Clifford Browder's Blog, page 37

217. Mystery Buildings of New York

      New York City is full of mystery buildings, buildings that pique your curiosity but at first elude you.   A prime example is – or rather was – a little one-story brick building near the corner of West 11thand West 4th Streets in the West Village, but a block from where I live.  I passed it for years, always wondered what it was and who, if anyone, lived there or, more likely, who used it as an office or studio.  One-story buildings are rare in the city, where real estate is so valuable, so it must have been an old structure dating back many years.  It had a skylight, suggesting its use as an artist’s studio, but the taller buildings around it would have robbed it of much of the light.  Always firmly shut, its door was flanked by a window on either side, but the whole façade was covered with a thick growth of ivy that all but masked both windows.  I never saw anyone go in or out, nor did I ever see a mailman delivering mail. 
     This went on for years, but then, last year, scaffolding suddenly sprang up around the little building and the three-story brick building next door on the corner, which only added to the mystery.  But occasionally a door in the scaffolding was left wide open and I could glance inside, where I saw the little brick building more than half demolished and obviously destined for complete demolition.  Since then the scaffolding has remained, as the neighboring structure at 282 West 4th Street, combined with another building at 280 West 4th Street, is being converted into a huge single-family residence – luxury housing with a vengeance.  The little mystery building, evidently a part of the 282 West 4th Street property, is gone forever, and I will never know its story.  Of all my mystery buildings, this is the one that haunted me the longest, but it never yielded its secrets. 

Beyond My Ken
     Another mystery building was one on West 14th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, that caught my attention as I rode past it many times on the bus.  The five-story structure flew two large flags, one the American flag and the other a mystery, on poles projecting from the third story, and boasted a façade such as I had never seen anywhere in the city, seemingly all metal with not a brick in sight.  Curved roofs stuck out above the windows like arched eyebrows over gaping eyes, and poles ran vertically from top to bottom with no apparent function other than to further clutter up the façade.  I categorized it as Art Deco on steroids, or maybe Cast Iron run wild.  It startled me but didn’t repel me; it simply made me curious.  Since the bus always zipped past it, I could never get the address or acquire any other information about it.  Finally, while doing errands in the neighborhood, I made a detour to see the building up close, and in so doing learned the address -- 45 West 14th – and the identity of the ground-floor occupant: District Council 9, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, whose name appears on the mystery flag displayed alongside Old Glory.
     Even armed with this information, I had trouble learning the history of the structure, finding only scraps of information here and there.  It was evidently built as a townhouse in 1875, and in 1960 underwent a radical transformation that produced the present façade, which has been described as a modern interpretation of the historic cast iron buildings on the street.  Maybe, but the cast iron buildings I’m familiar with have simple lines and never give the impression of clutter, as this one does – interesting clutter, highly original, but clutter nonetheless.  The current AIA Guide to New York City describes it thus:  "Bronze and glass, paper and trash.  In 1967, this Guide said:  'Hopefully, this witty and elegant refacing of a tired façade will inspire its neighbors to follow.'  They didn’t."  Which is why the building stands out today.
Beyond My Ken
      Another mystery building that I have glimpsed repeatedly from a 14th-street bus towers impressively just north of Union Square, its summit a spire-topped golden sphere that shone radiantly in the sun.  It was that splash of gold that caught my eye, for it made the structure stand out from other tall buildings in the neighborhood.  Finally, one day when I was visiting the Union Square greenmarket, I walked up busy Broadway to no. 874, on the corner of East 18th Street, where I discovered, to my surprise, that the building in question wasn’t a tower, but simply one section, the westernmost, of a massive twelve-story Neo-Gothic structure of brick and stone, richly adorned with rows of rounded arches framing the windows, its summit – the “tower” I had  seen from the bus – bristling with spiky little spires, one of them crowning a gold sphere that caught the rays of the sun.  I stood there for quite a while, dodging the bustling passers-by while gaping like a tourist.  The ground-floor level on Broadway is occupied by Sleepy’s, the Mattress Professional, with a sign outside:
EasyFinancePlansAvailable
     Online research informed me that the building was built in 1892, financed by a chemist and apothecary named Ewen McIntyre.  While laying the ornate tile floor in the Broadway lobby, the craftsmen mistakenly added  an A to his name, so that the building became known as the MacIntyre.  Today it survives as a co-op with 25 apartments, 4 of which are currently up for sale at a median price of $840,000, and none of them available for rent.  In 2000 the resident owners had the façade cleaned of a century’s grit and grime, which may explain why its radiant patch of gold caught my distant eye. 
     Another mystery building, a recent construction at Spring and West Streets by the Hudson River on the edge of trendy Tribeca, baffles passing motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.  A gray hunk of faceted concrete five stories high, a box with a huge door, windowless, it is massive by day, its slanted walls looming out over the sidewalks menacingly, while at night those same walls have been likened to huge chunks of ice breaking off from the edge of a glacier.  Unique, obviously, but what is it? 
Jim.henderson
     It is city’s new $20 million salt shed, whose door, 34 feet high and 25 feet wide, opens into a vast interior where 5,000 tons of de-icing salt will be stored, to be used on streets sheathed in wintry ice.  Unlike most of the city’s salt sheds, which are little more than shacks, it was designed by architects to be a singular sculptural object, and in this they have hugely succeeded.  Gray to some, it is described by others as glacially blue, which helps it enhance the neighborhood.  This last concern is no small matter, for local residents opposed its construction, fearing more gentrification, while luxury apartment developers opposed it, fearing less.  The developers predicted that the value of property in the neighborhood would plunge, only to see it soar.  Once again, gentrification triumphs, though in this instance it would be hard not to applaud.
     But this marvel of a salt shed is only half the story, for just across Spring Street is another architectural wonder also vehemently opposed by neighborhood residents, who once christened it the Tower o’ Garbage: a massive garage where sanitation trucks can be parked, fueled, repaired, and cleaned, but where garbage will most definitely not be deposited.  A five-story, block-long structure costing $250 million, it is masked by a sound-blocking glass curtain wall masked in turn by 2,600 custom-made perforated metal panels designed to reduce heat and glare, and oblige finicky neighbors by blocking views of the trucks inside.  Thanks to the finlike panels, the garage has the appearance of a shiny, sleek machine.  The upper glassed-in stories sit atop a dark-brick ground floor that is set slightly back, making the garage seem to almost float on its base.  (An effect I have yet to check out personally, which I hope to do.)  A green, sloped roof not open to the public catches rain water to clean the trucks.  Illuminated at night, with “DSNY” (Department of Sanitation, New York) in huge letters on the side facing the river, the structure then acquires a magic all its own.
 
     Never were two utilitarian edifices designed and executed with such care and flair.  The once critical neighbors should celebrate their recent opening, and be glad that no towering luxury high-rise blocks their view of the Hudson River flowing majestically just beyond West Street.
     Finally, a cluster of mystery buildings that I have only recently learned of and that I will probably never see: structures in an advanced state of ruin, covered with graffiti and hemmed in, even strangled, by thick vegetation that is slowly and relentlessly reclaiming a remote forested site where humans once imposed the geometry of architecture now long since abandoned and forgotten.  Here and there in the greenery – or among the wintry skeletons of trees – façades loom like ancient mausoleums or untenanted pagan temples, their interiors desolate and often littered with debris and the bristling splintered boards of collapsing walls and ceilings, not to mention banisters at crazy angles and gaping elevator shafts.  Suggestive of  pre-Columbian ruins strangled by jungle, this Surrealist site weirdly mixes architecture and vegetation, the hand of man and the hand of nature.  And all this within the bounds of New York City.
     These ruins were once the Farm Colony of Staten Island, a 96-acre site that officially is a part of the New York City Farm Colony-Seaview Hospital Historic District, which in itself is proof enough that being part of a historic district does not necessarily ward off graffiti artists, vandals, decay, and neglect.  The Farm Colony was originally founded in 1829 as the Richmond County Poor Farm, an asylum for the elderly who were looked after with dignity by nurses and attendants, and who were required to work on a vegetable farm to earn their board – a requirement eliminated in 1925, in view of the residents’ frailty.  The last residents were moved out in 1975, and neglect and decay then followed.           The Farm Colony achieved notoriety of a kind when Eddie Lynch, an orderly in wards 27 and 31 in the late 1940s, turned out to be Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, who for several years following a 1947 prison break found refuge at this remote location and worked quietly there, professing a love for the colony and its residents.  Willie endeared himself to posterity by answering the question “Why do you rob banks?” with the simple response, “Because that’s where the money is!”
     If the long-forgotten Farm Colony now claims my attention, it’s because it is newsworthy again: the City Council has approved a plan to sell 45 acres to a Staten Island developer who will renovate five buildings, demolish five others, and preserve a 112-year-old men’s dormitory as a stabilized ruin.  He will also build three six-story apartment buildings and fourteen multiple-unit townhouses for a total of 344 condominiums.  Units will be available only to applicants 55 and older, with some units reserved for those with incomes of $130,000 to $155,000, which by today’s standards rate as modest, not affluent.  All in all, a satisfying resolution involving rehabilitation of a dangerous property, housing for older adults, renovation of several historic buildings, creation of 17 acres of landscaped open space, and construction of new roads and utilities.  For these mystery buildings – at least some of them – a happy ending.
     Tumblr and the book:  My latest coup: Sexcuddlyhot is following me!  And among the “likes” of my posts are teacup 12, goodmorningawfulgoodbye, victimofyourwords, yourkittenhajk, and z3ng33kgr7.  Meanwhile and inevitably, there is still the book, available from  Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though Tumblr continues to steal my time.




     Coming soon:  Women of Mystery: Wise Ones, psychics, healers, and frauds of yesterday and today.  Before paying to have your fortune told, read this.  Likewise, read this before dismissing with scorn the claims of female healers; you may be surprised. 
     ©  2016  Clifford Browder    








      

216. Sexy

     This post originated in a poem I wrote for Tumblr, and that poem was inspired by two comments from long ago.  Many years ago I heard an interview on WBAI (where else?) with a New Agey author and visionary named Jean Houston, who said with fervor, “We’ve got to make peace sexy!”  Because, like it or not, for many people war is sexy.
     The second comment came more recently from a friend who had done social work to combat homelessness in this country.  After years of effort she saw no progress, no indication that the Powers That Be were going to devote ample resources to alleviating the problem.  Burned out, she finally quit.  "Homelessness," she sadly observed, "isn’t sexy."
     Obviously, “sexy” in these two anecdotes is not being used in the narrow, sexual sense, but rather in a broader, more metaphorical sense.  In my poem I describe something or someone as sexy if it is “hot, new, exciting, or compelling.”  Notice that I say “or,” not “and”; in other words, to be classified as sexy something need satisfy only one of these requirements, though the more of them it satisfies, the sexier it is.  So with this in mind, who and what do I call sexy in 2016?  These are purely personal opinions; viewers should feel free to disagree and to dispute my pronouncements with passion.
     Since this is an election year in the U.S., let’s have a look at the candidates.  Like it or not, the sexiest candidate of the moment – loudmouth, braggart, liar, and fool though he may be -- is the irrepressible Donald.  Yes, Mr. Trump has been leading all other Republican presidential wannabes in the polls because his flamboyant personality and outrageous statements make him, in the eyes of many, sexy.  And does he get the media’s attention!  They may not love him, but they love his sexiness, his newsiness, his ability to excite, inspire, and raise hackles.
BABYGRAND007
     And Hillary?  No way.  She’s cautious, sane, and reasonable, but she isn’t sexy.  But hubby Bill is sexy, and then some.  He is, always has been, and always will be.  And sexy too in the literal sense; there’s something about him that gets to the girls, and in the past he certainly obliged by getting to them in turn – too much so, needless to say.  Also, you can tell that he loves campaigning, he loves getting out there and mixing with ordinary people, something that Hillary is simply not comfortable doing.  As a presidential candidate she is one of the most capable we’ve ever had, combining domestic with foreign experience, but she simply is not, and probably never can be, sexy.
Her official portrait as Secretary of State.  A broad a smile, but alas, not sexy.
Watch out for this guy.  A White House portrait of him as President.
     As for the other presidential candidates, Dems and Repubs alike, I haven’t been exposed enough to them, having no TV, to have a fixed opinion.  Bernie Sanders has sexy ideas, but whether he exudes this elusive but necessary quality I simply don’t know.  Among the Repubs, Mark Rubio, being young and good-looking, may well qualify, but I’d have to see him in action more to be certain.
Mark Rubio: one to watch.  And even a red, white, and blue tie!
     As I pronounce boldly in my Tumblr poem, Pope Francis is sexy, but the Vatican is not.  Pope Francis makes the grade by virtue of his humility, his warmth, his compassion, and his willingness to break a few rules; he’s not a revolutionary, but as Popes go, he is, in my sense, eminently sexy.  The proof: his vast appeal to Protestants and other non-Catholics.  Yes, a spiritual leader can be sexy; think of Pope John XXIII and, today, the Dalai Lama.  A sexy spiritual leader has an appeal that is truly international.  As for the Vatican, rare is the governmental body or bureaucracy that could be termed “sexy”; “sexy” has little to do with paper shufflers and regulators, however necessary they may be.
Participating in a Turn Back Crime campaign in Columbia.
Policia Nacional de los columbianos
     In my Tumblr poem I assert that God is sexy, though His worshipers are not, though Herworshipers would be for sure.  Of course this is a gross simplification.  Whether or not God is sexy depends on how his (or her) worshipers describe the deity in question.  Because I opt for a dynamic, forceful, vigorously benign deity, full of humor and surprises, I see the Guy (or Girl?) as sexy.  And the idea of a female God is, for me, immensely exciting, therefore sexy.  But alas, worshipers so often define their God in the narrowest terms and project onto Him (always, in this case, a Him) their own prejudices and savage intolerance.  They belittle Him, cheapen Him, clog Him up with rules.  So to round the discussion out, in the poem I add the possibility of It, a God that is neither male nor female – a reminder of how we reduce to petty human terms a concept that is immense, awesome, and far beyond our mortal facilities to fully fathom. 
     Going back to the poem (it seems I can’t get free of it), I find these statements:
·      Death is sexy, dying is not.·      Comfort is sexy, health is not.·      Stupid is sexy, wisdom is not.
Death, being a dramatic transition from this known world to an unimaginable – or richly imaginable – Beyond involving radical change, is sexy.  How could it not be, involving as it does a fearful but fascinating journey and, for us humans, the supreme mystery?  But dying, since it entails pain, suffering, bedpans, bloody interventions, pills, enemas, robotic machines, and a general messiness, is anything but sexy; it’s simply a necessary interlude, long or short, bearable or unbearable, and always  diminishing, that precedes the ultimate adventure of Death.
   Yes, comfort is sexy, because compelling; we simply can’t do without it.  It’s vastly sexier than health, which requires discipline and sacrifice.  For many people, getting healthy means following a fierce set of rules from on high:
·      Thou shalt not eat red meat.  But red meat, they protest, made this country, gave it grit and pizzazz, let it conquer the wilderness and win the West, and become the biggest, best, most democratic democracy in the world, the immigrants’ dream, the City on a Hill that multitudes look up to.  So give us our wienies, our hamburgers, our steaks; they fuel our hearts and feed our souls.·      Thou shalt not eat dairy.  But we crave milk and scrambled eggs and tangy cheeses.  Tofu and tempeh don’t cut it.·      Thou shalt not drink Pepsi and Coke.  And drink soy milk and organic apple juice instead?  No way!  Pepsi and Coke are as American as Old Glory.·      Thou shalt avoid sugar like the plague.  Meaning that granular white stuff on every lunch counter in America?  C’mon, a little sugar won’t hurt anyone … will it?  Or a little candy?  ·      Thou shalt not eat pizza.  Our favorite take-out!  ·      Thou shalt consume vegetables and fruit.   Okay, maybe somemashed spuds with lots of gravy.  But not parsley, that limp bit of green; that’s just a bit of garnish, so we push it to the side of the plate.  And spinach?  Ugh!  Kale?  What’s that?  Collards?  That’s for the folks down South, isn’t it?  Apples?  Well, maybe, a good chomp now and then.  But broccoli?  Yuck!
No, health is most definitely not sexy.  Comfort is; we snuggle down into it like into our favorite armchair, our nest, our warm, snug home.
     As for stupidity vs. wisdom, I’ll simply cite the Donald yet again.
     Another health commandment might be added: Thou shalt not smoke or drink.  But smoking and drinking have been viewed as sexy since the beginning of time.  As a friend once pointed out to me, there are literally hundreds of poems and songs in all languages celebrating the joys of smoking and drinking, and none extolling abstinence.  True enough.  But in the last few decades smoking in this country has seemed less and less sexy.  Back in the 1930s and 1940s, when I was growing up, most of the sexy movie stars were seen smoking; you can’t imagine Bette Davis without a cigarette at hand.  But today, amazingly, smoking for most Americans is unsexy, not “in” or “with it,” the sign of a loser.  So these things can change with time.
Sexy for Germany in 1902.  But she herself isn't smoking.
     My poem deals only with the present and the immediate, but it’s instructive to glance back as well at the past.  Which Presidents within living memory – my living memory – can be classified as sexy?  FDR for sure; in his radio speeches and fireside chats he exuded a patrician charm that captivated the working class voters whose causes he championed; a good speaker, he has been described as both a lion and a fox. 
FDR during a fireside chat.  Here, more fox than lion.
     A tough act to follow, but Harry Truman pulled it off.  He wasn’t the charmer that Roosevelt was, but his feistiness got to people and won them over, making him robustly and gutsily sexy.  His opponent in 1948, Thomas Dewey, though he had been an excellent governor of New York, was a bit too cool, too distant, too dignified, too much the “little man on the wedding cake,” to be politically sexy, and so he lost twice, first to Roosevelt and then to Roosevelt’s vice president and successor, feisty Harry.
     Dwight Eisenhower, whom millions took to as to a father or grandfather, flashed a broad, winning smile that was sexy.  John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was sexy on all levels and in every sense of the word, inspiring the public while carrying on a bit of clandestine hanky panky on the side.  His opponent in 1960, Richard Nixon, was a shrewd politician, but hopelessly unsexy; other qualities and circumstances would vault him into the White House in 1968.   Ronald Reagan, flashing a warm smiling and proclaiming “It’s morning in America,” was the conservatives’ supreme embodiment of sexy—again, a tough act to follow, and his successors don’t match him in this one essential quality.  Not until Obama, who when he first appeared on the presidential scene was vigorously and refreshingly sexy.
Kennedy's posthumous official portrait, looking more
presidential than sexy.  But when campaigning, or when
reporters weren't looking … !
     Now let’s have a look at a few honored Presidents of the past.  George Washington was a statue in cold marble, hardly sexy by our standards today.  But he captivated everyone in his own time, and as a military commander was capable of volcanic anger.  But what let him win the Revolutionary War was a combination of judgment, patience, and persistence – not qualities we tend today to think of as sexy.
     The same could be said of Abraham Lincoln, whose great qualities were judgment, patience, humility, and a knowledge of human character – invaluable assets, but not sexy.  As for his appearance, by his own admission he “wasn’t much to look at,” though today we see his features as stamped with character and wisdom and therefore venerate him.
     Teddy Roosevelt, racist and imperialist though he was, was gutsily, boisterously sexy, and as such stormed up San Juan Hill and into the White House, first as Vice President and then as President.  The guy just oozed a macho brand of sexiness, and it went over big with the public.
Not an official portrait --  too gutsy, too alive.
     As for a prime example of sexiness masking mediocrity, one can’t do better than Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920 with the rallying cry of “back to normalcy,” the word normalcy being his own invention (he had trouble with suffixes).  His photographs show a remarkably handsome man, but his administration was riddled with corruption, though he himself was honest … and forgettable.
Warren G. Harding, looking thoughtful and profound, which by all
accounts he was not.
     So what is sexy today?  “Green” is sexy: retailers are eager to label their products “green,” whether the word is relevant or not.  The Internet is sexy, as witnessed by Tumblr, the subject of my previous post.  Among foods, kale, once unknown to most Americans, has become sexy, though these fads rarely last.  To live in a towering high-rise, one of those cloud-scratching needles now proliferating in midtown Manhattan with a stunning view of Central Park, is sexy, though only a few can afford it.   And on and on.  Add your favorite candidates for sexy at this point and let me know what they are.  Feedback is sexy, and so are those who do it.

