Recently I blogged about The Godfather Part II where the character Hyman Roth talks about his childhood pal Moe Green who invented the city of Las Vegas. In reality Hyman Roth was a gangster named Meyer Lanksy and his friend was Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, the mastermind behind the gambling mecca of America. Like Lansky, Siegel was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who grew up to be one of the most feared and powerful gangsters of his day -- or ever.
Bugsy was a killer and a visionary, a psychopath and a builder, a monster and a genius -- in many ways, the ultimate product of his hometown and country.
The 1991 movie Bugsy tells the story of the man's creation of Las Vegas. In the early 1940s, the powerful NYC mobster traveled to Los Angeles to take over the gambling rackets for his bosses in NYC, only to realize that next door in Nevada gambling was actually legal, and that an entire city and industry could be built around it. Bugsy's pursuit of this dream leads to his greatest professional triumph, something so much more than the life of crime and violence he had previously lived. But as his dream comes to fruition, his destruction comes with it. It's the story of triumph and tragedy, creation and death -- the American paradox that fuels our history.
Warren Beatty, nearing the end of his leading man days, plays the title character, and a young Annette Benning, in one of her break-out roles (both as an actress and Beatty's future wife) plays Virginia Hill, Bugsy's movie-actress mistress and partner in creation of the Flamingo, the first Las Vegas hotel. The supporting cast is the real treat of this movie -- Harvey Keitel plays Siegel's one-time adversary-turned partner Mickey Cohen, and the absolutely brilliant Ben Kingsley plays Meyer Lansky in a career-best performance (with all due respect to Gandhi, both the man and the movie, this may be his best work). It was directed by Barry Levinson, coming off his great success with Rain Man, and this movie is beautifully directed and produced. Made almost 30 years ago, this is the kind of dark, brutal, mature, literate, deeply dramatic movie that the big studios used to make and don't anymore. It was, in many ways, the last of its kind. While not a great movie like Chinatown or The Godfather flicks, it's worth seeing.
Bugsy is yet another in the unofficial Mr NYC canon of movies about New Yorkers far from home who either go on to greatest or ruin. This movie is really about both.
If you want proof that COVID-19 is taking a battering ram to NYC, here's proof that's indisputable -- the vacancy rate for apartments in Manhattan gone up to nearly 70,000, and rents have plunged by 10%.
It's easy to get either freaked out -- or delighted -- by such news. In times of crises people naturally freak out and believe that the new bad normal is forever.
Not true. New York City has been declared dead, done, finished, in the death rattle before -- and yet it always comes back. Before we now it we'll be reading articles about how the vacancy rate has gone back down and the rents are back way up. Just wait.
Claire Shulman served as Queens Borough President from 1986 to 2002, the first woman to hold the job and, for a long time, one of the only women to serve in high office in NYC. She has died at age 94.
Shulman was instrumental in the development of previously depressed parts of the borough like Jamaica, Flushing, and Long Island City. Most notably she speardheaded the transformation of Queens into a cultural hotspot, working to improve the Queens County Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the New York Hall of Science.
Shulman also had an impressive personal legacy -- her daughter is an astronaut named Ellen Baker and her son is a prominent oncologist. She had another son who died in 2001 and was a budding director.
Her rise to the BP job was dramatic -- her predecessor, Donald Manes, a flamboyant old-school machine pol had dramatically committed suicide in 1986 after being caught up in a wild mess of corruption, mob ties, and nastiness. In many ways, her time in office was transitional, as the last remaining ties to Tammany Hall and machine/mob-domination gave way to reform, good government, and a new city.
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.
In 1970 the brilliant musical lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim came out with Company on Broadway. After having made a name for himself with this work on shows like Gypsy, West Side Story, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sondheim was considered the greatest Broadway musical talent of his time.
He was -- as still is.
