Thursday, July 14, 2005

The New New York

Twelve years ago, I packed up my apartment on 19th Street and, via Paris, headed west, my last address burned in my memory ever reminding me that I still think with one foot planted firmly in Manhattan.

My various careers have led me back east frequently, however, ten months have passed since I worked
M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Pillage” premiere in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The space between gave me the opportunity to see the obvious changes collectively, if not lucidly.

“Destination New York”, as my friend Dr. Crosby dubs it, is a cleaner, sparkling place. On June 28th, the Times featured the $150,000,000 redevelopment plan for the East River esplanade. It was amazing, sure to give the city “a much-needed break from the quaint…vision of New York that is threatening to transform Manhattan into a theme park version of itself…” But hasn’t that already happened? The article recalled the park’s “gritty integrity” and I thought of its broken down amphitheatre, since renovated by Erin Brockovich in 2002, as one of my favorite hideouts.

The subway stations are no longer lit by bare bulbs hanging from crusty, water damaged ceilings that promote mysterious growth, the N & R train suddenly lurching to a stop beneath the 57th Street Bridge and a crackling voice from the depths of the car reciting: “This train is now out of service” at which point everyone on the train would slam their copy of “Bonfire of the Vanities” shut and make eye contact with each other, sighing, cursing or stifling snickers.

One can no longer quote "A Chorus Line", once the Broadway mainstay, “New York is falling apart” to which my late mentor, Norman Rothstein, would always reply, “New York is always falling apart. “

Gone are Carmel Cars’ beat-up Caprice Classic fleet, replaced by two-year-old Lincolns, and frankly, quite luxurious.

Gone is the bus station quality of JFK’s United terminal, having recently gotten a glossy, pastel face-lift. The grime seems to have moved to the outskirts; and although I enjoy the comfort of the new United terminal, I miss the grime.

Gone is the thrill of hitting every green light on Ninth Avenue, your taxi driver weaving in and out of lanes pockmarked with potholes. Traffic jams the city at all hours. Tokens are obsolete. One is encouraged to purchase a plastic Metrocard, preferably from the machines rather than the clerk, fares currently $2.00 per trip, a 200% price increase from when I moved to town.

Gone is the Beekman Theatre, immortalized in “Annie Hall” when Alvie Singer, waiting for Annie, is accosted by a fan from the cast of “The Godfather”.

Gone is the St. Mark’s Theatre, where on my 25th birthday, I watched my favorite film “Gone With the Wind” for the first time on the big screen and wondered why everyone tittered. Could GWTW be melodramatic?

Gone are the creative outfits in the past. As if at a loss for some originality, fashion photographer Bill Cunningham’s June 27th Sunday Times spread featured an onslaught of gold over-the-shoulder tote bags.

Gone are the Staten Island ferry girls with their bunched up socks and high-top aerobic sneakers. Two decades have passed and big hair is a relic, but I shuddered witnessing several ladies on the avenue caught in a sudden summer thunderstorm without a change of shoes. Ruined shoes were a reoccurring NY nightmare for me and could easily throw me into a funk for days.

It’s summer. Normally, only the die-hard New Yorkers would be in residence, a cold bath the only respite from the swelter, but the streets are festooned with ladies in pretty floral skirts and strappy sandals that show off pretty pedicures. Every female, age indifferent, resembles Carrie Bradshaw a la “Sex and the City”, a desperate attempt to imitate a shiny New York that only wet down streets and film cameras can bring to a celluloid reality. To emphasize the illusion, one can actually book a "Sex and the City" bus tour.

PAX and Cosi, “upscale” gourmet eateries offer a pricey alternative to the Korean delis that flourished during the ‘80s. For the first time in decades, Dean & Deluca have rivals. On the Upper West Side, Whole Foods Market competes with Zabar's and Fairway. Living on the opposite side of town, I shopped at the blue-collar Gristede’s and wistfully recall how my brother could easily shoplift a steak and the hit and run rat sightings we would compare. Think what you want, but these were the adversities that brought everyone together.

Restaurants are huge, meaning spatially enormous, invoking envy from renters struggling to find that extra bit of room. And speaking of restaurants, 145 Starbucks populate the island of Manhattan alone. 145. That means if you were to walk from the bottom of the battery to the tip of Washington Heights, that’s one almost every block and a half. Not that I mind. I am a devoted Starbucks customer and find myself frothing if I can’t find one near me, especially in a city that boasts 145. The city is also wild with French bistros, as if New York restaurateurs are out of the closet, blatantly admitting their Francophile status. While nyc.com lists 92, Yahoo does not discriminate, claiming 121. From the Hotel Gansevoort, I could've thrown a stone to either Pastis or Markt on opposing corners. I also discovered two L.A. hot spots, A.O.C. and Le Pain Quotidien. Are New Yorkers acknowledging their sister city on the other coast? When I lived in New York, L.A. was known as “Hell A”.

