One of the defining features of great cities is that even its streets and avenues are famous: think Saville Row in London, the Champs D'Elysee in Paris, the Via Del Corso in Rome, Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Mulholland Drive in LA, and many others.
In NYC, especially Manhattan, Wall Street, Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Central Park West, and Sutton Place are famous the world over because they posses some of the most expensive real estate on earth. These avenues are synonymous with wealth, power, fame, glamour -- you name it. The richest and most famous people in the world live there, its architecture and streets exude the 1%. Tom Wolfe wrote a whole book about it back in 1987.
'nough said.
So what about Riverside Drive?
Unlike those avenues, it doesn't have anywhere near the fame and pedigree. But what's crazy is that Riverside Drive is probably more beautiful than any of them. Nestled next to the Hudson River, running quietly from 72nd street up to the top of Manhattan island, it's an amazingly peaceful avenue right next to one the most frenzied places in the entire world. You just walk a block west from the loud craziness of Broadway onto the leafy, zen-like Riverside Drive and it's like you've stepped out of one world into another.
I know a lot about Riverside Drive because, well, I grew up there. And I've always felt like it never got the respect of Manhattan's other great avenue. But that's changed a little recently: there's now a book about it called Heaven on the Hudson that chronicles its amazing history. Riverside Drive is full not only of beautiful buildings, it's not only across the street from its own park with sweeting views of the Hudson River, but it's also full of monuments and also contains some of the last remaining free-standing mansions in NYC. You should read the interview with the author. I can't wait to read the book.
If you want to know more about what makes Riverside Drive so magical, you should read this 1998 essay "My Manhattan: 44 Blocks of Enchantment." I remember reading it when it was published -- I was in college, far from NYC, and it brought me right home in my mind.
You can read all of Mr NYC's Riverside Drive coverage here.
I never say things like this but I'll say it here: Riverside Drive is the best avenue in NYC!
If I had the cash to build a palace, I'd build it in a great city by a river.
Imagine living in a huge home, gilt and elegance everywhere, looking out the window and seeing a brilliant cityscape, and then looking out another window and seeing a big placid stream of water.
How lovely, how mesmerizing, how ... rich.
This is not, obviously, an original idea to me. There have been several historic palaces built next to rivers in great cities but today, sadly, most of them are gone.
And here in NYC, we also have phantom riverside palaces -- the lost mansions that used to exist on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
But foist, to history!
In London, in the medieval era, there was a huge palace on the banks of the River Thames in London called the Savoy Palace. It was huge, gorgeous, and absolutely screamed of power and wealth. Unsurprisingly it was owned by the then-royal family of England, the Plantagenets. Its last resident was John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, and an important political and military leader of his time -- a kind of guy-behind-the-guy, a Bismark or James Baker or Tywin Lannister kind of guy.
But tragedy befell the Savoy Palace in 1381 when, during the Peasants Revolt, it was burned down, totally destroyed (John of Gaunt had levied a very unpopular tax on the peasants and the peasants let him know what they thought of it). A smart politician, John didn't rebuild the palace -- instead, he made tax reforms and quelled the rebellion, restoring peace.
John of Gaunt is also the grandfather of every British monarch since Henry IV. John and his longtime-mistress/last wife, the gorgeous and amazing Kathrine Swynford, had four kids. John of Gaunt's riverside palace may not have survived but his DNA sure does!
Moving down to Paris, on the right back of the River Seine, used to stand the Tuilleries Palace. It was one of many residences of the French Kings and it was actually built by the great Queen Catherine de Medici herself. The French Kings before the 1789 didn't actually live there much (they soon headed out to Versailles) but in the 19th century it was used by the short-lived monarchs Louise-Phillipe and Louise Napoleon.
But the Tuilleries Palace became another victim of mass fervor when, during the Paris Commune of 1871, it was destroyed, never to be rebuilt. Now it's a massive public park, the Tuilleries Gardens, where families stroll and couples go to ... French.
