Clifford Browder's Blog, page 47

121. Famous Deaths, part 1

     New York is a place people come to in order to have fun, to find themselves, to make their way in the world, to live.  But, as chance or fate would have it, it is also a place where people – often famous people – die.  This post is about the last years and death here of four people famous in their time.  Three died in the West Village, where I reside. To a considerable extent they were all responsible for their demise.
Alexander Hamilton
     A Founding Father and influential supporter and interpreter of the Constitution, Secretary of the Treasury in George Washington’s cabinet, and founder of the Federalist Party, Hamilton had had to leave the cabinet following the revelation of his involvement in an adulterous affair.  (Yes, it happened back then, too.)  Living in a villa in Manhattan just north of New York City, he was still involved in the vituperative politics of the day, and  had incurred the enmity of Aaron Burr, whom he viewed as an unscrupulous opportunist. 




     Burr is a fascinating character about whom opinion differs to this day.  A brave soldier and shrewd lawyer, he had polished manners and magnetic charm, and was immensely attractive to women, but he was also ambitious and scheming in politics, and not one to endure a slight.  He and Hamilton had long been political rivals, and Hamilton had often thwarted his ambition.  Now, alleging insults in print, Burr, who was Vice President under Thomas Jefferson, challenged Hamilton to a duel.  Dueling was outlawed in both New York and New Jersey, but with milder consequences in New Jersey.  Hamilton, who was illegitimate, was touchy on the subject of honor and so declined to defuse the situation. 

     At dawn on July 11, 1804, the most famous duel in American history took place on a deserted rocky ledge in Weehawken, just across the Hudson in New Jersey.  Both fired, and almost simultaneously, but who fired first is unclear.  Hamilton seems to have intentionally missed Burr with his shot, but Burr was a crack marksman and his shot tore through Hamilton’s liver and shattered his spine.  Hamilton, who knew he was mortally wounded, was ferried back to New York and taken to the home of a friend at what is now 80-82 Jane Street (but a few doors down from where I lived in the 1960s).  After great suffering, on the following afternoon he died there, age 49, surrounded by weeping family and friends. 
An old print with some inaccuracies.  Only the two seconds were present.  The clothing is typical of the 18th century, not of the early 19th.
     Hamilton’s funeral two days later was a municipal event, for he had long practiced law in the city and was well known to the citizens.  Business was suspended, and muffled bells tolled from dawn to dusk.  At noon the long funeral procession, which included military officers, students, merchants, lawyers, politicians, tradesmen, and ordinary citizens, wound through the streets toward Trinity Church, where he was to be buried, while warships in the harbor fired guns, and merchant vessels flew their flags at half mast. 
     Fearing a mob attack on his house, and charged with various crimes, including murder, in both New York and New Jersey, Burr decamped for fairer pastures; the charges were eventually dropped.  But the duel ended his political career, since he never ran for office again after his term as Vice President ended in 1805.  In 1807 he would be tried for treason on questionable charges regarding an alleged conspiracy on the Western frontier, but he was acquitted.  For a while he tried without success to regain his fortunes in Europe, after which he returned to the U.S. and resumed his law career in New York.  In 1833, at age 77, he married the wealthy widow Eliza Jumel, no doubt with an eye to her fortune; that fortune was greatly diminished through a speculation he undertook, and she soon filed for divorce.  Burr then suffered a stroke and died in a boarding house on Staten Island in 1836, on the very day the divorce was granted. 
     Gore Vidal’s historical novel Burr (1973) is an interesting interpretation of the man, whom he depicts as an honorable eighteenth-century gentleman while disparaging Hamilton and others.  Burr has his defenders, who suggest that Hamilton fired first, and when Burr heard the bullet whiz by his ear, he thought Hamilton had meant to hit him and so fired in self-defense.  But the majority opinion is that he meant to kill Hamilton.  Late in life, though, he said, “Had I read [Laurence] Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”
     As for Madame Jumel, whose mansion in upper Manhattan survives and is open to the public, she rates a post, or at least a good part of one, all her own.
     Decades after Hamilton’s death his aged, white-haired widow, garbed in widow’s black and living quietly in Washington, worked hard to rescue her husband’s reputation from slanders by his political enemies.  Showing visitors about the house, which was crammed with faded memorabilia, she would pause reverentially before a marble bust of Hamilton, the work of an Italian sculptor who presented him as a Roman senator with a toga draped over one shoulder.
     In 2004, the bicentennial anniversary of the duel, descendants of the two opponents staged a re-enactment of the duel near the Hudson River before more than a thousand spectators.
Stephen Foster
    Though he has been hailed as the “father of American music,” Stephen Foster derived little income from his music, since publishers often printed editions of his songs without paying him a cent.  Struggling with alcoholism, depression, and debt, in 1860 he moved to New York, the center of musical publishing, but his wife and daughter soon left him – as they often had before -- and returned to Pittsburgh.  He published many songs here, but they were mediocre and sold poorly.  Living at the North American Hotel at 30 Bowery on the Lower East Side – some have called it a flophouse -- he became impoverished.  Still composing, he would pick out tunes on an old piano in the back room of a German grocery on the Bowery.  In January 1864 he was stricken for days by ague and fever, then fell while washing and dashed his head against the wash basin; the chambermaid found him lying in a pool of blood.  Taken to Bellevue Hospital, he died there in the charity ward on January 13, age 37.  His wallet contained a scrap of paper that only said, “Dear friends and gentle hearts,” plus 38 cents in Civil War scrip and three pennies.  He was buried in his native Pittsburgh.  Ironically, one of his most acclaimed songs, “Beautiful Dreamer,” was published soon after his death.
Dylan Thomas
     Another victim of alcoholism who died in New York was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, but unlike Stephen Foster he went out with a bang.  His demise was well observed and well recorded.
     I first heard of Thomas when, in my senior year at college, he came to our campus to do a reading.  This was his first American tour and, like so many Europeans before him (Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde), he came here to make money.  He was lauded to us by our English teachers as a great poet who had renewed English poetry with his rich lyricism and imagery, and we flocked to the campus’s concert hall to hear him.  Thomas was alcoholic by now, and the faculty had been warned that he was marvelous on the stage, but impossible off.  We would learn later that, following a dinner with the English faculty before the reading, he had roundly cursed the Dr. Strathman, the head of the English Department, when, eyeing his watch, Strathman had dragged the poet away from his last beer. 
     The reading was indeed marvelous.  His rich, resonant voice projected clearly as he read poems by Yeats and others, and then his own.  I couldn’t begin to untangle the lush Celtic tapestry of words, so I just let it flow over me.  Then, at the end of the reading, Dr. Strathman announced that Thomas would be glad to talk with students and answer questions.  We all gathered diligently around him, and he got things off to a vibrant start by turning around to confront the pipes of a large organ behind him. 
     “Good God!” he exclaimed.  “I didn’t know there was an organ bigger than mine in here!”
     Questions followed, with answers more arch than frank.  I was too inhibited to venture any, but a girl said, “Mr. Thomas, I didn’t hear what you said that one poem was about.”
     “That’s the first time anyone has said they couldn’t hear me,” he resonated.  “I said it was about masturbation.”
     Dead silence.  Hip, with-it college students that we were, we weren’t prepared for this.
     “Oh,” said the girl, flustered.  “Well, uh, masculine or feminine?”
     “Masculine or feminine?” he boomed.  “Does a woman go off like a rocket?”
     There then followed a sonorous explication as to why it had to be masculine.  We listened in stark silence, stupefied.
     So ended my first and only encounter with Thomas, though the campus crackled with accounts of the reading for days afterward.  And when I went into the English Department the next day for a bit more enlightenment, Dr. Strathman, a serious scholar, announced that, if Thomas continued drinking, he would cease to develop as a poet.  Which subsequent events bore out.  “And I noticed that when he got the check for the reading,” he added, “it went into an inside pocket.  At that moment, at least, he knew what he was doing.”
     After that I went to France and for two years immersed myself in the writings of the Gauls, which enticed me away from Thomas and other English-language writers.  And when I came to New York in the fall of 1953 to pursue graduate work in French at Columbia, I was so preoccupied with my studies far uptown, and with discovery of the fascinating, distracting, and baffling city of New York, that I barely noticed the sad last chapter of the Welsh poet’s life, which played out right here in the West Village, where I would reside from the 1960s on. 
     This was the fourth time Thomas had come over here to make money, and to drink.  When he arrived by air on October 20, those welcoming him were shocked by how pale and shaky he looked; he was obviously in poor health.  He checked in at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, where many writers, artists, musicians, and actors have lived.  He then attended a rehearsal of his radio play Under Milk Wood at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92ndStreet Y, following which he made a beeline for his favorite bar, the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of Hudson and West 11th, just one block from where I now live, a bar long popular with writers and artists.  During subsequent rehearsals he was obviously sick and on one occasion collapsed. 
The White Horse in 1961.  A hangout for writers and intellectuals,
real and pseudo.  One short block from my building, but I never
took to it.     On November 3 he spent most of the day in bed, drinking.  Late that night he went again to the White Horse, drank heavily, then returned to the Chelsea, where he announced, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies.  I think that's the record."  (The White Horse's barman and owner later observed that he couldn't have had more than half that amount, which for most of us would still be a record.)  After more drinking on November 4, his breathing became labored and his face turned blue.  Alarmed, at midnight November 5 his friends summoned an ambulance.
     He arrived at Saint Vincent's Hospital in a coma.  Informed, his wife Caitlin flew at once to New York and was taken to the hospital.  "Is the bloody man dead yet?" she asked upon arriving there.  Returning later that day, drunk, she threatened to kill John Brinnin, who had organized Thomas's tour; when she became uncontrollable, she was put in a straitjacket and committed to a psychiatric detox clinic on Long Island.  It is said that the young Beat poet Gregory Corso, who had been born at Saint Vincent's, tried to get into Thomas's room so he could see how a poet dies, but was chased away by the nurses.  Still in a coma, Thomas died at noon on November 9.  Surprisingly, a post-mortem gave as causes of death pneumonia, brain swelling, and a fatty liver, with no mention of alcoholism.  Caitlin's autobiography states, "Our only true love was drink.  The bar was our altar.”
     Thomas had long been buried in the churchyard of Laugharne, the fishing village in Wales where he resided, when, stealing time from my French studies, I read the slender volume of his poetry, and reread and reread it, until I at last got a take on it, separating out the mediocre stuff from the good stuff, and the good stuff from that handful of truly great poems on which his reputation, I was convinced, would rest.  He wasn’t easy – in fact, he was obsessively and needlessly obscure, a thick tangle of words and images – but I fought through until I found something solid, something that would last.  Alone of all my friends I became, always with reservations, a devotee, and still am to this day.  As for Under Milk Wood, the radio play he wrote for the BBC, I have seen it done here in a stage version and found it richly rewarding.  It takes place in the fictional Welsh town of Llareggub, a name that sounds convincingly Welsh, until you spell it backwards and discover, once again, a trace of the poet’s whimsical humor. 
Sid Vicious
      Another resident of the Chelsea Hotel was the English guitarist and vocalist Sid Vicious (needless to say, an assumed name), who in 1978 was touring the U.S. with the punk group Sex Pistols (a name that, when I first heard it, struck me as the ultimate in protracted adolescence).  He had been with the group since 1977 and was described as having the “iconic punk look,” his nails painted with purple nail polish, his hair wild.  What he lacked in musicianship – and he evidently lacked a lot -- he is said to have made up in “unmatched punk charisma,” which evidently involved spitting and hurling insults at the audience; he had already been arrested in Britain for assault.  Vicious’s mother, an addict herself, had been supplying him with drugs and paraphernalia for years, which goes to show that mother love hath no limits.
     A new chapter in his life opened on the morning of October 12, 1978, when he awoke from a drugged stupor to find his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, herself an addict and onetime prostitute, dead on the bathroom floor of their room in the Chelsea.  She had received a single stab wound to the abdomen, causing her to bleed to death.  The knife used had been bought by Vicious on 42ndStreet.  Arrested and charged with her murder, Vicious admitted that they had fought that night, but gave conflicting versions of what then happened.  “I stabbed her, but I never meant to kill her,” he confessed, but then said he couldn’t remember, and also said that during the argument she had fallen on the knife. 
His mug shot, when arrested for Spungen's murder in 1978.
NYPD
     Released on bail, ten days after her death Vicious attempted suicide by slitting his forearm, following which he was hospitalized at Bellevue.  In December he was arrested again for smashing a beer mug into a friend’s face during an argument and was sent to Rikers Island jail, where he was detoxified but otherwise languished for 55 days before being released on bail on February 1, 1979.  That evening his release was celebrated by a party at the apartment of his new girlfriend Michele at 63 Bank Street.  His obliging mother was present and arranged to have some heroin delivered.  Vicious overdosed on Mom’s heroin, but the others present got him up and walking about so as to revive him.  At 3:00 a.m. he and Michele went to bed.  There have been different accounts about the events of that evening, but what’s certain is that he was found dead late the next morning.
     Vicious was only 22 when he died.  In a 1977 interview he said, “I’ll probably die by the time I reach twenty-five.  But I’ll have lived the way I wanted to.”  His mother claimed to have found a suicide note in the pocket of his jacket a few days later: “We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain.  Please bury me next to my baby.  Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots  Goodbye.”  Since Spungen was Jewish and buried in a Jewish cemetery, and Vicious wasn’t Jewish, his wish could not be realized.  So he was cremated and his mother says she scaled the wall of the Philadelphia cemetery where Spungen was buried and, against the wishes of her family, scattered his ashes over her grave.  But another account has Mom tipping over the urn in Heathrow Airport, sending most of the ashes into the airport’s ventilation system.  Either way, requiescat in pace.  Vicious’s friends blamed his death on Spungen, who, herself suicidal, lured him into a morbidly codependent relationship that became a dance of death.  On her deathbed in 1996, Mom confessed that she had deliberately injected him with a lethal dose of heroin, to spare him from going to prison for Spungen’s death.  If so, the silver chord again.  So ended the family saga.
     Vicious died only a few blocks from where I was living (and still am) in the West Village, but the punk scene had so little purchase on my psyche, I was sublimely unaware of the whole to-do.  Of course I come off as an old fogy in commenting on the antics of these young fogies.  I once saw some kids in the subway with green or pink hair and a sign IF YOU THINK PUNK IS DEAD YOU’RE CRAZY.  It wasn’t dead for me.  How could it be, since it had never been born?
     The Chelsea Hotel:  One might think that Thomas’s drunken stay and Nancy Spungen’s murder would have tainted the Chelsea’s reputation as a residence for creative types of all persuasions, but they probably enhanced it.  A massive twelve-story, 250-room red-brick building with ornamental cast-iron balconies overlooking West 23rdStreet between 7th and 8th avenues, it opened in 1884 as an apartment coop, later became a luxury hotel, declined after that, but is now a New York City landmark.  By the 1950s much of the original lavish décor had been torn out, and the large suites divided into tiny rooms, as the hotel became something close to a flophouse, with low rents sure to entice needy writers and artists, and junkies, pimps, and prostitutes as well.
The Chelsea in 2010.
Beyond My Ken
     From the early 1970s on the manager was Stanley Bard, who tried hard to keep the rents for writers low, and let impoverished artists pay with art works and a promise to settle the balance in cash when their circumstances improved.  In Bard’s time the Chelsea was a very special place, like no other hotel in the city.  There might be prostitutes and pimps on one floor, and the black-sheep kids from wealthy families on another, mixed in with budding writers clattering their typewriters, and residents talking poetry or theater.  The elevator was notoriously slow, and a naked girl might run into it and out again, no explanation given.  Occasionally someone committed suicide by jumping down the grandiose stairwell, or an angry lover would set fire to a partner’s mattress or fancy shirts, sending black smoke swirling up the stairwell, and everyone would have to get out of the building.  Some residents were downright crazy, and one tenant kept a small alligator, two monkeys, and a snake.  Short of murder and mayhem (both of which at times occurred), no one was too far out, too weird, as long as – sooner or later – they paid their rent.
     Among the writers who resided there at one time or another were Mark Twain, O. Henry (each time with a different false name, since he was dodging the police), William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller (before and after Marilyn), Quentin Crisp, Gore Vidal (who reputedly had a one-night stand there with Kerouac), Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Bukowski, Brendan Behan – but why go on?  Who, for that matter, didn’t live there?  And these are only the writers.  One could do a similar list for actors and film directors, and another for musicians, and still another for artists.  Andy Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls provides a glance at the life of some of his stars at the hotel, which has been featured in other films as well and in novels.
     In the 1990s Bard refurbished the common areas and many of the rooms, so as to restore some of the Chelsea’s old grandeur, and junkies and prostitutes were expelled.  With the beginning of the 21stcentury gentrification overtook the neighborhood, rents went up, and well-heeled tenants moved in.  To the dismay of residents, in 2007 the new owners replaced Bard as manager, and things began to change.  In 2011 the owners announced that the hotel would take in no more guests, pending desperately needed renovations.  The paintings and collages that had always adorned the lobby, hallways, and wrought-iron staircase have now been put in storage, doors to empty rooms stand open, and the noise of construction reverberates.  Long-time residents remain in the building, some of them protected by rent regulations, but they fear that the new management may want to drive them out.  Yet even with the closure looming, on a given Saturday night in 2011 hip-hop blared from one of the rooms, the police rushed in to forestall a reported suicide attempt, and the arrival of a punk girl guitarist with her head shaved on both sides and her Mohawk dyed blond and blue didn’t raise an eyebrow at the front desk, while a longtime resident photographer gave an end-of-an-era party to cheer his neighbors up.  “Never a dull moment,” the front-desk clerk observed.
     Yes, the Chelsea in its heyday was unique.  It could only have happened in New York.

