Patell and Waterman’s History of New York
Being a … course, companion, blog, and book.
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Those of you who’ve heard Cyrus talk about growing up at the nexus of many cultures may also have heard me, on occasion, joke that Cyrus identifies, ethnically, as a Mets fan.
So I had to direct his (and your) attention today to the new Bowery Boys podcast on Shea Stadium.
Who are these Bowery Boys and how do they find the time to come up with such great material?
[/blog envy]
Tags: Mets, Shea Stadium
THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY
“We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to
issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come.”
So wrote the paper’s founders, Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, on September 18, 1851. Raymond was speaker of the
New York State Assembly and a journalist who had worked for Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune. Their goal was to publish a paper that avoided sensationalism. The first issue had four pages and sold for one penny. The paper’s offices were located at 113 Nassau Street. (The building was demolished at the end of last summer.) Three years later, the paper moved to a building closer to City Hall.
On September 14, 1857, the paper changed its name to The New York Times. And the rest, as they say, is history.
UPDATE: The New York Times will be publishing The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages, 1851-2008 in October. The set features 3 DVD-ROMs that contain every front page
ever printed. All of them will be indexed and linked to the complete articles on the
online archives of nytimes.com. The package will also include a book of essays by Richard Bernstein, Ethan
Bronner, Roger Cohen, Gail Collins, Helene Cooper, Thomas Friedman,
William Grimes, Caryn James, Gina Kolata, David Leonhardt, Steve Lohr,
Frank Rich, Carla Anne Robbins, Gene Roberts, William Safire, Serge
Schmemann, Sam Tanenhaus and John Noble Wilford. You can pre-order the collection here.
Okay, I guess we’re going to be a little political this fall. At least where New York history serves as a convenient backdrop.
Here’s Eric Rauchway (EOTAW and UC-Davis) on McCain’s uncanny channeling of Herbert Hoover:
Responding to the collapse of several major investment banks this
week, John McCain reassured us, “I think still — the fundamentals of
our economy are strong.” That move comes from an old playbook: On Oct.
25, 1929, Herbert Hoover declared, “The fundamental business of the
country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on
a sound and prosperous basis.”The day before Hoover insisted that the fundamentals were
strong was the day that came to be known as Black Thursday, when in
heavy trading the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 9 percent of
its value. And while, in endless stock-footage documentaries showing
images of dumbfounded traders over a soundtrack of mournful jazz
clarinets, the crash is supposed to begin the Great Depression, it
wasn’t quite so. The real cause was the collapse of the banking system,
which followed the crash in part because Hoover believed strong
fundamentals would protect the economy from disaster.
More here.
Tags: Black Thursday, Hoover, McCain, Wall Street
One of the texts that Bryan and I assign in our Writing New York course is Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). “Bartleby” is a wonderful story to use in English classes, because you can read it productively using a wide variety of critical methodologies. Our approach is to emphasize its subtitle: “A Tale of Wall Street.” In part, we recontextualize the story within the history of New York real estate and point out the subtle references to two of the city’s major landowners at the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Jacob Astor and Trinity Church.
We also trace the history of Wall Street from a residential area to a place of business, but we begin by asking students what the name “Wall Street” means in contemporary culture. We invariably show the clip below, the famous “Greed is good” speech from Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street (1987). The speech is delivered by Michael Douglas, playing a Wall Street takeover specialist named Gordon Gekko, who was loosely based on real-life financiers Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn. Douglass won an Oscar for the role. The clip will remind you why.
During the Clinton years, the film seemed to me like an artifact of a bygone era, but the Dubya Days have made it all-too-relevant once again. Especially in the light of yesterday’s bloodletting on the Street.