     The Big Apple vs. Ted Cruz:  Senator Ted Cruz, the presidential wannabe, has lashed into front-runner Donald You-Know-Who as a -- gasp! -- New Yorker embodying -- gasp again! -- "New York values."  Yes, the Donald is indeed a New Yorker, and an extreme expression of New York brag and push, though hardly a beloved native son.  But Senator Cruz's comments have aroused a firestorm of wrath and indignation, and a fiery assertion of New York values, for New Yorkers are not ones to take an insult quietly.  Far from turning the other cheek (their cheeks are rarely turned), they are passionately proclaiming their tolerance, spunk, open-mindedness, ambition, energy, diversity, and feistiness.  The Daily News blazoned the headline DROP DEAD, TED and a picture of the Statue of Liberty making a gesture that I prefer not to describe.  The moral: kick a beehive and you'll probably get stung.  Not that the Senator from Texas minds; he knows he'll get  even fewer votes here than the Donald.
     Tumblr and the book:   121 posts, 110 followers, am following 227 blogs, and continue to get reblogged.  Meanwhile there is still the book, available from  Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though Tumblr steals my time.



          Coming soon:  Mystery Buildings of New York.  The little red-brick building that disappears; Art Deco on steroids; the golden sphere; a windowless glacier-like hunk; and Willie Loman's hiding place.
     ©  2016  Clifford Browder






     

215. The Magical World of Tumblr

     Tumblr is many things.  First of all, some of you may be wondering, in the narrowest and most basic way, what it is.  Tumblr is a platform for miniblogs, meaning that anyone can go to it online and launch a blog.  Founded in 2006 by a young man named David Karp, it had over 75,000 users within two weeks.  Headquartered here in New York at 35 East 21stStreet in Manhattan, it now hosts no less than 271.6 million blogs.  Though acquired by Yahoo in 2013 --  a development that many users protested – it still has Mr. Karp as CEO.  And in 2014 the White House itself launched a blog on Tumblr to present info on White House doings to the public and receive queries from them, which, absent any divine intervention from on high, surely constitutes the ultimate act of recognition.
David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr, with Kathy Savitt, CMO (chief
marketing officer) of Yahoo, at a White House correspondents' brunch
at the Newseum (museum of news) in Washington in 2014.
Yahoo Inc
     Tumblr hopes to be a place where anyone – well, almost anyone – can say or do anything – well, almost anything.  There are a few conditions one must agree to, in order to become a member:
·      Don’t slander or abuse another member.·      Don’t entice a minor into an illegal act.·      If you’re going to do NSFW content (Not Safe For Work – in other words, porn, which you wouldn’t want your colleagues to know about), announce this so viewers who don’t want it can avoid it.·      Don’t promote or advocate suicide or self-harm.·      To become a member, you must be 13, not even 12 and 11 months.
     Once you agree to these conditions, you can join the Tumblr community and start your blog – or blogs, since some members do more than one.  It’s free, so one may wonder where Tumblr’s revenue comes from.  I learned this when ads for Samsung appeared on my blog and I couldn’t get rid of them; yes, there are ads.  But remember, your blog costs you not one penny.
     So you’ve become a member; what next?  Tumblr offers seven possible activities: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video.  My interest being writing, I confined myself to the first.  Tumblr then asks what your interests are: the chief one (mine is writing, both my own and that of others), and three others (I said history, culture, and architecture, though if allowed four, I would have added art).  Why this query?  So Tumblr can send your way blogs that will be of interest to you.  Since there are millions, this helps.  You must also choose a user name; Tumblr proposed several, but I made up one of my own on the spot.  What is it?  Ah, that’s classified information for the moment.  Also, you create a name for your blog (likewise classified).  And you’re off!
This chart attempts to explain Tumblr.  Good luck!
Jonas nocom
     Ah, those first days on Tumblr are a challenge.  I didn’t know what reblogging was, or tags; I didn’t know anything.  Then I stumbled on a HELP option, and most of the basics were explained.  You publish a post on your blog – in my case, poetry – and you wait.  For what?  For a “note,” which means that someone who saw your work liked it, clicked on a little heart at the bottom of the page, and registered a like, as indicated when the heart turns red.  You wait for this … and wait and wait.  Finally one appears, then another and another.  Not many, since you’re new to the game, but the fact remains that ajttk liked your poem and then mimosa203 and honeydewkiwi and dismissreality.  Who are these people?  Fellow bloggers, who hide behind these enigmatic user names.
     Better still, in time you start getting e-mails from Tumblr with cheery notices like these:
·      deepsauceblr is now following you.  Win!·      broadviewbuoyancy is now following you.  Whatever!·      theheavyheartbard is now following you.  Finally.·      18blackhearts is now following you.  Swoon.·      cdtswa is now following you.  Whee!
Which means that these bloggers like your work enough to become a follower of yours; from then on, every post you do will appear on their blog.  So it behooves you to visit their blog and, if it’s relevant, become a follower of theirs.  Slowly, you acquire more followers, and so do they.  And when someone starts reblogging a poem of yours – republishing it on their blog, giving it more exposure – you can really rejoice, and rejoice still more if someone else reblogs the reblog.  You’re becoming famous!  Well, you’re getting known.
     So who are these fellow bloggers lurking behind their user names?  Some don’t say, but others do.  Millennials?  Yes, lots.  But others, too.  Even when the real name isn’t given, the blogger’s content tells you something about them.  Here are some examples:
·      A blogger doing “dark” poems obsessed with suicide.  (He inspired a poem of mine addressed to a suicidal friend.)  I’m really worried about this guy, but have lost contact with him, since he doesn’t come to my blog.·      A Swedish librarian of 25 who writes poetry in perfect English.  (How many of us could do as much in Swedish?)·      In Grand Rapids, Michigan, “a child of anthropologists, hospice nurse, sonnet monger (NSFW)."·      A photographer from Patagonia in Argentina, showing his work.·      “21, a struggling musician, author, engineer.”·      The diary of a woman happily married for 22 years, a book lover, journalist, business owner, guitar player, beer connoisseur, etc., “ages 18+ only.”·       A self-proclaimed “typical introvert” who broods a lot but travels.  Tipsy in a bar in South Korea (no explanation as to how he got there), he headed for the john and walked into a glass door.  I find this hilarious, but can’t tell him that, since he was embarrassed and in pain at the time.  But what a story for your grandkids: “How I got high in a bar in South Korea and walked into a glass door.”·      A Tokyo-based photographer who posts photos with inscriptions in Japanese and English.·      A 50-year-old single dad with an adults-only blog.  (He should follow the 64-year-old below.)·      A Christian girl who wants to launch a network of online Christians.  (I wish her luck in this secular and very candid world of Tumblr.)·      An illustrator from Japan who posts comical illustrations of fantastic animals.·      A 19-year-old girl in Paris who posts poems in simple, readable French, and illustrations of women in dazzling, outlandish costumes that suggest a world of magic.  (I have wished her well in French.)·      “Yes I enjoy the female form.  Male, 64, NC, USA.  Adult content is contained.  Be warned.”  When I found his blog contained upbeat messages with many likes, and not porn, I decided to follow him.  But recently the first post on my blog was from him: a luscious half-naked female that might be labeled “soft porn.”  If this continues, I might have to block him.  (You can unfollow a follower or even block him, preventing him – or her – from connecting with you.)  I’m no prude, but don’t want my blog cluttered up with luscious females … or luscious males either.·       A bibliophile who admits he can’t stop buying books.  Photos show all the rooms in his house with bookshelves crammed with books.  He gets rare editions – often first editions signed by the author – from Good Will outlets, which are different from Good Will stores; the outlets get stuff dumped there when residences get cleaned out.·      “Reina, 17, New York.  Future writer and photographer.”  Ah, the hopes and dreams of the young!·      Finally, and enigmatically, “Indie fandomless/adaptable/ OC roleplay.  Psychic medium.  Selective/private.”  Make of this one what you will.
There are also blogs with stunning photography with posts in languages that baffle me.  All of which goes to show that Tumblr, though a preferred stomping ground of millennials, is an international club with members of all ages, interests, nationalities, and persuasions. 
     And what do they do in their posts?  I’m chiefly in touch with writers, so I’ll focus on them.  Most of the posts fall into one of three categories: Gooey Spilth, Uplift, and Gnomic Truths – categories that aren’t mutually exclusive, since they overlap.  The quotes that follow below are taken directly from blogs.
Gooey Spilth
The obsessive preoccupation of the young, lyric joy of love and what, perhaps a bit harshly, I call “The Boohoo School of Poetry.”  First, the joy:
·      You are the sunlight that fills the dark corners of my world.·      I find you / in the sunrise / and sunset / of every single day.·      You’ve captured my soul with your presence / Making love to my very essence.
And then the Boohoo:
·      I have been wandering / through the wetlands / of fallen tears … hearing his voice / in the murmur of waves …·      I miss the silk of your skin against my soul / The unconscious slipping of my mind into yours.·      He left, and I died.·      I miss you, but my life is better without you.
     The pain here is real, but the endless expression of it, with one poet’s lament often sounding just like another’s, produces monotony – though always with exceptions.  But in the Tumblr world Romance and Heartbreak are in, humor and irony are out.
Uplift
Contrasting with the heartbreak, supplementing and solacing it, are the boundless messages of uplift:
·      Good things to tell yourself every day: I am worthy, I am more than my appearance, I am loved, etc.·      An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo.·      Never stop learning.·      Committed means staying loyal to what you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left you.·      Plan like you will live forever.  Live like you will die tomorrow.
There’s not a one of these that I would quarrel with; I am constantly registering likes.  But just as Romance and Heartbreak can breed monotony, so do these uplifty thoughts, unless seasoned with a touch of irony.  But irony is rare in Tumblr – not nonexistent, just rare. 
     Sometimes, becoming impatient with cheery and upbeat, I post a bit of uncheery and downbeat: posts destined to reap neglect -- my sacrificial lambs.  A poem on what kills the sexy component of love – a poem with a touch of humor – got only a paltry 6 likes and nary a reblog, and a poem offering a glimpse into the nature of evil garnered likewise only 6.  By way of contrast, a poem about three ecstasies I have experienced – one culinary, one visual, and one auditory – got 47 notes, including 5 reblogs, some of them reblogs from reblogs.  Downbeat is definitely not “in” on Tumblr, even if seasoned with humor. 
Gnomic Truths
Uplift often takes the form of pithy utterances, sometimes snatched from other authors and sometimes original:
·      The world is a beautiful place and I am no longer afraid to die. (547,812 notes)·      Violence begets violence, peace begets peace, choices beget all.  ·      Don’t feel stupid if you don’t like what everyone else pretends to love.·      You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. – C.S. Lewis (1974 notes)·      What is meant for you, will reach you even if it is beneath two mountains.  (41,707 notes)
Again, I can’t take issue with any of these, but yearn for a few less relentlessly cheery comments, and sometimes find them.