This is New York


Joe Mazzola

     Coming soon:  Exiles in New York, part 3: a begetter of floating lovers and upside-down houses, a pianist with five Steinways, an anarchist with a compact, a future emperor, and a renegade priest with a talent for seduction and debt.  After that, one more batch of exiles, and at least one more batch of famous deaths in New York, some of whom may surprise you.
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder
     

120. Exiles in New York, part 2

     This post is the second about exiles in New York.  It will deal with the Scarlet Sisters and a dragon lady.
The Everleigh Sisters
     Exiles of a rather special kind were two sisters who came to New York and in 1913, using the name Lester, bought a brownstone at 20 West 71st Street and resided there for many years.  Neighbors had no idea who Minna and Ada Lester really were: the Everleigh sisters who from 1900 to 1911 had run the fanciest brothel in the country on the near South Side of Chicago.  As they told it, their father was a prosperous lawyer in Kentucky who had sent them to private schools and given them lessons in elocution and dancing, following which they married two brothers named Lester and left them after a year, Minna complaining that her husband was a brute who tried to strangle her.  They then joined a traveling theatrical troupe, performing in melodramas as they toured the country, until, in Omaha in 1898, they came into an inheritance that let them quit acting and launch a new venture: a bordello to accommodate visitors to the Trans-Mississippi Exposition opening there that year.  According to the sisters, they were strictly madams and had never offered their charms to the patrons.  When the exposition closed and business fell off, they took their earnings and moved to Chicago to establish the fanciest bagnio on the continent, which they were sure would lure customers from far and wide.  There, from 1900 to 1911, the Everleigh Club on South Dearborn Street flourished as the most luxurious and profitable house in the country, patronized by men of great wealth and pliant   morals, of whom there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply.
Ada in 1895.  She achieved the wasp waist.     Such was their story, prior to coming to New York as the Lester sisters.  But in many respects they had stretched the truth, even mangled it.  The 1870 census reveals that they were the daughters of a farmer named James Montgomery Simms of Greene County, Virginia.  That they attended private schools and had lessons in elocution and dancing I find doubtful.  Feminists have hailed them as liberated women of their time, which they certainly were, but recent scholarship suggests that they were never married.  Stranded by a theater company in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1895, they opened a brothel there, then opened a second one for the 1898 exposition.  Portraits commissioned by them in 1895 are suggestive, and publicity for the 1898  exposition includes a print showing Minna posing in a corset on an ornate brass bed and looking much less like a hard-nosed madam than a seductive courtesan offering her charms to whoever could afford them.  Just how two respectably raised young Southern ladies transitioned to this profession remains a mystery that even their nephew, with whom I once corresponded, could not explain.
Minna in 1895.  Just a madam???  The Everleigh Club, 2131 and 2133 South
Dearborn Street.     What is not in doubt is their having operated the luxurious Everleigh Club in Chicago and its immediate success.  The club had twelve soundproof parlors (the Gold Room, Moorish Room, Red Room, etc.), an art gallery featuring nudes in gold frames, a dining room, a ballroom, a music room where a “professor” fingered the keys of a $15,000 gold-leaf piano, and even a well-furnished library where, to the sisters’ surprise, some of their patrons settled down comfortably with a book, probably glad to be away from their wife and kids.  There were silk curtains, damask easy chairs, oriental rugs, mahogany tables, gold cuspidors, and perfumed fountains, and in the girls’ rooms upstairs, luxurious divans, gilt bathtubs, and warbling canaries.
The Japanese Throne Room, as shown in the brochure.
The Blue Bedroom, as shown in the brochure.
     The Everleigh “butterflies” had to be attractive and healthy, free from drugs and drink, adept at small talk, and experienced but ladylike.  The patrons had to dress and act like gentlemen; rowdy behavior was not tolerated.  To get in, they needed a letter of recommendation from an existing client or an engraved card, and once in they had to spend freely, sometimes as much as $200 or even $1,000 a night; the club was no place for the budget-minded.  The sisters were said to gross $15,000 a week, a generous amount of which went to corrupt aldermen and state legislators to guarantee their continued operation.  Among their reputed guests were J. Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, and Prince Henry of Prussia, the Kaiser’s brother.  In 1905, when Marshall Field II, heir to his father’s vast department store fortune, died of a gunshot wound, allegedly while cleaning a gun at home, rumor had it that he had been shot by a girl at the Everleigh Club, following which the sisters had the body smuggled out to his residence, or he himself, unaware of the seriousness of his wound, managed to get home by himself.  This story some have dismissed, while others even today deem it credible.  Yet another theory is that his death was a suicide.
     What happens when the census taker comes to a whorehouse, especially the plushest one in the nation?  Because I once did considerable research on the sisters, in preparation for a biography that I later gave up on, I can answer precisely, having combed the census records of 1900 until I found the entry for 2131 South Dearborn.  When the enumerator called on June 6, 1900, Minna gave her age as 29 and Ada as 26, thus shaving 5 and 10 years off their ages respectively.  As for the twelve “boarders” counted, not one confessed to being over 29.  And their occupations?  Artist, bookkeeper, cashier, seamstress, dressmaker, dry-goods clerk, milliner, saleslady, actress, cashier, and cook, plus one blank, probably the most honest answer of the bunch.  Did the census taker know he was being lied to?  Almost certainly , this being the city’s red-light district, with numerous “boarding houses” with only female boarders. 
     The Everleigh Club achieved national, even international, fame, but in time all good things come to an end.  Anti-vice crusaders had long campaigned to close not just the Everleigh Club but the entire Chicago red-light district, but the Club’s reputation, and the sisters’ generous pay-offs to  local politicians, had protected it.  Then, in 1911, the sisters published a brochure entitled The Everleigh Club Illustrated, describing the club and illustrating it with photographs of its sumptuous interior.  The brochure came to the attention of Mayor Carter H. Harrison, who took offense at it and ordered the police chief to close the Club once and for all.  Having amassed a fortune, the sisters accepted his decision and threw a wild closing-night party to end things with a bang.  They then sold the place, traveled a bit, and in 1913 moved to New York, taking some of the furnishings with them.
     Many people come to New York in search of opportunity and excitement, but the Everleigh/Lester/Simms sisters came to it for a quiet retirement and theater.  And so, having left their glory days behind in Chicago, they lived quietly on West 71st Street for years, attending theater, joining some women’s organizations, presiding over a poetry reading group, and visiting relatives in Virginia once a year.  Perhaps the only one who knew of their past was Charles Washburn, a Chicago Tribune reporter whom they had known back in Chicago, and who would visit them once a year to share a bottle of champagne and reminisce.  Drawing on information gleaned from these sessions, in 1934 he published Come into My Parlor: A Biography of the Aristocratic Everleigh Sisters of Chicago, a readable but undocumented biography that presents uncritically whatever they told him and is therefore not too reliable a source.  When Minna died in 1948 at age 82, Ada sold the brownstone and went to live with her nephew, James W. Simms, in Charlottesville, Virginia, taking with her some of the furniture from the Everleigh Club – “beautiful furniture,” the nephew assured me later in a letter.  She died there in 1960 at age 96.  When we corresponded in 1981, Mr. Simms assured me that his aunts, whom he had visited in New York, were “two of the kindest, most caring people I have ever known.”
     And how did I first hear of the “Scarlet Sisters” and their posh establishment?  The way any son of the Midwest would have heard of them: discreetly, from his father, in the absence of any women.  Long after their Club had been closed, its legend was passed on from father to son for decades. 


Dragon Lady
     The next exile to be mentioned here was a woman who cast an exotic spell not easily resisted.  According to those who had dealings with her – diplomats, generals, statesmen – she was the brainiest, sexiest, most charming, and most ruthless woman they had ever encountered: Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Puncsos     The daughter of Charlie Soong, a wealthy Chinese businessman and former Methodist missionary, she had been raised a Methodist and educated in this country, graduating from Wesleyan College, and so spoke fluent English and had a good grasp of American society.  As the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang, with whom she had a long but stormy relationship, she was viewed and celebrated here as the First Lady of China, especially when Japan invaded China in 1937, and even more so after we went to war with Japan in 1941.  Indeed, she and her husband, the Generalissimo, were embraced by us as the heroic leaders of China in the war against Japan, with little awareness of their opponents, the Chinese Communists.  If the Generalissimo, standing stiffly in official portraits with his chest bemedaled, struck us as a Great Stone Face, distant and reserved, his wife exuded charm and used it skillfully in enlisting support for her husband.  From first to last, svelte, well-tailored, and possessed of a seductive smile, she was into politics up to her lovely ears.
     Her fame in the U.S. peaked in 1943, when she came to this country to get more support for the Chinese Nationalist cause.  She drew crowds of thousands, appeared for the third time on the cover of Time magazine, and became the first Chinese national and second woman to address a joint session of both houses of Congress.  There was then great sympathy for China, our wartime ally long ravaged by the Japanese invaders, and she personified that ally, masking her husband’s authoritarian ways with her charm and her talk of democracy.  The Methodist church in Evanston that I then attended was especially supportive of her, a fellow Methodist, there being many Methodist missionaries in China, and the daughter of our local Congressman told a group of us of meeting and talking with her personally.  What I chiefly remember of her account was how, when Madame Chiang dropped something, she quickly picked it up herself, not wanting others to do it for her.  Needless to say, the girl was absolutely charmed by Madame Chiang.
With the Generalissimo, Roosevelt, and Churchill in Cairo, 1943.
The Generalissimo rarely left China, but this conference was important.
     After the war things changed.  The Nationalists, locked in a losing civil war with the Communists, were compromised by corruption; some of the money meant for the war against Japan had gone into the pockets of the Chiangs.  When, in desperation, Madame Chiang came again to our shores to plead her husband’s cause, she was not as well received; her presence, in fact, was an embarrassment.  When the Nationalists lost the mainland in 1949, she and her husband went with them to Taiwan, where they continued their struggle against the Communists.  When the Cold War developed, they regained favor in this country as allies against the Soviets and Communist China, inaugurating a relationship that would have many ups and downs.
     My own attitude toward the Nationalists and Madame Chiang changed when, in Evanston in 1950, I met a longtime friend of my mother’s, the YWCA’s official observer at the U.N. in New York, who viewed the Chiangs as despotic and corrupt.  She told of a conversation with Madame Pandit, Nehru’s sister and India’s ambassador to the U.S., who recounted a meeting with Madame Chiang.  Madame Chiang had stressed the importance of appearance; every morning, when she was dressing, Madame Chiang said she thought about what she would be doing that day, whom she would meet, and what impression she wanted to make.  For her, clothing and appearance were an integral part of politics.  Madame Pandit felt a bit overwhelmed by this unsolicited advice, and one suspects that Madame Chiang considered Madame Pandit just a bit dowdy.  (How any woman in a sari could be dowdy I can’t imagine; personally, I find saris superbly elegant and attractive.)
     As the Grande Dame of Taiwan, Madame Chiang made several trips to the U.S.in the 1950s to lobby the U.S. government against admitting Communist China to the U.N.  As the Generalissimo’s health deteriorated, control of the Nationalist government passed to Chiang Ching-kuo, his son by a previous marriage.  Madame Chiang and her husband had no children of their own, and she was not on good terms with his successor.  When the Generalissimo died in 1975, Madame Chiang left Taiwan and established herself in New York in an Upper East Side apartment overlooking Gracie Square, and on an estate on Long Island.  Though she lived here in semi-seclusion, when Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, she returned to Taiwan to support her old allies, but her influence had waned and she soon returned to New York.  Here she was guarded by a team of black-suited bodyguards who cleared the lobby of her apartment building whenever she entered or left.  She received few visitors, grew flowers, did calligraphy and drawings, read.  Though hard of hearing as she aged, she was still quick-witted and read the Bible and the New York Times every day.  She died in her apartment in 2003, age 105, having lived in three centuries, and is buried in New York State.
     The Everleigh sisters lived quietly here, seemingly without regrets.  How Madame Chiang felt while residing here, now wielding a pen and brush, when she had once manipulated statesmen and generals, I do not know.  Surely she nursed some bitterness toward this country, once her staunch friend and ally, whom she blamed for the loss of China.  She was a fascinating woman, a nest of contradictions, an enigma.  We won’t see her like again.  Regrettably, she never wrote her memoir.
     A note on Chester Kallman:  A viewer of this blog informs me that he briefly knew Kallman (post #119) in Athens in the 1960s or early 1970s.  Invited for dinner, he and two friends arrived at Kallman’s apartment to find Kallman unprepared for guests … at least, dinner guests.  After a delay Kallman emerged from the bedroom, disheveled and “quite messed up,” with two burly and surly young men.  Embarrassed, Kallman explained that he had forgotten about the dinner date and asked his guests to come back the following evening.  Kallman, it seems, had a liking for “rough stuff” from the junior ranks of the military junta then in power.  The guests returned the following evening and a good time was had by all.  But I hold to my personal conclusion that Kallman’s life was not, on the deepest level, a happy one.

This is New York

Kris from Seattle

     Coming soon:  Two more posts on Exiles in New York: a pianist with five Steinways; an anarchist with a compact; a future emperor; a renegade priest with a talent for seduction and debt; a would-be proletarian who loathed the capitalist U.S.; and a keeper of the flame with orange hair.
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder

119. Exiles in New York, part 1

     This post and the next are about exiles in New York City.  Some of them chose to live here, others couldn’t wait until conditions – usually political – changed, permitting them to return to their homeland.  Some learned English, others did not.  Some loved New York, some tolerated it, and some were never comfortable here and got away as soon as they could.  Admittedly, for most foreigners, New York requires an adjustment, being fiercely modern, fast-paced, noisy, and congested.  On the other hand, it has been the preferred destination of many who were separated from the land of their birth.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Saint-Exupéry in Toulouse in 1933.     A renowned author and pioneer commercial aviator, Saint-Exupéry came to New York on the last day of 1940, not wishing to live under the Nazi-allied Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, which had come to power following the disastrous French military defeat and collapse.  He spoke no English, but French-speaking American friends fed and feted him and found him and his wife Consuelo, who had followed him here, twin penthouse apartments on Central Park South.  (A very posh address.  It pays to have friends with connections.)  When one of those friends saw a figure in his doodles, she suggested that he turn it into the protagonist of a children’s book.  This would be a radical departure for Saint-Exupéry, the author of serious and sensitive works about aviation and travel, but the idea took hold and he started writing what would become his best-known work, Le Petit Prince, an illustrated children’s book to be read as well by adults.
     Another American friend, Silvia Hamilton, saw him regularly for a year and encouraged him in his writing until at last, in April 1943, the manuscript  was finished.  Rushing off to rejoin the Free French Air Force in North Africa, the author tossed a rumpled paper bag onto Hamilton’s entry table, containing the 140-page draft manuscript and drawings, the pages replete with corrections as well as coffee stains and cigarette burns.  The finished work has been called fabulistic, abstract, ethereal; it is anything but realistic and makes no direct reference at all to the war in progress.  In it a pilot stranded in a desert meets a yellow-scarfed young prince fallen to earth from a tiny asteroid.  The prince tells of visiting various asteroids and describes the inhabitants of each: a king who thinks he rules the entire universe; a businessman counting the stars he thinks he owns; a drunk who drinks out of shame at his drinking; and so on.  “Grown-ups are so strange,” says the prince.
     Published in New York in French and English in 1943, Le Petit Prince was Saint-Exupéry’s last work.  Though he was really too old, the Free French let him fly.  While on a reconnaissance flight on July 31, 1944, his plane disappeared in the Mediterranean, presumably shot down by a German plane.  The plane’s wreckage was found only sixty years later, though his silver identity bracelet was discovered snagged in a fishing net off Marseilles in 1998.  Meanwhile Le Petit Prince, not published in France until 1946, has been translated into 250 languages and sells over 1.8 million copies a year.  The author’s self-imposed exile in New York was fruitful in the extreme.  I urge anyone who hasn’t read the work to do so; it is charming, provocative, unique.  In fact, I recommend all his works, especially Terre des hommes (in English, Wind, Sand, and Stars, though I prefer the French title by far).


 André Breton


     The rise of fascism in Europe and the outbreak of World War II brought many European artists and intellectuals to these shores, many of them to New York.  “Tête léonine,” said a fellow graduate student at Columbia, when I mentioned the poet André Breton as a possible dissertation subject, and it’s true that Breton usually wore his hair fairly long, giving him a somewhat lionlike appearance.  The founder and arbiter of Surrealism, Breton was drafted into the army in 1939 and demobilized following the French defeat in 1940.  No friend of Vichy, he left his beloved Paris for Marseilles, and from there by boat in 1941 managed to reach Martinique, where the Vichy authorities informed him that there was no need for Surrealism in Martinique, and interned him for a while.  Released, he then managed to reach New York, where he found many of his Surrealist comrades, founded the Surrealist review VVV, and with Marcel Duchamp organized a Surrealist exhibition.  He evidently supported himself by taking a broadcasting job, probably one related to the war effort, even though, like Saint-Exupéry, he never bothered to learn English or, so far as I know, any foreign language.  An intellectual for whom ideas were vital entities to espouse and fight for, he exuded as always an undeniable charisma that drew others to him, and a quarrelsome streak that drove some away.  No opinion of his was tepid or wishy-washy; a celebrant of heterosexual love and the surreal, he was determinedly anticlerical and fiercely homophobic.

     Though he had long since broken with the Communist Party, where he never felt at home, in New York he had yet to renounce the tenets of dialectical materialism.  Knowing this, the art critic Meyer Schapiro invited two intellectuals of his acquaintance, one a dedicated Marxist and the other a critic of Marxism, to a debate for Breton’s benefit.  During the debate Breton listened intently but said not a word, as the critic of Marxism gained the upper hand.  After that, Schapiro told me long ago, André Breton never again mentioned dialectical materialism.  His distancing from Communism and its tenets was complete and final. 
Wearing Alexander Calder earrings.     Hosting Breton and other exiles in New York was the wealthy art patron Peggy Guggenheim, a niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder of the museum that bears his name.  She had taken an active interest in Surrealism in the 1930s and in a very short time amassed a significant collection.  Now, on West 57thStreet in wartime New York, she opened a museum/gallery called The Art of This Century Gallery, of which only the front room was a commercial gallery.  She was married at the time to the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, who found the marriage a convenient way to gain entry to the U.S., but by her own admission she had a sexual appetite for men that matched her appetite for art.  Photographs reveal a woman neither plain nor memorably beautiful, but she had money and influence and chutzpah (she was, after all, Jewish), and many an artist enhanced his career by obliging her in this regard.  A 1942 photograph taken in her New York apartment shows herself posing with no less than fourteen renowned artists of the time – not all of them necessarily her lovers – including Breton, Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian.  It is a curious photograph, with some of the subjects facing right, some left, and only a few looking squarely at the camera.  Only Peggy Guggenheim could have assembled in one spot such a clutch of avant-garde talent, most of them in wartime exile.
Front row: Leonora Carrington, 2nd from left.  Middle row: Max Ernst, far left; Breton in
middle; Fernand Léger, 2nd from right.  Back row: Peggy Guggenheim, 2nd from left;
Marcel Duchamp, 2nd from right; Piet Mondrian, far right.     It was not Peggy Guggenheim who enlisted Breton’s affections in New York, but Elisa Claro (née Bindorff), whom he met in a French restaurant on  56thStreet in 1943 and married in (of all places!) Reno, Nevada, in 1945, she becoming his third and final wife.  He traveled with her to Canada in 1944, and the following year they visited the Hopi reservation in Arizona, where they observed Hopi rituals and Breton added kachina dolls to his art collection.  Accompanied by Elisa, in the spring of 1946 Breton returned to Paris to resume his Surrealist activities and rambunctious ways, as inclined as ever to provocation and controversy.  His former Surrealist comrades Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, now ardent Communists, dismissed him as irrelevant, since he had not participated, as they had, in the Resistance.  Which didn’t prevent him from advancing as always the Surrealist cause and exploring what he would term Magical Art.
W. H. Auden
Auden in 1939.     The English poet and man of letters W. H. Auden, already well known in England as a leftist writer and intellectual, came to New York in January 1939 with his friend the writer Christopher Isherwood, the two of them entering the U.S. with temporary visas but intending to stay.  Auden and Isherwood, age 32 and 35 respectively, had known each other since boarding school, and in the 1920s had left strait-laced, homophobic England for the freedom of Weimar Berlin.  There Auden had remained for nine months and Isherwood for years, the chief attraction being a seemingly inexhaustible supply of boys available and eager for sex.  In the 1930s Auden worked in England as a schoolteacher, essayist, reviewer, and lecturer, but in 1937, when he did volunteer work for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, he became disillusioned with politics and disgusted with war.  It was this experience, above all, that prompted him to quit England for America, where he hoped to resolve the doubts, both political and personal, now plaguing him.Chester Kallman

