The Electric Egg Cream

The current word on the the streets and through the caverns of New York City is that it’s the Number One destination for foreign tourists, according to Global Insight, an international economic analysis firm.  No wonder I found it so crowded here lately, as a flurry of cultures and languages swarmed around me; one and all attracted by the city’s ingenious marketing campaign and weak American dollar to come skip the Big Apple’s light fantastic.

As Jennifer Lee states in yesterday’s NY Times: “The United States, unlike many other large industrialized countries, does not have a central tourism promotion and marketing agency. New York City, however, has been running a global ad campaign called “This is New York City.” The huge popularity of “Sex and the City” (both the HBO television series and the recent movie), which NYC & Co. has promoted, has helped to draw female tourists seeking a taste of the Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle.”  Well, that makes sense to me; it’s possible…unfortunately. Then again, I’m still in my personal Breakfast At Tiffany’s groove and forever entranced by that “Moon River” romanticism.

It’s one of the few cities in America to have experienced an increase rather than decline in tourism since 9/11…and not merely to gaze at Ground Zero any longer,  but to actually enjoy other activities (maybe visiting the Empire State Building or Times Square…or something like that). This lively surge of foreign visitors is forcing many local businesses to set prices in foreign currency. However, while this is good news for the local economy it’s bad news for New Yorkers traveling abroad.  However, that’s the way the cookies and the coins crumble.

(“Foreign Visitors Adore New York City” NY Times)

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For anyone who thought (or was hoping) that Peter Frampton was dead, he’s certainly not. The  Brooklyn Paper is reporting that the man behind the “talking six string” and accompanying wah-wah pedals, guitar jams and the like, will be performing at the Seaside Summer Concert Series on July 31 in Coney Island. The concert is free and this should be an added incentive to come running here from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Frampton was a huge sensation in his native England in the early 1970s, forming the band “Humble Pie” as a teenager in 1969, and rode the wave of that decade’s innovative if gaudy sound that would explode into the disco craze. Released in 1976, his “Frampton Comes Alive” made him an instant sensation all over the world and the album is still considered, by many, the greatest live concert recording of all time. (For what it’s worth, I doubt that…being a Cream fan myself.)

Sharing the bill with Frampton will be a band called “Starship,” a “creaky, power pop group,”  who are supposedly descended  from Jefferson Starship (aka Airplane); however, the band’s leaders, Grace Slick and Marty Balin (now, are they dead?) had long departed for distant galaxies when the newer Starship arrived to fill the vacuum.

However, Frampton is the center of expectation here and I’m sure that everyone will enjoy reliving those good old days of bell bottom blues and platform shoes…or was that merely a hallucination?

On the morning of July 28, 1945, a U.S. B-25 bomber piloted by Lt. Colonel William Smith, was flying a routine mission from Bedford Mass. to Newark Airport in New Jersey; the weather was rainy with a thick overcast. He inexplicably appeared over New York Municipal Airport (now LaGuardia ) and requested a weather report. The Municipal tower warned  Smith of poor weather conditions and advised him to land immediately, but he requested and received permission to continue on to Newark. Municipal tower’s final transmission to the plane were the ominous words,  “From where I’m sitting, I can’t see the top of the Empire State Building.”

Conditions were growing worse as the steady rain quickly changed over to a dense fog with visibility near zero at altitudes higher than 2,000 feet. Now over Manhattan but losing his approach vector to Newark, Smith lowered the plane to regain his bearings. The B-25 suddenly  found itself in New York City’s famed canyon of skyscrapers, flying at less than 900 feet, and Smith also realized that he was on a collision course with one of these skyscrapers:  the New York Central Building. He quickly banked to the west, (putting more drag on the plane and reducing its speed and maneuverability at such a low altitude) and was able miss that building, but also putting himself in line with another skyscraper and then another…until the Empire State Building loomed dead ahead.

At 9:49 a.m., as people on the ground watched in stunned disbelief and fear, the doomed plane struck the north side of the Empire State Building at approximately 200 mph, tearing a hole 18 feet wide and twenty feet high from its point of impact at the 79th floor. Its high-octane fuel tanks exploded and poured flames and pieces of wreckage along the sides of the building, through offices areas, and down hallways and stairwells. Several office workers were killed instantly, reduced to charred remains still seated at their desks. Smith, his two crew members, and 11 people working at their desks were killed; over two dozen more were injured. The workers were on the staff of the National Catholic Welfare Service, now known as Catholic Relief Services, who still keep their offices on the 79th floor.

