Letters From Brooklyn

May 28, 2011

Way back when, in the early part of March, when I sent you Brooklyn 82, I thought we’d be leaving New York and returning to San Diego in short order.  Well, there have been a couple of delays for an array of reasons, and now our departure date is June 10.  Starting then, we aim our Mazda westward, with dog and cat in the back seat, as they were when we drove east three years ago.

But we haven’t been idle in the meantime.  For every day that goes by, we’re more determined to grab another bite or two of the Apple. At home, we’re surrounded by ever-growing mountains of boxes as we pack another two or three every day.

The weather has been, let’s say, variable.  Most of the spring was damp and chilly. Today, summer arrived, unofficially to be sure, but it sure feels like a real New York summer. That’s right,  hot and humid. And the next few days promise to be even hotter.

There have been a few fine days, though, and they must be grabbed and enjoyed when you find them. On one, we walked up to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the annual Japanese cherry blossom festival. It was crowded but jolly, and we found a vacant spot on the grass just wide  enough to sit and share a portable sushi spread. Susan, as you see, was in a festive mood.

Our playgoing pace has stepped up in the past few weeks. And we’ve added some music to our mix.  For the first time, we managed to get to Jazz at Lincoln Center (not actually in Lincoln Center, but a few blocks south at Columbus Circle) for a session of Ellingtonia at the Allen Room, performed by a small combo and some excellent local singers, particularly emcee Michael Feinstein.

Here’s a picture from the back of the Allen Room. As you see, the wall behind the stage is entirely glass, affording a spectacular view of Columbus Circle and 59th Street to the east.

Favorite plays of our most recent batch (we’ve saved a box full of programs):  Born Yesterday, the 1946 Garson Kanin comedy about a junk dealer trying to buy Congress, and his dumb-blonde girl friend who wises up.  The other was ‘The Motherf**ker with the Hat,’ with Bobby Cannavale and Chris Rock. (The Times calls  it ‘the play that dare not speak its name’). Very funny, with a sharp bite. The action starts when a guy finds a man’s hat where it shouldn’t be — in  his girl friend’s apartment. And a special occasion for us:  There wasn’t supposed to be an intermission, but a between-scenes break lasted unusually long, then the house lights went up. Then a voice over the P.A. system spoke the immortal words we’d never heard before:  Is there a doctor in the house? We learned later that Cannavale had banged his head on a piece of scenery and needed to be quickly patched up. Apparently he was, for the action resumed about 20 minutes later, with his head bandaged. We learned the details courtesy of Nick Kuznetz, Cannavale’s nephew and an intern at ProPublica.

As always, New York itself is a never-ending show. An actor named Fabrice Yahyaoui spiced up the spectacle a few weeks ago, plastering the city with a poster announcing his eagerness to be cast in a show, any show, PLEASE!!

And over at Madison Square Park, Broadway and 23rd Street,  folks are lolling in the shadow of ‘Echo,’ a big, big white head devised by Jaume Plensa. The sculpture is modeled after the face of a nine-year-old girl in Plensa’s Barcelona neighborhood.

This morning  I walked past Leopoldi’s Hardware, around the corner from our brownstone, and saw a dad and daughter assembling her new Radio Flyer wagon.  ”I didn’t know it came with ‘some assembly required,’ ” the dad told me. “So we’re putting it  together out here on the sidewalk.” The guys at Leopoldi’s lent him the hammer for the job.

Other New York news:  as you might imagine, the tabloids have been agog lately over the story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French  politician accused of attempting to impose his lust on a reluctant hotel housekeeper.  Until a couple of days ago, he was housed in an apartment on lower Broadway, not far from Susan’s office, and the media, gaggles and gaggles of them, were camped out on the sidewalk across the street, cameras awaiting the moment when his wife, or anybody connected with the case, might enter or leave.

It’s the kind of New York story that challenges the tabloid headline writers to show the stuff they’re made of, and they haven’t disappointed.  On the day Dominique was allowed to leave jail for house arrest, the Post headlined:  FROG LEGS IT!

The Daily News has created its own label for him. In every front-page headline, he’s called LE PERV.  When he left his first modest house-arrest apartment for a much fancier one on the Upper West Side, the News headline said:  JUST PERVECT!

A few weeks ago, we went to a bicycle show in Manhattan, a terrific array of various new models, where I discovered a new genre of bike (new to me, anyway).  One seemed designed mainly to traverse and  survive New York potholes with the equanimity of a Sherman tank.  It was called the Gazelle, but it weighed as much as a Budweiser Clydesdale.

Today, in Brooklyn, I found a whole shop of such bikes, imported from Holland. The territory is flat there, the lady in the shop said. And from the looks of the bikes, they’re used as trucks and vans, equipped with cargo trunks big enough to haul a wide-screen TV or a small refrigerator. With never a hill in sight.   New York is mostly flat, but not that flat.

Several bikes were outfitted with up to four small seats, complete with seatbelts, for transporting small children. And signs scattered around the shop extolled the virtues of slow cycling, such being all the bikes are capable of. I don’t get it.

If you haven’t been in New York lately, you might think the truck-bikes are just the thing for pizza delivery guys, but they’ve long since pedaled ahead to the next big thing. Increasingly, you see them zipping by on battery-powered electric bikes (which they power up at the pizza — or Chinese food — restaurant). They make  faster deliveries than with regular bikes and, probably, earn bigger tips.

That I get.

This could be it,

Bob & Susan

March 10, 2011

The worst of New York’s winter appears to have passed.  But one never knows, do one?

From one day to the next, the afternoon temperature can rise or fall 20 or 30 degrees as the city staggers drunkenly in the general direction of spring. 55 one day, 35 the next, 45 the day after.  But we’ve had no snow since two or three inches fell the last week in February, and I’ve put away the snow shovel and ice-melting crystals. For good, I hope.

That February snow fell at the perfect time for us.  My son, Andrew, and his wife, Cynthia,  along with 7-year-old David and 5-year-old Rachel, were here for their annual visit.  When they arrived, our backyard snow patch had frozen down to mainly ice, after a few weeks of occasional  snow, occasional rain, followed by temps in the 20s, followed by more rain, etc etc.

But another two or three inches of fresh snow was just what we needed for a  noisy backyard snowball fight.  Rachel in particular showed no mercy; she especially enjoyed walking right up to Grandpa and firing away at point-blank range.

We all had a grand time during their visit.  We explored sites all over New York, covering as much ground as we could.  David didn’t much care where we went, as long as it took a long subway ride to get there.  He’s a particular connoisseur of the N, D and Q lines between Brooklyn and Manhattan, because they roll over the Manhattan Bridge, with its magnificent views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River shorelines.  The R and F lines, on the other hand, tunnel under the river, and where’s the fun in that?

We visited the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History (David and Rachel knew most of them by name),  rode the new Roosevelt Island tram across the East River, lunched at the Carnegie Deli and at Grand Central Station.

Rachel quickly got into a staple of New York fashion, scarves.  Not any scarf will do, of course.  Finding the perfect color combination is essential, and each morning she sorted through Susan’s abundant collection to pick out just the right one that would go with her ensemble of the day.

Andrew and Cynthia took the kids ice skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park. They were pretty tentative on their first few laps, but quickly caught the hang of it.  David, naturally, saw no problem in visiting both transit museums, including the one here in Brooklyn plus the one in Grand Central Station.

One cool,  cloudy afternoon we took in the aircraft carrier Intrepid, now a floating museum in the Hudson River, and stopped a moment on the flight deck, amid the array of parked jet fighters from all over the globe, to watch a cruise ship ease its way gingerly out of the harbor.