     When the two newly arrived English writers gave a reading here, two college students from Brooklyn College sat in the front row and winked and smiled provocatively.  One of them, Chester Kallman, showed up at their lodgings the next day to interview them for the college newspaper, causing Auden to remark sourly, “It’s the wrong blond!”  But Kallman, with an ample supply of Brooklyn chutzpah, persisted with the interview, and by the end of it Auden’s interest had kindled.  In fact, he was smitten; they soon became lovers.
     The New York literary scene was to Auden’s liking and he remained here, but in April 1939 Isherwood, sensing that the East Coast would be Auden’s turf, went to California, where he would settle down and cultivate the West Coast as his own.  When war broke out in September, Auden informed the British Embassy in Washington that he would return to Britain, if needed, but was told that for his age group only qualified personnel were wanted.  In spite of this, there would develop considerable resentment in Britain that Auden and Isherwood had absented themselves when Britain, following the fall of France, stood alone against Germany and endured the horrors of the Blitz.  Auden, on the other hand, viewed the wartime sloganeering, speechifying, and committee-joining fervor of British intellectuals as irrelevant to the war effort, and as potentially damaging as fascism at its worst.
     In 1940-41 Auden lived in a ramshackle brownstone at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights in an experiment in communal living launched by his friend George Davis, a brilliant fiction editor recently fired from his job at Harper’s Bazaar because of his total lack of self-discipline.  Experiments in communal living were nothing new in America, but nineteenth-century endeavors had proven impractical, since the free spirits involved were better at talk and philosophizing than at managing money, doing the dishes, and taking out the trash.  Nothing daunted, Davis assembled in the brownstone on Middagh Street a number of his authors and acquaintances, including Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, and others – such a concentration of creative talent, seasoned by the presence of an acclaimed stripper recently turned author, that it spices the mind.
Carson McCullers     Auden was not noted for neatness – wherever he lived, he left papers and cigarette ashes strewn about – but in this crowd he was by contrast the perfect bourgeois, imposing regular meals and regular working hours for all.  He wrote out cooking and cleaning schedules, lectured his housemates when they used too much toilet paper, and announced at dinnertime, “There will be no political discussion.”  He and Carson McCullers, who had just achieved literary fame with the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, developed a warm teacher-student friendship beneficial to both – a remarkable achievement, given Cullers’s neurotic hang-ups and hard drinking.  At Davis’s invitation Gypsy Rose Lee joined the party so he could help her work on a novel, The G-String Murders, which in time became a best-selling mystery.  She alone of the residents had both money and common sense.  Her maid came with her but was unable to cope with the accumulated dirty clothes and dishes, empty bottles, and cigarette ashes and stubs. 
     Visiting this curious artists colony were Anais Nin, who christened the brownstone the February House because several of the occupants had birthdays in February, and Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika and son Klaus.  (Auden had married Erika to give her a British passport, but by mutual consent the marriage was never consummated and they lived apart.)  The novelist Richard Wright and others also dropped in.
     Amazingly, the residents of the February House all managed to get some significant work done, but their love life was often less than satisfactory.  George Davis happily cruised the Brooklyn piers, but Carson McCullers pined futilely for the Swiss journalist and world traveler Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a friend of the Manns, while Auden yearned stubbornly for Chester Kallman, who after two years, being young and adventurous, informed Auden that from now on he would range freely in search of sex.  Deeply wounded, Auden, who wanted a stable relationship, managed to maintain his friendship, albeit sexless, with Chester.  Auden’s friends never could grasp why Auden clung to a younger partner whom they considered in every way his inferior, but they apparently failed to grasp that desire is not wise or prudent or practical; it simply is.  Auden and Chester Kallman each offered the other something that he needed, something beyond sex; the relationship ended only with Auden’s death.  How Auden squared his sex life with the Anglican faith he had returned to in 1940 I do not know.  He seems to have been troubled by his sexuality, as Kallman was not.
     Inevitably, communal living in the February House began to fray on the nerves of the participants.  Fed up with her housemates’ drinking and slovenliness, Gypsy bowed out first, soon followed by McCullers, whose boozing and late hours had impaired her fragile health.  Irked by Paul Bowles’s noisy sex games with his wife and loud partying, Auden and Britten expelled the offender, but Britten and Pears then also left the house and America, returning to wartime Britain.  Soon afterward Auden too moved out, convinced of the need for a balance between bohemian chaos and bourgeois convention that the February House obviously could not provide.  George Davis stayed stubbornly on until the house was demolished in 1945; in time he would marry Kurt Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, and work hard promoting Weill’s work.  The story of 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights, brief but stellar, has justifiably been called a true mingling of the sublime and the ridiculous; it is well told in Sherill Tippins’s February House (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
     When Auden was called up for the draft in 1942, the U.S. Army rejected him because of his avowed homosexuality.  For several years he taught at Swarthmore College and in 1945, unknown to Auden at the time, he was considered for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on the basis of his volume For the Time Being, but lost out to Karl Schapiro because of his alleged Communism (he had never joined he Party) and his aloofness from the war.  Then, in March 1945, he applied to join U.S. Army as part of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany, and became a major as a “bombing research analyst in the Morale Division,” interviewing civilians in the devastated cities of Germany.  Significantly, neither his wartime disgust with war nor his homosexuality seems to have been a problem, and the prospect of a steady and substantial salary was surely an enticement.  The thought of Auden in uniform is, to put it mildly, arresting.  (The Strategic Bombing Survey, by the way, studied the effects of bombing on both Germany and Japan and concluded that 10% of the bombs hit their target.  One wonders, then, where the other 90% ended up.)
The later Auden.    Auden became a U.S. citizen in 1946 and continued to live in New York, making a living as a writer, teacher, lecturer, and librettist.  Reading his poetry, he practiced a low-keyed delivery, despising the sonorous and inflated tones that often plague poets when they read.  In 1948 his long poem The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize.  From 1953 on he shared houses and apartments with Kallman, though later he would summer in Europe.  Time took its toll on both of them.  Auden’s aging face grew fissured from his steady smoking, and svelte, young Chester became a middle-aged man who drank far more than was good for him.  When Stravinsky asked Auden to do the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, Auden, hoping to reclaim Chester through the steadiness of work, enlisted his support and sold him to the composer as a collaborator.  Occasionally Kallman would show some poetry of his own to a friend, who was invariably struck by its intensity.  One suspects that Kallman secretly resented being in the shadow of an acclaimed man of letters, but he published three volumes of his own poetry and in collaboration with Auden became known as a librettist. 
     Auden’s literary reputation has had its ups and downs.  While a poet friend of mine praised him to the skies, I found him a bit too ironic, detached, intellectual, preferring the Celtic word jungle of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, impenetrable as that jungle can be.  By the time of his death in 1973, Auden was recognized as a literary elder statesman.  He died in Vienna of heart failure and is buried in Kirchstettin, a town in Austria where he had owned a farmhouse.  
     Just as Auden once went to Berlin for boys, so Kallman went to Athens for the same, moving his winter home there in 1963.  He is said to have been generous to his young male lovers.  He died suddenly in Athens in 1975, age 54, and is buried there in the Jewish Cemetery, far apart from Auden.  Some sources say that, mourning Auden, he died of a broken heart, but I find this fanciful.  On a deep level his life was not a happy one, but perhaps I'm being judgmental.
     A note on WBAI:  The loyal staff, whose devotion is commendable, profess optimism about saving the station, but the desperate appeals for donations go on and on and on.  I never thought the award-winning news program would vanish, but it did.  The substitute news program likewise vanished, replaced by fund-raising specials, then came back, and now has vanished again.  Inconsistency in programming is sure to drive listeners away -- listeners like me, a longtime supporter of the station.  I hear Gary Null’s one-hour program at noon on weekdays, though he warns that he may be eliminated, because of his criticism of the current management.  I hear Richard Wolff’s weekly economics program at noon on Saturday, though I’ve got his message fully by now (capitalism is bad, socialism is the answer).  And I hear Thom Hartmann’s 5 p.m. program weekdays, though his self-promotion annoys me, as does his constant replaying of segments, often up to three or four times within two days.  But that’s it.  I find it very easy to turn from WBAI to WNYC, and that is the crux of the problem.  (Apologies to those unfamiliar with WBAI and its travails, but I feel a need to chronicle its endless downward spiral; unique, it is in danger of disappearing forever.)


This is New York

                                                                       Bob Jagendorf

   Coming soon:  Exiles in New York, part 2.  The Scarlet Sisters, a Dragon Lady, an anarchist with a compact, diverse others.
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder

118. How New Yorkers Have Fun

     New York has always been fun city, a place where people came to have a good time, to live it up, maybe to get just a bit wild.  And the locals have always liked to have fun, too, and in the Big Apple the possibilities were – and are -- endless.  But what exactly is “fun”?  The dictionary says “what provides amusement or enjoyment,” and in distinguishing it from words like “game” and “play” says that fun “implies laughter or gaiety, but may imply merely a lack of serious or ulterior purpose.”  Okay, I’ll go along with that, though I may stretch the definition just a bit.
                                                                                                        lldar Sagdejev













                                                                  David Shankbone



















                                                  Bureau of Land Management
Having fun today
     I asked several of my friends what they do, or what they have done in the past, to have fun.  The answers varied quite a bit.  For instance:
·      Cook a dinner for friends you’ve invited over.·      Museums and concerts.·      Hiking.·      A good book.·      A congenial bar with a good piano player.·      A dinner out.·      A disco with loud music and dancing.
     No, not a single orgy; sorry to disappoint.  My friends don’t go for orgies, or if they do, they won’t admit to it.  But don’t worry, we’ll get around to some wild stuff later.  If some of these are on the quiet side, without laughter or overt gaiety, I still include them as fun, quiet fun, but bars and discos offer noisy fun, too.  One friend, by the way, reported that he didn’t have fun anymore, though he’s never struck me as glum.  Here now are some notes on the examples of fun listed above.
     As regards bars, one gay friend mentioned The Monster, a gay bar in the West Village on Grove Street at Sheridan Square with a bar/piano lounge at ground level.  He described it as having three personalities.  The pianist often plays show tunes from shows from the storied past, to the delight of the older gays present (personality #1).  But he also plays tunes from recent shows, to the delight of the younger gay set (personality #2).  And #3?  For that you go downstairs to the dance floor, where Hispanic males dance up a storm.  The bar has been going since 1970 and is definitely a fun scene.  One of the online reviews by a man from Brooklyn tells how his girlfriend wanted to take him out to a fun gay bar for his birthday and chose The Monster on a recent Sunday night.  “We happened to be thrown into a sea of fun bartenders and staff that were hosting an underwear party that night.  What a blast we had.”  And if his girlfriend was one of only three women there, everyone seemed to love her.  His conclusion: “Will definitely be back!”  Which sounds like a real New York scene.
     Though it’s in my neck of the woods, I’ve never been to The Monster, so I’ll mention instead a gay disco that Bob and I went to in the late 1960s and 1970s, when discos were all the rage.  It was a mafia-run joint in the West Village, with the inevitable thug at the door to keep the non-gay element out.  Inside you were obliged to have a drink first at the bar, before proceeding to the dance floor in back.  And what a dance floor it was!  Male and female couples (rarely mixed) bouncing and jiggling to ear-splitting piped-in music while strobe lights flashed splashes of color that made you think you were on an LSD trip, while a male go-go dancer in a bikini exposed his pulsating charms.  It was wild, it was crazy, it was fun.  At first some of the lesbians fooled me; they really looked like men.  But Bob and I decided that two things gave them away: the voice (if they spoke), and the line of the jaw, always slightly more delicate, less rough-hewn than a man’s.  Otherwise, you’d never have known the difference.  But all that was long ago. 

    I also mentioned a good dinner out.  Quiet fun, but fun nevertheless, and very New York.  New Yorkers like to dine out and have the choice of cheap, moderate, or very expensive and exclusive restaurants, and every ethnic variety conceivable.  Over the years Bob and I have patronized Italian, French, Spanish, German, Irish, Chinese, and Thai restaurants, with special emphasis on Italian and Chinese.  For a really good meal Bob and I used to go to Gargiulo’s, an old family-run Italian restaurant on West 15th Street in Coney Island, but a few blocks from the boardwalk.  Founded by the Gargiulo family in 1907, when the great amusement parks were flourishing, in 1965 it was bought by the Russo family, who have run it for several generations.  Under the Russos the restaurant has greatly expanded, adding extra dining rooms to accommodate weddings and celebrations, and a huge parking lot across the street offering valet parking to patrons coming from all over the city.  (Bob and I were probably the only ones who came and went by subway.)  The expansion was no doubt all to the good, though it did eliminate a brothel discreetly situated next door, passing which, as we approached the portals of culinary Elysium, somehow added spice to the adventure.  Gargiulo’s is famous for classic Neapolitan fare, but to sample it you have to observe their dress code: no shorts and, God knows, no bare feet.  This may be Coney Island, but it’s a very special Coney Island, catering to middle-class families of taste.

The main dining room, circa 1970.        Dining often in the high-ceilinged main dining room, Bob and I acquired a favorite waiter, Giancarlo, who looked after us with care.  My preferred dishes: as an appetizer, mozzarella in carrozza (mozzarella cheese on toast), then fettuccine alfredo, and for dessert, cannoli (fingerlike shells of fried pastry dough with a sweet, creamy filling).  I couldn’t begin to describe these dishes; I can only say each was delicious, exquisite, unique.  Though meat dishes and seafood were available, we learned to settle for pasta, which Gargiulo’s does superbly.  As veteran New Yorkers, such a meal was the evening’s entertainment; there was no thought of doing anything else, except the long subway ride home the length of Brooklyn, most of it above ground, looking at the dark borough’s lights, and savoring in memory the dishes we had just enjoyed.  When we saw other guests – a few – rush through their meal and dash off to some other engagement, we were amazed; what could possibly top a dinner at Gargiulo’s?
     When you have a favorite restaurant, you experience more than just food.  It becomes, in fact, a ritual.  Bob and I would go to the New York Aquarium at Coney Island on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, when there were very few visitors, to renew our acquaintance with penguins, walruses, and sharks.  Then we would walk along the boardwalk and, on a clear day, see the sun set over the ocean, en route to Gargiulo’s, where we would arrive shortly after 5 p.m., among the first of the diners to appear.  Always we asked for Giancarlo, who would greet us warmly and guide us to our reserved table.  Then, as the dining room filled up, we had the fun – yes, fun – of watching middle-class Brooklyn on a very special family night.  Three, even four, generations of an Italian American family would arrive, some of the elderly in wheel chairs, the grown unmarried kids dining of necessity with the family, the young women, sometimes blond, in stylish black dresses or pants suits, and the little kids invariably more elegant than their parents.  Only a restricted menu was available, so as to lighten the work of the staff, since they would be going to midnight Mass.  But if we asked Giancarlo if canoli, not on the menu, were possible, he would reply with a sly smile, “For you, yes,” and canoli would appear.
     Giancarlo wasn’t the only staff member we bonded with.  One of the Russos, Anthony, whom Bob remembers as long ago behind the coat check counter, now helps run the restaurant and welcomes patrons table by table with a hearty greeting.  And once we saw Lula, one of the staff in her late forties, come out of the kitchen to greet some longtime patrons and friends, and she seemed so open and friendly that we flashed a smile in her direction.  That was all she needed to come over and greet us, total strangers, and exchange a few warm words.  After that, with management’s approval and blessing, I would always go into the huge kitchen, hunt her up among the sinks and cutting boards and pans, and say hello and thank her – and through her all the staff – for the superb dinner we were having.  She always responded with the warmest smile and thanks.
The Gargiulo's staff.  Lula on the far right, with
Anthony standing next to her.
     Dining on less festive occasions had its advantages, too.  When we arrived at 5 p.m., the waiters would still be sitting at a table near the entrance to the kitchen shelling peas.  And with them was Father George Ruggieri, a handsome Jesuit in his fifties who was a renowned marine biologist and, for many years, the director of the Aquarium, but also a longtime patron and friend of the restaurant.  Though we shared two enthusiasms with him – the Aquarium and Gargiulo’s -- we never spoke to him, but he struck us as an  urbane, sophisticated gentleman, an impression reinforced by the greetings that other arriving guests gave him, including numerous women young and old who in a steady stream flocked to his table for a bit of conversation and charm.  The waiters and their peas had by now disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Father Ruggieri to hold sway alone at his table with poise and geniality, as at ease here as in a marine laboratory.  He died in 1987 and for us Gargiulo’s hasn’t been quite the same since, though his portrait adorns the wall of the dining room where he was often a guest.  But today Gargiulo's, having survived Hurricane Sandy, is still offering superb Neapolitan fare to diners of taste.
     A brief final note about dining out in New York.  If, having made a reservation, you arrive at a restaurant, find a long line, and are made to wait twenty minutes or more, never go to that restaurant again; it’s probably “in,” probably “hot,” and coasting on its reputation.  New York abounds in restaurants.  There’s probably just as good a one within easy walking distance where a reservation is a reservation and you’ll be seated promptly. 
Having fun yesterday
High-wheeled bikes in the 1880s.  Notice the
three-wheel bike to accommodate the lady.
     Yesterday – by which I mean the nineteenth century – offered many possibilities for fun, but with a distinct class difference.  The well-bred middle class often gathered in the living room to play parlor games and sing.  Tame by today’s standards, admittedly, and even then some were a bit more adventurous.  If rendering “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” or “Silver Threads among the Gold” wasn’t quite your idea of fun, in the years following the Civil War a whole range of activities appeared.  For hardy males the velocipede, an import from France in the late 1860s, opened vistas of healthy endeavor, while causing neophytes not a few bruises and fractures.  Then, circa 1876, came the high-wheeled bike that made the sport popular; cyclists’ clubs proliferated.  In time, ladies too were able to cycle, though the ample garb of the time posed problems. 

