New York City has changed in many ways during my lifetime, much of it in the physical infrastructure of the city itself: old buildings torn down and new shiny ones put up, neighborhoods gentrified from poor to rich, pedestrian plazas and new parks, bike lanes -- you name it, this town has transformed dramatically since the turn of this century. If a time-traveller from thirty years ago was to stroll the city streets today, he or she would be like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II, looking in wonder at how the old town had become techy and neon.
And they'd also discover that the city's old public TV station, WNYC-TV, is no longer around.
Today we live in the age of the Internet, streaming shows, and literally thousands of cable channels. We drown in content from all over the world. But it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, television was three and a half-networks, local stations, and a bunch of cable channels showing repeats, old movies, and news. Here in NYC any "alternative" programming was reserved for public television stations like Channel 13 which, then and now, mostly showed documentaries, British TV, and children's shows.
WNYC-TV was different.
Owned by the city, a sister broadcaster to WNYC radio (which is bigger and more popular than ever today), and located on Channel 3, WNYC-TV was a bizarre hodgepodge of programming. It was a cross between PBS and public access, a true oddity. WNYC-TV would show local public affairs shows, coverage of the United Nations General Assembly, foreign news from Japan and Italy, soccer games, and music videos.
Like the city itself, the station had a gritty, street-level vibe but also an international flavor. It was intensely local and extremely global.
It also showed a lot of very weird and off-beat British TV, the kind of stuff you didn't see on Masterpiece Theater. During the week, the station would show episodes of the working class British soap opera EastEnders. Very popular in the UK (and still on), the show basically consisted of lots of cocky-accented people yelling at each other in pubs and dreary houses. On Saturday nights, there was The Diary of Adrian Mole, about an English teenager dealing with the miseries of his home life and school (being a teenager at the time, I identified with him except that he had a cute girlfriend named Pandora and, uh ... well, anyway). There was The Fall and Rise of Reginal Perrin, about a food company executive who hated his life so much that in basically every scene he was trying to kill himself, only to get interrupted. There was The Young Ones, an extremely raunchy show about a bunch of university pals living together in a messy house. And there was Shelley, about an overeducated and unemployed man living in London, spending the entire time making fun of people who are more sucessful than him. It's also where I discovered Blackadder!
These shows were like nothing else on regular American TV at the time, and they did quite a number on my impressionable teenage mind. I felt lucky to live in a city where we had a station like this.
And then I went to college. And WNYC-TV vanished.
In 1996, the city sold off WNYC-TV and radio. A foundation was started to buy and run the radio station, and today it's a broadcasting and podcasting powerhouse. But WNYC-TV was sold off to some commercial broadcaster who just leased out its airwaves. Any trace or connection to the city was gone. All that is left of WNYC-TV are various clips on YouTube, some of which you can see below, including the final signoff in 1996.
This is a part of the city that is gone today but whose spirit still lives on.
Today is a momentous day in the history of New York City. For 90 years ago on this date, WNYC transmitted its first radio broadcast.
It's hard to believe that this radio station, which is a staple of New York City, has existed for almost a century. In this world of crass commercial radio, it's a great thing that it does.
Back in 1924, of course, there was no television. Or Internet. Nobody had smart phones or even Walkmen. If you wanted to get news about the city, you had to either read a newspaper or listen to the radio. But as people quickly discovered, radio was more than about getting information -- it was about community, about literally bringing together the "8 million people who live in freedom and enjoy the benefits of democracy" as WNYC would proudly announce every day that it signed on.
Today, in 2014, WNYC still holds together this city's vast and diverse community. The station still has great news and entertainment programming. It respects the intelligence of its listeners and broadens our horizons.
All this week, WNYC is remembering its history by going into its vaults and re-broadcasting its classic programming. You can find a link to it here. You'll here a 1959 report on Greenwich Village where they talk about the "problem" of black men and white women being seen in public together. There's a bizarre and hilarious series from 1998 of Kurt Vonnegut broadcasting from the afterlife (I kid you not). And there are also interviews with the Master Builder himself, Robert Moses and his ultimate antagonist Jane Jacobs.