One day we got on one of the big, orange Staten Island ferries,  which we’d ridden before.   But this time we didn’t just turn around and come back.  We rode the Staten Island Railroad about half-way down the island.  We discovered that Staten Island is mainly a very ordinary, almost California-style suburb – single-family houses with lawns and garages, apartment houses with parking lots, and occasional shopping malls.  (Parking places  are gold in Manhattan.  A nasty story in the news the other day involved a parking space.  A woman was standing at an  empty spot in Greenwich Village, holding a spot for her boy friend who was supposed to drive up in a minute.  A guy who wanted the space got out of his car and punched the woman so hard she was taken  to the hospital in a coma.)

But the best part of their visit was our trip to the Statue of Liberty. Cynthia, a jewel in every way, had made reservations allowing us to hike up the circular staircase inside the statue all the way up to the crown, where a row of tiny windows arching over Liberty’s forehead affords a spectacular view of the harbor. The stairs, 354 of them, grow narrower and steeper as you go up, and the inside of the crown is a room about as big as a large elevator. David was a little pensive up there.

Reservations to the crown are deliberately held to a small number, which allows each group to pretty much hang out up there as long they want and really drink in the spectacle. And here is Susan, after we’d clambered back down from the statue.

At the conclusion of his last subway ride, David leaned over before the train left and quickly kissed the side of our car. As we walked home, he had one last question: How come we never rode the Long Island Railroad or the Metro North?

—————–

Now, an announcement.   Susan and I will soon return to San Diego and our much-missed Morley Field home.  The logistics and exact timing are still being worked out, because our lease here expires at the end of April, but Susan needs to finish up a big project at Pro-Publica that will carry a week or two into May. (We’d stay here, but the house is being sold. We’re now searching for a short-term sublet, not rare in New York.)

We’ll be driving west, as we drove east three years ago,  with  our dog and cat, Duke and Bix, riding in the back seat, as they did then.

New York, as you know if you’ve followed these diaries, has been a fantastic, nonstop adventure.  We were never satisfied to merely live in New York but intent on seeing and doing as much as we could in the time we would be here.  We quickly became members of the major museums, the better to see as many shows as possible.  Farewell Met and MoMA,  farewell Picasso, farewell Manet, Monet and Georgia O’Keefe and Vincent Van Gogh.  Farewell Mayor Bloomberg and Vito Fossella, farewell alternate-side parking.  Farewell Film Forum and IFC Center and BAM.

Farewell to the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park, farewell to the Empire State Building (yes, we went to the top) and Chrysler Building (you can’t go to the top, but the lobby is a 1930s art deco wonderland), farewell to Teddy Roosevelt’s boyhood home on 20^th Street just off Broadway, farewell to Louis Armstrong’s home way the hell out in Queens. Farewell to Times Square, now blocked to traffic and all decked out in patio furniture, inviting tourists and New Yorkers alike to  relax and set a spell.

We joined Theater Development Fund, the key to half-price theater tickets, but even at half-price we spent a lot of money seeing plays and musicals. It was money well-spent and we have a box full of Playbills to help us remember.

Not that we did everything New York has to offer, not by a long shot. We still haven’t been to the Blue Note or the Village Vanguard or Jazz at Lincoln Center.  During our stay here we traveled to Paris for the second time and Rome for the first,  drank in the wonders of  Maine’s Acadia National Park, and returned for our third lunch at Dysart’s Truck Stop in Bangor (a serious eater’s Disneyland, I kid  you not).  We got to Washington, D.C., for a day or two, and I saw F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last resting  place. We visited FDR’s home at Hyde Park, and Edward Hopper’s home in Nyack, but we never  saw the Adirondacks or the Catskills or the Hamptons, never even learned to pronounce Joralemon Street.

We enjoyed every bit of what we did do and places we saw, from Carnegie Hall to Birdland, walks in Central Park, pizza at Grimaldi’s,  meatball sandwiches at Smiling Pizza,  deluxer Italian food at Sotto Voce, ice cream at Uncle Louie’s, jazz at Barbes and Puppets Jazz, right here in supposedly sedate Park Slope.

Park Slope has changed a little in the three years we’ve been here. New York magazine declared it New York’s most livable neighborhood, which made us feel quite smug. But a big store just down the street, once the home of a Hollywood Video and empty when we arrived, is still empty. A few restaurants have closed, and more have opened. The butcher and cheese shop closed shortly after we arrived, and that space also remains vacant.

But the most significant change, I think, was the remodeling of the local liquor store, Prime Time Wines.  When we arrived, clerks and merchandise alike were barricaded behind thick, forbidding Plexiglass against the threat of violent robbery.  Then the owner died, new owners took over, took out the Plexiglass and transformed the place. Now it’s wide open and quite civilized. You can actually walk right up and pick up a bottle of wine.  A small thing, a neighborhood liquor store, but the change reflects the evolution of a neighborhood that’s seeing better days.

Thank you all for reading, and for answering now and then, and we’ll see you in San Diego,

Bob & Susan

Feb. 4, 2011

Hello All!

A couple of letters back,  I told  you about the would-be Manhattan suicide who jumped from a ninth floor window and survived when he landed on a mountain  of garbage bags that had gone uncollected in  the aftermath of a snow storm.

Today, another story of snow and suicide in New York.  A week after Kevin Roman, 36,  of Long Island, was reported missing, his car was found parked at the curb, buried in snow in Queens.  It wasn’t the only car buried in snow in the neighborhood.  (Right here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, there are several cars still totally buried  up and down the block a week after the last snowfall. The temperatures have remained cold, too cold to melt the snow drifts.)

But somebody scraped the snow off Kevin’s car,  and there he was, dead.  He’d shot himself sitting in the car just as the snowfall was starting,  and wasn’t  found for a week.

We seem to be on a play-going binge right now, mainly seeing shows that are new to us.  Last week, on a cold, blustery night,  one of those nights where the snow seems to be falling horizontally,  we plunged into the storm  to see a preview performance of  “The Whipping Man.”  It starred Andre Braugher, whom we’ve admired since his days in ‘Homicide: Life on the Street.’  He played a former slave in the days after Emancipation,  still living in the wreck  of  the home owned by his former  ‘owners.’  In an unusual twist,  the family and the slaves are all Jewish and a Passover seder is part of the story.  (Reading the Times’ review, we were happy to see that ‘Whipping Man’ already had a run at San Diego’s Old Globe. The author, by the way, is Puerto Rican.)

Last night, at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn,  we saw  an imported English production of Henrik Ibsen’s ‘John Gabriel Borkman,’ with Alan Rickman as the disgraced onetime financier recently released from jail, blaming everybody but himself for his troubles. Both were really powerful stuff, plays you think about long afterward.  Ibsen based his play on a real incident involving an army officer accused of embezzlement,  but it predates the Ponzi story by more than 20 years.

Speaking of snow,  it’s always interesting to see how it stacks up.  This bicycle was almost entirely buried,  right up to the 8 inches or so piled atop the seat.

And here I am, in the midst of shoveling the stuff.  That might be our car, buried by the curb, in the background just  next to the shovel handle.

Feb. 7, 2011

Well, the snow continues to melt and guess what?   More bodies are being found.  The Times reports today that for several days  last week folks walked by the corner of Newtown  Avenue and 28^th Street in Queens without taking much notice of the snow- and ice-covered BMW parked near the corner.  Meanwhile,  the friends and relations of Argent  Dyryzl, 31,  an immigrant from Albania, wondered what  had become of him.

Friday,  the temperatures warmed up just enough to melt away some of the ice blanketing the BMW’s windows and a passerby looked inside.  Argent’s body was slumped over the steering wheel.

But it wasn’t his car.  Neighbors said that he had attempted to move the car as a favor for the owner, a friend of his.  The battery was dead, and no one was certain whether his death was accidental  or a suicide.

Feb. 17

It seems like spring in New York, even though there are about four weeks of winter left.  Some days.  Monday the temps reached 60 and all felt lovely and balmy.  The next day, it dropped 30 degrees and winter smacked our exposed faces as harshly and cruelly as ever.  Since then, it’s climbed gradually and today, Thursday, it’s in the 60s again, and possibly warmer tomorrow.  The snow is mostly gone, and  the ridges left on the sidewalk and in the gutters are generously peppered with gray, gritty dirt.  As it melts, it leaves behind the food wrappers, cigarette packs and paper cups and paper plates that have been deposited on the snow banks over the last few weeks by heedless New Yorkers.

