TIMES SQUARE’S ELITE IDLERS

By GrayFoxDown

NYC’s smorgasbord of fascinating delights is only equaled (some would argue surpassed) by its fascinating annoyances. Even putting aside the major nuisances/ complaints that this city is notorious for–everything from congested roads and sidewalks, noise and pollution, to the high cost of living,–there still remains its (what I term) little bureaucratic eccentricities. If only because these remaining points of contention further accentuate, whether directly or indirectly, this city’s more significant problems they’re somewhat even more annoying.

Many New Yorkers are losing patience with the city’s latest bureaucratic eccentricity. Begun in May, it’s only two months old but quickly wearing thin: fading, both physically and visually, as an attraction and assuming that woebegone appearance which is symptomatic of a hasty idea that probably looked good on the brainstorm drawing board but was doomed to failure in the real world: the Pedestrian Mall in Times Square.

Maybe the problem is all the people sitting in [the Pedestrian Mall]…New York is a city of walkers, not sitters; a city of motion, not repose. In Times Square, tourists should be looking at New York…caught up in the swarm of activity and lights and commerce and theater; instead, New Yorkers find themselves looking at the tourists, a cordoned-off display of the temporary sedentary.

Mayor Bloomberg, full time zillionaire/ part time politician/ lugubrious master of noblesse oblige machinations, gave his approval to this project as a way to have people (mostly non-New Yorkers) come and bask in the glow of Times Square, while not doing much of anything else. Vehicular traffic would be out, pedestrians in, with Times Square cordoned off and excluded from its fair share of traffic (of course, resulting in a disproportionate share of traffic in the surrounding area). Looking like a cross between a crime scene and a massive garden party that toppled to earth from out of nowhere, the area, comprised of lawn chairs occupied by an assortment of idlers, is demarcated with yellow tape fastened to orange barrels.

“The landscape designer Diana Balmori said she thought of the makeshift mall as a kind of “tidal marsh,” a place where the land and water push up against each other, and it is not clear which will take over. For Ms. Balmori, the phrase represents Broadway’s new tentative divide between a street for cars and a space for people. It’s also an apt description for Times Square itself, a space half-defined by the city and half-defined by the tourists who inhabit it. And it captures the people like Ms. Mia, someone living in New York but not of it, like a few of the other self-described regulars parked in Times Square that morning: a restaurant manager with a thick Argentine accent, a hitchhiker lounging on a chaise who said he lived in New Orleans but summered in Manhattan.”

Indeed, this sort of cosmopolitan/ hipster tackiness makes one recall the days of Times Square in the 1970s/80s, despite its dangers and unsightliness, with more than a touch of desperate nostalgia. While it may have been seedy in those days it was never boring: its tackiness cloaked intrigue, its kitschy-like overtones were exotic (oftentimes erotic) draperies for the sublime and sinful, its mysterious and lurid thematic was a provocation to/ for adventure.

The theatres, many of them dating back to Broadway’s Golden Age, were still packed despite the squalor. Musicals such as A CHORUS LINE, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC,  CATS and EVITA were performed and continued to run for many years: culture persisted against the illegitimacy of the heavy sprinkling of  pornographic book stores, peep show arcades, sleazy boutiques and decrepit movie theatres. The famous walked shoulder to shoulder with the lowly, the fashionable and well-to-do with the threadbare and destitute, and, in spite of its contradictions, Times Square continued to hold its head high amid the rush of crowds, traffic and neon lights.

Perhaps, in those days, people were able to reach a temporary compromise with NYC’s contradictions (its beauty and ugliness, its artistry and devilry, its wonders and disappointments, because this was New York; they didn’t have to bask in their own egos but preferred to observe the exhibitions rather than becoming one themselves while seated upon incongruous lawn chairs. Not that the Times Square area should have remained in its formerly depressed state…but not to have a tackiness that seeks an artificial tranquility replace a squalor that was at least in rhythm with the district’s ambiance.

“We’ve come to accept the multitudes of adjectives that rotate in and out of use for Times Square depending on the era: gritty, dangerous, commercial, touristy, kitschy, overpriced, overcrowded, flashy, tacky, corporate. But peaceful?”

NY Times

Related Post: Broadway Slumming.

