The neighborhood in the West 60s in Manhattan, now known as Lincoln Square, used to be called San Juan Hill.
It is centered around the mighty Lincoln Center Peforming Arts Center, a huge complex of theaters for opera, ballet, music, plays, and movies, and more, an amazing cultural touchstone in NYC.
I know a lot about Lincoln Center because, for years, my life centered around it. But I didn't know much about its history which, at the time, was relatively new.
In the mid-1960s, the working class and culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhood of San Juan Hill was effectively destroyed in order to build Lincoln Center. But many younger New Yorkers don't know anything about it -- until now. A new documentary tells this story and asks the question, "is art worth the price of ruining a neighborhood?"
Ironically San Juan hill became world famous just a few years before its end in the 1960 classic West Side Story. The famous opening prologue was filmed in San Juan Hill, on the very streets that would soon be transformed to make way for Lincoln Center -- the ultimate clash of art and the city.
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 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!
If you go to Columbus Circle, on West 59th Street next to the edge of Central Park, you'll find the blue twin towers of the Time Warner Center. This mighty structure is the home to numerous high end restaurants and stores and spas, luxury apartments and hotel rooms, the music venue Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the cable network CNN.
It's a true 21st century multi-use, multi-purpose behemoth. It's hard to believe that, twenty years ago, what sat on this very spot was an empty shell, the abandoned New York Coliseum.
The New York Coliseum was constructed in the early 1950s by the master builder Robert Moses. A huge post-war project, the building was a kitchy, tacky piece of 1950s nightmare architecture. It looked like an old-school television set without a screen, a boring lump of bad design.
In case you were wondering what I thought of it, I thought it was really ugly.
But for decades it thrived as a convention center, with events like the auto show, flower shows, home expos, and many others being held there every year. Then, after the Jacob Javits Center opened in the 1980s, the Coliseum went into a severe decline, closing in 1986 except for the very rare event.
As kid, whenever I passed it by, I was always amazed that this huge space was just sitting there, existing there, empty and largely abandoned. The only time I remember seeing it used was, once a year, when a bunch of bright red neon letters would be put over the entry, announcing the Coliseum as the location for the New York City Firefighters Annual Physical Exam. In the summer of 1996 I went to the Coliseum for the first and last time when there was a small exhibit about the New Deal (I got to see one of the microphones that FDR used for his Fireside Chats behind a glass screen). The exhibit was great but I remember thinking that the Coliseum was a depressing, sad, old building that was more than long in the tooth and probably doomed.
I was right. In 2000, a year before the original Twin Towers were destroyed, the Coliseum was torn down. By 2004 the Time Warner Center had risen to take its place. Columbus Center was reborn.
And another piece of NYC passed into history, as unloved with its creator.
Ever found a great old photograph or video from a long time ago? It's like discovering an ancient artifact from your past, a sort of personal archeological dig, unearthing living history.
You stare at your younger self -- or the younger selves of the other people in the picture or video -- and you experience a kind of headrush. The past becomes present, a memory turns vivid, something in your head escapes and becomes real before you -- and the thoughts and emotions you held at the time that have vanished suddenly well up again, like a pipe bursting from underground.
It's both amazing and unnerving, a unique mental and emotional sensation.
So that's how I felt when I recently found a 1988 performance of Romeo & Juliet on YouTube that was performed by American Ballet Theater on May 7, 1988, broadcast across America from the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. (Shakespeare's famous play is danced to from a score by Sergei Prokofiev, one of the greatest ever written).
See, yours truly, Mr NYC, was in it -- as an eleven-year old boy with a funny wig in the background. You'll see there's two little boys in funny wigs in the background -- I'm the handsome one!
I have some memories of this night, mainly that it was just another performence (we did several) only this time I had to sign a release allowing my visage to be televisually blasted across the Fruited Plain -- and there were cameras in the balconies and audience staring at us. When I saw a recording of this later, I saw that I one point I scratched my nose (which all of America saw, how embarrasing) but my embrassment was trumped by the dancer Kevin McKensize (who played Romeo) rushing out for the dramatic finale -- wearing his sweatpants. This was a faux pas extrodinaire and, if you watch this, and has gone down in television history along with that Starbucks cup that popped up on Game of Thrones.