Sidenote: a forgotten historical figure named Prince Phillipp of Saxe Coburg Gotha was born in the Tuilleries Palace in 1844. He was the brother-in-law and best friend of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary who, along with a couple of others, discovered Rudolf and his dead mistress at Mayerling in January, 1889. Philipp is an intriguing, pivotal character in Episode 4 of Fall of Eagles (see below, it's an amazing episode). Phillipp also put his crazy cheating wife (who was also his cousin) in an insane assylum and fought a duel with her lover that he lost, and then divorced her. During Word War 1, his son was killed when his son's mistress threw acid in his face. He had a life of both great privilege and great tragedy, an example of late 19th century/early 20th century European monarchy that vanished with the war.
Then there's the Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. Built by the insanely wealthy and noble Yusupov family on the banks of the Moika River. It was as huge, as gorgeous, as jaw-droppingly splendid as any palace ever built anywhere. It was (literally) a shining example of Tsarist Russia -- the kind of place that represented everything that the Communists hated and wanted to destroy.
Amazingly, however, the Communists didn't destroy it after the 1917 Russian revolution. It was too big, too impressive, and too useful to destroy. Instead, the Yusopov family fled Russia and the Communists turned into a ministry. Now its a museum. But even though this riverside palace still exists, it's still a phantom -- no one lives there, its original use abandoned, a curiosity of history and not a living part of it.
But what's most interesting about this palace is that while it's huge and gorgeous and an architectural marvel, its best known for something that happened in a basement room in the palace late at night on December 30, 1916. That's the night that Prince Felix Yusupov and his friends killed the mysterious and fake holy man/Tsarist whisperer and advisor Rasputin. They fed him poisoned cakes and wine and, when those failed to kill him, shot him. Rasputin managed to flee outside of the palace where Yusupov and his friends shot him again. Then they chained him up and drove him outside St. Petersburg where they dumped his body into another river. And while Yusopov and his friends thought killing Rasputin would save the Russian monarchy, it was in fact the moment when its doom was sealed.
Okay, so we've delved into history of some of the riverside palaces in London, Paris and St. Petersburg. Let's come home to NYC.
And here you can learn all about the huge, beautiful mansions -- some of them almost as big and gorgeous as palaces -- that were built in the 19th-century on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Obviously no nobles or royals built or lived in them, but they were examples of the Gilded Age, of New Money, of trying to show their European counterparts that they could build great homes as grand as anything in the Old World. And Riverside Drive, that great stretch of road by the watery Western frontier of NYC, seemed like the perfect place.
Sadly, most of these mansions on Riverside Drive are gone today. A couple still exist but, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, their wealthy residents could no longer afford their upkeep and sold them to developers. The new owners proceeded to knock them down and build apartment buildings -- some quite splendid themselves but not quite as interesting as the mansions they replaced.
This documentary below about the lost mansions, the lost palaces, of Riverside Drive tells the story about ten of these long-gone gems.
And I have a personal interest in this -- one of the mansions mentioned in this documentary was replaced by the building that I grew up in myself and where my family still owns the apartment.
So yeah ... I kinda-sorta-but-not-really-but-want-to-believe that I grew up and lived for years in a kinda-sorta-palace on the riverside of a great city.
And that I have a some stuff in common with other previous residents of riverside palaces, like personal intelligence and elegance, except for ...
John of Gaunt; I mean this guy had it all -- money, power, a hot woman (and women), kids, bling -- I just wouldn't want to have my home burned down.
... or Catherine de Medici but without all the killing.
... or Prince Phillipp of Saxe Coburg Gotha but without putting my wife in a loonie bin or discovering my brother-in-law dead.
... or Prince Felix Yusopov without killing a gross and weird holy man and then fleeing the country.
And if you want to just enjoy the beauty and impressive current day architecture of Riverside Drive, I strongly suggest taking a walk along this most amazing and unique of NYC thoroughfares.
Since the snowstorm two weeks ago, New York City has entered into a deep freeze.
The snow remains on the ground and various surfaces of the city, literally frozen in place. There are mountains and rocks and fields and valleys of solid snow, glacier-like, making the whole of NYC look like the surface of the moon.
But out of Mother Nature's icy dump on NYC, something else has emerged -- art.
Walking along Riverside Drive recently, I came upon these snow sculptures. What's intriguing about them is that it's impossible to tell if they were man-made or nature-made. Either guess might be correct. But these snow sculptures are a reminder that beautiful things can come out of mess -- and that the natural world and the city have a magical fusion.