FLIPPER-IN AROUND THE SOUND

By GrayFoxDown

Large groups of dolphins are currently vacationing in the waters in and around New York City. At least 150 to 200 dolphins were first spotted on Wednesday off the coast of Long Island: in Cold Spring Harbor, Huntington and Northport. Since then, they’ve split into two groups: one group venturing out into Long Island Sound near Bayville while the other group headed to City Island in the Bronx. “Charles Bowman, president of The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, said the dolphins are hunting and appeared normal. He said they likely have split into multiple groups to continue looking for herring.” Newsday.com

The Daily Intel suspects that this sudden visit, despite its playful charm, may be concealing a sinister motive and that these dolphins may in fact be up to no good:

These creatures are sophisticated, and we wouldn’t be surprised if this two-pronged strategic maneuver they are implementing to surround New York were part of some larger, complex plan to hunt something else. Like people. We’re not suggesting the city go ahead and gas them or anything. They’re mammals, just like us! But we’re going to have to all keep an eye out for these buggers. Ever been hit in the eye with a squirt from a blowhole? Neither have we, but we’re sure it isn’t pretty.

Of course, they’re only joking…I think.

In addition to the beauty and joy these creatures of the deep bring to sightseers, their presence also speaks favorably for the cleanliness of the metropolitan area’s waters: the millions of dollars spent in taxpayers’ money did, for once, amount to something. Scientists predict that the dolphins could potentially remain in these parts for week, depending on the food supply (sort of like my in-laws) and on their tour package; group rates are the only way to go…at least when you’re going somewhere.

WIZ THE GRAFFITI IZ DIED

By GrayFoxDown

Iz the Wiz died on June 17 in Spring Hill, Florida, where he had moved a short time ago,of a heart attack; he was only 50. Most people across the USA, certainly most across the world, would never have heard of Iz the Wiz. Even here in NYC, where he had attracted a curious admixture of fame and infamy in the 1970s/ 1980s, most have long forgotten him. However, anyone riding the NYC Transit system during those decades might have noticed Iz the Wiz’s artistry(?) spray-painted on numerous subway trains.

Amidst the city’s most depressed and anxious times, Iz the Wiz was a legend among graffiti artists…“the longest-reigning all-city king in N.Y.C. history [according to the graffiti Web site at 149st.com]. In other words, Iz put his name, or tag, on subway cars running on every line in the system more times than any other artist.”

His real name was Michael Martin. He was born in Manhattan, never knowing his father and, after his mother was imprisoned for burglary, grew up in foster homes; as a teenager, he lived in Covenant House on the Lower East Side.

He found a sense of community in the newly emerging graffiti movement of the late 1960s, working with artists such as Vinny, Epic 1&2, and Evil 13. He went on to paint with many of the “top crews” such as the Odd Partners and the Crew, becoming president of the Master Blasters and the Queens Chapter of the Prisoners of Graffiti.

After an initial period of creativity, spray painting walls and buildings, Martin graduated to the subway. His first “easel” was the A Train, NYC’s longest subway line; this became his most worked upon, favorite place to create. He signed his works with the tag “Ike” (sans the M in Mike, his nickname).

In 1975,at the 68th Street Station on the Lexington Avenue line, he spotted a poster for the Broadway play THE WIZ. Martin reasoned that “if the Wiz is a Wow, why can’t Iz be the Wiz?” Martin’s pseudonym was born right there.

He began to extend his talents to other lines in the late 70s, his displays reaching from the top to the bottom of many a train. These were called “burners,” complicated works meant to “dazzle” the competition (and there was much competition), while bringing mostly bewilderment and anger to commuters. A friend describes Martin as “an artist but also a bomber, recognized as a person who made himself seen by everybody….At the same time he appreciated the aesthetic side of it.”

“Iz the Wiz sought fame, and found it, but not on gallery walls. His work appeared on the old dusty brown subway cars known as coal mines, and their replacements, called ding dongs for the bell tone that chimes when the doors close. Painting one of those, end to end, Mr. Martin once said, ‘was like sex in a can.’”

Source: NY Times

Please read my related post  Urban Shamans.