Company kicked off a hugely prolific period for him -- among his shows were Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), and Sweeney Todd (1979). None of his musicals in either the 1970s or later were derivative of each other, none of them copied something that had worked before. Each of his shows were totally different from the others, completely unique. And his songs were complex -- fast, with a density of lyrics, with a great deal of plot and character development being revealed. They didn't simply emphasize only one point (like "I love you" or "I'm so excited about something coming up" or "I have to go" or "This is the end") -- each song conveys a mess of feeling or events all at once. In a Sondheim song and musical there's a lot going on, and you never get bored.
Back to Company. This show was about a young man named Bobby living in NYC in 1970 (it's probably the only one of Sondheim's shows to be fully contemporary -- and this was 50 years ago). All of Bobby's friends are married and encouraging him to get married too -- but he can't commit. Underlying all this, although never said explicity, is a belief that Bobby might be gay (like Sondheim himself). Sadly, fifty years ago, this couldn't be said or sung out loud.
Company was due for a revival this Spring, with Bobby being played by a woman this time, but obviously COVID-19 derailed it. The original cast, in 1970, included Elaine Stritch and many other great talents. Unusually, there was actually a documentary made about the recording of the cast album by DA Pennebaker. Enjoy this clip from it and pay tribute to a great NYC musical, now half-a-century old.
More recently the parody documentary show Documentary Now did something called "Co-Op: The Musical" that is a direct and loving parody of this show.
Recently I interviewed (for the third time) the prominent NYC journalist Ross Barkan about the recent victories of the DSA in primaries. I've also blogged about my sadness at the death of legendary NYC journalist Pete Hamill, and also about the quixotic, hopelessness of nostalgia -- part of what I dubbed the NYC Underwelt -- a longing for a past that is gone forever.
So it was fascinating for me to see these threads joined up when I stumbled upon a great new article by Ross in GQ that's about Pete Hamill, who made NYC nostalgia a huge part of his trademark. Ross's article is interesting because, while he cleary admires Hamill's life and career, it points out that the kind of career Hamill had isn't really possible anymore (thanks to the Internet, the need for advanced degress, plus the high cost of living in NYC), and that nostalgia has its dangers -- revanchism, regression, the kind of "make great again" mentality that led to Trump. Quite often, in fact necessarily, it's tied to racism/sexism/anti-semitism/bigotry of all kinds, to an attitude of "that's when those people knew their place", an ugly and dehumanizing worldview (one that Hamill tried strongly to denounce but that, nonetheless, hovers above). Hamill himself wrote about his dislike of (then) contemporary culture like rap (let's faec it, black) music and tight clothes, etc. and he rhapsodized about "Lost New York" -- where the Giants still played at the Pole Grounds, the Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field, the subway cost a nickel, no one was afraid of getting mugged -- oh, and with a post-WWII economy that boomed decade after decade.
Ross takes issue with the idea of "Lost New York", saying there really is no such thing: "There is no Lost New York, not lost Country. There are places we inhabit, and those we hope to do the best with while we're here." He believe that making the present better is all we have, and I agree. He also speculates that his Millennial generation (one I'm just a lil' too old to count as a member of but identify with) will be less prone to Hamill-esque nostalgia: he believes that the last 20 years of 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crises, the Trump presidency, and now COVID-19 (I'd also throw in the bizarre 2000 election into this litany of horrors) will render nostalgia for this time moot.
To this I say ... perhaps. Sadly, most people of his or any generation isn't quite as thoughtful as ross.
Certainly the 21st century has been brutal for America, especially for a generation raised at the end of the 20th century. It was an era, in hindsight, of misplaced optimism -- the economy boomed relentlessly (thanks to lots and lots and lots of debt and crazy financial shenanigans), Bill Cosby was America's role model, Harvey Weinstein was producing great movies, and Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were wildly popular.
But here's the thing about nostalgia, about the unending journey that so many of us, especially New Yorkers, take into the underwelt -- we're hardwired for it. It's a reptillian part of the brain, of our psyche and soul, of human nature. We can't help it, it's instictual, reflexive, like swallowing.