Miscellaneous
     There are also posts that can’t be easily classified, and these can get interesting.  For example:
·      I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.·      Reblog if you’re a cuddler.  (561 notes)·      I pretend a lot of shit doesn’t get to me.  (237,645 notes)·      Tumblr is a sanctum of calm, reasoned debate, thoughtful kindness and respectful good humour; bless this website and everyone on it.  (from a refugee from Facebook)·      SHIT  (1,024,493 notes)·      And, movingly: My family is awful.  You guys are my virtual family.  Thank you and Merry Merry.  (a Christmas greeting)
     There are also posts that propose a theme and invite bloggers to contribute.
A six-word story: 
·      Broke my own heart loving you.·      It’s crazy … how music reminds us.·      May I taste you once more?·      Life just keeps passing me by.
The saddest story in four words:
·      I can’t be grounded.·      Starbucks got closed down.·      You asked for it.·      There is no hope.  (my contribution)
A one-line poem:
·      His spleen was a demilitarized zone.·      My knees are cordoned-off crime scenes.·      Her lips were tautological.·      A home with no address.·      I want you to stay, when you get here.·      I think you and I could claim forever, though it may be a bold endeavor.
     But some things turn me off:
·      Anything that moves or jiggles: puppets, animated cartoons, special effects.·      Gaudy, unnatural colors: Technicolor sunsets, flowers whose hues  scream at you, etc.·      Blogs that don’t know the difference between it’s (= it is) and its (possessive adjective), and they are legion.·      Persistent bad grammar (though an occasional lapse is okay).·      Posts that go on and on and on (usually saying the same thing endlessly).·      Ads.·      Out-and-out porn.
     I could go on and on myself, but I think I’ve delivered a glimpse of Tumblr, what goes on there, and who does it.  Tumblr is a community, even a family, that both gives support and appeals for it: a place where one can rejoice or weep, gather strength and reinforcement, and above all to just let go.  Tumblr is safe, Tumblr is freedom, Tumblr is wild.
     Cuddle Parties:  Feeling lonely?  Want to be touched?  That's normal and natural,  science tells us; we all need to be touched, seniors as well as juniors.  But what if there's no one around -- no one trustworthy -- to do it?  Attend a cuddle party -- it's the latest thing.  No, it's not what you think.  They're nonsexual, with rules, but everyone who wants a touch gets one.  Most are mixed-gender, intergenerational events, but there are specialized ones as well.  So think about it.  There's nothing like a rub.
     Tumblr note:  The adventure and the numbers game continue.  I have published 104 posts, have 98 followers, am following 214 blogs, have registered 2,870 likes, and continue to get reblogged.  Swoon!  Meanwhile there is still the book, available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though Tumblr gobbles up much of my time.

     Coming soon:  Sexy.  Who and what are sexy, and who and what are not, and why.  Must reading for an election year, though I’ll also comment on the Pope, the Dalai Lama, presidents and statesmen of the past, and anyone or anything else I can think of.  Are you “sexy”?  Ah, that’s for you and your friends to say, not me; I’ll confine myself to celebrities and entities that are – or have been – in the news.  And there may be some surprises.


     ©  2016  Clifford Browder

214. Fraudster, or the Immigrant's Dream Come True?

     At 6 a.m. on Thursday, December 18 --  an hour when, at this time of year, the city is still shrouded in darkness -- F.B.I. agents arrested Martin Shkreli, a flamboyant and controversial pharmaceutical company CEO and former hedge fund manager, at his Murray Hill apartment in midtown Manhattan and bundled him off to be arraigned in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.  One might assume that this suspect was a seasoned Wall Street executive, plump in the tummy and wallet, but photos of the arrest show a dark-haired young man in a gray hoodie being herded along by husky, grim-faced agents.  Mr. Shkreli, though a veteran of many financial adventures and misadventures, is all of 32 and very much, if not a paragon, at least an exemplar of the millennial generation.
His famous smile (before the arrest).
     Martin Shkreli was no stranger to the news.  As CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals he had acquired Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat an infection highly toxic for babies, and overnight hiked the price up from $13.50 a pill – a price that already would raise my hackles – to an astronomical $750.  This ungenerous gesture immediately provoked rabid criticism – he was labeled a “morally bankrupt sociopath,” and worse – criticism that he rejected with a jeering response both in news media interviews and on Twitter (oh yes, he tweets), apparently reveling in his newfound notoriety as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed.  Inevitably, in this year of pre-election brouhaha, his and other drug companies have reaped vibrant denunciations from consumers, lawmakers, and our valiant crop of presidential wannabes.  All of which the target in questions seems – or until now seemed – to shrug off with aplomb.  Mr. Shkreli is nothing if not self-confident and immune to virulent attack.  Which makes him interesting, and all the more so, given his young years. 
     And what are the charges against him?  They hark back to his hedge fund days – he has gone through an amazing series of metamorphoses in his short career in business – when he informed investors that his fund, MSMB Capital Management,
·      had an auditor·      had posted a 36 percent return since its inception·      had $35 million in assets under management
Alas, according to federal authorities, none of this was true.  What, then, was the truth?  The fund had losses of some 18 percent, and by 2011 had less than $1,000 in its bank account, with no auditor in sight.  Which would seem to make Mr. Shkreli, for all his big talk and defiance, a rather small-time fraudster.  Perhaps, but I find him fascinating by virtue of his astonishing derring-do, his breathtaking appetite for risk. 
     Arraigned on Thursday afternoon in a packed courtroom, Mr. Shkreli pleaded not guilty and was released on $5 million bail secured by a bank account and guaranteed by his father and brother.  Wearing dark sunglasses, he left the court in a pouring rain and refused to speak to journalists.  But two days later, defying the usual advice of attorneys to clients under arrest, he did just that, telling the Wall Street Journal that the authorities were out to get him because of his drug price hikes – not an indictable offense – and his attention-getting public persona.  And of course he's innocent until proven guilty.  Be that as it may, let’s take a quick glance at his career, as presented by the authorities.
     From 2006 to 2007 he managed a small hedge fund, Elea Capital Management, and in so doing lost tons of money in a disastrous  speculation.
     But Mr. Shkreli, if not his enterprises, had a way of rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of a previous venture, for in 2009 he and a colleague founded MSMB Capital Management, another hedge fund, of which he became manager, and as such lied shamelessly to its investors, hence the charges against him.  He lost $7 million on a bad bet on a small drug company, owed his broker, Merrill Lynch, that amount, and got off with paying Merrill a mere $1.35 million. 
     And where did he get that $1.35 million?  From Retrophin, a biopharmaceutical company that he started in 2011, assuring his hedge fund investors that they would be compensated with cash or a combination of cash and Retrophin shares.  With him as CEO, Retrophin quickly became notorious for acquiring old, neglected drugs for rare diseases and hiking their prices astronomically.  A rising star in finance, in December 2012 Mr. Shkreli was hailed by Forbes magazine, which added his name to its list of “30 under 30 in Finance,” lionizing him as an activist “battling billionaires and entrenched drug industry executives” through his spiels on social media.  With such backing, no wonder he was able to launch a third hedge fund, MSMB Healthcare, attracting investors with blatant misrepresentations of his previous financial undertakings.
     In 2014 the Retrophin board ousted Mr. Shkreli for using the company as a personal piggy bank to pay off his hedge fund investors by hiring some of them for fake consulting jobs, and by using company funds to pay off others who were threatening to sue.  He was, in effect, running a kind of Ponzi scheme, milking each new enterprise to reimburse creditors from the previous one.  
     His inelegant exit from Retrophin might have discouraged some, or seasoned them with a minimum of caution, but not Martin Shkreli, who in August 2015 raised $90 million – from whom? one wonders – in a first round of financing for Turing Pharmaceuticals, following which he bought the American rights for Daraprim, a 62-year-old drug, and raised the price by 5,000 percent.  In the outcry that followed, he evinced not a trace of regret, and in November acquired yet another drug company, KaloBios, and announced plans to elevate the price of one of its drugs as well.  Meanwhile he was heaping scorn on his foes on Twitter, enjoying the adulation of young fans, and buying a rare album of music for $2 million.  Only his arrest  interrupted these ongoing grandiose adventures. 
     So who is Martin Shkleri?  When activists picketed the offices of Turing Pharmaceuticals last October, they brandished signs proclaiming THE FACE OF GREED with an image of him smiling smugly.  When not multi-tasking in his office, he tweets endlessly on Twitter, defending his transactions vigorously, and in an interview insisted that the media brouhaha over his drug pricing was "the best possible way to get girls."  In an hours-long live stream on YouTube he appears as a good-looking, boyish young man lolling about in a T-shirt who proclaims himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor ” and announces plans to dominate the rap industry.  Seeking an intelligent and handsome girlfriend online, he has described himself as “endlessly entertaining, providing comedic relief and artistic thought in one convenient package.  What a catch!”  But when a young woman asked online for a date, he informed her that she’d have to “get in a long, long line.”  After his arrest he resumed live streaming, showing himself, unshaven, playing online chess and guitar, and continues live streaming to this day.  As for the bachelor assertion, there’s no doubt that he’s a handsome specimen, the kind who, with a day’s growth of beard, looks even sexier.
     Oddly enough, his career has been, until now, the immigrant's dream of making it big in America.  He grew up in a crowded apartment on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, the son of Albanian and Croatian immigrants who did janitorial and other jobs to support him and his three siblings.  Admitted to Hunter College High School, an elite public school in Manhattan for gifted students, he was remarkably uncommitted to intellectual success.  Former classmates remember him as shy, often found in the school’s hallways playing chess or guitar, or studying stock prices in a newspaper.  Finally he stopped attending classes altogether and was booted out before his senior year.  After that he attended City-As-School High School, an alternative public school where students did internships for credit.  Becoming an intern at age 17 at a Wall Street hedge fund, he came into his own, and in 2004 got a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College.  Business administration and maladministration were his preoccupation from then on, with a predilection for selling biotech stocks short and launching one risky enterprise after another, as chronicled above.
     Following his arrest, Mr. Shkreli resigned as CEO of Turing, and newly acquired KaloBios fired him as CEO and promptly filed for bankruptcy.  Meanwhile another problem arose.  In March 2015 he had donated $1 million to Hunter College High School – the largest gift in its history – even though he had been kicked out for poor grades and poor attendance.  Former classmates remember him as willing to pay for nights out during their college years, as if to show that the onetime academic flop had become an astounding success – motivation that surely explains the million-dollar donation as well.  And three days before his arrest, he chatted online with a female Hunter student  during a live stream on You Tube – a performance that many Hunter students, alerted by messages on social media, forsook their homework to watch.  The result: a lively debate among Hunter students and administrators as to whether they should return the donation and have no more to do with the donor, a debate that is still under way.
     What is one to make of this guy?  Is he a minor-league Carl Icahn, the shark of Wall Street, or a Donald Trump writ small?  He shares Trump’s flamboyance, his self-promotion, his disregard for the truth, his blithe ability to bounce back from multiple failures in business, his love (until recently, at least) of even bad publicity, though unlike Trump, he rose up from humble beginnings and clawed his way to the top.  But to the top of what?  Wealth?  He pretends to $200 million, but any figures emanating from such a source are suspect.  (He later secured his bond with a brokerage account valued at $45 million, which isn’t exactly peanuts.)  To the top as regards celebrity?  Yes, of a kind, since he’s all over the media and social media, almost inescapable.  Success?  Hardly, with prosecution looming.  Narcissism?  Yes, certainly; just look at his endless live streams, his self-indulgent videos. 
     Martin Shkleri merits attention by virtue of his chutzpah, his intelligence, his energy, his insatiable infatuation with risk.  He reminds me of the remark of a Wall Street speculator of long ago:  “Aim for the stars, you get chorus girls.  Aim for chorus girls, you get nothing.”  Shkleri has aimed for the stars, but what he’ll finally get is in doubt.  His is a dark energy; it seems to have led him astray.
     Finally, let’s take note that this presumed whiz kid of Wall Street isn’t the only hedge fund manager in trouble, though he may be the only one threatened with prison.  The year 2015 has not been kind to hedge fund biggies, those alleged financial wizards whose talents are available only to the moneyed few.  The moneyed few are in fact up in arms at their wizards’ deplorable results.  Consider:
·      William A. Ackman’s Pershing Square Management, up 40% in 2014, is down 19.5% as of December 22, a performance he will have to explain to disgruntled investors when they meet in the hallowed halls of the New York Public Library this  January.·      Likewise in January, David Einhorn, the founder of Greenlight Capital, will host his investors at the American Museum of History over cocktails and dinner under a 94-foot blue whale in the Milstein Hall, but even this lavish setting may not make up for the fund’s 20% loss in 2015.·      Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management, down 17% this year, will similarly have an awkward time consoling investors when next they gather.·      Claren Road Asset Management suffered $3 billion in redemptions this year as disabused investors jumped ship, probably reducing the firm’s assets to just over a paltry $1 billion, compared with the $8 billion it once managed.
     Not all hedge funds have had a bad year, but those that did have exploded the myth of hedge fund success, the fantasy of unending profits and glory.  To be sure, in 2015 the number of out-and-out closures, when lousy performance forces the fund to shut down completely, is still below 2014’s grievous total of 731.  But some pension funds are beginning to question what value hedge funds add to their portfolio, given the funds’ substantial fee of 2% of assets under management, and a hefty 20% of performance.  Obviously, even if investors weep bitter tears, the managers are scooping up millions in profits.  But to judge by the opening days of 2016, this year is going to be a mite rougher than last.  So it goes in the Wall Street la-la land.  As for Mr. Shkreli, that sexy millennial in a black T-shirt, jeans, and a hoodie, we shall watch his unfolding saga with the greatest interest.

     Prediction fulfilled:  One of my predictions for 2016 in the previous post has proven, alas, disastrously right: the stock market is in free fall.  As for the other predictions, it will be months before we learn if I'm right.
     Tumblr note:  The adventure and the numbers game continue.  I have published 91 posts, have 85 followers, am following 193 blogs, and continue to get reblogged.   More about all this in the next post.  Meanwhile there is still the book, available from  Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though Tumblr now preoccupies me.