“Thought we’d been bombed,” Doris Pope, Boynton Beach, Fl. told the The Palm Beach Post in 1999. “I worked for the Office of Office of Price Administration in the Empire State Building. That day, as we were getting ready to take our coffee break, we heard this terrible noise, and the building started to shake. … As we looked out our third-floor window, we saw debris fall on to the street. We immediately thought New York was being bombed.”  ABC News

However, WWII was all but over; the next time a skyscraper(s) in NYC would be the scene of this sort of horror, it would be borne not out of accident but out of evil and with an intensity befitting evil: battled and believed forever vanquished in WWII.

A 12 block area in Prospect Heights consisting of 870 buildings is being designated a “historic district” by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It’s the city’s latest effort to preserve history while serving progress at the same time. Even though the LPC’s intentions are arguably well-intentioned, the proposal is too little too late and absolutely ineffectual in blocking the very destroyer of this locale’s history in the first place: the Atlantic Yards.

“’The purpose of our agency is how to protect the historic fabric of the city’s neighborhoods, not to stop development,’” de Bourbon said, noting that Landmarks primarily looks at architecture, dates of construction, and the streetscape. “’It certainly may have been a part of the motivation of people who wanted us to designate the district, but that’s something that we really can’t consider.’”

A factor used in determining a building’s historical significance here is its “sense of place” along with a “coherent streetscape” (in short, its appearance and location). Because this proposal came to the drawing board so late, it will be difficult to determine these senses of place and coherency when time and money press on. Bruce Ratner, the Goliath of the Atlantic Yards project and genius of laissez-faire construction and intrigue, is unlikely to compromise by becoming miraculously nostalgic when the financial and political cards are stacked in his favor.

Source: The Brooklyn Paper “Prospect Heights to Get Protection?”

brooklynpaper.com/stories/31/29/..

In Woody Allen’s film ANNIE HALL, Alvy Singer (Allen) describes his childhood home situated directly under a roller coaster. Flashbacks reveal his family “happily” gathered together for Alvy’s birthday. Everyone is neatly arranged around a neatly trimmed birthday cake that, in an instant of thunderous-sounding motion, is left broken and scattered all over the room…alas, it’s a fun-filled roller coaster in the wake of yet another routine passage over the domestic scene.

Of course, you’d assume that this is merely Woody Allen’s wild sense of humor and no one would or could ever actually live under a roller coaster. This would be worse than living under a bowling alley…or almost as bad as living under a day care center. However, you’d be wrong in your assumptions because a family did indeed live under a roller coaster; none other than the selfsame thunderous demon that so unexpectedly and hilariously makes its cameo appearance in ANNIE HALL: the Thunderbolt Roller Coaster of Coney Island. The Moran family, owners of the Thunderbolt, had lived beneath their fabulous concession for over sixty years.

Prior to his roller coaster lifestyle, George Moran owned and lived in the Kensington Hotel. In 1926 he hired John Miller, world-renowned roller coaster designer, to build the Thunderbolt near his hotel. To save the hotel, Miller and Moran not only built the coaster nearby but also on and around the building, using it as the coaster’s structural support. “You don’t tear down buildings in Coney Island if you can help it,” Moran said at the time.

The Thunderbolt became one of three roller coasters at Coney Island of legendary importance. Together with the twisting-winding Tornado and the hair-raising (world famous) Cyclone, the Thunderbolt formed a triad of chilling dips and spine-tingling curves which more than satisfied everyone’s roller coaster expectations. The Thunderbolt was basically wooden-tracked but supported by an unprecedented steel structure; the first of its kind. Its superb double-up pushed the borders on a rider’s free fall sensation and illusion of speed.

George and his son Fred managed the ride and enjoyed their unique lifestyle for many years. Mae Timpano, a waitress at Coney Island, became the third member of this singular and spirited family when she married Fred. In the American Experience episode, CONEY ISLAND: A DOCUMENTARY FILM, Mae recalls that they “used to find teeth in the yard [along with] wigs, glasses, guns. Everything we found in the yard…nobody came back for them though.”

Curiously, in spite of the Thunderbolt’s thunderous rumblings which tore at the house, Mae only recalls a few pieces of broken glass including  one or two perfume bottles. She remembers her home as being very spacious and comfortable, almost like “living in the country.” Like Coney Island itself, it must have been a strange but exciting, thrilling yet loving, world within a world. Whereas George and Fred Moran are long gone, Mae is still alive and lived to witness the closing of the Thunderbolt in 1983 and, on November 17, 2000, the roller coaster’s demise at the swing of a wrecking ball. New York City’s former mayor, and self-proclaimed “hero” of 9/11 Rudolph Giuliani, had “progress” in mind and not nostalgia; even Woody Allen’s talent couldn’t come up with something so ludicrous.

Sources: “The House Under the Roller Coaster” by Steven Zeitlin

nyfolklore.org/pubs/voicjl27/dns…

The Coney Island Thunderbolt

history.amusement-parks.com/cith…

clipped from gawker.com

gawker.com/398731/new-york-destr…