Interestingly, John McCain was talking about greed on Wall Street yesterday. According to The Wall Street Journal:
Both candidates blamed Wall Street greed and special-interest
influences in Washington. “We’ve seen self-interest, greed,
irresponsibility and corruption undermine these hard-working American
people,” Sen. McCain said at a rally in Orlando, Fla., where he
promised to “put an end…to running Wall Street like a casino.” He
offered no specific prescriptions but did call for ending
“multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs that have broken the public trust.”
In other words, McCain takes the methodologically individualist approach that is typical of the Republican approach to the economy when things go bad: he looks for individuals to blame — in this case the greedy CEOs — pointing fingers at the Gordon Gekkos of today’s financial markets.
Fundamentally, however, McCain’s policies are based on the assertion that Gekko makes: that “greed is good” — or, rather, creative. Why else would you assert, as McCain, Bush, Phil Gramm and their ilk do, that cutting taxes on the super-rich and on large corporations will create jobs? Give the rich more money, they’ll invest more to make more money, and the result will be more jobs and a trickling down of money to those below who have less. (Nobody seems to want to face up to the realities of just where those jobs are likely to be created in today’s global economy.)
The lesson of Stone’s film (and, I’d argue, of Melville’s story) is that it isn’t individuals but the system that is the problem.
Isn’t it interesting to see McCain disparaging Wall Street for being run “like a casino” — McCain, who chose Sarah Palin on gut instinct and without sufficiently vetting her? When the press wasn’t describing the choice as a “Hail Mary” pass, it was describing McCain as a man who loves to shoot craps and had rolled the dice in picking Palin.
John Weaver, a former chief strategist for McCain told Time magazine earlier this summer: “Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in
John’s life. Taking a chance, playing against the
odds.”
Did no one ever tell McCain that in the end the house always wins? It’s the system, Senator, it’s the system.
Here’s how Alex Ross, in his fantastic book The Rest Is Noise, describes Steve Reich‘s 1976 minimalist masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians:
The premiere took place at New York’s Town Hall on April 24, 1976. Here the fascination of rhythm is joined to a comparably sophisticated drama of harmony: at the core of this piece is a cycle of eleven chords, each of which underpins a section of two to seven minutes in length. Early on, bass instruments touch repeatedly on a low D, giving the feeling that this is the work’s fundamental level. But in Section V, the midpoint of the structure, the bass clarinets and cello lower the floor from D to C-sharp — a crucial alteration in the physical space of the music. The harmony sinks toward F-sharp or C-sharp minor, and rugged six-note figures burrow in. A similar change in the weather darkens Section IX, which is almost expressionistic in its stabbing intensity. Only at the end do bright D and A-majorish chords clear the air.
Ross’s writing here differs from his treatment of most other works in the book, which aims to allow his readers to imagine the sounds he’s describing. Here the description is almost clinical, and I don’t think it’s an accident. This is Ross at his most minimal, perhaps to emphasize Reich’s precision. But the minimalism he’s describing is also incredibly lush, and it’s strange that he doesn’t spend more time conveying the feelings Reich’s piece conveys or even the ways in which it was received.
[You can, however, in the web supplement Ross provides, listen to bits and pieces of Reich's influential repertoire if you're not already familiar with it.]
Reich — along with other downtown minimalists in the 1960s and 1970s: LaMonte Young, Phillip Glass, sometimes Terry Riley — contributed to what was then a burgeoning neighborhood avant-garde art scene, one that blurred boundaries between media and forms and disciplines. A few paragraphs after Ross discusses Reich’s piece, he quotes the critic John Rockwell describing a loft performance by Phillip Glass at the artist Donald Judd’s loft, ending with a comparison of 70s SoHo with 50s Greenwich Village. “It was a good night to be in New York City,” Rockwell remembered.
That’s what I was thinking last night at Le Poisson Rouge, the new Village club in the space formerly inhabited by the Village Gate. LPR has mounted an incredibly ambitious and eclectic roster of live shows for the coming season, including several installments of the “Wordless Music Series,” which aims to bring together contemporary composers and indie rock audiences (and vice versa). Last weekend, the new music ensemble Signal played Reich’s most canonical piece as the second half of an evening of pulsing orchestral sounds. Reich himself was on hand on Saturday, becapped and (unless I was imagining it) glowing under the adulation he received from a diverse audience: indie kids, NYU percussion students, older folks more likely to attend performances at Lincoln Center than in a downtown basement venue, Sufjan Stevens (who was behind me in line to get in and whose music — especially the Michigan album — owes an enormous debt to Reich’s work). Most of the crowd sat on the floor or packed in several pockets assigned for standing room only. It was a vibe much more akin to a rock show than a classical performance, though when the music got underway the audience was rapt.
When the Times reported on Reich’s first recording of this piece in 1978, the critic opined that the record was better than the live show, which, in the critic’s view, tended toward the mechanical and cultish. Sitting on the floor of Le Poisson Rouge, close enough to the principal clarinet player to be able to read the score on his stand, I would have begged to differ, at least on the first point. There’s an extraordinary joy to go along with the piece’s trance-like mechanical qualities, a secular energy that pushes you, in the interactions between the ensemble as much as in the pulses they are producing, toward something like religious ecstasy.
What I was doing …
I woke up yesterday morning hoping not to think too much, this year, about 9/11. The Internets put an end to that, though, in the form of emails from friends and family, blog posts, and the newspaper. Maybe it should be an unplugged day from here on out. Then again, the calls and emails from friends remind me that there’s a lot to celebrate — and to be grateful for.
So I stopped my whining about not wanting to remember (Emerson: “What opium is instilled in all disaster?”) and left the office a couple hours early to catch a matinée showing of Man on Wire.
What a perfect thing to do on the afternoon of a 9/11 anniversary. I have to admit, it was tough at first to watch all the footage of the Twin Towers being assembled. Those big waffle-wafers dangling from cranes look in retrospect like so much gingerbread! And the idea of being perched that high can’t help but bring the jumpers to mind. But something about Phillipe Petit’s giddy storytelling, the relentless egotism that fueled his wire-walking caper, and perhaps most of all the fact that he survived to tell the tale, ultimately constitutes a joyful remembrance of the buildings, even if 9/11 is never overtly referenced.
Something I hadn’t expected, though: The film is as much about memory — about the 30 years that separate the event and the retelling we witness — as it is about the original events. It’s also about art. And most surprising of all it’s about the relationships among the people who plotted with Petit and helped him pull it off — about the damage done by an ego large enough to think up such a spectacular stunt. I’m not sure the storytellers intended it to go that way, but the film making itself is masterful, and I think the director ultimately put together a much richer story than the adventure narrative he may have set out to recount.
Much later in the evening, SSW and I went to see a film one of her high school friends (from an exchange student experience in Germany) had a hand in making. Able Danger, showing for the next week or so at Two Boots Pioneer Theater, may be the only film in existence that can claim the generic designation as “9/11 action comedy/noir homage.” Its central character is based on Sander Hicks, owner of Brooklyn coffee shop/publishing house Vox Pop, which features prominently in the film, along with other neighborhood landmarks.
Reimagining Hicks as a hipster/geek superhero/secret agent, the film asks what would happen if Hicks’s self-published book, The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle Blowers, and the Cover Up, actually resulted in the FBI and neo-Nazi nutjobs chasing him through Brooklyn on his bike. The comedic referencing of Maltese Falcons, MacGuffin devices, Great Whatsits and other noir staples take the edge off what could have slipped too close to paranoid “truthie” earnestness, though there’s enough of the latter to send you home from a fun night at an indie film and deep into Google’s recesses.
Tags: 9/11, able danger, man on wire, phillipe petit
As of last Monday, the New York City Waterfalls project, created by the artist Olafur Eliasson, has had its hours of operation cut from 101 to 50. The reduction is the result of a complaint by The Brooklyn Heights Association
that the salt water from the installations was damaging waterfront plantings along the Brooklyn Promenade. The group had originally asked that the installations be dismantled after Labor Day, but October 13 remains the final date.
You can see the waterfalls now from 12:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and 5:30 p.m. to 9
p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays.
Around my neighborhood, the fall sounds of buzz-saws and hammers on ply-wood herald the coming of the annual San Gennaro Festival. Deep-fried oreos and all-night repetitions of the Godfather theme by amateur brass bands are sure to follow shortly.
Something new this year on Mulberry Street, though: The opening of a relocated and expanded Italian American Museum. The Times reported yesterday that the museum’s new digs, at 151-155 Mulberry, corner of Grand, originally housed the Banca Stabile, a neighborhood bank that operated from 1882 to 1932. The museum purchased the buildings from Stabile family descendants for over $9 million. The history of the bank itself will form the core of the inaugural exhibition:
The vault’s contents revealed that the neighborhood elite also
banked with the Stabiles. A ledger card shows that Antonio Ferrara, who
in 1892 founded the pastry shop that is still in business across the
street, closed his account on Jan. 31, 1931, taking his $211,131
fortune with him. Before that, a telegraphic receipt from April 3,
1920, shows that Mr. Ferrara wired 75,000 lire from Banca Stabile to
the Hotel Londres in Naples to reserve a vacation room there. Two years
later, Mr. Ferrara bought two first-class steamship tickets from New
York to Naples for a total of $110.“It was very rare that people
traveled first class in those days,” said Maria T. Fosco, a member of
the museum’s board who has been researching the history of Little
Italy. “Obviously, Mr. Ferrara was doing quite well.”Ms. Fosco
said that at its peak, the neighborhood was a cluster of enclaves
within an enclave, with various streets representing various regions of
the old country.“Most people who lived on Mulberry Street were
from Naples,” she explained. “Those who lived on Elizabeth Street were
from Sicily, those from Mott Street were from Calabria, and anyone
north of Broome Street was from Bari.“So if a boy from Mulberry
Street married a girl from Elizabeth Street,” Ms. Fosco said with a
grin, “that was considered a mixed marriage.”
Two other additions to immigrant history in the neighborhood to keep an eye out for: The Tenement Museum has just launched a new module focusing on the Moores, an Irish family who occupied the museum’s building at 97 Orchard in the 1860s.
Another much-awaited expansion comes in December, when Museum of Chinese in America reopens in its new location at 211-215 Centre Street.
Tags: italian american museum, museum of chinese in america, san genarro festival, tenement museum
BY JESSIE MORGAN-OWENS
BROOKLYN CORRESPONDENT
This is my third post in a row to start out by reading the Sunday paper, but today I’ve got a little story we shot for the New York Times Magazine: “Hipster Replacement” (ha!), a map of the newest old scene in Brooklyn. (You can find it on page 110 of the Men’s Fashion special issue of today’s magazine.)
Allow me to introduce “B.E.L.T.” to the readers of AHNY. The acronym stands for “below the elevated train” (the J/M/Z) in South Williamsburg. The neighborhood was “nameless” until the New York Times, the writer Cator Sparks, and Andy from Yoko Devereaux came along. We weren’t told what they were going to call the story or the neighborhood when they assigned us the piece for fear we might accidentally leak it or have it beaten out of us with vintage Air Jordans.
Frenchie of Frenchie’s Gym on 303 Broadway, a 67-year old Puerto Rican body builder, deserves a story in the Times all his own. You can see the old school, no nonsense, no a/c gym from the B.Q.E. He’s been in there coaching and cajoling giant young men from the neighborhood to “Do it with Love!” since 1976.
Maybe you need to spend an afternoon with the “community organizers” down at Frenchie’s, Mr. Rudy Giuliani.
Follow this link to an online version of the Magazine piece, featuring an interactive map of B.E.L.T.
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