  
     Coming soon: Tumblr and what it is, who does it, and what it is they do.  You'll even find out what NSFW means, if you don't know already.  And then: Sexy.  (I'll let everyone ponder what that one's all about.)
     ©  2016  Clifford Browder

213. Fear of Falling

     We humans take for granted our erect position, perched high up on our legs like stilts, even though the rest of God’s creatures swim in the sea, fly in the air, or slither or creep on land.  We think it normal to have our feet grounded and our head aloft.  This posture gives us pretensions, a feeling of dominance and control, of being above earthy things, of being close to heaven.  But gravity dictates that things high up will come crashing down.  Maybe not right now, this minute, but sooner or later, hence our fear of falling.
Were you ever tempted to walk on stilts?
If so, you have little fear of heights.
     I have no special fear of heights, no acrophobia.  When visiting the medieval cathedrals of Europe, I thought nothing of huffing and puffing up circular stone stairs in a tower to an edifice’s superstructure, where I could see gargoyles barely visible from below, and enjoy a wide view of the city.  And when my friend Bill and I visited pre-Columbian sites in Mexico and clambered up the steep steps of pyramids to the very top, I found the whole experience thrilling.  And when I clambered back down again and looked back and saw Bill still way up near the top, frozen in fear, I realized he had a fear of heights that to me was alien.  He did get down again, but slowly, one step at a time.
The George Washington Bridge, with a view from one of the towers --
a view I've never had and never will, thank God.     Am I ever afraid of heights and of falling?  Of course.  When I walk across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, and pause midway and look down at the river far below, my knees go limp and I feel a momentary dizziness; the thought of plummeting all that way to the water, as many suicides have done, tenses me with fear.  Back in my opera-going days, when I went down to a seat in the front row of the Family Circle of the old Met (the Metropolitan Opera), I was only too aware of the steep descent before me, with only a low rail at the balcony’s edge separating me from the gaping emptiness of the theater’s vast interior, and the main floor far below.  And when today I visit the new MOMA – the Museum of Modern Art on 53rdStreet – with its wide glass walls and plunging perspectives, I get nervous and move quickly to enter rooms with solid floors, relieved to be boxed in with thick walls adorned with works of art and not with views of empty space.

An inside view at MOMA.  No thanks.
Colin Chia 
     Once, long ago, I had surgery in my right knee and after weeks of bed rest had to learn to walk again and regain, slowly, slowly, the use of my right leg, which at first bent only a little at the knee.  In the hospital I went from wheel chair to walker, and by the time I left there I was walking with a cane.  The cane gave me support for many weeks and lessened my fear of falling, which was acute at the top of stairs, or when stepping off a high curb, of which there were many in those days, before the city lowered the curbs at intersections.  My fear of falling when stepping off a curb was so persistent that I carried the cane for weeks after I no longer really needed it; it reassured me, gave me confidence.  Then, once my leg muscles had toughened and my knee could bend to a right angle or more, letting me walk normally, I relinquished the cane and no longer nursed a fear of falling.
     Until recently, that is.  Now, on the cusp of my dynamic maturity, that fear has returned.  Not a fierce, nagging fear, just a sly, subtle one that from time to time flares up.  When?  When clambering down stairs and stepping off a curb.  Fortunately, most stairs – even those with only two or three steps – have a firm railing at hand, so negotiating them is no problem.  Stepping off a high curb is another matter, but as I step down I put blind faith in the muscles of my leg, which so far have seen me through.  But when I pass an open sidewalk entrance to the basement stairs of a store or an apartment building --  entrances usually marked with orange cones signaling danger – I get just a wee bit nervous, for the thought of plunging down into that darkness is unsettling.  I used to be fascinated by those stairs leading down into darkness, as if into some underworld of mystery, some Hades of the damned, but now I shrink from them in fear, or at least with a good dose of caution.
Even in an old castle -- or especially there -- scary.
Dark Avenger-commonswiki 
Inside a lighthouse is no better.   And barefoot?
hashi photo     During the last two winters, when the city was beset for days at a time with ice and snow and slush, I prudently clung to my hearth, and was assured by nurses and therapists, when they came to see my partner Bob, that I was wise to do so, since the hospitals were full of weather-related fractures and sprains.  Once, when I did venture out a very short distance to get a newspaper, I slipped on a thin sheet of ice and fell with a thump.  So it had finally happened, the thing I perennially feared.  Was I hurt?  No, not a scratch or a bruise.  So I just slid over the ice a few feet to a spot that seemed safer, laboriously got up, and tiptoed on. 
     Nothing is more threatening to us fragile humans, whether elderly or not, than the public transportation of the city of New York.  Our buses and subway trains lurch and screech and jolt.  If I don’t get a seat, I hold on to the nearest pole with one or both hands, preferably both, and when getting off, I wait until the bus or train stops with its inevitable jolt, and then, and only then, do I rise from my seat or let go of a pole to exit.  But caution is never enough.  Recently, when a bus lurched away from a stop, it caught a  bunch of us with only a tenuous grip on a pole.  We all toppled, three or four or five, but the others managed to grab hold of something and right themselves, whereas I inelegantly went all the way to the floor.  Gasps of “Oh!” erupted, and five hands stretched out to help me up.  Get up I did, clumsily, laboriously, but when others asked if I was hurt, I could announce grandly, “Not a scratch!”  “You fell just right,” said one witness, and it was true enough; in spite of my fear of falling, I seem to fall just right and bounce back up without a bruise or a scratch. 
Poles aplenty here, but I have never, never ridden in a subway car this empty.     Still, that fear persists, even to the point of making me hesitate to return to one of my favorite local restaurants where, as you exit, you have to descend two steps without a railing or any other form of support.  To fall there would be catastrophic, since there are outside tables near those steps, and anyone falling would crash down on a table and disrupt someone’s genteel lunching – for me, the worst outcome of all, worse than a fracture or sprain.  What could one then say?  “Excuse me, dear people, I didn’t mean to smash up your tacos and enchiladas.”  Embarrassment, shame, guilt.  Could I ever show my face in that restaurant again?  Probably not.
     My fear of falling is justified.  Statistics tell us that one third of those over 60 fall each year, and over half of those over 80.  And those who do fall are two to three times more likely to fall again.  And to make this cheery prospect even cheerier, we are told that these figures are an understatement, since many falls go unreported.  By way of confirmation of all this, my partner Bob’s nurses and therapists have told us horror stories of seniors living alone in the city who refuse to have a home care aide, and one day are found lying on the floor in a pool of blood.  So welcome to the Golden Years, that sweet retirement we have all been working toward and dreaming of, as we toil laboriously on through our lives.
     And to top the matter off, the December 2015 AARP Bulletin, which targets seniors, reports a growing but barely noticed epidemic of falls because people are living longer, and the aging Baby Boomers are joining the ranks of the vulnerable.  Older adults fall when inside, younger ones when outside.  Examples:
·      A 58-year-old man tripped over a dog leash while camping outdoors with his wife, bruised his spinal cord, spent three months in hospitals and rehab, and has now regained bowel and bladder function, but can’t walk or shower without help.·      A woman of 67 lost her balance while carrying a small table down the stairs to her basement, was found by family unconscious on the concrete floor, suffered brain injury, and has now improved, but still has time talking in complete sentences.·      Ex-President George H.W. Bush, 91, fell at his home in Maine, breaking a bone in his neck. 
My advice:  Don’t go camping with a dog, and don’t carry small tables up or down stairs.  AARP warns also of invisible ice on driveways, slippery bathroom floors, loose rugs, and high heels.  Personally, I’m not too worried about the first or the last, but the middle two are a concern, as well as clutter in the apartment.
A 1764 edition printed and sold by
Benjamin Franklin.  





























    Achieving heights and plummeting down from them are ingrained in the myths and traditions of the West.  “In Adam’s fall / We sinned all” is how The New England Primer, the most successful textbook published in the American colonies in the eighteenth century, introduced tender young minds to the letter A, presumably pronouncing “sinned” as two syllables to make the second verse have the requisite eight.  Adam’s fall, of course, was metaphorical, since it involved eating a forbidden apple at the prompting of mischievous Eve and the nefarious serpent (thanks to whom snakes have a bad press to this day), the serpent being none other than the wicked Tempter in disguise.  Far from plummeting, Adam and his guilty bedmate were driven from the paradisial Garden of Eden out into the hard, cruel world where we have all been laboring ever since, with death our inevitable end on this toilsome earth. 
The expulsion from Eden, with and without fig leaves.  Masaccio,
1426-28; a 1980 restoration removed the fig leaves, a 1680 addition.
     But the real Fall affecting and afflicting our universe was the Fall of Satan, up till then known as Lucifer, and his rebellious cohorts, following their revolt against God, who smote them mightily and sent them plummeting down from heaven to the smoky regions of hell.  This grandiose myth is retold vividly in Milton’s Paradise Lost, though Milton, himself a rebel against the majesty of Charles I of England,  couldn’t help but make Satan and his allies more interesting than God and his Son, and hell a far more fascinating bit of real estate than the vague and airy regions of heaven.  But the Fall of that arch rebel foreshadowed that of Adam and precipitated it since, in Milton’s telling, it was Satan’s desire for revenge that led him to investigate this new creation, Earth, and wheedle Eve into wheedling Adam into the guilty act of eating an apple.  (Fortunately, apples, unlike serpents, haven’t had a bad press ever since, New York State being rich in them -- apples, that is -- and apples a favorite fruit of us all; I gobble one daily.)  Satan’s Fall has haunted us down through the ages, and inspired Gustave Doré’s magnificent illustrations of Milton’s work, showing Satan and the fallen angels dramatically en route to hell.
Satan and his legions smitten down to hell by the Archangel Michael.
Gustave Doré, 1866.
     For all our fear of falling, we humans – some of us – are obsessed with climbing, with achieving perilous heights.  On my many hikes in an upstate wilderness, sometimes I would come across a rustic bridge or a shelter with a plaque commemorating a son who had fallen to his death while climbing rocks, perhaps near the very spot where I was standing; in his memory, the grieving parents donated funds for the bridge or the shelter. 
     We’ve all heard reports of mountain climbers scaling icy peaks in Nepal, and of avalanches sweeping them to their death.  These adventurers are obsessed with heights and the need to conquer them, no matter what the risk: an obsession that few of us share, an obsession that we admire from a safe remove, and that we admit baffles us.  Every summer there are reports of teen-age boys who, clad in light summer clothing, scale precipitous peaks, reach a ledge, look down at the ground far below, and panic; going down seems more perilous than climbing up.  Trapped up there, they often spend the night, shudder through the cold, are found by rescuers the following morning.  In one case one of the two boys was dead, and the other, close to death, whispered plaintively, “Please help me, I don’t want to die”; within minutes he too was dead. 
Andy Beecroft

     The supreme fear of falling may come in a waking dream or a nightmare, often toward 4 a.m., when the night is longest and dawn seems far away, and the body’s numbed metabolism counterfeits death.  In this dream we plummet through eons of time and infinitudes of space, down, down, down  into the ultimate doom of extinction.  No wonder we have a dread of falling.  And yet, there is a sport known as skydiving, whose enthusiasts relish plummeting for a few delirious moments through the air before opening a parachute that brings them gently to earth. 
The ultimate thrill … for some.
Arteaga Douglas     My predictions for 2016:  If I'm wrong on any or all of these, I'll chuckle along with everyone else.
The election: Hillary will be the Democratic candidate, and Rubio the Republican.  She will win in a close election.The weather: This winter will be less severe than the two preceding winters.Our foreign wars: No matter who wins the election, we'll still be mired down in the Middle East.The stock market: It will undergo a serious decline.
     Tumblr and the book:  The Tumblr adventure continues.  I have published 75 posts, have 72 followers, am following 172 blogs, and am getting reblogged.  I will soon do a post on the strange and wondrous world of Tumblr and its inhabitants, who they are (when known) and what they're up to (if printable).  Meanwhile there is still the book, available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though I'm more concerned now with Tumblr.


     Coming soon: Martin Shkreli: The American dream or a fraudster?  Or, robbing Peter to pay Paul, or Retrophin to pay MSMB.  Confused already?  Just wait.  I defy you to unravel this tangle of alleged fraud.  But even so, he's sexy.
     ©  2016  Clifford Browder

212. Con Men, Cheats, and Thieves

     Once, long ago, when my brother met me at an airport to give me a lift to the family apartment, he said with a canny look, “Let me tell you about my new scam.”   His “scam” was simply a plan to redeem hundreds of coupons in newspapers, so as to acquire a lifetime supply of whatever at a reduced price.  Being in the newspaper distribution business, he had access to reams of unsold papers and so had a free hand in clipping reams of coupons.  There was nothing illegal about this; he was simply taking advantage of his position to buy things cheap.  Years later, when I came back to bury him, I found the apartment crammed with his spoils: a lifetime supply of deodorants, ditto of detergent, car repair equipment that only a grease monkey could appreciate, and I don’t recall what else; it took me weeks to clear it all out.  But what I still remember most vividly, was that look on his face when he announced his so-called scam: canny, shrewd, knowing, worthy of Wily Coyote, the trickster of many Native American legends.  It was indeed the look of an operator about to put something over on others – in other words, the look of a con man.
     New York, like any big city, is a mecca for con men, cheats, and thieves.  An African American cruising the streets in a fancy limousine stuffed with clothing once asked with a winning smile if I’d like to buy some clothes; I declined, convinced that they were stolen items.  He was surely a thief or a fence.
The mug shot of Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme
was the biggest fraud in U.S. history.
     On another occasion when I found myself at night in midtown, I saw a man trying to sell some paper dolls to some sailors.  Aligned side by side, the dolls were dancing on the sidewalk as if by magic.  It was an old trick still being played.  But the sailors weren’t fooled; they were looking for the hidden strings that propelled the dolls.  Seeing this, another man standing nearby announced in a resonant voice, “It’s show time!”  He repeated his warning a second time, and the vendor of the dolls packed them up and moved on down the street.  “I knew there was a hidden string,” said one sailor, “and here it is.”  Looking closely, he had detected the almost invisible string.
Charles Ponzi, who was so successful a swindler in the 1920s that he has given his name to the fraud  where the con man promises investors fabulous returns, then uses the money from later investors
to pay the earlier investors.
     Another scam that used to be practiced in the city involved a man entering into conversation with a stranger outside a bank and telling him that banks were frauds, they took your money but wouldn’t give it back.  He would repeat this assertion so consistently, so smugly, that the other man would wax indignant and tell him he was crazy.  “Go ahead, just try,” the first man would dare him, “try to withdraw a sizable sum, and you’ll see that I am right.”  So the dupe would do just that, and it was just a matter of time before he and his money were separated.  How could anyone fall for such an obvious scam, you and I and almost everyone would wonder, and the victim, once disabused, would wonder the same.  But at the time, he fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and – to mix metaphors – got royally fleeced.
     Today the cheats take advantage of the Internet to reach you in your home.  Once, out of nowhere, I got an e-mail:  “Aloha!  I’d like to get to know you.  From your profile I think we have lots in common.”  The sender seemed to be a pleasant young woman.  Surprised and charmed, I was tempted to respond, but some good spirit deep within me, some demon of skepticism, held me back, and I quickly realized that this was probably a scam, bait to entice you to interact and yield personal information useful to the scammer.  Like all  such greetings since, I deleted it.
     On another occasion I got an e-mail purporting to be from my publisher, saying that on the spur of the moment he had taken a trip abroad – I think he said to the Philippines – was in trouble there and needed money; if I could send him several hundred, he’d repay me as soon as he got back.  This smelled fishy, so I asked for more information.  The appeal was repeated urgently, but it seemed fishier than ever, so I asked how he knew me, what was the connection?  No answer came.  I then e-mailed the publisher and got an immediate reply: an account of his had been hacked, and this appeal was going out to many of his authors and acquaintances whose e-mail addresses had been discovered; he was now closing the account and opening another with a different password.  Beware of sudden e-mail appeals.  With hindsight, I realize that I shouldn’t even have answered the first appeal before contacting him for verification.
     And of course we’re constantly assaulted by ads that make glowing vague promises.  WOULD  YOU  LIKE  TO  BE  A  MILLIONAIRE? one asked.  Amused, I answered by mail as instructed: “Yes, please tell me how to become a millionaire!”  The reply was simply a run-of-the-mill invitation to invest in something or other, an offer so drab and uninspired that it wasn’t worth messing with, even to chuckle or debunk it. 
     I’m not always so canny.  Recently I got an envelope labeled Social Security & Medicare, personal statement enclosed, and in bold red ink, EXPIRATION  NOTICE.  At the very thought of my Social Security and Medicare expiring, I almost panicked and hurriedly opened the envelope.  So what did I discover?  It was an appeal from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, urging me to renew my membership – in other words, give them more money.  Looking closely at the envelope, I now saw that the words “National Committee to Preserve” were indeed there, but in small print.  They had tricked me into opening the envelope.  But this so annoyed me that I vowed never to give them money again – not exactly the dénouement they intended.
     There are trivial tricks and scams, but serious ones perpetrated by real artists of the trade abound.  The current AARP Bulletin, distributed widely to golden oldies, has an article entitled “Season’s Cheatings” that mentions several online scams practiced at this time of year on the elderly.  For instance:·      Notifications by e-mail claiming that the U.S. Post Office or some other entity has a delivery for you; click on the link and you get malware.·      Rogue retailers offering bargain prices that you find on social media or through search engine results; they want your credit card number or will sell you inferior goods (or maybe nothing at all).·      Charity cons claiming to benefit police, firefighters, veterans, sick or needy children, or victims of natural disasters; again, they want your credit card number.·      Gotcha giveaways offering free merchandise or free vacations, likewise hoping to get your credit card or other sensitive information.
Not to mention scams that relieve some oldsters of their life’s savings, or induce them to send money abroad to rescue a grandchild who is reportedly in some kind of unforeseen trouble. 
     Being a bit of a tightwad and suspicious by nature, I’ve never fallen for any of these cons, but long ago a friend of mine was outrageously conned by a master of the trade.  (I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it here again, since it exemplifies this post’s theme.)  My friend Kevin, a natty, sophisticated New Yorker, told me he had just met an interesting visitor from South America (I forget which country) named Vergilio and was quite taken with him.  The next thing I knew, Kevin had arranged with a friend who was going away on vacation to let Vergilio move into her place temporarily.  Kevin’s praise of Vergilio grew ever more intense, and finally I met this paragon when Kevin invited me over for cocktails.  Vergilio was a good-looking young man of about thirty, no kid, well-groomed and well-mannered, with a soft, pleasing voice and a gracious smile.  Good enough, but everything about him, while pleasing, seemed strangely vague.  He was right there in the present, but he seemed to have no past and no discoverable future – a mysteriousness that made him that more interesting to Kevin.   
     “What is it about this guy that so gets to you?” I asked Kevin later.
     Kevin flashed a look of intensity.  “I’ve never known anyone like him. He’s fascinating.  He has glamour!”
     Glamour – a word I associate with Hollywood brouhaha – was something I had never hankered for, but it was clear that it appealed to some need deep in Kevin’s psyche.  But I was worried.  For me, Vergilio, who had appeared out of nowhere, was a smile over a cocktail glass, nothing more.

