This one goes out to anyone missing New York right now. It’s a rerun. So sue me.
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Tags: Music, Sesame Street, subway
In my last post, I mentioned that older son loves to read series of books — the longer the better. Before he read the Percy Jackson series, he read all of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books. He’ll still read the latest one for old times’ sake: he read the latest, Magic Tree House #43: Leprechaun in Late Winter and pronounced it “very good.” His little brother the kindergartener loves them too, so we read them aloud to him on the bus to and from school.
Appropriately enough given this week’s snowy weather on the East Coast, we’ve been reading book #36 in the series, Blizzard of the Blue Moon, which is set in New York in 1938 during the Great Depression. For those of you who don’t know the series, the premise is that eight-year-old Jack and seven-year-old Annie, two kids who live in “Frog Creek, Pennsylvania,” discover a magic tree house in the woods near their house: the tree house is full of books and when you point to one and say, “I want to go there,” well, you go there, wherever “there” is. Their first four adventures take them to the time of the dinosaurs, to the middle ages, and to ancient Egypt. They learn that the tree house belongs to Morgan le Fay, who is portrayed as the magical librarian of King Arthur’s Camelot. (She’s much friendlier than any other version of Morgan le Fay I’ve ever encountered: remember Helen Mirren‘s characterization in John Boorman’s Excalibur?!)
The books are very formulaic, as Morgan sends them on various missions that last about 10 chapters. The description of the tree house embarking on its journey is always the same, and my son can now recite it by heart. He’s learning about genre, which is fine by me. But in book 29 Christmas in Camelot, Osborne varies her formula: it is Merlin who sends Jack and Annie on their missions, four of them to mythical places like Camelot, and four to real-life places like Paris at the time of the Exposition Universelle (for which the Eiffel Tower was built).
Blizzard of a Blue Moon is one of these Merlin missions, and my son is enjoying hearing about places he knows: like Central Park and the IRT subway, which costs a nickel in 1938. Reading the book made me remember those old cross-shaped wooden turnstiles that were still installed in a few subway stations when I was growing up. Here’s a picture from the New York Transit Museum:
Note the fare: 5 cents! (Click here for more information about this particular photo, which comes from a wonderful collection of photos and images at nycsubway.org. The site is a treasure trove for subway buffs; in addition to the pictures, there is a wonderful collection of map PDFs.)
By the way, Jack and Annie’s mission in 1938 New York involves rescuing a unicorn that has been enchanted. Where do you suppose they end up?
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:
Anna Berger … The Mother Gary Bolling … The Homosexual Carol Cole … The Secretary Alex Colon … The Delivery Boy Joe Fields … The Salesman Mari Gorman … The Hooker Michael Gorrin … The Old Man Thomas La Fleur … The Older Son María Landa … The Spanish Woman (as Maria Landa) Louise Larabee … The Alcoholic George Lee Miles … The Pimp Carolyn Nelson … Coed #1 Eric O’Hanian … The Younger Son Lucy Saroyan … Coed #2 William Snickowski … The Hippie Barry Snyder … The W.A.S.P.
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?
Tags: subway, Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
Lost City had better luck than I when it came to dragging progeny to the MTA’s recent (and annual) moving museum — a 1930s subway train that ran, each of the past several Sundays, on the V line between 2nd Ave in Manhattan and Queensboro Plaza.
If you, too, missed the ride, you can still catch — in addition to LC’s account and a more humorous one by East Village Idiot — a bonus video of the working ceiling fan, spinning just inches above straphangers’ heads. Reminds me of the spinning shadows in the subway scenes from Pickup on South Street (1953). When I first saw that film I thought the subway ceiling fans were somehow a production goof introduced via a fake subway car set!
Photo from stationstops.com
Tags: MTA, nostalgia train, subway
Via today’s Gothamist, video of a ride along the contemporary 4/5/6 line from 14th Street to 42nd. If the ride seems too slow for your 21st-century tastes, jump to the 5 minute mark and watch it to the end. You won’t be sorry you took the time.
In other old subway news, I recently learned that the train that runs under the building I live in (on Broome Street, near Centre) is not the 4/5/6, as I’d always imagined, but the J/M/Z, which makes a 90 degree turn at Kenmare and then runs over to the Bowery/Delancey stop. The 4/5/6, by contrast, continues to run down Lafayette toward the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall stop, missing our location by a good block. The real estate grad student (also a resident of our building) who told me about this provided this map, which tipped him off:
Today’s Times article anatomizing the passengers of a random Q train car is a fitting follow-up to Cyrus’s post yesterday. Reporters interviewed 99 out of 128 passengers for information about national and ethnic origin, age, employment and such; the piece suggests — as pieces about subway riders are wont to do — that the subway serves as a microcosm for New York’s “tapestry.” In the parlance of another era, we’d call it a “democratic conveyance,” a mode of travel that forces people from difference walks of life literally to rub shoulders. To use one of Cyrus’s pet phrases, we could consider the subway an engine of cosmopolitanism.
I was reminded by the piece of a late-eighteenth-century account of travel by stage from New York to New Haven. It comes from the diary of a 25-year-old NYC physician and poet named Elihu Hubbard Smith, a central figure in my book Republic of Intellect. Here’s his take on his fellow passengers, 29 November 1795, just following New York’s yellow fever epidemic that year:
We were six, beside the driver: an old, greasy, gouty, lecherous Jew; a huge Irish manufacturer of Fleecy Hosiery; a South Carolina merchant; a middle-aged, decent Frenchman; a young mercantile Hamburger who spoke French & English; & myself. The Israelite was for fun and singing; but no one sung. He & the Irishman discust politics & The Fever. The Frenchman & the German, first fell on the French Emigrants, next on the Fever–& lastly upon this country. All these topics they handled, with prodigious volubility, in French. The Carolina growled a little, & muttered something on merchandise: I was silent. . . . A rambling talk, on religion, at Supper, gave opportunity to all the guests to discover their infidelity; & the Hebrew, in particular, disclaimed Moses & the prophets; & emphatically pronounced this sentence, that–’from Genesis to Revelations, all is trumpery.’
The Times article makes a point that 8 passengers with iPods refused to be interviewed, raising the well-worn specter that headphones are going to cause us all to be bowling alone someday. Nevertheless, the point remains that most subway riders wouldn’t be as engaged with their fellow commuters in quite the way Smith was with his — even though he clearly positions himself above them as an observer. And that doesn’t even get to the issue of New Yorkers then and now who, by virtue of class, never condescend to ride with the rest of humanity.
Tags: democracy, stagecoach, subway
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