Anyway, this brought up some fond memories but I still feel the tension, the anxiety of that night. And it's hard to imagine that I was ever 11-years old!
Here's more info about this Great Performence. The recording appears to have been done by someone in San Diego who, for whatever reason, threw it up on YouTube. I saw in the comments section that one of the chaperone's for the kids (i.e. me and the other one) weighed-in on the sweatpants fiasco. Sadly I don't really remember her -- but I hope she's doing well!
In 1981 a deeply disturbed black seventeen year-old named David Hampton ran away from Buffalo to NYC to start a career as a con man. He had nothing, knew no one, and was lost in the big city. But he was determined, in his own scary way, to "make it there."
He did -- sort of.
A decade later his bizarre story resulted in a hit play, a movie, and the popularization of the "six degrees of separation" concept into American culture.
In 1983 David Hampton showed up at the home of a wealthy Upper East Side couple, claiming that he had just been mugged in Central Park. He said that he was friends with their children at an Ivy League college and that he was also the son of Sidney Poitier. David "Poitier" was extremely charming, funny, insightful, and he won over the couple instantly. They allowed him to stay the night at their apartment -- only to wake up the next morning to find him in bed with a gay hustler. David vanished before the police arrived and soon the couple found out that David was a con man who had infilitrated their lives. The playright John Guare knew the couple and, after learning their story, wrote a great play about it -- Six Degrees of Separation -- that eventually became a so-so movie.
The fictional drama expands upon the real story. In the play, David's name is Paul and, after he escapes, the couple try to help the police to find him -- meanwhile he continues to seduce men and con them and others out of money (Paul/David had found this couple in the first place after he had, earlier, randomly seduced a troubled rich kid who really did know this couple's children). But Paul's interuption of this wealthy couple's life makes them realize how fragile, how fake, and how empty their existence truly is. They realize that Paul has, in a strange way, made them examine their lives, their marriage, their relationships with their children, and the whole world that surrounds them -- a world that people like David covet without truly understanding, a world that this couple comes to realize doesn't give them any real happiness. The couple comes to understand the pain that motivates Paul and the pain that they feel but can't acknowledge to themselves -- until Paul forces them to. They come to realize that everybody in the world feels pain, and that randomness, that chance meetings between people, plays a huge role in everyone's lives, and changes their fates. The climax of the play is a monologue that the wife gives. It concludes with: "I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names. I find that A) tremendously comforting that we're so close and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names. It's anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought. How Paul found us. How to find the man whose son he pretends to be. Or perhaps is his son, although I doubt it. How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds.Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people." Heavy. The play takes the always uncomfortable issues of race, class, privilege, socioeconomic advantage and envy, and puts them front and center. It makes people look at themselves, think about themselves, in ways that are both uncomfortable and illuminating. And thirty years ago, this was an even bolder thing to do than now -- John Guare was ahead of his time. I remember as a kid when this play was being staged at Lincoln Center. I was going to school near there and remember seeing the enormous banner for it on the street every day. I also heard ads for it on WQXR -- "See ... Six Degrees of Separation" -- and on TV. It ran from the fall of 1990 to early 1992 -- and a straight play that runs for more than a year is a big hit. The movie came out in 1993 and wasn't a big hit -- but the legacy of Six Degrees of Separation is immense. The success of the play caused David Hampton to threaten John Guare with violence, try to get a cut of the play's profits, and eventually sue the playright (unsuccessfully) for $100 million. And Hampton continued his con man life well after the play and movie were produced, using his newfound celebrity as well as new identities to con people. Eventually he migrated, at least for a time, to Seattle but wound up back East, dying in New Jersey in 2003 from AIDS. His life was tragic, obviously, and ironic -- the most legitimate and successful thing he was ever a part of was something he didn't create, wasn't actually involved in, and didn't get to enjoy the money from. He was like the gangster Henry Hill -- a truly bad guy who's life inspired a truly great work of drama. The original 1990-1992 NYC run also inspired a lot of careers from actors I love and who found great success afterwards. The most famous person in the cast at the time was Stockard Channing who had already done Grease and would later be on The West Wing. She was one of the only people