SILHOUETTED

By GrayFoxDown

from AMERICA at Facebook

AT THE EDGE OF URBAN RESIDUE

By GrayFoxDown

An abandoned construction site at 85 Bedford Avenue, in nearby-to-me Williamsburg (Brooklyn), is a nauseating wonder to behold. While numerous abandoned construction sites throughout the city are left to stagnate in indecision while raking in profits for delay, eyesores at best and traffic hazards at worst, this one is a cesspool to boot.

Of course, water isn’t this site’s biggest problem. That would be the alleged contamination in the ground. You see, this lot used to house a paint manufacturing facility owned by NJZ Color and Reichhold Chemical. It seems that lead and cadmium were at one point major ingredients in the company’s products and that some of this stuff may have made its way into the ground.   Brownstoner

Overlooking and left to wallow on the periphery of this scene of mindless and potentially dangerous neglect is the Russian Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration. Built around 1920, the five copper-covered onion-shaped domes, stained-glass windows and triple-slashed crosses merely complement the absolute beauty found inside. Nevertheless, the church is yet another victim of this city’s mismanagement, especially in that of construction: dillydallying  corporate/ union intrigue, political kickbacks, at taxpayers’ expense to watch their home be overrun by bureaucratic philistines.

APOCALYPTIC BILLOWS

By GrayFoxDown

The skies over NYC have taken on a strange look these days. Even though the strange and unusual go together as easily as hot dogs and mustard here, the Big Apple’s strangeness is apparently infectious because Nature too wants to get in on the act.

The Gothamist has an interesting gallery of cloud formations over the city. Sent in by readers from all over the town, these reveal how the sky’s been looking at sunset. As they put it: “Whoa! Was Ghostbusters 3 filming tonight? Because those were some crazy clouds just after sunset. They appear to be a mammatus formation–that’s Latin for “bumpy clouds.” Being something of a ne’er-do-well scholar myself, mammatus derives from the Latin word mamma which means “breasts”…but, on second thought, I won’t go there.

I haven’t seen anything as spectacular as these formations (I have to get out more often) but there are so many other equally (if not surpassingly) marvelous attractions to catch one’s eye at street level. In any event, one should avoid looking to the skies for apocalyptic configurations and a quartet of Horsemen in the clouds…if only to avoid falling into a pothole in the street.

A FUTILE UNITY, UNTIL…?

By GrayFoxDown

The crowds that converged in New York City’s Union Square last week did so without fear of Iran’s death squads and secret police. They held a peaceful demonstration here to show their solidarity with Iranians who were (and are) holding their own demonstrations in their native land while being subject to beatings, arrests, imprisonment and death. In NYC, and other cities across the world, no “Great Satan” appeared to terrorize people who were demanding justice in the face of totalitarianism.

Last June 18th’s Union Square rally was organized by Amid Amidi, 28, through Facebook and Twitter. Over 300 people responded to Amidi’s call for support:

“The unelected leaders of that country have failed over and over again in fulfilling their obligations to the citizens of that country,” Amidi said. “They are out there now fighting for democracy and reform, and I just want to say that people here in New York hear you. We hear your struggle and we are 100 percent behind you.”

Indeed, the crisis in Iran signals a bloody beginning to an inevitable end to elections in that country. The pro-democratic movement has almost certainly been destroyed: opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi is currently nowhere to be seen while his supporters are left behind to continue the struggle. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader’s stature is running on empty, but his evil is in full gear while he desperately maintains the legitimacy of the “duly-elected” front man President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

However, “supreme leaders” (be they priests or mullahs) DO NOT go together with freedom: the sooner that Iranians who demand free elections realize this, the sooner a true democracy will emerge. Iranians have to come to terms with the Great Satan that is intrinsic in their own government and within their own religion…the rest is merely contentiousness.

Voice of America

“DOWN WITH DICTATOR” CROWDS IN NYC

By GrayFoxDown

TALKING TREES

By GrayFoxDown

A tree museum is scheduled to open in the Bronx tomorrow. One hundred trees, stretching 4 ½ miles along Grand Concourse Boulevard, will be marked with signs that will include phone numbers/ codes linked to short recordings of people talking about the Bronx, their lives and work.

Tree No. 39, a honey locust at Marcy Place, will feature Jose Ortiz of the percussion group BombaYo. At another honey locust, No. 52, at 175th Street, Lurry Boyd, who grows peaches and strawberries in a community garden, will narrate. In Poe Park, a London plane tree (No. 75) will connect listeners to the story of the park, a former apple orchard that is now home to a cottage where Edgar Allan Poe lived. People often danced around the park’s bandstand at night, as Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, tells it, including two sisters named Clooney. One of them was the singer Rosemary Clooney, aunt of the actor George Clooney.