     In the weeks that followed, Kevin began evincing alarm: Vergilio's health was not all it should be.  Then he informed me that Vergilio was going to consult a doctor on the doctor's yacht, which struck me as an odd site for a consultation.  Next I got a phone call from Kevin, with anguish in his voice: "Vergilio is dying!"  His friend had informed him that he was suffering from a long-term fatal ailment, its exact nature undisclosed, that required treatment in Europe; he would be leaving soon.  So Vergilio left; Kevin moped about, waited for news, worried.  Postcards came from Paris, Monte Carlo, Nice, with only the briefest message and no news about his treatment.
     Three weeks later he was back, well-groomed and urbane as ever, the same soft voice, the same smile over a cocktail glass.  He showed Kevin and me a series of photographs from his trip, every one featuring a smiling and handsome Vergilio in a well-appointed residence, his host unidentified: photos of a narcissist.  By now even Kevin sensed something amiss, but his need of glamour locked him into the spell.
     Vergilio now informed Kevin that he had to return to Europe for an operation that might or might not save his life, probably not; professing embarrassment, he confessed he needed money for the trip.  Why he had to turn to a new friend, and not to old friends and family, went unexplained.  Kevin at once gave forth of his own meager savings, then phoned any number of friends, entreating them to loan him what they could.  Some did, some didn't.  I myself, unable and unwilling to label Vergilio a liar or a fraud without convincing evidence, promised five hundred dollars but then, common sense prevailing, gently but firmly declined.  "I don't believe in it," I explained.  Kevin’s response: "I feel like I've been kicked in the teeth.”
     Vergilio departed once again for Europe, and I heard no more of him, for Kevin and I were now estranged.  Finally I phoned a mutual friend, asking how he was.  "He's learning what he has to learn," she said, but refrained from saying more.  Months passed; other matters claimed me, but I thought often of Kevin.  Finally he phoned and invited me over.  He looked worn and wan, but got to it right away:  "If I ever see him again, I'll say to him, 'What?  You're not dead?  But that's why I gave you all that money and sent you back to Europe.  Dead -- you should be dead!'"  A hard look came over him that I had never seen before.
     To my knowledge, Vergilio never reappeared in New York; if he did, it was at a far remove from Kevin.  Kevin never mentioned his name again.  Since his finances were habitually precarious, I doubt if he ever repaid any of his friends.  But of one thing I am sure: Vergilio was off somewhere, on this continent or another, smiling over a cocktail glass and enlisting the sympathy and generosity of friends.  Newfriends; to the old ones he wouldn't dare show his face.
     Vergilio was a classic example of the con man, and Kevin a classic example of the dupe.  (Note my insisting on “con man” and never “con woman” or “con person”; it seems to be a males-only game.)  An article by Maria Konnikova in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times of December 6 of this year argues that we humans are born to be conned, that the true con artist makes us feel good about ourselves, makes us think he’s giving us just what we deserve.  The victim is always swept up in a narrative that at the time seems absolutely compelling. 
     So it was with Kevin.  He had a deep need to experience glamour, and Vergilio satisfied that need marvelously, to the point that Kevin ignored all the danger signs: the vagueness of Vergilio’s ailment, and his obvious good health; Vergilio’s inability to get help from old friends and family, so that he instead relied on a newfound friend of meager means; Vergilio’s trip to Europe supposedly to get medical aid, a trip memorialized in photos of Vergilio in luxury settings that belied the very purpose of the trip.  Kevin was no fool, but he fell for the con that a shrewd operator offered him, and his awakening was harsh; the wound was long in healing, if it ever did heal completely.
     The Maria Konnikova article cited above gives another example of a con.  On her first day in New York a college student named Robin Lloyd encountered a loud-mouthed performer behind a cardboard box on Broadway who invited the crowd to “follow the lady” as he switched three playing cards about face down with lightning speed; if you bet you could guess correctly where the “lady” – a queen – went, he would double your money.  She was taken with the offer, excited, all the more so when another bystander wagered and won.  So even though she had only two $20 bills in her pocket and no winter coat, she wagered all she had.  The moment she did so, she regretted it, and of course she lost.  The game that duped her is called three-card monte and is still played on the streets of New York.  The monte operator, a good judge of character, had sensed her need and exploited it.  And the bystander she saw win was of course a plant, put there to lure victims in.  Another classic case of a con man in operation who must be deft with his fingers and spiel.  The game itself has been played in many countries as far back as the fifteenth century, and is still being played today. 
ZioDave
     Robin Lloyd was tricked because she needed money; my friend Kevin was tricked because he needed glamour; always, the con man offers something we deeply desire.  Which is why con men will always exist, and someone will always be duped.  What do you need?  Be careful, there’s someone out there eager to offer it to you; if you believe him, you’ll be had.
[image error] Three-card monte in Warsaw in 1944.  Even in wartime, under German
occupation and with the Red Army approaching, it flourished.
In Mexico in 1828.  An international con.
     A postscript on cemeteries:  Having read last week's post on cemeteries, our friend Carol tells how, when her stepfather died, she and her mother toured a cemetery in New Jersey, looking for a plot.  A blustery bleached blonde drove them around.  She kept up a running conversation, assuring them, "The place is well kept up.  You'll never find any empty plastic milk jugs lying around here."  A great comfort to the bereaved family. 
     Freakish weather:  Tuesday, December 22, the shortest day of the year, was also the darkest I have ever experienced in New York.  A short day, overcast; we had lights on all day.  And Thursday, December 24, was the mildest Christmas Eve I have ever known, with temperatures in the low 70s.  Spring flowers have been reported; whatever their normal season, I see some white ones right next door.
     Tumblr note:  The adventure continues.  I have published 63 posts, have 62 followers, am following 156 blogs, and am getting reblogged all over the place.  I will definitely do a post on the strange and wondrous world of Tumblr and its inhabitants.  There is still the book, available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but my thoughts are now on Tumblr.


     Coming soon:  Fear of Falling: my fears, and everyone’s.  Then: A daring con man of our time, an alleged whiz kid of deceit.
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

211. Cemeteries and How They Entice

                   Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,                   If Green-Wood don't get you, Woodlawn must.


    In mid-nineteenth-century New York it was the dream of every dowager, and the dream of not a few elegant gentlemen as well, to be “buried by Brown from Grace,” Grace being Grace Church, the fashionable Episcopal church that still lifts its Gothic spire skyward at Broadway and East 10th Street in Manhattan, and Brown being Isaac H. Brown, the sexton of Grace Church, and the city’s definitive arbiter of taste.  It was he and he alone who decided what the “in” thing was for funerals in a given year, what the flower arrangements should be, how the casket (not the coffin) should be decorated, how the dear one should be laid out, and whether or not the casket should include a plate-glass panel to allow the deceased to be visible.  His knowledge was vast, and his decree, absolute – until the following year, when his dictate might change drastically.  (For more on Brown, see post #32, November 4, 2012.)
     To the phrase “buried by Brown from Grace” one should add “in Green-Wood,” for Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was the desired final resting place of the elite of Gotham: a spacious landscaped park with tombs and mausoleums of granite or marble adorned with sculpted weeping willows, winged cherubs, pensive female figures, draped urns, and broken lutes.  Gone were the simple gravestones of an earlier age, and the crowded graveyards of congested Manhattan, which for reasons of health had been displaced to the outer boroughs.  Gone too were the plain pine coffins from a carpenter’s shop, replaced by polished rosewood and mahogany caskets displayed on the sidewalks of Broadway in front of the elegant shops that offered them, caskets that provoked astonished stares and wonderment from visitors from the nation’s distant provinces.  By mid-century, burials of citizens of the better sort had to be done in style.  Let’s follow one of them of them and see how a dowager of that time might have departed this earth.
Green-Wood entrance in 1891.
     Mourning is duly performed in a draped parlor steeped in romantic gloom, the mourners in the bleakest mourning, dabbing their eyes and sniffling, with visitors signing a guest book recording the dear one’s dearest friends.  Hovering in the near-distance is Isaac H. Brown himself, red-faced, ample, bald, in elegant black, and lucky they were to get him (at a price), his eye vigilantly surveying the furniture, the flowers, and the casket with silver-plated handles and a calla lily cross at the foot, and at the head, a bed of moss and evergreen with the word MOTHER in violets.  When the mourners finish their viewing, at a nod from Brown the attendants close the casket’s lid, with the dear one elegantly visible through the panel of glass, and cushioned comfortably in velvet and lace, a hint of a smile on her face, suggesting, after this world’s tribulations, the deepest  sleep and peace. 
The ultra in how it's done today (minus the dear one).
Robert Lawton     Six sturdy pallbearers in gray kid gloves bear the casket down the steep brownstone stoop to a black-plumed plate-glass hearse, with the dear departed visible to all and sundry, showing bystanders the status and elegance of the family.  Following the hearse are a series of shiny black carriages (most of them rented), bearing the dear one’s family in solemn procession through the streets to the waterfront, where, accompanied by only the closest, dearest kin, who are determined to see the dear one through to the end, the hearse is put aboard a ferry and borne across the East River to Brooklyn. 
     There, on that alien shore, the retinue disembark and proceed through unfamiliar wilds to Green-Wood, whose Gothic gates loom large, topped with spiky spires, and panels showing appropriate funereal scenes, the whole effect suggestive of a medieval cathedral.  Beyond those gates, opening up to mournful eyes is a pleasing vista of hillocks and ponds and fountains and planted trees, and scattered discreetly among them, noble monuments dedicated to other dear departed of like status and elegance.  Awaiting the dear one is a mausoleum of the finest marble, bearing the family’s engraved name.  Here she can rest in peace with other dear ones close about her, and all around her the soothing presence of Mother Nature, offering tranquility and ease after a lifetime of struggle and strife amid the urban turbulence of the city of New York. 

     Less happy, perhaps, are the prospects for the feminine bereaved, who by the rigid dictates of society must cease to be seen in public for a matter of weeks, if not months, during which they remain sequestered at their domiciles, garbed in black that will gradually yield to a dash or two of purple.  As for the males, sober clothes and a band of black crape on the topper suffice, and no confinement at home, since they must, of course, see to the running of the world.

