Matching entries matching “life on mars” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

Gothamist has a photo of the recently unearthed WSP tombstone and more information:

FROM SESSION V: MARSHALL BERMAN AND DAVID FREELAND IN DIALOGUE

Our final session featured a conversation between Marshall Berman, the author (most recently) of On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, and David Freeland, author of the recently published Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure.

It began in unexpected fashion -- with a screening of the closing scene from Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935 -- the fabulous "Lullaby of Broadway" number. Take a look below (the clip is split into two parts on You Tube):





When the lights came up, Berman began to dicsuss the genesis of his book On the Town, holding up a photocopy of an illustration from the book's preface (shown below) and describing it to the audience:

For the full Lost New York program, click here. Friday afternoon's session and reception will be held in the Fales Library and Special Collections (70 Washington Sq. South, 3rd floor). Saturday's sessions will all be held at 13-19 University Place, room 102 (first floor auditorium). All sessions are free and open to the public.

We're pleased to have, as our final keynote session at the conference, two writers whose work we much admire, and who offer, we think, complementary approaches to the conference theme.

Marshall Berman, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has an extraordinary track record commentating on -- helping us to read, really -- New York's changing landscape, particularly in the twentieth century and beyond. His classic exploration of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, with its final chapters on New York in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, has provided many, including the documentarian Ric Burns, with a template for narrating the city's post-war history, especially the conflict in the 1960s between Robert Moses and downtown residents and preservationists led by the Village activist Jane Jacobs. (Berman's appearances as a talking head in the late episodes of Burns's New York are among that series' highlights.) Widely regarded as an urbanist and political theorist, Berman is at once a careful critic of New York's ever-changing landscape and a relentless optimist about the possibilities for creative living this and other cities afford their inhabitants. His recent work includes Adventures in Marxism, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, and, as co-editor with Brian Berger, New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomburg. Click here for an interview with Berman in the aftermath of 9/11, in which he considers the city's changes in the late 20th century and the impact of the World Trade Center's rise and fall.

David Freeland is a freelance journalist and historian of popular entertainment, whose writing includes Ladies of Soul (two chapters of which center on New York performers Maxine Brown and Timi Yuro) and the recently published Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure. In that book Freeland leads readers through a series of locations in which forgotten forms of popular nightlife entertainment are still visible to careful observers, from the 1893 Chinese Theater, to Tin Pan Alley, to Horn and Hardart's orignal Times Square automat. Freeland models for readers a practice of careful observation of our many-layered urban environments; as he peels those layers back he makes it possible for us to regain cultural memory of a lost city and its anonymous inhabitants. Freeland maintains a blog related to the themes of his recent work -- which coincides neatly with our conference topic -- at gothamlostandfound.com. His writing appears regularly in NY Press and elsewhere.

On Saturday afternoon each speaker will offer us an inroad into his recent writing before engaging in dialogue with one another and the audience.

Previously. And.

Normally when I lecture on The Jazz Singer, I spend some time near the end talking about the film's final two vocal performances, especially Jack/Jakie's decision to return to the synagogue to sing Kol Nidre in his dying father's place. (The final scene, back in the Winter Garden, is Jolson in blackface singing "Mammy" to his mother, seated in the audience.)

Kol Nidre ("All vows") is an Aramaic chant or prayer, performed to usher in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In this ritual the congregation is absolved from all obligations and vows that might come in the next year, working from the assumption that people make unwise promises all the time ("If I get a promotion, I'll attend service every week until I die!") and will need to be let off the hook. The ritual has murky origins, but for a long time--including during the period when the film was made--it was thought that the Kol Nidre originated in the forced conversion of the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. In this context, the idea of communal absolution for any oaths has particular salience: it means that any oaths God's people are required to take in order to ensure their survival are null and void. It turns out the ritual predates the inquisition, but it may have played this role for some people in that particular time and place. There's also a part of the ritual related to the question of the transgressor being allowed to pray with the congregation, which seems significant here, given that Jakie is a black sheep returning (however temporarily) to the fold. Finally, some critics have suggested that when Jolson sings Kol Nidre he's "ragging" it, jazzing it up a little. A few things to consider when understanding the song's role in the larger film.

So: Is Jack/Jakie leaving Judaism behind a the film's end, or carrying it with him and transmitting it into and thereby transforming American culture? Is he forging an alliance between Jews and blacks? Is he creating or perpetuating a hybrid form of identity or culture? (How will the lives of his Gentile friends be changed by their encounter with his family?) Are his gestures cosmopolitan? Or are they about his construction of a white identity beneath the blackface mask?

Critics have read this scene, variously, as one of unapologetic, even aggressive, assimilation, or as expressing an ethos of atonement. Representing the former, Michael Rogin writes in his influential book on Jewish immigrants, minstrelsy, and film, Blackface, White Noise, that the two vocal performances at the film's end constitute its most "hysterical moment":

The movie was promising that the son could have it all: Jewish past and American future, Jewish mother and gentile wife. That was what happened in Hollywood. The moguls left their Jewish wives for gentile women in the 1930s and mostly eliminated Jewish life from the screen. They bade farewell to their Jewish pasts with The Jazz Singer.

More recently, Marshall Berman, in On The Town (his wonderful book on Times Square in the twentieth century), offers a more generous reading, typifying those who endorse the idea that the Kol Nidre scene is redemptive:

For many Jews, [Kol Nidre] is the most dramatic and spiritually intense moment of the year. ... Many secular Jews who wouldn't dream of going to synagogue all through the year feel they have to be there for [Yom Kippur]. The Kol Nidre prayer is special in that it isn't addressed to God, but to other people. We are supposed to recognize all the ways we have hurt each other all year, not just openly but in the shadows; we are supposed to seek and to offer forgiveness. ...The cantor's solo is the most passionate, heartrending music of the whole year. Jews believe nothing else can break down people's resistance or open up their emotional floodgates. ... At The Jazz Singer's climax, Jolson ... leads the congregation with an amazing emotional fervor and intensity that have eluded him till now: Now, at last, he's there. His heroic act--returning to the ghetto, sacrificing for a father who didn't sacrifice for him, renewing his thrilling but dangerous bond with his mother--unites his adulthood with his childhood, frees unconscious energy, and taps emotional depths that he has had to repress in order to work and live for twenty years under his father's curse. Now, as his father dies, chains lift from his heart. He learns from his life what his father's religion couldn't teach him because it was too narrow, and what secular show biz couldn't teach him because it was too shallow: the universal lesson that "music is the voice of God." In The Jazz Singer, mass culture stakes a claim to universal value, not only for its global reach but for its emotional depth and power.

Berman goes on to reference the Eric Lott formula of "love and theft," suggesting that part of what Jack needs to be forgiven of is the "theft" side of his blackface act; he also suggests, however, that Jolson's Kol Nidre prefigures "the sounds, a generation later, of the great flowering of rhythm and blues: Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Mavis Staples, Patti LaBelle. But why not?"

I'm curious to know if our students or other readers have different ways they take the end of the film.

It is said that St. Patrick died on this day 1,549 years ago. The Roman Catholic Church canonized him 204 years later (in 664 CE).

St. Patrick's Day is another holiday that has a historical association with New York City. (Last fall I wrote about the first Columbus Day celebration, which took place in NYC.) The first recorded St. Patrick's Day parade was held not in Dublin but in New York in 1762 by Irish soldiers serving in the British army. According to the official New York St. Patrick's Day website:

The first St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York was held on lower Broadway in 1762 by a band of homesick Irish ex-patriots and Irish military serving with the British Army stationed in the American colonies in New York City. This was a time when the wearing of green was a sign of Irish pride and was banned in Ireland. The parade participants reveled in the freedom to speak Irish, wear the green, sing Irish songs and play the pipes to Irish tunes that were very meaningful to the Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland.

With the influx of Irish immigrants to the city after the Great Famine in 1848, the parade took on an even more political cast. According to William Federer, the author of St. Patrick: The Real History of His Life, From Tragedy to Triumph, "The Irish population went from two percent to 20 percent in just a decade. Half of New York City was now Roman Catholic Irish! The same thing happened in Boston, and there was an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish backlash." The parade, which became much larger in 1851 after the various societies united under the aegis of a single grand marshal, became a way of suggesting that Irish Americans were an important political constituency in New York. Federer suggests that when 15,000 Irish American showed up to march on St. Patrick's Day, "politicians in New York City said, 'wait a minute, they haven't decided who to vote for yet,' so they decided to march with them."

The picture above, an engraving from an original drawn by Lucius gray in 1874, shows the parade marching through Union Square (the German Savings Bank can be seen in the upper right hand corner of the frame). The float in the center bears a bust of the Irish national hero, Daniel O'Connell. The picture comes from the collection of the Library of Congress.

Over the last few months I've been reading, a few chapters at a time with a group of students, Timothy Gilfoyle's A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York. The book uses the life--and a rude manuscript autobiography--of a famous nineteenth-century career criminal, George Appo, as a window onto crime and punishment in the nineteenth-century metropolis.