There’s no snow in the forecast for the next several days, but we’re  not succumbing to optimism yet.  As the Daily News reminded us the other day, the Great Blizzard of 1888 hit the city in March.  We’ll never forget that one. If we New Yorkers seem to talk about the weather a lot, it’s because we get so much of it.

Today I caught a singular New York experience, The Clock, at the Paula Cooper Gallery, in Chelsea (sort of the lower West Side).  It’s by an artist named Christian Marclay, and it works like this: Marclay and a team of eight assistants plus other assorted  minions plowed their way through endless miles of old movie and TV clips, looking for shots with clocks,  many of them in the distance, and/or scenes where the actors mention the time.

Then the film unreels in real time; when I shot this picture of a scene with the time at 2:17 p.m., it really was 2:17.  The film runs a full 24 hours,  minute by minute, one scene to the next. About 100 people filled the room to capacity this afternoon, sitting on sofas and standing around the walls. You can stay as long as you want, and there was a 45-minute line outside waiting to get in. A lot of people looked like they were settled in for the long haul. On weekends, it’s open 24 hours, and a lot of people arrive in the wee hours and stay a long time.

I was there about 45 minutes and saw these scenes,  among others. Steve McQueen looks at his watch at 2:05.  After several trains arrive and depart, Matthew Broderick checks his watch at 2:08. In several scenes from the remake of  “The Taking of Pelham 123,” Denzel Washington and John Travolta remind each other of the time. A very young William Shatner checks the time at 2:17. At 2:22, one actor tells another,  “You have two minutes to live.”Robert Redford, in “The Sting,” walks into a diner and orders ‘the blue plate special.’ The clock on the wall behind the counter says it’s 2:24.

At 2:45,  Sean Connery, as James Bond, looks closely at a small hole in a wall clock and sees that someone else is staring back from the other side of the wall.

When it’s still 2:45, perhaps the most famous clock scene of all.

Harold Lloyd, in ‘Safety Last’ (1923) desperately clings to the hands of a clock on a tower far above the streets of Los Angeles. Still the best combination of  comedy and suspense ever.

Right now, I’m out of time, so until the next time,

Bob & Susan

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Hello all,

Well, it started snowing around 8 this morning, it’s now after 12:30, and it hasn’t stopped.  Which brings me back to my last letter,  when I said the snow from the big post-Christmas  blizzard was melting in the relatively warm temps that followed.

Boy, was that wrong. Or premature.  The cold made a comeback a few minutes later, freezing the remaining snow in place, and more snow followed.  And more. Today, four weeks after that big bashing,  we’re enjoying what is counted by Mayor Mike as the seventh ‘snow event’ of the season.  The craggy alps in the gutters and on the sidewalks are mounting ever higher and are taking on an ominous look of permanence.  Today, the forecast was for ‘a few light snow showers,’ and rain, with the real snowfall coming late tonight.  That seems to have been an underestimate.

Snow has amounted to more than 30 inches so far, and the city is actually in danger of running out of road salt.

Our coldest day so far was Monday,  when it dropped to 6. The Times, looking for the bright side of the story, reported that Manhattan sidewalks were unusually crowd-free,  and that there were no lines at the sidewalk hot dog carts.  Nor at the Times Square TKTS booth, which sells half-price same-day tickets to Broadway shows.

The Daily News,  also desperately seeking a silver lining, reminded New Yorkers that pitchers and catchers report in a mere three weeks. By then, we may have recovered from the heartbreak of the Jets’ loss in the playoffs.

So,  here’s a shot of Central Park yesterday, before today’s snowfall began, and another of  one of the devices use to torment chilly New Yorkers, a trailered-diorama  inviting us all to the beach at Ft. Lauderdale.

In the same vein, you may recall that last fall I sent a couple of pictures of the bush in front of our brownstone, one of the tree adorned in autumn red, another of the tree nearly naked after a windy day.  So here it is today, branches covered in snow.

You’ve all heard about New York’s big mob bust of last week,  but  the local press carried details that might not have made the national coverage.  So here are a few of the nicknames of the suspects,  gleaned from the News:  The Claw, Jack the Whack, Junior Lollipops, Fat Larry, Johnny Pizza, Meatball, Vinny Carwash, Jimmy Gooch, Baby Fat, Baby Shacks, Tony Bagels, Bobby Glasses.

On my way to the movies the other day, I ran across Russ & Daughters, a Lower East Side institution.  I’d read about the place in a couple of Calvin Trillin’s New York pieces, so it was fun to actually see it.  Russ & Daughters – slogan ‘Appetizing Since 1914’ – is a ‘specialty foods’ grocery, specializing in caviar, smoked fish, whitefish (whole and filleted), odd cheeses (midnight moon, Pierre Robert, and the ever-popular ossau iraty),  all sorts of dried fruits and several varieties of salmon, including Double Smoked Danish at $48 a pound.

A classic only-in-New York place,  Russ & Daughters has stood at 179 E. Houston St.  since Joel Russ opened up shop in 1920, six years after he started with a pushcart.  He renamed the place Russ & Daughters in 1933 after his three daughters joined him in the business.  It’s now operated by the fourth generation of Russes.

I walked out with a nice package of chocolate-orange  rugelach ($14.50 a pound).  With all due respect to San Diego’s D.Z. Akins,  Russ & Daughters makes the best rugelach ever.

Speaking of movies, in New York you can find them in places other than the city’s many movie theaters.  Once in a while, I catch a rarity at the Museum of Modern Art, which shows two or three a day, free for members.  Earlier this month,  “You Only Live Once,” a 1937 heartbreaker starring Henry Fonda.

On Tuesdays, French movies at the French Institute, on East 59^th St., a couple of blocks from the Plaza. This week, ‘Monsieur Gangster,’ vintage 1963, a very funny crime comedy.

Susan and I try to get out and take in the city despite the chilly weather, and Sunday (temp about 20) we made two stops on the Upper East Side.  First, we took in the Jewish Museum celebration of Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss), complete with his history, posters,  the milk can, water chamber and straitjacket he escaped from, and with  a few samples of modern art projects more-or-less  inspired by Houdini’s stunts.  Those were less interesting to us than the original stuff. A film of one modern performance artist showed her attempting to duplicate the straitjacket  escape, while another film showed Houdini’s escapes,  hanging upside down from a crane, in several different cities.  He did it three or four times while the artist struggled in vain to do it once.

And this is me with my good friend Harry Houdini.

From the Jewish Museum at 92^nd Street and 5^th Ave, we walked the 22 blocks (past the Met, past the Guggenheim) to the Frick Collection at 70^th St. , where Susan was especially eager to see the Velazquez portrait of Philip IV.  We saw that, and the rest of the collection,  then grabbed the subway home in time to catch the Jets disaster against the Steelers.

But Susan makes great hot chocolate so we had a nice evening.

Cheers to all,

Bob & Susan

Dec. 22, 2010

Except for the occasional mariachi group (once we were entertained by a cellist playing  a taste of Bach) or the simple beggar, subway rides pass without incident.

Today,  I was privileged to hear pitches from two competing entrepreneurs  on a single A-train ride from West 4^th Street in Greenwich Village to Brooklyn.  First,  came the guy peddling DVDs out of a large black satchel:  “Only five dollars,  all the latest titles,  some not released yet. ‘Tangled,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Colored Girls,’ you name it I’ve got it.  And I have a DVD player, so you can check them out right here.  Play before you pay! Only five dollars.”

He  had just moved to the other end of the car when along came another venture capitalist pitching plastic yo-yos that lit up when they spun around:  “Put a smile on  a child!” as he flipped a couple of yo-yos.  “Yo-yos,   only one dollar.  Put a smile on a child!”

I think the yo-yo guy was making more sales than the DVD guy.

New York’s  media have been noting the 50^th anniversary of  the December 1960 Brooklyn air crash.  Two planes collided above New York  Harbor near Staten Island.  One, a Lockheed Constellation,  went into  the harbor,  killing all 44 people aboard.

The other,  a United jet, crashed at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Sterling  Place in Park Slope,  just a few blocks from here,  killing all 84 people on board and six more people on the ground (including two who were selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk).  It’s a corner we frequently walk by.  The Times did a big remembrance , and so did the Daily News (hed:  HELL FELL FROM THE SKY) Everybody told the story of  Stephen Baltz,  an 11-year-old boy on the United jet who briefly survived the crash but died the next day at New York  Methodist Hospital, also nearby.

Here’s what they left out.  There’s still a memorial to Stephen Baltz at New York Methodist,  if you know where to find it.  It’s a small plaque in the hospital chapel,  with several  coins embedded in its surface.  They are the coins that were in Stephen Baltz’s pocket when the plane went down.

Once or twice in these dispatches I’ve mentioned the Forbes Galleries, repository of Malcolm Forbes’ massive and wonderful collection of antique toys,  not one of New York’s  most famous attractions  but one of my favorites.  I told you that the collection was going  to be auctioned off, so I decided I’d go to the auction.

It was at Sotheby’s,  a building of quiet but unmistakable modern elegance on the Upper East Side. At the museum, the  500 boats – some fit in the palm of your hand, others three feet and longer, gunboats, sailboats, submarines, gunboats,  yachts,  ocean liners – were arrayed as if at sea.  The 10,000 toy soldiers seemed to be locked in perpetual battle.  The narrow halls were dark, the toys illuminated  by stage lighting that added to the drama of every diorama.

Displayed at the auction house,  they became mere merchandise,  in bright light to reveal peeling paint, spots where parts were missing,  where repairs had long been needed. Boats were as if in dry-dock, soldiers at ease.

The 200 or so people at the auction were a chatty bunch, mostly collectors.  Each item went in a minute or two,  usually for a few thousand dollars. A German-built  1905 schooner for $21,000,  a 1912 riverboat for $2,000.  While I was there,  a model of the doomed liner Lusitania went for $160,000.  The aged collector sitting next to me said Forbes bought it for $28,000 in the 1970s.

Total  haul for the whole collection,  I learned later,  was $2.38 million.  But if they’re no longer in one place,  in public, but are  scattered and hidden where small children from around the world can’t see them any more,  what are they really worth?

I guess I’ve been busier this month than I thought.  Also paid a visit to the Morgan Library,  built by money mogul J.P.  Morgan  at 36^th Street and Madison in 1906 to house his vast collection of books, attached to his home.  A spectacular place, which has been displaying a trove of Mark Twainiana,  the great man’s notes, original drafts,  his eye-glasses,  even the ‘Conklin’s Self-Filling Pen’ Twain used and endorsed.

Twain wrote everything, it seems, on 7 in. by 4 in. notepads. Not just notes but essays,  novels, everything.  When he wanted to add material,  he’d insert new page numbers – page 110, 110a, 110b, etc.  Most interesting,  besides his original handwritten  pages of ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ was a note written to the press crew,  demonstrating his knowledge of the technical aspects of printing,  no doubt learned during his newspaper days,  indicating how he wanted  a part of  “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to look:  ‘Private to compositor:  ‘set it in old battered type,  only one size smaller than the body of the book.’

Jan. 1, 2011

Sorry to disappoint,  but we weren’t in New York for last week’s big blizzard.   So I can’t offer any eyewitness accounts other than what you’ve already seen on the tube.  We were in Hollywood, Fla.,  spending Christmas with Susan’s folks.  We were due to return on Monday, Dec. 27,  but our Delta flight was canceled,  of course.  After many, many phone calls we ended up flying to New York yesterday,  Dec. 31.  That was better  than getting  to JFK and being marooned at the airport.  That happened to some folks, who found JFK bereft of cabs or buses.  Some boarded the A train headed for Manhattan and thought they’d beaten the odds, but only found themselves spending the night on a freezing train when it got stuck.

We spent a nice few days with the folks,  took a walk on the beach, saw ‘True Grit’ and ‘The King’s Speech,’ enjoyed both a lot.

After we returned last night,  I went to pick up Duke at the Paws in Paradise kennel,  and heard more stories.  One couple with a dog at the kennel  simply gave up on flying and rented a car to drive to New York from Ohio.  Another couple was delayed much longer than us and is due Tuesday. The kennel owner spent  one night in the shop when her usual subway home wasn’t running.

As I said, we missed the worst of the catastrophe , but there are still many mountains of snow in the intersections and piled along the curbs.   Temps are in the 40s and it’s melting fast,  though.

The best only-in-New York story to come out of the storm was ignored by the Times,  but got front page treatment in both the Post and the Daily News.

For 10 days or so, New York’s  sanitation crews were clearing snow, not collecting garbage.  So sidewalks,  especially in commercial areas,  are crowded with immense stacks of black plastic bags stuffed with garbage.  And those aromatic stacks just kept on growing.

Now we take up the story of  Vangelis Kapato, who thought he’d reached the end of his rope.  Already suffering from depression, facing eviction,  mourning the recent deaths of a couple of family members,  Vangelis decided to end it all.  He jumped from his ninth floor window,  landed smack on top of a large pile of garbage bags   — and lived to tell the story.  Here is the picture from the News.

Front page headline on both the News and Post:  TRASH LANDING. I also liked the Post’s inside headline:  MAN OWES LIFE TO BEST SACKS EVER.

Speaking of movies,  I’d skip ‘Black Swan’ if I were you.  Among movies, it’s not a swan,  it’s a turkey.  But in the right spirit, you can enjoy it as a comedy.  Very funny,  though it wasn’t meant to be. Every time Natalie Portman is supposed  to be feeling poorly,  which happens a lot,  the background music cranks up to fever pitch.  But instead of saying ‘the poor girl is suffering,’ it’s screaming “LOOK OUT!  THE GUY WITH  THE CHAIN SAW IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!”

But “The  Importance of Being Earnest” was meant to be funny,  and it is.  A new production is running on Broadway and we went before Christmas and enjoyed every minute.  The part of the prim Lady Bracknell is played by the director,  Brian Bedford,  drag being something of a tradition in the play. He’s fabulous as the distinguished dowager.

We had a great time in Florida,  particularly on the night after Christmas when,  at about 11:30, we heard a band playing Christmas tunes in the parking lot outside Susan’s folks’ condo.  “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” by a full brass band, trumpets,  tubas, trombones,  about a dozen all-told,  standing in a circle, serenading the neighborhood.  We went outside to enjoy the concert close-up, and the band was just going into its second number when a real-life Scrooge yelled from a balcony:  “Stop that noise!  Shut up out there.”  The band finished its second number,  then wrapped it up.  I talked with one of them for a minute,  just long enough to learn they were all from Romania, and that one of them lived in one of the condo units just down the row.

More news from Hollywood:

The Irving Berlin For Men store has closed.  Irving Berlin’s has been a fixture in downtown Hollywood for 60 years or so.  (This Irving Berlin was an early owner of the shop, no relation to the composer of “God Bless America” and “White Christmas.”)  As we saw strolling through the store,  its specialty was the sort of brightly colored,  boldly patterned  silky-polyester shirts you might wear unbuttoned  to the navel,  the better to display the full array of gold chains hanging around your neck.

That general impression was confirmed by a story in the Miami  Herald describing a typical item, ‘a bright yellow silk shirt with purple cuffs for $283.’ The surviving owner just died, and his family couldn’t reach rental terms with the building owner.

His daughter remembers well one of the early regulars,  ‘Uncle Meyer,’  namely Meyer Lansky,  well known in mob circles.

Another regular was John Gotti,  whose rep as the ‘Dapper Don’ was established with the duds he bought at Irving Berlin’s.