from the play to do the movie -- and got an Oscar nomination for it. Courtney B. Vance originated Paul, and others in the cast included Anthony Rapp (Rent), John Cameron Mitchell (a huge actor and playright), Evan Handler (Sex and the City, Californication), David Eigenberg (Sex and the City), and Robert Duncan McNeill (Star Trek: Voyager). Later on Kelly Bishop (pre-Gilmore Girls) replaced Stockard Channing, James McDaniel (pre-NYPD Blue) became Paul, and a very young and totally unknown actress named Laura Linney also joined the cast. Another replacement actress was Deidre Lovejoy would later be on The Wire. In the movie, a young actor nameed JJ Abrams had a small part -- and now he's one of the biggest directors in the world. But the legacy of Six Degrees of Separation goes beyond the life of this man and the real and fictional drama he inspired: the concept of "six degrees" became popularized, it became conversation fodder, it became an idea, a meme, part of the popular lexicon -- that we're all seperated in this world, in this life, by only six people. It gripped the public imagination. So much so that a popular game called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" was created (finding actors who worked with him or worked with other actors who worked with him) that has saved many an awkward conversation. There was even a bad TV show called "Six Degrees" several years ago (that had nothing to do with the play). Before social media and COVID-19, Six Degress of Separation reminded us that we're all connected to each other, directly and indirectly, one way or another. I'm pretty sure David Hampton didn't realize, in 1983, that so many great careers would be spawned, and American culture altered, by his one-night con. The world truly is a random place. Postscript: I never saw the play when it ran in NYC but I saw it a couple of years later in Washington, DC with Marlo Thomas in the lead role. She was great but sadly I don't remember much else about the production. You can read all of the various articles The New York Times wrote about Six Degrees of Separationhere.
New York City abounds in ironies: it is geographically huge but its individual neighborhoods really make it a bunch of small towns. There are lots of places to live but it's almost impossible to find one that's available. It is the most populous city in America yet, in many ways, it's the perfect place to go if you're looking to be alone and live anonymously. NYC is both a place to go and a place to get away to. There is so much we know about the city, it's history, and what's in it. Yet, at the same time, there's vastly more that we don't know -- and there are lots of places in this city we know nothing about or would never think of going to (because we don't know they exist).
Take our history: a bunch of old New York City history books that were long out of print are now available for sale online. These include books of photographs of NYC from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I love old pictures of NYC. Looking at them, you see a city both distant and familiar, a place you know and a place you don't. It's really amazing to see, for example, what Union Square looked like in 1900 and to see the buildings that survived and those that didn't. Another irony of old NYC: it's a place you know very well and, at the same time, not at all.
Or parks and public spaces: when you're looking to relax in public, we all think we know where to go: Central Park, Riverside Park, Battery Park, Prospect Park, Bryant Park, etc. You can hang out at public spaces at Lincoln Center or South Street Seaport. But there are lots more secret places that are right there out in the open called vest-pocket parks: places like Abingdon Square, Duane Park, and Jackson Square. These are nice little cozy places away from the roar of the crowd where you can go and mentally repair. And just this past week I found a new secret place: even though it's something of a monstrosity, the Trump Soho on Varick and Spring Streets has a nice little plaza behind it with lots of benches and trees. It's just off the corner and you wouldn't know it's there. When I passed by it the other day, at around noon on a weekday, it was nearly empty. It's a perfect place to go if you want to go read a book or listen to your IPod in peace. Also, I'd imagine that amorous young couples might find it a great make out spot. These are the little places that New Yorkers like me like to go and escape from the city -- right in the very heart of it (another irony indeed).
But the secrets of NYC aren't all charming. Did you know that NYC has it's very own paupers grave? A place where unclaimed dead bodies -- abandoned babies, homeless people who have frozen to death, elderly people with no family, poor people, etc. -- go to their final rest? Known innocently enough as a "potters fields", NYC's pauper's graves exist on Hart Island, a mile long place just off the coast of City Island in the Bronx. Hart Island is where Long Island Sound meets the Atlantic Ocean and is about as far from the rest of the city as possible. The bodies are sent there and the graves are dug by prisoners who are ferried in each day from Riker's. There are almost a million dead New Yorkers buried there and some people are now trying to find and locate body's so that they can be given a decent burial.
