbs or Florida or anywhere else -- who stayed and persevered. 

They are the city's memory bank, the characters who give our city character. We're lucky to have them and we can learn a lot from them. They prove that New Yorkers can be just as provincial as anyone else -- that though this is a town like no other, it's also a town just like any other. It's a place called home.  

Greatest NYC

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.

Vanished Venues

There is a continuing series on WNYC's music show Soundcheck about long gone music hot spots in NYC called Vanished Venues. This series started in October of last year and so far they've done about eight installments with hopefully more to come.

Some of these venues you may have heard of, others you may not have, but all of them were places where past and future legends of music came to make music -- and history.

There was the Old Metropolitan Opera House on 39th Street where opera in America was born.

There was the Palladium in Union Square where The Band, AC/DC and the Clash amongst others performed.


The Fillmore East featured the Allman Brothers Band and the Jefferson Airplane.

Max's Kansas City is where many great bands from the 1960s to the 1980s played and where the Velvet Underground performed several legendary shows. 

And there was Danceteria on the lower west side where Devo and Phillip Glass amongst others used to perform -- and where young singer and Michigan transplant named Madonna got her start. 

It's a really series that gives you a wonderful insight into the history of music in America and New York's past. Hopefully they'll do more installments -- I can't imagine how series about vanished venues in NYC can't include CBGBs. 


Who knows? Maybe one day the Bowery Ballroom, Irving Plaza, the Hammerstein Ballroom or Terminal 5 will be all but a memory ...

These venues may have vanished but their ghosts live with us, and the music they produced and the cultural impact that they had are very much alive today. 

The Grand Prospect Hall Commercial (1986)

The Man Who Screwed Up the Storm

Meet Stephen Goldsmith, Deputy Mayor of Operations Stephen Goldsmith to you that is. He was given the job by Mayor Bloomberg last year and is a former Mayor of Indianapolis himself.

That's right, one of the Deputy Mayors of this town is probably rooting for the Colts tonight. And he's a Republican. He was an advisor to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and our own Rudy Giuliani. Egads.

So why was this fella Goldsmith hired? Well, don't you see, he's brilliant of course! Yes, Mayor Mike thought (and, I'm sure, still thinks) that Goldsmith is "dynamic" and an "out of the box" thinker and he was tasked with "transforming" city government to make it more ... I don't know what.

It's also his job, as deputy mayor for operations, to make sure that the city government is actually, you know, operating. Well, he did a "heckuva job" when the city government so manifestly failed to operate properly last week during the snowstorm. Apparently this recent transplant was in Washington, DC of all places, spending Christmas with his family. That's right: the man whose job it is to make sure that the city is operating full blast during emergencies was 250 miles away during an emergency!

Too bad this guru of "transformation" couldn't transform himself into an airplane and fly back the day after Christmas to do his job. 

It gets worse. In the year this supposedly brilliant Midwest Republican has been on the job, he has totally failed to learn how the city government or the city itself actually operates. He really is out of his depth and in over his head (sorry for the mixed metaphors). Can you imagine LaGuardia putting someone like Goldsmith in this job? Think not. 

And seriously, Mike, what were you thinking appointing someone who worked for George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaigns? Considering what a disaster that presidency and that campaign turned out to be, should we really be surprised? Anyone who worked for those two maniacs shouldn't be hired for anything, in my opinion. If someone who worked for them applied to a job I was hiring for, I would head for zee hilz! 

So please, Mike, tell Stephen to pack up and go home to Indianapolis. NYC already got David Letterman and Kurt Vonnegut so we don't need him.

From Ashes to ... 2nd Avenue?

The legendary Elaine Kaufman of Elaine's saloon apparently stated in her will and testament that she wanted to cremated and then have her ashes scattered ... along Second Avenue.

Makes sense. After all, her restaurant was located on Second Ave for 47 years so that strip of the city was buried in her identity. Problem: it's illegal. 

Remember, Second Avenue is public, not private, property. But that's not really the problem. I think New Yorkers might be just a tad weirded out by knowing that the remains of Elaine Kaufman were wafting up and down the street, getting into their hair and onto their faces and into their clothes.

Can you imagine people having this conversation? 

"Eww, I think I got some dirt on my face."

"That's not dirt, that's ... Elaine Kaufman ..."

Thought not. Cute idea but, uh, I think the executors of her estate should probably void this part of her will. 