     By 1880 the funeral director was taking charge of the entire operation, and services were held at a funeral home or church, with sermons eschewing the old fire-and-brimstone rants designed to scare mourners into virtue and compliance, replaced now by shorter spiels meant to console the bereaved and assuage their grief; as for the deceased, to get to heaven now, they had only to die – a condition that still holds today.  Clearly, this transformation of the funeral and mourning reflected the transition of the final resting place from crowded urban graveyard to the vast and soothing expanses of the landscaped cemetery.  The whole sad business of seeing off the dead had become, if not pleasant, at least less challenging, albeit at greater cost.  
Costica Acsinte Archive
     Ah yes, the cost.  According to James D. McCabe’s New York by Gaslight, published in 1880, a first-class New York funeral could cost $2,191, the biggest items being flowers, $100; rosewood coffin, $300; Green-Wood lot, $600; and granite monument, $900.  The smallest item was gravedigger, $5, and I’m sure the poor guy, who did the meanest bit of physical work, deserved more.  (In pondering these figures, bear in mind that an 1880 dollar would be worth $22.35 today.)  McCabe’s comment: “As only the rich can afford to live in New York society, so only the rich can afford to die in it.”  And die they did, with flair.
     The preeminence of Green-Wood as a final resting place was unchallenged throughout the nineteen century, its residents including such stellar names as editor Horace Greeley, jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany, assorted richies of the time, and the century’s most famous preacher (and sinner), Henry Ward Beecher.  To which might be added another name of dubious repute, for once, when I was traipsing Green-Wood’s vast domain while doing research for a biography, I was amazed to come across a plot bearing the name TWEED and, within it in a commanding position, the grave of the Boss himself, who, even though hounded from office by reformers and fated to die in prison, was still deemed by his family to be deserving of a distinguished last resort.
     It is in the nature of preeminence to be rudely challenged.  By the early twentieth century a tidal wave of Gilded Age arrivistes were forsaking Green-Wood for its brazen rival, Woodlawn.  Founded in the farther reaches of the Bronx in 1863, twenty-five years later than Green-Wood, this Johnny-come-lately of cemeteries was almost as vast as its rival (400 acres vs. 478) and just as lovingly landscaped, but it had been number two for decades.  Still, it had already enticed to its enchanted precincts author Herman Melville, newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, pioneer suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Admiral David Farragut of Civil War fame, and, for a dash of vinegar, the much maligned Mephistopheles of Wall Street, Jay Gould. 
A Woodlawn entrance today.     And that was just the beginning.  In the course of the twentieth century, it gathered to its bosom such notables as Hizzoner Fiorello LaGuardia, the beloved Depression-era mayor of New York; the onetime New York State governor and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes; author Damon Runyon; composer Irving Berlin; and jazz musicians Miles Davis and  Duke Ellington.
The Jay Gould Mausoleum.  Mephistopheles in the Parthenon.
Anthony 22
     Was Green-Wood worried?  You bet!  What followed, and still operates today, is a sort of Harvard-Yale rivalry, or should one say Macy’s and Gimbels, or Home Depot and Walmart?  “I’ve had to cede all the jazz musicians to Woodlawn,” Green-Wood’s current president, Richard Moylan, recently lamented to a New York Times interviewer; himself a fan of classic rock, Mr. Moylan is cut to the quick when he loses a stellar musician to his rival.  But there is hope: Leonard Bernstein was buried in Green-Wood in 1990, and today, with Brooklyn in the forefront culturally, Mr. Moylan has a wish list of prominent Brooklynites whom he hopes to snag. 
     But he’s doing more than wishing.  For the last eight years Green-Wood has hosted an annual benefit gala to raise money for the maintenance of its historic grounds.  Cocktails are sipped genteelly in an area bordered by the entombed remains of the cremated, whose proximity seems not to dismay the patrician imbibers, old-school richies who view anything trendy with disgust.  The result of the latest gala: $80,000, which followed a gift of $1 million for the restoration of a greenhouse that will become a visitor center.  No question, after a long decline in prestige, Green-Wood is becoming again a place of aspirational burial, the desired last resting place of the city’s socially prominent, especially the newly arrived of Brooklyn’s bohemian elite.  Watch out, Woodlawn; Green-Wood has risen from its ashes, and I don’t mean those of the cremated.  Its spiky Gothic gates are wide open; they beckon, they entice.
      A personal note:  In distant Illinois there is a cemetery plot where my father, mother, and brother are interred, with space for a fourth deceased: guess who?  But I won’t join their merry company, for my partner Bob and I are planning to be cremated, with the ashes strewn over the waves of the cold Atlantic.  No urn, no cremains; we will vanish from this earth.
     All through my childhood my family would drive past that cemetery en route elsewhere, and my brother David often quipped, “That’s a place people are just dying to get into,” which was true enough.  When my mother, long a widow, died, my brother and I had dealings with a local funeral home.  “You can be the skinflint from New York,” he advised me, being well aware of funeral home ploys and strategies.  At the home, while waiting to see the director, we were served coffee.  When we were summoned to the director’s sanctum, David announced loudly, “Bring the coffee, Hal.  It’s the only free thing you’ll get in this place.”  (My brother was not noted for tact.)  The director took this in stride; he was probably used to eccentrics and crazies.  When we were shown de luxe caskets at a hefty price, I inquired quietly, “Do you have anything else?”  “Yes,” said the director gently, then went into another room and returned wheeling in a somewhat plainer item, which we inspected briefly and bought.  The burial itself was routine, nothing fancy.
     Years later, when my brother died, I dealt with the same director in the same funeral home.  This time there was no fuss about the coffin; having recorded our choice on the previous occasion, he simply offered a similar bit of merchandise.  But then he mentioned embalming.  “Is this necessary?” I asked.  “Oh, you want your brother to look his best, do you not?”  I didn’t argue.  They wanted me to provide clothing for the deceased, including a tie.  He didn’t wear ties, and I had none to spare, so the home generously provided that item themselves.  Whether it was included in the itemized bill they sent, I never noticed; maybe not.  Again, the burial was routine; being a carless visitor from New York, I wasn’t even pressured to go to the cemetery.  But the cemetery is still discreetly after me, occasionally sending offers of flowers at a bargain price; I decline.  My clan never went for the fancy stuff; skinflints, if you like, or just unpretentious, not given to pomp.  So it goes.
     Coming soon:  Con men, cheats, and thieves: random notes on people who have tried to cheat me and others, and miscreants who have flourished in New York, where they are legion.  And after that, Fear of Falling.
     The book and Tumblr:  Once again, many thanks to all those who bought my collection of posts.  Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.

Meanwhile I’m publishing poems on Tumblr, and am now following 116 fellow bloggers, and have 41 – count ’em: 41! – followers of my own.  (Forgive this puerile numbers game; it's how this game is played.)  For better and worse, I write a new poem almost every day.  Last Thursday was perhaps an all-time first: between 2 and 3 p.m., seated in a dentist's chair while my dentist did two fillings, I wrote in my mind the better part of a poem that I finished while coming home on the subway, dripping wet from rain.  Had I goosed the Muse, or was it the novocaine?  The result: not my best, but not my worst, and certainly good enough for Tumblr.  What an adventure!  My impressions of the strange world of Tumblr will be recorded in a future post.  But I repeat: please don’t go there; leave well enough alone.

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder
    

210. Dying Alone

     Dying is by nature solitary, yet we want someone there to see us out.  When Sarah Bernhardt died, the person who mattered most was at her side – not any of her numerous lovers, but her son, who was with her to the end.  And when André Gide died, he too had the person who mattered most to him at hand: the young man, now married and with a family, who had been his lover as a boy, and who came to him in spite of his familial obligations.  Many such stories can be told.
     These people were lucky.  But in the city there are many who live alone, die alone, and sometimes the body isn’t discovered for days.  If no one claims it, it is shipped off to Hart Island, a small, forbidden island in Long Island Sound near City Island in the Bronx, where the anonymous, the indigent, and the forgotten are buried in plain pine coffins stacked three deep in a common grave dug by inmates from Riker’s Island.  Why is this island forbidden?  Because it is covered with the crumbling remains of abandoned buildings used by facilities long since gone, dilapidated structures that one risks one’s life in visiting.  (See post #49 for more on Hart Island.)  To die alone in the city and be buried on Hart Island is a thought to haunt us all: the saddest end conceivable.  And Hart Island, open as a final resting place since 1869, holds 800,000 such coffins, with more arriving daily.
Digging graves at Hart Island, 1890.
     Sometimes someone who is by no means indigent or forgotten ends up on Hart Island.  I recall a squib in a New York newspaper from the 1870s reporting that a man just off the boat from one of the British Caribbean islands had exhibited erratic behavior, including hallucinations, and died.  His fellow passengers reported similar behavior on the boat, symptoms typical of delirium tremens and the last, fatal stage of alcoholism.  When no one claimed the body, it was sent off to Hart Island and buried there.  Soon after, relatives looking for him arrived from the Caribbean, and from descriptions were able to identify him and take possession of the body for burial at home.  He was a wealthy planter, but hopelessly given to drink.  His body was reclaimed, but most of those buried then and now on Hart Island, though numbered carefully, will never be identified.
     Recently the New York Times surprised its readers by running on the front page of its Sunday edition an article by N.R. Kleinfield entitled “The Lonely Death of George Bell,” recounting in detail precisely the kind of death so many city residents dread.  I will recount it in summary here, but urge interested viewers to read the entire article (see the source note following).
     A neighbor in the Jackson Heights apartment building in Queens detected a fetid odor from the apartment and dialed 911.  The tenant hadn’t been seen for several days, and his car, parked on the wrong side of the street, had been ticketed.  The firemen came, jimmied the door open, entered.  The police followed, found an apartment crammed with things, a jumble of possessions strewn on the furniture and floor, heaps of litter, trash: the den of a hoarder.  And collapsed on the living room floor was a puffy body, decomposed, unrecognizable.  They assumed it was George Bell, the resident, though no one knew for sure.   
     Now began the complicated routine of a complex of city agencies.  An investigator from the medical examiner’s office was summoned to see if a crime had been committed, and he quickly concluded that there was no sign of a forced entry, no bullet wounds or blood on the body, therefore no evidence of crime.  A Fire Department medic formally declared that the man was dead, and the body, zipped into a human remains pouch, was taken to the morgue at Queens Hospital Center, where it was placed in a refrigerated drawer. 
Identifying the dead in New York City's first morgue, on the grounds of
Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, 1866.
    Next came the attempt to locate next of kin, but neighbors didn’t know of any.  Finding some names and phone numbers in the apartment, detectives called them but got nowhere, for the man presumed to be George Bell evidently had no wife or siblings.  Meanwhile fingerprints were taken at the morgue – not easy, given the condition of the body – and sent to city, state, and federal data bases, but without results. 
     After nine days with no contact with next of kin, the medical examiner reported the death to the Queens County public administrator, an obscure official whose office manages estates when there is no one else to do so, usually in the absence of a will or known heirs.  Twelve days after the body was discovered, two investigators from the administrator’s office clad in ample white hazmat suits, whole-body garments worn as protective gear against hazardous materials, entered the cluttered apartment to search for clues that might identify the deceased occupant and his heirs.  Bad as this apartment was, they had seen worse: an apartment so cluttered that when the resident died, she died standing up, unable to fall to the floor, and another where the investigators were driven out by swarms of flies. 
Workers in hazmat suits, dismantling a pier.
     The inspectors inspected the bed, a lumpy fold-out couch in the living room, and a soiled shopping list discovered in the kitchen, where the faucet didn’t work and the stove, being without knobs, was unusable.  A table and some drawers yielded $241 in bills and $187.45 cents in coins, all duly noted.  A bear’s head and steer horns were mounted on the wall, plus some pictures of planes and warships, and photos showing a parachutist coming in for a landing, with a certificate recording George Bell’s first jump in 1963.  Chinese food cartons and pizza boxes were everywhere, showing how the deceased had eaten.  In the clutter were six unopened ironing board covers, packages of unused Christmas lights, and four new tire-pressure gauges, evidence of a hoarder’s blind urge to accumulate.  The investigators left but returned twice more, finding more papers and cash, but no cellphone, computer, or credit cards that might yield useful information.  Said one of them, chastened by his work here and elsewhere, “I don’t want to die alone.”
     Back in the public administrator’s office a young caseworker, officially termed a “decedent property agent,” scrutinized the salvaged photographs and papers while wearing rubber gloves.  The photos showed a child with a holster and toy pistols, a man in uniform, men fishing – ordinary scenes that revealed almost nothing useful.  But an unused passport issued in 2007 identified the holder as George Main Bell Jr., born January 15, 1942, and gave the names of his parents.  There were also greeting cards from friends, and some tax returns prepared by H&R Block that gave information about George Bell’s estate, which amounted to several hundred thousand dollars.  So the hoarder was hardly impecunious, which simply heightened the mystery of his hoarding.  Finally, there was a will, dated 1982, dividing his estate evenly among three men and one woman of unknown relation, and specifying that the remains be cremated.  Now at last the investigators had something tangible to work with, and the mystery of who George Bell was began to be resolved.
     Letters went out to the four heirs, but only one responded: a man in upstate New York who had not been in touch with George Bell for some time.  The deceased’s car was sent to an auctioneer, a funeral home was selected, but queries to doctors’ offices and hospitals furnished no results.  The medical examiner filed an unverified death certificate stating the cause of death as hypertensive and arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with obesity a significant factor.  Though city law requires burial or cremation within four days of discovery, an exemption in this case was granted, pending conclusive identification of the remains.  Meanwhile the unplugged refrigerator had to be removed, its rotting food and roaches disposed of, following which it was sent to a recycling center.   Months passed.
     At last, a bit of luck: in response to queries sent out far and wide, a radiologist reported that he had X-rays of George Bell dating from 2004.  Retrieved from a warehouse, they were compared to X-rays taken by the medical examiner’s office, and they proved at last – four months after his death – that the body was indeed that of George Bell.  A rented hearse took the remains to the funeral home, where they were placed in a wooden coffin and sent on to a crematory for cremation, with no mourners, no member of the clergy: the simplest, bleakest disposal conceivable.  The cremation required three hours, and some days later an urn containing the ashes (the “cremains”) was deposited in a storage area.
     George Bell’s car, a Toyota, was auctioned off and sold for $9,500, beating expectations.  His watch fetched three dollars at another auction, and six husky men from a junk removal service broke up George Bell’s furniture and scooped up his cluttered belongings and shoveled them into trash cans and bags.  It took seven hours, and the stuff was taken by trucks to a Bronx dump that paid good rates.  The workers took a few items for themselves: a set of Marilyn Monroe porcelain plates, an unopened package of socks, some model cars, a television.  A worker wearing George Bell’s boots cleaned up his apartment.