It's hard to imagine that anyone should ever end up in such a place. One can only feel sad for those people whose lives ended so sadly that that's where they ended up. And fortunately it's a part of our city that most of us don't see or experience, the kind of place we know exists but otherwise stays far from our own consciouses. But it's there, and it represents something sad and distressing, and it's just as much a part of our city as Rockefeller Center or the Brooklyn Museum. It's a secret of NYC that shouldn't be secret at all.
In 1974, the historian Robert Caro published The Power Broker, his masterful biography of Robert Moses. It won the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1999, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest works of nonfiction written in the 20th century (it ranked at #92).
So who was Robert Moses? He was, unquestionably, the most important person ever in New York City history. His impact on this town was enormous, immense, reverberating. We are, for all intensive purposes, living in Robert Moses’ NYC. No one has ever held so much power in this town for so long – more than 44 years – and he was never elected to anything.
So what did he do? He was New York’s master builder. He developed the city we live in today. “Robert Moses shaped New York … He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.” He also built the Triborough and Verrazano Bridges as well Jones Beach, Orchard Beach, Jacob Riis Park and other public parks out on Long Island and upstate. He constructed hundreds of playgrounds, tennis courts, boathouses and baseball diamonds. He also built public pools, including the Astoria Park Pool, one of his better accomplishments.
Oh, he built buildings too: housing developments like Stuyvesant Towns and Peter Cooper Village, as well as Co-Op City. He built some other buildings you might know about: Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Shea Stadium, the New York Coliseum (since demolished, the Time Warner Center sits there now). He also built three of Central Park’s notable structures: Tavern-on-the-Green, Wollman Rink and the Delacorte Theater and the 79th Street Boat Basin in Riverside Park. And he ran (badly) the 1964 World’s Fair.
You get the idea. He built everything. “And what Robert Moses built on was as lie.”
The lie was the image Moses cultivated and propagated for five decades: that he was a self-less servant of the people, above politics, only “doing good” for “the masses.” The reality was that he warped the city to serve the rich few and not the poor and middle class many.
The lie was that he was answerable to the Mayors and Governors who appointed him to head dozens of state and city agencies over the years when, in reality, these elected people deferred to Moses. This includes Franklin Roosevelt when he was Governor and President, as well as FiorelloLaGuardia. Moses was a bully supreme. There’s a great scene in the book where, when FDR was governor, Moses stormed into his office and screamed “You’re a liar Mr. Roosevelt!” Can you imagine anyone doing that? Moses called his supposed elected superiors by their first names: he addressed one letter to Mayor Vincent Impellitteri “Dear Vince.” And he called LaGuardia “that dago son of a bitch.” Nasty, nasty man, this master builder was.
So how did he do it? Moses created and ran a public authority called Triborough that raised money through toll-booths and public bonds and that gave Moses nearly a billion dollars that he could hand out (or not) to the public officials he supposedly served. Needless to say, money talks, or in this case, rules. And the unelected, unanswerable Robert Moses ruled this town for nearly half of the 20th century.
And while Moses certainly did some good for the city, the lie was that New York was better off because of Moses rather than the opposite.
“Robert Moses was America’s greatest builder,” Caro writes. “He was the shaper of the greatest city in the New World. But what did he build?” What did he do to construct the city we live in today? “By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions.”
He “threw out of their homes 250,000 persons … He tore out the hearts of scores of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.” The Cross-Bronx Expressway gutted a pleasant neighborhood called East Tremont, wrecking the Bronx and turning it into a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken borough. The Gowanus Expressway similarly destroyed a lovely middle-class area in Brooklyn, burying it under shadow generating highway. And the public housing Moses built was ugly and depressing. He also built almost no playgrounds and public pools in Harlem or other black neighborhoods. The one public pool he built in Harlem wasn’t even heated – he didn’t think, for some reason, that black people could get cold.
If there are things about New York that drive you crazy today, you can thank Robert Moses for them.
Why aren’t there subway lines that go directly to La Guardia or JFK? Why aren’t there subway lines serving huge parts of Queens? Why can’t you take a subway to Red Hook? Why is there still no 2nd Avenue Subway? Because Moses didn’t believe in public transportation and had contempt for people who needed it and couldn't’t afford cars. From 1933 until 1968, Moses years in power, not one new subway line was built and New Yorkers had to, and still have to, pack themselves like sardines into the subway cars on the old, old tracks. It’s not exactly a secret that our city’s public transportation is inadequate and overcrowded. Moses was so convinced that cars were the future of New York, he even proposed a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have run through and destroyed Soho and Greenwich Village! (Mercifully, that was stopped.) And the irony was that Robert Moses never drove a car a day in his 92 years of life.