     Archery and lawn tennis were also popular in the 1870s, being thought refined games appropriate for both sexes of “the educated and refined classes.”  Archery required more skill than exertion, and many women  excelled in it, striking handsome poses in the process.  Ladies playing lawn tennis held the trains of their long skirts and were not expected to run for the ball, which was patted gently back and forth over a high net stretched across the lawn; overhand serves and smashes at the net would have been though unmannerly. 
The hurly-burly of lawn tennis in the 1880s.
The most genteel of games.     Coming from England, croquet was welcomed by some as an alternative to lawn tennis’s “hurly-burly.”  Esteemed above all in the game were grace in holding and using the mallet, easy and pleasing attitudes in playing, and gentlemanly and ladylike manners.  Young ladies were allowed to cheat, since gentlemen were thought to find such indiscretions charming.  And since croquet permitted the sexes to mingle innocently, it facilitated courting, as couples socialized and flirted freely in full view of parents and neighbors. 
     Was the fun of those days inevitably and oppressively constrained by  notions of gentility?  Not always.  In 1866 The Black Crook, a hodgepodge of an extravaganza mixing melodrama, spectacular stage effects, and ballet, burst upon the New York theatrical scene and proved an instant success.  The plot is too complicated and too absurd to merit recounting; suffice it to say that it involved a villain’s pact with the devil, a kidnapped heroine, a hero aided by a fairy queen, and finally – after five and a half hours – a happy ending.  What appealed to audiences were the special effects: scenes rising out of the floor, fairies soaring in the air, shimmering stalagmites and stalactites in the fairy queen’s crystal grotto, a hurricane in a mountain pass, Satan’s sudden appearances, and gilded chariots dropping from the clouds.  But what appealed even more – especially to the male contingent – were a Grand Ballet of Gems featuring two hundred shapely female legs daringly exposed in flesh-colored tights, and a Pas de Demons with four leotard-garbed women, skirtless, who, possessed by the devil, danced devilishly. 
The finale, where Amazons defeat the forces of evil.
Lydia in all her glory.       Ministers and newspaper editors inveighed against this incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah and its “ancient heathen orgies,” but the public flocked.  Old men leered from the front-row seats, and riffraff of the lower orders peered down from the gallery, but high society came to the theater as well, some of the women in décolleté just as shocking as that of the performers.  While solid ranks of the godly held aloof, it was obvious that times and morals were changing; what high society did today, the middle class would probably do tomorrow, its younger members in the lead.  The Black Crook was repeatedly revived and imitated; from it, in time, came both the Broadway musical and burlesque.  And when Lydia Thompson and Her British Blondes burst upon the city in 1868, the performers wearing short tunics and tights that displayed their legs, the girlie show of later times was beginning to take its familiar form, with emphasis more on bodily charms than on talent.  And it was all being pioneered in Babylon on the Hudson.
     What other fun was available?  Baseball had appeared before the Civil War, was played during the war by soldiers eager to relieve the boredom of camp life, and spread nationwide thereafter.  This was strictly a man’s game, but healthy and orderly, and it would soon be professionalized, with rival clubs contending and spectators paying a fee to watch.  All in all, it was acceptable to respectable society.
     What was truly abhorrent to the genteel middle class were certain pastimes of the desperate classes, those legions of unwashed, unchurched, or Romanist masses, drink-ridden and riot-prone (and mostly, needless to say, Irish), who existed in uneasy proximity to their betters in the city.  Cockfighting was common among those masses, with spectators betting on either of two contenders, who then lunged and stabbed at each other till the loser was a bloody and demolished mess of feathers, and the victor bled copiously, minus an eye or two; the loser was then tossed on a heap of dead fowl in a corner, and the next fight began.  Also widespread was the rat pit, where scores of spectators sitting on pine planks or standing around a sunken pit watched as packs of rats, often collected by the neighborhood youngsters, were released, to be attacked by trained terriers, while the audience bet on the number of rats the dogs would kill.  The spectators were mostly working class, with some male gentry thrown in.  Clearly, this and cockfighting were the dark side of fun.  To suppress them, in 1866 the reformer Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) here in New York and, with solid middle-class backing, began eliminating lower-class blood sports.
Here, to judge by the top hats, the gentry seem to prevail.
     Another kind of fun condemned by Victorian gentility were the pretty-waiter-girl saloons especially in evidence along Sixth Avenue, Broadway, and the Bowery: taverns offering some kind of vaudeville on a curtainless stage in back, with “waiter girls” in short skirts and tasseled red boots who joined the audience in sing-alongs and then, during intermissions, plumped themselves down among the spectators and solicited customers for carnal encounters in private rooms upstairs.  Flocking to them were males of all classes, though sporting gents of the middle class found the fancier  establishments safer, if not quite respectable.  The most popular of these concert saloons was Harry Hill’s, on Houston just east of Broadway, where clean-cuffed professional men – judges, lawyers, doctors -- mingled with boxers, politicos, and gamblers, and danced and drank with the local demimondaines, under the strict surveillance of the host.  Ever vigilant, Hill suppressed any threatened violence with vigor, and provided a private room where patrons could sober up, so as not to be attacked by thugs outside.  
A rambunctious night at Harry Hill's.
     As for full-fledged brothels, the city had every kind, from the lowest waterfront joints to palatial uptown establishments catering to an exclusive and well-heeled clientele.  Periodically some minister from the provinces would come to the city, visit one of them warily, then rush back to sermonize his flock on the utter and unrestrained turpitude of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Hudson.  Which, inevitably, brought more customers to the establishment in question.
Crazy fun
     We’ve had a glance at quiet fun, noisy fun, and dark fun; so what about wild, crazy, madcap fun?   New York has always harbored plenty of it, but I’ll focus on a peculiar variety that I term fitness fun.  This is what Bob’s and my friend Dyan, a nurse, does, when not looking after others.  It’s crazy stuff that I didn’t know existed, all of it right here in this city.  Aside from attending a no-pants party with her boyfriend, Dyan has done the following:
·      GORUCK drills, marches, and water push-ups in the harbor off Brooklyn.·      A Color Mob 5k race where she ended up splotched with many colors and looking like a piece of abstract art.·      The Walking Dead Escape, an obstacle course where survivors who run the course without being touched by zombies can then become zombies and try to contaminate others.
     So what is this all about?  It’s about keeping fit.  GORUCK is an organization that stages challenging military-style programs for civilians staffed by Special Operations combat veterans.  Civilians who volunteer for the program can select one of several options that vary in length of time and distance.  They join a team, carry heavy rucksacks, do military drills, and learn survival skills.  Dyan chose GORUCK Light, which involves a mere 4 to 5 hours and 7 to 10 miles.  (GORUCK Selection, the most challenging option, involves 48+ hours and 80+ miles!)  She did physical drills that included carrying heavy packs and the American flag through the streets, then crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to do push-ups in the harbor there.  This is fun? you may ask.  Maybe not for you or me, but for Dyan, yes, though she also calls the experience awesome.  She’s a real fitness freak, and adventurous to boot.

GORUCK water push-ups.  Dyan is the blonde.




    Color Mob 5k stages five-kilometer races where runners of all ages get splattered with wild colors as they run, then party at the finish line with music and beer.  You are advised to wear clothes you want to have colored permanently, since some of the colors will never completely wash out.  The runners aren’t timed; everyone is a winner.  Coming back on the subway, their clothes all splotched with colors, Dyan and her friends were quite a spectacle.  When a woman asked if she could photograph them, they said yes; she then sent them a copy of the photo.  This, at least, sounds like fun – good, honest, wild, crazy fun.
Coming back in the subway from Color Mob.



     Walking Dead Escape was staged on the evening of October 12 last at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum at Pier 86, West 46th Street and 12th Avenue, Manhattan.  The museum features the aircraft carrier Intrepid, a veteran of World War II and Vietnam that is now a National Historic Monument.  Walking Dead Escape participants were invited to climb, crawl, and slide through an obstacle course on the Intrepid that included overturned buses, while trying to avoid being touched and contaminated by zombies.  Or you can choose to be a Walker (zombie), or just watch as a spectator.  When Dyan and her friends finished the course, they became zombies and then were professionally made up, their faces smeared to look like zombies, following which they spent several hours trying to touch and contaminate others.  At the end, the contaminated zombies were taken into quarantine and subjected to a fake execution, since there is no cure for the zombie virus.  Again, pretty strenuous fun, but fun nonetheless.  For Dyan and her friends, at least.  I’m not sure I’d care to dodge overturned buses or be smeared to make like a zombie. 
A smeared face makes you a zombie.




     Note on Kitty Genovese:  In vignette #13 I discussed the Kitty Genovese case of 1964, which a New York Times article presented as a shocking instance of New Yorker indifference to a murder witnessed by many neighbors who chose not to get involved.  Drawing on online sources, the vignette refuted the Times account, which misrepresented the whole event, since many alleged witnesses never heard Kitty Genovese’s screams, and some neighbors did indeed notify the police, who failed to respond in time.  One viewer of this blog just sent me a clipping from The New Yorker of March 10, 2014 (pp. 73-77) that confirms the account of my sources, adding some relevant details.  Anyone interested in the case, and the legend of New York apathy it inspired, should have a look at the article.  Legends die hard, but sometimes they do finally get put to rest.  Since her death occurred just fifty years ago this month, the March 2014 issue of the AARP Bulletin, which addresses Golden Oldies like myself, has also revisited her murder and the Times’s coverage of it and reached a similar conclusion.  (To access the vignettes, click on July 2012 in the Archive.)


This is New York

Thomas Altfather Good
        Coming soon:  Exiles in New York.  A Dragon Lady, a future emperor, two madams in discreet retirement, a prince-begetter, an icon of queerness, and many more.

     ©  2014  Clifford Browder

117. Prophets vs. Profits of Doom

     This mini-post comprises thoughts inspired by radio station WBAI and Wall Street, two distinctly New York phenomena.  To even mention them in the same breath is unusual, since they are diametrically opposed.  I doubt if Wall Street pays WBAI much attention, but WBAI, ever the rebel and champion of progressive causes, sees Wall Street as a cesspool of lucre and a nest of greed.  When, ironically, the station was lodged there prior to Hurricane Sandy, it referred to itself as being “in the belly of the beast.”  So let’s have look at the rebel and the beast.
This is what Gary says we should hoard.
Apollo2005      WBAI is the natural home of Prophets of Doom.  Even in its current and never-ending crisis, as programs disappear and others replace them, while the station pleads desperately for donations from listeners, its prophecies of doom persist.  Veteran nutritionist Gary Null, who has been with the station for years, predicts an imminent financial crisis that will dwarf the one we have just survived.  He foresees the dollar no longer the world’s preferred currency and advises us to get into silver and gold, actually taking possession, as the only safe investment.  Since he correctly predicted the bursting of the real estate bubble that provoked the last crisis, he is not to be cavalierly dismissed.  So should we make room somewhere for those ingots and coins and start piling them up?
Greed, one of the seven deadly sins, as
portrayed in a portal of the Gothic cathedral
of Metz.  Was he expecting a crash?
     Another Prophet of Doom is Thom Hartmann, a radio and TV talk show host and author now heard on WBAI from 5 to 6 p.m. weekdays, a newcomer to WBAI whose nationwide following the station probably hopes to recruit.  He is not shy about promoting his book The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America – and What We Can Do to Stop It, in which he argues passionately that this country, corrupted by corporate greed and the doings of the very rich, is headed for another Great Crash, a catastrophic repeat of the crashes of the 1760s, 1856, and 1929, crises that come, he insists, every four generations and are followed by an armed conflict: the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II.  This grim scenario can be prevented, if ordinary citizens – the 99% -- see to it that major reforms are enacted and moral choices made. 
     I haven’t read Mr. Hartmann’s book, so I cannot review it.  Though  tempted to have a look, I held off.  He is very knowledgeable about current events, but I find his grasp of history a bit shaky.  His view of our history as cyclical, with a major crisis every four generations, seems a bit too schematic, too forced.  I know nothing about financial crises in the 1760s, but his choice of one in 1856 – an error for 1857 – strikes me as arbitrary.  There was indeed a crash in 1857, but it left the agricultural South untouched, and the resulting recession in the North lasted only a year and half, following which the economy recovered.  Far more serious were the Panics of 1837 and 1873, each of which produced a severe recession – you could even say depression – that lasted many years.  If Mr. Hartmann ignores these panics, it’s surely because no great war came in their wake, and they wouldn’t fit into his cyclical theory of a crisis every four generations.  Nor would World War I, though it was hardly a minor affair.  Mr. Hartmann’s heart (no pun intended) is in the right place, but his facts don’t always add up.
The run on the Seamen's Savings Bank during the Panic of 1857.  The ragpicker to the
left in the gutter seems to be ignoring the whole brouhaha.
     So what do I conclude?  Certainly the stock market now is very high, and the bull market that began in March 2009 is now one of the longest ever and ripe for a correction, if not a full-fledged bear market.  Just when such a downturn might come, and what might trigger it, I wouldn’t presume to predict, but come it will.  Will it be as catastrophic as the Prophets of Doom insist?  In its winter 2014 report my mutual fund company, T. Rowe Price, comments on the stock market’s remarkable recovery from its March 2009 low, and insists that our financial system today is in much better shape than it was in 2006-2008, when banks were burdened with risky debt and the housing bubble was at its peak.  Yes, banks are still too big to fail, Price concedes, and high-speed trading poses risks, but corporate balance sheets and risk controls have improved, rendering a crisis like the last one unlikely.  So speaks a moderate and experienced voice from the financial sector, one not given to political pronouncements but rather to analysis of things as they are – political, social, economic -- and how they affect investing.  But that same voice adds a note of caution: stock prices are very high now, and the impressive gains of 2013 are not likely to be repeated in 2014.
     One of the T. Rowe Price fund managers refers to the 2008 collapse as a “once-in-a-lifetime career event.”  There were Prophets of Doom back then too – I remember bold captions DON’T  BUY STOCKS --  but those who bought stocks at the time have been richly rewarded.  Veteran investors have chorused this advice over time: Buy low, sell high.  Or, put another way: Buy when everyone is selling, and sell when everyone is buying.  Easier said than done, since it means ignoring the hysteria or euphoria all around you; you have to be a resolute contrarian.  But if you do buy when things look bleak, the result will be what I term Profits of Doom.  Though maybe the best advice of all would be this: If you have made good investment choices, stick with them long-term and ignore the ups and downs. 
     Is it obscene to be talking about investment profits and strategies, when vast numbers of people are out of work, and many more are working part-time only or in jobs far below their skill level?   And when students are burdened with debt, and people are losing their homes?  Yes, it is.  But we live in a capitalist society where money rules, and we have to take care of ourselves.  Will the Prophets of Doom be proven right?  To judge by the past, probably not, or at least, they’ll be proven only partly right.  If another crisis comes, moderate or severe (probably severe, in my opinion), those who tough it out and take advantage will realize Profits of Doom.  Those who profit won’t be exclusively the super rich; small investors can take advantage too, and I hope they will, because they’re just trying to survive.  Someday we may have a more ideal society where things are handled better, but that’s a long way off.  Meanwhile, we cope as best we can.  As for WBAI vs. Wall Street, the one lacking money and the other up to its ears in it, I must sadly note that Wall Street’s future is, alas, assured, whereas that of WBAI is not.  So it goes.
     Note:  Is Browder a greed creep?  Those who know me as a longtime listener (and critic) of WBAI may be surprised by the above and indeed ask if I am.  My answer:  A greed creep?  Of course!  Who isn’t?  In this society we have to be concerned about money.  And greed is as American as apple pie.
                                                                                                                Hhemken
Even so, I'm not just a greed creep.  I’m many things, and so are we all.  I’ve even done a very unpublished poem, “Jokers Wild,” that catalogues my at least nine selves.  I am
o   a raunchy bisexual studo   a juicy little nitwit fruito   a seeker who ignores the first two, being eager to renounce blind lusto   a sour-tongued critic who denounces all three as depraved and inaneo   a blathering poeto   a greed creepo   a health nuto   a weepy, self-pitying suicideo   and a detached observer who views them all with amused tolerance, who is eyed by an observer eyed in turn by an observer through a mirror maze of infinite regression, while all the others, oblivious of him or them, pursue their antic ways.
And I’ve probably left some out.
     Schizoid?  Not at all.  We all harbor a host of selves who constantly compete with one another, some dominating at one moment, and others at another.  And in my case, the greed creep is just one of the many.  Indeed, there is room for all.  A mere one or two selves would be boring.  Having multiple selves, some of them at war with others, is much more interesting and much more fun.  So count up your many selves, spank the bad ones, and cheer on the others. 


This is New York
                                                                                                                                 David Shankbone
     Coming soon:  How New Yorkers Have Fun.  Quiet fun, noisy fun, genteel fun, naughty fun, dark or bloody fun, and crazy, wild, madcap fun.   Which should be fun.
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder
     
     