So Long Guys

Today is a very sad day in the annals of New York journalism: after more than thirty years, the Village Voice will no longer be publishing the brilliant work of Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins. Thanks to budgetary reasons and the Voice's inept ownership, Barrett was let go at the end of the December and Robbins, in an act of solidarity, left with him.

Wayne Barrett is, without question, the best journalist working in this town today. He has done more to rip the scabs off the powerful in this city and state that he should have earned multiple Pulitzer Prizes over the years. Tom Robbins has done similarly excellent work. They are classic shoe leather reporters -- digging up documents, interviewing people, following the money -- journalism at its best. 

Barrett and Robbins did what all reporters should do but few these days do: speak truth to power, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Theirs is indeed a rare breed these days. Too many "journalists" in this town today aren't really journalists at all but thumb sucking opinion writers. "Journalists" like the vile, repulsive Michael Goodwin spend all their time propagandizing for politicians and policies that help the wealthy and powerful while attacking any public figure or policies that dare help anyone making less than $100 K a year. Pricks like Goodwin don't have the balls (or the heart) to engage in real journalism -- they just act as stenographers for entrenched interests. Real journalists investigate what the entrenched interests do to regular people -- and how they get away with it.    

Whether it was his annual list of the city's worst landlords, how Ed Koch basically sold this city to real estate developers, investigating how Rudy Giuliani utterly failed to prepare this city for a massive terrorist attack, how George Pataki is the real culprit for our totally inept state government, or how the Bloomberg administration was complicit in the Duetsch Bank building fire -- they covered the stories most newspapers in this town shied away from.  

They had no holy cows: they went after Republicans and Democrats, unions and corporations, you name it. As this article states, they were good old-fashioned muckrakers  -- they would have made Upton Sinclair proud. 

You should read Wayne Barrett's final Voice column -- it's a hoot. He'll be working at the Nation Institute and hopefully Tom Robbins will land somewhere. But it won't just be the same without these guys at the Village Voice. Our city has lost another small part of its identity. 

They like us ... they really like us

Here's some rare good news: last year was a record for tourism in NYC.

48.7 million people visited our fair city in 2010, up 7 percent from 45.5 million in 2009.

It's a clear sign of economic recovery when more and more people start to travel and, when a big international city like ours gets more visitors than ever, things must be looking up. Of course it also helps that the dollar is still pretty weak compared to many international currencies so it's cheaper for foreigners to come here. Even if it makes traveling for us Americans less desirable, whatever pours more cash in NYC's economy is always welcome.

Let's just hope we reach the city's goal of 50 million visitors in 2011. I can't think of a better way to show that the city is back, ten years after 9/11.  

Taxicab Confessions: The City That Never Sleeps

A Happy New Year

It's been a tough week here in NYC, as 2010 segued into 2011. A snowstorm hit our town pretty hard and made the last week of last year a rough one. Mayor Bloomberg got something he's rarely used to -- bad press -- for his administration's mishandling of what was, in many respects, a pretty ordinary blizzard. Now there accusations and counter-accusations of whether it was official incompetence or some kind of intentional sanitation worker slowdown that caused the mess. Whatever the reason, it was a bummer.

But there's some good news emerging from the melting snow.

President Obama was finally able to sign the Zadroga bill, the legislation which will cover the health care costs for 9/11 rescue workers. This bill took a torturous route to passage as Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, as well as Congresspeople Maloney and Nadler, heroically pushed it through relentless Republican opposition. It's unbelievable that a political party that has so ruthlessly and cynically used 9/11 for their own political gain would deny the people cleaning up the worst terrorist attack in American history health care -- but they sure as hell tried. Fortunately a few (very few) Republicans in Congress had blood flowing through their calloused hearts and voted for the bill in the end. While it's sad that this bill which should have passed overwhelmingly barely squeaked through, at least it did and now our workers will get the care they deserve.

And last week, amidst the tumult of the blizzard, Old New York society made a rare appearance. The 56th International Debutante Ball was held at the Waldorf-Astoria and the Observer has a great piece about it. Young women from around the country, immaculately dressed and coiffed, are accompanied by two escorts -- a civilian and a cadet from one of the service academies -- to this soiree that marks the end of the Deb season. There is dinner, dancing, and the formal entrance into Society for these young ladies -- as well as reminder that the finer things in life like class and poise and manners are still relevant in this world of Jersey Shore. Call it snobbishness, call it classism, call it elitism or whatever you will, it's nice to know that, under the radar, refinery still rules somewhere in this town.