Clifford Browder's Blog, page 38

207. The Rich Today

     A previous post (#205) looked at the rich of nineteenth-century New York, most of whom earned their fortune themselves and provided some useful product or service to society.  So what about the rich of today?  I know of no compilation of the richest New Yorkers comparable to Moses Beach’s tabulation of 1845, but Forbes magazine’s annual list of the 400 richest Americans is a good place to start.  Among the top 100 names listed are 16 New Yorkers, with the source of their income as follows:
Investments, 4Hedge funds, 2Real estate, 2Media, 2Private equity, 1Leveraged buyouts, 1Financial services and news, 1Cosmetics, 1Luxury clothing and housewares, 1Television and real estate, 1
Since investments, hedge funds, private equity, and leveraged buyouts can be combined under the term “finance,” it’s obvious that finance, for a total of 8 (or maybe 8½, including financial services and news), is tops, and “finance” of course means Wall Street.  Real estate is second with 2, or maybe 2½, if one adds the “real estate” half of “television and real estate.”  Tying real estate with 2, or surpassing it with 2½, if the television part of “television and real estate” is included, is media.  Finally come luxury clothing and cosmetics, which can be lumped together as “retail.”  What is conspicuous by its absence is technology, since that is more of a West Coast phenomenon.
     Finance and real estate were biggies in the nineteenth century also, but the Wall Street of today is not the Wall Street of then, for hedge funds and leveraged buyouts are recent creations, and very different creatures indeed.  How many of us even know what a leveraged buyout is, or what a hedge fund or private equity firm does?  In the nineteenth century the public was surely baffled by short sales, puts and calls, and straddles, but those devices never by themselves precipitated a worldwide financial crisis, which is more than can be said for the financial gimmicks of today.  How reassuring it is to find cosmetics and luxury clothing included in the first 100 – real stuff that you can see and smell and touch.  Even if you can’t afford it, you can understand such products and wish their creators well.
     Who is the richest New Yorker?  Michael Bloomberg, whose firm Bloomberg LP is the “financial  services and news” provider listed above.  A business magnate credited by Forbes with $38.6 billion, he is also the eighth richest man in America.  And oh yes, he was the 108th mayor of our fair city, serving no less than three consecutive terms.  A successful business magnate, independent politician, and philanthropist, he is not to be  dismissed lightly.  By serving as mayor he continued a tradition of New York merchants who in the first half of the nineteenth century – before the advent of the professional politician and the dominance of Tammany Hall --  took two years or more out of their business career to govern, or try to govern, the unruly city of New York.  For them, it was a matter of public service, even though their heart was in their business.
     For Michael Bloomberg, a phenomenally successful businessman, politics was probably the only place to go for the thrill of further achievement.  The results?  Both negatives and positives.  But the negatives – a stop-and-frisk policy that abused minority communities, homelessness, and cozy relations with banks and real estate – were surpassed by the positives: restrictions on smoking in public, pedestrian plazas, 850 more acres of parkland, 470 miles of bike lanes, and a safer, cleaner city.  Not a bad public record for the city’s biggest moneybags, far surpassing that of Cornelius “Old Eighty Millions” Vanderbilt, the richest New Yorker in the 1870s.  And I haven’t even looked at Bloomberg Philanthropies Foundation and what it’s up to.  Nor have I mentioned his living with a lady friend, which bothers New Yorkers not a bit.  His appearance?  Dignified, mayoral, but with a winsome smile.
Hizzoner.
David Shankbone
     The next richest New Yorker, according to Forbes, is Carl Icahn, a Far Rockaway native and Princeton graduate turned hedge fund manager and activist shareholder whose wealth is pegged at $20.5 billion.  His involvement in risk arbitrage and options trading is enough to baffle the uninitiated (of which I am one), and his reputation as a ruthless corporate raider is not likely to endear him to multitudes.  In 1985 he staged a hostile takeover of TWA, then sold TWA’s assets to repay the debt he used to acquire the company – a procedure known as asset stripping.  Then in 1988 he took TWA private, reaping a profit of $469 million, while leaving the company saddled with $540 million in debt.  So if Bloomberg is the big fish in the pond, Icahn is a shark.  Labeled a financial parasite by some, he insists that he is always acting in the company’s best interest by ousting incompetent management; also he tends to hold stock for over three years, which makes him something of an investor.  Hostile takeovers, proxy fights, stock buybacks, chairman of this and acquirer of that – no layman could follow his career or grasp his motivation, but it all explains why he has the second biggest New York fortune.  A sober-looking, well-dressed business type whose features have graced the cover of Forbes and Time, he manages to work in some philanthropy, too.
     The third richest New Yorker, with $12.5 billion, is investor and philanthropist Ronald Perelman, whom I confess I had not heard of, but whose photos show a chubby, balding fellow, rather jolly-looking with a hearty smile.  Forbes describes the source of his wealth as “leveraged buyouts,” so I’m suspicious already.  His modus operandi is to buy a company, strip it of superfluous divisions so as to reduce debt and generate profit, then focus on the company’s core business and either sell it or hang on to it for its cash flow.  So is all this good or bad?  I haven’t the slightest idea, but I gather that Perelman, like Icahn, is a corporate raider, which makes him shark no. 2.  One of his favorite operations is greenmail: he buys a big chunk of a company’s stock, then threatens a takeover unless they buy his stock back at a much higher price; if they do, he reaps a phenomenal profit.  The mere acquisition of shares by such a raider precipitates panic in management and a buying frenzy in the public.  But like Icahn, he finds time for philanthropy, and for five marriages as well.  He does get around.
Shark no. 2.  A great smile.
David Shankbone
     The fourth richest New Yorker is none other than Rupert Murdoch, with $11.6 billion made in media.  We’ve all heard of the gentleman, and “media” barely suggest his amazing career.  Australian-born, he first acquired newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, then expanded his acquisitive talents to Great Britain, and for further conquests moved to New York City in 1974, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1985 for the soundest of reasons: to be able to expand into U.S. television, which can’t be owned by foreigners.  Expanding comes naturally to him; by 2000 his News Corporation owned over 800 companies in some 50 countries, including such U.S. gems as Twentieth Century Fox, HarperCollins (a publisher I used to work for), and The Wall Street Journal.  Indeed, one wonders what he doesn’t own. 
Mr. Murdoch and wife no. 3, before divorce proceedings.
David Shankbone     Not that all is well in the Murdoch empire, for in 2011 his newspapers were accused of hacking the phones of celebrities, including the British royal family, no-no’s that provoked criminal investigations on both sides of the pond.  Photos reveal a smiling, wrinkled gentleman of 84 with a very receding hairline and glasses, which hasn’t prevented him from going through three wives, the last of whom (if “last” there is) he is divorcing.  His urgent need to expand his media empire, like the force driving corporate raiders and hedge fund honchos, puzzles and intrigues me; I would like to know what makes this man tick, and wonder if he himself knows.  As for hedge fund honchos, perhaps relevant is the fact they make much more money than CEO’s of corporations – annually, sometimes a billion or more.
     Compared to these other richies, not to mention Donald Trump – no. 121 on the Forbes list, with a paltry $4.5 billion – Michael Bloomberg comes off looking good.  He isn’t a pirate or an egomaniac, gave us bike lanes and greenery, made it possible for us to stroll in Times Square, and cleansed our indoor public spaces of nicotine.  Not bad, Mike, not bad.
     So what do these folks do in their spare time (if they have any)?  For one thing, they give.  The New York Times ran a recent article on The Big Ask, on philanthropies hoping to nudge fat cats toward a Big Give.  New York is full of big-name cultural institutions that gobble up big money so as to realize their big dreams, and big donors are in their sites.  In 2008 Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, gave $131 million to the Whitney Museum of American Art – the biggest gift the Whitney has ever received.  And in 2013 he gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art 79 Cubist works, a collection of Picassos, Braques, and Légers valued at more than $1 billion, to be housed in a projected new wing for contemporary art.  Lauder is seen as embodying an old money model of largesse, concentrating on one or two institutions and in so doing making a big splash. 
    Contrasting with Lauder is Bruce Kovner, a hedge fund manager who in 2012 gave $20 million to the Juilliard School of Music for its early music program.  Never heard of him?  That’s the way he likes it.  He shuns publicity, doesn’t want his name on a building, avoids interviews and black-tie fundraising galas that would love to feature him and lure more donors.  A bit of a surprise: a hedge fund manager in love with music and who believes that “the arts … are what make humans what we are.”
     But today’s moneybags don’t give just to the arts, far from it; with their eye on the 2016 election, they give big money to the candidates of their choice.  Mostly Republicans, of course.  According to a lead article in a recent New York Times, only 158 U.S. families have given almost half the cash -- $176 million – raised to date for the election.  So who are these donors?  White, wealthy, older males clustered in a handful of communities throughout the nation, the biggest of these being New York.  So right away I smell hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, private equity.  And theTimes confirms my hunch, for these donors aren’t from old big money, haven’t inherited their wealth; they’re newbies who launched their own businesses, took risks, and reaped huge gains, prominent among them the hedge fund managers of New York.  And they support Republican wannabes who promise lower taxes, fewer regulations, stingier entitlements.  Not that it’s easy to sniff these donors out.  They hide behind business addresses, post office boxes, and limited liability corporations and trusts.
     One hedge fund manager named in the Times article is Robert Mercer, whose Renaissance Technologies, founded in 1982, is one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, with some $27 billion in assets.  Closed to outsiders and open only to employees and their families (minimum investment $1 million), Renaissance is said to be run by and for scientists, with an emphasis on quantitative finance research done by mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, astrophysicists, and statisticians; Wall Street experience is frowned on.  Mercer loves computers, calls himself “simply a computer programmer,” uses computers to guide his investing and avoid the herd mentality of Wall Street.  His staff amass vast amounts of data and use secret computer-based models to predict prices. 
     Despite the fund’s obsessive secrecy, one example of their novel approach to investing has come to light: they obtained data on clouds indicating that markets are less likely to rise on cloudy days, which was then  confirmed by more data from Paris, Milan, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and New York.  With even the weather behind them, no wonder they are billionaires and the rest of us are poor.  So if you must invest, check out the cloud patterns first.
     As for donating, the Washington Post has called Mercer one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics, labeling him a “Tea Party conservative.”  Well, he’s got a lot to protect, and the IRS has been sniffing around his hedge fund for years.  His money-backed choice for the White House: Ted Cruz.
     Mercer’s firm is based on Long Island, but its administrative offices are in Manhattan.  He lives with his wife (believe it or not, he’s had only one) in Head of the Harbor, New York, a quiet little village in Suffolk County on the North Shore of Long Island.  I confess that until now I’d never heard of Robert Mercer or Head of the Harbor, New York.  As to how he commutes from there to Manhattan – private jet, limousine, whatever – I haven’t a clue, but I’ll bet he does it, however discreetly, in style. 
     The nerd of nerds, Mercer is reclusive, avoids photographers, rarely speaks in public.  Described as “an icy cold poker player,” he appears in rare photos of him as a clean-shaven older man with thinning hair, appropriately tense when playing poker at a tournament.  All that clout, and most of us have never heard of him.  Which says a lot about the rich of today; they aren’t all attention-grabbing fiends like The Donald.
     This last Halloween hedge fund billionaires left their mark on Manhattan, bedecking their townhouses with goblins, crones, witches, zombies, skeletons, ghouls, ghosts, spiders, and bats leering from balconies, peering through railings, or guarding entrances.  Outside the East 74th Street residence of Marc Lasry, a cofounder of Avenue Capital, bloodied life-size dummies dangled from a balcony, while a chaste neo-classical entrance on East 67th Street featured an effigy of a two-headed girl standing in a multitude of rats.  But it could have been worse: a year before, the façade of hedge-fund billionaire Philip Falcone’s residence on East 67thStreet, a street that seems to lure spooks, was graced with a crone cradling a dead infant, while inside a hearse parked at the curb the Grim Reaper was seen beheading a corpse – a display spooky enough to provoke protests by the neighbors.  All of which shows where some of the millions – a tiny portion -- reaped by fat cats goes.
     The rich are served by an army of maids, nannies, janitors, doormen, chauffeurs, shop clerks, and the staff of elite restaurants, but not all of the army is enchanted with those they serve.  Another Times article (the Times seems to feast on stories of the rich) tells of the service of a young captain of waiters in a Michelin three-star restaurant.  When the doors open and the first guests are seated at 5:31 p.m., he scans a digital dossier listing every guest’s water preference, food allergies, likes and dislikes, and whether or not they spend big on wine.  The captain greets the table, asks for water preferences, signals with his hand behind his back to an assistant: wiggling fingers means bubbles; a slashing motion, still; a twist of the fist, ice water.  Minutes later the captain takes orders, memorizes each one, then passes them on to the server. 
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Michael Plutchok
     “Make it nice” says a sign in the kitchen, reminding employees that everything in the restaurant, from the placement of candles to the part in your hair, must seem perfect.  Captains, servers, and sommeliers know they are playing a part, and they do it with a touch of irony.  They project warmth while keeping emotional distance: the thrill of the con.  The guests want to believe that all is perfect, and the staff are trained to sustain the illusion.  A smudged glass, a fingerprint on a fork would shatter the illusion, must not be allowed to happen.  The guests eat ravenously, attempt sex in a restroom; one woman tries to leave her baby at the coat check counter, and grown men at the bar chant, “We are the one percent.” 
     When a regular has a stroke and topples to the floor, the staff are visibly shaken, but the manager quickly pushes a champagne cart in front of the body on the floor, hoping to hide it, and turns the music up.  Ten minutes later the paramedics arrive to cart the victim off, and the charade resumes.            Finally, after months of “make it nice,” the young captain felt empty and tired, and quit the job to become a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.  The superrich would have to do without his service, and he could certainly do without them.  They look best from a distance.
     It must mean something when the ultra rich get ribbed in advertising.  The New York Lottery has launched a humorous ad campaign showing richies wasting their money in oddball ways.  One TV commercial shows a man soaking in a bathtub of pinot noir; when his butler lets a bit of cork fall in the tub, he gets angry.  The viewer, suggests the ad, would make a much better rich person than this fool in a tub, and Lotto is the way to do it.  Advertisers know you can’t make fun of the poor, but today the wealthy are fair game.  So the Lottery satirizes the truly rich so as to encourage the not-so-rich to get a little less rich.
     The year 2015 has not been kind to the rich; their investments have  languished.  “I’ve failed to protect your capital,” one hedge fund manager, Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management, told his investors, acknowledging a 15% loss of their capital this year to date.  But this hasn’t kept him from buying the top four floors of the Charles condominium, a soaring 31-story glass box at 1355 First Avenue between 72nd and 73rd Streets; the price of his multi-storied penthouse, its huge floor-to-ceiling windows offering sweeping views of the Hudson and East Rivers, is $37.9 million, a record for that part of Manhattan.  In fairness to Mr. Robbins, it should be noted that the market has not been kind to most investors this year, though not all are down 15%.  And his purchase of a luxury penthouse, a mere pied-à-terre, since his primary residence is a sprawling mansion on a four-acre estate in Alpine, New Jersey, shows that the New York real estate market is still ablaze and booming.  On this happy note, I’ll end; the rich have worn me out.

The Charles.  Want to live there?  Sorry, the top four floors are taken.
     Paris:  A sign in a ground-floor window of a building on my street:  J’adore Paris.
     The book:  The second and final Goodreads giveaway for the collection of posts from this blog has ended; 598 people signed up, of whom one will receive a free copy.  Both a print version and an e-book are available online.  See Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

     Coming soon:  The inevitable and inescapable Donald Trump, who for better and for worse is New York to the bone, and then some. 
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder
    





     

206. Tiffany

     A large, darkened room with 132 Tiffany lamps on display, each having its own space, each illuminated and casting a soft glow.  Reddish or brown bronze bases topped by polychrome shades of glass, mosaics of small pieces of luminous red, yellow, blue, green, purple, and pink: miracles of glass, of color, of light.  Looking closely at one lamp, one sees a ring of dragonflies with red bodies, their yellow wings extended horizontally, and above them on the shade, a band of green and blue that could be the water they are darting over, and at the very top of the shade, a patch of blue that might be sky.  Another lamp suggests purple wisteria drooping languorously, and another, the wings of a peacock with eyespots of red and green.  Other shades are geometrical, with triangles and squares and ovals of many colors, still others show daffodils or peonies or poppies, or spiders with webs, or butterflies: nature enhanced, transformed.  This room is magic; to leave it is jolting, dispiriting, sad.
Cliff
     The room just described exists only in my imagination, but it or something like it will exist on the fourth floor of the New York Historical Society in 2017, when their new installation is completed and opens to the public.  In the meantime I have to settle for whatever my imagination can cook up.
A wisteria lamp.
Fopseh A dragonfly lamp, plus pigeons.
Rickjpelleg


         “Tiffany”: the name suggests luxury, quality, style.  There are no Tiffany lamps in the West Village apartment shared by me and my partner Bob, but we do possess two genuine Tiffany products.  One is a sterling silver letter opener that Bob once gave his mother and then repossessed after her death; he uses it daily to open mail. 
     Our other Tiffany possession is a small vase that was given to Bob by a friend who inherited it from his mother.  Round-shaped with a narrow mouth, it is two and a half inches in diameter and serves no practical purpose, nor should it, given its exquisite fragility.  To my eye it is silverish, and to Bob’s eye golden, but in either case it emits a soft luster to be marveled at.  Bob keeps it on top of his dresser in a little glass case that he bought specifically to shelter it, and there it sits, asking only to be looked at and admired.
     Our friend John, while serving as co-executor of the estate of a mutual friend, came into possession of a genuine Tiffany lamp lacking a few small pieces of glass.  He and his fellow executor spent $2800 to have it repaired, so they could sell it through Christie’s.  Christie’s estimated its value at $20,000 to $30,000, but at auction it drew not a single bidder.  Undismayed, Christie’s decided to hold off for six months and offer it again.  At the second auction it was sold for $18,000; after Christie’s fee and other expenses were subtracted, the two executors netted $12,000, which as heirs they split evenly.  All of which shows the value of genuine Tiffany lamps today, for which there is an ongoing market.  Because Tiffany’s, to put it bluntly, has class.
     It also has a long and interesting history.  Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder, and his partner John P. Young opened the first Tiffany’s as a “stationary and fancy goods emporium” in 1837, with the intention of selling not to the moneyed few, but to the masses.  Located at 259 Broadway, opposite City Hall Park, it netted all of $4.98 on the first day, which hardly suggested success.  But the partners persevered, offering umbrellas, Chinese carvings, portfolio cases, fans, gloves, and stationery, and on New Year’s Eve, the peak of the holiday shopping season, they rang up sales of $679. 


Charles Lewis Tiffany in his store, circa 1887.
     In the years that followed, Charles Lewis Tiffany roamed the docks for unusual imports, bargained with sea captains for exotic items, and acquired a reputation for selling such curiosities as dog whips, Venetian-glass writing implements, Native American artifacts, Chinese novelties, “seegar” boxes, and “ne plus ultras” (garters). 
      Jewelry was not at first a significant item, but that changed in 1848, when aristocrats fleeing the revolution in Paris dumped their diamonds on the market, and Tiffany’s partner Young, just arriving in the city, snapped them up.  Arrested as a royalist conspirator, Young talked his way out of it and survived to forward his trove to Tiffany, who publicized his partner’s adventures; ironically, it was Tiffany himself whom the press then christened the “King of Diamonds.” 
     In 1850 Tiffany opened a Paris branch, thus acquiring access to European jewelry markets that no American competitor could match.  Years later Charles Lewis Tiffany would acknowledge that the firm had also acquired the girdle of diamonds of Marie Antoinette, which had disappeared when the 1848 revolutionaries looted the Tuileries palace.  Breaking the girdle up into pieces to sell, Tiffany claimed that its authenticity could not be proven, and thus avoided any awkward revelations about how the item had migrated from the royal vaults of the Tuileries into his own welcoming palms, a mystery that remains unsolved today.
     His reputation for scrupulosity, his ready cash, and his swift judgment made Tiffany the city’s leading dealer in jewelry and Oriental pearls.   Always on the lookout for rarities, in 1856 he bought a perfect pink pearl from a New Jersey farmer who had found it in his dinner mussels.  He promptly sold it to the Empress Eugénie of France, news of which precipitated a mass combing of the waterways of America in hopes of finding another huge triple p: perfect pink pearl.  (None was found.)  And when a Montana prospector unearthed some sapphires and mailed them to him for appraisal, Tiffany appraised them and immediately sent him a check for $12,000.  But in his store haggling over prices was not allowed; one paid the tagged price, however astronomical, and that was that.
Isabella II, before she lost her jewels.    The tottering monarchies of Europe continued to transfer Old World wealth to the New via Tiffany & Co.  In 1868, when a revolution deposed Queen Isabella II of Spain, the firm acquired her gems for $1.6 million and sold most of them to railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, so they could adorn his spouse.  And in 1887, when the remaining French crown jewels were auctioned off by the very anti-monarchical Third Republic, Tiffany’s agent was of course on hand to acquire them; soon afterward, the necklace of the ex-Empress Eugénie (yes, that same Eugénie, now ousted), consisting of 222 diamonds in four rows, was seen at a ball gracing the neck and shoulders of Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, the consort of the renowned newspaper publisher. 

     Not that Charles Lewis Tiffany was infallible.  In 1872 word of a discovery of diamonds in a mine in Arizona reached New York, and a clutch of speculators, eager to buy stock in the mine, consulted him.  Shown the diamonds in the rough, he announced, “They are worth at least $150,000.”  The speculators then invested four times that in the mine, but subsequently a government geologist went to the site, which was in fact in Utah, and discovered that it had been “salted” with poor-quality stones from South Africa.  Informed of the fraud, Tiffany confessed, “I had never seen a rough diamond before.”  And he lost $80,000 in the swindle himself.   
     As the city spread northward and the affluent middle class migrated uptown to more fashionable districts, Tiffany & Co. migrated with them.  By the 1860s the firm was at 552 Broadway, occupying an ornate five-story building with round-arched windows and, over the main entrance, a nine-foot carved-wood Atlas shouldering a huge clock that was said to have stopped at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, the exact moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death.  (Painted to look bronze, Atlas would accompany the firm on its migrations thereafter and overlooks the Tiffany entrance on Fifth Avenue today.)
     And what did one see in Tiffany’s window in those days?  A mishmash of cluttered objects, some made by Tiffany and some imported: bronze figurines, vases and cups and goblets, fancy lace fans, jeweled clocks and caskets, ornate silver picture frames, and draped over everything in profusion, strings of pearls.  Such was the bric-a-brac that the Victorians used to clutter up themselves and their parlors; one can well imagine the smaller items clustered on the shelves of a whatnot, next to a daguerreotype of young Danny in his Civil War uniform and, in a fancy frame, a lock of Aunt Millie’s hair.


Tiffany's, circa 1887.
     Probably not on display was the famous Tiffany Diamond, weighing 287.42 carats, discovered in South Africa in 1877 and purchased by the firm for $18,000.  The young gemologist whom Tiffany entrusted with cutting it down studied the diamond for a year before starting work.  He then carefully cut it down to 128.54 carats, adding 32 facets for a total of 90, and thus created a dazzling multifaceted gem that, never sold, has highlighted Tiffany exhibits throughout the world ever since.  Only two women have ever worn it: Mrs. Sheldon Whitehouse at a Tiffany ball in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1957, and Audrey Hepburn in 1961 publicity photographs for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  The film helped refurbish Tiffany’s then sagging reputation, and for years afterward visitors coming to the store would ask where breakfast was served.  Today the diamond is displayed on the main floor of Tiffany’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue at 57th Street.


The Tiffany diamond, topped by a bird.
Shipguy
     But Charles Lewis Tiffany marketed any rarity that he thought might sell.  In 1858, when the Atlantic cable at last reached Ireland and established a transatlantic telegraph link, he acquired 20 miles of the cable salvaged from unsuccessful earlier attempts to lay it, and sold four-inch snippets for fifty cents apiece, as well cable-adorned canes, umbrellas, paperweights, watch fobs, and lapel pins that the public snapped up eagerly – so eagerly that the police had to restrain the crowds.
     In the late nineteenth century Tiffany’s produced fine silverware that won international prizes, and in 1894 built a huge factory in Newark to make such luxury items as the silver plate favored by Delmonico’s, as well as exotic leather goods and engraved stationary.  By now, obviously, the firm was catering to the rich and famous.
Tiffany no. 2, circa 1908.     When Charles Lewis Tiffany died in 1902, his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, became vice-president, but Tiffany no. 2 was more of a painter than a merchant.  The major contribution of his Tiffany Studios was the Tiffany lamp, a costly handcrafted item marketed to the wealthy.  Recent scholarship has revealed that it was not no. 2  but an artist named Clara Driscoll who designed many of the most famous lamps, which were turned out by her team of “Tiffany Girls.” Introduced to the public at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the lamps became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  The New York Historical Society’s collection of 132 Tiffany Lamps was the gift in 1984 of a single collector, Dr. Egon Neustadt, an Austrian-born New York City orthodontist and real estate developer who had been collecting them since 1935, when he and his wife bought their first lamp in a Greenwich Village antique store.
     The successors of the Tiffany family abhorred publicity, and under their direction the firm produced staid and predictable merchandise.  By the 1950s sales had shrunk to half the level of the generation before, and the firm risked bankruptcy.  Whether the general public was aware of this is uncertain, since when I came to New York in the 1950s the name “Tiffany’s” still had cachet, suggesting fine products for the elite who were willing to pay accordingly.  Things changed for the better with the coming of Walter Hoving, the Swedish-born American businessman who became president of Tiffany & Co. in 1955 and held that post until 1980. 
     A tall and distinguished-looking man, impeccably tailored, Hoving began by getting rid of everything in the store that did not meet his standards, marking down silver matchbook covers to $6.75 and emerald brooches to a mere $29,700.  Hoving has been called a snob, but under his guidance the quality of the merchandise improved and customers flocked.  Among the shoppers on several occasions was President John F. Kennedy, whom Hoving dealt with personally in private, and who bought items for his wife.  When Kennedy asked if the President got a discount, Hoving pointed to a portrait of Mary Lincoln wearing a strand of Tiffany pearls and replied, “Well, President Lincoln didn’t receive one.”  So Kennedy paid full price.
The Trump Tower (the tall one, of course).
InSapphoWeTrust     Hoving was a shrewd businessman, but Donald Trump was shrewder.  Wanting the Bonwit Teller site at 727 Fifth Avenue, next door to Tiffany’s, to build his Trump Tower, The Donald also coveted Tiffany’s air rights, which would let him build a structure that would otherwise exceed regulations.  So he presented to Hoving a sketch of a hideous building that he knew the fastidious Hoving would abhor, so that Trump could then offer to build a far more attractive building if Hoving sold him the air rights.  Dreading the prospect of an ugly building right next door that would devalue his beloved Tiffany’s, Hoving agreed, and Trump got the air rights.  The Bonwit Teller store was then carefully demolished – in this exclusive neighborhood, no wrecking balls or explosives allowed – and the 62-story Trump Tower went up.
     Hoving left in 1980 because Tiffany’s had been acquired by Avon Products in 1979.  A buyout by management followed, and in 1987 Tiffany’s became a public company and raised $103 million through the sale of its common stock.  During the 1990-1991 recession it turned to mass merchandising, presented itself as affordable to all, and advertised diamond engagement rings starting at $850.  A brochure entitled “How to Buy a Diamond” went out to 40,000 people who had dialed a toll-free number.  The founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany, was adept at publicizing his wares, but what he would have thought of these modern expedients I leave to the viewers’ imagination.

     One thing is clear today: genuine Tiffany lamps are still prized items that sell for tens of thousands.  But plenty of imitations are on the market, since they are advertised online for as little as $64.78.  So how does one tell the authentic lamp from the knockoffs?  Some clues are very technical; here are several simpler things to look for:
·      A bronze base.  Not wood, plastic, brass, or zinc.·      The color of the glass changes when the lamp is lit.·      A Tiffany Studios stamp and a number on the base.·      Signs of age; it won’t look brand new.  (But some fakes mimic age on the base.)·      A ring of grayish lead in the hollow base.·      The glass shade, if knocked gently, should rattle.
Also, a buyer should ask for a money-back guarantee and beware of any  shop that won’t give one.  Not that there’s anything wrong with cheapie Tiffany lamps that don’t claim to be authentic; they have their place in the market.  It’s the ones that are deliberately made to look like and sell as authentic ones that cause trouble.
     One almost final note: in 2013 a former Tiffany vice-president was arrested and charged with stealing more than $1.3 million in jewelry.  This development, for sure, would make founder Charles Lewis Tiffany turn over in his Green-Wood Cemetery grave in Brooklyn.


Tiffany's today.
David Shankbone

     Since 1940 Tiffany & Co. has occupied a granite and limestone building on Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, with a grandiose stainless-steel entrance overlooked by the nine-foot near-naked Atlas that has been shouldering a clock for Tiffany’s since 1853.  And what does Tiffany’s offer today?  Their website promises free shipping on orders of $150 or more, and advertises gifts under $500.  Clearly, they want to appeal, if not to the masses, at least to the modestly affluent.  But modest they themselves aren’t, claiming to be “the world’s premier jeweler and America’s house of design since 1837.”  Among their offerings is an item labeled “quintessential Tiffany,” a dazzling sixteen-stone ring in 18-karat gold with diamonds from Parisian designer Jean Schlumberger, a marvel whose “timeless perfection … deserves a place of honor in every stylish woman’s jewelry box.”  The price?  $9,000, which is reasonable indeed when compared to Schlumberger’s Croisillon bracelet in 18-karat gold for $30,000.  And remember, no haggling.


Atlas still holds the clock today.
Meg Lessard
     A bulletin from the health-care front.  My eye doctor, a very no-nonsense type who wastes no time on small talk, wanted me to get an eye-drop refill immediately from the pharmacy on the ground-floor of the clinic.  One of her assistants phoned the clinic to order the refill, then informed me, “The pharmacy needs a twenty-four notice to –”  Hearing this, my doctor seized the phone, jabbered fiercely, then hung up and announced, “You can pick it up downstairs now.”  Her two assistants who witnessed this were smiling already.  “We all know where the power is,” I said softly to them, and they grinned from ear to ear.
     End of story?  No way.  When I went down to the pharmacy, the pharmacist informed me that if I got the refill now, my insurance wouldn’t cover it, so it would cost $120.  But if I waited two days, the refill would be covered and cost only $35.  So I chose to wait.  Moral of the story:  In the health-care universe doctors are gods, but insurance companies are super gods.  So it goes.
     Coming soon:  The rich of today, who make those rags-to-riches nineteenth-century types look absolutely quaint.  We’ll get with it with hedge fund managers, corporate raiders, and the like.  And guess who is the richest New Yorker?  You may – or may not – be surprised.  (Clue: it isn’t Donald Trump.)
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

205. The Rich

1845
They are always there and we acknowledge the fact with our envy or our resentment.  And they’ve always been especially conspicuous in New York City.  So let’s have a look at who they are – or were – and how they got their money, starting in 1845.  Why 1845?  Because that year saw publication of the sixth edition of Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, offering an alphabetical list of all persons in the city believed to be worth $100,000 or more, with the sums appended to their name, along with, as the preface states, “interesting biographical and historical matter, as derived from the consultation of books and living authorities.” 
     All of which suggests a compendium of The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and People magazine, a formality worthy of Barron’s spiced up with some juicy tidbits like those featured in the gossip magazines prominently displayed in supermarket check-out lanes.  But remember, this was 1845, not 2015.  And the publication was answering a need, since in those days there was no official agency offering credit ratings of individuals or businesses, and this lack became obvious during the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, when bankruptcies multiplied throughout the city and the nation.  People wanted to know who was financial sound and who was not.  So Moses Y. Beach, publisher of The Sun, a prominent New York daily, got busy and produced this publication.  And if $100,000 sounds like a low entry level for admission to its pages, it’s worth remembering that an 1845 dollar would be worth $31.25 today, so multiply all the figures accordingly.
     So who had the biggest fortunes in 1845?  There’s no doubt about #1, John Jacob Astor, whose $25 million made in the fur trade and New York real estate established him as the richest man in the entire country and earned him two full columns of comment in tiny print, more than anyone else in the publication.  He is hailed as a truly great man, a German immigrant who arrived on these shores as a common steerage passenger, a poor uneducated boy who didn’t speak English, but who through his own industry accumulated a fortune “scarcely second to that of any individual on the globe, and has executed projects that have become identified with the history of this country, and which will perpetuate his name to the latest age.”  His princely house on Lower Broadway, furnished with “richest plate” and works of art, and staffed with an army of servants, including “some from the Empire of the Celestials,” is viewed with admiration and awe.  Moses Beach estimates his income at $2 million a year ($62 million in today’s dollars), which for 1845 was an unprecedented sum.  Also noted is Astor’s gift of $350,000 for the creation of a library in New York City that would bear his name, and that in time merged with two other libraries to create the New York Public Library of today.  All in all, the career of John Jacob is presented to the reader as a classic but exceptional example of rags to riches, a theme that Beach's preface promised to celebrate.  But his portraits  suggest only riches and dignity, no hint of rags or steerage.
John Jacob Astor, an 1825 portrait.  Dignity,
plus a neck cloth (no ties as yet).
     Sadly, the subject of this encomium, now 82 years old, was suffering from ill health.  White-haired and portly, with an iron jaw under folds of loose flesh, he walked only with the help of attendants, took short carriage rides, struck others as dignified but tired.  Yet he was still alert when it came to moneymaking and tight with his pennies, for in his mind he was still the penniless youth who came to this country in steerage.  While dining with a friend once in a new hotel, he eyed the proprietor and announced to his friend, “This man will never succeed.”  “Why not?” asked the friend.  “Don’t you see what large lumps of sugar he puts in the sugar bowl?” 
     The second richest man in the city, with $10 million according to Moses Beach, was Stephen Whitney, another rags-to-riches story, who started out poor as a retail liquor merchant, went into the wholesale liquor business, speculated with great success in cotton, and also invested in real estate.  Liquor, cotton, and real estate – three sure ways for a shrewd New Yorker to make money, and Beach assures us that Whitney was very shrewd, and also “very close in his dealings.”  Is he remembered today?  Hardly.  Unlike old John Jay and his descendants, Whitney had little time for philanthropy.
Stephen van Rensselaer no. 3     The third largest New York City fortune, matching Whitney’s at $10 million, was not a living person but the estate of Stephen van Rensellaer (d. 1839) of Albany, who qualified for inclusion by virtue of his ownership of hundreds of lots in New York City.  But city real estate, however substantial, was simply a shrewd side investment, since Stephen van Rensellaer (the third of that name) had been the fifth in a long line of Dutch patroons, lords of the huge semi-feudal estate of Rensellaerswyck, comprising vast lands on either side of the Hudson River both above and below Albany.  Whether a vast feudal estate where a Rensellaer lorded it, however benevolently, over 3,000 tenants was appropriate in a modern, democratic age, Moses Beach never questions, though the tenants were beginning to do so in what would become the anti-rent movement and put an end to the anachronistic patroonship.
     Other multimillionaires of 1845 include William B. Astor ($5 million), John Jacob’s son, another shrewd investor in Manhattan real estate; Peter G. Stuyvesant (($4 million), a descendant of the one-legged last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, from whom Peter G., Beach informs us, has inherited and kept the silver spoon; and James Lenox ($3 million), who inherited from his father and, so Beach assures us, “devotes himself chiefly to pious objects.”  Actually, he was acquiring rare manuscripts and books, including Bibles, and paintings, busts, engravings, and other art works for what would become the most valuable such collection in the hemisphere and be housed in the Lenox Library, which in time would be consolidated with two other libraries to create the New York Public Library.  If with the Astors, father and son, one sees money-getting finding time for philanthropy, James Lenox shows inherited wealth devoting itself almost exclusively to cultural activities from which the whole community will benefit in time.  Sooner or later, money begets culture.
A Gutenberg Bible, circa 1455, in the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library.  
From the Lenox Library.  One of James Lenox's "pious objects."
NYC Wanderer     Of the eleven other millionaires, three names stand out, albeit for very different reasons.  Peter Harmony is said to have come to the city as a poor cabin boy born in the West Indies, and to have lately retired from the shipping business with a princely fortune ($1.5 million).  (He was in fact an immigrant from Spain.)  “Some of his ships to Africa, it is said, have brought out cargoes that have paid a profit equal to the difference in price between negroes in Africa and Cuba.”  Which is a pretty clear reference to the illegal but lucrative and still flourishing slave trade that brought Africans to the Spanish colony of Cuba, where sugar plantations still provided a market, and officials looked the other way.
     Jonathan Thorne is described as “the very pink and glass of fashion in the Parisian circles,” and this despite his descent from old Quaker ancestors who would wonder at his “gorgeous private chapel at his imperial mansion in the French capital.”  “What changes in the wheel of fortune,” Beach adds, “from an humble purser in the navy?”  How a humble purser achieves a fortune of $1 million and a mansion in Paris, Beach fails to explain.  But he is clearly on the side of hard work and business, and not on the side of fashion.
     Cornelius Vanderbilt, credited with $1.2 million, rates only a short paragraph, since Moses Beach could not anticipate the future railroad king and titan of finance.  But Beach recognizes energy when he sees it:  “Of an old Dutch root.  Cornelius has evinced more energy and ‘go aheadativeness’ in building and driving steamboats and other projects than ever one single Dutchman possessed.”  It takes the American hot sun, he adds, to clear off the fogs of the Zuyder Zee and wake up the phlegm of a descendant of old Holland.
     Though full of admiration for many, Moses Beach was at times ready to pronounce a moral judgment as well.  Just hear him, no doubt with memories of the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, praise a team of mechanics who became celebrated engravers of bank notes.  By contrast, he asks, what utility is to be seen in “swindling stock operations … deemed more reputable than the walks of mechanic life.”  No longer, he insists, can dreaming speculators and fancy operators sneer at the “brawny arms” and “russet palms” of the honest laborer.  The false system of credit that once prevailed has been eliminated, he declares, “breaking up the nests of lounging, idle upstarts, that like mushrooms on a dung-hill sprouted up out of the masses of rag-paper and spurious capital.”  And what would Mr. Beach say today, in the wake of our own recent financial convulsion, when such novel phenomena as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps appeared, and still appear, to the bafflement of many and the enrichment of a few?
     The first half of the nineteenth century in New York was the age of the merchants, when success in trade brought wealth.  Most of Beach’s subjects dealt in things you could see, touch, taste, or smell: silks, cotton, tea, furs, chinaware, brandy, ships, and real estate.  And in a few cases, slaves.  Not that rich marriages and inherited wealth didn’t help.
     Among the names that had yet to achieve their greatest success was Phineas T. Barnum, proprietor of the American Museum and guardian of the celebrated midget Tom Thumb.  Reported to be currently in Europe exhibiting said Thumb, “by whom he is coining money,” the master of showmanship and humbug is said to be worth $150,000.  Yet his sensational promotion of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, lay five years in the future, and his traveling circuses had yet to be organized.
     Another New Yorker just at the start of his career is Irish-born Alexander T. Stewart, worth $800,000, already a “celebrated Dry Good Merchant of Broadway whose shop is the grand resort of the fashionables.”  Yet he rates only a mere six lines.  Rest assured, we will hear of him again.
     For an unusual name no one can match Preserved Fish, a sea captain turned shipping merchant worth $150,000, and president of the Tradesmen’s Bank.  Beach presents him as “an example of an uneducated man, of strong mind, exercising great influence in his sphere.”  But how he got his outlandish name Beach does not explain.  Other sources state that Fish was of Huguenot stock, and that his father and grandfather bore the same first name, which they pronounced in three syllables, pre-SER-ved, meaning “preserved from sin” or “preserved in grace.”
Catharine Sedgwick, an illustration probably dating from the early 1800s.

     Women are far and few in Moses Beach’s compilation, and then almost always as widows or heirs of males.  The one exception is Catharine Sedgewick, a “distinguished novelist” famous for her “New England Tales,” a “religious satire published some 20 years since.”  Though she received a “snug” fortune by inheritance, she “has reaped a large income from her books, the circulation of which exceeded those of any American author.”  Though she seems to have resided in Massachusetts, she gets a princely seventeen lines and is credited with $100,000.  Here, then, is an early  example of the “scribbling females” that Nathaniel Hawthorne would acknowledge with scorn, writers whose novels, not rated highly today, were widely read in their time, often bringing in income that the less pecunious male writers of the day envied and resented bitterly.
1863
No other source that I know of gives as comprehensive and colorful an account of New York’s wealthy as does Beach, but the income tax imposed by the federal government during the Civil War lets us know who then were the wealthiest citizens of New York, for in January 1865 the enterprising but often controversial New York Herald published the names of prominent citizens paying the tax, prompting protests at this invasion of privacy, and a New York Times editorial observing that “the most glaring and shameless frauds are practiced in the return of incomes, and in the assessment of taxes upon them.”  Men living at the rate of anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 a year, it insisted, were put down as having no income at all, an assertion that the New York Tribune echoed.
     And that wasn’t the end of it, for later in that same year of 1865 the American News Company published The Income Record: A List Giving the Taxable Income for the Year 1863, of Every Resident of New York.  The publisher’s stated goal was “to satisfy an imperious public curiosity, which thus far has been only partially gratified by the public journals”; to let citizens decide whether their neighbors had been honest in stating their income; and to provide trustworthy statistics to future legislators for revisions of the tax laws.  Many a moneyed gentleman, one suspects, trembled in his ruffled shirtfront and shiny boots at the prospect of having his income revealed yet again, and so authoritatively, to the public.
     So who, according to this tabulation, were the wealthiest citizens of 1863?  The top three:
A.T. Stewart             $1,843,637William B. Astor         $838,525Cornelius Vanderbilt   $680,728
All three appeared in Moses Beach’s tabulation of 1845, but times have changed and they now eclipse all others in wealth.
Alexander T. Stewart, circa 1860.  Beards and
neckties are in, neck cloths are out.     Stewart’s income astonished the public and probably establishes him as the most honest of the lot.  His new department store on Broadway at 10thStreet, a six-story cast-iron structure with a glass-dome skylight, built in 1862 and occupying most of a whole block, employed some 2,000 people, had hydraulic elevators, and offered fashionable society a wide range of fabrics, scarves, shawls, lamps, carpets, bric-a-brac, and toys.  Hailed today  as the father of the modern department store, this generously bearded gentleman prospered to the point of being considered – for a while – the richest man in the country.


Stewart's department store, the granddaddy of Bloomingdale's,
Macy's, and Marshall Fields.
William B. Astor circa 1850, looking just
as formal, dignified, and (let's face it)
 stodgy as his father.     William B. Astor, the son of old John J. and his chief heir, was heavily invested in New York City real estate, earning him the name of “the landlord of New York.”  He also gave money to the Astor Library founded by his father.  Upon his father’s death in 1848, William was considered the richest man in America with a fortune of $14 million, which makes his 1863 declaration of annual income of $838,525 perhaps a bit suspect.  Photographs reveal a rather full-faced man, clean-shaven with long sideburns and a hint of jowls, a competent heir who lived a profitable but uneventful life devoid of his father’s eccentricities and flair.
     If Commodore Vanderbilt’s figure of $680,728 likewise seems to err on the side of modesty, it’s worth remembering that in 1863, having sold his ships, he was just beginning to acquire the railroad empire that would increase his fortune vastly and make him the richest man in the country, referred to endearingly in the late 1860s as Old Sixty Millions.  In photographs Vanderbilt appears tall and erect, with a strong nose and a square jaw, his gray hair turning strikingly white.  Beside such a figure the other two top moneybags of the day, Stewart and Astor, seem just a bit bland, but then, anyone compared to the vibrant and often ruthless Commodore would have come off bland indeed.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, dated by my source as "before 1877."  I should think
so, since that's when he died.  But to my eye, he comes across as more forceful
and energetic than the other moneybags pictured in this post.
    This supremely pecunious trio – Stewart, Astor, and Vanderbilt – resembled the wealthy of 1845 in that they dealt in tangibles: a department store, real estate, and railroads.  And if Astor’s making a fortune in real estate and being known as the landlord of New York didn’t necessarily benefit society at large (who loves a landlord anyway?), Vanderbilt’s New York Central line got people from New York to Chicago and back efficiently, and Stewart’s dry goods palace dazzled them with its offerings of this world’s goods.
The Gilded Age
Caroline Schermerhorn Astor -- the Mrs. Astor --
entertaining at one of her balls.  The ladies'
gowns rustle on the floor but are decidedly
low-necked.The Civil War ended in 1865, following which came the so-called Gilded Age, when the rich dressed rich, paraded about in fancy turnouts, built palatial mansions, raced their yachts, hitched their moneyed daughters to impoverished European noblemen (most of them accomplished debauchees), and generally enjoyed the good life free from such annoyances as an income tax.  On the Upper Fifth Avenue the Vanderbilts and Astors leapfrogged over one another, building ever more palatial mansions that made their rivals’ residences lower down on the avenue look opulently shabby, while Mrs. Astor – the Mrs. Astor, whose mail required no other designation to reach her – welcomed annually to her ballroom, which held just four hundred guests, the select four hundred persons deemed by her to be socially acceptable.  Needless to say, the simplicity of an earlier age, when flaunting your wealth was frowned on, had vanished, and often as not the pampered descendants of those earlier moneymakers felt no need to smirch their hands with toil.
     On this happy note I will end.  The rich of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – a very different species -- will be looked at in a future post.  As well as The Donald, who merits a post all his own.

     The book:  The selection of posts from this blog is available in print version at $14.95 (or cheaper), and as an e-book with Nook, Kindle, etc., for $3.99.  One of the online come-ons describes it in a unique brand of English:  "Stories excluding the Authorization Agitating Metropolitan area in the Copernican universe …  art critic Clifford Browder leaves no wallpaper unturned … a invest that so muchness are worthy to caw home."  One copy of the print version is offered free on a Goodreads giveaway through November 18.


     Coming soon:  Tiffany’s: The magic of their lamps (and how to tell a genuine one from a fake), the tiny lustrous vase in our apartment, a great fraud, and how The Donald bamboozled the Tiffany’s of today.  Plus a mystery: How did Marie Antoinette’s diamonds end up over here?

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

204. People of New York

The marrying man
     Gino Filippino, a trim-looking 53-year-old who favors tailored designer suits, has an unusual occupation: when not selling real estate, in his capacity as a justice of the peace he arranges and performs civil weddings for out-of-towners, many of them foreigners, who want to achieve their nuptials not in some quiet church, but amid the bustle and brouhaha of Manhattan.  He and his staff handle the paperwork, flowers, cake, champagne, photographers, and musicians, if such are required, but above all he helps the couples pick the spot for the wedding.  He has married both gay and straight couples in Central Park, dodging power lawnmowers and the blaring noise of tree pruners at work, and on the Brooklyn Bridge amid the roar of traffic, in busy Grand Central Station, and at the Top of the Rock, the observation deck of Rockefeller Center, with its breathtaking 360-degree views of the city.
Night view from the Top of the Rock.  Okay for a wedding?
Daniel Schwen     The unusual is his specialty.  He has bribed employees to let him do a quickie in the Waldorf Astoria and other fancy hostelries, and once even married two hippies from California in bed at the elegant Plaza Hotel.  While he has on occasion staged elaborate ceremonies on a yacht in the harbor, most of the weddings are what he calls “hitch-and-gos,” done in a matter of minutes and costing $500 and up.  Often he has to shoo homeless people away from the marriage sites, but at other times he recruits them as witnesses to sign marriage licenses.  And once he even had to read the vows for a bride who was too drunk to manage it herself.
Grand Central Station.  Would you like to be married here?
Or here?  The Waldorf Astoria lobby, okay for quickies.
Alan Light     How many weddings has he done?  Over 200 a year, and even 11 in a single day, most of them in Central Park.  But he himself isn’t married, though in New York State he could be, since same-sex marriages are now legal.  He lives with his partner on the Upper West Side and operates out of an office in Columbus Square.  “I’m the marrying man,” he explains, his purpose in life to give visiting couples the “New York moment” they desire – a unique experience they won't soon forget.
There’s no place like home
     Eleanor Murray, a plump, white-haired 93-year-old, has one claim to distinction: she has lived all her life in an unassuming five-floor walk-up at 531 West 135th Street in Manhattan.  “And I mean my whole life,” she told an interviewer; “I was born in the basement.”  Indeed she was, since her mother, a Hungarian immigrant, was the building’s super and lived in a basement apartment, rising daily at 4:00 a.m. to shovel coal into the boiler.  There she gave birth to Eleanor – in the apartment, not the boiler -- with the help of a midwife and then probably went right back to work.  Her family knew all the people in the building, “all good family people, no roomers.”
     By the age of 13 Eleanor, the fourth of five children, was helping to clean the building and shoveling coal herself.  Then, at 16, she and a sister moved into the two-bedroom apartment on the third floor where she still lives today.  The rent then was $31 a month; today, being rent-regulated, it is a mere $500, which gives her yet another reason to stay.  Not that she would move anyway.  “I never wanted to move, because I love the neighborhood and I’d never leave my church.”  Her church is the Church of the Annunciation on Convent Avenue, where she and her six children attended grammar school, and where she married her husband, John Murray, who managed a warehouse on the Hudson River waterfront, and who died in 2001.
     Much has happened over the years.  She remembers swimming across the Hudson to New Jersey with friends, and the time when a cosmetics factory went up in flames, and “the neighborhood smelled beautiful for months.”  She worked as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s department store, and attended Baruch College, but never graduated because she left to have children; later, she worked in the registrar’s office at City College.  In 1988 her mother, age 99, died on the very couch in her living room where she sat to be interviewed. 
     When she grew up, the neighborhood was all Irish working-class immigrants, but today they have disappeared, replaced by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and others.  “I’m the last of my gang left, but I still love the people in the neighborhood.”  Robust and cheerful with a hearty laugh, on nice days she sits with friends on a bench on the Broadway median, ignoring the traffic roaring by on either side, and takes food to an incapacitated neighbor.  When she visits a daughter in New Jersey she doesn’t stay long, missing the noise and excitement of the city.  A committed New Yorker, she leans out her window and waves to the open-air tour buses passing by on 135thStreet, shouting, “Welcome to New York!”  As for the future, she has no doubt: “I’m staying here till I die.”  And she laughs. 
A Broadway chorus boy
     Ted was a Broadway chorus boy, young, short, and blond, more “cute” than stunningly good-looking, whom I knew in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a graduate student at Columbia and subsequently began teaching French.  We met in Ogunquit, Maine, where he was appearing in the musical Pajama Game, and reconnected in New York, where, through him and his friends, I got a glimpse into the life of Broadway chorus boys.
Broadway theaters at night.  
UpstateNYer
     Their world was a world within a world, small, exciting, self-contained.  Ted lived in a cold-water flat in the West 40s, near the theaters, his agent, and the bars that the chorus kids frequented.  Cold-water flats, being what they were, were low-rent apartments, and as such got passed along from one struggling young actor or dancer to another; Ted’s had once been the home of the veteran stage and film actress Jo Van Fleet, whom I especially remember from her role in the movie East of Eden.  Ted’s apartment, as I dimly recall, was small and sparsely furnished, probably with running cold water in a sink; for baths and other bodily needs, he had to go down the hall to a communal facility.  But this was how the chorus kids lived; they were glad to get such a place and thought no more about it.  It was less a home than a base of operations; their real life was on the stage, whether in the city or on tour, and in the bars.
     Ted had been in a number of big-time Broadway musicals, including Guys and Dolls, as commemorated by a number of photos on his wall.  Among them was one showing him in a classical ballet pose with a female dancer, but it seemed all wrong for him, whereas Guys and Dolls and Pajama Game seemed right, and he knew it.  His life was a matter of waiting for phone calls from his agent about a possible part in a musical.  He had strange and hilarious stories to tell about try-outs and casting.  On one occasion he was told, “Sorry, Ted.  You’re just what we need, but we don’t want another blond in the chorus.”  So he went out and got a dark-haired wig, hurried  back, and tried out again.  They laughed and said, “Okay, okay, you’re hired.  But don’t wear that lousy wig; dye your hair.”  And to me he explained, “Sometimes you have to do their thinking for them.”
     “Don’t you ever just walk into a part and get hired immediately?” I asked.
     “Just once.  The male chorus in The Boyfriend is supposed to be English, but there’s one American.  When they saw me, they said, ‘We hope you can sing and dance.  You’re short and blond, just what we want for the American.’ ”  Ted could sing and dance; he got the role.
Ted's world, not mine.
     Ted had tales to tell about rehearsals as well, like the time they had the heaviest of the women dancers paired off with him, the smallest of the males.  When, at one point, the girls were supposed leap up on their partner’s shoulders, Ted’s partner slid right down to the floor, taking his pants with her.  “Embarrassing,” he told me.  “There I was only in my dance belt,” meaning the jock worn by male dancers.  But he was laughing as he told me.
     At Ogunquit, on the last night of the performance there, he invited me into his dressing room, where I saw him and two other dancers, seated in their underwear, busily applying makeup.  It was the last night of the tour, always a time of joyous celebration and hijinks, with jokes and banter flying about.  Ted planned to black out some of his teeth and then, during the performance, flash a gap-toothed smile at a friend onstage, hoping to break him up.  But one of the company’s staff, wise to the ways of dancers, made an announcement warning against such shenanigans.  “Remember,” he said, “you may want to work for these folks again.”  So Ted didn’t blacken his teeth.
     When there were few shows in the offing, dancers had a recourse to industrials, lavish spectacles with dancers used by big corporations, especially automakers, to introduce a new product.  Industrials went all over the country and they paid well, so dancers took them to bring in some cash, but their heart was in the theater.  I recall seeing an industrial on a friend’s TV set, with dancers dancing around glistening new limousines lit with bright lights.  Said my friend, who was in advertising and knowledgeable, “You wouldn’t believe what all of that costs!”  Why dancers were needed to introduce a new model of car, I never quite grasped, but the automakers presumably knew what they were doing.
     The social life of chorus boys was centered in a handful or more-or-less gay bars in the West 40s.  I went to one once with Ted.  The emphasis was less on cruising than socializing, and everybody seemed to know everybody.  The latest bit of gossip was about a young dancer who had just broken up with his lover, the show’s dance captain, who had then got his ex fired.  When the kid just fired showed up, all the others flocked around him to sympathize; the dance captain was vilified by one and all.  As Ted observed to me, mixing your private life with your career was risky; he never did.
     On another occasion a friend of Ted’s told him and some other dancers how he had got a part given up by a strikingly good-looking dancer.  “I knew I couldn’t match him in looks, so I decided to strut like a stud, as if to say, ‘Honeys, what I’ve got going for me is right down there between my legs.’ ”  All the other chorus kids agreed that, under the circumstances, this was the only thing to do.
     Dancers were always socializing; they weren’t ones for quiet times at home with a good book, or for reflection.  And when they went on tour, the socializing wasn’t diminished, for they were constantly being partied wherever they went.  Once Ted met Tennessee Williams, who had invited the chorus boys to a private party.  Williams scanned each as he arrived, and said to Ted, “Hmm, yes, you can stay.”  Thanks a lot, Ted thought to himself, I thought I’d already been invited.  But in Denver a wealthy young businessman was so taken with Ted that he offered to keep him in style.  Ted  politely declined the offer, which his admirer pressed repeatedly, sure that he could wear down Ted’s resistance.  But Ted knew that in the long run such a relationship led nowhere; he stuck to his guns, said no.
     Ted and I weren’t steady lovers, just on-and-off-again partners.  Weeks, even months might pass, and then, on the spur of the moment, I would phone him and we would get together. We were of different worlds – me an academic, a teacher, and him a dancer steeped in the small, rich world of Broadway chorus boys.  But at times he needed to come out of that world, even though he always went back into it.  “It’s always good to see you,” he told me more than once.  “Theater kids aren’t in the real world, they’re off in some fantasy world of their own.”  At first I shrugged his remark off, but when he repeated it several times, I realized that it was for real, he was in that world but not altogether of it, he needed to come out and get a breath of fresh air.  Seeing me was that breath of fresh air, and at the same time I could escape from my own world, the rich, small world of academics.
     Ted knew that you can’t be a chorus boy forever – a problem explored decades later in the musical A Chorus Line.  A few dancers end up teaching dance or becoming choreographers, but only a very few.  Ted’s plan was to transition into acting.  His acting teacher encouraged him, but his agent and others resisted; “Ted,” they said, “you’re a dancer.”  Which didn’t leave much room for transitioning.  Like all young actors in search of credits and experience, he took parts in what veteran actors laugh at and deride: children’s theater.  In one, I recall, he played a mad physicist.  I never saw him perform, but an acquaintance of mine did.  “It’s fascinating how dancers get into a role,” he told me.  “When I do it, I’m exploring the character’s emotions, finding out what the character feels.  But dancers do it through movements; they dance themselves into the role.” 
     But what chance did a dancer have of getting into acting in New York, when he was competing with a host of young actors doing the same?  Often as not, an aging dancer – and in that profession aging comes fast – goes back to his hometown, Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Denver, where family and friends are waiting, and a job in some mundane profession offers the security that theater can never provide.  More than once Ted told me, “You may get a phone call that can change your life.”  Now he was waiting, not for a call offering yet another job as a dancer, but for a call offering a serious role as an actor.  But as long as I knew him, that call never came.
     One day I finally suggested to Ted that we continue as friends minus sex, prompting his wistful reply, “I hate for things to change.”  Soon after that I met my partner Bob, and from then on Ted was out of my life.  With hindsight, I regret this; it wasn’t necessary.  I suspect that Ted finally went back to Pittsburgh or wherever and the inevitable mundane job.  Now that decades have passed, I wonder what became of him, but probably I’ll never know.  So it goes, with time.
     Epilogue:  The story of Ted has a surprise ending.  After writing the above, on the spur of the moment I googled him by both his real name and his stage name, expecting nothing, since he was only one of hundreds of young male dancers who have their moment of glory on Broadway and then disappear into the maw of oblivion.  But to my astonishment, several obits in New Jersey newspapers came up, announcing the death last spring of an 87-year-old man with the same two names, an inhabitant of Bayonne.  What a coincidence! I told myself, but soon became convinced that this was, indeed had to be, the Ted I knew.  This Ted was a Broadway chorus boy back when the Ted I knew was appearing in Broadway musicals and, when he retired from dancing, began working in wardrobe, and finally retired from that with honors after 45 years on Broadway.  So Ted found a way to stay in Broadway theater after he left dancing, and it wasn’t acting.  But the obit told me things I didn’t know:
·      He was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, so that his leap into a career in dancing  anticipated the story of the Broadway musical Billy Elliot.·      He was a year older than me, whereas I had always thought he was two or three years younger.·      He had been briefly in the military at the end of World War II.·      After I knew him he married a dancer and by her had a daughter.
He was quoted as saying, “I had a wonderful life.  I have no regrets.  Always follow your dreams.” 
     My reaction to this news was astonishment, then sadness, then joy.  Astonishment for obvious reasons.  Sadness because I just missed discovering him in time to reconnect, talk old times, say hello and good-bye.  And joy because he solved the problem of what to do when he quit dancing: he followed his dream and stayed in the world of theater that he knew and loved.  To be backstage in wardrobe and not out there performing must have been an adjustment, but he managed.  He had a rich,  full life; I wish I could have shared a little of it in the years after I knew him almost a half century ago on Broadway.  Good-bye, Ted, and good luck!  Have a dance with the angels.
     Source note:  For information about Gino Filippone and Eleanor Murray, I am indebted to articles by Corey Kilgannon in the Metropolitan section of the Sunday New York Times of July 19 and September 27, 2015, respectively.

     The book:  The selection of posts from this blog is now available as an e-book on Kindle and Nook for $3.99.



     Coming soon:  The Rich.  No, I don’t mean Donald Trump – not yet, at least.  I mean a young foreigner who arrived here in steerage speaking no English and became the richest man in America.  Also a slave trader, a Paris-inhabiting “pink and glass of fashion,” a ship captain named (I invent not) Preserved Fish, a “scribbling female,” the father of the modern department store, and the man who became known as Old Sixty Millions.  What did these nineteenth-century moneybags have in common that makes them different from the moneybags of today?  As for those  moneybags of today, I'll get around to them in time, including, no doubt, the Donald.

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

203. The Next Big Thing

     It bursts upon the scene.  Fans want to attend it, consumers want to buy it, investors want to invest in it before word gets around.  It excites, it maddens, it intoxicates.  Above all, it is something startlingly new, astonishingly different.  And it can make the world better … or worse.
     No,  don’t mean the entrepreneur-led charitable foundation of that name that seeks to empower young entrepreneurs to take on the world, admirable a goal as that is.  Nor do I mean any number of novels and high-tech gadgets and other stuff marketed online as “the next big thing.”  I mean a rich variety of break-through inventions, styles, fashions, and fads that swept New York and the nation, if not the world, changing, or seeming to change, the way we live.  Let’s have a look at some of them.
Fulton’s steamboat, 1807
In 1807 Robert Fulton’s pioneer North River Steamboat, later rechristened the Clermont, made the round trip on the Hudson River from New York to Albany and back in an amazing 32 hours.  Amazing because, prior to this, the Hudson River sloops, sailing upstream against the current and often against wind and tide as well, took as much as three days just to get to Albany.  Steamboats revolutionized traffic on the waterways of America and the world, bringing distant places closer together and, in New York State, letting New York City legislators get to the state capital expeditiously, so they could pursue their legislative schemes and stratagems, and try to keep upstate lawmakers, whom they termed “hayseeds,” from neglecting or abusing their beloved Babylon on the Hudson.
Steamboats on the Hudson at the Highlands.  A Currier & Ives print of 1874.
Jenny Lind, 1850
The Castle Garden concert.Promoted shrewdly and outrageously by P. T. Barnum, the master of humbug, the Swedish coloratura became a sensation in America.  Citizens who knew little or nothing about coloratura sopranos suddenly felt an intense need to hear the Swedish Nightingale warble her magical notes.  Thousands thronged the piers to witness her arrival on September 1, some of them suffering bruises and bloody noses in the process; a fatal crush was narrowly avoided.  To get her through the crowd, Barnum’s coachman had to clear the way with his whip.  As for her first performance on September 11 at Castle Garden on the Battery, she astonished the packed audience with her vocal feats.  All tickets having been sold already at auction, some without tickets hired rowboats and rowed out into the harbor to hear her from there, faintly but distinctly.
The Hoopskirt, 1856
When news reached these shores that Eugénie, the Empress of the French, had adopted a new style of dress, the hoopskirt, averaging some three yards in width, the fashionable women of New York and the nation simply had to add this marvel of  technology to their wardrobe, and the factories of New York bustled and hummed accordingly, turning out up to four thousand a day.  For the next ten years or so, the ladies labored to maneuver through narrow doorways, and to sit gently and comfortably, in these cagelike monstrosities of fashion, until word came that the Empress of the French now favored quite another style, the bustle, which spelled the end of the hoopskirt.
An 1856 cutaway view from Punch.
The Black Crook, 1866
It opened on September 12 at Niblo’s Garden, a huge theater on Broadway, and ran for a record 474 performances: a heady brew of a melodrama with a scheming villain who contracted to sell souls to the devil in exchange for magical powers.  An extravaganza of extravaganzas with a hodgepodge of a plot, it featured a kidnapped heroine to be rescued by a hero; a fairy queen who appeared as a dove and was rescued from a serpent; a grotto with swans, nymphs, and sea gods that rose magically out of the floor; a devil appearing and disappearing in bursts of red light; fairies lolling on silver couches in a silver rain; angels dropping from the clouds in gilded chariots; a “baby ballet” with children; a fife and drum corps; the raucous explosion of a cancan with two hundred shapely legs kicking high, then exposing their frothy underthings and gauze-clad derrieres.  When, at the end of the five-hour spectacle, the cast took their curtain calls before a wildly applauding audience, they were cheered by leering old men in the three front rows who pelted them with roses.  Denounced from pulpits as “devilish heathen orgies” and “sins of Babylon,” it was a long-time smashing success, revived often on Broadway and touring the country for years.  Some see it as the origin of both the Broadway musical and burlesque.
 An 1866 poster.  For spectacle, even the Met Opera today couldn't match it.
Edison’s incandescent light, 1882
At 3:00 p.m. on September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison flicked a switch at his Pearl Street power plant in downtown Manhattan, suddenly illuminating the Stock Exchange, the offices of the nation’s largest newspapers, and certain private residences, including that of financial mogul J.P. Morgan.  “I have accomplished all that I promised,” announced the Wizard of Menlo Park.
     A young inventor already credited with the invention of the phonograph, Edison had demonstrated his new incandescent light bulb to potential backers in December 1879, and subsequently to the public.  “When I am through,” he told the press, “only the rich will be able to afford candles.”  Impressed, wealthy patrons such as Morgan and the Vanderbilts had invested in the enterprise.  At his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison and his team worked diligently to develop and patent the basic equipment needed, including six steam-powered dynamos, 27-ton “Jumbos,” the largest ever built.  The dynamos at the Pearl Street plant were then connected by copper wires running underground to other buildings whose owners had contracted with Edison for illumination.
Laying Mr. Edison's electrical wires in the streets, 1882.     The miracle of lighting by electricity had been demonstrated in New York, but throughout the nation the public held back, having heard reports of horses being shocked and workmen electrocuted.  Insisting that electric light was clean, healthy, and efficient, not requiring the sprawling, foul-smelling facilities needed to provide gas for gas lighting, Edison staged an Electric Torch Light Parade where 4,000 men marched through Manhattan, their heads adorned with illuminated light bulbs  connected to a horse-drawn, steam-powered generator.  The marchers weren’t electrocuted, proving that electricity was safe, and the public was slowly won over.  Hotels, restaurants, shops, and brothels soon became radiant with light.  Darkness was banished and urban life transformed, and pickpockets could work in the evening.
First U.S. auto fatality, 1899
On September 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss, a real estate dealer, was struck by an electric-powered taxi while getting off a streetcar at West 74th Street and Central Park West, and knocked to the ground; rushed to a hospital, he died the following morning, the first such fatality in the nation.  The taxi driver was arrested and charged with manslaughter, but was acquitted on the grounds of having exhibited no malice or negligence.  All of which is a reminder that the Next Big Thing can bring perils as well as benefits.  Installed on the centennial of the accident, a plaque commemorating his death now marks the spot.
The Armory Show, 1913
A 1913 button.The International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, introduced avant-garde European art to Americans who were primarily used to realism, shocking them with a heavy dose of Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism.  Especially jolting to their eyeballs was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which expressed motion through a succession of superimposed images not of human limbs, but of conical and cylindrical abstractions in brown, a double blast of Cubism and Futurism.  Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, this assemblage of 1300 works, including a fair number of nudes, was more than some could take.  Accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy multiplied, parodies and cartoons mocked the show, and former president Theodore Roosevelt declared, “That’s not art!”  But the civil authorities declined to close the exhibition down, and Americans began adjusting to the startling, radical, nerve-jolting, and precedent-shattering phenomenon that was modern art.
Duchamp's descending nude.
The Charleston, 1923
It burst upon the nation when a tune called “The Charleston” ended the first act of the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild, and the all-black cast did an exuberant, fast-stepping dance that grabbed the audience, the city, and the nation, and then went on, some say, to become the most popular dance of all time.  (But what about the waltz?)  The song’s African American composer, James P. Johnson, had first seen the then-unnamed dance danced in 1913 in a New York cellar dive frequented by blacks from Charleston, South Carolina, who danced and screamed all night; inspired, Johnson then composed several numbers for the dance, including the one made popular by the musical.  But the dance itself, which made the tango seem tame and the waltz antiquated, has been traced back to the Ashanti tribe of the African Gold Coast.  The dance was brought to this country by slaves, and after emancipation African Americans seeking jobs in the North brought it to Chicago and New York, where Johnson discovered it, and the rest is history. 

     The dance spread like fever.  Dance halls and hotels featured Charleston contests; ads in New York papers seeking a black cook, maid, waiter, or gardener insisted, “Must be able to do the Charleston,” so they could teach their employers the dance; hospitals throughout the country began admitting patients complaining of “Charleston knee”; an evangelist in Oregon called it “the first step toward hell”; and the collapse of three floors above a dance club in Boston, killing fifty patrons, was blamed on vibrations of Charleston dancers, causing the mayor to ban the dance from all public dance halls.  But the more the dance was censured or banned, the more popular it became; the whole nation was “Charleston mad.”  (Ragtime, then jazz, then the Charleston: the African American contribution to American pop culture has been phenomenal.)
     A personal aside: I discovered the Charleston when I saw The Boyfriend, a frothy 1954 Broadway musical that re-created and spoofed the musicals of the 1920s, while vaulting Julie Andrews into stardom.  Ever since, having been raised on the waltz and the foxtrot, I’ve wanted to do the Charleston, but never found anyone to teach it to me.  I’d like to say that my parents did the dance, but they were in their thirties when it burst upon the scene, and living quietly in and near Chicago, untroubled by Al Capone and his cohorts, and raising one infant son and soon expecting another (guess who).  In my later years, feeling totally uninhibited at last, I did my share of wild dancing, but never the Charleston, for which I feel grievously deprived.  Why the Charleston?  It’s joyous, it’s crazy, it’s wild.  Go check it out on You Tube and you’ll see what I mean.  But I don’t plan to do it now.  If I did, the Daily Drivel, a tabloid published only in my mind, would flash a headline:
OCTOGENARIAN  RISKSFRACTURING  HIS  HIPWHILE  DOING  THECHARLESTON
DOCTORS  ADVISETRANQUILIZERSAND  THERAPY
(P.S. to the above.  Thanks to a charming young African American teacher on You Tube, I have in fact learned a basic step or two of the Charleston, which I now do wildly in my apartment, humming to myself some jazzy music probably snatched from The Boyfriend.  So far, no mishap.  I urge everyone in the mood for a bit of craziness to learn, at least a little bit, this wild and crazy dance.  It banishes tedium, relieves depression, and incites joy.)
New York World’s Fair, 1939-1940
A view of the Trylon and Perisphere.Covering 1200 acres in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, it exposed 44 million visitors to “the World of Tomorrow,” as embodied in the Trylon, a soaring 610-foot spire, and the Perisphere, a huge sphere housing a diorama depicting a utopian city of the future.  The fair’s modernistic vision of the future was meant to lift the spirits of the country, which was just barely emerging from the Great Depression, and meant also, of course, to bring business to New York.  (Little did the optimistic planners realize that the world was about to be convulsed by World War II.)            Exhibits included the Westinghouse Time Capsule, a tube buried on the fair’s site and containing writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, copies of Life Magazine, a Mickey Mouse watch, a kewpie doll, a pack of Camel cigarettes, and other goodies meant to convey the essence of twentieth-century American culture.  A Book of Record deposited with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington contains instructions for locating the buried capsule, instructions that will be translated into future languages with the passage of time.  One indeed wonders what future generations, if such there be, will think of us when, if all goes as planned, they locate and open the buried capsule a mere 5,000 years from now.
The Futurama exhibit, showing a street intersection of the City of Tomorrow.
I'll let residents of New York and our other big cities report to what extent
this has been achieved.     Also featured at the fair was Westinghouse’s Electro the Moto-Man, a 7-foot robot that talked and even smoked cigarettes; an appearance by Superman; a General Motors pavilion with an astonishing Futurama exhibit of the U.S. of tomorrow; an IBM pavilion with electric typewriters and a fantastic “electric calculator”; a Borden’s exhibit with 150 pedigreed cows, including the original Elsie, on a Rotolactor that bathed and milked them mechanically; Frank Buck’s Jungleland, with three performing elephants and 600 monkeys; a Billy Rose Aquacade with synchronized swimmers; and a Salvador Dalí pavilion with scantily clad performers posing as statues.  This and some neighboring girlie shows prompted complaints, and the New York Vice Squad on occasion raided the Amusement Area, but these tributes to the world of today were never quite shut down.  As for the World of Tomorrow, some of it, such as robots and computers, has come to pass, but a lot has not, showing once again the near impossibility of accurately predicting the future.
The Beatles, 1964
On February 7, 1964, the now legendary foursome, then newly popular in Great Britain, arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport, where, to their astonishment, they were greeted by 4,000 fans held back by police barriers, and – just as important – 200 journalists.  Intensifying anticipation of their arrival were five million posters distributed throughout the nation to announce their coming, and the phenomenal success of their song “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which had sold a million and a half copies in just three weeks.  Grinning and waving cheerily, the lads from Liverpool were immediately subjected to a chaotic press conference where they played the journalists for straight men.
     “What do you think of Beethoven?” one reporter asked.
     “Great,” replied Ringo Starr.  “Especially his poems.”
From left to right: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.  
Greeting fans at Kennedy Airport.     After an hour of this banter they were put into limousines, one per Beatle, and driven into the city to the sumptuous Plaza Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, where a ten-room suite on the 12th floor had been reserved for “four English gentlemen.”  The sedate Plaza didn’t know what had hit it, as Beatles fans – mostly hysterical young women – ran against traffic to the hotel, eager to get even the barest glimpse of the Fab Four in their collarless sleek mod suits, their young faces topped by pudding-bowl haircuts called “mop tops” that provoked much comment, not all of it positive, from the press.  BEATLES 4 EVER proclaimed an outsized sign that the fans held aloft, as they chanted “We want the Beatles” and screamed and wept, and sometimes fainted from excitement.  Their idols reveled in the hotel’s luxury but felt besieged, their suite guarded by round-the-clock guards.  Two large cartons addressed to the Beatles arrived at the hotel, but proved to contain two female fans who, being detected, never reached their goal.  Another sixty got as far as the 12th-floor stairwell before being caught and expelled.
     Briefly eluding their fans, the boys were soon riding in Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage, staring in wonder at the city, and Ringo was photographed dancing the night away with singer Jeanie Dell at the Headline Club.  But this was mere prelude to their first U.S. TV appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, which was watched by an estimated 73 million viewers, this blogger among them, though their music was barely heard over the screams of the teenage girls in the audience.  Continuing their ten-day tour, on February 11 they gave a concert at the huge Coliseum in Washington that was attended by 20,000 fans, then the next day gave two back-to-back performances at Carnegie Hall in New York, where fan hysteria caused the police to close off the surrounding streets.  After more concerts, on February 22 they flew back to England, allowing a semblance of normality to return to this city and the whole East Coast. 
     Meanwhile their singles and albums were selling millions of records, and their first feature-length film, A Hard Day’s Night, was released in August 1964, a gentle spoof of the whole scene that this blogger much enjoyed.  And later that month, to capitalize on the Beatlemania now raging in the U.S., the foursome returned for a second tour and played to sold-out houses across the country.  Some critics scoffed and quibbled at their music, but it hardly mattered; by now the foursome had the young audience firmly in their grip.  The renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski, commenting to an audience of his own at Carnegie Hall, complained that the Beatles’ music, which he happened to like, was drowned out by the teen audience’s screaming.  “If you can’t hear them,” he asked, “why are they so great?”  The answer came at once from a red-headed girl in the audience: “Because they’re cuties!”  As for the older set, they were probably relieved, in that age of strident youthful rebellion, to encounter four likable twenty-somethings who didn’t threaten anyone.  And the twenty-somethings raked in millions.

     I shall end this chronicle here, in the turbulent 1960s, because it’s already long enough, and I’m not sure what to mention next.  So what today will be the Next Big Thing?  Driverless cars?  Robot-operated factories?  A cure – a real cure – for cancer?  Life on Mars?  Some crazy new dance?  Your guess is as good as mine.  But this much is certain: sooner or later it will come, and when it does, it will astonish, madden, and excite.
     Coming soon:  People of New York: a Mexican Sunday-night cowboy, a Broadway chorus boy, a man who marries couples on the Brooklyn Bridge, and a retired policeman who looks for Old Masters at yard sales.
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

202. Hate

      “I hate Mrs. Brooks!” I announced to several classmates, not in a spirit of bravado or revolt but simply as a statement of fact.  Immediately Daffy Dinwoody, the class tattletale, rushed to inform the lady in question, she being my first-grade teacher and a bit of a battleax.  The result was a fifteen-minute lecture on responsibility and respect, barely half of which my six-year-old mind managed to grasp.  Things quieted down after that, for Mrs. Brooks had her softer moments, albeit few, and she was simply the fire-breathing dragon guarding the entrance to a paradise of learning since, once I got past her, the other teachers were easy to cope with and my grades and spirits soared.  I relate this incident simply because, insofar as I can tell, it was the first time I used “hate” as a verb.
     Toward the end of sixth grade my class was informed that Biff Brady, a much-sought-after school entertainer, would be hosting the sixth-grade graduation party, and lucky we were to get him.  The much-anticipated party took place in the gym, which should have warned me, since for me, a bespectacled bookworm, the gym was a scene more of horrors than accomplishments.  Biff Brady proved to be a meaty hunk of a man with a loud voice that commanded and a manner that effused a hearty and blatant cheer.  Not five minutes into the party he called for quiet and when I babbled on to friends for a moment or two more, he commanded loudly, “Be quiet, Glasses!”
I was clueless as to what this was all about.     I hated him.  I loathed and detested him, for I had been called “Four-Eyes” all too often, and in him I sensed a forerunner of the seventh- and eighth-grade coaches who would torment me, whether by their attention or their total indifference: beefy, obtuse types with thick necks and hairy armpits whose physical education classes were physical but hardly educational, since the coaches spent most of their time doing paperwork in their office.  Occasionally they emerged from their sanctum to inflict, without preparation of any kind, some new species of torment such as gymnastics or boxing or wrestling, rather than the usual touch football (where I could lose myself in the scrimmage, clueless as to what it was all about) or baseball (all eyes on me as I struck lamentably out or fumbled a ball in the field).  With hindsight I would say that the hate I felt for these clumsy oafs was not intense; perhaps it should dismissed as mild but persistent dislike.  But they taught me a valuable lesson: Know who the enemy is.  From then on, I did.
This I could manage.
This was a horror.   










     An enemy of a different species was Miss Kraus, the junior high music teacher whose depredations to my psyche were dire.  A tight little woman with an acid sense of humor, she put the weaker pupils in the front rows and the better ones in back (I was well toward the front), then patrolled the aisles, listening to each pupil in turn as we chorused lustily together.  Not knowing how to read music and being incapable of singing on key, I dreaded her approach.  If she detected an off note, she had the culprit – often me – sing the passage alone, subjecting errors to her dry, mordant wit.  She never used my first name, called me “Browder” or “boy.”  Tuesdays and Thursdays were an ordeal for me, since I had gym and music back-to-back, but it was Miss Kraus who inspired the keenest fear.  Did I hate her?  No, but I should have.  Fear is the first step toward hate, since what we fear we inevitably hate.  But I kept my fear to myself, let it stew in my murky depths.  I had other bad teachers – a few – but only Miss Kraus incites my resentment today.  She once told us of getting caught in quicksand where she grew up in Texas, and ever since I have wondered why, when God put it there for a purpose, that quicksand didn’t do its job.
If only …
Peter O'Connor     One other individual from my childhood whom I should have hated was Hector Stevenson, who, playing tough to mask his own vulnerabilities, constantly challenged me to fight and called me “Sissy!” when, being a bespectacled wimp of a bookworm, I refused.  At these moments he had a surly look, his upper lip drawn tight, that I came to recognize in bullies.  He achieved the ultimate in meanness one afternoon when, on his way home from school in the company of his little brother, he socked Billy Simpson in the eye.  I came on the scene just after the incident, with Billy weeping, other pupils denouncing Hector, and the assailant sauntering off in triumph, having proven his toughness to his kid brother.  If there was anyone in our class more vulnerable than me, it was Billy Simpson, a likable and absolutely harmless kid, but an easy mark for Hector, who was careful never to take on the tougher boys of the class.  Hector instilled in me a lifelong hate of bullies.
     The bully whom I encountered daily was my brother, three years older than me, who once, without provocation, bounced a brick off my forehead.  Probably he meant to miss me and scare me, but he yielded to an impulse and his aim was far too good.  I ran home screaming, with a huge swollen lump on my forehead, and they rushed me off for X-rays to see if there was a fracture (there wasn’t); what my parents did to my brother I don’t know, but it must have been severe. 
     Once, just once, I fought back to the point of frightening my brother.  One afternoon at home, having been constantly harassed, I snatched up a letter opener and flung it at him.  I’d like to say that it missed him narrowly and lodged itself deep in the wall but a inch or two from his dear face, but in fact it wasn’t thrown with much force, missed him widely, and clattered harmlessly to the floor.  But years later, when we were older and calmer, he confessed that it had scared him at the time.  Did I hate him?  No, I was leery of him and made sure not to provoke him, but for some reason my feelings never achieved the level and intensity of hate.
     So much for the hates and travails of my childhood, no different, I suspect, from the childhood hates and travails of most of us.  So what today,  in my wiser golden years, do I hate?  Lots of things:
·      Bullies·      Junk mail·      Telemarketing phone calls ·      Lists of things to do·      Noise (especially jack hammers)·      Monsanto (above all because of GMO’s)·      Big Pharma (their foul marketing practices, for which they are constantly paying hefty fines)·      My computer (when it misbehaves)
In short, all the things that harass my daily living, with bullies, Monsanto, and Big Pharma thrown in.  As for telemarketing phone calls, I especially hate the endlessly repeated recorded messages, several of which I have received up to 40 or 50 times to date; I hate them for their mindlessness, their sheer stupidity.
     These are significant annoyances, but do they deserve to be hated, as opposed to disliked or resented?  Perhaps not. 
     Of course there are lots of things to be hated with a robust, positive hate: injustice, racism, brutality, intolerance – the list goes on and on.  But these are abstractions, and hating them costs us nothing.  How about people?  Is there anyone living that I hate?  But first, what do I mean by “hate”?  Upon reflection I would say that hate is a settled and persistent enmity that risks becoming vicious and obsessive.  Do I hate with that kind of hate, the kind that Hitler felt for the Jews, or that Osama Bin Laden felt, and whose followers still feel, for Americans?  No, not that I can think of.  And when I put the same question to my friend John, he pondered a moment and then said the same.  It takes a lot of energy to really, truly hate.
     I can’t hate public figures with whom I disagree; I can dislike them intensely, but it doesn’t achieve the status of hate.  The one who comes closest to inciting hate in me isn’t Baby Bush, whose foreign policies I deplored, for on a personal level he struck me as rather likable.  The one whom I can almost hate – almost -- is Dick Cheney, the former vice-president under Bush.  Why him?  Because he’s always managed to have his finger in every pie, public or private, and in the process reaped a fortune.  Bush Junior has had the good grace to admit that a few of his actions were mistaken, but not Mr. Cheney, who is defiantly unrepentant.  The sly smile of his official portraits says it all: you can have your cake – a huge big cake with oodles of icing – and ravenously eat it, too.
     And now for a glance at local history to see who has been motivated by hate, real hate.  Let’s consider some famous New York shootings. 
Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton
     On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey.  The wounded Hamilton was taken back to New York, where he died the next day.  Some historians assert that Burr fired only in self-defense, thinking that his opponent meant to kill him, but most are of the opinion that Burr really meant to kill Hamilton.  Who is right, and did Burr truly hate Hamilton?



     The duel was the culmination of a long vendetta between the two.  They were on opposite sides politically, Hamilton being a Federalist and Burr a Democratic Republican, but much more than that was involved.  Hamilton viewed Burr as an unscrupulous opportunist solely out for no. 1 and tried constantly to thwart him in his career.  In the 1800 presidential election, when Burr and Thomas Jefferson were tied in the Electoral College and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, Hamilton did all he could to swing the election to Jefferson, who in fact did become President, with Burr as Vice.  And Burr did not relish being no. 2.
     The last straw for Burr came in 1804, when he ran as an independent in the New York State governor’s race.  Hamilton lobbied his fellow  Federalists not to support Burr in his fight against the Democratic Republican candidate, who overwhelmed Burr in the election.  Learning from a press account of Hamilton’s denunciation of him at a dinner party, Burr accused Hamilton of slander and demanded that he apologize or accept his challenge to a duel.  Unwilling to apologize, Hamilton felt compelled by the code of honor to accept the challenge.
               Was Burr’s challenge primarily a political maneuver to redeem his honor and revive his flagging political career, as some have suggested, or behind it was there hate?  Given Burr and Hamilton’s prolonged antipathy, I come down on the side of hate: Burr meant to kill Hamilton and succeeded.  But at a cost: the duel was denounced by all and ended Burr's political career.  (For a fuller account of the duel, see post #121, April 6, 2014.)
Edward S. Stokes and James Fisk, Jr.

    On January 6, 1872, Edward S. Stokes, a dapper but impecunious young man about town, shot the controversial impresario and Wall Street operator Jim Fisk in a midtown hotel.  Stokes had stolen away Fisk’s lady friend, Helen Josephine Mansfield, following which he and Josie had attempted to extract money from Fisk through a series of lawsuits.  Cross-examination by Fisk’s lawyers on the day of the shooting had demolished what little reputation Stokes and Josie had left, revealing him as a scheming fancy man and her as woman of loose morals, in consequence of which Stokes’s lawyer told him the suit must be dropped.  Following this humiliation, Stokes learned that a grand jury had just indicted him and Josie for attempting to blackmail Fisk.  Frustrated and angry, Stokes confronted Fisk on the stairway of a Broadway hotel and shot him twice.  Fisk was carried to an empty hotel room where he died the next day, and Stokes was immediately arrested.




Worth a shooting?  Well, tastes change.
Back then "buxom" was in.
The elegant Mr. Stokes.  The girls really
went for him. He had money, Stokes had the looks.















     Did Stokes hate Jim Fisk?  I’m inclined to say no; the shooting was more an impulsive act provoked by his humiliation in court, followed by the news of his indictment.  I don’t sense in Stokes the deep, prolonged hate that Burr felt for Hamilton.  But if the shooting wasn’t planned in advance, one can ask why Stokes was carrying a revolver.  (For a fuller account of the Fisk/Stokes/Mansfield triangle, and what became of Stokes and Josie afterward, see posts #67 and 69, June 28 and July 3, 2013.)
Harry Thaw and Stanford White
     On the evening of June 25, 1906, during a musical comedy performance at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, the renowned architect Stanford White was shot and killed by Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw, who was arrested at once.




Here she is, on a souvenir card.  Hardly
an innocent.  But you can see what the
fuss was all about.     This murder too resulted from a love triangle.  Long before marrying Thaw, Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit, a hauntingly beautiful woman, had caught the eye of Stanford White while appearing at age 16 in the popular musical Floradora.  She later told how White drugged her with champagne and then deflowered her, for which she professed to hate him.  But in another version she described herself as a young innocent from the provinces who, dazzled by the attentions of this suave, sophisticated older man, allowed herself to be seduced.  What is certain is that she became his mistress for a while, until White, a free-living philanderer, lost interest in her and moved on to other conquests.
     Meanwhile Harry Thaw had declared his love for Nesbit, showered her with gifts, and finally got her to marry him.  Learning of her prior relationship with White, he became morbidly jealous, repeatedly pressing her for details about her affair with White.  Intensifying Thaw’s resentment was his feeling that White had prevented him, an outsider from Pittsburgh, from being accepted into the city’s elite men’s clubs.
     Did Harry Thaw hate Stanford White?  I think so, given his ungovernable rage, his jealousy, his envy of White’s social position and life style, and his obsession with the details of his wife’s relationship with the older man.  Contributing to his mental instability was his use of cocaine and morphine.  (For a fuller account of the story, and to learn what then became of Nesbit and Thaw – an account that contains some surprises --  see post #107, January 5, 2014.)
Valerie Solanas and Andy Warhol
     On June 3, 1968, radical feminist Valerie Solanas shot Pop artist Andy Warhol in his studio at 33 Union Square in Manhattan.  Hospitalized with an almost fatal wound, Warhol slowly recovered, but his studio, dubbed the Factory, did not.  Fearing another attack by Solanas, from then on Warhol lived in fear and controlled the Factory more tightly, so that it was never quite again a wide-open meeting place for avant-garde artists, writers, musicians, and assorted weirdos and crazies.  Arrested, Solanas pleaded guilty to reckless assault and was sentenced to three years in prison.



     Everyone then and now has heard of Andy Warhol, the Prince of Pop, whose works sell for as much as a million, but who was Valerie Solanas?  Born in New Jersey in 1936, she became estranged from her divorced parents and was abused by her alcoholic grandfather, to escape whom she ran away and for a while became homeless.  Coming out as a lesbian in the 1950s, when such things were not done, she got a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, and in 1966 moved to New York City, where she supported herself by begging and prostitution.  Andy Warhol agreed to read a play of hers with the endearing title “Up Your Ass,” but found it too pornographic to produce.  When he admitted that he had lost her script, she demanded money in compensation, but instead accepted bit roles in two of his movies.
     In 1967 Solanas self-published the SCUM Manifesto, “SCUM” being an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men.”  It begins cheerily enough:
“Life" in this "society" being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of "society" being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.
The manifesto then asserts that, since men have ruined the world, women must fix it by creating an organization named SCUM to overthrow society and eliminate the male sex.  To achieve this, violence must be used.  “If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.”  Though some have seen the manifesto as satire, Solanas insisted at the time that she meant every word of it.  But the SCUM organization had only one member: Solanas.



     According to producer Margo Feidan, on June 3, 1968, the day of the shooting, Solanas called on her at home and tried to persuade her to produce her play.  When Feidan refused, Solanas pulled out a gun and announced, “Yes, you will produce the play because I’ll shoot Andy Warhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you’ll produce it.”  When Solanas left, Feidan made frantic phone calls to the police and other authorities, but was told that you can’t arrest someone for simply uttering a threat.  Solanas then went to the Factory, met Warhol, took out a .32 revolver, and fired three shots at him.  The first two missed, but the third pierced his vital organs.  She then also wounded another man present, and tried to shoot a third, but her gun jammed. 
     Later that day Solanas surrendered to the police and confessed to the shooting, claiming that Warhol had “tied me up lock, stock and barrel” and was going to ruin her.  Sent to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric observation, she was declared incompetent to stand trial and confined in a prison for the criminally insane.  But in June 1969, being deemed fit now to stand trial, she pleaded guilty to reckless assault and got three years in prison.  Famous at last, she was denounced by Norman Mailer, no friend of feminists, as the “Robespierre of feminism,” but was already hailed by some feminists as a heroine of their movement.
     Released in 1971, Solanas threatened Warhol and others over the telephone and was arrested again in November and institutionalized several times.  After that she faded from the scene and reportedly became homeless, while still clinging to her beliefs.  In 1988 she died of pneumonia and emphysema in a welfare hotel in San Francisco at age 52.  Her life inspired a movie and several plays, and her play “Up Your Ass” was produced as a musical in 2000.  Rejected by mainstream feminists, she was hailed by other feminists as a “girl Nietzsche,” “Medusa,” and “Medea,” and recognized as the founder of radical feminism.
     In shooting Warhol, was Solanas motivated by hate?  Absolutely.  She  hated men, and she hated Warhol in particular, thinking that he meant her ill.  Mentally unstable, she has been described as paranoid or schizophrenic.  Her photographs show a woman with a look of meanness and hate.  And what did it get her?  Fifteen minutes of fame, then a sad and pointless life; she ended up penniless and alone.  (For more on Warhol, see post #108, January 12, 2014.)
The Draft Riots of 1863
     So far I have cited examples of personal hate, the hate of one individual for another.  Now I shall present an example of mass hatred, of a whole group of people acting out of hate.  In July 1863 the Irish immigrants of New York erupted in three days of riot provoked by the draft that the federal government had just enacted, hoping to bring more recruits to the army and end the Civil War.  Resentful of authority and wanting no part of the war, the rioters poured out of their workplaces, marched by the thousand in the streets, and sacked the office where the draft was being implemented.  Far outnumbering the police (many of whom were also Irish), for three days the rioters ran wild in the streets, attacking any person or building they thought  connected with the draft.  Blaming blacks for the draft and the war, they lynched every black they could lay their hands on, often hanging them and building a fire under their dangling bodies, around which the women danced savagely. 


A Harper's Weekly print of the time.
     Only when National Guard regiments that had been fighting at the battle of Gettysburg were rushed back to the city did the rioting stop.  The rioters were not drifters and ne’er-do-wells, but men with steady jobs, and their women.  Their savagery – the women even more frenzied than the men – implies not only a resentment of authority nourished by centuries of British rule in Ireland, but also a deep-seated racial hatred that surfaced suddenly when the streets were theirs.  If Irish immigrants were looked down upon by the WASP majority, the blacks were even lower in the social scale.  Many blacks, having fled, never returned to the city, and the stunned WASP middle class, who felt threatened even in their elegantly furnished brownstones, harbored more than ever a profound distrust of what they called the “desperate” or the “dangerous classes,” most of whom were Irish.
Conclusion

     The personal hates chronicled here built slowly over the years, nourished by an accumulation of apparent grievances, and sometimes by mental instability.  The racial hate behind the draft riots emerged suddenly, when chaos took the streets, anarchy ruled, and anything seemed possible; if it built slowly, it was near invisible, hidden in the depths of a collective psyche.  Which makes me wonder what, if anything, is brewing in my depths, and in the depths of all of us.  But maybe it’s better not to know.

     The book:  The Goodreads giveaway ended on October 12.  509 people entered their name; the winner resides in Illinois.  The e-book will soon be available for $3.99.



     Coming soon:  The Next Big Thing: a Swedish Nightingale, fairies on silver couches in a silver rain,  an Electric Torchlight Parade, why Henry Hale Bliss's death is historic, a kewpie doll buried for 5,000 years, the Fab Four, and a dance that collapsed a building.

     ©  2015 Clifford Browder 

201. Bedford Street: Greek Revivals and the CIA, and a badass granny selling Egyptian chandeliers.

     Recently I walked the whole length of Bedford Street, a quiet, tree-lined street in the West Village, part residential and part commercial, that runs in a southeasterly direction from Christopher Street to Sixth Avenue.  Walking it,  I discovered wonders great and small, though mostly small.  Let’s repeat that walk now and see what we can find.
     We’ll begin at the end, where Bedford  meets Christopher Street (yes, that Christopher Street) just opposite the Lucille Lortel Theater, a theater whose name invokes in me frustration and annoyance, as well as memories of leaving one of its very serious avant-garde productions convulsed in uncontrollable laughter, but that’s another story – really two stories -- unrelated to our walk today.  And by the way, why “Bedford”?  Presumably it is named for a Bedford Street in London, but no one knows quite why.
     The first stretch of Bedford Street, walking southeast from Christopher toward Seventh Avenue, is mostly residential.  At no. 113 on the right or south side of the street is a handsome Greek Revival house with a plaque telling us that it was built in 1843 for George Harrison, the saloon keeper at the nearby Northern Hotel.  (Saloon keepers in those days must have made good money.)  The plaque describes the house’s architecture, noting such features as the recessed doorway flanked by pilasters, which is typical of the Greek Revival style.  I love Greek Revival, its clean lines and elegant simplicity: a nice beginning for our walk.  And inside this handsome façade, an online real estate website informs me, the house even today, despite much renovation, retains its original custom wood, copper, and iron work, which is nothing short of miraculous, since landmarking preserves exteriors, but not interiors, of old buildings.  And what was its last listed price?  $5,950,000.  Which reminds us that charming homes on this tranquil street don’t go for chump change today.
     A little farther on, at the corner of Bedford and Grove Street, is a handsome old three-story frame house, a rarity today because the construction of new frame houses, seen as a fire hazard, was banned in 1866.  White with red shutters framing the windows, it was built in 1822 for William F. Hyde, a window sash maker, whose shop was located just across a yard in another old frame building, now a private residence, at 100 Bedford Street.  Mr. Hyde must have done well, for the city was growing rapidly, and demand for sashes for double-hung windows surely must have been in constant demand; also, the value of his property soared.  Originally a two-story house, in 1870 it added a third story and probably the Italianate-style cornice, typical of Greek Revival and brownstone houses.  I love coming this way at Christmastime, for each of the house’s 14 street-facing windows is adorned with a green wreath with a red ribbon, and if you peek in a ground-floor window on Grove Street, you can see a lighted Tiffany lamp that suggests a sumptuous interior.  I call this the Christmas House.  Whoever lives there lives in style.


    (An aside: Not everyone knows what a window sash is.  A window sash is the framed part of a window that holds the sheets of glass in place.  A double-hung window – the commonest kind of window today – has an upper sash positioned above a lower sash; the lower sash can slide upward until it is almost parallel with the upper sash.  The windows are operated with a series of counterweights in panels on either side of the window.  If the cords or chains holding the counterweights break, the sash they operate will come crashing down.  I know, because it happened to me.  On two separate occasions, single-handed, I actually replaced a broken cord with a chain, which involved removing the window from the wall, installing the chain, and replacing the window in the wall – an epic feat that I wouldn’t want ever to repeat.  Should you need to do this repair, don’t try to do it yourself; pay a professional whatever it costs and watch in wonder as they do it for you.)
     Just past Grove Street, at no. 95 Bedford, is an old four-story building with a ground-floor brownstone façade featuring what appears to be two wide-arched coach house entrances with double doors, and a smaller arched doorway originally leading, so I’ve learned, to the upper floors.  Above the two wide entrances are the engraved words J. GOEBEL & CO., and under that, EST. 1865.  And over those words there is a crest with what seem to be three crucibles flanked by ornamental curlicues.  (Not that I’m sure what crucibles are, or why anyone would need them.  Maybe I encountered them in a high-school chemistry class, but certainly not since, which injects a note of mystery.)  The façade above the ground floor is brick, rising to a boldly projecting cornice.  The building is an eye-catcher, but what is all this about?

     Accounts differ.  Account #1:  J. Goebel & Co., founded here in 1865,  manufactured crucibles, tongs, furnaces, and casting equipment, with the ground floor housing a stable.  But others tell it differently.  Account #2:  Herman Schade, a prosperous merchant in the plumbing business, built no. 95 as his stable in 1894, and perhaps leased the upper floors to tenants.   Julius Goebel arrived in this country from Germany around 1865 and, far downtown at 129 Maiden Lane, established a firm that imported a heat-resistant clay from Germany and used it to make crucibles.  Only in 1927 did the firm, now run by Goebel’s son, move into Schade’s stable, at which point the molded insignia was installed over the arched entrances.  The Goebel firm evidently used the lower floors for warehousing, shipping, and office facilities, while renting out the upper floors to tenants.
     So which version is to be believed?  The building dates from 1865 or 1894?  And the insignia from 1865 or 1927?  Various guides to the city present a conflicting jumble of facts, some even calling the building a former winery or brewery, and interpreting the insignia not as crucibles but as wine vats, and the curlicues of the crest as grape-vine tendrils, which is fanciful indeed.  So we’re on our own.
      I want to go with #1, because the insignia looks so charmingly old, so quaint.  And since you can’t really know a building unless you know the lives of the occupants, I imagine Herr Goebels to be a hard-working Teuton, beefy with a bushy mustache, who six days a week supervises his workmen making crucibles, quantities of which are dispatched from the ground-floor stable by wagons to satisfy a crying need for these mysterious items throughout the city.  Then, on Sunday, he takes his abundant family to a beer garden, where they spend the day feasting on Wiener schnitzel or Sauerbraten, clinking frothy mugs of nose-tingling lager beer, and, teary-eyed, singing sentimental songs of the Fatherland.  Not a bad life, all in all.
     Alas, it doesn’t hold up.  #2 is so well documented, so rich in detail, that I have to regretfully accept it, with the insignia dating only from 1927.  And plumbing instead of crucibles – what a comedown!  But either way, the building catches your eye.
     In 1945 poet Delmore Schwartz moved into a cold-water flat at no. 91, only a few doors away from Chumley’s, where he was soon immersing himself in alcohol.  Acclaimed early as a poet, he was haunted by the thought that he had peaked and was now in decline, which in some ways he was.  Drink and drugs would coarsen him, bloat him, and finally destroy him, a story that was repeated all too often among artists and writers in the Village.
Chumley's today, alas.     Chumley’s at no. 86, near the corner of Bedford and Barrow, was a famous speakeasy of the 1920s with two unmarked entrances, a front one with a peephole in Pamela Court, off Barrow, and a back one at no. 86, available if patrons, fearing a raid, needed to make a quick exit.  (Legend has it this is the origin of the expression to “86 it,” meaning to beat it in a hurry.)  In the bar restaurant’s rustic and woody atmosphere the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) might be holding a meeting upstairs, planning nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism, while Edna St. Vincent Millay read her poetry downstairs.  Surviving Prohibition, Chumley’s, still unmarked by a sign, became a popular literary hangout frequented by the likes of Dreiser, Cather, O’Neill, Cummings, Mailer, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the very thought of whom, all crammed together in one place, sends chills and thrills down the spine.  (It’s just as well it surely never happened; mayhem both literary and physical might have erupted.) 
     As the years passed, Chumley’s evolved yet again, becoming a meeting place for young professionals.  When my partner Bob and a friend visited it in the 1960s, it still had its two entrances, and they entered by the back door because, flanked by garbage cans though it was, they thought it “more picturesque.”  The interior still had its woody atmosphere, featured beer, not wine, and was frequented by a neighborhood crowd seasoned with a few visiting college kids.  In 2007 one of the interior walls collapsed, forcing the bar to close for a lengthy reconstruction.  Now it is finally about to reopen, but neighbors have brought suit to prevent it, feeling that their quiet residential neighborhood is already threatened by booze-dispensing enterprises, and fearing that Chumley’s reopening will attract “unwanted business.” 
     So here again, this time on Bedford Street, the familiar conflict looms: gentrification vs. commerce, tranquility vs. history, with the final decision not yet clear.  But one battle has already been lost: the renovated Chumley’s, following Landmarks Conservancy directives, has an arched door with a transom flanked by sidelights, set in a false stone-block stucco façade – all of it totally unrelated to the Chumley’s of history, architecturally inconsistent with the neighborhood, and to my eye just plain ugly.  Let’s hope that the interior still retains its rustic, woody charm.
     No. 81, an ordinary-looking residential building, has a unique and sinister history, for in 1953 CIA agent George White, a chubby, balding tough-guy veteran of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, rented an apartment here and, using a CIA bank account and a fake identity as an artist, outfitted the place with a two-way mirror, recording equipment, Toulouse Lautrec posters, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet.  His mission: “to develop drugs that would enable the CIA to discredit friends and foes alike, and that could be delivered clandestinely and kill without a trace.”  White was a curious choice for this assignment, being alcoholic and into kinky sex (he liked to be punished by women in stiletto heels), and also, with the full cooperation of his wife, into orgies, but he had worked for the OSS, the CIA’s forerunner, and had distributed marijuana-laced cigarettes to suspected enemy agents in New York during World War II, in hopes of getting them to talk. 
     Having set up his fake artist’s pad, over the next two years White lured unsuspecting victims – or should we say “subjects”? – to his apartment: aspiring actresses, young “hip” couples, even hoodlums, as well as men hooked by hookers whom he paid $100 a night for their service.  He then served his guests drinks laced with LSD and observed their reaction through a two-way mirror that let him view the guests without their knowing it.   “Gloria gets horrors … Janet sky high,” he noted in his diary.  Whether these experiments constituted legitimate research or simply let White enjoy himself sadistically at the expense of others isn’t clear.  In 1955 White and his operation were moved to San Francisco, permitting Bedford Street to resume its customary veneer of gentility.  Years later, reflecting on his career, White remarked:  "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.  Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"  Let’s move on before I register disgust.
     Between Seventh and Sixth Avenues the street, hitherto primarily residential, becomes a mix of residential and commercial.  At no. 75½  is the narrowest building in the village, a three-story brick structure only 9½ feet wide built in 1873 on what was once the carriage entrance to stables in the rear.  Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here briefly in 1923-24, but before one conjures up visions of her penning her flaming sonnets there whenever she could steal time from her many lovers, one should take note that she lived there with her newly acquired husband, a middle-aged Dutch businessman and playboy.  Yes, it was an open marriage, but she and her complaisant husband weren’t there very much, since for their honeymoon they took a two-year trip around the world and then bought a farm upstate.  And what did the building sell for in 2013?  Only $3.25 million.

     Just beyond the skinny building is a row of six handsome Greek Revival  houses.  Behind the 1830s façade at no. 75, so a current real estate listing informs us, is a light-filled artist’s residence with a glass and steel room with an 18-foot ceiling and a limestone floor, a stainless-steel state-of-the-art kitchen, a dining room with a Japanese dining table “perfect for hosting either a Thanksgiving dinner or a Japanese tea ceremony,” and on the top floor a sky-lit artist’s studio.  Just the thing for a struggling young artist today.
Liza Sherman's antique store.
















     Now we enter a stretch that I find less interesting, much of it commercial.  But at no. 37A, just beyond Carmine Street, we come to Liza Sherman’s antique store, with an outsized neon star in the window, and an article reporting that it had caused a sensation among her affluent clients.  Just why it should, I couldn’t imagine; to me it looked big and ugly – and useless too, since it would weigh down any Christmas tree it crowned, with the possible exception of the gigantic one in Rockefeller Center.  Peering through the window and open doorway, I saw a shop cluttered with chandeliers, furniture, and any number of objects I couldn’t even describe or identify.  Online research revealed some of the items on sale there:
·      Set of chairs made from washing machines, $660 per item·      Cast-iron cage light with ribbed glass, $1,100·      Polish multicolored bench, $1,200·      Pygmy suit, $2,600·      Venetian marble-top table, $2,900·      French leather club chair, $4,600·      Egyptian hand-blown chandelier with turquoise bell-shaped glass $7,800·      19th century samurai warrior’s vest, price upon request
Very high prices indeed, and in the most unlikely, most unchic locale.
     When I lingered outside the shop, the octogenarian proprietor was nowhere to be seen, and maybe it’s just as well, given the Yelp reviews that I later found online.  Here, for a human touch this post has so far perhaps lacked, is a sampling of those reviews:
·      Liza the owner is an old snobby witch who will nickel and dime you when she snobbily thinks she's got great stuff -- when really it is just overrated and overpriced.  Oh it's also very moldy-smelling in the store.  I should have listened to my nose….  I have never been treated so badly in a store.
·      Avoid this store!  I thought I had stumbled upon a great little gem, but I actually found a rude proprietor and a lot of overpriced furniture.
·      Buy with caution!  I purchased a lamp for $1200 and found the exact same lamp online for $275.  I thought I bought an antique and not a mass produced lamp.  When I complained via email, Liza ignored me.
·      Do NOT buy from this woman!  She's rude, capricious, unresponsive, and her pricing is out of a control.  We purchased a very expensive Egyptian chandelier from her a couple of years ago that has never worked properly….  Let celebrities keep wasting their money here if they want to -- I'm out.


·      Rude, arrogant, snotty hag of an owner, who rolled her eyes and said condescendingly, "NOT cheap, my dear" when I inquired about the price of a lamp.  What a way to shoot yourself in the foot, lady.  The other reviews were right: it's a whole lot of reproduction stuff sprinkled with a few true antiques, but the woman is such a high-falutin' snot I'd never do a dime of business with her.


Spite makes for keen writing; it sharpens our wit, equips us with an armory of barbs.  I’ve never met the lady in question, but Yelp offers not one positive review.  I suspect that, having a devoted affluent clientele, she doesn’t need walk-ins from the street.  And to attract that clientele, she must radiate some kind of charm, or at least an aura of exclusiveness, of offering things rare and special, whether they really are or not.
     Online one finds a 2011 article with illustrations of Grandma's home, Grandma being the lady herself, seen in one photo dressed stylishly in black, white-haired, and surrounded by a rich clutter of objects.  The whole house (location unspecified) is richly cluttered with brightly colored antiques: signs, rows of mirrors, an inlaid chest, a chair suspended from a ceiling, clocks, a handblown glass chandelier, a furry bench at the foot of a queen-size bed, and very modern-looking chairs on a yellow-painted floor.  Commentary by what appears to be a granddaughter labels the house "a junk shop with a lot of cool junk," and says of Grandma's smiling photo, "she's pretty badass."  A cool granddaughter too, it would seem, and not exactly fawning.  The comments by others that follow the article range from "AWESOME!!!" to "Yuk," with remarks like "not a pastel in sight," "a fun person," "yah for granny balls," and, if the writer owned the house, "that whole mess of crap would go out and STAY OUT."  My final thought: I wouldn't want to deal with Granny personally, but she's her own thing, knows who she is and what she likes, and lives accordingly.  Bland she ain't.  And that I have to applaud.
     Next door to Liza’s shop we encounter a bold sign PSYCHIC and, dangling in the breeze, a smaller sign announcing SPECIAL READING / $10; in the window are crystals and what looks like a god of ancient Egypt.  So if you can’t afford Liza’s prices, right smack next to her you can get an insight into “past/present/future” for a mere ten bucks.
      Finally, and anticlimactically, we arrive at the very beginning of Bedford Street, where it meets roaring traffic at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and West Houston Street.  There’s a small Greenstreets park there, but it’s scant  consolation.  The last building on the south or downtown side of Bedford is a big brick box of an apartment building, with a skimpy side area guarded, on the top of a brick wall, by a row of menacing prongs curved outward to ward off possible marauders.  With this picturesque touch, we know that our tour of quiet, tree-lined Bedford Street has come to an end.
     Source note:  For information on Bedford Street I have consulted many sources online.  But I am especially indebted, once again, to John Strausbaugh’s The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues.  I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the Village. 
     Yogi Berra:  This legendary Yankee baseball player died recently at the age of 90.  He was famous for his nonsensical utterances, which he insisted were said in all seriousness.  Here are some of my favorites:
·      When you come to a fork in the road, take it.·      It’s déjà vu all over again.·      Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.·      Never answer an anonymous letter.·      90% of the game is half mental.·      No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.·      Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.
Lurking behind each of these is some intended meaning, but Yogi never quite managed to achieve it.  But this one, I insist, does have meaning as stated:
·      It ain’t over till it’s over.
And with this bit of wisdom, this post too is almost over.
     The Goodreads giveaway of a copy of my selection of posts from this blog, No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, ends on Monday, October 12.  So far, 201 people have signed up for the giveaway, and 82 have marked the book "to read."  If I do another giveaway, I’ll announce it.

     Coming soon:  Hate: four shootings and a riot, and why I wish my music teacher had been buried in quicksand.  And after that, The Next Big Thing.  Suggestions as to what it might be are welcome, as are reviews of the book on Amazon.
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder   


     

200. New York Humor

     Is there a sense of humor peculiar to New York?  Let’s explore the subject and see.  Since the New Yorker presents itself as quintessential New York, we’ll have a look at some of their cartoons (minus the cartoons themselves, alas).  Not the cartoons of recent years, which I don’t find that amusing, but vintage cartoons from the past.  Then as now, they often show a middle-aged couple in their living room, with one of them addressing the other. 
    In one cartoon that I still find amusing, the husband says to the wife, “Well how would you feel, if someone called you ‘spry’?”  Of course this assumes that the reader catches the nuances of “spry,” which most Americans would; it’s used of the elderly and meant in a complimentary but somewhat condescending way.  Right off one notices that New Yorker cartoons have a context, require a certain amount of prior knowledge.
     A famous New Yorker cartoon shows a householder retrieving the Sunday New York Times that has been delivered to his doorstep.  When he picks it up, under it he finds a dog squashed flat.  No New Yorker requires an explanation, but other readers might not fully “get” it, unless they know just how thick and heavy a Sunday Times can be.
    Still another cartoon: a matronly woman is showing a bunch of tiny tots around a museum that could well be the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The kids are eyeing a painting reminiscent of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), showing two very clothed gentlemen and two very unclothed ladies lunching in a rural setting.  Says the matron, somewhat taken aback, “It’s … a picnic.”
[image error] Some picnic.
     Still another very New York-centered cartoon is a cover illustration of the New Yorker showing a crowded rush-hour subway car and, holding onto a strap and unmistakable, Osama bin Laden.  But the tired commuters either have their nose in a book or newspaper, or stare vacantly into space; no one recognizes the man most wanted by the U.S. authorities in the wake of 9/11.  I sent this to a friend in North Carolina with a brief explanation of New York commuters and the boredom of the commute; without that explanation, he confessed he wouldn’t have “got” it.
     Finally, I’ll mention my favorite New Yorker cartoon, dating from years ago but fresh in my mind because our downstairs neighbor has it posted on his bathroom wall.  Speeding in a roadster are a middle-aged couple, the wife in an abundance of furs and an outlandish hat that looks like an inverted funnel, and the husband sporting dark glasses, with a cigar planted firmly in his teeth.  Everything about them says filthy rich, and nouveau riche at that.  The wife says to the husband, “Remember that Christmas you sold your watch to buy me a comb, and I sold my hair to buy you a watch fob?”  Mildly funny to begin with, but much funnier if you recognize the famous O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi,” that inspired it.  In the story a young husband and wife with scant resources want to give each other a really nice Christmas present, so he sells his watch to buy her accessories for her hair, and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain.  They then discover that their gifts have been rendered useless, but they appreciate the intent behind them and therefore feel rewarded.  The O. Henry story has a dose of sentiment, but the cartoon has none.  Once again, for full appreciation the New Yorker cartoon requires prior knowledge on the part of the viewer.
     What do I conclude so far?  Yes, there is a New York sense of humor, urban, sophisticated, and devoid of sentiment, and it assumes a certain knowledge and awareness.  Here now are two time-honored New York jokes, so time-honored that no New Yorker will waste a laugh on them, but that show a New York sensibility:
     Tourist to New Yorker: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”     New Yorker: “Practice, practice, practice.”
Again, there’s a context: you have to know the significance of Carnegie Hall.
     The second joke: A young man arrives for the first time in the city and sets his luggage down.  “Look out, New York,” he announces, “I’m here to conquer you!”  But when he looks down, his luggage is gone.  (More relevant in the 1960s and 1970s, when New Yorkers were obsessed with crime.)
     Further conclusion, based on these two jokes: New Yorkers consider themselves insiders, and everyone else outsiders.  But the club is not exclusive.  Anyone can join it by moving to New York, or by visiting often enough to get to know the New York temperament.
     So what do New Yorkers laugh at today?  Here are some examples:
·      Larry Craig, a Republican senator from Idaho, was arrested in 2007 for alleged lewd conduct in an airport men’s room.  He claimed it was all a misunderstanding, to be explained in part by his “wide stance” when sitting on the john.  Late-night comedians had a field day with this, and New Yorkers joined heartily in.
·      “Wildman” Steve Brill, a forager who leads people on foraging tours in city parks, was arrested in 1986 for picking and eating a dandelion in Central Park.  When the media reported a man arrested for eating a dandelion and described him as “nabbed 
Here he's putting the bite on Japanese knotweed.
     in mid-bite,” gales of hilarity erupted, and the charges were dropped before the case could be laughed out of court.  (I celebrate the Wildman in post #23.)
·      In 1997, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a committed law-and-order type, appeared in public in drag, sporting a blond wig, jewelry, and a frilly pink gown, New Yorkers were at first incredulous.  When the story proved true, they roared with laughter and came close to forgiving Mr. Get-Tough-on-Crime his many misdeeds as mayor.
·      In the 1990s I did volunteer work for the Whole Foods Project, a nonprofit advocating a nutrition-based approach to AIDS and cancer. At one of the Project’s Sunday suppers a young woman performer, an enthusiastic supporter of the organization, introduced a number of her own by telling how she approached a new neighbor, a young woman from Memphis, and inviting her over for cocktails so they could get to know each other.  “Oh no,” the neighbor replied, “I couldn’t do that.”  “Why not?”  The singer then launched into her song, “Jesus loves me but he can’t stand you!”  It brought the house down.  The woman minister of the church, in whose recreation hall  the event was taking place, happened to be present and laughed so hard she nearly fell out of her chair.  The occasion is vivid in my mind to this day.
     The last example might not work outside New York, depending on the audience, but it suited the city’s sense of humor completely.  Urban and sophisticated, New York humor tends also to be secular, and leery of anything claiming to be sacred.
     What New Yorkers do and don’t find funny in a public figure can be seen in the career of Jim Fisk, the bouncy Vermonter whose antics put Wall Street in a frenzy more than once, and whose grandiose style of living while managing and mismanaging the Erie Railway earned him the name Prince Erie.  To replenish Erie’s near-empty coffers, he and his pal Jay Gould brought suit against Commodore Vanderbilt, the richest man in the country, whom they had already diddled once but hoped to diddle again.  Appearing in court, Fisk testified in a whimsical manner that repeatedly elicited laughter.  Describing an interview he had had with Vanderbilt, he said, “It was pretty warm -- not the interview but the weather.”  (Laughter.)  “I remember, because the Commodore was a bit profane about it.”  (Great laughter.)  “It shocked me to hear him talk like that.”  (Laughter.) 
     Fisk further remembered that, while he and Vanderbilt talked, he had noticed the great man’s shoes.  “They had four buckles.  I thought to myself, if men like this have shoes like them, I must get me a pair.”  (Hilarious laughter.)  So convulsed in mirth was the courtroom, that the judge himself was wiping tears from his eyes.
     And when Fisk and Gould tried to corner gold and almost succeeded, convulsing markets on both sides of the ocean, they were summoned to Washington to testify before a Congressional committee investigating the tumultuous events of September 24, 1869, Black Friday.  Had Mr. Fisk tried to corner gold?  Certainly not.  The committee chairman was baffled; millions had been at stake that day, yet no one admitted to a profit. 
     “Mr. Fisk,” he asked, “where did all that money go?
     Replied Fisk, “It went where the woodbine twineth.”
     Silence.  Then titters, followed by mounting gales of laughter. 
     New Yorkers couldn’t help but like a rascal who disarmed courtrooms and even a Congressional committee with mirth.  But then there came a change.  Scandal-hungry elements of the press began reporting on Prince Erie’s deteriorating relationship with his lavishly kept inamorata, Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield, who was said to be dispensing her charms to a certain Ned Stokes, a dapper young man about town.  Quarrels followed and Miss Mansfield, in a gesture of fiery farewell, hurled Fisk’s galoshes into the street.  When a cartoon appeared in the press, showing Prince Erie bedewing his galoshes with tears, Gotham roared.                                 But for Prince Erie, worse was to come.  In July 1871, when Fisk’s Ninth Regiment of the National Guard was protecting a march of Ulstermen against threats of violence from Irish Catholics, shots rang out, causing panicky spectators to stampede across the line of march, leaving the toppled colonel with a dislocated ankle.  To avoid mobs of hostile Irish, he hobbled down back alleyways, hid his uniform under a coat given him by a sympathetic householder, took a taxi to the docks, boarded a steamboat, and ended up nursing his swollen ankle on the veranda of a hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey, a resort where he was persona most grata. 
     Getting wind of Colonel Fisk’s strategic retreat all the way to New Jersey, the press turned viciously on him, reporting rumors of his “wounded (?) ankle,” his backyard flight past ash cans and privies, his alleged fainting from terror, his fleeing the state in an old lady’s bonnet and dress.  All the dailies sneered.
     When the ailing Colonel finally retuned to New York, he faced lawsuits by Stokes and Josie attempting to squeeze thousands of dollars out of him.  He who had once reveled in attention from the press now fled reporters hounding him daily for more juicy scraps of gossip.  And he who had always been a joke-spewing mixer, a “people person,” kept more and more to himself, holed up in his brownstone with his valet, wrenched from the rumpus of his life.  Yet the press showed him no mercy, and the town continued to titter and guffaw.  Like most Americans, New Yorkers suck joy from the fall of the mighty.
     When Ned Stokes, enraged by defeats in court, shot Fisk on a hotel stairway on January 6, 1872, and Fisk died the following day, the city reappraised him.  Still hostile to Prince Erie were Wall Street, the bluebloods, and the pious, who viewed him as an upstart, a publicity-hogging parvenu, a disrupter of markets, a cheat, and a wanton.  Those who sincerely mourned him included bellhops, messenger boys, dancers and chorus girls, his office staff and his adoring National Guard regiment, Erie Railway bruisers (his bodyguard), and recipients of his random acts of charity. 
     What made half the town idolize this rascal?  He had tweaked noses with a wink of merriment, punctured pretensions, tipped generously, and laughed heartily at himself; above all, he was fun.  When, as colonel of the Ninth, he got a military funeral with all the frills involved, multitudes watched in tears, as his coffin was borne away to the sound of muffled drums, with six colonels and a general in black-draped, solemn pomp – the biggest sendoff seen in the city since Lincoln’s casket had passed though en route to Illinois, a comparison that some thought obscene.  Prince Erie had been a rascal, but at least a merry one; they would miss his bustle and shine.
     Further conclusions: New Yorkers love a sense of humor, scorn weakness, relish scandal, hate pretension, esteem those who can laugh at themselves.
     A personal note regarding this last:  The only president of my time that I disliked personally was Richard Nixon.  There was something about him that put me off: his total lack of humor, his vindictiveness, his vulnerabilities masked by spite and rage.  My dislike began when, during Eisenhower's presidency, Nixon, the Vice President, was photographed in a church praying for Eisenhower's recovery from a heart attack; the photo had obviously been carefully planned, with the photographer positioned in the pew in front of him, so as to get a good full-length shot from the front.  On the other hand, though I disliked almost all his policies, I rather liked George Bush Jr.  When the Washington Press Club confronted him with a list of his utterances that made little or no sense, he laughed and said he hadn’t the slightest idea what he had meant to say.  This won me over completely.
     When it comes to four-letter words and irreverence, New Yorkers are an easygoing bunch, vastly more tolerant than many.  But that doesn’t include the authorities, as seen in the Lenny Bruce obscenity trial of 1964.  A stand-up comedian already notorious for his loose language and numerous arrests, Bruce was appearing at the Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street in (where else?) Greenwich Village, where his performance on March 31, 1964, included a bevy of blunt sexual references such as “jack me off,” “motherfucker,” and “go come in a chicken”; the observation that “Eleanor Roosevelt has the nicest tits of any lady in office”; familiar monologs of his like “Pissing in the sink” and “To is a preposition.  Come is a verb”; and the statement that men are oversexed animals willing to have quick sex with anything that moves, including a chicken.  Sitting in the audience was a city license inspector who scribbled notes furiously.  On April 3 plainclothesmen arrested Bruce and the club’s owner on charges of presenting “obscene, immoral, and impure … entertainment … which would tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others” – charges bringing a maximum of three years in prison.  (And charges that, come to think of it, echo the charges against Socrates in ancient Athens.)
One of his many arrests, this one in 1961.     News of Bruce’s arrest provoked protests from prominent writers and entertainers of the day – Allen Ginsberg, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Woody Allen, and others -- guaranteeing that the trial in June 1964 before a three-judge panel would be well attended and well reported.  Bruce’s attorney thought he faced prosecution not for his use of dirty words, but for his attacks on religion and public figures.  The prosecutor, on the other hand, viewed Bruce’s show as a series of “nauseating word pictures” seasoned with offensive words spewed at the audience, unredeemed by any artistry or cogent social criticism.  Testimony by the license inspector and policemen who had attended performances took three days.  The defense called expert witnesses who testified that Bruce’s routine was not sexually arousing, did not offend local community standards, and was socially significant.  The prosecution then complained that it had trouble finding expert witnesses to counter these arguments, because the experts didn’t want to come off as “squares.”  So there it was: the hip vs. the square, easygoing New York vs. the prudes or, to be kinder, vs. traditional morality.
     The decision wasn’t announced until November 4, 1964: guilty.  Bruce’s act, said the presiding judge, appealed to prurient interest, was patently offensive to the average person in the community, and lacked redeeming social importance.  One of the three judges dissented.
     At a later date Bruce was sentenced to four months in the workhouse but was free on bail.  He never served time, for he died of a morphine overdose in California on August 3, 1966.  One of the New York assistant prosecutors later expressed regret for his role in the case, stating that they had used the  law to kill him.
Lenny Bruce's grave in Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California.
Paul Neugass     I suspect that the presiding judge was right in asserting that Bruce’s act was offensive to the community, for that community was not confined to the East and West Village, but extended to all five boroughs.  (But were all five boroughs in the audience that night?)  Whether or not the act appealed to prurient interest, I can’t say, not having witnessed the performance; I doubt if it would have fired me up.  On the other hand, I’m not sure if I would have found it funny or socially significant.  This was the late Lenny Bruce, drug-ridden, unfocused, obsessed with his drug busts and obscenity arrests – not Lenny at the peak of his career.  But there is something very moving in his appeal to the judges, just prior to sentencing, to see his act just once.
     Today New York City and State derive scant satisfaction from the prosecution of Lenny Bruce.  In 2003 a group of prominent lawyers, scholars, and entertainers sent a letter to Governor George Pataki asking that he issue a posthumous pardon of Bruce to show the state’s commitment to free speech, free press, and free thinking.  And the governor granted it – the first posthumous pardon in the state’s history.  So the last laugh is Lenny’s after all.
     Those who defended Bruce at the time of his arrest, and who argued for a posthumous pardon, are a good indicator as to who define and shape the New York sense of humor.  They include:Live-wire activists who write letters and sign petitionsThe “in” people, the “with-it” crowd, the hip (or those who think they are)The young in spirit (if not in years)Manhattan professionals (who often commute from the other boroughs)People who spend little time in churches, synagogues, or templesPeople who read the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and  Mother JonesPeople who spend time in museums and galleries, but give little attention to sportsHardy souls who think of themselves as unshockable (until some event proves them wrong)Needless to say, this leaves out a lot of New Yorkers who do spend time in  churches, synagogues, and temples, who do follow sports, and have never heard of Mother Jones.  But they don’t define New York humor.
     Goodreads giveaway:  I have listed one copy of No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World as a giveaway on Goodreads, the website for people who like to read books.  The free copy will be given to one of those who sign up for it; Goodreads will pick the winner.  So far, 124 people have entered their names.  In addition, 53 people have marked the book as "to read," though I know from experience that this doesn't mean that all 53 are going to read it.  (A confession: Long ago I marked three books as "to read," but still haven't found the time to read them.)

     Coming soon:  Bedford Street: Edna St. Vincent and the Wobblies, an old witch selling Egyptian chandeliers, and drinks laced with LSD, courtesy of the CIA.
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder       

199. Roughriders on West 44th Street

     West 44th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan is not my turf, and for at least three reasons.  On the north or uptown side of the street it harbors in close proximity (1) the exclusive Harvard Club rising in stately neo-Georgian splendor at 35 West 44th ; (2) the very private New York Yacht Club at no. 37, a 1901 Beaux-Arts concoction jutting huge galleon-style windows over the street with sinuous braids of seaweed, as well as snails, shells, dolphins, ships, and leviathans in limestone -- a nautical extravaganza over which J.P. Morgan once reigned as commodore; and finally, for a very modern touch, (3) the Sofitel New York at no. 45, a luxury hotel where room 2806, the presidential suite, goes for $3,000 a night, and where, in another room, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for the French presidency, was accused of sexually assaulting a maid.  And all three flying the flag!  With all due respect to Old Glory, I repeat that this is not my turf, because (1) I didn’t go to Harvard, (2) I don’t have a yacht, and (3) I don’t need a luxury hotel, least of all one that may have witnessed the grievous misdeeds of M. Strauss-Kahn.
Harvard Club




















New York Yacht Club
Dmadeo


Sofitel New York
Rob Young


















    And yet recently I found myself hurrying along that very block.  My goal  was neither the Harvard Club nor the Yacht Club nor the Sofitel, but another noble structure where I had never to date set foot: the New York City Bar Association at no. 42, an imposing Gilded Age edifice completed in 1897 and  
New York Bar Association 
Pattonnh
fronted by two soaring Doric columns.  Between those columns, taking shelter from a hint of rain, I waited patiently for the friend who had invited me to this address for a special occasion having nothing to do with the Bar.  As I waited there in my “business casual” attire—a polo shirt and slacks – I saw an endless procession of lawyerly types in jacket and tie and toting a bulging briefcase come and go, making me feel still more out of place.  Finally, toward noon, I ventured inside and beheld, stretching away into the inner recesses of this landmarked monument, a marble entrance hall worthy of Versailles.  Though tempted to explore, I did not proceed farther, since my destination was immediately to my right: the Hughes Room, a handsome high-ceilinged room with a woody feel that I peeked at from the doorway.

The entrance hall, which I longed to, but did not, explore.
Pattonnh
The original Roughrider, 1898.     What brought me for the first time ever to the Hughes Room?  An invitation from my friend to attend a meeting of the Roughriders, a name that, for a history buff like me, evokes images of Teddy Roosevelt rampaging up San Juan Hill and into the White House, his wartime exploits having made him vice president and then president in his own right.  But no, the Roughriders, who got their name from the room at the Roosevelt Hotel where they originally met in 1956, are also known as the Toastmasters, and are a club of middle-class professionals working to hone their skills in public speaking.  At first thought there’s something rather quaint and charming about the notion of public speaking, suggesting the popular and often lucrative lecture circuits of the nineteenth century when Americans, having neither radio nor TV, flocked to lectures by visiting speakers (Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan among them) in quest of entertainment, instruction, and inspiration.  But the Toastmasters, as we shall see, are a distinctly twenty-first-century breed of public speakers, very earnest and very professional.
     When my friend arrived, a young Taiwanese-born woman of many talents and many languages, she ushered me into the room, introduced me to several friends, and waved me toward the buffet luncheon.  Being famished, I helped myself generously and sat down at the long table in the center of the room and, even as I gobbled, took in my surroundings.  The Hughes Room is a handsome woody chamber with dreary rows of gray law books on low shelves around the walls, two chandeliers with ornate curlicues, handsome leather armchairs (like the one I was sitting in) with gilt-studded arms, and an impressive fireplace over which, in a thick gilt frame, hangs a large full-length portrait of a bearded gentleman who reeks of dignity and authority – surely Charles Evans Hughes, a former member of the Bar Association, who had given his name to the room. 
Charles Evans Hughes, as Governor of New York.  Not the
portrait in the Hughes Room, but still reeking dignity.
     I suspect that the assembling members of the club were little aware of Mr. Hughes’s presence, flanked though he is by two smaller portraits of likewise imposing dignitaries, and I myself only vaguely recalled him as a Supreme Court justice and an almost-president.  Later research would establish him as having been (though not simultaneously) Governor of New York, Associate and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Secretary of State and, in 1916, the Republican candidate for the presidency who lost out to Woodrow Wilson in a very tight election.  Legend has it that he went to bed thinking he had won, but by morning more results had come in, making Wilson the winner.  When a journalist phoned Hughes’s residence to get his reaction to the news, Hughes’s son or a servant (accounts differ) answered, saying, “The President is asleep.”  The journalist then replied, probably with a touch of malice, ‘When he wakes up, tell him he isn’t the President.”
     All of which has little to do with the Toastmasters, except to help establish the setting and my reaction to it.  The Roughriders Toastmasters Club meets every Thursday from noon to 2:00 p.m. to provide a workshop where members can perfect their speaking and leadership skills in a professional and supportive environment.  I was especially eager to attend this meeting, since my friend would be giving the climactic last speech of a ten-step program, each step of which involves giving a prepared speech with certain objectives in mind.  Just how this worked I would soon learn.
Curriculum of Toastmasters International, of which
the Roughriders are an affiliate.
Chris Charabaruk
     At 12:30 sharp the meeting was called to order by the presiding officer, a charming Japanese-American woman whose very presence there, reinforcing that of my Taiwanese-born friend, demonstrated the group’s diversity.  Yes, they were all well-educated and successful middle-class professionals with mysterious letters (ACB, CL, CC) appended to their names, but within that group there were members of very different backgrounds.  My friend, for instance, had worked in various business jobs on two continents and, besides her native Chinese, was fluent in English and Japanese and had some knowledge of German.  Also in the room were an African-American and an Orthodox Jew.  What brought these people together was a community of interests and purpose.  A good mix, worthy of New York.
     After some opening remarks, the fun began.  First, the Table Topics, brief impromptu talks on the theme “Where did the summer go?”  This prompted memories of summer jobs and summer vacations.  One speaker told of attending a Boy Scout camp and making a bit of money selling snakes, which for some reason were in hot demand.  Another told of mowing lawns and doing yard work, his toil seasoned by winks and come-ons from housewives in the absence of their hubbies – evidence of the looser morals of the 1970s, he observed, without relating what then, if anything, resulted.  (A good speaker’s ploy: leave them wanting more.)  Then and throughout the meeting, some speakers stayed close to the lectern, while others ranged freely about; all used gestures effectively.  The talks were carefully timed, with no one to go over the time allotted.  Members then voted on the best Table Talk speaker, and the winner received an award.
     Next came the main course of the banquet, the four prepared speeches.  By now I was impressed by the speaking skills of the members, who spoke without the notorious American mumble (we often speak in a monotone, barely opening our mouth), without ums, and without amplification.  (An example of ums:  “I’m glad you asked that because … um … it’s especially relevant to what … um … we’re taking about.”)
     The first speaker I had some trouble understanding, perhaps because of projection but perhaps also, in that high-ceilinged room, because of acoustics; but she was well received.
     My friend was the second speaker; her theme, “Life Is Better in Two,”  was meant to inspire.  The gist of it was simple: should a single woman of 38, committed to her work and successful, get a dog, as a friend suggested, or instead start looking for a husband?  (Which reminds me of the old radio soap opera “The Romance of Helen Trent,” which asked if a woman 35 or older could still find romance; needless to say, Helen did, albeit in a respectable 1930s way, thus giving hope to frustrated housewives throughout the nation.)  While speaking, my friend smiled graciously and seasoned her talk with humor, and in her quest for a husband stressed the importance of not giving up.  After some missteps she did indeed find a husband – a handsome, gray-haired older man who was sitting at the far end of the table – and has now been happily married for five years.  When she took him to Taiwan to meet her family, who had all but given up on her marrying, they liked him immediately, though she had to school him in the ways of Chinese culture, very different from ours.  Though hers was a serious theme, and inspiring, she had us smiling or laughing throughout. 
     (Another point of view is of course possible.  Recently a Visiting Nurse from the Caribbean came to my partner Bob, absolutely radiant with joy; the mere sight of her gladdened us both. “You know why I’m so happy?” she asked, unsolicited.  “Because there’s no man in my life!”  She left us almost singing.)
     The third speaker, giving a step #2 speech meant to inform, had chosen the theme “Accentuate the Positive.”  She asked if we knew, on average, what percentage of our thoughts are negative, and solicited guesses from the members.  (Hazard a guess; the answer follows below.)  She then emphasized the need for positive thinking and at one point had us singing that old song, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive.”  Her message resonated with me since, being under great pressure that morning, I had probably registered 90% negative, though attending this meeting brought it down to 10 or less.
     The last speaker, already a professional speaker, had for a theme “Take Me to Your Leader” and emphatically made the point, “You yourself are your leader,” with all the responsibilities entailed.  Not a bad conclusion to that segment of the meeting.
     Members then voted for the best speaker and, to her genuine surprise, my friend got the award.  Evaluations of each speech by another member followed, for the group has no instructor, and members are always evaluated by their peers.  The evaluations were detailed, often complimentary, and tactful in criticism, with attention to facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, and the use of humor.  Another member serving as “grammarian and um counter” then made a report, having kept track of grammar lapses and those invasive ums.  There can’t have been many of either, since the report was brief and now escapes my memory. 
      The meeting adjourned at 2:00 p.m. on the dot, at which point members engaged in a social free-for-all, and the babble level rose.  My friend  introduced me to her husband – the first prosecutor I have ever met -- who said he has stories from his work to tell, but not until he retires.  He was impeccably dressed, spoke with rather clipped words, and struck me as very New York, being charged with energy, but channeled energy, disciplined --  in the courtroom, I suspect, a power to reckon with.  Who today, come to think of it, could have more need of good public speaking skills than an attorney addressing a jury?
     So ended my session with the Roughriders, unique in my experience: a friendly bunch but serious, very professional, highly motivated, submitting readily to a structured environment where speeches are monitored by a timekeeper, grammar lapses are noted, and ums are counted.  My friend has urged me to come and speak to them, but given the level of their skills, I wouldn’t so presume; I can just imagine the awkward pauses, the grammatical lapses that would occur, and the ums that would multiply to the point … um … where the counter … um … would lose count.  Besides, I’m a writer; my concern is with the written, not the spoken, word.
     Regarding prepared speeches, I have one cautionary remark.  The challenge is to keep them spontaneous – the same challenge that actors face in performing a role over and over again.  But in this regard the Roughriders did rather well.
     I have often been struck by the contrast between the cultivated, articulate, disciplined speech of British public figures and the mumbling, rambling flabbiness of our own.  Granted, some of our presidents have acquitted themselves fairly well.  Roosevelt – not the Roughrider, the other one – had a patrician grace seasoned with humor that went over with the masses, and he left us some memorable phrases:
·      “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  (From his first inaugural address, in the pit of the Depression.)·      “I welcome their hatred.”  (Referring to the forces of “organized money.”)·      “A day that will live in infamy.”  (Of Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.)
FDR giving a fireside chat on the radio -- a tough act to follow.
     His successor, Truman, was feisty and blunt on the stump – no refined speaker, but with a directness that got him elected.  Eisenhower, while eminently likable, rambled a bit, and his slurred speech – “in’erestin’” -- drove English teachers to despair.  John F. Kennedy had wit, but Lyndon Johnson did not; his folksy Texan ways failed to inspire.  Jimmy Carter had sincerity, and Ronald Reagan projected warmth, made people feel deep-down good.  Poppa Bush admittedly lacked “the vision thing,” but he is not alone.  Bill Clinton was garrulous, using five words where two would do.  Baby Bush could walk onstage with a snappy stride, but his few memorable utterances were uninspired, if not calamitous (“Bring ’em on,” when our troops in Iraq had their hands full).  Our current President has certainly had his moments, but we need more of them.  Conclusion: most of our post-World War II Presidents could have profited from a few sessions with the Roughriders – in fact, most of them needed the whole ten-step program.
     This was not always the case with our public figures, as seen in two famous speeches delivered by American politicians of another age.  In 1830 Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts took on Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina in a passionate speech defending the Union and the Constitution, his words flowing so smoothly and eloquently that one who heard him likened them to the steady flow of molten gold.  Resonating even today, and carved in the pedestal of his statue in Central Park, is his concluding affirmation of “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”  Many consider this the most eloquent speech ever delivered in Congress. 
     For the second example of good public speaking, we’ll fast forward to 1896.  At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska delivered a speech that pitted silver versus gold as legal tender (or, more accurately, silver and gold versus gold alone), the West and South versus the Northeast, the common man versus Eastern elites, farmers and laborers versus businessmen and bankers, the agrarian Great Plains versus Wall Street in the distant, wicked city of New York.  A passionate speech eliciting much applause, it concluded  dramatically, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”  As he spoke these words, he pressed his hands to his temples, then extended his arms to his sides and held this pose briefly, as if offering himself as a sacrifice. 
     Hammy, we may think today, but things were different back then.  As he left the podium to return to his seat, the audience sat in stunned silence, and Bryan feared that he had failed. Then, suddenly, the convention hall burst into pandemonium as delegates cheered and tossed hats and handkerchiefs in the air, and hoisted Bryan to their shoulders to carry him around the floor in triumph.  Often hailed as the most effective American political speech ever made, the Cross of Gold Speech made Bryan, at the tender age of 36, the 1896 Democratic candidate for the presidency.  Bryan lost the election to the Republican, William McKinley, but from then on he was a major political figure to contend with, and the Democratic presidential candidate again in 1900 and 1908. 
An artist's portrayal of the pandemonium following
Bryan's Cross of Gold Speech.
     Obviously, in those days public speaking counted; it could vault you into  influence and power.  As for today, with the pre-election presidential debate season already in full swing, well seasoned with impassioned shouting matches and insults, I’ll let the voters decide who measures up and … um … who doesn’t.
     Papal mass:  The Pope left yesterday, after a tumultuous greeting here, and the city can now breathe a sigh of relief and try to get back to normal (whatever that may be).  Yesterday he celebrated a Mass at Madison Square Garden for some 20,000 people.  Tickets were almost impossible to come by, and hours ahead of time there was a line that stretched for fifteen blocks in Midtown.  What's not so well known is the fact that a special team of volunteers were on hand, stationed throughout the Garden, to make sure that everyone who received the host at Communion consumed it, instead of taking it home as a souvenir.  So far as I know, no unpleasant scenes resulted, and the hosts did get consumed.  Outside the Garden all kinds of papal souvenirs were available, including T-shirts, caps, squeezable dolls, umbrellas, and an 8-inch-tall bobblehead beaming a benign papal smile.  



     Sex sells:  An artist friend showing at the recent Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit told me, “Red sells.”  When I went home and checked the five works of his that I own, I found that two of them had a dash of red right in the center, immediately drawing the eye.  Yes, red sells.  And when I checked the number of views for the last post of this blog, “New York Hustlers,” I found that the total for the first  day it appeared (Sunday) was 206 – far more than usual.  And for Monday it was 140, and for Tuesday, 150 – again, more than usual for the days following publication of a post.  My post wasn’t about hustlers in the sense of male prostitutes, but viewers coming to the post didn’t know that.  And who, besides Americans, were interested?  The Irish.  And which other posts are perennial favorites?  Man/Boy Love: The Great Taboo (#43, Jan. 20, 2013), the all-time favorite, and Francis J. Spellman, the Controversial Cardinal (#136, July 20, 2014), which ends with the inevitable question: Was he or wasn’t he?  Yes, sex sells.


     Coming soon:  New York Humor.  Is there a New York sense of humor?  For New Yorkers, what is funny and what isn’t?  In the offing: Bedford Street, then Hate.  And maybe – just maybe – the imperious Donald (and I don’t mean Donald Duck).
     ©  2015  Clifford Browder
     And oh yes, the book:  From those who read it, a review in Amazon would be much appreciated.

198. New York Hustlers

     The word “hustler” has many meanings.  It can mean a male prostitute, but publisher Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine is a monthly porn sheet that is blatantly, flagrantly heterosexual.  In this post I take “hustlers” to mean people who promote themselves or something else aggressively.  Hustlers of this variety are endemic in New York City and always have been.  This city is a mecca for hustlers of every kind, from the Wall Street sharper to the sorriest, most down-and-out panhandler.  In previous posts I’ve covered plenty of them, as for instance:
·      Panhandlers (#143)·      Patent medicine men (#191)·      Andy Warhol (#108)·      Robert Moses, the master builder (#78)·      Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean (#81)·      Walter Winchell (#86)·      Fiorello La Guardia (#102)·      Norman Mailer (#139)·      Al Sharpton (#164)
Some might question one or another of these as examples of the hustler --  Andy Warhol, I’m told, had a very gentle manner -- but I think that each, in his or her own way, showed the aggressiveness typical of the species.  Not included here, however, are the subway and sidewalk entertainers described in vignette #6; some of them may verge on hustling, but to label all such entertainers “hustlers” would be too inclusive, and unfair.  The true hustler is usually pushy and often, though not always, offensive.
Some of them do have imagination … and a sense of humor.
     An exuberant and especially gifted hustler was Jim Fisk (posts #44 and #61ff.), who graduated from Yankee peddler in Vermont to impresario and Wall Street robber baron, promoting himself and his wares -- whether calicoes or cancans or the stock of the near-bankrupt Erie Railway – with vigor and flair.  And his successors, whether they’ve heard of him or not, flourish on Wall Street today.  Wall Street is, and always has been, a nest of hustlers, a stewpot of greed.  (And a few reasonably honest individuals as well, but who ever hears of them?)  Which reminds me of what a Wall Streeter of some years back once said: “Aim for the stars and you get chorus girls.  Aim for chorus girls and you get nothing.”  Which goes a long way toward explaining the mental make-up of the hustler.
     Have I ever been hustled?  (And I don’t mean by male prostitutes, though there’s a recent exception.)  Yes.  Long ago, while dining in a New York restaurant with friends on Halloween, our table was approached by a young black kid who wanted money – a twisted variation of “trick or treat,” since he wore no costume and just wanted cash.  How he even got in there I can’t imagine.  In any case, we gave him nothing.
     And once, returning from vacation, I was approached at Grand Central Station by another young black kid who opened a taxi door for me and for this needless act wanted a tip.  The taxi driver told him to clear out, but, being in a good mood, I gave him a quarter.
     On another occasion I saw a woman in a floor-length nunlike gown stride boldly into a bar and get, from an obliging bartender, a dollar or two, and then immediately leave – bound, no doubt, for other bars.  She was, of course, a hustler, for no authentic nun would walk into a bar in quest of donations.  In my experience a nun may sit quietly in a public place, eyes down, with a dish for donations, but she never solicits and rarely even makes eye contact with others.  Long ago I used to see one in the subway, but now, come to think of it, I haven’t seen any for years.
     Lately, getting soft of heart and head, I’ve often given to beggars if they look old and somewhat decrepit, but rarely if they look young and healthy, and never if they get pushy.  In other words, never if they come on like a hustler.
     And once, just a few weeks ago, I had a curious adventure.  It was the night of my eye surgery, and with a big patch over my right eye I had gone to bed early, but an hour later I heard the hall door, which we never close tight, creak and squeak a bit, which told me someone had entered the apartment.  Flashlight in hand and still half asleep, I went to investigate and found a young man in his mid- to late twenties just inside the door.
     “I saw your door was open,” he explained.  “I’m waiting for a friend.  Would you mind if I used your bathroom?”
     Being barely awake and not knowing everyone in the building, much less their friends, I said yes.  Minutes later he called me into the bathroom, said that his belt was broken and asked if I could give him some rubber bands to fix it.
     “Rubber bands?” I asked incredulously.
    “Or some string,” he added.
     Eager by now to get rid of him, I fetched both rubber bands and string.  But when I returned to the bathroom he had dropped his pants enough to display the family jewels, a sight I could barely believe.  My look of total disinterest must have registered, for he then announced, “I can do this in the hall,” and departed with the string.  Anxious to prevent his return, I put a heavy wooden card table against the slightly open door, so if the door budged even a little, the table would fall with a crash.  The night passed peacefully, and now it all seems like a dream.
     Was my visitor a hustler in the broadest sense?  Absolutely.  And in the narrower sense, meaning a male prostitute?  I assume so, but certainly not a professional, or he wouldn’t have wasted time on me, when he could have been hanging out where hustlers hang out and their patrons know to find them. 
A pro.
Sasha Kargaltsev
     But enough of this amateur; let’s have a look at the pros.  The subject has come up recently because Mayor de Blasio has talked of eliminating the pedestrian mall at Times Square and returning it to traffic – a proposal that alarms and dismays New Yorkers and visitors alike.  The problem is hustlers, meaning in this case the costumed Elmos, red-suited with goggle eyes, and the armored Iron Men, big-eared Minnie Mouses (or Mice?), and brazen bare-breasted desnudas with wild feathered headdresses, all of whom have evidently been harassing tourists for tips, and hefty tips at that.
Elmo and Minnie greeting Muslin women in headscarves.
InSapphoWeTrust
     So who are these hustlers?  For the most part, as noted in post #143 just a year ago, Latino immigrants willing to parade about in cartoon-character costumes that are stiflingly hot in the sticky summer heat, so they can stand beside children while their parents take photos, following which Elmo or Minnie wants a tip.  Or topless Latinas with feathered headdresses, painted breasts, and thongs who pose with male tourists for photos and hope to extract twenty dollars or more.  Costumed or near naked, Times Square hustlers usually speak little English, fear deportation if arrested, and would do something else if they could.  Interviewed, a nineteen-year-old Nicaraguan Spider Man says he averages $9 an hour, better than he would do with a job, if he could get one. 



     In fairness, it should be noted that tourists with children often initiate contact with Spider Man or the Cookie Monster, and some desnudas insist that they don’t bother anyone, that being topless in New York isn’t illegal (true enough), and that it’s only a few of them who harass tourists and give them all a bad name.  And let’s face it, these antics are a part of New York, they’re what bring tourists here eager to see something in the deliciously wicked city that you can’t find in Topeka or Des Moines.  (No offense intended to Topeka or Des Moines, which are probably delighted not to be so graced.)
     Let’s have a look at some other types of New York hustlers.  In Brooklyn a few years ago young black gang members would jam the dollar-bill slot in MetroCard machines, so commuters couldn’t buy cards; then the hustlers  would offer to get them through the turnstile by selling them an illegal swipe for a dollar or two, or for the same fee let them through a service gate.  This being clearly illegal, arrests followed.
     More controversial are the young black hip-hop artists who peddle their compact disks to passersby in Times Square.  Often arrested for disorderly conduct and aggressive begging, the rappers claim that they aren’t breaking the law, that the police have it in for them, treat them differently from other vendors, and violate their First Amendment rights.  The police insist that the rappers shove CDs at pedestrians, block the sidewalk, and follow potential customers down the street – allegations that the rappers claim are phony, causing their cases ultimately to get dismissed.  Some of the rappers have been arrested thirty times, and in 2014 their exasperation reached the point where eight of them filed joint lawsuits in Manhattan Federal Court against the city and 17 policemen.  How their lawsuit is playing out I don’t know, but these guys are spunky and innovative, tailoring their sales pitch to what people are wearing and how they look.  They remind me of the squeegee men who used to clean the windshields of cars stopped for a red light, for which unsolicited service they hoped to get a tip.


A squeegee man at work, albeit with no squeegee in evidence.
     Another species of hustlers are the Buddhist monks in orange robes who haunt the High Line, Bryant Park, and Times Square, pushing cheap amulets at passersby and expecting, even demanding, a tip.  I saw one once on Sixth Avenue offering his trinkets right and left, but now they’re all over the city.  When one on the High Line got five dollars from a visitor, the holy man  protested, wanting twenty.  Of course they are fakes, just like the nun I in the bar.  Usually they are Chinese immigrants who return to flophouses in Flushing, Queens, with their day’s earnings, some of them doffing their robes en route on the subway, before setting out in khakis and Nike sneakers for a meal spiced with liquor in a local restaurant.  Some have also been seen sneaking a smoke on the sly, or napping on ledges of the Fifth Avenue public library.  Real Buddhist monks might carry a beggar’s bowl to receive gifts of money or food, but they would never aggressively solicit cash, and  would shun cigarettes and alcohol.  Authentic New York Buddhists are offended by these fakers, who disrespect the faith.
Even in Hong Kong.  Is it a franchise?     An observer who recently surveyed the Times Square scene reported the aforementioned costume characters, topless cuties, CD hawkers, and bogus monks, but also these:
·      Ticket hustlers who try to sell you tickets for comedy clubs, Broadway shows, and bus tours·      Coupon hustlers who thrust at you coupons for sandwiches, massages, and strip clubs·      The Naked Cowboy playing his guitar in his undershorts, now joined by scantly clad Naked Cowgirls likewise strumming guitars·      Statue people who stand stock still, spray-painted gold or silver or purple, including one or several Lady Liberties, sea-foam green replicas of the Statue of Liberty·      Religious hucksters parading about with signs urging REPENT! FOLLOW JESUS and similar messages, and buttonholing passersby to ask if they can tell you about their Savior·      A very middle-class-looking man in a jacket and tie, giving an intense deadpan stare and flaunting a sign TV IS BRAINWASHING
And some of them get into fights with one another, which should vastly enhance the entertainment of tourists.
Kris from Seattle  
































     Another kind of hustler is the testosterone huckster.  Is Low T making you feel like a shadow of your former self? asks the bold-face ad.  The solution for low energy and low sex drive, this and other ads propose, is one or another prescription drug.  U.S. sales of testosterone boosters, a mere $324 million in 2002, soared to about $2 billion in 2012.  And in 2012 drug makers spent $107 million advertising top brand-name testosterone drugs in the U.S.  “Low T” is now proclaimed a malady with symptoms like listlessness, increased body fat, and moodiness, and multitudes of 40-year-old males and up have been convinced that they need these drugs, the long-term effects of which have yet to be determined. 
     Should aggressive advertising like this be termed “hustling,” and its practitioners “hustlers”?  All advertising involves a good bit of hustling, but the aggressiveness of testosterone marketing inclines me to say yes.  Likewise the ubiquitous subway ads, big and colorful, of Dr. Zizmor, a Manhattan-based dermatologist with unblemished features, who promises “beautiful, clear skin.”  I would label all today’s medical hustlers a new phenomenon, if their ads didn’t echo the blatant claims of the nineteenth-century patent medicine men, who, unlike today’s hucksters, didn’t have a legitimate degree in medicine.Ernie in later years.

     A different kind of hustler that I have just read about online haunted neither Times Square nor Bryant Park nor any other park, but only the city’s bowling alleys.  Back in the 1960s those alleys were jammed all night with bowlers and the cigar-puffing gamblers, some of them gangsters, who bet on the games.  It was the time of action bowling, a high-stakes form of gambling in which bowlers, often only in their teens, played for thousands of dollars.  The king of the scene was an arrogant kid from Manhattan’s West Side named Ernie Schlegel, a real New York wiseguy with scraggly blond hair who favored black stovepipe pants, a white silk shirt, and an iridescent raincoat.  Before he bowled, he’d have one drink and then throw a shot of bourbon on his head or down his neck, so that he reeked of liquor, and his opponents became overly confident, thinking he was drunk.  The result?  “I crushed ’em.”  Working weekdays as a stock boy at a watch store, he earned $42.50 a week, but in a single night of bowling he could pocket hundreds, and once even $7,800, in cash.  Little wonder that, drooping with exhaustion at work, he quit before they could fire him.  His parents disapproved, until he showed them his earnings -- wads of cash stuffed in his bureau drawers. 
     Once the other bowlers got wise to his tricks, Ernie’s hustling days were over.  It was years before the PBA (Professional Bowlers Association) let him join their tours, but in 1976 he toured the nation with them as the Bicentennial Kid, wearing a white jumpsuit decked with blue sequins, red-white-and-blue shoes, and aviator sunglasses.  After that he went on to win legitimately a series of titles in bowling matches and become a PBA Hall of Famer.  But he still had his New York chutzpah, declaring “I am the greatest!” and promising to take on any challenger and “beat the living daylights out of him!”  An unrepentant hustler, but one who finds time to coach young bowlers, too.
     Some of the bowling hustlers were not above out-and-out cheating.  They would drill a hole in a bowling ball, pour mercury in, and plug the hole with a liquid that hardened overnight.  As the “loaded” ball rolled, the mercury would shift in the ball, making it go sideways and topple more pins.  When some of the gangsters who bet on the games discovered that one bowler was throwing a loaded ball, they took the offender outside, flattened him on the ground, held his bowling bowl high above their heads, and smashed his hand with it, so that he never bowled again.  Another bowler, having bet on himself to lose, learned that some gun-toting gangsters had bet on him to win, and so he faced a dilemma: he could win and lose his bet, or he could lose and risk the wrath of the gangsters.  But never underestimate the resourcefulness of a hustler.  Getting up to throw the next ball, he grabbed his chest, faked a heart attack, and collapsed.  Taken away in an ambulance, he lived to bowl another day.
     I hesitate to label political wannabes hustlers, since campaigning requires a good deal of aggressive self-promotion.  But among today’s Republican wannabes one goes beyond the bounds, breaks all the rules, and merits the name of hustler: Donald Trump.  New Yorkers – meaning residents of the city or the state – have rarely made it to the White House, with the exception of two, both of whom bore the magical name of Roosevelt.  The others failed for one of two reasons: they struck Middle America as either too brash or too suave, and probably of dubious morality as well.  Trump is the epitome of brash, a thrice-married, rude New Yorker who has lived all his life in Gomorrah, meaning New York City.  Similarly, Rudolph Giuliani failed in the 2008 primaries and caucuses, when mainstream Republicans saw in him a brash and bullying New Yorker who had likewise been married two times too many.  
Can a hustler become President?  Time will tell.
Gage Skidmore
     As for suave, the rich and sophisticated Nelson Rockefeller failed to get the Republican nomination in 1964, being seen as too Eastern establishment, too urban and urbane, and divorced as well, and married to a divorced woman.  And in the 1970s John Lindsay, a Republican turned Democrat, lost out because he struck mainstream voters as too smooth, too big-city sophisticated, too to-the-manner-born, too bright, and I’d almost add too handsome, too dapper.  Hustlers or not – and Rockefeller and Lindsay certainly weren’t hustlers – New Yorkers just can’t cut it with the great masses of voters who decide presidential elections.
     So who are the New York hustlers?  People who are desperate but resourceful, and too full of energy to give up.  People who are driven, who have to do, who can’t stand still.  And why do they hustle?  For money, for excitement, for power, and for glory.  Whatever you think of them, New York wouldn’t be New York without them.  But if you encounter them, hang on to your wallet and your wits. 
     Note on sources:  Information on New York hustlers is available from numerous sources online.  For action bowling, I am especially indebted to a 2012 article by Gianmarc Manzione, who interviewed many of the action bowlers in their later years or quoted from earlier interviews.
     An update:  When walking on 42nd Street near Times Square the other day, I saw an African-American couple negotiating with a fake Buddhist monk who seemed to be offering a trinket.  “He’s a fake,” I whispered as I walked briskly by.  They flashed a smile; perhaps they didn’t care.  And when, a bit later, I made a quick foray into Times Square, I didn’t see a single Elmo, a single Spider Man or Minnie.  Either they were off duty or, aware of the Mayor’s diatribe, they were lying warily low.  But they are still around, and a coalition of elected officials, property owners, and business leaders has proposed, as a solution for the Times Square mess, three different zones: activity zones for hustlers; civic zones for public events or special programs; and flow zones where pedestrians can pass through freely, without being harassed.  Confined to activity zones, the hustlers would not be allowed to operate elsewhere.  Will it come to pass?  Who knows?
     Coming soon:  Roughriders on West 44th Street, posing two pertinent questions: (1) What percentage of our thoughts are negative?  (2) Should a successful single businesswoman of 38 with international experience get a dog or starting looking for a husband?  Plus a side glance at a candidate who went to bed thinking he was the president elect, and woke up to learn that he wasn’t.

















     My new book:  Many thanks to those of you who have ordered it, and no problem with those who have not; it will find its readers.  The cheaper e-book will soon be available.

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder