Patell and Waterman’s History of New York
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A pest control company called Terminix lists New York, Philadelphia and Detroit as the three cities most infested with bedbugs. And apparently there’s a new bedbug-related problem: people desperate to get rid of infestations are using pesticides intended for outdoor indoors. Take a look at this Huffington Press article.
I’m getting out of Manhattan for the weekend and noticed this view on the west side of Lexington Avenue between 40th and 39th Streets while waiting for a bus. I think it embodies quite a nice bit of the history of New York.
It might make a good prompt for the exam in the “New York and Modernity” course that I’m teaching this January for NYU ABu Dhabi.
Yesterday, I wrote about reliving the 1970s in the service of my Rolling Stones book. In fact, for the past two years, many New Yorkers have lived in fear of doing just that: reliving the seventies. Ever since the economic downturn began in late 2008, New Yorkers have been petrified that the city would revisit the bad old days of the mid-1970s when New York had a brush with near-bankruptcy. (Remember: “Ford to City: Drop Dead”?)
Well here’s an unexpected way in which we seem to be reliving the 1970s. What was it the Stones sang in “Shattered”?
We got rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown …
Now I grew up on the West Side and uptown. Yes, there were some rats, but the bugs I remember are cockroaches. Every morning, when I turned on the light in the kitchen of our prewar apartment on Riverside Drive, the little buggers would go scurrying. No amount of visits by the official exterminator seemed to help. And then my mother discovered boric acid, and the roach problem was solved.
Bedbugs, we never had. They did not loom in my imagination as I was growing up in the city in the 1970s. Not like muggers or “dog-doo” (pre-poop scoop New York, it was). But apparently the city had them. And it does again.
This time around, even the upper East Side has got ‘em, according to NBC News and New York magazine.
Bedbugs freak me out. When I heard about this article in the New York Daily News, which noted that movie theaters were a good place to pick up the critters, well, let’s just say I haven’t seen too many movies this summer.
And then, in Sunday’s New York Times, I learned this disgusting fact about bedbugs:
their sexual practices are bizarre even by insect standards: Because the female bedbug has no genital opening, the male inseminates her by using his hardened, sharpened genitalia to punch a hole through her abdomen. With no elaborate courtship ritual, males in a frenzied pursuit of sexual congress often blunder into and puncture the bodies of other males, occasionally inflicting fatal wounds.
Gross. This town’s in tatters. Uh-huh.
[Photo credit: New York magazine]
Bryan noted in a post the other day that I was out of town: I’d been in Amsterdam and London on NYU Abu Dhabi business. I got back at the end of last week, but I didn’t stay in New York for long. At least, not present-day New York. My family was going to the Midwest for a week to visit grandma, so it seemed like a golden opportunity to step into my mental time machine and beam myself back to the summer of 1977, when the Rolling Stones were on the verge of recording the album Some Girls, which I’ve been contracted to write about for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.
The summer of ’77, of course, is famous for the blackout that occurred in mid-July, setting off an orgy of looting and arson in all five boroughs.
I missed it; I happened to be in summer camp in Rhinebeck, NY that July, and I don’t think that the fact of the blackout made much of an impression on me when my parents told me about it on the phone.
So I decided to live it (I can’t very well say “re-live it”) by taking another look at Jonathan Mahler’s account of that year, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, which interweaves the story of the ’77 Yankees (who went on to win the World Series) and the story of the city in which they played. In New York City, 1977 was notable not only for the blackout but also for the arrest of the “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz, the opening of Studio 54, the beginning of Mick Jagger’s affair with Jerry Hall, Keith Richards’s arrest in Toronto for cocaine possession, and the ascension of one Ed Koch.
The title of Mahler’s book refers to a line that the legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell was reputed to have said during the World Series when an aerial shot of Yankee Stadium captured the view of an abandoned elementary school burning nearby. New York, like many cities in the nation, suffered an epidemic of arson in the 1970s, as landlords essentially liquidated unprofitable buildings by selling them to their insurance companies. The South Bronx was hit particularly hard, resulting in the burned-out landscape for which it would become infamous. Mario Merola, then Bronx District Attorney and a navigator in World War II, told Time magazine that “the destruction is reminiscent of the bombed-out cities in Europe.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cosell said, “the Bronx is burning.” And so it was.
Except, it turns out, he never uttered the iconic line. The release of the broadcasts of the 1977 World Series on DVD apparently demonstrates that Mahler’s memory was faulty. (I write “apparently” because I don’t own the DVDs, being a Mets rather than a Yankees fan, and the disc hasn’t arrived from Netflix yet.) During the broadcast, reporter Keith Jackson comments on the size of the fire, and Cosell notes that President Carter has recently visited the area. In the second inning, Cosell noted that the burning building had been abandoned and that no lives were at risk. The fire wasn’t mentioned again during the broadcast.
During the making of the mini-series based on Mahler’s book, the producers investigated the provenance of the remark and couldn’t find it. The Wikipedia entry for Howard Cosell speculates that “Mahler confused the documentary with his recollection of Cosell’s comments when writing his book.” (You can read more about the discovery here.)
The title glitch aside, Mahler’s book is splendidly evocative of the time and well worth reading.
We love it when the archeology of New York becomes front-page news. Click here for the account in this morning’s New York Times of the discovery of what seems to be a 17th-century ship during the excavations for the new World Trade Center’s underground vehicle security center. The excavations are taking place at a site that was not dug up before, which according to the article, “is close to where Lindsey’s Wharf and Lake’s Wharf once projected into the Hudson.”
Previously (on the subject of things dug up from the ground in New York). This one too.
[Photo:Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times]
We’re keeping an eye on a new series from Fordham University Press called “Empire State Editions,” an imprint devoted to books about New York State, with an emphasis on New York City and the Hudson Valley.
The series will be launched in November with the second edition of Patrick Bunyan’s All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities. The second edition is 368 pages long with 150 black-and-white photographs, and (at 5×8) it’s a little more portable than its predecessor (which was 9×8). The book’s entries are organized by street address and offer historical accounts of well-known and not-so-well-known events, as well as amusing anecdotes about life in Manhattan from the early Dutch days to the present. It should make an excellent supplement to the recently updated AIA Guide to New York City, which by the way is available in a Kindle edition.
Apparently, Empire State Editions will also gather together a number of books already published by Fordham UP, including Brian Cudahy’s How We Got to Coney Island: The Development of Mass Transportation in Brooklyn and Kings County (2002) and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (2009), edited by Roger Panetta. Click here for a PDF containing a catalog excerpt that includes descriptions of the series and of All Around the Town.
THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY
So today will not go down in New York history as the day that LeBron James came to the Big Apple and brought the New York Knicks not only back to respectability but also back to championship calibre. As a once and (I hope) future Knicks fan — I can still see Charles Smith failing to get either a basket or a foul off Horace Grant in four attempts under the basket during the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals — I’m disappointed that James didn’t choose to become King of New York. A Knicks team led by James and Amar’e Stoudamire would have made for a great rivalry with a Miami Heat team led by Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.
Still, though, you can’t help respecting a sports superstar who chooses to take less money (mind you, he’ll still get a ton) to play with his friends (Dwayne and Chris) with the hope of winning not one but several championships together. We’ll see if these guys will be able to do the really hard thing and share the ball so that they complement rather than thwart one another. Meanwhile, I hope for Miami’s sake that they’ve decided to leave enough money in Pat Riley’s budget to field a full team. Right now the Heat have, what, four players under — or about to be under — contract?
Maybe this will indeed go down in history as the week the Knicks revived themselves by signing Stoudamire to anchor the franchise. Apparently, Knicks president Donnie Walsh does have a Plan B in place that involves a sign-and-trade agreement for David Lee. (Actually, it’s probably Plan B-2, since signing Stoudamire was Plan B once the handwriting about James was on the wall.)
Here’s what I fear: that the Knicks will indeed revive themselves but that — in the same way that the Knicks of Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Charles Smith, and John Starks could never get the best of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant and their Bulls teammates — Stoudamire and Co. will come close but never get the best of LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, and whoever plays for the Heat with them.
Here’s hoping that I’m right about the Knicks’ revival and wrong about their becoming also-rans. In any case, Stoudamire and Co. have got to be more watchable than the teams that Isiah Thomas saddled us with lo these many years.
[Photo:Rich Arden/ESPN, via Associated Press]
Out of the city by a lake: hot dogs, yellow mustard, sparklers, and fireworks.
Taken with Hipstamatic for iPhone [lens: Kaimal Mark II; film: Ina's 1969; flash: standard]
More photos from the 4th over at patell.org.
Tonight, as part of their Centennial Celebration, The Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) will collaborate with ISSUE Project Room for a special outdoor performance, “I Do Not Doubt I Am Limitless: Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn.”
The event is free and begins at 5:00 p.m. at the Pier 1 Harbor View Lawn of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park and lasts until midnight. According to the organizers, the event is meant “to channel the psychedelic spirit of poet, journalist, humanist and Brooklynite, Walt Whitman.”
The outdoor concert, closing with a late night program of acoustic music after 10 pm, is part of Celebrating a Century, an exciting year-long series of events highlighting Brooklyn Heights history, famous residents, and the BHA’s past & future. Musicians and bands including the Wingdale Community Singers, Christy and Emily, Prince Rama, and others will perform original work along with new pieces set to a marathon reading of “Leaves of Grass,” recited by some of the nation’s most intriguing poets. Performers Include:
Rick Moody and Hannah Marcus of the Wingdale Community Singers
Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille
Sexual Energies School: Quebec City
Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers
Nicole Peyrafitte, Pierre Joris, Brendan Lorber, Yuko Otomo,Tsaurah Litsky, Linda Lerner, and more.
For directions to the park, CLICK HERE.
MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa was on hand for the grand opening of the Lego Store at Rockefeller center yesterday. Among its delights are recreations in Lego of Rockefeller Center and two of its talismanic statues: the Atlas (above) and Prometheus. Take a look at her post “Mecca, Now Open in Rockefeller Center.”
Fans of either Lego or the television series Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s animated series Futurama, which began its sixth season on Comedy Central last Thursday, might enjoy looking at Pepa Quin’s rendition of New New York City in Lego. Take a look at this article on Gizmodo.com.
[Photo credit: MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa]
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