116. Fires and Firemen

     This post is about New York City fires and firemen, past and present.  I’ll start with fires I have experienced personally, then have a look at fires and firemen of the past.  I have been through 2½ fires in the city.
Fire no. 1
     My partner Bob and I heard a commotion downstairs, poked our noses out the apartment door, saw a haze of smoke coming up the staircase, and a fireman knocking on doors one flight down.
     “Do you want us out of the building?” I yelled.
     “Yes,” came the fireman’s answer, “and fast!”
     That said, he darted down the stairs into the hazy smoke.  So Bob and I tossed on our light jackets and followed him down the stairs into the smoke.  Ahead of us we saw Mrs. T., the landlady, who was housebound with arthritis, being carried down the last flight of stairs.  Only when we were safe outside, joining the crowd watching the firemen at work, did we realize that we had done exactly what you’re told not to do in a fire: to go in the direction of the smoke. 
      The fire was in the basement.  We later learned that Mrs. T. had once had a perfume business and stored some chemicals there.  Another no-no: don’t store inflammables in the basement, and above all, don’t leave them there, forgotten, for years.  The chemicals had been a fire just waiting to happen.
     The fire was quickly put out, and after the firemen had aired the building to get rid of the smoke, we were allowed back in.  No damage except in the basement, so it ended well.  Being a bit shook up, Bob and I and our downstairs neighbor Hans joined another neighbor in her room for an after-crisis drink.  A real Village scene, we thought: four survivors tippling together in a tastefully shabby apartment.
     “Like in La Bohème,” said Hans, a great opera buff. 
     “Or Götterdämmerung,” I quipped, mindful of Wagner’s fiery finale.
     So ended my first fire in the city.  No word of it in the newspapers, since such non-events occur all the time, too numerous and routine to merit a mention.  But I had learned to be leery of accumulating inflammables.  Once, when our trash area was piled high with boxes and newspapers that the super hadn’t bothered to put out for collection, I informed the Fire Department, and they were on the spot inspecting the place within 24 hours.  And every time I walk past the Magnolia Bakery, our celebrated ground-floor neighbor, and the Bleecker Street entrance to our basement is open, I peer down the steep stairs, wondering if that shadowy underworld is piled high with the bakery’s empty cartons, as it once was, when I went down to have access to our circuit breaker.
Fire no. 2
     One summer many years later there came a sudden knock on the door.  Bob was away, so I was in the apartment alone.  At the door was our young next-door neighbor, and behind her, once again, smoke pouring up the staircase, this time much thicker and more threatening.
     “Get out of the building!” I said, before she could say a word.  “Don’t go down the stairs.  Use the fire escape.  I’ll see you down on the street.”
     So she went down the front fire escape to West 11th Street, and after phoning Hans to alert him, I went down the other fire escape to Bleecker Street.  It was a mild summer afternoon, so all the tenants joined the inevitable throng watching the fire from the street.  Hans told me that another of our neighbors, who was watching the scene with visible anguish, had apologized to him: the fire had started in his kitchen.  Long out of work, he watched television day and night and had probably been watching it when he had something on the stove.  A quiet, harmless guy, but sad.  Another neighbor had told us once of helping him get an ambulance on Christmas Eve.  “I’m the loneliest man in the city,” he had confessed, before being whisked off in the ambulance to an emergency room – not a cheerful prospect on Christmas Eve.  And now, a fire in his apartment, and all of us routed out to the street.
     Again, the firemen had come quickly and soon the fire was out, with damage only to his kitchen.  For several days afterward, going up or down the stairs, through his open door I could see workmen working in his kitchen, and him, seemingly oblivious of them, watching television.  In time he moved out; I have no idea what has become of him.  And that is the story of my second fire in the city.
      As fires go, not much, you might say.  No roaring infernos, no charred bodies, no tangled, blackened wreckage.  Agreed.  But I have one more fire to offer.
Fire no. 2½
     Why 2½?  Because this fire wasn’t in my building, so I wasn’t routed out to the street.  One summer night, long past midnight, I heard a commotion on the roof next to mine.  Going to a window, I looked out and saw firemen on the roof next door, training hoses on a fire on the next roof over, where the residents had partied quietly the night before.  The flames were leaping skyward: a real conflagration devouring everything in its path.  I hadn’t even heard the sirens, but there were the firemen, dousing the fire with torrents of water until the flames finally faltered, shrank down, flickered, went out.  It was all over in a matter of minutes, but I’ll never forget the sight of that great mass of flames leaping high.  The excitement over, I went back to bed.
     The next morning I looked out and saw two of the residents poking about in the charred ruins of what had once been a charming roof garden.  Among the wreckage were glasses from the partying of the night before.  They saw me, gestured, shrugged.  I shrugged too and told them of the spectacle I had witnessed well past midnight.  And that was the end of the rooftop partying.  One cigarette, not quite out, had probably been left behind, when the revelers quit the roof and went downstairs; that’s all it took to kindle a blaze.
New Yorkers and fires
     New Yorkers tend to shrug off fires.  Not in their own building, of course, or in a building nearby, but otherwise they don’t pay much attention.  Fire engines race down the streets every day, their sirens wailing, and they’re just a part of the usual hullabaloo, along with police and ambulance sirens, rumbling trucks with screeching brakes, horn blasts of irate drivers, and altercations – often shrill – of motorists.  But New Yorkers don’t resent those sirens, annoying as they can be, since they are rushing aid to someone who needs it, and fast.  Here the city’s congestion is actually advantageous, since firemen, once an alarm is sounded, can be at the scene of the fire within minutes.  Congested cities don’t harbor the worst risk of fires; it’s those handsome dwellings out in the country, in idyllic settings, that risk burning to the ground before fire engines from some distant location can arrive.  There are fires in the city, but they tend to be put out fast.
     An exception to my statement that New Yorkers shrug off sirens: my partner Bob.  Once, when he was fourteen, he and his family were routed out of the floor they rented in a three-story tenement in Jersey City when, in the wee hours of the morning, a fire raged next door.  They were soon allowed back in, with no damage to their building, but the experience marked him for life.  Whenever he heard a fire engine’s siren in the street below our West Village apartment, he would listen intently, nervously, until the engine raced on past our building.  And if the siren stopped near us, he would peer out the window to see if our building was involved.  It never was, and he always breathed a sigh of relief.  Overly cautious, needlessly fearful?  Maybe.  But he was the best fire detector our apartment could have had.
     New York City firemen are generally admired.  Yes, their union long resisted admitting minority applicants and had to be coerced by the courts, and yes, occasionally a few of them get into off-duty brawls and scrapes, but our firemen emerged as the heroes of 9/11, when so many of them died in the collapsing Twin Towers.  We need the police too, but they have been tainted by corruption in the past, and the recent stop-and-frisk practice offended the minority youths who were arbitrarily harassed, and alienated the general public as well.  Luckily, the firemen have escaped such controversy.  When our friend Barbara visited from Maine, she watched in admiration and awe as firemen performed some routine task in public.  And another woman, a passerby and total stranger, joined her, professing the same admiration of these burly stalwarts going about their business, totally unaware of two admiring females watching discreetly from a distance. 
Great fires of the past
     Thanks to the city’s frequently updated Fire Code, regulating fire prevention, the storage and handling of combustibles, and related matters, and its regulation of building materials, the chance of a great fire today is vastly reduced.  And New York has never been devastated by a city-wide conflagration like the ones that leveled Chicago and San Francisco.  But in earlier times, when building materials were inflammable and regulations minimal, there were not one but two great fires in the city.
     The evening of December 16, 1835, was unusually cold, with high winds hammering the city.  Toward 9 p.m. a watchman smelled smoke and, joined by other watchmen, traced the smoke to a large warehouse on Merchant (now Beaver) Street.  Forcing the door open, they found the interior ablaze and watched helplessly as flames burst through the roof and, whipped by the wind, spread quickly throughout the downtown commercial district.  Bell towers and church bells clanged the alarm, and the city’s firemen, exhausted from fighting two fires the night before, turned out to haul their engines to the scene of the blaze.  But by midnight the freezing wind had lashed the flames into an inferno so bright that the glow could be seen in Poughkeepsie, New Haven, and Philadelphia, where firemen also went into action, thinking their suburbs were on fire. 
The burning of the Merchants' Exchange, 1835.
     Firemen arriving on the scene found the wells, cisterns, and hydrants frozen solid, and when the firemen, chopping holes in the frozen East River, tried to pump up water, the water froze in the hose.  Meanwhile merchants dragged goods out of warehouses to supposedly safe locations, only to see them consumed in the spreading conflagration.  Racing north, the flames engulfed the supposedly fireproof Merchants’ Exchange, a handsome cupola-topped, marble-faced structure on Wall Street that was the pride of the city and a tribute to its commercial success.  Rescuers managed to save records of current stock transactions, but barely got out in time before the great cupola came crashing down.  Scraping together supplies of gunpowder wherever they could be found, fire fighters blew up buildings along Wall Street and succeeded in blocking the fire’s progress and thus saved the northern half of the city from destruction.  By morning thirteen acres of the downtown commercial district were still aflame, and rivers of burning turpentine rolled out across the frozen East River to set several vessels on fire.  When the fire finally subsided, the ruins were littered with scorched silks and satins and laces, bottles of wine and champagne, and a mountain of coffee on South Street.  Looters were prowling about, getting drunk on scavenged liquor and gloating at the misfortune of the affluent, until state militia and U.S. Marines were brought in to put a stop to the looting.
The Merchants' Exchange, where merchants met to buy and sell
commodities, real estate, stocks, steamboats, whatever.  Before the telephone, 
merchants made themselves available to one another by going "on 'Change."
     What was the toll of this, the city’s worst fire ever?  Some 674 buildings had been destroyed, with losses estimated at from $18 to $26 million – for that time, a huge amount more than triple the cost of the Erie Canal.  Yet only two people died, since the commercial district was almost devoid of residential buildings.  And the Go Ahead spirit of the city was such that reconstruction began at once, with the ground still hot from smoking embers.   Within a year some 500 new buildings had gone up, and the whole ravaged area was completely restored.
     Ten years later the city suffered another great conflagration in the same downtown commercial area.  It began about 2:30 a.m. on July 19, 1845, on the third story of a whale-oil and candle manufacturer on New Street, a block south of Wall Street, and spread quickly to adjoining buildings.  When the fire reached a large warehouse on Broad Street where quantities of combustible saltpeter were stored, firemen rushed into the building to drag a hose up to the fourth floor to direct water onto the blaze.  When heavy black smoke began coming up the stairway, the firemen were ordered out of the building; five minutes later there was a huge explosion that demolished not just the warehouse but many nearby structures, while hurling bricks and flaming debris through the air, tossing people in the area to the ground, and setting the whole neighborhood ablaze.  But on this occasion the firemen were aided by water flowing from the recently completed Croton aqueduct, so that the fire was under control by 1 p.m. that afternoon. 
The warehouse explosion, 1845.
     The destruction caused by the 1845 fire was vast  -- 345 buildings destroyed and property damage appraised at from $5 to $10 million -- yet it confirmed the efficacy of building codes adopted in 1815 that banned the construction of new wood-frame structures in the densest parts of the city.  When the fire spread eastward toward areas rebuilt after the 1835 fire with stone, masonry, and iron roofs and shutters, it had been checked. 
The Triangle fire.  The firemen's hoses could
reach the upper floors, but their ladders couldn't.     Still, a lot remained to be done.  It was not until two tenement fires in 1860 blocked stairways and trapped residents on the upper floors, with consequent loss of life, that public pressure forced the state legislature to pass laws requiring fire escapes on tenements and other structures.  Further reforms came only after the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, when fire broke out on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of a ten-story building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.  Flames soon blocked one stairway, and the doors to other exits were locked to prevent theft.  Terrified employees crowded onto the single fire escape, a flimsy structure that collapsed under their weight, flinging twenty employees to their death on the pavement below.  The firemen’s ladders couldn’t reach beyond the sixth floor, and their nets couldn’t withstand the force of bodies falling from such a great height.  Crowds below watched in horror as other employees – mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women – jumped from the flaming upper floor windows to their death, landing on the pavement with a thud that would haunt bystanders for months to come.  In all, 146 garment workers died as a result of the fire. 
     When the company’s two owners were tried on first- and second-degree manslaughter charges, a skillful defense led the jury to acquit them.  But reformers pressured the state legislature to modernize the state’s labor laws, mandating better access and exits, improved fireproofing, the installation of alarms and automatic sprinklers, and better working conditions for employees.  Further measures were subsequently adopted as skyscrapers lunged higher and higher into the sky, and still more after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11.  Fire prevention is a never-ending enterprise requiring constant revision and improvement. 
Volunteer fire companies of the past
     Long before the city had a professional fire department, there were volunteer companies composed of young men who hauled their engines through the streets, ostensibly because horses would panic at the sight of a fire, but really because they liked the glory and to-do of hauling their prized engines themselves.  In the nineteenth century their typical uniform included a wide-brimmed leather helmet with the number of the fire company blazoned on the front, a red flannel shirt, and black pants.  The companies were known by such nicknames as Honey Bee, Short Boys, Red Rover, Big Six, Old Turk, and Yellow Birds.  Each company had an engine house in a certain neighborhood, and if an alarm sounded, they would rush the engine from there to the site of the fire, while their foreman shouted orders and gave encouragement through a brass trumpet.  Rivalry among the companies was intense, and if two of them arrived at the scene of a fire, and only one hydrant was available, fierce fights resulted with fists, pipes, and the blunt ends of axes, while the building continued to blaze.  On one such occasion in July 1846 engine companies 1, 5, 6, 23, 31, and 36 engaged in a donnybrook of epic proportions, and on a Sabbath morning, no less, until a superior managed to calm things down; fortunately, no building was burning at the time.  Every so often a company was disbanded for brawling, but the brawling somehow persisted.


     When not so engaged, the firemen performed valorous deeds in rescuing residents from burning buildings, and in calmer moments took great pleasure in marching in parades.  The fire companies, like the militias of the day, were an integral part of  working-class society.  And they often exerted political influence as well.  Nine New York mayors were elected as active firemen or as candidates sponsored by fire companies.  To launch a political career, what could be better than having a whole fire company solidly behind you?  Which was why Big Bill (not yet “Boss”) Tweed tried repeatedly to get himself elected foreman of a fire company and finally succeeded in 1850, when he became foreman of Engine Company 6, whose tiger emblem later became associated with Tammany Hall.  Reformers deplored Tammany's influence on the fire companies, not to mention outright theft; money appropriated for equipment often ended up in the pockets of Tammany politicians and foremen.
Chanfrau as Mose.     New fame and glory came to the volunteer firemen on the evening of February 15, 1848, at the Olympic Theatre, when the actor Frank Chanfrau first appeared in the sketch “A Glance at New York” as Mose the Fireboy, conveying with great accuracy the speech and mannerisms of a contemporary Bowery boy “dat ran wid der mersheen” (English translation: “who ran with the machine”).  In the audience were Bowery Boys, fire laddies, and their friends, who recognized the character at once and cheered.  An instant success, the play ran for seventy nights, which for the time was extraordinary.  More plays featuring Chanfrau as Mose followed, and Mose became a staple character, much beloved, of the New York stage.
     But reality was something else again.  In time, the volunteer firemen’s propensity for brawling, combined with the city’s rapid growth, brought a realization that New York City needed a full-time professional force of fire fighters, resulting in an act by the state legislature in 1865 creating a Metropolitan Fire Department.  The era of the fist-swinging volunteer fireman, colorful and rampageous, was over, and it was no doubt all to the good.


Harper's Weekly celebrates the formation of the New York City Fire Department in 1865.  As the
pictures show, horse-drawn engines were now increasingly in service.
     Voluntary or professional – preferably professional -- we need firefighters; we  couldn’t survive without them.  Risking their own lives, they keep us and our cities safe.
                                                                                                                                                                                Pere Qintana Seguí  
     And now, a new feature to end on: a photo that expresses some essential aspect of New York – its energy, diversity, congestion, craziness, or whatever.

This is New York
                                                                                                                                                                   Seamus Murray

     Coming next Wednesday:  Prophets vs. Profits of Doom.  Or: WBAI vs. Wall Street.  Gary Null and Thom Hartmann pronounce.  Is another Great Crash coming?  Should we hoard gold and silver?  Will there be another fearful war?  DON’T BUY STOCKS, or should we?  Am I a greed creep?  Our many, many selves: I have at least nine; how many do you have?
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder
                 

      

115. Greenwich Village, Bohemians, Walt Whitman and how gay was he?

      I have just begun reading John Strausbaugh’s comprehensive and well-researched book The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues; A History of Greenwich Village (HarperCollins, 2013), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the Village and its colorful past.  It will be a long read (553 pages + end matter!).  I’ve only reached the mid-nineteenth century, but it has inspired this post, and I hope it will inspire many others.  Much of what follows I owe to this source.
Greenwich Village
     I always assumed that the name was somehow related to Greenwich in England, a district of southeast London where the Royal Observatory is located, and the modern prime meridian was first established in 1851, creating zero degrees longitude, by which mariners calculate their east-west position at sea.  (Confused?  So am I.)  All of which is mercifully irrelevant.  According to Strausbaugh, a Dutchman named Yellis de Mandeville, who lived near the village of Greenwijck on Long Island, bought some land in what is now Greenwich Village and named it Greenwijck.  This was of course too much for the English, who by the 1720s had Anglicized it as “Greenwich.”  And since all settlements outside the city were called villages, the area came to be known as Greenwich Village.
     In the eighteenth century the Village was still wild countryside where hunters went to shoot woodcock, snipe, and rabbits.  Wealthy New Yorkers bought estates there and lived comfortably until the 1820s, when the city’s relentless march northward overtook the area.  In 1822 an especially virulent summer epidemic of yellow fever drove many city residents, businesses, and government offices from the crowded, filthy, ill-drained city at the southern tip of Manhattan up to the healthier, well-drained soil of Greenwich Village.   A boom in building followed, and when the epidemic ended, many residents chose to stay, commuting daily by stage to the business district far to the south.  But the new buildings went up along the Village’s existing paths and lanes, thus perpetuating the area’s haphazard street plan where, one short block from where I live, West 4thStreet intersects West 11th in defiance of all logic, reason, and common sense.  When the grid plan of the city fathers, forcing all of Manhattan into rigid rectangular lots, reached the Village, it had to accept and tolerate the neighborhood’s crazy labyrinth of streets, which baffles and infuriates newcomers to this day.  So already the Village was an exception to the rule, a law unto itself, a curious backwater destined to become a bedroom community free of industry, a charming neighborhood, quiet and – to use that trite and dreadful word – quaint.
Bohemians
     The term “bohemian” was apparently first applied to impoverished young writers, artists, and intellectuals in Paris’s Latin Quarter by a journalist named Felix Pyat in 1834.  Prior to the French Revolution of 1789 writers and artists had for the most part depended on patronage from the nobility and the Church, which obviously imposed severe limits on their works and the ideas behind them; individualism and revolt were out, deference and conformity were in.  Yes, there were a few free spirits like Caravaggio and François Villon, the first an accused murderer and the second a thief, but these were rare exceptions.  Mozart and Haydn and Bach, Racine and Molière and Shakespeare, all had to tow the line. 
    But by the nineteenth century, when the rising middle class finally got there (they had been “rising” for centuries), writers and artists experienced a new freedom, but with it the need to please these arrivistes or enjoy the charms of poverty and near starvation.  This was the Romantic age, which glorified the artist as a tortured genius, finer and braver than the triumphant but often ill-informed and insensitive bourgeoisie.  These hungry and often antisocial rebels clustered together on the Left Bank and formed a nonconformist society of their own, a society that was portrayed in Henry Murger’s play Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which, when first produced in Paris in 1849, was an enormous success. 
     All the Western world became fascinated by these new young bohemians, and Murger’s 1851 book of the same title became an international best seller.  Puccini’s La Bohème, first  performed in Italy in 1896, was based on Murger’s book and perpetuated its idealized sketch of bohemian life.  In the first act, when the quartet of free-living young men are confronted by the landlord who wants his rent, and avoid coughing it up by getting the landlord drunk, I have always had issues with the story.  No Paris or New York landlord worthy of the name would have let himself be stymied so easily; within minutes he would have the minions of the Law there, and the non-rent-paying tenants would have found themselves duly dumped on the street.  But then, why let a touch of reality spoil a charming and much-acclaimed opera?
Pfaff’s and the Queen of Bohemia
Pfaff's, with Whitman seated in the foreground.
Presumably as imagined later by an artist.     Bohemia came to these fair shores in the 1850s, and settled down – or let’s say surfaced and congregated – right here in the Village in a basement restaurant-saloon called Pfaff’s, under a delicatessen and shoe store at 645-647 Broadway, near Bleecker Street.  Broadway by then was the city’s main artery, its chief shopping district and entertainment zone and, after dark, its most notorious red-light district.  Just the place, then, for a hangout for a clutch of impoverished poets, journalists, artists, and a few actresses of dubious repute.  Presided over by a German Swiss named Charles Pfaff, it offered fine beers and wines, and real silver and chinaware, to the regular customers who sat at small tables in front, while a long table in back was reserved for the city’s first bohemian crowd.  The genial host welcomed them all, and no doubt realized that the free-living bunch in back would attract the curious eager to get a glimpse of bohemians.  And the ill-paid journalists and illustrators of the time appreciated the host’s letting them linger over their beers and run up substantial tabs. 
     Another opinion was voiced by the New York Times, a staunch upholder of integrity in a city that often had little of it.  A “Bohemian,” it opined in January 1858, was not quite, but close to, a loafer.  He has either written a flop of a play, painted a picture that didn’t sell, published an unreadable book, or composed an unsung opera.  Bohemians despised anything low or mean or inelegant, it granted, but they were not useful members of society.  There spoke the work-ethic of America, which would last as long as bohemia existed, each in a sense feeding off the other in a curious state of  symbiosis.  A work-ethic needs loafers it can despise and feel superior to; bohemia needs diligent, rent-paying, nose-to-the-grindstone types to rebel against.  No one can rebel against a vacuum.
Ada Clare     And who were these bohemians?  From 1859 on, a self-published, little-known poet who was also a self-proclaimed loafer, Walt Whitman.  But more of him anon.  The queen of the roost was Ada Clare, born Jane McElhenny into a well-to-do Charleston family in 1836.  Losing both parents as a child, she was raised by a grandfather who brought her to the North.  Breaking free from Southern gentility, she changed her name and went on the stage in New York and got her first poems published there.  (One explanation of the new name: a take-off of the Southern lady’s frequent utterance, “I declare,” as in, “Ah declare, General Beauregard, it’s time to open fire on Fort Sumtah.”)  She also fell in love with a famous pianist and composer named Louis Gottschalk, a notorious seducer by whom she had a son out of wedlock.  Far from hiding the fact in shame, as was considered appropriate in that Victorian age, she proclaimed it in calling cards announcing, “Miss Ada Clare and Son,” thus no doubt becoming the city’s first liberated woman, years before the celebrated shenanigans of Victoria Woodhull (see posts #39 and #40), who was christened Mrs. Satan.   
     In 1858, after travels with her son (and the calling card) abroad, including a look at bohemian Paris, Ada Clare returned to New York and was welcomed by the Pfaff regulars as the Queen of Bohemia.  Her complexion was pale, her eyes blue, and her hair short, blond, and wavy, and parted on the side like a boy’s.  Whitman called her “a perfect beauty” and credited her with intellect and cultivation.  Certainly her presence, plus that of several other single, unchaperoned women, gave Pfaff’s the requisite risqué atmosphere, so necessary to any authentic bohemian hangout.  (In those days any unchaperoned women seen in public were assumed to be prostitutes.)  In France Ada Clare might have been the hostess of a salon frequented by intellectuals and statesmen (albeit minus their wives, if such they had), but in New York the one immediate opportunity was Pfaff’s.
     A personal note:  I know how special and liberating such an atmosphere can be, having sampled it here in the Village at the famous San Remo, on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, circa 1959 and 1961-65, and again at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop in North Beach, San Francisco, in 1960-61, when I was hovering on the fringe of bohemia and observing with fascination and wariness its mix of beatniks, hustlers, drunks, and leeches, plus a few real artists and poets and liberated women – a group I loved to rub easy elbows with, up to a point, but that I was too square, too bourgeois, too concerned with my financial well-being, to embrace wholeheartedly.  But, as I once heard author Jean Houston say, “Groups are juicy.”  Yes they are, some of them, though others can be stultifying.  The ones at the Sam Remo and the Co-Existence Bagel Shop were fun, and gave you the feeling that you were in just the right place at just the right time, though I wouldn’t quite call them creative.  A human amusement park would be more to the point, a scene not to be missed, but not to be lingered in too long.  Knowing when to quit is half of successful living.  (And the other half?  At the moment, I haven’t a clue.)
     Ada Clare gave acting a try, but excelled mostly in sharp-tongued literary and theater criticism, dismissing works she deemed inferior with scorn.  At her home in the uptown wilds of West 42nd Street, she is said to have held Sunday evening soirées for men who had distinguished themselves in the arts, war, and philanthropy, and for women who were beautiful and brilliant.  If so, she came close after all to emulating the grandes horizontales of France, the cocottes who offered charm and intelligence as well as delights  of the flesh.
Walt Whitman, and how gay was he?    One of the roughs.    In 1855 Whitman had published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, unsigned, but with an engraving of himself, bearded, in a loose open shirt and what look like dungarees, head tilted under a wide-brimmed hat, with one hand on his hip and the other in his pocket, the whole pose loose, casual, relaxed.  This was not at all the image of the poet of that time. 
     If Americans had an image of the poet – and most of them were too busy to bother with such nonsense – it was probably a Byronic look such as McDonald Clarke (see post #85) had effected: clean-shaven with an open collar, tousled hair, hatless, rather handsome features, preferably with a hint of elegance and sensitivity.  This was the Romantic poet, well-groomed or not (one was, after all, a rebel), not dainty but not rough.  And a bit of inner torment was requisite, as seen in that quintessential Romantic, the poet Hoffmann, the protagonist of Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann: a tormented genius plagued by an evil nemesis and doomed repeatedly in love, foundering at last in drink.  Whatever the variation, the Romantic was a man apart, out of the mainstream, a visionary misunderstood by others, a rebel, an outcast. 
McDonald Clarke, definitely not
one of the roughs.
     But Whitman presents himself differently.  The engraving in the unsigned first edition suggests a man of the people, very working class, and in the opening poem of the volume, now called “A Song of Myself,” he reveals  himself as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual.”  And the poetry itself is healthy, robust, expansive, all-embracing.  This is a poet speaking for America who hopes that America will listen.  No inner torment here, no broodings of an outcast. 
     Of course Walt Whitman was homosexual; no one doubts that today.  But was he in his own time “out”?  That is a question not so easily answered.  I am annoyed by current gay biographers who simply assume that every contact Whitman had with younger men was sexual; it strikes me as a projection of modern attitudes onto an earlier age when homosexuality (the word had yet to be invented) was universally condemned as a crime against nature.  For many years I inclined to the opinion of an earlier biographer whose name escapes me, but who suggested that Whitman may not have had sexual experience: “For his work to be complete, maybe his life had to be incomplete.”  This made sense to me, since many an author has recounted experiences that he (or she) can have known only in fantasy.  Stendhal comes at once to mind, but the supreme example surely is Shakespeare.  So why not Whitman?
     Certainly what we know of him poses contradictions.  The Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, which first  appeared in the 1860 edition, celebrates “manly attachment,” “the need of comrades,” “athletic love,” and declares that he will unbare his broad breast, having long enough “stifled and choked.”  Here now is a hint of inner torment.  And he goes further:
    Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,    With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,    For I am the new husband and the comrade.
Which, for mid-nineteenth-century America, was pretty daring.  Let’s face it, whether fantasy or not, the Calamus poems are “hot.”  In fact, they’re torrid.
John Addington Symonds.  An 1889
photo autographed to Walt Whitman.     What complicates things is the correspondence between Whitman and the English man of letters John Addington Symonds, a married homosexual who had fathered four daughters.  Symonds discovered Whitman’s poetry in 1865, was overwhelmed by the Calamus poems, and wrote Whitman an admiring letter in 1871, thus initiating an intermittent correspondence that would last many years.  In subsequent letters he addressed Whitman as “My dear Master,” yet skirted around the subject of his own homosexuality while pressing Whitman to say more about the male bonding of Calamus.  After years of beating around the sexual bush, in August 1890 Symonds wrote Whitman asking pointedly about the homosexual content of the Calamus poems.  Whitman’s response was an angry and defensive denial, spiced up with the preposterous claim that he had fathered six illegitimate children, confirming evidence of which, needless to say, has never come to light.  Whitman’s heated reply has provided fuel and fodder to all those determined to establish the poet’s heterosexuality or, failing that, his bisexuality, and has certainly added greatly to the enigma of his sex life.
     Here is where I find John Strausbaugh’s account convincing.  Whitman began frequenting Pfaff’s in 1859, eager to get attention for himself and a forthcoming third edition – the one with the Calamus poems – of Leaves of Grass.  The first edition, generally ignored, had garnered a few reviews that dismissed it as “stupid filth,” “twaddle,” and “a muck of abomination,” and one that, long before the Calamus poems had appeared, denounced the poet for “the horrible sin not to be named among Christians,” which the critic discreetly phrased in Latin.  The second edition of 1856 had been received with silence.  At Pfaff’s the poet, then forty, enjoyed the high spirits of the younger crowd, who, as Strausbaugh tells it, accepted him and were no more bothered by his homosexuality than they were by Ada Clare’s status as an unwed mother.  In other words, at least to a small circle of fellow bohemians, Walt Whitman was definitely “out.”
The good gray poet, albeit closeted, in 1887.  A favorite
 photo of his, a copy of which he sent to Tennyson in England.
     And what about the famous 1890 letter of denial that Whitman sent to Symonds?  By that time Whitman had achieved a modest amount of recognition and was surrounded by a coterie of younger admirers.  Given the attitudes of the age, he chose to protect his reputation as the “good gray poet” by denying his homosexuality flat out.  It’s too easy today to criticize this surrender, so in contrast with the boldness of the Calamus poems, but Whitman was living in another time.  Having been discreetly, to a small circle, “out,” he went back “in.”  And Symonds’s hesitation over time to deal with homosexuality directly and in a personal way should likewise be viewed with understanding.  Only five years later, in 1895, Oscar Wilde would be arrested and tried for “gross indecency,” convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison, the judge lamenting that this, the maximum sentence allowed, was totally inadequate for such a case. 
Epilogue
     The outbreak of the Civil War broke up the bohemian crowd at Pfaff’s.  Some of them joined the Army, and Whitman went to Washington to do volunteer work with the wounded in the hospitals. 
     Ada Clare’s years at Pfaff’s may well have been her best.  Subsequently she traveled, wrote, and acted, but her novel Only a Woman’s Heart (1866), relating her affair with Gottschalk, garnered harsh reviews, some of them from vengeful writers whom she had once savaged in reviews of her own.  After that she gave up writing and devoted herself to acting in a provincial stock company.  In 1874 she was bitten by a rabid dog, collapsed on a stage in Rochester, was brought back to New York by friends and installed on Bleecker Street in the Village, where she died a horrible death of rabies.  Informed, Whitman mourned the loss of a “gay, easy, sunny, free, loose, but not ungood life.”
     After the war Pfaff and others tried to revive the bohemian scene in the rathskeller, but it never quite came off.  Instead, the place became a respectable lager beer saloon, just one of many in the city.  Pfaff closed it, then in 1870 opened another uptown on 24thStreet near Broadway.  In the mid-1870s Whitman visited him there and they reminisced over brim-full wine glasses about the old times and friends now mostly deceased.  Pfaff closed the new place in 1887 and died a few years later.