WNYC is a treasure, the crown jewel of the New York City air waves And as it complete its first century of broadcasting, I'm sure the best is yet to come.
In late 2020 I blogged about my memories of WNYC TV, the long defunct public television station that was owned by the city and was the sister broadcaster of WNYC radio.
The programming, as I indicated, was a weird cross between PBS and public access, with lots of international programming along with local shows. In the evening they would mostly show half-hour comedy and drama shows from the UK, much of it very offbeat stuff.
One exception to the British stuff on WNYC TV (although still quite "offbeat") were repeats of a late 1980s series called Trying Times. This was, unusually, an American show and it was actually created for PBS. Today we would call it an "anthology show" -- every episode was a stand-alone story with a totally different cast and characters. It could also be described as a "dramedy" -- the stories had a comic tone but there was a serious current underneath all of them. The episodes weren't laugh-out loud funny but there certainly weren't intensely dramatic. They were, well, weird.
Each episode chronicled painfully ordinary Americans (almost all white, let's face it, it was the '80) as they dealt with the trials and tribulations of life. A young lady goes home with her boyfriend to meet his family and it ends up with the father getting his hand caught in a food disposal in the sink. A woman gets divorced and experiences a miserable moving day. A guy who's been writing his thesis for 10 years has to get a job. I remember one odd episode where woman breaks into the house of a man to sleep with him because she's setting him up for a mob hit -- only to discover later that he's the wrong target.
And on and on. In many ways it was Seinfeld right before Seinfeld -- normal people who get into odd situations that escalate beyond anyone's control.
There were only about 12 episodes of Trying Times broadcast in 1987 and 1989. It's mostly (okay, completely) forgotten today but it was, in retrospect, way ahead of its time -- a single camera comedy/drama anthology series about wacky people. But what is memorable are the actors and talents who appeared on this show: Rosanna Arquette, Gina Davis, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Stockard Channing, Griffin Dunne, Robert Klein, Jean Stapleton, Steven Wright -- even Corey Feldman! Many were at the heights of their careers at the time these episodes were made. Some of the directors, also flying high at the time, were Buck Henry, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (currently getting some attention in the epic Beatles documentary), Christopher Guest, and even Jonathan Demme. There was a murderers row of talent in this series -- and one of the producers was, of all people, David Byrne.
You can find episodes of Trying Times on YouTube and watch the Golden Age of Television in its nascent form since you can't time-travel 30+ years and watch it on WNYC TV.
A few years ago I blogged about the late WNYC-TV which went off the air in 1996 after the city sold it off (WNYC radio still exists and is bigger than ever).
Now the city's Municipal Archives has digitized thousands of hours of tapes from WNYC-TV, from the 1940s to the 1980s. Obviously it's massive and impossible to watch everything but, if you're interested, you can find it and a history of the station here.
Before it became a broadcasting and podcasting powerhouse, WNYC was just the local city-owned radio station that reported on the news and events of the day. And every so often notable people would drop by the station for a chat -- and a moment in history would be captured forever.
That's why it's fascinating to hear the following legendary people getting brilliantly interviewed by a lady named Patricia Marx on WNYC in the 1960s:
- A 1960 interview with recently deceased journalist Neil Sheehan, talking about the situation in Vietnam -- almost thirty years before he wrote the definitive book on the war, A Bright Shining Lie.
- A 1961 interview with Lorraine Hansberry talking about her recently produced hit play A Raisin in the Sun. A black woman playwright having success on Broadway is still a rarity, even more so 60 years ago.
- A 1963 interview with Bob Hope, right after the release of the final Road movie.
- A two-part 1963 interview with New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine.
- Two seperate interviews from 1964 with groundbreaking comedians Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl.
- A 1964 interview with a very young Woody Allen, talking about his comedy act and how he's getting ready to appear in his first movie, What's New, Pussycat? The idea that this kid comic would eventually become a great director isn't even mentioned.
- A 1968 interview with David Halberstam about the war in Vietnam, years before he would publish The Best and the Brightest.
And many more.