Hamill's younger days were a time when legal segregation reigned, either in law or in practice, and homosexuals lived in The Closet. There was McCarthyism, the JFK assasination, Vietnam, riots, Watergate, and stagflation. And yet ... people like Hamill remember it fondly. Even the most horrible war in human history lead to gauzy nostalgia movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, turning the tragedy of what killed my great uncle into entertainment (hey, I bought tickets to both!). When Marty McFly travelled from a rundown, porno infested Hill Valley in 1985 to a sock-hoppy happy one in 1955, the idea of "this time sucks, it was so much better 30 years ago" was quite au courant. Now we have Stranger Things, set in the 1980s, that does the very same thing!
The past is always better than the present -- because it's a safe, predictable place to go.
In the time when Ross and I were young, we had Reagonomics, Rodney King, Lorena Bobbit, NAFTA, OJ, Monica -- and people today are super-nostalgic for that time. There's literally a movie called Mid-90s. NYC in the 1970s, when the city was subtley named "Fear City", has gained cultural traction today.
See my point? No matter how horrible the past was in reality, the present always looks at it through rose-colored glasses. The rough edges get smoothed, the messiness of the past is neatly re-packaged in books, documentaries, movies, TV shows, and podcasts, with narratives giving it a logic it didn't possess at the time. NYC today is a gentrified nightmare for a lot of people today, the same people who deplored the city thirty, forty-plus years ago when they thought it was falling apart.
So I agree with Ross that we should cast Hamill-eque nostalgia aside and do our best the make the present better -- that we should not get trapped in the underwelt. But nostalgia, like racism and sexism and bad taste, will forever exist in some form. Again, it's just a part of who we are.
UPDATE: Comment from Ross Barkan on August 18, 2020: "I enjoyed the post and agree with the sentiments. Thank you for sending it to me. The Hamill legacy is a complicated one and deeply tied to NY."
In the summer of 1970 the Velvet Underground made its last hurrah in NYC. From June to August, for nine weeks, the band played two shows a night at the now vanished club Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue South. One of their shows, on August 23, 1970, was recorded and later released in 1972 as Live at Max's Kansas City.
The Velvets had a short and tumultuous existence. Formed in the mid-1960s, under the guidance of Lou Reed and John Cale, they produced four albums in almost as many years. But only a couple of years in, Cale left the band. The albums didn't sell. Their original partnership with Andy Warhol ended after their first album. So, by 1970, the band was on the verge of collapse. This nine-week gig turned out to be a finale (of sorts). Lou Reed would leave the band afterwards. Their final album, Loaded, would come out in November 1970 to little interest. And that, it would seem, would render the band to history -- forgotten, a failure, a footnote.
Instead, the Velvet Underground made history. It wrote volumes in the history of rock'n'roll. It will be remembered forever.
Generations of musicians and songwriters would cite the band as an influence -- including U2, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, REM, Talking Heads, and David Bowie. When the band re-united for a European tour in 1993, it was a sensation. They were inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. They've been included on soundtracks for movies like Juno and Orange is the New Black. They've even inspired museum exhibits. To paraphrase, anyone would bought a Velvet Underground album back in the day probably ended up starting a rock'n'roll band.
But history is only understood in hindsight -- it's made in the (then) present, forever grinding forward. In July 1970, before the famous recording was made, the Village Voice wrote a short article about this now legendary gig, about how the band sounded as good as it ever did, and that playing in NYC again after three years meant that they were "back where they belong."
P.S. The Velvets gig at Max's KC ended on August 28, 1970. Five days later my parents got married in NYC. History is funky like that sometimes.
I blogged once before that Mr NYC is an underworld, an underground, a secret thing all its own. This blog remains totally uncorrupted, pure and free from any ties that bind. It floats through time and space, hurtling like ... a basebell .. forever into the infinite. In my mind, I combine the notions of the underground and the underworld into the "underwelt."