     Trees:  An article in the Times a week ago celebrated the wintry beauty of elm trees in Central Park, each branch and twig delicately lined with snow.  “A tabernacle in the air,” it proclaimed.  Yes, the bare skeletons of trees in winter, with or without snow, are a marvel to behold, and most of us don’t bother to behold.  I have already celebrated the beauty and wonder of trees in post #71, “The Magnificence and Insolence of Trees,” and urge all residents of the winter-besieged North to look about themselves in awe at the wonder of trees. 


     Coming soon:  Fires and firemen in the city (my 2½ fires, why New Yorkers shrug off fire alarms, and the volunteer fire companies of yore).  After that:  How New Yorkers have fun (the options are endless and sometimes crazy).
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder
    

114. Freedom, Fakery, and Freaks: Coney Island

Luna Park
     Smoke suddenly poured out of the four-story building’s upper stories, and flames engulfed the roof and shot out the windows.  Fire trucks clanged and clattered, firemen shot long streams of water upward and mounted tall ladders toward the upper stories where, as crowds gaped from the sidewalks below, terrified men and women leaped out of windows into the safety nets stretched out far below. 
     Soaring towers and minarets, spires, domes, flags, golden arches, lagoons, dazzling by day but entrancing by night, when every tower, spike, and dome, every bit of ornamental architecture, was defined by strings of light bulbs, and the whole storybook Baghdad became something even more idyllic, festive, magical.

     Day or night, the streets of Delhi featured gilded chariots, prancing horses, soldiers, dancing girls, and elephants you could ride upon, while an airship crammed with passengers left earth, plunged into darkness, survived thunder and pounding rain, traversed a calm night of stars, and in the pink light of dawn approached the moon’s surface, a breathtaking experience seasoned curiously by singing moon men holding green cheese.
     There were parading camels, a Venice-like city with gondoliers, an Eskimo village, elephants shooting the chute, acrobats, trained bears, a cakewalking pony, and a mountain torrent you could zoom through to splash in a glacier lake.  You could, on one occasion, watch an elephant being electrocuted, and if that bothered you, and you sat on a chair that tilted over and dumped you on the ground, for consolation you could go to a delicatessen and devour a sausage, or pork chops, or liver pudding, or sweet potatoes, or deviled crabs, or plum pudding, or any number of other offerings, all of them made entirely of candy.   
     Such was Luna Park, one of the three great amusement parks at Coney Island in the early years of the twentieth century: 722 acres of splendors, surprises, and horrors that cost its inspired creator, showman Frederic W. Thompson, a million dollars, but whose wonders were available to the public at ten cents a head.  Yes, the buildings were all of plaster, and the structure engulfed in flames survived to burn again and again: fakery, but fakery raised to the point of sublimity.  Luna Park was a gigantic stage set such as had never been seen before, flamboyant, dynamic, and extravagant, a dream world with laughs and surprises, and at times a nightmare world as well.  Above all, it couldn’t be drab or dull, since the multitudes Thompson hoped to entertain had enough drabness and dullness in their everyday lives.  They came to Coney Island to escape.  “What is presented to them,” he insisted, “must have life, action, motion, sensation, surprise, shock, swiftness or else comedy.”  In Luna Park he gave them all that, and more.  It was bizarre, it was crazy, it was fun.
Sand, surf, and Sodom
     Luna Park flourished in the heyday of Coney Island, but Coney Island already had a  long history as a place of entertainment.  But first: why “Coney” and why “Island”?  As for “Coney,” there are several explanations offered, the most commonly accepted one being that rabbits, or conies, once inhabited the area.  (Konijn = “rabbit” in Dutch.)  And Coney Island is not a true island but an “almost island,” or peninsula, 5 miles long and ¾ of a mile in width, separated from Brooklyn at its western end by Coney Island Creek.  There was once talk of extending the creek eastward to Sheepshead Bay and turning it into a navigable canal, which would have made Coney a true island, but this never happened and part of the creek was filled in; but the name “Coney Island” has stuck.
Seen from the air, Coney does seem almost an island.
Psychocadet
     For years Coney Island was a barren stretch of windswept sand far removed from the settled part of Brooklyn, but its all-day exposure to the sun destined it for something better.  That something began in 1829, with the construction of the first road accessing it and the appearance of the first beach hotel, the Coney Island House, which soon became a renowned summer vacation hotel.  People liked being near the open ocean and its breezes in at least the milder part of the year, and soon began dipping their well-clothed limbs in the chilly water and feeling the force of the waves, the tickly froth of the surf.  A strange new sport, sun and surf bathing, was coming into being, a sport that involved a modest display of flesh and therefore constituted, for Victorians, was a rather daring adventure. 
     By the 1860s hotels, bathhouses, and beer halls were springing up, and a steamboat began making regular trips from Manhattan to a long pier sticking out far into the ocean.  But Coney now offered more than sun and surf, as pavilions sprang up housing games, carousels, gypsy fortunetellers, vaudeville, and melodrama.  Not that gentility universally prevailed, since Coney, being outside the jurisdiction of the Manhattan and Brooklyn authorities, also drew prostitutes, pickpockets, and gamblers, not so many of them as to spoil the place as a fashionable middle-class resort, but just enough to give it a tangy edge and let moralists denounce it as Sodom by the Sea. 
The birth of an atrocity
     How appropriate it was, in my opinion, that Sodom should produce a contribution to American life – popular, inescapable, and horrible – that is predicted to last as long as the Republic itself.  In 1867 (though some say later) a young German immigrant named Charles Feltman, who made a living selling pies to Coney visitors, stuck a Vienna sausage into a kaiser roll, tasted it, added mustard, tasted it again, and so created a new food that he christened a “red hot.”  It caught on at once, garnered attention and jealousy as well, and when a newspaper article suggested that it might involve dog meat, the new food became known as the “hot dog.” 
                                                                                                Jersyko
     In a previous post I have recorded my antipathy, my utter loathing, for this ludicrously phallic concoction, a loathing that dates from an occasion at college when, in the school lunch line, I was given a wienie still encased in its wrapping, on which were printed its ingredients: meat scraps that no red-blooded American would knowingly ingest, but that are sneaked into this most pernicious and popular of foods.  I would like to record that Feltman died of an overdose of wienies (an imagined forerunner of today’s annual wienie-eating contest at Nathan’s), but alas, he became rich overnight, founded a lavish hotel that was fabulously successful, its restaurant the biggest and best on Coney Island.  Diners dined in beautiful gardens to soft music, but the hot dog was nowhere to be seen, for Feltman, having come to his senses, realized the impropriety of serving so lowly a food in the most elegant hotel on the Island.  The hot dog was relegated to the stands oppressively present all over Coney, though it would later achieve fame as the featured attraction of Nathan’s Famous at the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues, an eatery still flourishing today.
     Insanity can be contagious.  My partner Bob’s Haitian home-care aide assures me that hot dogs are known and devoured in Haiti.  And Bob’s Norwegian doctor has told of eating them in the beautifully landscaped Tivoli Garden in Copenhagen, and has described a popular Norse variation: a hot dog with shrimp salad added, wrapped in a potato pancake.  Even in France, that bastion of culinary elegance, I recall seeing signs CHIENS CHAUDS.  And the foul things must exist in China as well, since I have seen a photo of them there.  Maybe they have yet to penetrate the unexplored wilds of New Guinea, but it’s only a matter of time.
Steeplechase and Dreamland
     A new era for Coney began in the 1890s, when the entrepreneur George C. Tilyou, a Coney native who had already installed an immensely successful Ferris wheel, decided that, if he built an amusement park and enclosed it so as to keep out undesirables, he could attract a free-spending middle-class clientele.  The result, in 1897, was Steeplechase Park, the first of the three great Coney amusement parks, featuring a simulated horse race where people mounted horses one or two at a time (giving couples a chance for a good long hug) and raced off on an undulating curved metal track.
The Steeplechase Ride.
     But Steeplechase offered much more than that, since Tilyou knew that change and variety were required, to keep the crowds coming season after season.  And he knew that they wanted more than just to gaze at marvels and catastrophes; they wanted interaction, they wanted to be jostled and tossed and whirled and tumbled, as long as no one got hurt and it was all in fun.  Presiding over the park was the Steeplechase Man, whose hideous grinning face greeted visitors high over the entrance for decades, and grinned at them from tickets for the rides inside, foretokening the giddy fun to be had.  And inside were Venetian canals, an elephant ride, a Human Roulette Wheel that flung riders out to its periphery, a Pavilion of Fun with indoor rides that jarred and tumbled participants, a swimming pool, a sunken garden, a merry-go-round, and countless other devices producing thrills, chills, and spills.  When the park burned down in 1907, Tilyou promptly rebuilt it and promised more and better features and delivered them; his park would go on for years.
     Luna Park opened in 1903, and Dreamland just one year later.  Dreamland, launched not by showmen but a consortium of politicians investing in real estate, was a lavish imitation of Luna, which it tried to outdo in every way.  Its buildings were pure white, with massive arches and columns, and its dominating Beacon Tower soared 375 feet into the sky, its light at night visible for miles out at sea.  There were lion and leopard tamers, a huge ballroom on a pier, and a Midget City with a population of three hundred and its own midget fire department.  Visitors could tour a Pennsylvania coal mine, ride a scenic railroad through the mountains of Switzerland, and take a simulated airplane ride over the Atlantic and a submarine ride under it.  Or witness the Fall of Pompeii where, as Vesuvius erupted in colored fire, toga-clad inhabitants ran about in panic, and a whole city disappeared in torrents of blazing magnesium powder.  It was all spectacular and yet, lacking a showman’s expert touch, never quite matched the spark and spice of Luna.  But the spectacle to top all spectacles came very early on the morning of May 27, 1911, when some hot tar caught fire, the flames spread, the great tower toppled, and most of Dreamland became a nighttime conflagration that left only smoking ruins by morning.  Some animals died screaming in their cages; one lion escaped into the street and had to be shot.  Already in financial difficulties, Dreamland was never rebuilt; its site is now occupied by the New York Aquarium.
The Dreamland tower and lagoon.
     What inspired the creators of these three stellar amusement parks, and what were those parks really about?  The forerunners were many: Barnum and the traveling circus; Edison’s illumination of Manhattan, showing what marvels electricity could create; splashy Broadway musicals whose backstage machinery could produce spectacular effects; and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, with its dazzling blend of grandiose buildings, canals, and lagoons, plus a separate amusement area.  People wanted to be dazzled, surprised, shocked, and jostled, and would pay to experience it.  They didn’t want lectures and uplift; they wanted amazement and fun.  And at Coney they got it.
     Perhaps the abiding spirit of Coney, both the parks and the other entertainments and the beach, is best expressed by a photo showing a quintet of grinning girls in bathing costumes, raising their skirts to show their well-clad derrières.  Respectable young ladies, one suspects, who out at Coney, far removed from the constraints of family, school, job, and church, could for a moment be deliciously, collectively naughty.  If Victorian propriety was showing cracks in the city, out at Coney it was fast disintegrating.  Coney was lots of things, among them delicious and collective naughtiness.  And who, by the way, was the photographer?  A boyfriend?  A stranger?  Who?  If we knew, it would tell us just that much more about Coney. 
The later Coney
     In 1920 the subway reached Coney Island, so that vast numbers of city residents could taste its marvels for only a fare of a nickel.  The whole atmosphere of Coney changed, as the era of huge amusement parks gave way to sideshows with screaming barkers, hot dog stands, blaring music, noisy shooting galleries, roaring roller coasters, and a sun-drenched beach jammed with people.  There was still life aplenty, but it was more raucous, more garish, and maybe just a bit sleazy.  Frederic Thompson, the creator of Luna Park, lapsed into alcoholism and debt, declared bankruptcy, left his park to the management of others, and died in 1919.  Luna survived, but without inspired leadership it lost its innovative character and saw its revenues steadily decline.  George Tilyou died in 1914, but his family continued to manage Steeplechase, which by the 1920s was losing out to radio and movies, those new entertainers of millions, in a world where Victorian morality had crumbled, so that Coney seemed less special, less naughty, less unique.  People came in ever greater numbers, but the experience wasn’t quite the same.  When Luna, with declining revenues, succumbed to fire in 1946 and became a parking lot, of the trio of great amusement parks only Steeplechase remained.
     It was to Steeplechase Park that my partner Bob came for the first time one afternoon in 1951, at the impressionable age of fourteen.  Having long heard of Coney Island, he came from Jersey City with his friend Henry and was immediately struck by the many concessions all jammed together, the looming, screeching roller coasters, the Parachute Jump, the freak shows with barkers, the famous boardwalk, and the crowded beach.  Entering Steeplechase Park, he and Henry mounted one of the iron horses of the Steeplechase Ride and embarked on the raucous race.  Then, to leave the ride, you had to exit across a stage where women’s skirts were suddenly blown up by blasts of air, and midgets with electric rods poked you and gave you a mild shock, while an audience roared with laughter.  Having been buzzed by the midgets, Bob and Henry then joined the audience and laughed as others crossing the stage suffered the same fate.  After that they sampled the Whirlpool, other rides, and a Spook Tunnel, and Bob knew that he would be back, and back many times, in winter as well as in summer, so as to undertake the more challenging charms of the Wonder Wheel, the roller coasters, and the Parachute Jump.  Coming from Jersey City, where he perceived a sameness in everyone and a lack of imagination, he discovered two things above all in Coney Island: freedom and imagination.  Which is exactly what the genteel crowds flocking to Luna and the other parks had discovered in the distant era of Coney’s heyday.
     After that, in the 1950s Bob went to Coney Island many times, with Henry or other friends or alone.  He always began his visit by eating a half dozen clams at Nathan’s, plus a hot dog and beer.  Then he was off to his favorite amusements: first seat in the Cyclone roller coaster, costing only a quarter; the Steeplechase Ride and other rides; the Wonder Wheel; walking the boardwalk from one end to the other as he and Henry talked; walking to the end of the pier for a view of the crowded beach; and the freak shows, where the barkers’ ballyhoo delighted him, and the freaks, though mostly fake, helped him appreciate people who are different.  But he did the Parachute Jump only once, for this enthusiastic roller coaster fan found the Jump frightening.  With a roller coaster, after all, there was solid track beneath you; with the Parachute Jump, only a flimsy seat and a chasm of empty space.
     Bob also went in winter, starting as always with clams at Nathan’s, which was open all year.  And what did he find?  The rides all covered up, the boardwalk devoid of crowds, the beach almost empty so he could walk on it, and, hovering all around him, the ghosts of the summer people.  Coney then seemed wild and desolate, truly an island apart, and he loved it.  And always, vast and moody, there was the gray Atlantic.
 Coney today
    The amusement zone of the Coney Island of today, much shrunken, has survived many assaults.  In the 1940s the heavy hand of master builder Robert Moses (see post #78) demolished many structures to make room for the Aquarium, an ice skating rink, and public housing.  Steeplechase Park finally closed in 1964, and the property was sold to developer Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump, who, convinced that the amusement area would now die a natural death, fought in court for years to get it rezoned, so he could build luxury housing; he failed, and the property remained vacant.  Since then there have been other plans to revitalize Coney, with developers, residents, and the city squabbling endlessly, as the claims of recreation are pitted against those of commercial interests and public housing.  Even now the brouhaha continues, and I wouldn’t presume to predict how all these controversies will finally, if ever, end.
The beach today: July 4, 2006.
Jaime Haire
     Symbolic of Coney’s glorious past and dubious present was the Thunderbolt roller coaster, a wooden structure whose curving, mounting, plunging track loomed over Coney along 15th Street, operating from 1925 until 1982.  Having ridden it many times, Bob recalled the mild beginning, the steeper drops that followed, and the final stretch when the coaster plunged almost to the ground, like a mighty beast suddenly revealing its jaws and teeth, before delivering riders safely to the loading station.  He remembered too the coaster’s last days many years later, the horrid sounds as the trains negotiated the poorly maintained track, the peeling paint, the missing lights, the loose nuts and bolts, the seat that fell off its springs and had to be pushed back into place, the sense of impending danger, but also the feeling that an old friend was telling him it still had integrity and excitement in its aged bones.  After the coaster closed, it sat huge and silent in an abandoned lot that grew rich in sumac and weeds, a sight that Bob and I viewed many times as we walked the boardwalk from the Aquarium to Gargiulo’s, our favorite Italian restaurant. 
The abandoned Thunderbolt, 1995.
     Under the Thunderbolt was a little house that had once, long before, been a hotel.  Later the coaster’s owner had lived there with his mother, and then also with his lady friend, who stayed on for years after he died.  In the winter it was quiet, almost rural, she said, but in the summer, as the coaster roared by overhead, things occasionally broke and her pictures hung slanted.  Passers-by had no idea that anyone lived there, and that was how she wanted it. Finally, at her family’s insistence, after some forty years she moved out.
     There were those who wanted to save the Thunderbolt, but early one morning in 2000 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, without notice to anyone, sent bulldozers to demolish it, probably because it blocked the view for a baseball stadium already under construction: a decisive but probably illegal act.  But famous names die hard: in 2013 word came that a new steel roller coaster would be built on Coney Island; its name: the Thunderbolt.  And a new Luna Park opened in 2010.  Coney’s death as an amusement zone has been predicted more than once, but somehow it always manages to survive.
                                                                                              David Shankbone

     Me and roller coasters:  My partner Bob loves them, says each one has its own personality, subscribes to a magazine called RollerCoaster, has ridden many, making a trip once to Pittsburgh just to ride the famous Thunderbolt there.  And me?  No way!  As a teenager I once rode a coaster at Riverview Park in Chicago, and will never forget that first climb up, up, up, and then -- whoosh! – the hurtling plunge down, down, down, holding fast to the rail in front of me and wondering if I would survive the ride or end up mangled flesh in a jumble of wreckage.  Yes, I survived, but I had had my fill of roller coasters.  The gentle charm of the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, yes.  The Parachute Jump, likewise.  But a roller coaster, there or anywhere, never.  Call me a spoilsport, a namby-pamby, a wimp.  I’ll gladly accept all those epithets and worse, if it frees me from any pressure to ride a roller coaster ever again.  I’d rather face a bayonet charge, hungry lions, a tsunami.  But one of those hurtling, twisting, roaring monsters full of screaming occupants, never.

     Free at last:  My inmate buddy Joe, whose story inspired post #43, Man/Boy Love: The Great Taboo (still the most visited of all my posts by far), has just been released, after 20 years (minus 3 months) in prison.  He now begins another life entirely.  Over the last 13 years or so, he and I have exchanged over 500 letters, so I know a lot about him and his  story.  In time, he will tell that story, and quite a story it is.

     Coming soon:  Greenwich Village, Bohemians, Pfaff’s, Walt Whitman and how gay was he?

     ©  2014  Clifford Browder

113. The Sacred in Secular New York

     This post is about the sacred in New York – a bizarre notion, given the invincibly secular nature of the city.  Maybe there is no sacred here, and yet maybe, just maybe, there is.  We’ll see.  I’ll go at it in three parts.
The Sacredness of Water
                                                                                       Elke Wetzig     On the radio recently I heard an interview with Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmental activist and author who is fighting against the privatization of water in her country.  “For us,” she said, “water is sacred.”  She also noted how Indians see the Ganges as their mother.  She then described how Coca-Cola had come to a small village in the state of Kerala in southern India and opened a bottling plant there.  This might sound like progress and was no doubt presented as such, but the plant consumed all the water in the area, forcing the women to walk miles to obtain water for their households.  Outraged by this, one of the older women organized the others and launched a campaign to get rid of the plant.  As a result of their efforts the village council refused to renew the plant’s license, causing the plant to shut down.  “What shall I tell them back in Delhi?” Vandana Shiva asked the leader of the struggle, Delhi being the capital, where the government was making deals with foreign companies like Coca-Cola.  The leader replied, “Tell them they drink the blood of my people.”

Bathing in the Ganges.
Biswarup Ganguly
A formidable foe, bigger than life.
Paul Arrington     This interview and all that Vandana Shiva said impressed me greatly, above all her emphasis on the sacredness of water.  Primal peoples and traditional societies all over the globe believe in this, just as they see the earth as their mother, but we in the developed societies, being obsessed with science, find this notion strange.  Water is certainly necessary, precious, essential, but … sacred?  No, to our ears that sounds strange.  Yet it inspired the village women to take on the mighty Coca-Cola Company and, against all odds, defeat it.  To view water as sacred may be a tough sell in a city like New York, the victim recently of two powerful hurricanes whose flooding caused vast damage, but the water we’re talking about is of course fresh water, not salt.  And I do think that we should give this idea consideration: the sacredness of water.  In some strange way it reaches to my depths, it resonates.
     As I have often said before, New York City came into existence because of water, salt and fresh, and could not exist without it.  Its large harbor, and its location at the mouth of a navigable river, the Hudson, stretching deep into the interior of the continent, predestined it to flourish as a trading post and port, then as a  metropolis, then a money center, and then a cultural center, too.  Where there is commerce, money will accumulate, and where there is money, culture and the arts will follow.  But it all began with water, and the city’s fate will always be linked to water.
Pete Seeger in 2011.
Jim, the Photographer     But will that water be clean?  We don’t think of water as sacred.  We have thought of it in the past as something to be used, to be exploited, and the result has been pollution.  Finally, after the pollution reached alarming levels, we began to be aware of the problem.  The late Pete Seeger was a pioneer in the fight against pollution in the Hudson.  Though he was born and died in the city, he lived most of his life in Beacon, a river town about midway between New York and Albany.  In the 1940s he acquired land there and built a one-room log cabin on a hillside overlooking the Hudson, hewing the wood and laying the stone foundation himself, and later adding a bedroom for his wife.  In time he became aware of the river’s pollution, which was so bad that wooden boats from the Caribbean would sail up the river, so its poisons would kill the worms and other parasites that were boring into their hulls.  Loving the river, Seeger launched a campaign to clean it up.

The Clearwater sailing on the Hudson.

Dxede5x
     In the late 1960s Seeger raised money to build the 106-foot river sloop Clearwater, modeled on the Hudson River sloops of yore; its name proclaimed his goal: to clean up the Hudson’s dirty water.  To get the sloop built, he and his allies had to go all the way to Friendship, Maine, to find a shipyard capable of the task.  Launched in 1969, the sloop has plied the  Hudson ever since, educating people about the river’s pollution and the dangers it imposes.  Seeger even sailed the Clearwater down to Washington to serenade members of Congress and, in so doing, educate them as well.  As a result of his and others’ efforts, Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972.
Another formidable foe.     To pass a law is one thing; to enforce it is another.  There was still plenty of pollution in the Hudson, so the Clearwater sailed up and down the river, stopping at river towns along the way to tell schoolchildren and adults about pollution, and posting the names  of the greatest polluters, with General Electric’s at the top of the list.  For years GE’s facilities at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, about 50 miles north of Albany, had been dumping tons of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the river, contaminating the entire river and its fish, as well as humans who drank that water or ate the fish.  In the course of my hiking in the Hudson Valley, I encountered the sloop more than once, and on one occasion enjoyed a short sail on it and talked with the crew.  I even volunteered to do a stint on it, but cancer reared its ugly head and I had to give that up and have surgery (successful) instead. 
     In 1977, thanks to the Clearwater’s efforts and others, PCBs were banned in the United States.  But what about the PCBs  already in the river?  In 1983 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared a 200-mile stretch of the river, from Hudson Falls to New York City, to be a Superfund site requiring cleanup, but GE started the necessary dredging only in 2009.  What was happening in the meantime?  Faced with dredging costs of an estimated $460 million, GE, like any U.S. corporation worthy of its name, fought the cleanup tooth and nail.  It lobbied Congress, attacked the Superfund law in court, and funded a media campaign to spread disinformation about the usefulness of the cleanup, alleging that dredging the river would in fact stir up PCBs.  Finally, in 2002, a landmark decision by the EPA ordered GE to create a plan to remove the PCBs from the river.  After further delaying tactics, GE finally began dredging, a process that is still under way.  Given its past maneuverings, GE requires close supervision throughout.  As the kids said in the 1960s, “Corporations have no souls.”

The Hudson, looking north from Bear Mountain Bridge.
Can we fish in it?  Can we swim in it?
Rolf Müller
     So even if we today don’t think of water as sacred, we at least appreciate its importance and campaign long and hard – inspired by the likes of Pete Seeger – to keep it pure and clean.  His motto: “Think globally, act locally.”  And that is what he did.
The Idea of the Holy
     Pete Seeger’s songs were often pacifist and contemplative in nature, even spiritual.  Was he religious?  In the conventional sense, perhaps not.  But one can be spiritual without being overtly religious.  “I feel most spiritual when I’m out in the woods,” he told an interviewer.  “I feel a part of nature….   I used to say I was an atheist.  Now, I say, it’s all according to your definition of God.  According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist.  Because I think God is everything.  Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God.  Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God.”  Saying this, he speaks for many Americans today.
     Personally I think that anyone who sees a night sky filled with stars, or a sunrise or sunset, will experience some hint of the spiritual, even of the sacred or holy.  But in the city one rarely has the full experience of these things.  Can a city resident experience the sacred or holy anyway?
     In his book The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917), the German author Rudolf Otto examined the nature of the holy.  He saw the experience of the holy as involving three things: a feeling of awe, of something weird or uncanny, yet fascinating; a feeling of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming might; and an awareness of tremendous energy.  Deep in all of us, Otto insists, is an irrational yearning, a need of the overabounding and unutterable. 
     Let’s face it, to experience such feelings in a noisy, congested city ain’t easy.  The Hebrew prophets forsook the settled areas of Palestine and went out into the wilderness to get clean with God and hear his commands, then returned to civilization to preach and proclaim and inveigh.  To experience the holy requires silence, and in the city there isn’t much of it.  Yes, a believer can take refuge in a church or temple or synagogue, but how many of us today are true believers?  We need silence, for in silence the spirit speaks.  But where can we find that silence?  Pete Seeger points the way, for even in the city or near it, we can find places of sanctuary and silence, places where we can be alone and experience something at least a little bit akin to the holy.  In my experience I can name five.  They won’t work for everyone, but they have worked – modestly – for me.
My Five Secret Spots
     Of course they aren’t really secret; they are there for all to see, but most people ignore them or pass them quickly by.  I have mentioned some of them before in different contexts.  Here they are.
Tanner’s Spring
     Well known to bird watchers and photographers, but to almost no one else, Tanner’s Spring is a small pool of water in a wooded area on the west side of Central Park near the park’s 81stStreet entrance, accessed by either of two short paths of wood chips.  One of two natural springs in the park, it is named for Dr. Henry S. Tanner, an advocate of therapeutic fasting, who in the summer of 1880 fasted for forty days and nights, drinking only water from this spring.  Since he survived, it was thought that the spring must have magically concentrated nutrients, but this seems doubtful; it is simply a spot where migrating birds often gather to drink and bathe.  I have seen warblers and tanagers and sparrows there, but even when it is barren of birds, it is a quiet spot where you can sit quietly on a stone bench, relax, reflect, and feel a bit of what Pete Seeger felt in the woods: something spiritual, maybe even, in the woods all around you, God.  In silence the spirit speaks.  And a spring gives forth water, which means it gives forth life.  Again, the sacredness of water.
The Wildflower Meadow
Green-headed coneflower, eating up the sun.     Another special spot for me is the Wildflower Meadow at the North End of Central Park, especially in late August, when many of the flowers achieve full growth.  We think of wildflowers as dainty little earth-hugging plants flaunting charming bits of color, but here, towering above us, are tall coreopsis and cup plant and green-headed coneflower, hardy composites rising to nine or ten or twelve or rarely even fifteen feet above the ground, thrusting their greedy yellow light-gobbling flowers at the sun.  They are dazzling, and for us lowly earth-bound mortals, humbling. 
     Here I always get a hint of what visitors feel upon viewing the giant sequoias of California: awe at the mightiness of nature, its ability to humble us, to put us in our place.  In other words, the feeling of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming might, one of the feelings that Rudolph Otto associates with the experience of the holy.  But only a hint.  To my knowledge, no one was ever won over to God or the gods by looking at a wildflower, not even one that towers far above us. 
The Meadow at Pelham Bay Park
     Here is another meadow, quite open to the public and quite ignored by them, which makes it just that much more interesting for me.  It is accessed from the picnic area at Orchard Beach, but only if you know which path to take, since there are several false starts leading nowhere.  After failing to find the right path and giving up on the Meadow many times, I finally learned to watch for a threesome of trees, two of them sycamores, and to get my bearings from the location of several distant buildings.  Doing this, I then found the one right path and followed it into some underbrush, zigging and zagging a bit over dry ground, and emerged in an open weedy area where the noise of picnickers and the more distant bathers faded, and I had the whole place to myself, with the occasional exception of a nude male sunbather, another initiate whom I could easily avoid. 
Fruit of the staghorn sumac.
melicamp
     What I found in the Meadow were the hairy bright red fruit of the staghorn sumac, and  early goldenrod and mountain mint and other wildflowers, and silence.  Above all, silence.  Sitting on a smooth outcropping of rock, watching puffy white clouds drift across a clean blue sky, I was immersed in silence, in the gentle fullness of summer, and maybe, just maybe, in God. 

Silence, for sure.  Something more?  It depends on the observer.
     There’s lots to ponder here.  A public space, found only by the knowing few.  False starts, and then a secret path: seek, and ye shall find.  Silence, calm, peace.  
The Groin of Summer
     I have described this spot before, a low, wet area on Staten Island’s Red Trail that I have often visited on a hot, muggy day in August, and that I have never had to share, even briefly, with another passing hiker.  There, thriving in the rich, moist soil, are a bunch of thirsty wildflowers: boneset, its hairy stem with paired veiny leaves thrusting clusters of white flowers; Pennsylvania smartweed, with tight spikes of tiny pink flowers; and above all, rising to seven feet, a thick growth of  New York ironweed luring bumblebees and cabbage butterflies and swallowtails to its flat-topped clusters of flowers of a bold purple hue.  I have christened this spot the Groin of Summer because it seems the very essence of the season, secret, fertile, moist, hot, and sensual.  Before hiking on to higher, drier ground with different flowers, I have always lingered there, reluctant to leave a very special spot that I won’t see for another year.

New York ironweed.  One of the boldest purples I have found in nature.
SB_Johnny
Uma, the Mother Goddess, consort of Shiva.
She comes in many forms.     Yes, the Groin is profoundly sensual.  Far from hinting of the spiritual and sacred, it seems to suggest the very opposite: the Slut of Sluts, Eve, Big Mama, the vegetation goddess whom so many pagan religions and primal societies the world over have worshipped under many names, and who has haunted my psyche, emerging in poetry and even a previous post (#59) of this blog.  


As Eve the Temptress she was shunned and abhorred by the male-dominated early Christian Church, until pressure from below – from the people – forced the male hierarchy to acknowledge her, to accept and embrace her as the pure and compassionate Virgin, the spiritual face and persona of the many-faced, inevitable, and inescapable Great Mother.  So the Temptress became the Pure One, Madonna, the Goddess who pleads for us all on the Day of Judgment.  And boy, let’s hope she’ll do a good job of it because, if you go that route, most of us are going to need some help.
Eve tempting Adam.  Here, the serpent too is female: a double threat.
A Raffael mural at the Vatican.
The Virgin Mary, by Nikolaos Doxaras, ca.1700.
Eve redeemed; nothing sensual here.
 The Giant Stairs
     The last of my special spots is the Giant Stairs, a huge jumble of rocks and boulders that over the years, even centuries, have fallen down from the Palisades, that towering wall of dark gray rock stretching for miles along the Jersey side of the Hudson River.  The Shore Path of the Palisades brings you to this stretch, which I have clambered over several times, rarely meeting another hiker along the way.  To hike this quarter-mile stretch always took me forty-five minutes, since you hike up, down, and around the fallen boulders, some of which teeter under your feet.  Lizards, small mammals, venomous copperheads, and other creatures lurk in the dark tunnels and caves and crevices beneath the boulders, but you never encounter them, since your noisy clambering gives them plenty of warning to get out of the way.  The hiker treks the sun-drenched face of the boulders; the creatures keep to the depths. 
     So what is there of the spiritual or sacred here?  A reminder of the power – seemingly capricious and unpredictable – of Nature, or whatever force underlies or inspires Nature’s doings.  I have told elsewhere (post #104) how, on May 12, 2012, a huge face of rock came crashing down from the cliffs, dumping a fresh layer of boulders onto the Stairs and sweeping a whole growth of trees into the river.  Because the slide occurred in the evening, the Stairs were clear of hikers and no one was injured.  But like any sudden and unexpected manifestation of Nature’s power, it was alarming and humbling, worthy of the savage God, jealous and unpitying, of the Old Testament.  Skeptics will scoff at the suggestion of a divine intervention, but deep down in most of us lurks the fear, irrational and unavowed, of just such a God-wrought calamity.  Reason has its limits; even the most secular aren’t always sober and sane.
     My five spots are all gateways to silence, portals of dream.  They invite quiet and reflection, provoke fantasies of Big Mama or Yahweh, some awe-inspiring Other that we aspire to or might want to avoid.  My fantasies, of course, no one else’s.  Another hiker might get no hint of the sensual Eve in the Groin, no thought of a punishing God while scrambling over the Giant Stairs.  Maybe we find what we already know and contain within us; maybe we seek because we have found.
     The silence of my special spots points me back to another German scholar, Max Picard, and his work The World of Silence (Die Welt des Schweigen, 1948).  Picard’s silence, which is mine as well (see post #55), is all around us, embracing our little universe of noise.  We come from it, we in the end go back to it.  It is a complete world in itself, uncreated and everlasting, distant, yet close.  When we talk to one another, it is always there, listening.  It reveals itself in the dawn, in the aspiration of trees toward the sky, in the descent of night, in the change of seasons, but above all in the silence of our inner selves.  Art can convey it.  Cathedrals were built around silence, are reservoirs of it.  Today the marble statues of Greek gods lie embedded like white islands of silence amid the noise of our world.  The cities of that world are reservoirs of noise.  As for the radio (Picard was writing before the advent of television), one can imagine what he thinks of its incessant babble.  But in sleep, if it is deep and soothing, we can return to the great silence of the universe.  And beyond that silence is Being, the Creator. 

                                                                                                                                                                                Henry Mühlpfordt
     Even in the babble and bustle of New York, then, one can experience a silence that leads us back to the spiritual, the Other, the Creator.  Maybe most of us will settle for that silence, or a slice of it, and proceed no further, so as not to discombobulate our snug and comfy secular self.  But if we look quietly at some bit of nature like my special spots, we will find that silence.  Or in a museum.  In the South Asian galleries of the Met, I never fail to marvel at the sinuous, twisting body of a bejeweled, limbless, full-breasted dancer who seems the very embodiment of the sensual, and am awed by Shiva, delicately poised on one foot in his cosmic dance, and by the sublime calm of a nearby Jain seated in meditation.  
                                                                           Rosemania
These images too convey silence, rich, meaningful, profound.  How can that silence, even when tinged with eroticism, not be spiritual as well?  And in Shiva and the Jain, as in Buddhas anywhere, the sacred shines forth; how can we not acknowledge it, revere it?  Without some form of the sacred, our lives would be incomplete.





       Two strikes on WBAI:  Tired as I am of station WBAI's endless appeals for donations, one fund drive coming hot on the heels of another, I did decide a week ago to make another modest contribution.  Since the opera program early Sunday morning probably has only a small audience, I like to contribute as one of their supporters.  But when I tried a week ago, the volunteer answering the phone didn't know the program and advised me to phone back when I knew its name.  Alas, the program's host never mentioned the name.  Strike one.  Today I tried again, knowing the name -- Through the Opera Glass -- and got a recorded message: "The extension you dialed is not available at this time."  This, in the midst of a fund drive with desperate appeals for money.  Strike two.

      Two phoenixes come to New York:  Two phoenixes, one male and one female,  made of shovels, hard hats, pliers, saws, screwdrivers, plastic tubing, drills, and other salvaged construction debris from China -- the creations of Chinese artist Xu Bing -- now hover overhead in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.  No, I haven't seen them, only photos of them in the New York Times, but they look epic in proportions, monumental.  Weighing over 12 tons together, the huge birds required over 30 hoists and 140 feet of trussing to lift them into place, one in front of the other, so they seem to soar.  A curious addition (for about a year) in a magnificent Gothic-style church, bearing an implied message about modern industry and labor, though in their present setting the artist sees them as having a sacred quality.  And so, once again, the sacred in New York.

      Coming soon:  Freedom, Fakery, and Freaks: Coney Island.  After that, who knows?


      ©  2014  Clifford Browder


         

112. New York and the Vision Thing

                        Where there is no vision, the people perish.   Proverbs 29:18                                                   

                                                                  
     This post is about New York City and whether or not it has ever achieved, to use the memorable phrase of our forty-first President (Poppa Bush), “the vision thing.”  Certainly there was plenty of it in America once, since the New England colonies, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Georgia were all founded to create, here in the New World, an ideal community or sanctuary free from the intolerance and tyranny of the Old.  But not New York.  Right from the start it was a business town, a place to make money.  When the Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1626, they meant it to be a trading post, a place where beaver skins and other pelts obtained from the native peoples of the interior could be loaded onto ships and sent to Europe, since beaver skins were in great demand for the hats of fashionable gentlemen.  And geography had predetermined that this was the spot for such a post, since it offered a large harbor at the mouth of a navigable river reaching far into the interior.
     And right from the start the settlement featured also a heady mix of people, a hodgepodge of races and nationalities: not just the Dutch, but also  Norwegians, Danes, Germans, Walloons, Bohemians, Italians, blacks both slave and free, Munsees, Montauks, Mohawks, and others, including refugees like Englishmen fleeing the oppressively sectarian colonies of New England and, in time, French Huguenots and Sephardic Jews.  Half the early inhabitants of New Amsterdam were non-Dutch, and business was conducted in half a dozen languages, the currencies employed being Dutch guilders, beaver skins, and wampum (belts of strung beads made of seashells). 
     And early on there developed a type of resident that would always characterize the city: worldly, brash, self-confident.  Then as now, New York was a magnet for hustlers and achievers, for all those eager to get ahead, make money, acquire power.  And that included not just fur traders, but also pirates, prostitutes, and sharpers of every stamp and breed. 
     Hardly a place, then, for vision.  Yes, there was prayer, but probably to many different gods, and not so much of it as to interfere with business.
     Fast-forward to the eighteenth century.  Renamed New York when the English took it over in 1664, the growing city was still a commercial hub, a significant port.  And a city with a large population of slaves – one resident in five was black -- their numbers second only to Charleston, South Carolina.  What did they do?  They fished, hauled water, cleaned privies, cooked for white people, split firewood, swept chimneys, peddled, worked in shipyards.  But slavery degrades the masters as well as the slaves.  A slave rebellion in 1712 killed 9 whites and wounded 6, and the retaliation was severe: 20 blacks were hanged, 3 burned at the stake, 1 broken on the wheel, and 1 roasted slowly for eight hours.  And in 1741, when several fires broke out, white citizens suspected black arson – probably erroneously – and burned 13 blacks at the stake and hanged 17.  I am no expert on eighteenth-century New York, but suggest that a city so involved in slavery, and the dread of a slave revolt that results, was hardly a fertile ground for vision.  During the Revolution the British promised their freedom to all slaves of rebels, and slaves from all over the colonies flocked to British-occupied New York.  When the British left the city in 1783, some 3,000 blacks went with them.
     Fast-forward again, this time deep into the nineteenth century.  As the leading port and financial center of an independent nation, New York, now a metropolis, could develop freely and express what I have termed its dark eros: the blind energy, ambition, and desire that characterize it to this day.  Flocking to it, along with immigrants from abroad, were all those locals bent on making it, on achieving wealth, success, and fame.  The city, like the nation, was drunk on Go Ahead, on material progress, on Bigger, Better, Faster, on More.  Confined to a long, narrow island, its growing population pushed steadily north, opening new streets and building new homes and stores and banks, even as it launched ships, cast marine engines, refined sugar, transshipped cotton from the South, and imported textiles and iron goods from Britain and silks and fancy goods from France.  In this frenzy of construction and commerce, was there room for vision?
     One could easily doubt it.  Literature and great ideas New York left to Boston.  Abolition didn’t tempt it; too many New York merchants had lucrative business ties with the South, and a few of them were secretly getting rich from the slave trade.  What great achievements did the city  accomplish, aside from making money?  I know of three: the completion of the Croton water supply system in 1842; the laying out of Central Park, which opened to the public on the eve of the Civil War; and the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883.  But are these accomplishments the products of vision?
     The water supply system, bringing clean water from upstate into the homes of the affluent, who could now bathe themselves and flush away wastes with ease, transformed the daily life of citizens, but maybe doesn’t rate as the realization of a vision.  But the creation of the 843-acre park, a vast expanse of greenery in what, as the city expanded northward, would become the heart of the city, with separate pathways for pedestrians, horseback riders, and carriages, and sunken transverses to hide commercial traffic crossing the park, all this could indeed be seen as realizing the vision of its inspired creators, Olmsted and Vaux.  Nothing like it had ever been done in this nation.  It was meant to welcome all citizens, rich and poor alike, and provide them with an urban Eden free from the turbulence of a noise-ridden, congested metropolis.  If the poor found the trip uptown to this leafy paradise a bit long and burdensome, while the wealthy paraded on its drives in their thin-wheeled, sleek black carriages with a coachman and footmen in livery, that need not detract from the splendor of the vision. The Drive in Central Park, a somewhat idealized view by Currier & Ives.
     Likewise the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the greatest suspension bridge built to date in the nation, can be seen as the product of vision.  To project such a span over an expanse of water and connect two great cities, New York and independent Brooklyn, thus eliminating the threat of winter ice jams and tides and wind and sleet – to sink two huge caissons through muck and clay and sand down to bedrock, then build on that bedrock two giant towers and bind them high over water with a harp of steel – to realize such a project was indeed the result of vision.  Even in this money-grubbing city, corrupt and dirty, where the rich got richer while the poor stayed poor, great dreams could be realized.  Secular dreams, material dreams, but dreams nonetheless.

Ad Meskens
     Still, New York could inspire counter-visions, visions hostile to it.  In the 1890s the Populist movement flourished in this country, representing farmers and laborers in the South and West who resented the dominance of Eastern bankers and plutocrats, big corporations and railroads, and the high cost of money.  Populist leaders inveighed especially against that hub of greed and corruption, Wall Street, which meant that New York City seemed to embody all that they detested … and feared. 
     Fast-forward again into the twentieth century.  By the 1920s New York, whose thrusting of ever taller buildings had always dazzled and amazed visitors, was sprouting in abundance those truly American marvels, the skyscrapers.  Indeed, with Manhattan now all built up, where else could the city expand except high into the sky?  Even today, when those big glass boxes known as high-rises clutter up the scene, I still marvel at the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State, and salute their stark modernity, their secular – dare I say it? – vision.  
New York City as seen from the Empire State Building, circa 1932.
The Empire State Building today,
as seen from the east.
Beyond My KenNot to mention  Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center, and the multiple creations of that master builder, Robert Moses, and the George Washington and Verrazano bridges.  I have walked the George Washington Bridge en route to or from the Palisades and, in spite of all the noisy traffic, have had that feeling of being projected into space, into sky, with my knees trembling at a glance at the abysms of space below that separated me from the river and the little toy boats on its surface: no ordinary experience, but one both exalting and frightening, made possible by what must be the most sublime of visions.

     That twentieth-century New York was a New Thing, all its own, struck any visitor coming from the Old World for the first time.  In a previous post I quoted Salvador Dali’s rapturous salute to the city when he first came in the 1930s:
The poetry of New York is an organ, Gothic neurosis, nostalgia of the Orient and the Occident, parchment lampshade in the form of a musical partition, smoked façade, artificial vampire, artificial armchair….  New York is not prismatic; New York is not white.  New York is all round; New York is vivid red.  New York is a round pyramid.  New York is a ball of flesh a little pointed toward the top, a ball of millennial and crystallized entrails; a monumental ruby in the rough – with the organ-point of its flashes directed toward heaven, somewhat like the form of an inverted heart – before being polished!
     Anything inspiring such Surrealist lyricism, such a hymn to the Modern,  surely points toward vision, not the vision of a single inspired architect or planner or engineer, or even a team of them, but a collective vision, a vision of the many.  I have defined New York City’s driving force as a dark eros, a combination of blind energy, ambition, and desire.  Cannot this force be considered visionary, and can we not attribute to such a vision these essentially material achievements?  Yes, then, there is vision in New York.
     But I will take it one step further.  The Gothic cathedrals of Europe are certainly the products of vision, but an essentially spiritual vision.  I marvel at their soaring vaults and towers, their sculpted Virgin and saints, their breathtaking stained glass windows, their every detail expressing a living, vibrant faith.  Can the structures and bridges of New York be in any way comparable?  Or is it folly to even attempt such a comparison?  Can one think of the Empire State Building and Notre Dame de Paris in the same breath?  Or the Prometheus of Rockefeller Center and any Gothic sculpture?  Surely the Prometheus and Atlas of Rockefeller Center are more related to the epic sculpture of the Renaissance.
Notre Dame de Paris, illuminated at night.
Fabien1309
Virgin and Child, in front of the western rose window of Notre Dame.
MOSSOT
The Prometheus of Rockefeller Center, bringing fire to mortals.
Jorge Royan
     A nun of my acquaintance insists that there is no spirituality without sexuality, and no sexuality without spirituality.  So I wonder if, against all likelihood, the secular vision producing the monuments of New York can have a hidden spiritual component.  Behind this city’s and this country’s urge to dream, dare, do, is there some lofty purpose that surpasses the individual agents, that seeks to achieve some goal of which we are but dimly, if at all, aware?  
THIS  NATION  CAN  DO  ANYTHING
DREAM  DARE  DO
THE  EYES  OF  THE  WORLD  ARE  UPON  YOU
     Hasn’t this always been the nation’s credo, and by extension now, the city’s?  So here we tread upon the thorny question of American exceptionalism, the belief that we are somehow different, special, unique, created by God or some Unseen Power to realize a Great Purpose on this earth.  Which brings to mind a refrain from a poem by Carl Sandburg:

                                    We are the greatest city,                                    the greatest nation:                                    nothing like us ever was.

Isn’t this the credo of America?  But Sandburg isn’t celebrating New York and America (he preferred Chicago anyway).  This refrain is from his poem “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind,” which begins with an epigraph: “The past is a bucket of ashes.”  Like Shelley in his poem “Ozymandias,” Sandburg is really expressing the folly of such exceptionalism, the fragility of grandiose human achievement.  A sobering thought, when one contemplates soaring bridges and towers, epic statuary, wondrous parks.  Visions too are fragile and probably, in the long run, doomed.  Maybe the Twin Towers – which I never quite managed to like – were our Babel, our crowning hubris, and destined for destruction.  Maybe we should think small for a change.  But has New York ever thought small, and would it still be New York, if it did?  Surely not.  But maybe we should.  Think small, that is.  Maybe.  And maybe not.
  Our crowning hubris?

September 15, 2001.  A New York City fireman calls for ten more rescue workers
to enter the rubble of the World Trade Center.
Clothespins.
Kris Krug      Note:  Me and fashion, and will our mayor be seduced?  Fashion is big in New York and always has been.  Next Thursday is the beginning of Fashion Week, so I’m told.  Not that it means anything to me.  Even though designer clothing stores have invaded my neighborhood, I know nothing of fashion, am totally and contentedly ignorant about it, don’t even window-shop along Bleecker Street.  The fashion industry involves lots of money, I gather, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.  Yes, in the window of the Marc Jacobs store across the street I’ve seen films of expressionless young models, male and female, parading clothes past multitudes of seated buyers (at least, I assume they are buyers), the models’ faces completely deadpan, making of them an endless chain of well-dressed clothespins.  And the clothes they model are stuff I wouldn’t be caught dead in.  To which the fashion world would probably retort, “And we wouldn’t be caught dead trying to outfit you!”  Touché!  Because I’m not the least bit elegant, wear clothes until they’re fearfully worn out, am always the last to adopt a new fashion.  In the 1960s – or was it even the 1970s? – I was the last male in the country to wear bellbottoms.  (A snug, low-rise pair, deliciously blue, that I actually fell in love with and clung to long after bells went out of fashion.)  All of which says nothing about our new mayor being seduced.
     What brought me to this subject was an article in a recent New York Timesinspired by the imminence of Fashion Week.  It seems that our previous mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, though no fashion icon himself, had a close  relationship with the fashion world, attending their shows, speaking at their award ceremonies, showing up at their store openings, and walking the red carpet at their galas.  “I am a fashionista!” he on one occasion jokingly announced.  “Our mayor, our father, our caretaker,” one designer gushed.  Said another, “He realizes that fashion is the heartbeat of this city.”  (All these years in New York, and I never detected its heartbeat!)  So in love was the fashion world with Hizzoner, they gave him a private farewell dinner last December at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
     But the old order changeth, giving way to the new.  Enter a new mayor named de Blasio, all six feet five of him.  “Nobody in fashion knows this guy,” one fashion exec has observed.  “I am sure we will seduce the new mayor, too,” says designer Diane von Furstenberg.  Which may not be so easy.  De Blasio’s “tale of two cities,” contrasting the ultra rich 1% with the other 99%, didn’t resonate with fashion, an industry that doesn’t exactly cater to the hoi polloi, least of all those at the very bottom of the heap.  Bloomberg and his partner Diane Taylor were very social creatures, hobnobbing easily with the fashion world at its frequent dinners, parties, and events.  But the new mayor, with two teen-age children, may be more homebound and less socially inclined.  And it doesn’t help that in the last primary the fashion crowd bet on the wrong horse, Christine Quinn, and not on that unknown who came from behind, Bill de Blasio.  But the fashionistas are hopeful, insisting that anyone with two “with-it” children like Dante and Chiara has to have a secret fashion bent.  So will the new mayor be seduced?  We’ll soon get a hint, since he’ll be expected to attend the imminent opening of New York Fashion Week.  And this is one seduction of a politician that we can all witness at least without dismay.  Suspense is building.  Can progressives and fashion march in step together?  Or even dance?  Time will tell.
     Coming soon:  The Sacred in Secular New York.  (Is it even conceivable?  The sacredness of water, Pete Seeger, and GE.  The role of silence and my five secret spots.  Greek gods and dancing Shiva.) 
     ©  2014  Clifford Browder