The museum’s founder, Katie Holten, stumbled upon the idea while she was strolling down the boulevard near the Cross Bronx Expressway. She was endeavoring to win an art commission honoring the centennial of Grand Course Boulevard and was pondering how to best describe the place and its people. “The light bulb came on: If this is about the whole street, well, then the trees have to be part of it… ….The Concourse has always been tree-lined, even before it was paved.”

The Concourse was designed in the late nineteenth century as an express route for people traveling from Manhattan to the parks of the north Bronx. In 1909, a road with designated paths for horse-drawn carriages, cyclists and pedestrians opened. The arrival of the IRT elevated line spurred development of the Concourse with construction of Art Deco apartment buildings, the Loew’s Paradise Theatre and the Concourse Plaza Hotel, to name just a few.

NY Times

SCAB AT THE FATAL “S” CURVE

By GrayFoxDown

The worst subway disaster in New York City history occurred on November 1, 1918 in Brooklyn. A speeding Brighton Beach-bound BRT (the now defunct Brooklyn Rapid Transit) train failed to negotiate a treacherous “S” curve along an elevated-to-tunnel stretch of track at Malbone Street (now Empire Boulevard) and Franklin Avenue. While the lead car of the five-car train managed to (partially) remain on the track, the other four cars derailed and slammed into the wall of the tunnel’s entrance, killing 102 passengers.

Edward Luciano, 23-years-old, the motorman of the ill-fated train, was not only an inexperienced motorman he was also totally unfamiliar with the Brighton Line. In fact, Luciano wasn’t a motorman at all but a train dispatcher. He, along with a host of other BRT workers, had been pressed into service at the last minute in the midst of a strike against the company by motormen and flagmen; in union terminology, he was a scab. While regular motormen received a minimum of 60 hours of training, Luciano received a 2 hour “crash course” (as Freddo at Everything2 puts it). To make matters even worse, immediately after completing a shift on another line, Luciano was placed behind the complicated controls of an overcrowded, 1887 wooden relic of train for his ride towards disaster.

The evening rush hour was already in progress and Luciano was running ten minutes late when he departed Park Row station in Manhattan. From the get-go, it was probably apparent to anyone with a functioning brain that something was dangerously wrong. At the descending grade off the Brooklyn Bridge, the train overshot several stations and continued erratically down the track until reaching the Franklin Avenue station where Luciano proceeded along the wrong lineup (the track of another line) and had to backup several hundred feet into the station.

At this point, many passengers decided (wisely) to exit the train or did so at the next stop Park Place, their last chance to flee to safety. After leaving Park Place, Luciano lost all control of the train and shot pass the Consumer Park station (now Botanic Garden) without stopping and while gaining more and more speed:

Luciano in his panic was unable to master the complicated air braking system, and the train entered the Malbone Street S-curve, which had a 6 mph restriction, at a speed estimated to be anywhere between 30 and 70 mph.

The front half of the first car stayed on the rails, but the back half, and the next three cars did not. The second, third, and fourth cars dashed themselves to pieces against the tunnel wall, while the fifth car rolled to a stop relatively undamaged. Luciano, in the motorman’s cab, was uninjured but 102 people, mostly in the middle cars, were killed.  Everything2

While Luciano was held directly responsible for the disaster, five Brooklyn Rapid Transit officials were also indicted on charges of manslaughter. Attorneys for the BRT successfully argued for a change of venue and the trial was held in Nassau County, Long Island. Anti-union sentiments were popular during this era and probably helped in winning an acquittal for the defendants. The BRT, however, went into receivership and eventually merged with the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) in 1923.

The disaster site is still an active but non-revenue (not carrying passengers) part of the subway, on the southbound track of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle at the Q train/ Prospect Park junction. In 1974, the same sort of accident occurred when a non-revenue train derailed at the exact spot of the 1918 disaster. Traveling at a much slower speed and barely occupied, no one was killed and only one car was destroyed.

An excellent, detailed account of this disaster:  THE MALBONE STREET WRECK by Brian J. Cudahy