Meanwhile, you can hear Betsy talking about Irving and Knickerbocker on Penguin’s recently launched site, “From the Publisher’s Office,” which went live two days ago. Betsy is featured in the fifth episode of a series called “Penguin Classics on Air,” located in the “Radio Room” section of the site. Betsy is interviewed by Penguin Classics editor Elda Rotor in the first segment from the episode entitled “The Birth of a Knickerbocker.” Give it a listen!
The subsequent segments feature Alan Walker talking about Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants in “Reading the Classics from A to Z” and Stephen Morrison presenting the opening to Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle.” Earlier episodes of the Radio Room focus on Jane Austen, Jose Rizal, Mikhail Lermontov, and Sholem Aleichem.
Sometimes New York gets it right. In the middle of the rainiest, coldest, grayest June in the history of all Junes, a bright spot: The High Line Park, ten years in the planning, has opened to the public. You can literally rise above the city streets and walk an idyllically meandering path from Gansevoort Street to 20th street (eventually the park will extend to Penn Station).
So many people — locals and tourists alike — are delighted by this new park that, in true New York fashion, on opening weekend there was a line to get in. But last Monday afternoon, when I was there, I saw only handfuls of people walking along, all with the same half-smile on their faces, admiring the park planners’ attention to detail, which Robin Pogrebin catalogs in her NY Timesreview.
The joy with which this park has been received suggests to me that New Yorkers are starved for public green space. It’s true, as one blogger wrote, that the High Line winds through real estate that I will never in my life be able to afford, and also true that I couldn’t afford the $1,000 ticket to the High Line benefit — hell, I probably won’t ever be able to afford to stay at the new hotel that straddles the park. But I can still sit on one of the wooden chaise longues (cleverly parked on rollers along the old rails) and stare out at the river, or lounge on the wooden “viewing platform” that looks uptown along Tenth Avenue.
Many people have applauded this park as a testament to creative urban planning and persistence; it is surely that. But what if we also used it as a call to arms, to insist that our city planners turn their attention from high-rise glass boxes to creating public oases like the High Line? I mean, yes, plunking aluminum lawn chairs in the middle of Times Square is whimsical as hell, but is that really how we want to define “public space?”
The High Line proves that we can do much, much better — let’s hope it’s not a fluke but instead the start of a trend.
Very little time to post this week and next as I wrap up two summer courses.
I thought about heading to see the High Line over the weekend, but the coverage at Animal makes me glad I waited. David Byrne’s lovely photo of an evening stroll makes me think I’ll try it after dark once I eventually make it over there.
Instead, we went to see the new Pelham, probably against better judgment. The beginning was bad, the ending waaaayyy worse, but I tried to enjoy the middle as much as possible, which still wasn’t a lot. Running Scared is spot on for a handful of the film’s major problems, but for me the worst departure from the original was, in the end, the decision not to keep the contrived Noah’s Ark casting of the original. In the new version, there are no New Yorkers. There are a few attempts at ethnic typing — Travolta is a bit of a bigot who can’t stop calling John Turturro a “greaseball,” as if Italians remain at the top of the persecuted minority list in the 21st century city. Travolta himself, a Wall St. broker gone bad, seems more calculated to play to Main Street prejudice against Wall St. than to represent anything recognizably related to the city. Instead of city types, even bad movie stereotypes, there’s just a bunch of vanilla on a subway train. The passengers have no personality at all. They’re just there — like the rest of us, I suppose — to be terrorized or eventually stand up and be counted. Let’s roll, you know.
It’s like a movie version of a movie version of a movie version of New York, where New Yorkness can be signified only by jerky editing or rats in the subway, and where a runaway 6 train somehow gets to Coney Island only moments after crossing the Manhattan Bridge (did I miss something about rerouting?). Characters either love the city or hate it (the mayor starts off hating it — especially the subway — but comes to love it, I think); there’s no nuanced way of inhabiting it. The low moment in this regard came when suburban-chubby Denzel is being spirited uptown in a helicopter and the pilot says, gesturing to the majestic skyline, something like: “Makes you realize just what it is we’re fighting for.” A skyline! A view from above! No sense of the value of life on street-level. There are no neighborhood streets in this city — only towers and freeways and tunnels, and the lower you go the more rats you’ll find.