One of the owners said Gotti was  “always a gentleman.  He would come in with five or six bodyguards.  They were very well-mannered.”

So long for now,

Bob & Susan

Dec. 2, 2010

I swear I’m not making this up.

This afternoon,  I’m at the West 4^th Street-Washington  Square station,  waiting for the F train back to Brooklyn.

Most of the stations have a few wooden benches here and there. Not as many as they need,  but a few.

Just as I’m approaching a bench with a couple of empty spots,  a young guy, I’d guess in his 20s or so, walks to the bench, carefully places a small stack of coins atop the back of the bench, and keeps walking.  A couple of people glance at the coins, but nobody says a word.

I sit a couple of spots down from the coins, then a 40ish lady sits at the spot with the coins, and without noticing knocks the stack on the floor behind the bench.  Silence all around.

A few minutes later,  the train comes, the lady gets up and boards. I check the floor, and see three or four pennies and a nickel.  I take the nickel.

This is in Greenwich Village,  where the unusual is frequently the usual.  This is the display in a tattoo shop window,  offering a useful suggestion for a gift for that hard-to-please  person in  your life.

Always on the lookout for odd and interesting only-in-New York places, today I visited the not-exactly-world-famous Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.  I’d seen an ad for it in Coffee Talk, one of the innumerable tabloids,  flyers, pamphlets,  business cards and various adverts stacked in New York coffee shops and diners.

The MoCCA, said the ad, was at 594 Broadway,  Suite 401.

It’s another one of those places that you’ll never find if you don’t already know where it is.  594 Broadway  is one of New York’s countless generic office towers,  about a half-block south of Houston Street.  At the front of the building,  not a hint of who occupies the fourth floor.

Up on 4, a wide-open door, and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, in a space that would be fairly large for a four-person office, but is quite small for a museum.  Only one person gets paid to work there, the rest are volunteers,  including Oliver Bair.  I asked Oliver how many visitors had been to the museum that day. I was the first,  he said. I asked why there’s no sign on the front of the building advertising the museum.  The owners won’t allow it, said Oliver.  They won’t even allow a sign in the fourth-floor window of the museum.

The museum’s walls right now are dedicated to the work of  Mad Magazine stalwart  Al Jaffee,  still active as he nears 90; New Yorker regular Liza Donnelly,  and Denis Kitchen, whose portfolio includes the 1972 cover of Bizarre Sex Magazine and ‘The giant penis that invaded New York.’  Think Godzilla, except it’s not a lizard.

Chatted a bit with Oliver – white T-shirt,  braces,  stringy goatee, pony tail – and discovered  that among his other hobbies is light-saber dueling with fellow members of the New York Jedi.  (The Jedi are available to perform  for parties,  corporate events,  and,  of course, comic conventions.) http://www.newyorkjedi.com/

So far this year, no snow in New York.  So if you want some, you have to make it.  Which is what this fella was doing on an Upper East Side sidewalk the other day.  Why would you do that?  He was part of a movie crew,  filming “Mr.  Popper’s Penguins,” with Jim Carrey.  Didn’t see Jim Carrey anywhere,  so we’ll  have to make do with the snow-making guy.

Dec. 12

How do you know it’s Christmas season in New York?  The subway mariachis are playing ‘Feliz Navidad.’

And it’s cold.  Sometimes.  Earlier this week I had a tough time surviving when it was 27 (or  so it said on the big CNN digital thermometer atop a skyscraper) shopping at Columbus Circle.  The street fair season has run out,  but at the holidays several Manhattan open spaces (Columbus Circle, Bryant Park, Union Square) become outdoor malls, with tented booths selling all manner of jewelry,  coats,  wool caps, scarves,  gloves,  carved knick-knacks,  tree ornaments,  mugs of hot cocoa, exotic European chocolate. Every year we’ve bought one or more New York ornaments.  One was a curbside hot dog stand manned by Santa Claus, another was a model of the Brooklyn Bridge. This year,  a miniature sesame seed bagel.

Today, though,  it’s considerably warmer,   in the 50s.  With rain and wind.  And by the middle of the week,  we’ll drop back to 30 or so.

The ice skating rinks are open at Rockefeller Center,  Central Park and Bryant Park (where  you’ll find this statue of a seated Gertrude Stein).  A good 500 or more people were lined up waiting to skate at Bryant Park when we walked through the other day.  The line was so long it was difficult to imagine that those at the rear would get on the ice before the day was through.

We were in the neighborhood for the New York Public Library’s annual open house for members.  We were looking forward to the tour of the stacks, which was something of a disappointment.  We saw one tiny corner of the stacks,   mainly Russian reference books, including several Russian Who’s Whos and the St. Petersburg phone book.  But the whole affair was very festive, with cookies, bubbly water and white wine available everywhere,  bands playing and choirs singing.

At a subway station,  our train was arriving, but I was just able to grab this shot of one of the more unusual subway musicians, honking away at a didgeridoo.  We’ve seen musical saws,  cellos,  mimes, acrobats,  drummers,  opera singers,  doo-wop singers,  and a lot more.  But this was the first didgeridoo.

Brooklyn iPhones are the object of a new type of criminal.  A bicycle rider has been snatching iPhones from the grasp of pedestrians as they chat and riding off into traffic.  The Park Slope Courier (implacable campaigner against bike lanes or anything else velocipedic) pulls no punches.  In its news story it calls the culprits ‘cycling muggers,’ ‘riding thugs’and ‘two-wheeling  hoodlums.’

A real estate note:  You might recall that some time back I reported that the Brooklyn house where Truman Capote once lived was for sale.  Now,  if you’re in the market for a Staten Island Tudor,  we have the perfect item.  This is the “Godfather” house, where scenes from the 1972 flick were filmed,  including the big wedding scene.  Price: a mere $2.9 million, the Daily News reports.

Speaking of crime in New York,  there seems to be a major outbreak of minor offenses.  In  Queens,  Anna Stanczyk says two of New York’s finest roughed her up when,  they said, she neglected to pick up her dog’s poop.  She said the dog only peed.  The cops said he did more than that.   She said the cops hit her and threw her into the back of their patrol car.  The Daily News ran pictures of her several bruises.  Internal Affairs is investigating.

Meanwhile, the Post is atwitter over the case of Delia Gluckin, 80,  who got a $100 ticket last Sunday morning for tossing a newspaper into a  Manhattan sidewalk trash bin.  It was the Post,  of course.  The law says  you can’t use the city’s barrels for your household or business garbage.  The city sanitation cop (yes, there are such things in New York) accused Delia of dumping ‘improper refuse’ in the bin. She says she’s going  to fight for justice.  The Sanitation Dept. admitted that getting fined for tossing a newspaper is “odd.”

We got back to Broadway this weekend,  to see ‘La Cage Aux Folles,’  one of the best we’ve seen.  Great performances by Kelsey Grammer as Georges, and Douglas Hodge, a Brit,  as the queenly Albin.  All very over-the-top,  funny  and flamboyant,  and at the end, poignant.

When we left the theater,  it was late,  but Times  Square sidewalks were like a crowded elevator.  A jammed sardine-can of an elevator,  but one that kept moving, however slowly.

The lights of Times Square glowed everywhere,  giving the whole place the eerie glare of noon at midnight.

Cheers to all,

Bob & Susan

Nov. 19, 2010

You see here evidence of how quickly the elements change in our neck of the Brooklyn woods.

This tree stands in front of our Brooklyn brownstone.  All summer long,  it’s lush and green. (A family of birds brought up a couple of young ones in its branches over the summer.)

In the fall, its colors change.  Not the mix of orange, brown, yellow and red we see in most trees,  but simply bright, bright red, like a big, bushy, brilliant poinsettia.

It normally stays that way for a week or two,  then its leaves fall away in unusually short order,  in another week or so.

This year, however,  was a little different.  The first picture was taken Tuesday,  Nov. 16.   Wednesday was windy.  Really really windy.  The second  picture was taken Wednesday afternoon.  The tree was stripped nearly bare in a single day.