Where our treasured belongings may one day end up.
Ximonic
     By law, George Bell’s assets could not be distributed for seven months after his death, allowing time for creditors to appear.  Meanwhile the heirs were traced via the Internet; two had died; the others, long out of touch with him, were surprised at being named in his will.  Distant cousins were found and included as heirs; one had never even heard of George Bell.  The apartment, the last asset to dispose of, was sold to a neighbor for $215,000.  The estate was finally tallied at $540,000, which commissions, fees, and other expenses reduced to $264,000.  Fourteen months after the man’s death, checks to the heirs went out. 
     Interviews with people who had known George Bell filled in a few details of his life.  He had been in the moving business and developed a close friendship with one of the heirs; a thickset, brawny man, Bell had been known to his friends as Big George.  One surviving friend told how George had a prankish streak.  Once, when moving the furniture of a financial firm, he slipped notes into the desk drawers: “I’m madly in love with you.  Meet me at the water cooler,” and “There’s a bomb under your chair.  Your next move might be your last.”  Yet no one really knew him, knew what made him tick.  He had almost married, but broke it off when the bride’s mother insisted on a prenuptial agreement; but the intended bride, now deceased,  was named in the will.  In 1996 George Bell had injured his shoulder during a moving job and had retired, getting workers’ compensation and Social Security disability.  His old friends had died or drifted away.  His life became empty, but he had one good friend in the neighborhood with whom he went fishing and talked by the hour.  Even he had no idea that George Bell had become a hoarder; he felt that George had died of sadness.  “I miss him,” he told the interviewer.  “I would like to see George one more time.  He was my friend.  One more time.”  So ends the story, skimpy as it is, of George Bell, who died alone in the city. 
      Should the Times have pried into the life of this lonely man who in his last years kept to himself and concealed his hoarding?  In spite of its length – 8,000 words – over three million people have read it either in print or online.  Many readers wrote to the Times’s Public Editor with praise, one calling it the best thing he had ever read in the Times, while another said that it deserved a Pulitzer Prize; a few raised the issue of privacy, questioning the Times’s showing photos of the cluttered apartment and mentioning old love letters and medical records.  But when the author consulted Bell's closest surviving friend and his heirs, they all were in favor of the story being published, and Mr. Kleinfeld himself said that George Bell “was a stand-in for all the people who die these lonely deaths.”  Among the Letters to the Editor that the Times printed, one called the article a “lyrical novella,” another saw it as eloquently describing the reality of hoarding in the city, and one declared it a “callous violation of George Bell’s privacy.”  I understand all these views, but personally I think the article was justified; it reports on a sad fact of living in the city: the lonely deaths of people who live alone.
     George Bell’s story reminds me of a 1911 novel by the French author Jules Romains, Mort de quelqu’un (The Death of Someone), which tells the story of a childless widower, a man so ordinary that when he dies, only his aged parents remember him for any length of time.  When they die, the memory of him likewise dies, and it’s as if he had never existed on this earth.  Though I read it long ago, it haunts me to this day.
     Whether we die alone or with loved ones on hand, do any of us have a right to be remembered?  It’s a chancy business.  Catullus, a major Roman poet, is known today because a single manuscript of his survived the Middle Ages and was discovered crammed between a wine vat and a wall in a monastery.  And of the works of the Greek poet Sappho, renowned in ancient times, we have only one complete poem, quoted in its entirety by a later author; of all the rest, only fragments, likewise quoted, remain. 
     And what about those of us who lack the talent – and perhaps the luck – of Catullus?  Do we have a right to be remembered at all?  The answer depends on our belief system, or lack of one.  Some might say no.  Others might insist that our every thought, word, and deed exists in the mind of God and therefore has eternal life.  This last, though wonderfully consoling, requires a spiritual commitment.  Maybe it’s true … and maybe not.  But if George Bell’s death haunts us, it’s because he is us, or may be, and his lonely death is the very death that we all fear, especially in the city.
     Does it have to be this way?  No, not in a caring community.  One such community is Monhegan, the small island off midcoast Maine where Bob and I used to vacation.  One of the most colorful of the year-round residents was an artist named Lynne Drexler, with whom we were slightly acquainted.  She came off as one tough cookie, bossy and sharp-tongued, with a voice like dark molasses, speaking her mind with utter indifference to what other people thought: a free spirit if there ever was one.  At midday, when the island dock was crowded with islanders and visitors awaiting the arrival of the daily mail boat from the mainland, I often saw her walk the length of the dock, greeting no one and looking neither to neither left nor right, while others babbled all around her.  What the point of this silent promenade was I never fathomed.
     Lynne’s paintings, bold splotches of color as assertive as herself, sold well to summer visitors and fetch high prices today.  For all her off-putting ways, she did have friends among the islanders and would receive them in her house, sitting on a couch in white sneakers, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  Bob and I and some others were invited there once, not for whiskey but for tea.  Instead of inviting her guests to partake of the goodies spread out on a table, she slouched down out of sight and voiced barbed opinions on a variety of subjects, her  voice projected from some hidden nook at the other end of the room.  Finally we realized that it was up to us to help ourselves, and when I went to the table to do so, I discovered her at last, sprawled on the floor in a corner, cigarette in hand.  It was the strangest affair I’ve ever been invited to, a Mad Hatter’s tea party where none of the usual rules held fast.
     Why am I mentioning Lynne Drexler now?  Because of what happened when she learned she had terminal cancer with only six months to live.  “Well, I guess I’m going to croak,” she announced, without a trace of self-pity, but with an edge of defiance.  She wanted to die on the island, where there was no doctor, no nurse, and just one paramedic, so her neighbors  formed a volunteer hospice group of eight who, as her condition worsened, took turns staying with her round the clock.  She lasted a year, and when she died, all eight of the group were with her, one holding one hand and another the other, while they played her recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which she loved.  After she died, one of them leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, knowing full well that, living, she would have hated it.  She is buried on the island in the little hillside cemetery that I have often visited, sometimes to look at old gravestones, sometimes to hunt rare wildflowers, and once in vain hopes of witnessing the weird mating ritual of the male woodcock, performed only in springtime at dusk.


[image error]Lynne Drexler's grave, with her white house in the background.
Barbara Hitchcock
[image error] Barbara Hitchcock

     When we go, will we be as lucky as Lynne Drexler and have loving friends around us, or as unlucky as George Bell, who died alone and collapsed amid the clutter he had secretly amassed?  A thought to haunt us all.


     Coming soon:  Cemeteries: Green-Wood and Woodlawn fight for our remains.  In the offing: Con men, cheats, and thieves. 
     The book and Tumblr:  Once again, many thanks to all those who bought my collection of posts.  Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.

Meanwhile I’m publishing poems on Tumblr, and am now following seventy fellow bloggers, and have twenty-two – count ’em: twenty-two! – followers of my own.  For better and worse, I write a new poem every day.  My latest post there, a holiday greeting, would be unprintable here.  My impressions of the strange world of Tumblr will be recorded in a future post.  But please don’t go there; leave well enough alone.

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

209. Buildings That Change

New York is in perpetual flux and always has been.  This post is about buildings that change, buildings that undergo amazing metamorphoses.  We'll start back in the nineteenth century.
Grand Central Hotel
The slender man, wearing an elegant gray overcoat, top hat, and polished boots, stood at the top of the hotel stairs, revolver in hand, eyeing the top-hatted fat man in a cloak halfway up the stairs.
     “I’ve got you now,” said the man at the top of the stairs; he fired one shot, then another.
     The fat man, a perfect target at point-blank range, staggered, grasped a handrail, managed not to fall.  “For God’s sake,” he shouted, “will anybody save me?”
     The slender man fled into the hotel, where he was soon apprehended.  Alarmed by the sound of the shots, hotel employees came running, helped the wounded man up the stairs and into a vacant room.  Word of the shooting spread like fire through the city, doctors flocked, newspapers stopped their presses and prepared a story.  The fat man lasted the night, then died.
 A bellhop witnessed the shooting.  From
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.      Such was the fatal shooting, on January 6, 1872, of Colonel James Fisk, Jr., robber baron, impresario, and commander of the Ninth Regiment of the New York National Guard, who, after President Grant, was the most reported-on man in the nation.  The shooting was all about the charms of Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield, Fisk’s former mistress and the present inamorata of the assailant, Edward S. Stokes, a handsome but impecunious man-about-town whose attempts to get money out of Fisk had proved fruitless.  Fisk was given an elaborate military funeral and shipped off to his home town of Brattleboro, Vermont; Miss Mansfield disappeared; and Stokes survived two trials for murder, was convicted at a third of manslaughter, served four gentle years at Sing Sing, and was released.
     The point of this story is not to tell once again the dramatic end of Colonel Fisk, which I recounted in another post long ago, but to situate the crime in the Grand Central Hotel and show how, with time, that hotel’s fortunes changed.  In 1870 it had opened on Broadway between West Third and Bond Streets, an eight-story, 400-room hostelry in Second Empire style, with the mansard roofs then fashionable.  One of the largest in the world at the time, it had three elegant dining rooms and sumptuous Gilded Age furnishings.  Fisk had called there because he was visiting the family of a deceased friend who were living there in comfort, thanks to his largesse. 
The Broadway Central Hotel in 1893.
    In the years that followed, the hotel witnessed elegant society weddings, other fashionable events, and an occasional murder or suicide, but nothing so dramatic and headline-grabbing as the affair of January 6, 1872.  But times and neighborhoods change, owner followed owner, financial difficulties arose, and by the late 1960s the hotel, now known as the Broadway Central Hotel, had become one of the city’s largest welfare hotels, with its share of crime, drug use, and prostitution.  Gone was the glamour of the Gilded Age, but in an attempt to spark it up, six theaters called the Mercer Arts Center moved in, and it was renamed the University Hotel.  But residents reported cracks and sagging walls.
     Early on August 3, 1973, those living there heard “bongs,” “tings,” and “groans,” and everywhere saw plaster falling in the building.  By late afternoon most of the 300 residents had been evacuated.  Then, at 5:10 p.m., a huge section of the building collapsed in a cloud of smoke, bringing a vast pile of tangled wreckage and rubble down on the street.  As firemen later sorted through the rubble, four bodies were found.  The rest of the hotel was torn down and removed, including the ill-fated Mercer Arts Center theaters.  Housing for New York University Law School students stands on the site today.
     Not every old building goes out with a bang, but startling metamorphoses occur.  Long ago, in some printed source I can no longer locate, I saw a mid-nineteenth-century photograph of a church turned into a stable.  I have never forgotten the shock at seeing what had obviously once been a house of God abruptly converted into a house of horses, with teams constantly going in and out those once sacred portals.  And I’m sure that the aroma of piety had similarly yielded to the smell of manure.  So let’s have a look at some other buildings that have changed over time.
May 1: moving day
In nineteenth-century New York those changes occurred massively, and convulsively, on May 1 of each year, when both residential and commercial leases expired citywide.  On that day cartmen could charge triple their usual prices and were reserved weeks in advance.  The streets became a jumble of carts and wagons, with cartmen shrieking oaths as they transported people’s furnishings, often as not trading fisticuffs with other cartmen doing the same.  A sign announcing SOAP & CANDLE FACTORY might come down, to be replaced by BOOTS & SHOES, while a family’s precious pianoforte, the showpiece of the parlor, was carried on a cart with special springs, bound for a more sumptuous brownstone fronted by a steep stoop often fatal to bulky but delicate objects in transit.  A jewelry store might become a lager beer saloon; an oyster cellar, a salesroom displaying fancy coffins; and a young ladies seminary, a house of ill repute.  On May 1 anything could happen and often did.
Moving day, May 1, 1856.  Be sure to notice the details; they say a lot.
Carriage houses
One of the most surprising metamorphoses, over time, has been the transformation of carriage houses into highly coveted and high-priced housing.  One sees them all over the West Village, where I live, their wide entrances meant to accommodate carriages but now changed into elegant residential doorways.  Once these little structures housed carriages and teams of horses, with the coachman and his family lodged snugly on a floor above, while the employer’s family occupied a spacious Greek Revival or brownstone mansion on a nearby but more fashionable street.  Occasionally, as at 271 West 10thStreet, one sees a metal hayloft hoist projecting from a floor above, originally installed to lift heavy bales of hay up to a second story, or in this case, to a third story, since the 1911 building once lodged a construction firm’s horses on the first and second floors, and a hay loft on the third.  And how did the horses get up to the second floor?  By a ramp, of course.  And what price does this modest little three-floor structure fetch today?  $17.2 million.
Bayview Correction Facility
Another building with a history is the Bayview Correction Facility, a notorious women’s prison at West 20th Street and Eleventh Avenue.  In 1931 the eight-story red-brick Art Deco structure had opened in the rough West Chelsea neighborhood as the Seamen’s House, a Y.M.C.A. accommodating some 250 merchant seamen whose ships docked at nearby piers.  As New York declined as a port, it ceased to serve that function and in 1967 was sold to the city, which turned it into a drug-treatment center.  But the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws imposed long prison sentences instead of rehab on offenders, so in 1974 the building  became a prison, and in 1978 a women-only facility that was soon plagued with reports of staff sexual misconduct, unsanitary conditions, and poor medical care.  In other words, it rivaled the Women’s House of Detention, another scandal-ridden facility that loomed like a dreary Bastille in the heart of Greenwich Village, whose genteel residents (myself included) were scandalized by the often obscene exchanges of inmates with their friends on the street below.  And just as that Bastille was in time demolished to the satisfaction of almost all, so the Bayview, which closed as a prison in 2012 following flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy, has now found itself besieged on all sides by gentrification and likewise a candidate for demolition. 
     Surrounding the ex-prison today are art galleries, an entertainment complex just across the street, and a shiny new condominium.  But the Bayview, for all its sordid past, had been designed by the same designers responsible for that marvel of Art Deco, the Empire State Building, and therefore, though not landmarked, seemed worth saving.  The neighbors feared yet another luxury housing development, but a happy compromise has been found: it will be gutted and converted into offices to be rented out primarily to nonprofits providing services for women.  And to spice it up, there will be landscaped terraces and an art gallery, and a refurbished swimming pool lined with mosaics of fish, and a chapel with stained glass windows showing seafaring scenes.  (Those windows won’t be Chartres, but let’s not quibble.)  In addition, a six-story annex added in 1950 will be demolished and replaced with a glass-walled atrium.  So how trendy can you get?  All in all, the neighbors are delighted … and relieved.
Knox Martin's "Venus."
     Covering the entire south wall of the building, by the way, is an abstract mural entitled “Venus” by artist Knox Martin, which dates from 1970, prior to the Rockefeller drug laws and long predating gentrification, back in a time when art for the masses was "in."  It’s a huge affair, an abstraction with big patches of red, blue, green, and pink, but what it has to do with Venus, philistine that I am, I can’t imagine.  Let’s just say it ain’t Botticelli.  Commercial interests have hankered for the space, then visible from miles away, but the fastidious Correctional Services didn’t want Venus covered over with ads for jeans or beer.  And today?  The mural is almost entirely obscured by architect Jean Nouvel’s “vision machine,” a super modern 23-story residential tower at 100 Eleventh Avenue completed in 2010.  So vision trumps Venus; so it goes.
Metro Theater
Few buildings have undergone more dramatic and often depressing metamorphoses than old movie theaters built in another age.  The Metro Theater on Upper Broadway between 99th and 100th Streets opened as the Midtown (a misnomer) in 1933, in the pit of the Depression and long before television, back when movies were one of the few recreations accessible to people on a budget.  An Art Deco gem with a terra-cotta façade, it featured, above the marquee, a medallion, illuminated at night, with two female figures back-to-back, holding the masks of tragedy and comedy.  Needless to say, such a fancy façade, not to mention the elaborate interior, announced a theater showing first-run films, a movie theater at the top of its kind.  Adaptable, in the 1950s and 1960s it showed foreign films and other non-mainstream fare – just the sort of films that I was then seeking out in small art theaters in Greenwich Village, having lost interest in the concoctions of Hollywood.  By the 1970s, with television co-opting the film-watching audience, the theater had stooped to showing second-run films and finally, like so many desperate movie houses struggling to survive, pure porn.  (As if porn could be “pure.”)  Reviving as an art house in the 1980s, with a name change from Midtown to Metro, it showed first-run films again in the 1990s, before decline resumed, forcing it to close in 2004.  