In short, Caro writes, Moses “systematically defeated every attempt to create the master plan that might have enabled the city to develop on a rational, logical, unified pattern.” By destroying so many neighborhoods and making so many others inaccessible with little or no public transportation, Moses reduced the number of pleasant areas where New Yorkers can or want to live. That’s why it costs so much to live here today and why New Yorkers are paying so much for so little space.
Needless to say Moses’ legacy is what contributed to the subtitle “The Fall of New York” and, for the last few decades, Mayors and Governors have been trying to undo a lot of the problems he created. Bloomberg’s PlaNYC is basically an attempt to overturn and minimize the Moses mess.
So what about the book itself? The Power Broker is a long, exhausting, infuriating, and brilliant book. Caro is an absolutely masterful writer and the jaw drops when you read about all of the interviews he conducted and all of the documents he browsed through. Caro’s gift is explaining the details and decisions of public policy making and how they affect people’s lives. Ultimately, this book is really not a biography of Moses or a history of New York City or a sociological study of urban planning, but an examination of power (hence the book’s title): Caro brilliantly explains how Moses got power, used it, kept it, and eventually lost it.
Because of its length, The Power Broker is a door stopper and it takes a commitment to read it. It took me over a month! But I highly recommend it if you have any desire to understand how New York City changed and grew in the 20th century.
And you can even find it on the radio -- yes, NYC has its own jazz station, WBG0 88.3 FM (it's actually located in Newark, NJ but that's ok, the five boroughs doesn't mind)!
Several years ago I wrote about Robert Caro's 1974 classic book "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York."
Clocking in at around 1,200 pages, "The Power Broker" won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and is generally considered the greatest book ever written about NYC. It tells the story of the long, complicated, and fascinating career of Robert Moses, the "master builder" who constructed roads, bridges, highways, parks, beaches, playgrounds, public housing, and huge structures like Lincoln Center and the United Nations. From the mid-1920s until the late 1960s, he was the most powerful man in New York City and New York State, a more consequential figure than any mayor or governor during that time -- or since. Because of Moses, the city's waterfront was cut off from the people, islands were bolted together, neighborhoods were destroyed, public transportation wasn't built, and over half-a-million people were evicted from their homes. The city was, as Caro writes, "flooded with cars" due to Moses' works, and our city's physical landscape changed forever.
Most shockingly, even though Moses wielded more power and had a greater effect on this city than anyone else in the 20th century, he was never elected to anything.
The story behind "The Power Broker" is equally fascinating: how the young reporter Robert Caro wrote a series of stories about Suffolk County and how it got him a grant to write a book about Moses -- a project that Caro thought would only last a year. How, instead, Caro spent seven years chronicling this incredible story and he and his wife almost went broke, living a total hand-to-mouth existence. How Caro interviewed Moses several times before the great man cut off communication with him. How interest for the book, prior to publication, was generated by serialization in The New Yorker. And how, today, on the 40th anniversary of its publication, "The Power Broker" stands as a classic that has never gone out of print. This article tells the story of how "The Power Broker" came into existence and is a must read like the book itself.
P.S. This article uses the word "archipelago" i.e. a group of islands, to describe NYC. That is, obviously, an apt description, and I feel deep shame that I have never, in almost a decade of blogging about NYC, never referred to this city as an archipelago. After all, not only is that a neat and proper word to call our fair city, but it's a really cool one. So expect me to throw around the word "archipelago" a lot on this blog going forward. I'll start now: archipelago, archipelago, archipelago, archipelago, archipelago ... archipelago.
NYC in the 1970s and 1980s was an historically rough place. High crime, rising rents, the fiscal crises, AIDS, Ed Koch -- it was tough. But there was one place that was, for many of us living in this city at that time, a kind of mental and emotional refuge.
It was Channel 13.