Now, an update on the Canada geese of Prospect Park.  With their numbers returning following the summer slaughter by federal agents,  Brooklyn folks are looking for a way to discourage them from flocking and nesting around here,  and hopefully keeping them away from nearby JFK, without harming them.  The latest idea: hire a dog to chase them away.  Park officials have brought in a border collie that will, it’s hoped, pursue the birds and encourage them to find other digs.

We’ll see if it works.

From time to time,  I’ve been going to the afternoon play readings at the York Theatre,  deep in the sub-basement of St. Peter’s Church at Lexington and 53d Street.  Without costumes or sets,  accompanied by a piano,  in front of audiences who got in for free, the actors perform brand new,  untried plays or musicals that may –  or may not – go  on to brighter futures.

Last week,  I saw a musical that was better than the rest and could potentially get a more auspicious treatment  someday.  It’s called “Only a Kingdom,” and it begins with an idea that I was surprised to hear nobody had tried before.  Written by Judith Shubow Steir,  it’s based on the story of England’s Edward VIII,  the king who in the 1930s abdicated the throne so he could marry his American sweetheart  Wallis Simpson.

All around, it was memorable, with good songs and a good re-telling of a familiar story that hadn’t been told in quite that way before.  Don’t forget, you heard about it here first.

Nov. 22, 2010

We’re always on the lookout for things to do in New York that can’t be done anywhere else.  Or at least no place else where we usually go.

So the other day we decided to take in an art auction.  You know, those swell, elegant affairs where the works of Picasso and Degas and Renoir are peddled for millions and millions.

Christie’s has a big showplace at Rockefeller Plaza,  and the other night the works  of some of the more famous Latin American artists were being sold.

I wasn’t sure  if we were up to the standards of Christie’s, so I called in advance.  Can anybody just walk in,  I asked the lady on the phone.  Sure, anybody, she said.  Do you have to wear a suit and tie? I asked. No, you can wear  your jeans, she said.  I wondered if she could somehow see me over the phone.

So I  picked Susan up after work and off we went.  The auction was held in a room that sat about 1,000 people, most of them dressed better than us.  But not all. A lot of them circulated around the room chatting and gossiping.  Some were  talking on their cell phones,  constantly.  Taking orders,  I thought.  I warned Susan, if you see somebody you know, don’t wave.

The chummy buzz of conversation was constant,  quieting only on the occasion when a painting by Fernando Botero – “Family Scene,”a  portrait of three matadors and a flamenco dancer – went for $1.7 million.  As the price rose to $600,000 and kept climbing,  the level of conversation  lowered gradually until the only voice we could hear was that of the auctioneer.

She spoke in a crisp, no-nonsense English accent.  Her long hair was brown,  flowing straight down to her dark blue scarf and trim black jacket.  Her eyes swept over the crowd constantly,  and she also kept checking the two banks of clerks on the phones,  who were taking bids from who-knew-where  and occasionally signaling her with a discreet  wave of a hand.

Most of the paintings and sculptures sold for $100,000 or more.  When one went for  a mere $55,000,  I felt like we’d missed a bargain.  But the auctioneer was nothing if not efficient.  That sale for $1.7 million took about four minutes, the longest of the night.  Most of the time,  a painting might start at  $50,000, and in a minute or two the auctioneer  might pronounce “lahst chahnce” and slam the gavel  and at the $200,000 mark.

It wasn’t long before the reason for Christie’s  y’all-come policy became evident.  A young, rather disheveled-looking couple arrived and sat a few rows in front of us. The guy wore a black wool coat,  a shaggy beard,  his hair in a frizzy,  unkempt Jewfro.  Classic impoverished grad student,  I thought.  He was with his girl friend (or wife?),   who no doubt sustained him on a diet of pizza and ramen.  Not my idea of obvious big spenders.

But he was holding a bidding paddle,  number 307, which he began waving enthusiastically when  lot No.  54 was offered.  A few other people bid as well, but he was not dissuaded.  At last the painting was his, for a mere $170,000.  He and the girl friend looked at each other and beamed with delight.

Must be a Facebook billionaire, I decided.

Speaking of art,  we went Sunday to the Whitney Museum,  to see a major exhibit of Edward Hopper paintings,  all of which glowed with a light only he could create.  But I discovered a new piece of art in the men’s room.  Or a copy,  anyway.  Anyway, back in 1917 the artist Marcel Duchamp set up a urinal in an art show,  wrote  ‘R. Mutt 1917’ on it, and declared it a work of art.  The art world fell for the gag, and it’s now a recognized masterpiece.

So in a men’s room at the Whitney,  someone has also written  ‘R. Mutt 1917’ on the plumbing over a commode.  Looks like art to me.

After the Whitney,  we went over to the Columbus Circle area,  where the Hearst Corp.  building,  a classic  1930s stone art deco,  has been sort of improved.  Sprouting out of it, soaring skyward, a whole new building of aluminum and glass,  girders crossing in Xs and hexagons all the way to the top,  both obscene and audacious, disheartening and inspiring.

New York keeps changing, but in ways all its own.

Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Bob & Susan

Tuesday,  Nov. 3,  2010

It’s been  a noisy day here at 319 8^th St. in Brooklyn.  A couple of guys are in the basement,  clearing out the chimney.  We discovered the chimney needed cleaning when the new gas furnace started acting balky just when we needed to turn it on.

The weather turned very suddenly last weekend from balmy Indian summer to chilly autumn.  The high on Thursday was 75,  and  Friday it was 55.  Just like that.

So those two guys are clearing out the chimney that provides ventilation for the furnace.  And the head chimney guy offered me a little history lesson.  We have four faux fireplaces – they seemingly serve no purpose but decoration – but a couple of them actually have a purpose: they conceal the chimneys for the furnace and the hot water heater,  which both go straight up to the roof  through the columns at the sides of the fireplaces.

When we moved in, in May 2008,  there was a big oil tank in the basement, and a huge oil-burning furnace that doubled as a hot-water heater – both standard early 20^th Century Brooklyn technology.  Now there’s the new gas furnace and a separate  water heater.

But these houses were  built around the 1880s – BEFORE oil. In other words,  that big iron trap-door hatch in front of the house used to be a coal chute.

We spent the weekend seeing Susan’s son Adam and his family over in Melrose, Mass.  On the way there and back, we feasted our eyes on the blazing red, orange and yellow fall colors of the trees that carpeted the hills of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts  like an enormous shaggy rug.  The leaves were falling fast, though, and many of the trees were already bare.

Another sign of the changing seasons: Our neighborhood Uncle Louie G’s ice cream stand has disappeared.  In its place is an establishment calculated to prosper in cold weather, the Soup Bowl. I stepped  in just long enough to ask what happened to Uncle Louie’s, and was told it would be back in March.  Well, I certainly hope so.

We  got back in time for  the Halloween parade on 7^th Avenue here in Park Slope.  Sidewalks were crowded with kids and their parents in costumes,  all trick-or-treating  at the shops and restaurants.  Folks at La Bagel Delight were passing out orange pumpkin bagels.

A few kids piloted homemade sidewalk subway cars.  This boy was, as I recall, part of a G train,  and I also spotted an R train car and a D.  But my favorite costumes were worn by these four moptops,  recalling my favorite musical group.

On a walk yesterday through Union Square,  I made the acquaintance of LeLand William Howard,  an author selling his two novels from a card table.  They’re called ‘Pirouettes Get No Applause in Goldengrove’ and ‘The Grass Hut.’  (Both available from authorhouse.com.

Howard is a longtime New Yorker,  very friendly and unassuming, who’s here now selling his books and taking a break from his day job teaching English composition at a college in Las Vegas, NM.

He was quite surprised when I told him I’d visited Las Vegas, NM. Susan and I were driving in that part of the country and stopped there for lunch, a beautiful small town with most of its 19^th Century Old West architecture and flavor intact.  A short but memorable visit.

Howard’s on a sabbatical,  selling his book,  getting reacquainted with New York , apparently divided between the hubbub of New York and the relative peace of the smaller of the two Las Vegases.

Nov. 8, 2010

Sunday we  got our second dose of New York Shakespeare under our belts.  (The first was ‘As You Like It,’ an imported Brit production  we saw last January in Brooklyn.)  This time we went to a matinee of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” another Brit import, staged at Pace University,  which is hard by the Lower Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.  It’s one of the comedies,  and the production has been a long-running hit in London. The Times critic was crazy about it,  even said it was ‘sparkling.’

Well, we thought the sparkle had gone flat.  Not much imagination went into the direction or stagecraft, we thought.  At  intermission,  the first thing Susan said was “this isn’t as good as the Shakespeares at the Old Globe.”  New Yorkers,  who can be quite provincial,  wouldn’t want to hear it,  but it’s true.  The Shakespeares we’ve seen in Balboa Park are generally more imaginative, more lively, more fun.

It’s been four months, but Brooklyn still misses its geese.  Those were the 400-odd Canada geese,  long one of the nicer parts of the scenery around the lake at Prospect Park (a few blocks up the hill from here).  Then came the famous incident of the airliner that landed in the Hudson River.  The reason that plane landed in the Hudson was that a flock of Canada geese got swallowed up in its jet engines when it took off from JFK and jammed the engines, thus crippling the plane.

JFK, it turns out, is not that far from the park – as the goose flies, that is – and the same geese that hang around the park also frequent the airport.  So last July federal Agriculture agents rounded them up at the park, took  them to an enclosed building and gassed them with carbon dioxide.  Apparently it didn’t occur  them that a goose dinner might be welcome at the city’s homeless shelters.  And a lot of people loved those geese.

Now, the latest bulletin:  The Brooklyn Paper, one  of the tabloids we grab whenever we’re at Key Food, reports that the geese are making a comeback.  The Paper has followed the story relentlessly,  with headlines like “A Gooseless City?” and “They Didn’t Have to Die!”

The BP’s reporter covering the goose beat goes over to the lake and counts them every week.  As of last week’s Goosewatch 2010,  there are now about 160 Canada geese hanging out at Prospect Park.

But the Freak may be gone for good.  Back in June, you may recall (Brooklyn 65),  I described the ‘Shoot the Freak’ booth at Coney Island,  where patrons are invited to shoot paintballs at a human target,  who dodges around trying to avoid getting shot.  “Have some fun with a paintball gun!” the barker invited.  But ‘Shoot the Freak’ is an endangered species.  The new owners of the property   are trying to erase Coney Island’s  tawdry history – such as Shoot the Freak and Ruby’s bar (opened in 1934) – and class up the joint with more chain franchises.  Personally,  I like Coney better with Shoot the Freak and Ruby’s than I would with a TGI Friday’s or an Applebee’s.

One of New York’s quaint and honored local customs is the slip-and-fall lawsuit.  Sidewalks are frequently in terrible shape (including that in front of our house) and big cracks and crooked pavement are common.  In the winter,  snow, ice and slush make them all the  more perilous.

A person who slips and falls might be seriously hurt,  and elgible to take home some serious money. Right now,  a 71-year-old lady is heading to court after slipping and falling at Borough Hall (local equivalent of a city hall) and breaking her hip.

Borough President Marty Markowitz has expressed his sympathy, and said his office has ‘been begging to get repairs done’ on the sidewalks in front of the Hall.  Marty knows something about the subject.  He financed the start of political career after he slipped and fell in an Albany parking lot in 2001, sued the owners and won $225,000.

What with  the constant danger of slipping and falling, it’s easy to understand why New Yorkers are so stressed.  In fact, the Daily News says, the American Psychological Association is reporting that New Yorkers are the most stressed-out people in the nation.  The causes of stress in New York:  economic problems,  health issues, housing costs and safety.

And, as if all that isn’t enough,   people in Staten Island are also stressed over the wild turkeys marauding  through the streets.  A flock of wild  turkeys,  the News says, is ‘rampaging’ around the Ocean Breeze neighborhood, ‘tying  up traffic,  covering yards with excrement,  even trapping one terrified woman in her car.’

They jumped on  her car and just stayed,  she said, ‘I screamed like I was being murdered. I felt trapped I was so scared.’

The wild flock got its start, the News says,  about 10 years ago when a woman who kept nine of the birds as pets released them.  Now, there are about 100 of them.

Don’t slip, don’t fall,

Bob & Susan

Oct. 27, 2008

Hello again,

It’s been a while since my last dispatch,  I know.

I’ve been laid low with a cough and cold that only now,  after three weeks,  is showing signs of  relaxing its grip. (Or should I say grippe? Maybe I’ve got the grippe.)

Over the same period Susan’s work has been fairly consuming. Between us, we haven’t  done much doing of the town.  We have been to a movie or two,  but that’s been about it.

But we haven’t been entirely inactive.  And New York  has continued it ways without waiting for us.

George Varga, an old pal from the Union-Tribune,  and  his wife Beth Wood, came to town for a week of vacation,  and we saw them for dinner near their hotel in midtown.  Together we discovered the Caffe Linda, a quiet, excellent,  medium-priced Italian place with great food.  Highly recommended.  (145 E. 49^th St.)

A couple of weeks ago, we  got back to Broadway for the first time in a few months and saw “Brief Encounter,” a musical adapted from the 1945 British movie, in turn made from a Noel Coward one-act play.  Great production,  wonderful actors.  The original wasn’t a musical, but this was,  thanks to the addition of several Coward songs that pepped things up very nicely. Actually,  I liked it far better than the movie, which is just too sad and morose all the way through to the sadder-than-ever  ending.  The musical ends the same, but there are several bright spots adding levity along the way.

The theater,  by the way, was Studio 54.  Now it’s a Broadway theater,  but it occupies the same space that in the 1970s and 1980s held New York’s most fashionable and still famous disco.

After the show we  took a stroll down 8^th Avenue where another of New York’s  perennial street fairs was under way.  And, proving once again that you have to keep your eyes peeled in New York all the time and in every direction, we saw this sign embedded in the pavement at an intersection,  maybe 48^th Street.  Don’t ask me what it means or why it’s there, but there it is.

As I said,  we haven’t been too active lately, but New York never lets up.  And for those who haven’t the time or money or inclination to take in the theater,  there’s plenty of entertainment to be found in New York politics.  Not to mention local crime.

You’ve no doubt heard about our race for governor of New York,  with better-safe-than-sorry Andrew Cuomo of the Democrats taking on the wild-and-crazy Carl Paladino, the Republican whose favorite hobbies is e-mailing porn and racist cartoons to his friends and threatening to ‘take out’ journalists he doesn’t favor.  You’d think the presence of a guy like Paladino would provide all  the entertainment value the audience could desire.

Not in New York.  There are five others representing various fringe parties,  a colorful supporting cast providing comic relief in the tradition of Shakespearean grave diggers.

My o­­wn favorites  are Jimmy McMillan and Kristin Davis.  McMillan,  a Vietnam vet and karate instructor who sports a lavish mustache that winds around his cheeks and back to his sideburns,  represents the “Rent Is Too Damn High” party.  And in the sole debate in which all seven candidates took part,  his answer to nine different questions was,  you guessed it, “the rent is too damn high.” At least it’s a platform no New York  renter will disagree with.

He is easier on the issue of gay marriage than Paladino, who’s totally against it. Said McMillan: ‘You want to marry your shoe,  we’ll marry you.’

But a second-day story in the Times reported that McMillan has some kind of friendly deal where he lives, and pays no rent at all.  “We’re like family, they don’t want me to pay any money at all,” he told the Times.  The Daily News later reported that he’s a registered Democrat,  and that there is no Rent Is Too Damn High party registered in New York.  You can’t trust anybody these days.

Kristin Davis is the former madam who is running for governor to legalize prostitution.  Addressing the woes of the Metropolitan Transit Authority,  a state agency which for some reason I can’t figure out is in charge of the city’s subways and buses,  she said: “The key difference between the M.T.A. and my former escort agency is I operated one set of books and I offered on-time and reliable service.”

You think you have troubles with neighbors?  Karim Samii and his wife, who live in a $12 million apartment on Fifth Avenue, are suing their upstairs neighbor, Guinness heiress Daphne Guinness.  Daphne is in the habit of leaving the water running in her bathtub. Four times now, her water has flooded Samii’s bathroom. They are “fearful of leaving their premises unattended,” says the $1 million lawsuit.

New York’s in awe today over NYPD officer Feris Jones. She was in a salon getting her hair done the other day when a young guy walked in waving a gun, announcing he was robbing the joint. Jones drew her police pistol, shot the gun out of the robber’s hand, then on a second shot smashed the lock on the door, locking it. The robber dove out the plate glass window, and  was caught a while later.

Sunday, Susan was deep into journalism at home, but I was getting restless after too many days indoors. So I went off to one of New York’s many available walking tours.  This one, run by “Adventures on a Shoestring,” promised, according to the notice in the Times, ‘haunted Midtown sites and the ghosts that are said to inhabit them.’

We met at 7^th Avenue and 58^th Street. Our leader was Howard Goldberg, the fellow in the light blue baseball cap, who said he’d been leading New York tours for 47 years, and was given to tossing out non sequitur one-liners such as: “Beware of tourists, they’re all around.”

We started at the Osborne Apartments, the very place, he said, where Gig Young in 1978, in Apartment 709, shot and killed his bride of three weeks and then himself. (Gig Young, for those who don’t recall was a dashingly handsome actor who specialized in playing the debonair best pal of leading men in romantic comedies. He did win an Oscar, though, in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They.”)

It was here that members of our group of 15 or so began asking Mr. Goldberg if Gig Young, or other subjects of his stories, still  haunted the place. Oh yes, absolutely, he said, without fear of contradiction.

A couple of blocks south, we found the Park Central Hotel. It was brand new in 1928 when Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who reputedly fixed the 1919 World Series, got his in Room 328.

It was also at the Park Central (then called the Park Sheraton) where another gangster Albert Anastasia (known as the mob’s ‘Lord High Executioner’) was in turn rubbed out by a couple of executioners while sitting in the barber’s chair at a shop in the hotel lobby. (No barber shop there now, though.)

After that, though, the  tales of bloody murder thinned out. We did learn that a Broadway McDonald’s once housed the original Lindy’s, and that a computer shop was previously the home of Jack Dempsey’s old joint.  An aerialist fell to his death in 1966 at the Palace Theater, also the place where Judy Garland performed her last show.  “West Side Story” is playing there now.

All these historical facts are absolutely guaranteed true.

Be careful at the barber shop,

Bob and Susan

Sept. 30,  2010

Hello all,

I’m just back from a long weekend trip to San Diego and Costa Mesa,  mainly to see grandkids David and Rachel,  their dad Andrew and mom Cynthia.

Had dinner with No. 1 son Peter in San Diego, saw a few of you for lunch (too few, alas), and stayed in the Mission Hills home of Cheryl Clark, where Bob Pincus and Valerie Scher came by to visit. We all had a delightful time.

Along the way,  saw a couple of copies of the new Union-Tribune, and was disappointed.  Well,  not exactly.  I didn’t expect much,  and there wasn’t much  to be seen.

It was in the L.A.  Times, though, that I saw sad news about one of my favorite New York sites.   It was a brief item,  but I caught up on the details after returning  to Brooklyn. In a couple past letters I’ve mentioned the Forbes Galleries,  and I’ve taken a few of you to see them when you’ve visited.  The Galleries, on lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village,  are a collection of toy boats and soldiers, hundreds and thousands of them,  displayed in elaborate,  wonderful dioramas, miniature historical ships and soldiers of all kinds and periods,  all  collected over many years by Malcolm Forbes, the late swashbuckler publisher.

The news is that the current  Forbes administration is selling the lot at Sotheby’s on Dec. 17.  A three-foot long model of the Lusitania is expected to go for up to $300,000 and a 1933 version of a Monopoly game for maybe  $80,000.

Personally,  I don’t see why this sale is necessary.   Total, it’s expected to bring in maybe $4 mil, a pittance to the Forbes empire.  And the space the display takes is only a few small rooms.   Still,  it’s one of the treasures of New York and it’ll be a shame to see it scattered and lost.  Alas.

Alas, also that the Anaheim Angels lost their game Sept. 25 to the Chicago White Sox. We had a sizeable delegation in the right field stands of  the Big A, including son Peter, his friend Mary, me, grandson David, granddaughter Rachel, son Andrew, and Cynthia, wonderful  Mom to David and Rachel. The kids got free Angels caps, and we all feasted on hot dogs, pretzels and Cracker Jacks.  We had a great time and hardly noticed the outcome of the game.

Once back to New York,  it was soon time to return to the MoMA. The coolest thing about being members is that we can go early to the blockbuster exhibits,  during the ‘members preview’ days and avoid mingling with the common riff-raff.  The newest show is the Abstract Expressionists,  the artists of the 1940s and 1950s who totally abandoned making pictures that look like anything recognizable at all.  Jackson  Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and that crowd.  To tell  the truth,  seeing it all didn’t take us too long. Call me a dunce, but I’ve never understood Pollock’s drip paintings.  Just don’t get it. What I did see, though, was that the Abstract Expressionists  broke away from the cliches of the past — and created new cliches of their own.  Blocks of color, stripes down the middle of blocks,  rectangles and squares, circles, too many experiments that escaped the old boxes only to walk boldly into new boxes of their own creation.

More interesting, actually,  was a smaller exhibit about the evolution of kitchen design in the 20^th Century. Here’s a photo of an experimental  economy stove.  There was also a compact kitchen designed as a modular unit to be installed complete in a house.  About 1920s vintage. Some fascinating stuff.  The exhibit should have been bigger.

From the MoMA, we rode the F train to Herald Square (one of my favorite places,  a crossroads like Times Square, but not so crowded or frantic).  A pretty good jazz quartet  was  playing on the sidewalk.

Oct. 7, 2010

Fall is settling in in New York.  The first couple of weeks were toasty and pleasant,  blessedly cooler than the pizza-oven heat of the summer. But now it’s tending toward chilly – 50s and 60s – with enough rain now and then to warn us that winter’s on the way.

One of the New Yorkier stories of the past few days ran in the Post under the headline NO BRAINER.  It seems that when Jesse Shipley, 15, was killed in a car crash in 2005 and subsequently buried,  a piece of him was left behind.  His brain. That was seen a few weeks later in a jar with his name on the label  — by several of his classmates on a field trip to the coroner’s office.  The kids freaked out.  A lot of shock and outrage all around,  Jesse was dug up and re-buried, this time with his brain, and his parents just got the legal go-ahead to sue the coroner and the city.

On a happier note,  the Daily News ran a nice shot  of Bruce Springsteen at a New Jersey beach with the just-engaged Ed Dwyer and Jennifer Smith.  Ed and Jennifer were posing for engagement pics when the Boss, walking barefoot on the beach, strolled up and offered congratulations,  and posed for a pic with the  couple.

The Times the  other day ran a tone-deaf , irresponsible story on a new trend in cycling in New York.  These are young professional women riding the city streets ‘in fluttery skirts, capes  and kitten heels.’  The story is accompanied by several pictures of women riding in skirts and heels — and all without helmets. Throughout,  the story marvels at these fashionistas and how they’ve ‘given the image of cyclists ‘an extreme makeover.’  You’ll  have to read deep, deep  into the story before anyone mentions that riding without a helmet,  particularly in a demolition derby like the streets of New York,  might possibly be a teeny bit dangerous.

Be careful out there,

Bob & Susan