And yes, I know you're asking, "Where Have All the Hookers Gone?" It’s hard to coolly overlook the revamping of 42nd Street, a feat that Norman, once a member of the “42nd Street Restoration Committee”, would declare could never be done, not without “at least 25 million bucks”, which no one in those days had or wanted to part with. But millions came in the form of The Walt Disney Corporation. The impeccable restoration of the New Amsterdam Theatre and the installation of Disney’s “The Lion King” replete with vendors hawking beanie baby Simbas up and down the aisles during intermission laid the groundwork for a full block renovation, attracting other corporate entities to plug into the 42nd Street glorification like Starbucks, Chevy’s, Bubba Gump Shrimp, and London’s famous Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

Hiking up to the theatrical production office on 43rd & 8th which employed me, disembarking at Times Square station, coffee and roll with butter in hand, my comrades on the street of dreams were working girls and cops flipping through the porn magazines at the peep show entrances. Now, bar signs on 8th Avenue have all been painted to look like quaint village taverns and only McHale’s sports its original neon sign.

Most surprisingly, Red Sox fans have come out of hiding, as if to provoke the defeated Yankees, people sporting hats and t-shirts everywhere. In 1991, I went to a Yankees-Red Sox game where the number of fights threatened to stop the game.

Why this melancholy reflection? It all started with the Basquiat Retrospective hosted by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Rather than wait until the show traveled to L.A., I wanted to see Jean-Michel on his own turf. I left the galleries depressed, prickly and peevish. I jotted some notes down, struggling to figure out why my mood swung into such a low and bleak place. Certainly Basquiat will do that to you. His paintings are angry, lonely, sad and we witness the artist at the beginnings of his career, never getting to see what might have been accomplished had he lived to be an old man. But deeper than that, Basquiat reminds me of the 80s and a permeated sadness that dwelt in the city during that decade. Maybe it’s the me I miss when I first arrived here, fresh off the Amtrak. I miss The Palladium, The Limelight and turning 21, feeling like an adult ordering my Absolut Tonics and long neck beers here’s-my-ID-thank-you-very-much-off-we-go-to-an-after-after-hours-party-and-still-make-it-to-work-at-10:AM. It was messy and dirty and fabulous. During those days, a full face lift wasn't required, the city swept the mess under the carpet.

In fact, if any of you have seen “Party Girl”, “Pieces of April” or even the biopic, “Basquiat”, that is the New York I remember. Small dark apartments with hundreds of coats of paint so much that the cornices and crown molding from the 19th Century look like globs of toothpaste. No matter. Your apartment is where you sleep; the city is your living room, your den, your piazza, your dining room and back yard.

I lamented these observations with a few friends. Most people agreed that the city had lost its edge. You could be in Chicago. You could be in St. Louis. Jon commented that the last time he returned east, he thought he was “going to New York and ended up at City Walk”.

That said, New York is still one of my favorite cities and is home to many of my favorite things, like Café La Fortuna, Arturo’s Pizza, Katz's Deli, ABC Carpet, Strand Bookstore to name a few.

I also love walking home in the early morning hours without a care in the world. I love that you can sing out loud, talk out loud, dress out loud and no one will take notice. I love that random newspaper sheets still blow down Broadway and tackle people in the face. I love taking the subway out to Coney Island. I love how green the trees get in August, how summer hosts a parade every weekend, how Century 21 is still the best place anywhere bar none to get a great deal on designer shoes. I love walking past the Neil Simon, the Music Box, the Golden, the Walter Kerr just after the curtain goes up, wondering what the audience, seated in the dark, thinks about the mystery unfolding before them on stage. I am thrilled that the amphitheatre I once dreamed on has gone through rehab and is home to the East River Music Project.

And I love those moments that you can only have in New York, like this one: I was on my way home via the N Train suffering from what else but “mal d’amour” as Norman would say. Dejectedly looking out the window, a homeless man stood in my periphery by door. As the train pulled into the next station, he blew up a red party balloon, twisted it into a flower, and presented it to me saying, “You look like you need this”. That to me was the spirit of New York, a complete stranger, more down on his luck than I, putting my emotional welfare before his in the most surprising way. He stepped off the train before I could say thank you.

According to Jerry Quickley, for whom volunteered for at KPFK last week, I’ll never really be a New Yorker because I wasn’t born there. And I thought it was because I wouldn’t embrace the Yankees as my home team. However, the eight years I put in marked me in a beautiful way, (and I’m not talking about my first tattoo!), and I think of them lovingly, without regret, but with the nostalgia that maturity brings. Those messy years are moving so far away.

Shameless Crushes...

find life experiences and swallow them whole.
travel.
meet many people.
go down some dead ends and explore dark alleys.
try everything.
exhaust yourself in the glorious pursuit of life.
-lawrence k. fish

Yoga For Peace

read much and often

Cleopatra: A Life
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Never Let Me Go
The Angel's game
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Bel-Ami
Dreaming in French: A Novel
The Post-Birthday World
A Passage to India
The Time Traveler's wife
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Kite Runner
Eat, Pray, Love
Slaughterhouse-Five
Les Misérables
The Lovely Bones
1984
Memoirs of a Geisha


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