The programming on this local PBS station at that time was glorious. It brought great high culture to the unwashed masses in NYC. Even though I was watching things like "Sesame Street" and "Mr Roger's Neighborhood" on Channel 13 at the time, there were also programs like "Live from Lincoln Center" that presented performances of ballet, the philharmonic and the opera; long before "Downton Abbey" made it cool again, "Masterpiece Theater" was in its prime with shows like "Upstairs, Downstairs", "I, Claudius" and "The Jewel in the Crown"; there were also great news shows like "The MacNeil/Leher Report", "Bill Moyer's Journal" and "Nature"; and there was comedy too with shows like "Monty Python's Flying Circus". I also remember in 1988 Channel 13 had a wonderful series of Saturday nights where they showed old silent movies. And "Brideshead Revisited", the glorious 1981 mini-series that gave the world Jeremy Irons, was the "Downton Abbey" of its day.
In those down and dirty decades in NYC. Channel 13 was an uplifting and beautiful escape.
The man who made all of it possible -- and who made not only Channel 13 but all of public broadcasting what it is today -- was named Robert Kotlowitz, and he died recently at the age of 87. He had an interesting and unusual background for a TV executive. He was a novelist and magazine editor who was hired at Channel 13 in 1971 basically because he was unemployed and Channel 13 couldn't find anyone else to do the job. It was totally haphazard and accidental but it changed the culture of NYC -- for the better -- and Mr Kotlowitz's legacy lives on.
Thank you, Mr Kotlowitz, for what you did for Channel 13, my family, and NYC back then. Rest in peace.
So color me surprised when I checked my daily podcast downloads this morning and saw that Macaulay Culkin was featured on the latest episode of WTF with Marc Maron. For those of you under thirty, allow me to provide some background: back in the early 1990s, Macaulay (or Mac as he's generally known by) was the biggest child movie star in the world and perhaps the biggest one since Shirley Temple. In 1990 he was in a Christmas movie called Home Alone and it was one of the biggest hits of that decade. It made him a movie star -- for a while -- and he appeared in the movie's successful sequel a couple years later plus another successful movie called My Girl. Then he made a bunch of other movies that most people didn't see. And then, by the late 1990s, he vanished. Until the early 2000s when he came back -- sort of. He did an off-Broadway play and some indie movies. Then ... he vanished again. And, since then, he's basically been absent from popular culture. What's Mac been doing? That's what he talks about in this podcast episode. It seems that he just lives on his movie money and travels and hangs out. He talks about his complicated family life and the fall-out with his father who used to manage his career. It's a fascinating, if somewhat sad, story. And, bizarrely, yours truly, yes Mr NYC himself (i.e. ME) is a small, very small, part of Mac's story. Back in the late 1980s, as a young child, I was a student at the School of American Ballet (SAB). I was one of small cadre of boy students. I was there for about four years and appeared in the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center for three years. My last year there, and the last time I was in The Nutcracker, Mac had just joined SAB and we were in the same Nutcracker cast. We "worked" together for about three months. We didn't become friends (I found him annoying, he was always running around, seemed completely unable to focus) but we muddled through. I strongly remember his very large family hanging around as well as his father who, later on, he had an epic falling out with. They all seemed very noisy. After that Nutcracker year, I left SAB and didn't give this kid (like the others) a second thought. So, as you might imagine, it shocked me when, a couple years later, he popped up in this movie Home Alone (I didn't realize he acted and danced) and overnight became a sensation. It was a surreal, fun-house experience to see this. And, this morning, listening to this podcast, it was equally surreal to hear him talk about his time in The Nutcracker of which I was a part. I certainly hope Mac is happy and wish him well. I'm also so glad that I never got into show business and walked away from the mentally and emotionally punishing world of of child performing. It's not a surprise that he hasn't had a normal life when he certainly didn't have a normal child hood. It'd be interesting to talk with him again and, who knows, maybe I will. But it's strange when a small part of your childhood literally pops up one morning on your phone. Oh the times we live in.
It's amazing that these broadcasts have lasted for almost 80 years, and just another example of what makes New York such a great city.
Kurt Baum sang "Addio alla madre" followed by the finale from Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana."
The broadcasts start in December and go through May. You can listen to them here in NYC starting December 12 at 12:30 PM on WQXR 105.9 FM (this first opera is called Il Trittico)