Though I'm finding many aspects of the book fascinating--its detailed discussions of routine torture for prisoners at Sing-Sing and overcrowding on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island); its discussion of Appo's mixed Chinese and Irish heritage (his Chinese father was well-known, first as a model minority and then as a murderer); its anatomy of underworld cons and categories of persons (especially the importance of being a "good fellow")--I'm a little let down overall that the book spends so much time making Appo representative of a larger class of criminals and leaves a lot to be said about his celebrity status, or what made him extraordinary.

Still, lots of enticing details that make me look at my neighborhood in new ways. I've often thought of the old crime-ridden Mulberry Bend and the Five Points or Bartleby in the Tombs when I bike my daughter to school through Chinatown each morning, but today I caught myself looking out for number 4 Mott Street, which is where one of Appo's favorite opium dens was located. (Today it's a large glass Citibank building just off Chatham Square numbered 2-4 Mott.) Gilfoyle writes:
 

The den at 4 Mott Street was one of the best known, but not the first opium den in New York City, as Appo believed. More accurately, it was the first well-known opium joint that allowed Euro-American visitors to indulge in opium smoking. In 1882, an Evening Post reporter described a visit to 4 Mott Street as "an extraordinary experience." The den was situated in a four-story tenement just off the Bowery, only a few steps from several prominent concert saloons. Inside, smokers reclined on low platforms extending the length of the small, dimly lit room, their heads supported by small wooden stools. The Chinese proprietor, Poppy, weighed and served opium in little seashells. Fumes from the pipes filled the room with such a thick, bluish cloud that one visitor claimed it was impossible to see his hands held at his waist. When the smoke cleared, he observed a dozen small peanut-oil lamps glowing "like the fire flies in a fog," and a room packed with smokers, all of whom were Euro-Americans. Poppy busily moved from patron to patron supplying opium, many crying out, "Poppy, gimme a quarter's worth."

Who were these Euro-American opium smokers? The habit wasn't cheap. Appo could afford it because his crime paid fairly well (when we wasn't locked up). Plus he had an in with some big-shot Chinese gangsters. Appo writes of the scene in his manuscript life story: "Mott Street was being deserted by the good American people on account of the Chinese tenants drifting into the neighborhood rapidly." (Appo never identified as Chinese himself, apparently.) "With the Chinamen came many American opium habitues from the West, most of them from San Francisco, and all crooks in every line of stealing brought on to the East by the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. ... [Poppy's] was crowded day and night by opium habitues from all stations in life, both men and women, some of good social and financial standing. Most of the rest were crooks in every line of dishonest business, from the bank burglar down to the petty thief." Slummers and the criminal poor, smoking up in cosmopolitan fellowship. Simpler times.

If the days of cross-class opium dens are safely behind for most New Yorkers, some monuments of Appo's world remain: One of the most interesting details in the book, I thought, was Gilfoyle's note that "Convict labor" (provided by Sing-Sing's "quarry slaves") helped to "transform New York City into a 'vast expanse of marble palaces,'" including Federal Hall on Wall Street (built as a Customs House in the 1830s) and Grace Church at Broadway and 10th. The idea of the stones for those buildings being hewn by captive labor reminds me of a comment from Marshall Berman's introduction to New York Calling: he recalls something his father used to say when he was a kid admiring the city's grand structures: "And don't forget who built this." When Marshall would ask "Who?" his dad would respond: "People we never heard of, who worked themselves to death."

(Photo of Grace Church from bridgeandtunnelclub.com)

I wrote a while back about attempts in the 1820s to gentrify the Bowery. More recently, a couple blogs I follow have charted current efforts to remake the street's image as a luxury shopping district with a little bit of urban edge. (That shitty Hamptons store "Blue & Cream" in the shitty Avalon building even went as far as tagging their own store with "graffiti" directing passers-by to their recession sales inside.) Most recently we've seen attempts to move away from the idea of "the" Bowery toward a "Bowery district" (spreading the faux-seedy influence and reputation?) or slips from newcomers calling it "Bowery Street" (as if to contain its once-unruly energy and long reputation as the dark twin to Broadway?).

EV Grieve directs us to another NY history blog, Inside the Apple, which has this to say about previous attempts to rename the Bowery:

The most famous Dutch bouwerij was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark's in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. Mark's in the Bouwerie, its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row. A lot of the Bowery's reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song "The Bowery." Its chorus boasts:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street's reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was "Cooper Avenue" in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer) Peter Cooper. A rival proposition recommended "Central Broadway." It's hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway. Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed "The Bouwerie," to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue "El," and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue--which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the "El"--and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street's cachet and, presumably, retail rents.

While preparing for this morning's lecture on Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1868), I noticed for the first time just how much the novel hates on the Bowery. In its opening sequence the otherwise industrious street urchin Dick realizes he's overslept and probably missed a few shines because he'd spent the prior evening at the Old Bowery theater. Even though the theater is one of the spots that keeps Dick in town, the novel remains pretty equivocal about the entertainment provided there: clearly Dick enjoys it, but later in the novel he reforms and promises not to waste his money there in the future. The book's less equivocal about Bowery fashions: one pair of pants is frowned on by the narrator as "very loose in the legs, and presenting a cheap Bowery look."

And Dick is fine with this dis. He's more than happy to scrub up for an imagined life as a clerk (no Bartleby is Dick!) and he continually fantasizes about having a "manshun" on the "Avenoo." At the novel's close, he and his pal Fosdick resolve to leave their little pad on Mott Street and move to "a nicer quarter of the city."

If Alger were still writing today (or if some team of underpaid ghost writers continued to churn out sequels the way someone keeps turning out new titles in the Boxcar Children series) I'm sure we'd see Ragged Dick -- ragged no longer -- ready to move back down to the Bowery now that the Whole Foods had arrived. Slumming's the new Old New York luxury craze, after all!



(h/t to Grieve for the last illustration, as well as a bunch of the links above; topmost image: Reginald Marsh, "The Bowery," 1928)

The Guardian's Travel section published a piece last week admonishing readers to throw out their NYC guidebooks and turn to the city's literary heritage instead. Advice we can stand behind -- though we still have favorite guidebooks we'd recommend!

The list included one item per decade from the 1930s forward. If you're too lazy to click through the link above, I'll give the spoiler version here:

1930s: Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
1940s: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1950s: New York 19 by Tony Schwartz [audio recording]
1960s: Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
1970s: The Power Broker by Robert Caro
1980s: Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney
1990s: My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum
2000s: Lush Life by Richard Price

A couple things I find interesting about this list: One, we don't teach any of these in Writing New York. Granted, the reason we can't teach half of them is strictly due to length: in a 14-week course attempting to cover more than two centuries of writing, we simply can't devote the time required to teach Ellison's masterpiece, as much as we would want to. We used to teach selections from O'Hara but he somehow fell off the syllabus a few years back.  Caro sneaks into our course via the Ric Burns documentary, where he and Marshall Berman are our favorite Robert Moses bashers. And I have to admit: I'd never heard of New York 19! Amazon only has it available for mp3 download, but I'll keep my eye out for the real thing. The Guardian's description makes it sound quite appealing:

Tony Schwartz, who recently died, is a man perhaps best known for creating Lyndon Johnson's 1964 hawkish Daisy ad but he was also one of New York City's most dedicated sonic scribes. OK, so this is not a book, it's an album, but I've snuck it on to the list for the remarkable fact that Schwartz was a lifelong agoraphobic who rarely moved beyond the confines of his block, and yet managed to capture the cacophony of Manhattan's streets. New York 19 never ventures beyond the environs of Schwartz's postal code (10019), yet it resurrects the long-gone street preachers, children's skipping ropes, tire squeals, honking horns, and theatre barkers.

As for the selection from the 1990s? Are we really supposed to pick a whiny Upper West Side striver memoir over Tony Kushner's Angels in America or Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker?

What would your decade-by-decade list look like?

Watching the premiere of Life on Mars got me reminiscing about New York in the Seventies. And then today I gave a brief talk at a College of Arts and Science admissions open house, which I preceded with the opening slides from Bryan's and my Writing New York class. I substituted a version of "Sidewalks of New York" performed by Duke Ellington for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "New York, New York," which we usually play over the slides, but I still played Ace Frehley's "New York Groove" at the conclusion of the slide show.

Do you remember that song? It was from Frehley's "solo" album, released in October 1978. Frehley was the lead guitarist for the band KISS, and each member of the quartet released a solo album that fall.

Here's a video of the song from the KISS tour that followed the release of the solo albums and the group album Dynasty in 1979:

In the premiere episode of the new series Life on Mars, which we previewed in yesterday's post, the time-warped protagonist, Detective Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) makes references to The Wizard of Oz. He tells a sympathetic but disbelieving policewoman (Gretchen Mol) that he's going to "follow the yellow brick road," hoping he'll find the end and a way out of what he believes is a dream.

If you missed the episode, click on the continuation link below to see how Sam first realizes that something is amiss ...