Allow me to expound.
Recently I decided to re-read Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a massive novel about the second half of 20th Century America. It follows two people, Nick and Klara, who used to live in the Bronx. After a short affair in 1952, their lives go in dramatically different directions until they meet again, briefly, in the Arizona dessert in 1992. As we follow their paths over five decades and 800+ pages, we also encounter their various friends, lovers, and family members, we hurtle through some of the most dramatic events of the Cold War, and we literally end inside the place that would come to rule the incipient millennium -- the Internet. The novel's various plots and touches with history are held together by one thing -- a baseball, the very homerun ball hit by Bobby Thomson on October 3rd, 1951, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World." Tracking that ball over these decades becomes the thread that holds the whole unwieldy empire of the novel together.
So what's the underworld part? How does that relate?
Throughout the novel there is this recurrent theme of trash, of waste, of buried nuclear weapons and radioactive debris, of discarded objects and people, of loss. The threat of nuclear annihilation hangs over the novel, the Cold War ruling it completely, married to the irony that a baseball is roughly the same size as the uranium found inside a nuclear weapon. This is the "underworld" of the novel, the stuff we want to forget, the stuff that falls away (it is also literalized as an early 1930s German movie called Underwelt that, at one point, Klara watches -- as ominous a piece of media as ever existed).
The underworld, the underground, the underwelt, defines itself in opposition to the above ground, outside world. It is a constant friction, a perennial resistance. Like the aforementioned trash -- we want to forget it, we want it out of our lives, but it never goes away.
Quite simply the underwelt is anything buried, anything like ...
... secret worlds, worlds within worlds, worlds not easily found or accessed, worlds that both tempt and repulse us, worlds that can trap or set us free, worlds with no rules, no laws, no obligations, no reason, no compromise, worlds of pleasure and pain and big messes and invisible orders, worlds free of logic or logics that exist on their own terms, worlds that only a chosen few can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, taste, worlds that we create, that belong to us, at odds with ... the outside world.
And what brings these underworlds above ground into the outside world? What makes the imperious ... pervious? What kills the resistance, ends the frictions?
The Media. The Law. Money. Time. Mother Nature. Death.
They exist to root out anything buried, to burrow into these undergrounds, to conquer these underworlds -- to corrupt and change them, to make them public and own them, to put them on display, to disrupt the "underwelt."
So where does the underwelt exist? Where do we find it?
Some are literal, physical, or spiritual, or "other": travel, sex, crime, excitement, horror, secrets, memories, trash, fringe culture, back alleys/basements/attics/hallways. Any place where we believe we can go and do and see and feel and touch and taste and hear whatever we want, all personal inhibitions and societal strictures disregarded.
Now more than ever the Internet is the ultimate "underwelt" as well as the ultimate "underwelt" disruptor -- a paradox that our society struggles with every day and that rips it apart.
But those are not the only underwelts we live in. There is one ultimate underwelt one we all wish we could travel to, one that is forever out of reach -- the past.
The final sentence to the prologue of DeLillo's masterpiece is, "It is all falling indelibly into the past." It can't help but remind me of the final sentence of another 20th century American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." This underwelt exists everywhere, around us and inside us, and yet ... we can't go there. We want to, desperately, we all want to hide away inside it, we all want to, as vernacular of this particular present goes, "quarantine" there.
Yet we can't. We try and fail constantly, it's the most quixotic of quixotic undertakings. Pointless.
The past is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. The past exists but we can't possess it. The past is forever conquered by the future.
This blog explores the underwelt of NYC. It is both within and outside it, both its captor and its hostage. It's part of the present, even the future, and yet ... it is borne back ceaselessly into the indelible past, into the NYC underwelt, both drowning and unable to swim in this empty, overflowing pool.
If you want to explore the Mr NYC underwelt, what it means in general and what it means to me, go here.
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.