Today I saw a big article on NYC movies. Obviously there are tons of NYC movies and, when I review one here, I try not to review the big famous ones -- instead, I look for the forgotten or overlooked NYC movies, trying to make my meagre audience aware of those they might have missed. Like this article indicates, I also try to review movies that give you a sense of the city, a feeling of living and experiencing it -- not just where the city is used as a convenient, familiar backdrop.
One such example is Vanilla Sky. A few weeks ago I blogged something that included a clip from the 2001 Tom Cruise movie where he is driving around a deserted Manhattan, stops in an empty Times Square, gets out of his car, starts running, then stops and yells into the (not exactly vanilla) sky. We learn later on that this moment was probably some kind of technical glitch in an artificial dream that he is living through -- and that is apparently the plot of the movie.
I say "apparently the plot of the movie" because, to be honest, the plot makes no friggin' sense. Tom Cruise plays a guy very much like ... Tom Cruise: handsome, rich, famous, lots of broads (one too many as it turns out) who gets into a car crash, messes up his face, gets accussed of murder ... and then, from there on, it becomes a weird heady trip. This movie was on the back-end of a trend that really started in 1999 with movies like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich where the entire reality of the story, the world the movie is set in, gets totally undermind and flipped around. But instead of using this plot-twist once, Vanilla Sky tries to outdo them but have numerous "reality redefining" moments and you get nice and confused until you don't care anymore and you don't really understand what the "vanilla sky" is or why we should care and then Kurt Russell shows up as some kind of psychiatrist/interrogator and Cameron Diaz gets to look hot and act crazy and Penelope Cruz gets to look hot and get naked and a bunch of other really good actors spend their time telling Tom Cruise that he's an asshole and, yeah, that's about it.
But it's still a great NYC movie -- the city is not only lovingly rendered, it becomes a real character in the movie, the filmmakers give you a great sense of life in the city. I also have a personal love for this movie -- in the scene where Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are driving around (she's busting his balls because she believe that once a guy sleeps with a woman, he owes the lady his entire soul -- and presumably money), and then she drives off the 96th street overpass on Riverside Drive. During this scene they drive past the building I grew up in -- so that was cool.
Anyway, see Vanilla Sky, preferably in an inebriated state, because then you might understand it better.
Oh, btw, Tom Cruise couldn't drive into Times Square and yell anymore -- in 2007, the city turned most of it into a pedestrian plaza so now he'd have to go yell elsewhere.
I've always been fascinated by the 1930s movie star Greta Garbo, the great Swedish actress who made classic movie after classic movie -- before quitting and remaining a recluse for the rest of her life. Over the years I've blogged about her life in NYC where apparently she became known as the "hermit about town."
Equally intriguing is that apparently, in the 1950s, when Garbo was herself in her 50s, she went to a party one night hosted by the acclaimed playwright and screenwriter William Inge. He held it, of all places, in his apartment on my beloved Riverside Drive.
One of the guests was a handsome young actor, just starting out on Broadway, named Burt Reynolds. The older Ms. Garbo was quite struck by the hunky young thespian and made overture after overture to him to take her home and do the funny business ... and he chickened out.
That's right, "the Bandit" might have shtupped Ninotchka. How cool would that have been? And this meeting happened, of all the square places, on Riverside Drive!
Apparently the divine Garbo didn't always 'vant to be alone.
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.
As works of art, memorials are usually very staid, conservative things. Since they are public exhibits and meant to remember the dead, obviously they need to be as tasteful as possible and offend no one. Thus most memorials, on strictly aesthetic grounds, are usually less than stunning l'objects art -- that is, of course, unless they are designed by someone like Maya Lin (who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC and the Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial in Atlanta). New York City doesn't have a lot of memorials of note with the clear exception of the Soldier and Sailors Monument on 89th Street and Riverside Drive (I guess Grant's Tomb counts as a memorial, sort of). There's also the World War I memorial in Astoria Park and, of course, the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero is built slowly, slowly.
However, some regular people have taken it upon themselves to create their own memorials in NYC. In Bayridge, Brooklyn, there is a rather incredible memorial to 9/11 of Jesus cradling the Twin Towers. While one might question its artistic merit, there is no denying its sincerity.And if you look around town, on the streets, you might come across some bicycles spray painted in white. These are called Ghost Bikes and the are meant to remember cyclists and pedestrians who have been killed on the streets.
While some might consider these exotic types of memorials strange, in the end, aren't we kind of glad they're there? After all, who says you have to be boring when remembering the dead?
I don't understand rich people sometimes which why I guess I'll never be one.
Today there's a big story about a guy who bought two small islands off the coast of the Bronx. One of them had a small former radio tower on it that he spent millions rehabbing into a beautiful house -- and he only spent one night in it. He also spent a fortune landscaping the island to make it beautiful (since the island is basically a rock being constantly pelted with saltwater). The other island is tiny and basically unusable. Now he's trying to sell the islands, apparently uninterested in living in his creation.
What the hell? He spent around $10 million on one island he'll never use and another he can't! Now he's trying to sell them for $13 and I can't imagine who'll want to buy them. Who the hell wants to live on a island that completely isolates you from the rest of the the city? It might be cool to visit but who'd want to live there? Insanity!
Meanwhile, in the more civilized world of Riverside Drive, there is a literal mansion for sale around $8 -- less than the cost of fixing up those islands. This Renaissance Revival mansion lies vacant, aching for a buyer. Now, it needs work, it'll cost a lot of money to rehab, but the pictures of it (check it out here) are stunning and mesmerizing -- this mansion even has its own ballroom! If I was one of those super-rich guys, I'd buy this mansion ASAP and fix it up to the "noines." It's the opportunity of a lifetime. And yet, for some reason, in a town of super-rich people, no one wants to buy it! This amazing piece of NYC real estate and history just lies empty! What the hell is wrong with rich people? Seriously, get your priorities straight: Rehabbing a mansion -- yes, yes, yes! Rehabbing islands -- no, no, no!
Wherever you grow up, wherever you spend your formative years from birth to adulthood, it stamps you forever -- no matter how far you may run away from it.
Think of Gatsby. The Long Island millionaire bootlegger is revealed to be, at the end of The Great Gatsby, what he always really was -- a poor boy from North Dakota trying to make good. Think of Ronald Reagan -- yes, he was a Hollywood movie star and US President but he never really stopped being the poor boy from small town Illinois whose dad was a drunk. It haunted him and his years in power, informing his dark view of the world.
You might not be able to "go home again" but your childhood home never leaves you -- no matter how old you get, no matter where you move to.
Being a kid in New York City is something special -- this city is so unique, so weird, so crazy, that growing up here defines you forever. You may move far away, you may grow old -- but NYC kids are always NYC kids no matter where they live or whatever age they are.
Here are two amazing examples of kids from NYC who grew up to define the culture: the movie director and author Peter Bogdanovich and the writer Diane di Prima.
Bogdanovich grew up on Riverside Drive (like me), fell in love with the movies as a kid and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the NYC art house movie scene. Eventually he moved to Hollywood and became a successful (and then not so successful) director of movies like The Last Picture Show and Mask. He had a wild life, dating Cybill Shepherd and Playboy playmates, being best buddies with Orson Welles, acting on The Sopranos -- just an amazing ride. He's an old man now but, as this big interview shows, despite all his successes and failures, despite all his adventures, he's still just the kid from NYC who wanted to be in the movies. And he did it.
I had never heard of Diane di Prima until now but I wish I had: she was the leading female member of the Beat generation. A child of Greenwich Village, she wrote books and poems, taught school and college, and was an innovator in what today we'd call "confessional memoir." She's over 80 now and has had a crazy life but, you get the sense from this article, that Diane is still a young girl from the Village who just wanted to write.
And here's something that all kids in NYC and their parents have to struggle with: at what age can they be allowed to ride the subway alone? Believe it or not, this is a matter of great debate. Honestly, I don't recall how old I was when I started riding the subway by myself (I was 10 when I started riding the bus by myself) but it's one of the "only in NYC" things that defines being a kid in NYC.
I'm currently watching the Paramount+ mini-series The Offer and it's ... highly mediocre.
It's a 10-hour retelling about the making of the 1972 classic The Godfather, told mostly from the perspective of the producer Al Ruddy. Ruddy is played decently by Miles Teller and he's made out to be a hero, the genius behind ones of the greatest movies ever made (but my favorite performance is by Matthew Goode who does a great job portraying fellow Riverside Drive native Robert Evans, the flamboyant head of Paramount in the early 1970s who was responsible for overseeing the production of Love Story in 1970, The Godfather in 1972, and Chinatown in 1974 -- three movies in four years made that him a legend forever). The Offer would have you believe that somehow Ruddy is the reason for The Godfather's greatness, never mind that Francis Ford Coppola is the one who actually made it, and that Ruddy never produced another movie in his career that was anywhere near as good.
Also, The Offer is actually longer than all three Godfather movies combined!
Anyway, there's a minor character in The Offer that caught my interest -- the late Congressman Mario Biaggi who was the grandfather of Alessandra Biaggi, the former State Senator who destroyed the IDC in 2018.
Back in the early 1970s Biaggi was at the height of his prestige and power, a big-shot politician, a gregarious personality, and easily the best constituent-services Congressman NYC had the time. He was beloved, always won his elections easily, and seemed destined to become mayor. He also had strong connections to the real-life mafia, a "finger in every pie" kind of guy.
And he hated The Godfather.
Biaggi thought that it demeaned Italians, made everyone think they were all gangsters, and he did everything he could to stop it, including getting the movie's permits pulled so that the production couldn't shoot around NYC. Obviously he failed, but The Offer makes clear what a headache he was to Ruddy and Coppola, and how he was brought to heel by Joe Columbo, once he cut a deal with Ruddy to get the word "mafia" removed from the screenplay.
This profile of Mario Biaggi ran in New York magazine in December 1972, the same year The Godfather was released and just before he ran for a mayor in 1973 -- a campaign he would ultimately lose to Abe Beame. Biaggi would continue in congress until 1988 when he resigned and was ultimately imprisoned for corruption. He died in 2015, still a beloved if somewhat controversial figure -- but he was the kind of old-school politician who was, at heart, a public servant, a man passionate about his community and city, a guy who did a lot of good -- even if he sometimes feathered his own nest and tried to derail a cinema classic.
Fifty-years ago the movie The Odd Couple was released. It's probably the quintessential NYC roommate story about a slob and a neat-freak, Oscar and Felix, middle-aged men who've been kicked out by their wives and are looking to re-start their lives. Of course, unlike most NYC roommates, they live in a huge apartment on Riverside Drive (best line: "Do me a favor? Smoke towards New Jersey") and seemingly no money worries.
Originally written as a play by Neil Simon, The Odd Couple movie, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, was a huge hit. It inspired the successful 1970-1975 TV show with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, a 1998 sequel with Lemmon and Matthau, another recent TV show from 2015-2017, and even an early 1980s TV show where Oscar and Felix were black (The New Odd Couple). Oscar and Felix seem to be perennial.
Why?
As a play and a movie, the story is okay but nothing terribly exciting. It's not even the best of Simon's plays (Lost in Yonkers or the Brighton Beach plays probably take those honors) and yet it's his most popular creation. Audiences seem unable to get enough of these wacky New York roommates and their antics.
Again, why?
It's probably because it's a story about friendship, the original "bromance", and how men can help each other at difficult times in their lives. It's also an excuse for a couple of guys to be silly, "boys will be boys", and a chance for two actors to show their comedic chops. And it's about how there can be a bond between men that's separate and special from a romantic relationship that's not necessarily homoerotic or gay (more in the lines of "bros befo' hoes").
It's a story about a couple of New Yorkers that's also universal. Odd -- and understandable.
What's also interesting about the original 1968 movie is that it was largely filmed on the streets of the city so it's a great way to look at what NYC was like fifty-years ago -- a city once very familiar and strange. Much like Oscar and Felix.
Other favorite line from the movie, after Matthau throws a plate of linguini at a wall: "Now it's gah-bage!"
Favorite line from The New Odd Couple, after one of the characters has given money to a hooker named Charity: "I gave it to charity."
The definition of plastic surgery is, "the process of reconstructing or repairing parts of the body ... either in the treatment of injury
or for cosmetic reasons."
As this definition indicates, sometimes plastic surgery is necessary -- when people get disfigured, it helps them restore their appearance and improve their lives. But most of the time, plastic surgery is just tinkering, an attempt by people to "improve" their appearance even if they look fine to begin with. And, of course, the fact that it's plastic surgery means that they look less than natural, their appearance is no longer organic. The reality is that people who get plastic surgery usually look worse than they did originally. Most people who get plastic surgery do so because they want to look younger than they are -- but, in reality, they don't look younger, just weirder.
NYC has never been this boring -- or this weird.
Boring, because the city is getting gutted and homogenized, the businesses and buildings that made them unique are being destroyed and replaced by mega chains and uninteresting glass constructions. Weird, because there's something unnatural about this transformation, about how the city no longer feels like a special place but some kind of McCity. We talk a lot about "gentrification" but really, in my mind, it's the equivalent of urban plastic surgery -- tinkering with the face of NYC in an attempt to improve it but that really just ruins it.
And there's a reason for this beyond the usual complaint about gentrification -- tourism. As this exhaustive article from VICE indicates, the bending over backwards to tourists in NYC is one of the reasons why this city feels less and less like it belongs to the people who actually live here.
Of course, the face of NYC has always been changing -- just in a more organic way.
Once upon a time, on Riverside Drive, there used to be amazing mansions lining this most beautiful of boulevards. However, as these mansions became more and more expensive for their residents to maintain, and as the demands for housing exploded, these mansions were torn down and made way for apartment buildings (the building I grew up in used to be the site of an old mansion). This article is about one of those mansions that, before it was destroyed, was touted to become the official residence for the Mayor of New York City (the plan fell through when Mayor LaGuardia quashed it and, instead, Gracie Mansion was chosen). So the face of NYC has always changed -- but it used to be for the benefit of the people, not the visitors.
That said, some wrinkles of the past still appear on the face of NYC today. Take, for instance, the Ear Inn, the watering hole in Lower Manhattan. It's over 200 years old and still in business. I recently went there with a friend and it's still a vibrant, busy place. We quite enjoyed ourselves and felt, for once, at home in our hometown.
As long as we preserve some aspects of the past, NYC won't be entirely plastic -- and its soul will never die.
In a city of 8-plus million people, New Yorkers live in every imaginable
kind of home: single rooms, basements, attics, townhouses, penthouses,
apartments, regular houses, libraries -- one friend told me his sister
even lived in a boiler room. Most of us are struggling either to pay the
rent or beat it. Even those of us lucky enough to be owners gotta cough
up a mortgage payment each month.
Oy vey.
But there are those few -- very few -- New Yorkers who are
lucky enough to live in mansions. Not apartments or homes but actual
mansions! Back in the day, millionaires and billionaires in NYC would
build huge stand alone mansions for themselves uptown. If you ever saw the movie Gangs of
New York, there's a scene where the characters escape Five Points, go
uptown, and rob a mansion. Many of these mansions were built in the
mid-to-late nineteenth century and were torn down over time (the
building I grew up in used to be the sight of such a mansion). Some
survived and were taken over by businesses or non-profit organizations
or museums (like the Frick) or schools (one of the schools I went to as a kid used to be an old
family mansion).
This slide show of Gilded Age mansions will blow your
mind and there's currently an exhibition at the Museum of the City of
New York about them as well.
Today there are almost no stand alone mansions left in NYC. Even Mayor Mike's mansion is next to a
school and an apartment building. In fact, as far as I know, there are
one three fully-detached mansions left in NYC where people actually
live: the Steinway mansion in Astoria, Gracie mansion, and the Schinasi
mansion.
The Steinway mansion is a beautiful home but its located in an
industrial wasteland. The owner died a few years ago and, beautiful as
it is, its cost and location make it almost uninhabitable.
Gracie Mansion, of course, is the residence for the mayor of NYC and has
been vacant ever since Bloomberg became mayor since he has his own
(although De Blasio might move there).
The only fully detached, privately-owned mansion in Manhattan is the Schnasi mansion. Interestingly enough, it's not located on Fifth Avenue or Park
Avenue or somewhere like that. It's on Riverside Drive, nestled up on
107th street (near where yours truly grew up actually). It was built
about a hundred years ago and has been sold and re-sold and left vacant
over the decades. For years I would walk by it and wonder if anyone was
living there. Recently it was on the market for $31 million but,
allegedly, found a buyer for around $15. That's a pretty good deal for
the only fully detached mansion in NYC.
If you're interested in the historic mansions of the Gilded Age that still populate our city in one form another, this very cool web site is worth checking out. It's a reminder and legacy of another time, a living history of NYC in stone and granite.