History is being made all the time, we just don't realize it. When people are interviewed, they're simply sharing their thoughts and feelings about what's going in their lives and the world at that moment. Of course their lives and time moves on, things change, and that's how we make history. So that's why it's amazing to peak into or, in this case, listen, to a moment in history.
Big news today in the world of New York radio: two of the oldest stations in town are merging. Well, sort of: public radio station WNYC and the media company Univision have bought classical music radio station WQXR from The New York Times Company. They have actually bought two radio band signals: 96.3 FM and 105.9 FM. WQXR will be moved from 96.3 FM to 105.9 FM and, presumably, 96.3 FM will become a Spanish language station. The good news is that classical music radio in NYC will be saved. In the last couple of decades this has been an endangered species. The bad news: the 105.9 FM band isn't as strong as the 96.3 FM band and it will probably not be as easy to find or get as many listeners. Still, we should be glad that there'll be some classical music on New York radio as opposed to none. And by having it become a public radio station, this relieves it of commercial pressures. So now an 84 year old station (WNYC) owns a 73 year old station (WQXR). Both stations are legends. And this tribute to a former WQXR broadcaster from 1983 gives you a flavor of what an important and amazing legacy this station has.
If you want to know what NYC looked like in earlier eras, there are countless photos you can find online and elsewhere of the city in the 19th and 20th century. You can see pictures of workers building the subways and the city's famous buildings, you can see the old-fashioned streets and lamp posts and street cars, you can see the old storefront signs and billboards, you can see famous New Yorkers of the past like Fiorello LaGuardia or Robert Moses, you can even watch old TV shows set in NYC like the original Tonight Show. When it comes to NYC's past, its visual legacy is secure.
But what about the sounds? Old pictures can show was what the city looked like but what did it sound like?
Well, WNYC has the answer. You can check out its amazing vault of radio broadcasts from the 1920s to today. You can hear famous New Yorkers giving speeches, getting interviewed, debating, and so much more. Listen to William F. Buckley debate Ramsay Clark. Listen to Ed Koch host a forum on drugs in 1969, long before he was mayor. Listen to a broadcast from January 1, 1950, where people wonder what the next 50 years of the 20th century will be like. Listen to a pastor bemoan the tawdry state of Times Square.
It's all here at the WNYC Municipal Archives website. Listen to the past, then contemplate our future.
"Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives ..."
Thus spake Saint Augustine. Or an old soap opera. Either way time has been passing quickly lately because life has been quite hectic lately and blogging has gotten away from me lately -- until now!
But as I compose my first real post in over a month, the passage of time is very much on my mind -- and a couple recent events and remembrances have focused my mind on how people and things come and go, and either leave a lasting impression ... or don't.
First, a passing: the brilliant screenwriter and movie director Robert Towne recently died at the age of 89. He wrote and directed several films but the movie that catapulted him to cinematic greatness was his script for the 1974 classic Chinatown (which I've blogged about here several times). Besides being the most perfect screenplay ever written, Chinatown is also probably the best American movie ever made about the dark soul of a city and the forces that shape it. While it's about LA and not NYC, the movie has echoes of the real-life works of Robert Moses in NYC and how, to quote Chinatown, "he made this city." Towne understood the giant, secretive, menacing forces that surround and suffocate us, how cities are largely the products of deeply corrupt and powerful men, and how all of us are subject to their will and live within their warped creations. Hence the movie's iconic final line "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." But we'll never forget Robert Towne, his great legacy, and what "makes" our city.
Second, another passing but one nowhere near as sad. As I've also blogged about several times, one of my favorite shows ever is the early 1990s sci-fic drama Quantum Leap -- about a brilliant scientist who travels back in time, "leaping" into the life of various people and "putting right where once went wrong," changing history "for the better." It had many great episodes, including several in NYC. A couple years ago it had a reboot that I had high hopes for -- only to see them dashed. The show was a mess. Instead of focusing on the humanity of the characters who were to be saved, it chose to be some kind of weird thriller with numerous and confusing storylines, too many poorly developed characters, and no real chemistry between the actors. It failed completely. Now it's been cancelled, put out of its misery, and hopefully it will be forgotten -- while the great original show will hopefully be remembered and rewatched for decades to come.
Third, it's hard to believe but it's been over a quarter of a century since Sex and the City first hit our airwaves. It's now become a part of NYC's culture and identity but, back in 1998, it was just a little show struggling to find an audience. The pilot was directed by Susan Seidelman who also made the funky 1982 NYC movie Smithereens which I reviewed back in 2017. In this recent big interview, Seidelman remembers the making of Smithereens, the S&TC pilot as well as her classic 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan. In many ways these movies and TV shows define late 20th-century NYC -- and Susan Seidelman's vision made them happen.
Fourth, an anniversary, a big one: WNYC radio is 100 years old! Yes, broadcasting in this town has existed for more than a century. Probably the most powerful public radio station in the country, WNYC has had a tremendous legacy -- and present day relevance -- to the life of this city. Besides going back and reading my numerous posts about WNYC, you can also listen to a history of the station here and also a recreation of the station's first July 8th, 1924 broadcast here.
All things and people pass, come and go -- but so much else lasts (like this blog!). And, for that, yours truly is truly grateful.
Balancing a checkbook is hard. It's not easy to make money, and saving it is harder, so how we spend our money, and what we spend it on, is something we constantly struggle with.
I have no advice to proffer about what you or anyone should spend money on. But I believe in the maxim only to buy things that you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful or that make you happy. Everything else is a waste of money.
But even then it's not always easy to know what to spend money on. Sometimes a wise purchase looks less wise in retrospect. Conversely, sometimes today's savings is tomorrow expense ("penny-wise-and-pound-foolish").
Take, for example, the Second Avenue Subway. For decades, we were told that NYC needed this and, finally, after billions of dollars spent, it opened in 2017. And yet ... ridership is relatively low. And the money spent on it was not spent on improvements to existing lines. Was it money well spent? It's not clear.
Same with WNYC radio. The great hometown public radio station is a long ways ways from being a municipal utility. Today, it's a giant business, with hundreds of employees, sisters stations, and numerous podcasts and streams. And it pays accordingly: when added up, the CEO of WNYC makes over $1 million a year. Much of this comes from donors and "sponsors" (i.e. advertisers) of the station. Sure, WNYC is great radio but does the CEO deserve to be paid that much? I'm not 100% certain.
Finally, is axing a massive amount of staffers from the Daily News really a financially prudent move? Yes, it'll save money in the short term but in the long term a great NYC paper will be diminished and not really be worth reading. You can't do great journalism on the cheap and, in my opinion, this'll hurt paper in the long run and probably cost it more money.
Money is hard -- to make, save, spend, and most of all, get the greatest value from. This is vexing problem and, as we see in NYC today, even the most powerful among us struggle with it.
Last week, former WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate began a new show on WBAI.
This caused one of WBAI's longtime hosts, a guy named Jay Smooth who hosts (or hosted) a rap show on the station, to quit in protest because Lopate was fired from WNYC for unclear reasons involving his conduct with women. Never mind that rap music hasn't always had the greatest track record when it comes to attitudes towards women, hiring a nearly 80-year old man to talk about boring issues was too much for this guy.
But Jay Smooth should be happy.
WNYC has hired a woman named Allison Stewart to take over Lopate's old spot. She is a Peabody award-winning journalist so she certainly is qualified.
Here's my take: people should be able to work. Short of a criminal conviction, I don't believe in blackballing. That's what went on during McCarthyism and it's shameful.
As congestion pricing takes effect in NYC, we may very well be seeing the eclipse of the car in NYC -- or at least in lower Manhattan. Less cars, more money to public transit it music to the ears of any real New Yorker.
Take that Robert Moses!
But people still loves their cars -- I get it.
And even if you don't love cars (like me), you might have enjoyed theSaturday morning NPR show Car Talk (like me) that ran from 1986 to 2012 -- syndicated nationally from Boston and broadcast locally here on WNYC.
If you want to listen to some old Car Talk episodes, WNYC has a massive archive of old shows that are a pleasant diversion from the miseries of our time -- and love letter to the all-American automobile.
New York City is an evolving animal, a dynamic panoply of buildings, parks, landmarks, and streets that make up the physical city. Our infrastructure is in constant flux, and its nearly impossible to keep track of everything being built up and torn down in this ever changing place. But this place is our home, and our home is always being redesigned. WNYC is dedicating the month of April to a feature called Cityscapes, both online and on air. Each Wednesday morning, Brian Lehrer interviews New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger and other experts about the city's physical character and how economic development, artistic vision, local politics, and current events are affecting our city.
I heard the first of these segments last weeks and it was really interesting. Best of all, the callers were really good and made the guests think and talk about things they hadn't considered before.
You also should really look at the Cityscapes website, it has lots of pictures, videos, and write-ups about all of the construction projects and changes going on around town.
In NYC, there's lots and lots and lots of things to see: buildings, people, cabs, trucks, cars, storefronts -- you name it, you can see it here.
But what about the things you don't see that make an impact? And what about what you hear?
First, impact. Namely, gay marriage. Namely, the money that gay marriage has thrown into our city's economy. Last year, when New York made gay marriage legal, there was lots of speculation that the marriage industry would see a boost and that it might help our city's economy.
A year later, thanks to marriage equality, an extra $259 million was pumped into our city's economy and an extra $16 million into the city's coffers. That's some impact. That's great.
Second, the sounds. Again, you can hear anything you like. That's why this WNYC segment about the most annoying sounds in NYC is so interesting. It's so hard to think of just one. WNYC is doing a listener survey and you can add your own idea of what this city's most awful noises are here.
Just another example of the city we don't see but that certainly exists.
If you love comedy and happen to suffer from Sunday night insomnia, then switch on WNYC AM 820 at 11 PM Sunday night. Here you can listen to brilliant comedian (and former Astoria resident) Marc Maron interview the biggest names in comedy like Conan O'Brien, Judd Apatow, and Louis C.K on his show WTF (I have no idea what that stands for *wink wink*).
WTF began a podcast and has proven so popular that public radio came callin'. New technology meets the old, I guess.
If, on the other hand, you're actually able to fall asleep on Sunday nights, then you can hit the WNYC website and listen to it later. And it's definitely worth it.
Yet another piece of kooky 1950s NYC propaganda, this time produced by WNYC when the city owned its own public TV station. Again, you must see it to believe it -- and see how much the city has changed in the last 50-plus years.
Blog posts are, in many ways, a bunch of essays of varying length that are collected, chronologized, and streamlined on this platform called "da blog." In the analog world, essays usually appear in newspapers, magazines, books, or other various tactile media, usually with a similar logic applied to their aggregation.
So where does that leave the radio essay?
For decades the radio essay was ephemeral, existing only for as long as it was broadcast across the airwaves and into the minds of its listeners. Then it vanished into the ether of time. Alistair Cooke, both before and after he hosted Masterpiece Theater on PBS, produced radio essays for the BBC called Letter from America. He broadcast thousands and thousands of them, from 1946 to 2004 (!), commenting on everything from the re-election of Harry Truman to the Second Iraq War. Most of those radio essays no longer exist but more than a thousand have been rescued and now, thanks to the Internet, are easily accessible.
The radio essay is now more lively and powerful than ever!
Which brings me to The Fishko Files, a wonderful oddity in the world of present day New York City radio. Broadcast on WNYC every Friday morning, and freely available online, they are short essays by culture critic Sarah Fishko. She covers the whole swath of culture in NYC and elsewhere, both past and present -- art, architecture, music, movies, TV, even unknown or recently discovered recordings. She "writes" about Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Woody Guthrie, Scott Joplin, Andy Warhol, the architecture of the Old Penn Station, movies about the Holocaust, the new Whitney Museum, film composers, and many, many more. It's an audio feast of culture, a compendium of cultural essays from the cultural capital of the world.
Sarah Fishko has been producing these essays for WNYC for more than 20 years and you can listen to them all now -- whenever, wherever, however you want.
If there's one constant in New York life, one reliable anchor in the
tumult of existence here, it's pizza. Ever since the influx of Italian
immigrants in the early 20th century, this concoction of flat bread with
tomato sauce and cheese has become one of the staple items for all New
Yorkers, providing sustenance and comfort to the world's greatest city
for over 100 years. How this did happen? How did it conquer NYC? How
come NYC is pizza's city and we just eat in it? This segment from WNYC
radio explores why.
And talking about the anchors of NYC, no
place anchors our town more than Times Square. The crossroads of the
world in the center of the world, Times Square has been remade in the
last few years with the introduction of pedestrian plazas -- large
swaths of the public square where New Yorkers and tourists can roam free
and "chill" sans the threat of cars. This other segment from WNYC is
about the transformation of -- and caused by -- the new Times Square.
This
past weekend, the wife and I found ourselves in the Times Square area.
We got some ice cream and plunked ourselves at the public tables smack
dab in the center of the crossroads of the world to enjoy our treats.
There we were ... eating ice cream ... sitting on chairs, at a table ...
in the middle of friggin' Times Square! Reeled the mind at how
this isn't our parents Times Square. It's almost a cliche to say it now,
but the hookers, pimps, drug dealers, vagabonds, ruffians, porn
theaters, and dilapidated structures that used to populate the area are
truly gone, gone, gone. Now Times Square is a buzzing hive of tourists
and merchants, ablaze with LED screens advertising ... everything ... a
family friendly gathering place.
The transformation of Times
Square prove the old maxims: the old becomes new, the sleazy becomes
respectable, the rebel becomes the establishment. Like the old man said
in Chinatown, if something lasts long enough, it doesn't matter how
outrageous it's past: it becomes respectable.
There's lots to do on any given Saturday night in New York City but it's not every Saturday night in NYC where you can go to "A Prairie Home Companion." But last night a bunch of us went to the 1174th live broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio variety program at Town Hall.
It was a great show and hopefully you'll hear it this weekend on your local public radio station. Wearing his trademark suite and red sneakers, Keillor was hilarious and quick-witted as always (best joke of the night: when the Pope is in town this month he'll spend most of his time listening to confession from Elliot Spitzer). Keillor was joined by Scottish chanteuse Jean Redpath, who several beautiful songs, as well as by country music star Brad Paisley (who sang several HILARIOUS and naughty songs). Also, a local poet read several funny short poems and Keillor and the band sang several delightful songs.
Of course there was a Guy Noir mystery story (special guest: Kimberly Williams-Paisley, star of The Father of the Bridemovies and TV series According to Jim, also wife of Brad) that involved demolitions (gotta hear it to believe it) and, naturally, the News from Lake Wobegon.
I'm not able to hear "Prairie" every week but I do my best to. It's such an sweet, fun, innocent, old-fashioned show that it's almost hard to believe that such an uncool, thoroughly unhip thing could still exist in this deeply cynical age. But thankfully it does and, when it does to NYC, we should be grateful.
"A Prairie Home Companion" is broadcast locally on WNYC 93.9 FM, Saturday afternoons at 6 PM. It's rebroadcast on Sundays at 11 AM on WNYC 820 AM. Check out their website for more info.
The great cultural radio show Studio 360 (hosted by Mr NYC interviewee Kurt Anderson) has a recurring segment called American Icons that reviews important works from our nation's culture. These include things like the classic novels The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick, special moments like Jimmy Hendrix's performance of the "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, the Harley Davidson motorcycle, even the old TV soap Dallas. The segments look at why these various creations, from different points in American history and in radically different art forms, made a lasting impact on not only American culture but also the American psyche. These American Icon segments are some of my favorite things to listen to.
But wait, 'dere's more!
Recently Studio 360 launched a new New York Icons series that does the same thing for distinctly NYC-centric works. So far: the classic salsa album Siembra, Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", and the musical West Side Story. There are lots of classic movies and books and shows that could qualify as New York Icons, as well as moments like 1951 "Shot Heard 'Round the World", or Mayor LaGuardia reading the comics on WNYC radio, or Studio 54. The possibilities are endless. May I make one suggestion to the creators of the New York Icons series? Maybe you should include blogs. And, if you're including blogs, maybe you could include, oh, I don't know, Mr NYC!