When it ended, a smattering of people in the audience clapped. I imagine they were the same ones who laughed when Travolta said “greaseball” for the fourth time. I also imagine they haven’t seen the original. Shame.
I finally made it up to the Museum of the City of New York yesterday, which I hadn’t visited in a very long time. The impetus was provided by my father-in-law, who was visiting from out of town — isn’t that always the way? In light of the “Lost New York” conference that Bryan and I are planning for the first weekend of October at NYU, several of the exhibits held a special interest for me. The first was the ongoing exhibit on “Trade,” which traces the rise and fall of the port of New York and features wonderful wooden models of old sailing ships.
Two special exhibitions, however, are particularly worth visiting in this year of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s first visit to New York. The first is Mannahatta/Manhattan, which presents a natural history of the island from 1609 to the present. A 3D topographical map with a projected overlay of rivers and forests gives at the center of the exhibition gives you a real sense of how hilly the island was originally (a fact underscored by the walk from the 103rd St subway station, which takes you under the Metro-North el). My kids loved the computer program that allowed you to move from a present-day Google Maps aerial view of the city to a simulated aerial view of the city in 1609, which enabled them to watch our neighborhood transformed back to its woody state of 400 years ago. My favorite insight, perhaps, was the idea that the topography of today’s Times Square (a meeting place of streams) made it a crossroads even then. Mannahatta/Manhattan runs through October 12.
From there you can go to the exhibition Amsterdam/New Amsterdam, which traces the rise of the city after Hudson’s arrival. The exhibition hall is about the length of Hudson ship, the Half Moon, and the exhibits are hung on displays that are arranged to suggests its outlines, complete with a prow. Although the introductory blurb highglights the idea that New Amsterdam “came to exhibit a comon spirit with the American city it would become — marked by unusual diversity, economic innovation, and contentious politics,” the exhibition does a good job of showing that these politics were more about more than economics and included moments of religious intolerance that have something in common with the colonies up north in New England. The exhibit closes on September 27.
Amsterdam/New Amsterdam is part of the city’s NY400 Celebrations and is co-sponsored by the Consulate-General of the Netherlands in New York. You can find out more about events related to the 400th anniversary at www.ny400.org.
The posters all over town for the upcoming Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (note the 2009 version uses the numerals rather than the orignal’s spelled-out numbers) had Stephanie and me itching to watch the original, which we did the other night. Well worth returning to, though we hope it doesn’t deflate the remake too much.
So much of the film seemed like a time capsule from the mid-70s, even though (as NYMag notes this week) the mayor’s office mandated that the train used in the original be free of the era’s ubiquitous subway graffiti. The contents of the time capsule, then? It would include the characters’ obsessions with things like women joining the police force or transit union, the now-defunct names of transit companies, the assumption by Matthau’s character that visiting Japanese transit officials wouldn’t speak a word of English, and above all the array of New York accents.
Whatever happened to the New York accent — or even to New York accents in the plural? It’s possible to live in downtown Manhattan and go for days without talking to someone who speaks like a native New Yorker. You’ll hear them in mom and pop shops, or in places like post offices or public schools. But it’s not too much a stretch to imagine the old New York accents — which began to be noticed by observers and represented in print in the late 19th century — will soon be a thing of the past, thanks mostly to the homogenizing force of global capitalism.
Clearly, the filmmakers in 1974 aimed to make the train hostages a cross-section of New York types, one or two of each, almost like animals chosen for salvation on Noah’s Ark.
When the film ended and the credits rolled, we saw that the characters had, in fact, been named for the types they were supposed to represent. The list, in part, taken from IMDB:
A collection of social types, professions, ethnic stereotypes. The old man was an old Jewish man, I think, though he’s not listed this way. The Pimp, who was black, might have been listed as the Veteran, since he mentions his service record, and at one point one of the hijackers calls him by the N-word before cracking him across the face with a machine gun, but I suppose they didn’t want to type him by the N-word in the credits. It took me a second to figure out what one of the passengers had been The Homosexual. I’ll be interested to see what comparable types turn up in the new version. Will the 6 train in 2009 be similarly depicted as a cross-section of the city? If so, how will the writers and directors imagine our social divisions?
Yesterday on The Great Whatsit my friend Tim mentioned a George Carlin record, Occupation: Foole!, which he picked up in a dollar bin. It was recorded in California in 1973, making it roughly the film’s contemporary. One of the tracks is called “New York Voices.” Who would have thought, at the time, that either it or the original Pelham would wind up serving a documenta
ry function?
One of the passions in our household is Lego. There are literally thousands and thousands of Lego pieces in our apartment jumbled together from the countless sets that we have bought since my older son first got interested in the bricks about five years ago. Each morning, we can count on the characteristic sound of Lego bricks being dumped out onto the floor by our younger son, who uses them to tell stories about spaceships and battles among pirates, trolls, and Jedi Knights. My older son can often be found assembling pieces into ever more elaborate spaceships, vehicles, and buildings. He has an amazing memory for the Lego inventory and often enlists my help to locate very particular pieces in order to execute one of his designs. Keeping it all organized is, shall we say, a challenge (one that we have yet, frankly, to meet).
Last year, in partnership with Adam Reed Tucker, a LEGO enthusiast and founder of Brickstructures, Lego created the Lego Architecture series last year, beginning with sets devoted to famous Chicago landmarks, the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Canter.
This year is New York’s turn. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, Lego Archtecture and Tucker have collaborated on a model of the Guggenheim, which was released last May 15 in conjunction with the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, which runs until August 23.
The set has a list price of $45 and is available at the Guggenheim exhibition or from the Brickstructures online store. A set featuring Wright’s famous cantilevered waterfall-house, Fallingwater (located just outside Pittsburgh) will be available in August.
Oh yeah — the exhibition looks pretty cool too. We’ll report back after we’ve seen it.
Arriving close on the heels of Donna Karan’s corporate founding in 1989, the mural must have been viewed by survivors of SoHo’s transformation in the 80s as the coup de grâce of the fashion industry’s takeover of an art neighborhood. (Anyone have documentation of the neighborhood’s original reaction? I’m curious.) It’s not the sort of landmark typically mourned by those who mourn the lost city. And yet, almost twenty years ain’t a bad run, especially in this neighborhood, and I’m sure it will be missed by many.
As the Times reported a few years ago, the mural took on new meanings after 9/11, due to the prominence of the World Trade Center peeking through the sign’s oversized letters:
No thought was given at Donna Karan International [after 9/11] to changing the
DKNY mural that has overlooked Broadway and Houston Street since 1989 [sic].
Hand-painted from a Peter Arnell photograph taken out of a seaplane
window, it shows a panorama of Manhattan Island as seen through four
cutout letters. The World Trade Center, framed by a soft cloud bank, is
unmistakable in the upper crook of the N.
“The critical thing is
that you don’t change history,” said Mr. Arnell, the founder and chief
executive of the Arnell Group, the advertising agency responsible for
the DKNY campaign. “You don’t see it differently. You understand it
differently.”
Racked reports on the design for what will come next: it’s more than a little annoying that New York’s unofficial colors — black and white (what better typifies New York fashion, high and low?) — are being replaced by a boring, if wholesome, California beige, the “NY” of Donna Karan’s corporate logo replaced by Hollister’s (and parent company A&F’s) geocultural orientation: California.
Last Friday, Betsy Bradley and I took a train up to Plattsburgh in northern (really, really northern) New York to attend the annual conference of the New York State Historical Association. I’d agreed to be on the panel that Betsy had proposed, “Knickerbocker’s History: the First 200 Years,” without really doing the math, which turned out to be this: 15 hours of travel time back and forth, 17 hours in Plattsburgh, and about 20 people in the audience for our session, which took place at 8:30 a.m.
It turned out to be a delightful trip: Amtrak’s “Adirondack” speeds along right next to the Hudson all the way up to the Albany, and after that the scenery is a mix of rolling hills, farmland, and lakes. The historians we met were an affable group with a real passion for the history of the Empire State. I was pleased to learn about Cornell University Press’s recent rededication to New York History and to see an advance copy of Betsy’s book from Rutgers UP, Knickerbocker: The Myth that Made New York (officially due out on July 15).
Betsy spoke about the ways in which Irving’s History responded both to the New-York Historical Society’s call for documentary information about Dutch New York and to Samuel Latham Mitchill’s Picture of New York; Or, The Traveller’s Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States (1807), which gave short shrift to New Amsterdam.
Next up was the historian Elisabeth Paling Funk of the New Netherlands Project, who gave a talk entitled “From Amsterdam to New Amsterdam: Washington Irving, the Dutch St. Nicholas, and the American Santa Claus.” A longer version of the talk can be found in the recently published anthology Explorers, Fortunes and Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland. (If you use that link to amazon.com, ignore the incorrect description presented to you. For more information about the anthology, download this PDF from NNP).
I spoke about “Washington Irving’s Cosmopolitanism,” making the argument that in the History (particularly the first book) Irving rejects those who reject the idea of difference and thereby anticipates modern theories of cosmopolitanism that present alternatives not only to nationalism but also to univeralism. I highlighted this passage, which I read as a rejoinder to the account given by William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation:
From the foregoing arguments therefore, and a host of others equay conclusive, which I forebear to enumerate, it was clearly evident, that this fair quarter of the globe when first visited by Europeans, was a howling wilderness, inhabited by nothing but wild beasts; and that the trans-atlantic visitors acquired an incontrovertible property therein, by the right of Discovery.
Irving doesn’t cite Bradford, but he does refer to a number of “authorities” (largely Dutch contemporaries of Bradford) whose arguments about the barbarism of the American natives are consonant with the account that Bradford gives. This juxtaposition allowed me to suggest that Irving’s History can be seen as a New York rejoinder to the line of New England historiography begun by Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation. And I suggested, finally, that Irving’s cosmopolitanism arises in part from Irving’s comic technique in the History: Knickerbocker pokes fun at the fallacies of other philosophers and historians, but allows us also to poke fun at him.
One of the questions we received was apparently a version of one posed at last year’s conference to Bryan: it had to do with the hostility that many Dutch historians and readers feel toward Irving’s History because of the way in which it seems to reinforce unflattering stereotypes about Dutch people. Bryan was reported to have said something along the lines of “get over it; it’s a joke.” I said something similar, adding that Irving’s satire of the Dutch is affectionate, in contrast to the mocking reserved for those who think like Bradford, and that there is really affection and vividness in Knickerbocker’s portrayal of the foibles of his Dutch characters.
And then it was off to the station, where the step-ladders were already in place, awaiting the day’s visit from the “Adirondack.”
Bowery Boogie continues to report on the dramatic demolition of the historic Provincetown Playhouse. The site looks like an ancient ruin, and as BB notes, it’s hard to pick out what’s left among the rubble:
It’s hard to know what to think about this situation. Apparently the facade of the first floor and the four interior walls of the original theater are the only thing to remain in the new structure, which from the outside will look much like the old building, with the addition of lots of south-facing windows and a penthouse situated on a sizable set-back. You’ve got to admit that occupants of south-side rooms will be happy for a little sunlight, but then again, there’s a clear pattern of disregard for community sentiment that’s no secret to folks in or out of the institution I work for, and plenty of people inside and out are unhappy about that fact.
CB2 helped get the concession from NYU to scale back the size of the new building and keep parts of the original structure. Landmarks had determined that the building had been altered too significantly in the last half century or so for the building to warrant historic preservation. It’s true that the post-1940s renovation of the building was pretty horrendous: I always found it kind of sad that Off-Broadway’s birthplace looked like a cheaply erected post-War elementary school. But I’m also not sure that token gestures toward preservation — keeping parts of a facade and a few lousy bricks here and there — are much better than wholescale redevelopment. (Actually, I take it back: I think the Poe House [right] is probably better than no house.)
I’m less equivocal about the loss of Frank O’Hara’s longtime residence at 791 Broadway and the apparent lack out outcry on its behalf. Jeremiah brought itto my attention, and I don’t really know of anyone else who’s even bothered to notice its imminent doom.
On Tuesday night, I had the pleasure of attending a pre-publication party on honor of Betsy Bradley’s forthcoming book , Knickerbocker: The Myth that Made New York, which will be published by Rutgers on July 15. The party was sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities, which is cooking up some interesting events to celebrate what they call “the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial.” We’ll have more to say about those events in the days to come.
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