     Abandoned since then, it became a shuttered eyesore in a neighborhood again on the rise.  Having a façade landmarked in 1989, the Metro posed a problem: what to do with an aging movie house, its interior long since gutted, that had become an eyesore, a structure too small to accommodate the multiplex theater of today.  To further complicate the matter, the theater's lack of windows, and its jutting landmarked marquee casting shadows on the entryway, made it undesirable as retail space.  The Metro was now a once glamorous lady desperate to age gracefully, but to whom the years had not been kind.  
      Since the theater’s closing, numerous deals have been announced.  It was going to become an Urban Outfitters clothing store, the home of a nonprofit arts education group, a member of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, serving beer.  But year after year the marquee posted the phone numbers of real estate dealers hoping to find a tenant, and no tenant appeared.  Many neighbors hoped it could house a cultural institution of some sort, but this was not to be.  Finally, after a year of negotiations, a deal was announced last October: the Metro will become a Planet Fitness gym.  Not even a trendy high-cost gym, but a gym costing only $10 a month.  “At least it isn’t a Duane Reade,” the local city councilman remarked.  What the figures above the marquee, with their masks of comedy and tragedy, think of this dénouement, I dare not venture to ask.  But at least the old Metro is saved.
American Bible Society Headquarters
For 49 years the American Bible Society has been headquartered at 1865 Broadway, at the corner of Broadway and West 61st Street, in Manhattan.  Today, it’s surprising enough to learn that a nondenominational society founded here in 1816 to print Bibles and ensure their widest possible distribution has been located in congested, secular New York, in a 12-story building towering above the hectic, converging traffic of nearby Columbus Circle, crossing which on foot, even in a marked crossway and with the light, makes me nervous.  But there it is, or rather, there it has been since 1966, when it moved from its previous home on chic Park Avenue, another surprising address.  But today the Society seems hardly at home in this neighborhood of cloud-scratching super luxury high-rises and the tenants they attract.
The Bible Society building in 2008.
     The building itself is 1966 functional late Modernist, nothing godly or sanctified about it, but of course it was an office, not a place of worship.  One observer has suggested that the twelve deep recesses of its façade, one at each story, might hint of the twelve tribes of Israel or the Twelve Apostles, but let’s not push it; it was a secular building with a saintly purpose.  Back in its heyday, and the heyday of Protestant missionary work worldwide, the Society by 1893 had printed 56,926,771 Bibles and helped in the translation, printing, or distribution of Scriptures in 95 languages and dialects the world over.  Needless to say, times have changed; it stopped printing Bibles in 1922, and moved from one site to another before settling down in Columbus Circle.  And if that structure fails to inspire, it’s worth noting that it was decidedly innovative, being the first in the city to be built with load-bearing exterior walls made of pre-cast concrete panels, unlike the usual soulless high-rises of the time, with heavy interior steel frames and diaphanous glass skins.  (Don’t let “diaphanous” mislead you; most of them are dull indeed to look at.)
     And today?  The Bible Society, citing the building’s need of repairs and the high cost of doing business in New York, is moving to Philadelphia; in fact, it has moved already.  And the building itself, not landmarked, will it be refurbished and preserved?  No way; sold to a developer for $300 million, it has a date with the wrecking ball.  I doubt if tears will be shed, but replacing it will be a sleek 40-story glass-and-masonry tower with ground-floor retail space along Broadway and luxury apartments above, including, I’m sure, a super luxury penthouse: a concoction that may or may not inspire rhapsodies of praise.  As always in this city, flux.
     One casualty of the change is the Museum of Biblical Art, also housed in the building, which, just after attracting record crowds to an exhibition featuring the Renaissance sculptor Donatello, has also had to close.  Likewise affected was a bronze sculpture by Lincoln Fox installed in front of 1865 Broadway in 2007; entitled “Invitation to Pray,” it showed, seated on a bench, a life-size Jeremiah Lanphier, who founded the Fulton Street prayer meeting in 1857, a year of financial convulsion that drove some to despair and others to religion.  Leaving plenty of room for others on the bench, the statue attracted passersby, though less for prayers than “selfies.”  Their online comments include praise of his shiny bronze clothes, “he looks like he wants company,” and “ick.”  But Jeremiah has not been demolished, nor will he be moving to The City of Brotherly Love.  He now sits in the lobby of King’s College, a Christian liberal arts college located far downtown at 56 Broadway, another island of piety in secular New York.
Not exactly Michelangelo, but why quibble?  It's been saved.
BROWDERTHOTS

These are profundities so deep that I hesitate to share them with others.  But I'll risk two today:


A rose in full bloom is a raunchy miracle.Lilies are obscene.  
Envy the creators.Their navels hiss,                              their armpits sing. 

If these are too much for you, I promise to suppress them in the future.

     The book:  Many thanks to those of you who have bought it.  Still available from  Amazon and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.




    Coming soon:  Dying alone, the dread of many New Yorkers, and what happens if you do.  A tale of hazmat suits, hoarding, X-rays, pranks, and cremains.
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

     

208. Twelve Things to Know about The Donald

     We all know that he’s a loud mouth full of himself.  That, like his predecessor, P.T. Barnum, the master of humbug, he loves publicity and is a genius at getting it.  That, again like Barnum, he makes grandiose claims unsubstantiated by facts.  That he lives big and wants everyone to know it.  That he’s a fighter and fights nasty.  That he’s a billionaire, though the latest annual Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans credits him with a mere $4.5 billion, and not the $20 or $200 billion that he claims, which makes him only no. 129 on the list.
     So why feature him in a post?  Why, as my friend John asked, should I give him more publicity, when he already has more than his share of it and  covets even more?  Because he’s a New York phenomenon, and this post is all about New York.  Because there are other things about him, some good and some bad, that we should know, a few of them surprising.  Because his antics can be amusing.  And because, whatever publicity I give him, this post won’t go viral, won’t make a speck of difference in how the great mass of people regard him.  But I’ll put my two cents in anyway, so all aboard for The Donald.



     Donald Trump today stands tall and straight at 6 foot 3, his well-preserved features topped by a mop of bright blond hair carefully sprayed into place, his suits expensive and his shirts monogrammed, with silk ties and gold accessories.  His latest biographer, who had several interviews with him until Trump cut him off, describes him as a rooster in a tuxedo, or a Hollywood star all wardrobed up for a role as an executive.  Enhancing his image is his office in the luxurious Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, where one wall is plastered with magazine covers adorned with his features;  his penthouse apartment there is valued at $100 million.  As for hopping about the world, he has his private jet, a $100-million Boeing 757 with the name TRUMP blazoned on its sides in big gold letters, and whose seat belts fasten with gold-plated buckles.  No question, he moves about in style.  Here now are twelve things about him we all ought to know.
Adamkriesberg
1.  His parents
His father, Fred Trump, was the son of a German immigrant who came to this country in steerage, made money in Alaska, and invested in real estate in Queens.  Fred Trump too invested in real estate, focusing on the outer boroughs while keeping clear of Manhattan.  Tough, savvy, and inventive, he knew how to cultivate judges and politicians, and to buy up mortgaged properties cheap – lessons not lost upon his son.  His advice to Donald: “Be a killer.”
     The Donald’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was a Scottish immigrant who went from poor beginnings to accompanying her husband as he made the rounds in a Rolls Royce collecting rents.
     Both his parents were superior beings, Trump insists, and thanks to them he has good genes that make him better at everything from golf to business.
     (A note on Fred Trump.  A friend of mine and her husband once rented an apartment from him on Staten Island.  Not in good shape, the apartment  was overrun with roaches.  One winter they were about to go off on a trip, but her husband got the flu and had to stay behind.  The day after she left, he heard fierce pounding on the door.  Feverish, he dragged himself to the door, found two burly men with crowbars who were trying to break the door down.  They were surprised to see him.     “What are you doing?” he asked.     “We’re here to evict you,” the bigger one announced, waving a piece of paper from Trump Management.     “I paid my rent,” said the husband, showing a receipt.  He had indeed, but eight days late.     “Too bad, we gotta getcha out.”     Her husband, big and broad-shouldered, announced, “You may get past me, but it’ll ruin your day.”     The bluff worked; they hesitated, they left.  But if he had gone off with his wife, the two men would have come, battered the door down, and put all their furniture out in the snow, and a new lock on the door.  You didn’t fool around with Fred Trump.)
2.  His love of fighting
Donald Trump’s love of fighting – all kinds, including physical – dates back to his youth.  If attacked, he counterattacks, no matter who the perceived assailant is, a celebrity, a journalist, or the federal government, and in so doing he always insists that he is the party wronged.  Today, in the age of the Internet, he knows he can use Twitter and Facebook to reach millions and clobber any unfavorable book or news item almost as soon as it appears.
3.  His dread of being a sucker
He dreads being seen as a loser.  Suckers are those who cling to the sidelines and watch others – people like Trump -- acquire wealth and power.  He sees life as a relentless battle, a struggle for survival of the fittest, and he means to be a winner.
4.  His charm
Yes, this mountain of ego has charm, can be likable.  When offstage, or onstage when it’s to his advantage, he oozes it.  When schmoozing, he shares supposed secrets, is ready with praise, and offers sympathy, thus creating a kind of synthetic friendship.  He admits to having a con man’s talent for persuasion.  To pull off a deal, along with connections and insider status, he uses charm.
5.  His kindness
Yes, this bully can be kind.  His employees describe him as demanding, but generous with pay and benefits.  His former chauffeur tells how Trump paid for the doctor’s bills stemming from his wife’s pregnancy, calls him “a good guy.”  A loving father, too, even though he’s gone through three wives to date.  And when a boy of ten with terminal cancer asked to be “fired” by Trump on his TV reality show The Apprentice, where the losers were always fired by him, Trump couldn’t bring himself to utter the words “you’re fired”; instead, he gave the kid a check for several thousand dollars and told him to go have the time of his life.
6.  His optimism
For all his talk of a struggle for survival, he is an optimist, an advocate of the “power of positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale, whose church he and his father attended.  He has experienced many bankruptcies (of his properties, never of himself), many defeats, but always bounces back. 
7.  Trump on Trump
He has lots to say about himself.  For example:
I only go first-class.Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.I was never a drinker.  I was never a drug guy, and I was never a cigarette guy.I’ve been much more successful than people even admit.I am the creator of my own comic book, and I love living in it.I don’t like to analyze myself, because I might not like what I see.
8.  Trump on others
Of Graydon Carter, a founder of the gossip magazine Spy, which had pilloried him more than once:  “A sleazebag.”  Or, alternatively: “A  scumbag.”
Of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of banking giant J.P. Morgan Chase, for settling a case with the Justice Department for $13 million, instead of fighting it: “The worst banker in the United States.”
Of President Obama:  “Stupid.”
Of Hillary:  “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
Of the elderly actress Kim Novak:  “She should sue her plastic surgeon.”
9.  Others on Trump
Michael D’Antonio, his latest biographer:  “A rooster in a tuxedo.”
Attack-dog attorney Roy Cohn, whom Trump had often employed:  “Donald pisses ice water.”  (For more on Cohn, see post #137.)
Playgirl magazine:  “One of the ten sexiest men in America.”
An acquaintance:  “That Donald, he could sell sand to the Arabs.”
His first wife, Ivana:  “He’s the people’s billionaire.”
David Segal of the Washington Post:  “The people who know the least about business admire him the most, and those who know the most about business admire him the least.”
Columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune:  “He knows how to turn audacious and even obnoxious narcissism into pure gold.”
His son Donald Jr.:  “The person who hates Trump the most still wants to get his picture with him when he walks by.”
The New York Daily News, when he announced he was running for President:  CLOWN RUNS FOR PREZ.
Gossip columnist Liz Smith:  “I’ve known him forever, and I can’t figure him out.”
10.  His fights
When insulted by Trump, Kim Novak felt so humiliated that she took shelter in her home and didn’t go out for weeks.  But others were tougher and met him taunt for taunt: singer/actress Cher, Mayor Ed Koch, and hotel owner Leona Helmsley, known also as the Queen of Mean.
M  Abancourt
Cher of Trump:  “Loudmouth racist cretin.”Trump to Cher:  “I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.”


Trump:  “The city under Ed Koch is a disaster.”Koch:  “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done  something right.”Trump:  “Koch is a moron.”Koch:  “Piggy, piggy, piggy.”(For more on Ed Koch, see post #101.)
Smiling through adversity: her mug shot when
arrested on various charges, including tax evasion.
Trump of Helmsley:  “Vicious… horrible … a living nightmare.”Helmsley of Trump:  “Sick … a skunk … I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized.”  (For more on Leona Helmsley, see post #81.)
All the participants in these public exchanges show themselves at their grade-school worst.
11.  His hair
It fascinates friend and foe alike.  Fearing baldness, he uses special creams and evidently had a surgical procedure to close a bald spot on the back of his head.  He has denied having surgery, but circa 1990 his brown hair was mysteriously transformed into a swirl of reddish gold, with strands from one side to another, and from back to front.  Speculation raged in the media, and Time magazine published an account of how hair grown long in back can be combed forward, then swept back and fixed with a spray.  Insisting that his hair is his own, Trump sometimes invites visitors to pull on it.  Meanwhile, costume makers have begun selling Trump wigs for Halloween. 
This photographer got him from behind.  Sneaky, what?
Imagine this hairdo protected by the Secret Service.
BostonJerry
12.  The primacy of image
With Donald Trump, image trumps reality (no pun intended).  This explains his preoccupation with the confection topping his pate, and much else.  Everything depends on his keeping his name out there as an image of wealth and success.  His face has appeared on the cover of countless magazines.  There is a Trump Tower, a Trump Plaza, a Trump Park, and by the start of this century there were – albeit briefly -- Trump steaks, Trump loans, and a website called GoTrump.com. 
The Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.  As unpretentious as The Donald himself.
Ingfbruno
     From 2005 to 2010 there was also a Trump U, offering retreats on “wealth preservation” and “creative financing” for  a mere $5,000 each, and much more.  Even though this was sponsored by a man whose business ventures have ended in multiple bankruptcies, students flocked.  Since then the Attorney General of New York State has filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump U was not a bona fide university but simply an overpriced how-to-get-rich program making bogus claims, and there are class-action lawsuits filed by disenchanted former students in California.
     The success of the reality TV show The Apprentice depended on contestants competing against one another for a one-year job with a glamorous businessman named Trump, and more than 215,000 people applied to be among the first 16 contestants on the show.  Because whatever his critics say, and no matter how many business failures he has racked up, or how many polls show that most Americans dislike him, lots of us still love what he offers; we feast on the image, not the fact, of success.
Final thoughts
Donald Trump has little time for reflection or analysis, just blurts out his thoughts regardless of the consequences.  This pleases many voters, who notice the contrast with Hillary Clinton’s cautious, calculated approach.  This brashness passes for candor, though some might call it folly or imprudence.  But is he serious?  He offers many an outlandish opinion with a grin or a scowl or a poker face, as if daring others to guess if he really means it or not.  Michael D’Antonio, his most recent biographer, knows him as well as anyone can, and believes that Trump’s 2000 presidential campaign was “the first true pseudo-campaign in the history of the presidency, a determined effort to exploit the political process by a man whose real purpose was profit.”  Or profit and self-aggrandizement.  So is his 2016 effort, under way already, another pseudo-campaign?  Serious or not, it’s my opinion that, if he sees he won’t be the Republican candidate, he will bow out with a grin, as if it all really was a joke.  Why?  Because he can’t stand being labeled a loser.
His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
     And let’s face it, we Americans do like risk-takers, do admire wealth and success, do want to achieve them for ourselves.  And we do envy those who strive big and get away with it, or get away with it almost.  So maybe The Donald is us, blown up to gigantic and offensive proportions.  Alas.
     But clowns belong in a circus, not the White House.
Michael Vadon
     Source note:  For much of the information in this post, I am indebted to Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (St. Martin’s Press, NY: 2015).  D’Antonio does an excellent job of interpreting the vast amount of information available.  He interviewed many people who have known Trump, and was granted several interviews with Trump himself, until The Donald cut him off.
     Tumblr:  I have started another blog on a platform called Tumblr.  Its name is "Nerve Gas: poems to dent the psyche."  So there I am, mixing it up with millennials.  Quite an adventure; more of this anon.  The poems are short little prosy things that I dash off in minutes and then tinker with a bit before publishing them.  So far I have five (count 'em: five) followers, while some members have hundreds, thousands.  Well, it all takes time and I've just begun.  As for the poems, forget it.   Awful stuff.  Don't go there; stay away.

     The book:  The second giveaway has ended; all quiet on the Western front.  But a possible holiday gift, if you want to be seasonal.  Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.



     Coming soon:  Buildings That Change: the site of a famous murder and of a catastrophic collapse; a prison that gets gentrified; a landmark movie theater that turns into a gym; and a Bible house that just plain disappears.  If you’re as tired of the super rich as I am, this will be a change.  And change is what New York City is all about.
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder