ActionDirection

Lost in History vol. 83: MASSTRANSISCOPE MYSTERY REMATERIALIZES!

2009-10-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

Imagine you're a precocious, loudmouthed 10 year old, enamored with the city that you live in and its myriad mysteries. The never-ending speed of its citizens, the spray-painted scarred walls of the subway (this was in 1990 mind you), and the subway itself, with its electronic beeps and boops and its tunnel hugging, bridge chugging path from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Now imagine that in the middle of a routine trip to Grandma's apartment, taking the Q Diamond (RIP) from Ditmas Park, Flatbush to the Upper West Side (with a transfer at Herald Square to the D) all of a sudden there's a flash of light, a burst of imagination, and a brightly colored cartoon strip, coming out of nowhere, bursts onto the walls of a subway station that isn't even there. You're enamored, even though it last less than 30 seconds before it disappears and you're climbing the Manhattan Bridge towards the original burst of imagination that is New York City.
You're 10 years old, you just saw an awesome animated cartoon-strip thing while on the subway and then its over, and gone again. You look for it on next month's trip to Gramma's apartment, but its gone. You can't even remember which windows it showed up on - the left or the right side - or between which stops on the train. Years go by, you wonder if it ever really existed, or was just a catnap-powered dream while holding Mom's hand on the subway. A decade goes by and you can't even describe it successfully, further removing this phantom vision from the possibility of reality.
Well guess what Virginia. It existed, and exists again, and has a name. Its called the Masstransiscope and is the genius of an artist named Bill Brand. And last night, at the NY Transit Museum, Mr. Brand gave an enthralling lecture about the inspiration, creation, scientific explanation, destruction, and re-installation of one of the most whimsical, energetic, free pieces of public artwork in New York City. Free if you have an unlimited Metrocard, that is.
Bill Brand, an experimental filmmaker and archivist, as well as professor of Film and Photography at Hampshire College was just another young, creative soul in New York City during the deep dark 1970s and early 80s. He became enamored with cartoons at an early age (Woody Woodpecker with Walter Lantz) and how all films are "simply individual pictures that change from frame to frame". We're learning this as Mr. Brand lectures in the screening room of the NY Transit Museum, and hands out small pieces of 35 mm film, to explain the notion of how film works. Next up, a VHS tape, which Mr. Brand violently smashes against the corner of the podium, in order to rip up the tape and pass it over our heads in the audience. Then Mr. Brand kills all the lights and illuminates himself with a high-powered camera flash. We watch as the ghostly retina image of Bill hovers in the air for a second, then floats away - persistence of vision. Its all visceral, and slightly loopy, and does a good job of explaining early films, notably the zoetrope.
We go on learn how Mr. Brand approached Creative Time, the arts organization, with this wacky idea of installing a slow-motion stop-animation cartoon in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway stop on the (nowadays) B & Q trains. To his amazement, they were on board from the get-go. In order to create this interactive film projection, a 300 foot installation, kind of a narrow square hallway had to be installed on the platform of the disused station, with narrow vertical slits in the wall closest to the trains rushing by, and with the painted panels on the back wall. Silkscreened panels, 228 in all, with each one showing a different stage of the animation. Protective graffiti-proof sheer coverings on top of each painting (more on this later). Two vertical fluorescent bulbs framing each of the slits, to light the art as the subway rushes by. Installed and "opened" to the public in 1980, and lasted for 5 years. It looks likes this:

Then Mr. Brand had a family, moved away. Couldn't keep up the upkeep. "Public Funding for 'permanent art' in this country generally means five years" Mr Brand shrugged at us during the lecture. It briefly resurfaced for a few months in 1990, which is when I saw it on my way to Gramma's and it blew my mind. Again, covered in graffiti, vandalized, left for trash.
Until 2008, when construction work on Flatbush Avenue at Myrtle unlocked a gate in the sidewalk which lead to the Myrtle Avenue station, and direct access to the installation. With help from MTA Arts for Transit, and other organizations, including ShelterExpress/MetroClean which helped strip away the years of accumulated paint that coated the panels (but thanks to the sheer coverings, left the animated paint works largely intact), the Masstransiscope was reinstalled.
After Q&A with the artist, the audience of 40 left the museum as a group, and went on a "ride-by" the Masstransiscope. Present in the tour group, Thersea DeSalvio, the artist who painted the original pieces in 1980, and her daughter. Ms. DeSalvio had left the country in 1985, missed the resurfacing of the piece in 1990, and returned to live in NJ. Therefore she hadn't seen her own artist creation since it was first installed in 1980. What a trip! We boarded the R train at Lawrence, rode into Brooklyn one stop and transferred across the platform for a city-bound B. In no time at all we were watching (and applauding) the piece as we whizzed by it (at 7 mph). You too can check out the Masstransiscope. Just swipe your card on a Manhattan-bound B or Q train, sit tight, and wait for the dream to begin. It'll be on your right, after Dekalb Avenue station and before the bridge.

Photographs and Youtube video thanks to Masstransiscope website and artist Bill Brand.

Lost in History vol. 82: Long bike rides, useless Queens forts, suburban hoods & delicious foods.

2009-06-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

Every so often, one needs to forget the plans. drop the job, ignore the bills, get on a bicycle and ride off, into the horizon, like the superlative urban cowboy. No, not that type of urban cowboy, more like a two-wheeled adventurey explorer, armed with water bottle, bike map and camera, a little bit of spending cash and balanced atop a trusty steed, ready to take to the roads of eastern and suburban New York City. However, you'd be surprised how many friends found the notion of a long leisurely bike ride a no-go. My arguments fell on hungover ears.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/ny/massapequa/838124533226019113"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;iMapMyRide Jun 18, 2009 9:37 AM&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br/&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/find-ride/united-states/ny/massapequa"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Find more Bike Rides in Massapequa, New York&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;a
30 miles round trip, to the northern-eastern end of Queens and back!

No.
To see a historic Fort built during the Civil War but never used!
No.
Just us and bikes and the vast private driveways and detached houses of eastern Queens!
Leave me alone.

I almost had to roll by myself. Right up until t-minus one hour, when good buddy / food writer / avid cyclist Josh Bernstein decided to tag along. Noon o'clock hit and we were off!
We took a circuitous route, that started us zipping through subway-accessible 'nabes, like Ridgewood and Glendale (the M train); Forrest Hills Gardens (the G, R and V trains); and North Jamaica Hills (the F and E trains), which is where we found this awesome art deco power station, across from the Queens Hospital Center, on Goethals Blvd, related in name only to the Goethals Bridge, in Staten Island.
After North Jamaica Hills however, it was suburban Queens with generic hood names to the max. Before getting lost in the bland, we figured it was snack time - on the corner of Utopia Parkway and Hollis Court Blvd we charged into D'Alessandro's Meat Center, since 1957, for some protein based munchies, like sausage and cheese stuffed antipasto, and some fresh mozzarella balls in a spicy olive oil.
Finally upon reaching Fort Totten, we were a) amazed at the sheer size of the park and b) totally lost in trying to find the Visitors Center and historic fort at the center of it. All we could find was the FDNY training facilities, picnic grounds, decaying Victorian houses, and lots of construction cranes and fenced off areas. After asking a few locals we stumbled upon the Visitors Center, and, lo and behold, were a few short minutes from the next public tour! What luck!
Fort Totten was built as the Civil War was getting under way, (the very pleasant and dorky-cute NPS Ranger informed us) but midway through the War, rapid advancements in technology rendered the Fort completely unusable.
In 1862, after finishing 2 out of 5 walls to the (ultimately incomplete) Pentagon-shaped structure, the US Army field-tested a new type of cannonball. This pointed-tip rifle-shot projectile had a much better aim, and whats more, did tremendous damage to the interior of the Fort. Whereas a basic projectile would ricochet across the granite room, causing few dings but not much structural damage, this new rifled weapon lodged itself deep into the Fort and knocked whole chunks of masonry off the walls.
This test projectile, circa 1863, is still lodged deep into the walls of Fort Totten. This meant that if the Fort couldn't stand against one basic (massive) bullet, there's no way it would survive an artillery shelling, and the entire structure became totally obsolete as a defensive post. USA! USA! USA!
Once we were all swole up with national pride, it was time to stuff our stomachs. After getting a little lost and ending up in Douglaston (which is almost as far away from everything else in NYC as one can possibly get) we found a nifty little Deli with old school signs on the inside and outside. We got two massive heroes - a homemade Roast Beef and another homemade Roast Turkey, plus some North Carolina style slaw (apple cider vinegar!) chips, drinks, and custard.We found our way (after getting lost once or twice more) to Alley Pond Park, sat on a bench, and scarfed some serious hoagie. An unmitigated Sunday success, Josh and I biked our tired legs, full stomachs, and sun-scorched heads back to Brooklyn.

Lost in History vol. 81: Gin and Juice, Tacos y elotes, the El and Samosas; Food crawl in Jackson Heights

2009-06-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

The invitation was as straight-forward as it gets: Jackson Heights and Elmhurst have good food. We're bringing good booze. You bring good conversation, and some greenbacks, and we'll eat our way through some of the most ethnically diverse blocks in all of New York City. How could we possibly refuse?
Once we got to the Jackson Heights / Roosevelt Avenue subway stop and locked up our bikes, we found the crew lined up outside a taco cart parked right under the El. Frank, our tour guide and a Jackson Heights native - praised this particular cart's beef paunch, con picante. A few of us got puerco, some ventured for the callos (tripe), and some for the lengua de chivo (goat tongue). We knew that this wasn't going to be your basic meat-on-a-stick kind of noshing tour.
Our sturdy group of 13 included an Asian, a Kiwi, a handful of Hungarians (including Frank and his girlfriend Zsuzsi), a laid back California surfer-dude, a Wasps, two Jews (soon to be three) an Italian, two Polacks, and one who pleaded "non-denominational." But good eats and early summertime drunk knows no color lines; we were all excited for our cross-cultural conclave of creative crunch-and-munching across Queens.
Frank and Zsuzsi had thought ahead and brought a couple of thermoses filled with Pimms Cup, a delicious (and strong) gin-and-juice-based summertime refresher. With our Subway soda cups stocked with Pimms, we made our way under the 7 train to our next stop, an Ecuadorian ceviche truck, for camarones (shrimp,) chivo and callos (tripe). each served in a thick soupy takeout cup.
Jackson Heights is an extraordinary neighborhood for its confluence of ethnic types, as well as the number of train lines that service it. You have the good old International Express (the 7 train) which rumbles on old steel I-beams along Roosevelt Avenue from Times Square to its terminal in Flushing. It was built by the IRT in different segments from 1915-1928, and therefore it shares a designated number, along with the other IRT lines 1 through 6.
The IND lines of E, F, G, R and V all share the same track, and were built by the city in the mid-to-late 30s. This new mode of public transit allowed immigrants to flood into the newly established garden community of Jackson Heights. What started out as Irish and Italian eventually became Ecuadorian, Mexican, Indian, Bangladeshi, Tibetan, Korean, Malaysian, Bhutanese and Fillipino. Ergo, yummy. Onto the elotes cart! Frank brought us to a tiny shack under the El and bought us a bunch of elotes - thick grainy stalks of corn, slathered with mayo, queso, a spicy ground pepper and lime juice. It started to rain, and we huddled under a modern FroYo shop's awning, devouring our elotes. Que sabor!
We hauled eastward, into Elmhurst, for Malaysian-Chinese. This is where one of our intrepid Italians bought, halved, scooped and served up Durian fruit to the crowd. Durian is the noxiously smelling-of-rotten-milk-and-eggs type asian monstrosity of a fruit. Our party was split down the middle on the disgusting/engrossing taste of the Durian fruit, but there was no denying the rank odoriferous. On the other hand, the Malasian takeout at Good Taste Malaysian Chinese was exquisite and yumtastic. Our third Jew arrived, in the form of BFU Will Meyer.
Back to Jackson Heights! There was more to eat! Samosas! Sammy's Famous Street Meat (being fought over here, in the concrete triangle, between yours truly and Mr. Aaden Stern.) Tibetan Momos (beef, chicken and veggies steamed dumplings,) and sticky Indian honey dessert! Our man Frank could do no wrong!It wasn't until we got to the Korean Fried Chicken takeout spot, complete with its own quirky mascot (shown here with Kate McCooliak) that we shouted, Enough! Enough! Too much deliciousness, Frank, let us roll home on our fat bellies! It had been 5 hours of wandering Jackson Heights, and enjoying no fewer than 9 different food stuffs from 7 different countries, found on 3 different continents, all under the El of the 7.
We love Queens! And Frank! (FYI, he's also available for private tours.)

Lost in History vol. 80: A Very HALy Memorial at the City Reliquary

2009-04-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

Hal was a coyote. Possibly the most famous coyote to scamper the grounds of Central Park, score cover shots on both the Post and the Daily News, and pass from these terrestrial plains in two days' time; Hal had snuck his way into our hearts. Named after the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, where he was discovered on March 20th 2006, Hal enjoyed a short but exciting hustle before the NYPD shot him with a tranquilizer dart and ended his adventurous romp. While en route to the New York Zoo in the Bronx, Hal passed away unceremoniously, due to complications of heart worms and the digesting of a poisoned rat. So ended the saga of Hal . . .
. . . until a few Sundays ago when Brooklyn-based artist Dillon de Give hosted a memorial to this fallen figure of mystery. Dillon got it into his head that Hal never saw a proper send-off, and intended to do so with help from his friends at the City Reliquary. Dillon's intention was to create a reciprocal human trip by recreating Hal's 60-some-odd mile journey, from upstate New York to Central Park, but backwards, starting here and ending there. Dillon also planned on leaving impromptu memorials to Hal along the way. He wanted a proper send-off for his own journey, and we sent out the word and got a few speakers together for a late-afternoon lecture in our rotating exhibit gallery.
Audience members enjoyed Wile E Coyote cartoons and mingled around while waiting for the event to start. Dillon went first, explaining his childhood association with coyotes, growing up in New Mexico where there are a helluva lot of them, as opposed to here in NYC. He spoke about the evolution of the coyote and their predilection for living with humans as scavengers, much like pigeons, how the two are almost spirit animals, surviving on the cast-offs of us. We watched some live coyote footage and enjoyed the explanation for Dillon's impending journey.
I went next, explaining how Central Park was the first man-made creation of nature in the world to resemble nature itself. Prior to Central Park, parks in the world looked as if they were designed by humans - the National Mall in DC is a giant rectangle, with all the trees in a straight line, all the landscaping done very consciously. Ditto Versailles in Paris, but to the nth degree. With Central Park, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux had the opportunity to make a obviously landscaped park in the middle of the most urbanized city to date, but they went the opposite direction, hiding the city from the park-goers.
Following the Central Park talk we had a sculptural artist, Nao Matsumoto show a slide of his sculpture hanging in the Pratt Sculpture Gardens in Brooklyn, and discuss the mythology of Wile E Coyote and the never-ending chase for the Roadrunner. It was completely impromptu, as Nao had just been contacted the day before the lecture and wasn't sure if he was going to make it. Nevertheless, his talk was brief and beautiful, discussing the experience of soul-searching and always hunting, and allowing the process of the hunt to be part of the discovery.
After Nao, Kay Turer, Resident Folklorist of the Brooklyn Arts Council spoke about the coyote as trickster in Native American folklore. "Coyote went along" was her gift to Dillon, in which she explained that at the start of every tale, these magical talismanic words impart the knowledge that Coyote the explorer, Coyote the adventurer, Coyote the unknown will always go "along" in his ways, no matter what obstacles or interruptions he might face.
Following the speakers our collected group of 60 audience members went to our spacious backyard and participated in a group howl, for all the dogs and coyotes of Williamsburg to share in. It was a wonderful event, and Dillon de Give took off the next morning on his 66 mile journey. We miss you Hal!

Lost in History vol. 79: A Fowl Affair

2009-03-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

Our neighbor, Shai Kessler, happens to be a highly accomplished chef, having worked for such NYC institutions like Bloomingdales as well as hotshot new restaurants like Dovetail on the Upper West Side. Regardless, we are all busy New Yorkers and hardly ever get to sit around and appreciate the man's talent for cookery. Its not like we want to give tours to our friends on our days off, and he sure as hell isn't interested in cooking for neighbors and hangers on.
But when his roommates, Thomas & Samantha, a wonderful married couple from Tennessee had their fancy digital SLR camera stolen from them, off Sam's neck, while they were asleep on the L train on Christmas Eve! . . . Shai decided to do something about it. He did the thing he's best at - get friends and neighbors together for a homecooked meal / benefit to help the kids buy a replacement camera. That's how we found a quirky invitation with a plump bird slapped up top slipped under our door.
We put on our fancy dinner jacket and slippers, walked the 20 feet down the hall with a bottle of organic red and the requested $20 donation in hand, and joined a raucous party in progress. We also did our part in party production by donating our banquet table and most of our chairs. We nibbled on olives and introductions before the first course, a sumptuous Roasted Quail in a sherry reduction augmented by a tart lentil salad.
The benefit seemed on the successful side, as had any more than 20 arrived, there'd be no place to put their butts or wine glasses. Two couches, a flight of stairs, three tables, seven chairs and various flat surfaces were all quite accommodating, and plates of food were being balanced on bookshelves, countertops, hands, laps and the aforementioned banquet table. Sam and Thomas (pictured above left and right) made a speech that brought a few to wipe their moist eyes. More wine!
Second course was a delightful Coq Au Vin, surrounded in a pomme puree and augmented by wilted winter greens. As the various party people (and Josh, above,) can attest, the dishes were basically licked clean by slightly tipsy revelers.
With dessert - a scrumptious Cardamom Flan encircled by a Rose Petal sauce - came the post-prandial Ports and Sherrys, as well as a rousing game or three of Apples to Apples, the best party card game in the world. After hysterical comparisons and more wine, port and sherry (but no more food - we all had our fill) it was time to head home. We, in the most delicious food and wine induced coma, thanked our fortunes to know such good people who have such good taste.

Shai is already planning future dinner parties and benefits - if so inclined, shoot us a line and we'll gladly put you in touch with this DIY chef superstar.

Lost in Philly vol 78: Twentyfour hours of Philidelphia, Beer, and Boys will be Boys

2009-03-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

Josh the freelance journalist sent out the first email. "Yo. Goin' to Philly for their Beer Fest. Who wants to come along? Wheee!" Josh has a preternatural tendency to tap into excellent food and drink adventures, which makes him a natural when exploring the outer boroughs of our own city. The deal only got sweeter when Josh scored a free hotel room as well as a 2 free passes for the opening night's event. One for him and one for me! Wheee! Off to Philly for me! I invited Jonah for the beertivities.
Josh and Aaron Wilson (known as Wilson) had bused down earlier that Friday, so when Jonah and I arrived at 4pm sharp, Wilson and Josh had been wandering and drinking. We parked the Eggplant Xpress, made our way to the bar, and gulped down the first of many a beer. I started with a Marzen, a heavy, malty 6.8% whopper of a beer, auspiciously heralding my arrival in this beer-mad city.
Countless dorm rooms are plastered with the wonderful Benjy Franklin (mis)quote "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." How trite, yet how true. Just like Brooklyn's Brewers Row in today's East Williamsburg / Bushwick, Philadelphia had its own hood, Brewerytown, in the northwestern part of the city. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, Philly boasted more than 90s breweries in the city itself, with another 100+ in the metropolitan region. However, the one-two punch of post WWI anti-German sentiment, followed by Prohibition shuttered most of these industries for good, in both Philly and BK.
But just like Brooklyn, Philly has seen a beer resurgence, with dozens of breweries and brewpubs reopening and jumpstarting the microbrew revolution with delicious results. The Philly Beer Week, now celebrating its 2nd year, is a 10-day festival spread out over over 50 bars with hundreds of events and thousands of pints poured into thirsty maws. None of us could spend more than 24 hours celebrating, so we got straight to liquid business.
After the first pub, after the hotel check-in, we set off on a bar bounce. But its not all booze and blues - many bars and breweries offer feel-good reasons to drink. Our next bar gimmick, called "Save a kitten, drink a fish!" was in donating all dollars spent on Flying Fish beer to an animal rescue fund. Following bar #2 was Bob & Barbara's Lounge, where every square inch was dedicated to PBR paraphernalia and ads from as far back as the 40s.
Then, it was a quick cab ride to the Comcast center and the Opening Tap event. Over 50 brewers offering 2 to 3 different samples of their luscious, liquidy wares. Each participant was handed a 6 ounce plastic tumbler in which to taste the beers, but with one entry ticket each, we could sample as many beers as we wanted. And lord, did we sample!
Following the opening tap, two more Brooklyn Boys - Aaron #2 and Ben Haas were waiting to meet. We found them, surprise surprise, in another bar. So we joined them for beers (hoppy, spicy) and charged onwards, to more bars for more beers. At some point a cheesesteak was devoured. At another point, a strip club was entered. Sadly, Philly shuts down for the night at 2am and our gang all passed out, a day well drunk.
The next morning was a little painful, so we decided, rather spectacularly, to head to Johnny Brenda's in the north end of Philly, for an authentic Port Brunch, in which we had over a dozen microbrewed ports to choose from.
Naturally, we tried them all. A wise decision.
Following our port brunch, we marauded our way across town in the brilliant Philly haze and sunshiney smog, enjoying the resurgent industrial neighborhoods.
Somehow, through blind, drunk historical luck, we stumbled upon a historical marker declaring the very first Lager brewed in America! To celebrate, we went to the bar.
And then another one. And then . . . it was time to leave this magical world of hefeweisens and hopbacks, of IPAs and Bells for Boobs (Bells Brewery which donated proceeds to breast cancer research) in which our drinking would certainly save the world. Maybe not our livers . . . but who needs them?!? Philly, we love you and we'll be back! As soon as our throbbing headache goes away . . . More than enough pictures of our adventures can be found here, here, and here!

Lost in History vol. 77: 3way Bro-date Bike ride to Flushing; Farewell Shea Stadium.

2009-02-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

Every forecast we checked promised a perfect weather weekend, considering this was still February. Saturday's bright sunshine, clear blue skies, slight breeze and mid-to-high-50s meant one thing: bicycling! And where better to ride our trusty two wheelers to, but a far-off land of outer-borough exoticism and tongue-numbing food, Flushing! Rounding out the adventure team were our buddies Josh Bernstein, food writer extraordinaire, and Jean Barberis, a dapper and delightful Frenchman of extraordinary abilities.
First Josh biked from his place in Crown Heights to mine in Bushwick, a total of 3.5 miles. Together, Josh and I then hustled up to Jean's pad in Woodside, another 4.3 miles. Once we pickedup the Frenchman, we all boogied our way to Flushing, tallying another 4.5 miles, but we got turned around in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and ended up in the Queens Botanical Garden before hitting the magical land of East Asian delicacies along Main street, Queens, USA.
Flushing started out its lengthy history as a Dutch trading village called Vlissingen. Always a center for ethnic diversity and religious tolerance, proved as such way back in 1657 with the Flushing Remonstrance, which allowed Quakers and others to worship freely, against the wishes of the New Netherlands Governor (and mean son-of-a-bitch) Peter Stuyvesant. The Remonstrance is widely considered a birthplace of religious freedom in the new world.
A few hundred years have gone by since, and the diversity (both ethnic and religious - there are over 200 houses of worship within 2.5 sq miles!) of Flushing pulses up and down the streets. Before Flushing became NY's largest Chinatown, it was mostly Italian and Greek. They left during Great White Flight in the 70s, and the immigrants from SE Asia started pouring in. Nowadays Flushing is crammed with Koreans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians, and Chinese from the Sichuan, Fujian and Hunan provinces.
Our aim was the Flushing Mall on 39th avenue. On our way in, we were greeted by a very friendly Chinese dragon, a remnant from the Year of the Ox celebration last weekend. The Flushing Mall is a split-level, split-personality spot, with clothing stores, tailors and two small cafes on the ground floor surrounded by plain decor and uninspired mall decor. Turn a corner and go down some stairs and one enters a subterranean food court and electronics shops surrounded by multi-colored flooring and walls, with a space-age modern Asian design scheme. We went ground level for Korean-Chinese dumplings, and underground for spicy Dandan noodles, spicy hot and sour soup with rice noodles and lamb, and spicy fried chicken over sticky rice with salad. Needles to say, we weren't in it for the bland or boring. Everything was cheap, delicious, and spicy, but unfortunately not the face-melting-off spicy we were looking for, just the caught-in-the-back-of-the-throat-type-cough spicy. Next time . . .
Filled to the gills with szechuan foods and fantastically happy, we went two separate ways - Josh for some food shopping and Jean and I towards the Queens Museum. En route we passed the almost-entirely-gone Shea stadium, formerly home to the NY Mets, the lovable/hateable underdogs of MLB's National League. Its not that they suck, the way the Knicks suck, its that they try really hard but never make it to the finals. (Don't ask me, I don't do sports.) However, I DO do NY's iconography, and the vision of the classic Shea Stadium, all but its Western Wall pulled down to make way for a parking lot for the new Citi Field (which should be named the Citi / Taxpayer Field, but don't get us started) was heavy on the heart.
Off to the QMA, for short films on Queens and a Q&A at the QMA with the filmmakers. Following, we had a fantastic bike ride back to Bushwick, (6 miles), first stopping & dropping Jean in Woodside. Magical, marvelous mouthfuls of Queens on a beautiful bizarrely blue-sky Saturday in February should be on everybody's life list. Next up, the Bronx!

FREEZING in History vol. 44: Inauguration Vacation (and so much more)!!!

2009-01-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

It had been quite the 3 week jaunt. First up, the American Bus Association Marketplace, held this year in Charlotte, NC. A full week of schmoozing, boozing, bad luncheon eating, business card swapping, small talk with big people from all over America & Canada, and the slow but sad realization that Charlotte, although pretty and pleasant, is as dull as its former cotton fields turned into financial skyscrapers. Although Gideon and I did come across the World's Largest Duncan Phyfe Chair, in Thomasville, NC.
That, and we took a few spins around the NASCAR racetrack.
Nextup, Gid goes to Miami and Matt makes a lovely little visit to old college friends in Athens, GA. Indie rock noise and beer before noon, Golden Corral Buffets and lots and lots of coffee. Scott, small-time author and music-romantic drove me around Athens on a personalized tour of the old stomping grounds of Elephant 6. E6 was a legendary lo-fi recording collective who's members made the greatest indie-pop album of all time, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea among other albums by other bands including Elf Power, Olivia Tremor Control and Of Montreal. Drove like a maniac across South Carolina, stopping to visit the World's Largest Fire Hydrant;
as well as check out fragments of an Atom Bomb that was accidentally dropped on Mars Bluff, SC in 1932.
Picked up the girlfriend in Wilmington, NC and headed to the Outer Banks to meet her entire family as well as consume outrageous amounts of oysters at Aunt Susan & Uncle Richard's yearly OYSTER FEST!! Everything good was here: hand-built stove, five bushels of the aphrodisiac, chowder, beer, wine, salad, more food, good vibes, great music and homegrown people. Our Brooklyn 'tude went great with the gf's fam and so on so forth. We'll be back for more oysters. Until then, these pictures will have to do.
However all these personal and familial experiences can't compete with the events in our Nation's Capital on January 20th, every four years (give or take). After the oysters (and after a pitstop for BBQ with the GF's Dadster in northern NC) we went to DC for the crowning of President Obama. With our HQ in McLean, VA - 6 miles from the Capital; a sturdy group of 5, prepared for everything including the bone-shivering chills we told the Inauguration to bring it on; crack a dawn; with our friend Pokemon; bring it on!
Wokeup 3:30am on the 20th. Layered up like it was Himalaya-stompin time. Piled into the minivan (muchas gracias Mama Goldblatt, la princessa de McLean y mi corazon!) and jumped out on the side of the highway, west of the Potomac and the Great Mall.Walked a mile over the bridge and towards the Lincoln memorial, then past it, past the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Memorial, onto the Mall itself.
Closer and closer to the Capital building. Close enough to see the thing, but far enough away to need the jumbotron positioned right over our patriotic heads. And we waited.
And waited. And shivered. And puppy-piled. And used up all our hand- and foot-warmers. And shuddered. And watched the sun rise. And chillied.
And watched the concert from the day before. And tried to think about anything other than the toes-numbing, nose-running, skin-burning, finger-churning, soul-stabbing cold. And finally, finally, the party started. And the energy rose. The flags waves, the voices shouted out, the chants tumbled in their polysyllabic glory OH- BAM- AH! OH- BAM- AH! We saw Hillary, we cheered a bunch. There was W, and we politely kept out bad-ass mouths shut. But nothing compared with the man of the hour, our confidant and commander, our superhero and superstar, Mr. Personality himself, the 44th Prez of the U. S. of A. We holla'd for the world to hear, which they promptly did, and holla'd right back. It was glory itself. You shoulda been there. If you were, good job. If not, our pictures are here.
We wont recount the hellhole of trying to escape the streets of DC, of taking 3 hours to walk 2 miles because of the seething mass of humanity all trying to do the same thing, namely, get the hell outta there. We didn't take any pictures of the aftermath because we were trying to forget it even as it was happening. Lets all just remember the moment of magic: that hand on Lincoln's bible, that calm and steadfast demeanor, that hopeful upward glance towards a brighter future. And lets hope he gets to work quickly.

Lost in the ArtChurch vol. 1: Awakenings, Asleepenings, Adreamenings, Aschemenings

2008-12-04T14:25:00.000-08:00

A few weekends back, we attended the sanctification of an an antinomian church, located deep along the border between Bushwick and Ridgewood. We'd been to the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope before & had participated and written about the experience and art-exorcism of Gordon Matta-Clark. So we were excited about returning and reviewing the latest event slash artattack to take place far away from the well-trod artist paths of Williamsburg and the LES. The Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope (for simplicity's sake, CCSH) is a former storefront-turned-Latino-Roman-Catholic-church-turned-vacant-room-turned-artist-haunt-slash-performance-space, run by three friends of ours: Matthew Blair, Lech Szporer and Andrew Wingert.
The playbill promised a lot: performances, photography, hot liquored drinks, theater, mime, noise band, and possibly the sacrificing of a live chicken named Lucy. When we arrived at the CCSH we were impressed by the full house of young creative peoples jamming the floor, drinking hot toddies and exploring the decor, which included: tree branches rising out of dirt mounds on the wooden floor; two enormous church pews built on risers facing the stage; a ceiling-suspended rope web large enough to climb into, laden with dangling church organ pipes; candles spinning on a Victrola player; vintage radio microphones and more. The carefully constructed aesthetic of slow but beautiful decay contributed to the atmosphere.

Someone in the audience shouted "Cold as hell tonight" and the burbling laughter belied the fact that CCSH is a church, but instead of religion, it offers experience. The experience, like regular churches, is to pull the church-goers out of their expected levels of comfort, to shift their mode of intake and let that shift permeate other processes of life. To enter the building one way and leave changed. Such is the process of Artaudian theater, named after the great pervert of French theatrical aesthetics, Antonin Artaud. Not an easy accomplishment, especially with today's jaded and ironic youth. However it wasn't for CCSH's want of trying.
The opening act consisted of a not-quite-goth girl playing some plaintive songs on guitar, with good intention. Following the music, Becky the Burlesque performer as Neurotic Jewish Mother Necrophiliac. The stand-up routine that followed would've given Woody Allen a hard-on and material for his analyst. The act subsited of both a comic monologue and a live example of teabagging corpses set to Celine Dion. Subtlety it wasn't, and life-shifting it absolutely aint. Then the third act.

A stocky, not unattractive but not particularly engaging actress in a blond wig took the stage and started to do a Tammy Faye Bakker self-help shtick. The southern accent, the "Yes, you can do it too!" power attitude, the 80s music, all of it, a little tiring and expected. Until she stripped down naked in the middle of this unheated church, and proceeded to give a hygiene and sex-ed course on the proper way to insert objects into one's anus and vagina. It was astonishing - by the gaping mouths and wide-eyed shock it seemed that no-one in the audience had seen anything like it. The performer, Ann Liv Young, was using her own splayed legs as the easel and her cunt and asshole as the anatomy chart. Eventually Ms. Young got up, butt-ass naked and all, and thrashed her way around the church, grinding against audience members as 80s house music thumped. Her aggressively sexual dance piece would have been at place in a megaclub in Chelsea, but performed by a naked woman in a blond wig in the middle of an Art-Awakening truly blew this church-goers mind.
Then Lucy the chicken came into the picture. Lucy was supposedly due to meet the chopping block right on the floor of CCSH, but an unnamed woman in tears (who according to Mr. Blair, wasnt part of the show) rushed the stage and made a plea to spare the chicken's life. Another shifting moment, bringing an audience member to interrupt the show. Lucy, along with Ann-Liv Young eventually escaped, courtesy of Ms. Young, her videographer Michael, and a getaway car waiting outside.

The next act started when an argument exploded between two audience members, who moved down to the central staging area and expounded, in Shakespearean English, the accurate process to live a passionate life. It was entertaining, if a bit too pretentious. My lady and I liked the part where both gentlemen chomped down on raw cow heart, only at the insistence of each other. After the argument, it started to rain inside the church, and a group photograph was called for, so the crowd reassembled themselves outside and all posed, shiveringly.

There was still the noise band and mimery to follow the intermission, but we had experienced enough moments of suspended comfort, and besides, I had worked all day while fighting a cold. It was a fast, long walk to our apartment where a warm bed and hot tea were waiting to soothe our souls. Following burlesque necrohiliac stand-up and naked lessons in sexual physionomy, after the almost-slaughter of a chicken and consumed raw cow hearts, tea and sleep will do just fine.

Lost in History vol. 76: Hindenburg Tour: The Humanity, the History, the Joisey Diner.

2008-11-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

34 seconds. That's all it took for the Hindenburg, the greatest airship in the history of Hydrogen-fueled aviation to explode into flame, sink to the ground and change the world. 34 seconds from the first fire on the tail to the epic crash-landing. What's more, it all happened next door - at the Lakehurst, New Jersey Naval Airforce Station, about 90 minutes from NYC. The good volunteers at the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society provides tours free of charge to interested citizens, only on the second Saturday of the month, only at 9:30 in the morning, and only if all attendees provide their home address and social security numbers two weeks in advance. It is an active Naval Airbase after all.
We couldn't possibly pass up such a geek-a-licious historical adventure, even if, two weekends ago, it was pissing rain like Heaven's plumbing had gone haywire. Off to Joisey! Three cars from three different parts of Brooklyn took off for Lakehurst - the Levy boys plus Alisa car; the Eggplant Xpress carrying yours truly, friends Josh & Jenene, and yours' trulys' lovely new girlfriend Emily; and the roommate car with Steve and GF Zan. After swimming our way south on the Garden State Pkway we arrived at the Airbase and on our way into disaster-history!
The Hindenburg was built between 1931 and 1936 in Friedrichshafen, Germany. 803.8 feet long and 135.1 feet wide in diameter - which is roughly the length of an 80 story building. When fully inflated, she carried approx. 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen in 16 separate cells; this allowed for easier inflation. The German government paid for the Hindenburg's construction; therefore, enormous swastikas painted onto her tail and fin. Her cabins included a piano room, a reading room, a dining room and a smoking room (which utilized pressurized gases, neutralizing the hydrogen.) Her trip to the States on May 6th, 1937 was the first of 10 scheduled trips kicking off the '37 airship season.
Our guide, a well informed volunteer and former navy man Donald Adams, led our caravan onto the wide open field where the Hindenburg went down; we approached a somber airship-shaped memorial complete with historical bronze plaque. There was also a rough hand-painted little Hindenburg on a post, flapping in the tough winds. Donald gave us hard facts - the Hindenburg hovered approx 300 feet in the air, mooring lines out and down and waiting for mooring. This was when (most reports claim) the static electricity in the atmosphere (or a lightning strike) coupled with the wet weather made a deadly combo for the airship, which was venting hydrogen in order to land. Oxygen + Hydrogen = extremely combustible; within 34 seconds, it was all over.
We also learned that the legendary Oh the Humanity! newscast with Herbert Morrison was recorded at a slightly slower speed, so in the sped-up real-time version, his naturally sonorous voice seems high-pitched & charged with extra emotion. What's more, the newsreel wasn't broadcast until the next day out of Chicago, and no-one heard it live unless they were present at the crash. Out of 36 passengers and 61 crew, 13 passengers and 22 crew members died, plus one ground crewman. Two survivors are still alive, including then-14-year-old cabin boy Werner Franz.
Following a lot of snapshots, we made our way into the hangar and airship museum. Along with scale models of the Hindenburg there were relics and pieces from the wreckage. We bought some souvenirs (Hindenburg coffee mug! Naval Air force Base jacket patch!) and made our way into the hangar, large enough to fit two Hindenburg airships side-by-side with 12 feet of clearance. This double-airship hangar is the largest in the country and one of only two in the world. Hidden within the hangar was another museum, filled with model airplanes, ships and jets as well as walls upon walls of Navy, Air force and Army patches, all of which were supremely awesome.
All of this disaster and naval history and air force patches and old men flying model airplanes made us pretty hungry, so off to a Joisey diner we went! Although most of us had our hearts set on a classic stainless steel, Formica counter, burgers / grilled cheese / meatloaf style joint, but instead we settled at a quaint, cute little cafe in downtown Lakehurst. Good food, but the attitude and atmosphere was top notch thanks to the owner, a former local Bronx boy (he and Dad Levy both attended the same high school!) After some homemade ice cream from the parlor next door, we piled back into our vehicles and called it a historical disastery day.

Lost in History vows 5: the Wedding Blitz. Ben Inwood & Erin Bublitz, West Point NY, Oct 12th

2008-10-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

For those of you who weren't previous aware, Matt Levy had been issued a challenge: 6 weddings in 6 consecutive weekends. In 4 different states, in 2 different times zones (east & west coasts.) We've already detailed the joys and thrills of the first 4 weddings here. We now bring you part 5 in this 6 part series.

Wedding Number Five: Benjamin Inwood & Erin Bublitz, West Point NY, Oct. 12th.
It was a wonderful Sunday for a Wedding. Saturday had been busy: biking around Farmingdale NY with good pals and total strangers in search of cemetaries, oktoberfests, and accidentally, a super skanky stripclub. But Sunday is the Lord's day and I was booking it up the Hudson River Parkway in the trusty Eggplant Xpress, my 2-week old 1998 Hyundai Elantra Stationwagon. West Point in October is beautiful and oozes propriety as the premier Military Academy on the Eastern Seabord. I park Eggy, grab the camera and head to the Hotel. The ceremony's running late, which is good because i was slightly rushing.
Benjamin Inwood, aka Ben-wah, was my best friend in highschool. We lived a few blocks from each other, and for a good two years we were inseparable, although as different as rose gardens and cement mixers. Ben was the conservative, I was the whack-job. His folks still call me Rusty after my traffic-cone-orange early-junior-year hair. Our first travel adventure was a 20-day Greyhound cross-country road trip in the summer '98, between high school and college.
Ben went to college in Alaska; this is where he met his beautiful bride Erin. I went to the final frontier to visit Ben twice. The first trip was due to a bet I lost when, in Junior year, I loudly proclaimed to all our friends there was no way Ben would go to college in Alaska! Up I went, in January '99. The second visit occured in June '02 and came of the need to drive his car and unwanted stuff from Alaska to Brooklyn. 9 days, 10 hours of driving each day, me and Ben-wah. After the AK > BK road trip Ben and I fell out of touch; the last we spoke was his older sister's wedding party two years back. Between the two road trips Ben and Erin moved to Anchorage and had a child. Knowing my far-away best friend was a Dad at 22 was a shocker, but last I saw the kid, in '02, he was brand new and not speaking yet.
He looked good. Pleased and surprised to see me. Much stockier than in the past, but it looked good, solid, like he was a real man ready for his family's future; moving into all those scary adult stages. The wedding was outdoors on the Hudson, and the ceremony, as well as the festivities to follow, were the most conservatively Jewish wedding yet attended. There was the chuppah (the canopy under which the bride and groom stand,) the smashing of the wine glass, and yarmulkes on everyone's head. Nothing in Hebrew or Yiddish, but a heavily mystic Jewishness pervaded the whole day, much to everyone's delight. Especially the massive bowl of jumbo cocktail shrimp. Definitely delightful.
The ceremony was short and sweet, the party slightly longer and better tasting. Ben's darling family, like my own surrogate fam, the most marvelous surrogate family a Brooklyn boy could have. There was dancing, mostly haphazard. And the groom & bride did NOT want to go up on the chairs. However, without a doubt, Ari took the spotlight. A fine looking little man in a dapper suit, he walked with Ben and Erin down the aisle and stood underneath their clasped hands. He walked them back to the hall after the ceremony, and as Ben and Erin took their first dance, he yelled ME TOO! and jumped into their arms. That kid's going to be a real mensch someday.
After taking my fill; after chatting it up with Oren and Truzman - Brooklyn boys of my child- and teen-age years; after unsuccessfully trying to flirt it up with each of my boys' platonic dates; after Mediterranean salads and a take-home tin full of cocktail jumbo shrimp (which made their way into a pesto for that evening's date); after delivering the gifts (Ben, Erin & Ari live in Shaker Heights, Ohio, so this former New Yorker & his fam get: an NYC Subway Curtain Shower Map, two subway oven mitts, and a pair of subway socks for Ari); after hugs, kisses and misses with the Inwood clan, after complements paid to the bride & her family; and after much soul-searching and private joke-making with the mighty Ben-wah; after all those activities it was time to get back in the Eggplant and bring it all home. The rest of the pics are here.

Lost in the World's Fairgrounds vol. 75

2008-10-06T19:09:00.001-07:00

This past weekend was the 6th annual Open House New York (OHNY), the city's ginormously adventurous exploration of the insides of often-closed structures throughout all five boroughs. OHNY covers many bases for many peoples - from the antiquatedly awesome Highbridge Water Tower; to the luxuriously lethargic Sutton Place apartment tour. From the industrial subterranean Substation #22 in Crown Heights to the open all the time yupster pedestrian Brooklyn Academy of Music building. OHNY is cool shit. CAVEAT! There are tricks of the trade to tackling OHNY. First off - avoid downtown and midtown Manhattan at all costs. Due to the architectural and explorable density of the island, most of the tours/reserved sites are chock-a-block fullup weeks in advance; for those open houses with no reserve, lines get interminably long. Also the insufferable haughtiness of seen it all New Yorkers in their prime habitat - a genuinely cool thing they haven't seen before but play it off like Clara Bow past her prime.
HOWEVER it is possible to enjoy the fruits of OHNY. First and most critical: get far away from the expected spots. Leave Ft. Greene and Astoria to the birds and hipsters. The outer rings of the outer boroughs is fab. Second: own a car (!!!!!) which can take you to said outer rings of outer boroughs. Third: don't make plans with people who get lost on the subway (thank you Larissa!) and take 3 hours to get from Brooklyn to Brooklyn via Manhattan, which would cause you to miss a geektastical walking tour of a neighborhood most New Yorkers would have trouble finding on a subway map. Fourth: Be flexible. With all those points in mind, aforementioned late friend Larissa and I zipped over to Flushing Meadows Corona Park IN MY NEW CAR!!!!! for a walking tour of the Worlds Fairgrounds, inside and around the Queens Museum of Art.
John Kriskiewicz, a visually and audibly excited architectural historian led a group of 40+ for two marvelous hours in the historical shadow of the two Worlds Fairs - 1939-40 & 1964-65. We started inside the QMA's theater and enjoyed a slideshow filled with images and wonders of the two fairs, but focusing mostly on the second one, the first Billion Dollar Fair and the last Great World's Fair. John asked us all to "look back and remember the future" in a tone half reverential and half good-naturedly cynical. The Worlds Fair 64-65 straddled two very different epochs - planning started in 1958, Eisenhower's America, highways and suburbanization. Robert Moses (boo! hiss!) came on board in 60, and nothing was left to decide by 62, so by the time the Fair opened, it was already behind the times. By the mid-60s America was dealing with civil rights, flower power, Vietnam and disillusionment. From consensus to conflict, and the World's Fair split these two eras.
From the neato slideshow we went out into the park to marvel at the always magnificent Unisphere. 13 stories tall, 700,000 lbs, the world's largest global structure and built out of stainless steel by US Steel, it is the only remnant of the World's Fair that is landmarked by the NYC Landmarks Preservations Committee. The three rings that orbit the Unisphere are supposed to represent the first two men in orbit - Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn and the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar. This giant hunk of metal had always intended to be permanent, while the rest of the Fair was temporary.
As John walked us on top of some etched-in-granite murals depicting various scenes from the Worlds Fairs around the globe, he pointed out the importance of the Worlds Fair to the people of America, especially as it opened six months after JFK's assassination. It brought people together to celebrate and enjoy themselves, just as the technology of entertainment (movies, t.v.) separated and privatized people from others. The reason we don't have Worlds Fairs anymore is that with flight, and eventually internet, we can visit the world on our own, and hardly need the world to come to us.
Other points of interest included the exterior of the Queens Hall of Science, designed by Wallace Harrison, in an ethereal style that reminds one of mitosis, undulating forms and shapes inside our bodies; a geodesic dome leftover from the Fair that is now the Queens' Zoo's Aviary; the Port Authority building, a ghastly T-shaped monstrosity now home to a banquet hall; an original Carousel from the Fair, still in use and hardly known by its users to be vintage from Coney Island, circa the early 20th century; and the crumbling NY State Pavilion buildings, designed by Phillip Johnson, massive urban detritus that once stood for utopian visions of tomorrow. All in all a simply spectacular tour, led by a passionate man with a personal connection - Mr. Kriskiewicz showed a slide of a chubby youngster at the Fair. The best part about this Open House? The bright sun, the cool breeze, the laughing children and the tangible history.

Lost in History vows 1-4: the Wedding Blitz

2008-09-23T09:05:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't been up to speed with the stories and subjects of my whirlwind life, there's a whole lotta marriage going on. From the middle of September to the middle of October I have been invited to, and plan on attending, 6 weddings over 6 consecutive weekends, taking place in 4 different states - NJ, NY, CA & MA. The last wedding I attended was a long time ago, possibly 6 or 8 years back. And now we have 6 weddings in 6 weekends. When it rains, it absolutely deluges. Some of my friends have remarked that this must be a sign of growing up; some have mentioned that maybe I might hear the jangling of bells in my own immediate future (not just yet, thankyouverymuch); some have exquisitely pointed out that I should be getting very drunk and hopefully very laid over 6 separate wedding weekends; and to quote my darling brother Gideon: "Wow. 6 weddings in 6 weekends. 30's coming up soon, bitch." So what follows is a blow-by-blow wedding blitz breakdown extravaganza - complete with pictures, descriptions, social breakdowns, stories and comments of the first four weddings.

Wedding Number One: Jordan Hoffman & Anne Farrell, Seabright NJ, Sept. 13th
Jordan Hoffman is a former tour guide for the Levys' Unique New York, but moved on to bigger and better things (or so he claims) working for UGO entertainment as well as making films on the side. More importantly, Jordan has been loving and living with his wonderful, wondrous girlfriend / fiance / life-partner Ann Farrell for many years now, 5 out of their 7 in coupleship. The sweethearts live in Astoria, Queens, in an apartment crammed with geekitude of the highest order - graphic novels, Star Trek figurines, a million Jazz albums, '50s retro kitschware in the kitchen, and a fatso catso named Goober. Jordan and Ann are lovers of life - fun loving fun having people. I would certainly and sincerely call them jolly, as well as funny-as-all-get-out.
The wedding was held on the beach (yes, those are random bathers in the background) and in a catering hall in Seabright New Jersey, about 2 1/2 hours from the city. It was a packed car all the way down there as the entire Levy clan attended. The short, delightful festivities were held on the beach, so that as Jordan and Ann yukked their way through the vows (Kerry, the officiator: "To have and to hold for better or for worse, in richer or in poorer, til death do us part." Jordan: "Can you repeat that last part again?" Ba-dum dum bum,) there were total strangers in bathing suits and with boogie boards strolling past the event. Made for great pictures. After the vows, after the huzzahs and the hoorays, after the cheers and whoop-tahs, we all went inside to get drunk and fed and danced and romanced. On the whole, a wedding filled with laughter and joy, humor and irreverence. Also a 30's style radio mic, and a killer DJ. Good interaction between the various friends, family and associates of the Hoffman / Farrell crews. More pictures of the Hoffman/Farrell funtimez are here.

Wedding Number Three: Jonathan Tull and Nina Isaacson, Mendocino Woodlands Park, California, Sept. 20-21
This wedding was clear on the other side of the country, but Jonah and I had been planning a vacation away from the city for a while - it had been the busiest summer Ive ever had, with non-stop work weeks gunning all the way through July & August, then two back-to-back tourism conferences in September - one in San Antonio Texas, the other in downtown Brooklyn. After all that tour guiding and biz building it was time for a well deserved get-away, to visit friends in San Fransisco and chockup another wedding on the calendar. Off to California, and the Jon Tull - Nina Issacson freak flag wedding in the woods! Jon Tull was the bookkeeper for LUNY and fronted a funny kind of bipolar humor, vacillating between a laid back California stoner dude 'tude to an anal retentive number-crunching Brooklyn busybody - well suited for his bookkeeping facilities. He met his not too blushing bride here in Brooklyn and although I had never met her before the wedding itself, she and I are both babies of 1980, and grewup in relatively relational Brooklyn hoods - Flatbush and Park Slope, attending Murrow and Stuyvesant High Schools respectively. I should've known this chick, probably slept with her in another life, but our paths never crossed.
Their wedding was held in the breathtakingly beautiful redwood forest campground about 3 hours north of San Francisco, 4 1/2 if you get lost getting out of SF and again if you get lost in the campground. Which we did. And therefore missed the vows, exchanging of the rings, promises, cheers, jeers and humors. But we made it on time for the festivities, and boy howdy were there enough of those. We rolled in just after the I Dos (missed by 20 minutes! 20 effing minutes!!!) and stuck around through Monday morning. There was eating, drinking, magnificent speechifying, (no fewer than 4 peeps broke down in tears describing the love and trust of the married couple) and dancing. The food was killer - garlic sausages, grilled asparagus, freshly baked rolls with jalapeno butter. And cupcakes! We imbibed local California keg beer, top notch wine, bourbon, vodka and gin, as well as some of the more illicit California produce.
This particular wedding celebration was operating on its own kind of communal CA attitude - most of the attendees in their 20s and 30s had arrived at the camp on Wednesday, partied through the festivities on Saturday, and returned to the real world Sunday. Us lucky Levy boys got to stay til Monday AM, which meant we closed the party down, along with Nina and Jon, Jon's folks & older brother, Mom's friend and Nina' gal pal; therefore from the Sat night attendance high of 80+, the Sunday night's BBQ had just 9. It was a marvelous everybody-project, where the food, the booze, the illicits, the fun was brought for and consumed by everyone. And with too much food leftover, Jonah and I did our civic duties and brought back to our host in SF all sorts of goodies, including an uncooked pork loin, a case of beer, cheeses, juices, a tray of the aforementioned sausages, and the crowning achievement, a box of cupcakes. Further effects of the wedding in the woods can be discovered here.

Wedding Number Four: Bill Scanga and Sarah Frank, Aboard the Jewel, Up and Down the East & Hudson Rivers, NYC, Sept. 27th
God please, make the weddings stop. Well, maybe not until I've completed my wedding blitz. After a week-long vacation in San Francisco, I took the red-eye back to NYC, arriving 6:30am Saturday. This left enough time to get home, crash out for a few, shake myself awake, shower, shave, suit-up and head out for wedding number four, the glorious union of Bill Scanga and Sarah Frank on board a boat traversing the rivers of our city. Bill is the older brother I never had, a fellow member of the City Reliquary, an avid cyclist and the Vice President of collections at the DR, including but not limited to: pencil sharpeners, marbles, vintage bicycles, exonumia, postcards of the Williamsburg Bridge and more. Bill is also a hysterical human being with an unmatched love for life. The guy is a 12 year old trapped in the body of a 38 year old. And up until Saturday, all I knew about Sarah was that she put up with Bill's shit. But as of Saturday I learned a lot more about Sarah. That she's patient, calm, and has wonderful eyes. That she's on top of her game. That her folks are supercool. And that she's gorgeous, dressed up or down, the girl is a total babe. Bill is luckier than I ever imagined.
What more could one ask for other than a wedding aboard a boat around the East River? Maybe some clear weather, which we didn't receive. All fog and gloom. But nevertheless, the procession was awesome, parked under the Brooklyn Bridge with a very special speech delivered by the Best Man and Officiator of the ceremonies, Dave Herman, President of the Reliquary and Bill's best friend. A live soul band swung the dance floor and the bar kept the partygoers sufficiently tipsy enough, although that could have also been the boat itself. Although the food took forever to get to the buffet tables, the cupcakes as wedding cake (cupcakes are in this season) made up for the delay. As did all that booze and soulful tunes. There was an afterparty at a hip downtown dance club, but the truth is that after numerous bottles of Prosecco and gallons of sweat dumped on the dance floor, there isn't much more to tell about the afterparty, except that the only thing I brought home was my hangover. Other parties might have different stories regarding the afterparty, as well as the tequila shots that were consumed, but don't trust them. Splish Splash more pix!

4 down, 2 more to go.

The Wedding Blitz of 08 is Great!

Lost in the Hudson River vol. 74: Bannerman's Castle

2008-09-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

It couldn't have been a more perfect day. A wide-open Saturday in the slowly closing August, replete with wide blue skies, beautiful breezes, a temperature floating in the low 80s, and a yellow school bus just aching to take off with its cargo of 30+ New Yorkers to places unknown. This was it: the final Going Places, Doing Stuff adventure of the summer, and as a former GP, DS leader (of the very first one, no less!) and a participant in 6 out of 8 there was no way I'd miss the final blowout. In addition, Jeff Stark, the organizer of today's spectacular, is a friend, colleague and role model, and his knowledge of the hidden, urban, rural, & superb New York is unmatched. I trust this man with my life, and throughout the course of 16 hour day there were many opportunities for those words to sing true, if not always with my life, then instead with my sanity, poise, calm, and the life of my new $700 digital camera.
We met in Queens Plaza, where Jeff introduced himself with a welcome and a warning: the Places we were Going and the Stuff we were Doing was, in some cases, highly illegal and certainly arrestable. There was to be no peer pressure on anybody in case they wouldn't or couldn't participate, IE even the coolest adventure wasn't worth the revoking of a green card and the booting out of a country. That having been said, the day was going to be awesome, occupied by 4 different artists and their 4 wildly disparate projects, all to do with the Hudson River and water and Jeff couldn't wait any longer. So we piled onto our trusty yellow Bucephalus, with the omnipresent, multi-talented, infinitely patient Marcus behind the wheel, and we were off!
First stop - a short fence hop in Long Island City and onto a pier to meet and listen to Marie Lorenz, a New York based artist who builds and sails her own canoes under the title Tide and Current Taxi. She had docked briefly in LIC with her canoe and two passengers on their way to Roosevelt Island and Renwick's Ruin, in order to give an impromptu talk on the power of currents and how she uses them in her project. She told us about how the East River is one of the largest collection of tidal currents in the hemisphere, and by using those streams to propel her boat, she harnesses nature to get where she wants to go.
Next up, a lengthy bus ride to somewhere upstate - nearby Beacon NY - where we crawled through a strategically cut hole in a chain link fence and scampered off to a swimming nook. This nook boasted a couple jump-off points, between 20 and 40 feet up, a picnic area (just a bunch of flattened-off rocks) and most excitingly, another handmade boat, painted tomato-red. This boat came courtesy of Paula Zaslavsky and her partner Dylan Gauthier, two sharp young Brooklynites who used to run the Empty Vessel Project but now work on an ongoing DIY boat building project, Mare Liberum. In between homemade peach cocktails and lunch; before and after trips in their lovely boat and a brief talk about how anybody can build their own pond-worthy sailing vessel; once intrepid venturers had had their fill of divebombing off the rocky steps into the swimming hole, Jeff announced it was time to move on. Farewell gorgeous swimming hole! We had 2 more art-water projects to hit.
After an ice cream and coffee hit in downtown Beacon, we drove until we came to a clearing in the road, and crossing through some bushes and over some very active Amtrak rail lines, until we were standing on the banks of the Hudson. Off in the distance was a crumbling shell of what seemed to be a castle. This was the big exploration - Bannerman's Castle, on Pollopel Island. And Jeff, in all his rational, madcap determination, was going to get us over there.
After a few back and forth trips via one leaky canoe, one tippy kayak and two rockin' zephyr motorboats, the majority of us were on the island, and free to wander around and take magnificent pictures of this unbelievable ruin. Really. Click ahead and see the slideshow.
The story to Bannerman is as eccentric as the building itself. Frank Bannerman VI, born in 1851 and grew up in Brooklyn, was the Father of Army-Navy stores. Inheriting a flag & rope business from his father, he realized the inherrent value of purchasing surplus ammunition, uniforms, heavy artillery, and other goods from post-war governments, and sold them to other nations, at peace or at war. At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, Bannerman purchased 90% of the captured goods in a sealed bid, and needed a remote location to stockpile his collection. His block-long storeroom / showroom at 501 Broadway was no place for such weapons of destruction, so Bannerman purchased Pollopel Island in 1900 and built himself a castle to store his goods. The construction of the buildings took 17 years, not the least of which because Bannerman did most of the loyout & construction himself, without the use of professional architects or engineers. He designed most of it in an outrageous stylized Scottish castle style. The place is magnificent, with little flourishes tucked in the labels and signposts, as well as in the wall sconces and turrets.
Bannerman died in 1918, and his family continued to sell army supplies up through the 70s, but they sold the island and the building to NY State in 1967. Unfortunately, two years later a tremendous fire ripped through the building, which damaged most of the walls, incinerated the ceiling and made the grounds unstable for long-term visitors or tours. We were certainly trespassing, but were doing so with utmost care. (The Friends of Bannerman Island would probably have called the cops on us.) The pictures show the story better than these words can ever do. After an hour or so, after we had a few go-rounds the island, after a near-death experience in which Jean busted his head open via a too-shallow dive, it was time to return to the mainland.
Which we did. Went into town, had some pizza and beer. Visited Swoon's Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, which had been docked up in Beacon for the night, but it really was just an afterthought. Then we piled back onto the bus and returned to New York, getting back to Queens Plaza by 2 in the morning. It was simply splendid - the entire day. Kudos to Flux, to Jeff Stark, to Marcus the driver and to all participants of Going Places, Doing Stuff.

Lost in History vol. 72: Exit Poll Cocktail Toll

2008-08-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

What goes best with politics? Blue-in-the-face arguing? Solipsistic grandstanding? Memorabilia collecting? Sure, those are always a hoot, but what truly makes political discussions oh so fun is booze! The addition of liquor to our political conversations allows us hard-working, hard-drinking Americans to surge forward, secure in the knowledge that our treasured opinions on personal, cultural, communal and national matters make so much more sense when they’re powered by liquor. That’s the beauty of America: when the BAC level coursing through our bloodstreams makes red and blue states meet in the middle, liberal arms around redneck necks, and we sing the national anthem (not really, but we all have a dream).
Dean Baldwin also has a dream: one that involves free booze and the documenting of ever-shifting social dynamics. Not an American but a bona fide Canadian, Mr. Baldwin was in Chelsea last Thursday for the opening of his interactive vodka-fueled exhibit, titled Exit Poll Cocktail Toll, which runs through today at the White Box Gallery. For Exit Poll Cocktail Toll, one of six weeklong exhibits shown as part of White Box’s Six Feet Under series, Mr. Baldwin brought a bunch of vodka, shelves, and curious questions to the American fashion-forward, art-going, booze-drinking public. Picture, if you will, a fancy Chelsea gallery with a bar at the center. Free vodka drinks handily dispensed by cheerless galleristas — vodka and cranberryl vodka, pineapple and blue curacao; vodka and nothing else — to happy-go-lucky hipsters and the standard gallery-hopping crowd. Surrounding the bar, mounted to the walls, are a bunch of shelves with empty plastic cocktail glasses stacked on either side of a demarcated line. Sharpied on each shelf is a question, and under each shelf is a option of two answers.
“If the election were to take place today who would you vote for?” has an overwhelming stack of empty cups — 30 or more — on the Obama side, and a half dozen for McCain. “Does Capitalism control democracy?” (pictured) also has a stack of empty cups on the YES side, and a handful (but not many) on the NO side. Another query has a shelf perched high above the heads and reachable arms of all boozers in the gallery and a ladder placed squarely underneath leading to the inquiry “Are poor people lazy?”
Chen Tamir, a NY resident and guest curator who invited Mr. Baldwin and his spirited installation of spirits, describes his art as “creating social scenarios and sparking conversation through the argument of art and the lubrication of booze.” White Box’s theme of Six Feet Under was developed to take a humorous yet interactive approach towards the election season. Chen and Dean interviewed friends as well as strangers on the street to come up with 30 questions, which were then whittled down to 13 and displayed prominently on the walls. It seemed as if patrons had a good time boozing it up and making their decisions known. If the answers to the questions surprised n -one, well, neither did the crowd of young urbanites on hand for the opening. Neither did the stack of empties on the positive side of the shelf labeled “Did you come for the free booze?”

Lost in History vol. 73 - Hip-Hop Gospel in Maria Hernandez Park - One Afternoon Only!

2008-08-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday I had the second half of the afternoon off, and it was gossip catch-up time with the BFU (that’s Best Friend in the Universe, to those of you who didn’t know.) So I boogied by bike from East Bushwick to Williamsburg, caught-up with the lovely girl for an hour or so, shared a raspberry iced tea, marveled and planned a future fedora purchase at a South Williamsburg Hatter Tomatoes you've never had (but should! - email me for exact location!) I heard some on lower Broadway across from the WBridge Bus Depot, and made my way back home. After stopping to pickup some of the most amazing homemade Sundriedslammin' live music from Maria Hernandez Park across the street. So I hoisted our groceries, and biked up the slight hill to the open plaza in the heart of the park. I practically biked right into a serious urban gospel concert happening in the middle of the park, middle of the afternoon, middle of the week.
The chorus is comprised of 30 some-odd teenagers, mostly of the Latina & Afro variety, but with an assorted Asian up on the stage, all of them bouncing back and forth behind a 4 member band supporting a few different solo performers. Electric Guitar, Bass, keyboards and drums; all amplified and booming across the park, to the senior citizens on the benches, to the squadron of tykes on tiny bikes, to the dozen or so attentive listeners on the folding chairs, to the sarcastic older boys in the back row making snide comments, to the occasional hipster strolling past with a quizzical look on their face. The solo performers are alternating tracks between hip-hop, rap, soul, r&b, the odd & impressive hard rock track with a bitchin' guitar solo. But between all the nice beats, the grinning kids, the tshirts that say DIE HARD, LIVE FREE, the grooving rhythms is a message - that life is tough, drugs and violence can tempt one down the wrong road, but friends, family and Jesus Christ can help those in need.
I had stumbled upon a one-time only live performance from the YE Ministries. YE stands for Youth Explosion, and the backs of a few DIE HARD, LIVE FREE tees were emblazoned with a YE graffiti logo. Youth Explosion Ministries is a religious & spiritual group originating out of a Ministry on Myrtle Avenue in Glendale - aimed mostly at Junior High and High School students, but allowing the word to reach all. And all it did reach - the music was awesome. The positive presence was tight. The message, if one were to listen closely enough were indeed religious proselytizing, but proselytizing about the one and only God and living a life more attuned to pure expression and experience. And who can find anything wrong with that?! I left Maria Hernandez with a rhythm in my heart and an uplift in my spirit. And a badass mix cd, which I will gladly share with any who write and ask. (Along with the location of those delish homemade sun-drieds.)

Lost in History vol. 71: Party for Your Right to Ride!

2008-08-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday night we had the pleasure of converging at a midtown bar, in a room full of people who like to drink and ride bikes (hopefully not, but probably sometimes, at the same time). However, instead of drinking and riding (hard to accomplish, let alone in a cramped Chelsea bar), we were standing around on our own two legs schmoozing, boozing, talking shop about cycling in the city and crossing fingers for the bike stuff raffle. Welcome to the first ever social mixer/benefit for the positive, progressive bike advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives.

Trans Alt (or TA) was founded in 1973, during the cresting wave of environmental action and organizations that also birthed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. Although Trans Alt is hardly as powerful as sweeping legislation or a major government branch, they are still effecting small and large changes on the streets of New York. TA’s predominant focus is on bicycle and pedestrian advocacy, in five different fields: Bicycling, Walking and Traffic Calming, Car-Free Parks, Safe Streets and Sensible Transportation. TA stresses that it is not focused only on cyclists – their goal is the best possible utilization of our multifarious mixed-use avenues. In their very helpful green transportation hierarchy, TA demonstrates how different a city block could be if it were occupied by 50 New Yorkers in cars vs. 50 New Yorkers on bikes vs. 50 New Yorkers on a city bus. Clearly, the mass transportation mode beats private autos, and the happy cyclists trump all.

A phenomenal 110,000 cyclists travel the city every day, whether commuting to and from work, riding for work (say, delivering food, packages and documents), or for leisure. All these people deserve safer bike lanes and off-street greenway paths to get to work and home (and the bar) safely; daily commuters need more indoor and outdoor bike racks to lock up their trusty rides — all of these are causes for which Trans Alt lobbies, in City Hall and Albany, for the sake of safer roads for everyone— cars included. Along with bike advocacy, TA works towards traffic-calming atmospheres, where local community groups join the Department of Transportation to achieve pedestrian-primary spaces (parks, streets. routes) throughout the city.

Back to the booze and the blab about bikes. TA’s first mixer/benefit (because when you think about it, cyclists only get together on their bike, which is hardly time to talk shop) was a rousing success. 150 happy people (out of TA’s 6000-strong membership) crammed into The Black Door’s back room, swilling free drinks and snacking on veggies and dip. The atmosphere felt more like an after-hours office party than a collection of strangers who prefer the cycle to the subway.

Ryan Nuckel, TA’s Membership Director shared some facts about Transportation Alternatives. First off, they’re growing rapidly: a few years ago they just had 7 paid staffers, and now they’re up to 20 full-timers and practically bursting out of their office (a few flights above The Black Door). Also, TA sees itself as the wonky, legislative side to the cycling community. (As opposed to Critical Mass, the take-it-to-the-streets direct action side — with which TA has no official affiliation, although members of TA ride CM all the time.) Wonky political pushers are important when dealing with mega-bureaucracies like NYC and the DOT — to get the Man on your side, you have to know how to talk to him. To that end, TA is involved heavily with small-time players with moderate agendas — like City Council members, a dozen of whom have signed an open letter to Police Commish Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg asking that the charges against Christopher Long (the Critical Mass rider who was knocked to the ground by a rookie cop) be dropped, and that a fuller investigation into the NYPD’s anti-bike tactics are opened. It’s a start . . .

On the whole, it was a lovely evening, filled with booze, bikes, and beautiful people, excited about all of the above. Unfortunately we didn’t win anything from the Trans Alt merch table raffle, so after two free whiskeys and some veggies and dips, we mounted our freewheel singlespeed Fuji, snapped on our helmet, and headed east, along a lovely bike path that was planned specifically for us.

Lost in History vol. 70: All Boro Bonanza

2008-07-28T21:48:00.000-07:00

Damn you Flux Factory. Are you really that good? Can you truly tell the secret whims and desires, the wants, needs and must haves of a bunch of New York City artists / adventurers / self-proclaimed geeks / cheese-bus aficionados / travelers / cheapskates / and those in the know? It seems that way – and 54 people can prove it.
Two weekends back, Flux hosted another one of their fantastically popular, terrifically peculiar, all-day extravaganzas titled Going Places, Doing Stuff. The premise behind GP, DS is that there’s a whole lot of awesome to see in our city. And yet, people generally take this city for granted. Since Flux lost its lease on their gallery-cum-home in Long Island City (they have to move by October,) lead curator Jean Barberis (full disclosure – a fine friend of mine) realized that one doesn’t need a static indoor gallery to display the art or performance of New Yorkers – one can do just as well in the city itself. So Flux asked a half-dozen writers, artists, historians, and so forth to create an adventure-slash-tour, on board a yellow cheese bus, in which participants would have no idea of where they were headed, just a title, a list of supplies to bring and a departure time and place. Get on the bus and take off to points unknown.

I was asked to lead the first Going Places, Doing Stuff, and we delved, mind, body and soul into weird religious spots in Staten Island. The second GP, DS took us into the wilds of Pennsyltucky, courtesy of artist Douglas Paulson. Two more adventures were led – one by Fluxer Annie Reichert, in which she brought a busload of explorers to her native suburban New Jersey and accompanied her Dad on everyday Dad stuff; another journey called Wandering Restaurant, where Portland, OR artist Gary Wiseman brought people to edible areas in Queens. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend either of those two escapades. But nothing was stopping me from attending the Flux-curated expedition on July 19th. What’s more, it was the only one in which I truly had no clue where we were going.

We went All Boro. Five boroughs in one day. Ambitious? Insane? Brilliant? Check, check, triple check. Flux Factory Senior Team: Jean Barberis, Stefany A. Golberg, Morgan Meis, Jason D. Brown, Chen Tamir & Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria compiled the days’ events as personal favorite of theirs. We met at the Staten Island Ferry terminal at 9am, in order to knock off the most estranged borough first. Also, the SI Ferry is one of the only places in NY where you can drink in public (I’ve done extensive research on the subject.) Once we disembarked at St. George, we boarded our cheese bus (54 adults on a machine that should only hold 40) and the journey began. First stop was a private gallery in the backyard of a home in St. George. Some Chilean sculptor who was related to another, more famous Chilean painter. I had had a few rum and iced coffees by then, so I didn’t quite catch the guy’s name. Following the sculpture gallery we made our way down onto the North Shore, immediately across from Sailors Snug Harbor to discover the coolest spot of the day – a DIY BMX bike track hidden in the overgrowth on the shoreline of Richmond Terrace.
After running around like maniacs on this totally badass BMX track, we returned to the cheese bus to discover – our very own Staten Island cocktail! It was 10:30am, we had 4 more boroughs to tackle, and people were getting nice and soused. All cocktails coutesy of Chen Tamir. Staten Island Cocktail

6 parts coffee vodka 
1 part dry vermouth 
2 parts fresh lime juice 
Maraschino cherry
Combine liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker with cracked ice and shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with maraschino cherry.Over the VZ bridge to Brooklyn and to our next stop – Floyd Bennett Field, NY’s first municipal airport. Opened in 1931 at the southeastern tip of Brooklyn, FB Field was home to a number of daredevil pilots just as aviation was cruising from the airplane age to the jet engine age. Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, Howard Hughes and more all made Floyd Bennett Field a space-age wonder in a pre-World-War-II New York. After a quick tour of Hangar B – home to dozens of out-of-commission Army, Navy & Government aircrafts, complete with septuagenarian Brooklyn boys building a replica of a Jenny bomber out of wood,

we went to the Aviator indoor stall for a picnic lunch and more Brooklyn booze.
Brooklyn Cocktail

2 ounces rye or blended whiskey
1 ounce dry vermouth
Dash of maraschino liqueur
Dash of Amer Picon
Shake all ingredients well with ice; then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Onto Queens! Way up north in Queens – the neighborhood of College Point, and the art gallery and brilliant loft-garage-home of local artist John Norwood, a friend to Flux. Again, more art here, some of which was wonderful and some of which was just weird. I took off to explore College Point Boulevard and score some scrumptious Columbian fresh-fruit drinks called Cholada. The day was long, hot, and brains were addled with liquor and other, more illicit substances, so a nice long respite in Mr. Norwood’s air conditioned home was just the ticket. We watched airplanes take off from LaGuardia Airport, just across from Flushing Bay. We drank a special Queens cocktail that was just as nauseous as the first two.

Queen's Cocktail

1 chunk of Pineapple
I slice of Orange, in the shaker.
Ice
1/3 Italian Vermouth
1/3 French Vermouth
1/3 Booth's Dry Gin
Shake well and strain into cocktail glass.

We soaked in the A/C and tried to ignore the fact that eventually all 54 of us would have to reboard that 40 pax bus, in 92 degree humidity, in the northern-ass-end of Queens, and depart for the only borough that attached to the mainland of America. Which we did. Evetually.

The Bronx. Fort Apache. Burning tenements. Yankee Stadium. Yachts. Lobster shacks . . . quiet, serene, Maine-like fishing villages?!? Welcome to City Island, population 4500. Commonly referred to as New England in New York, this impossibly picturesque spit of land off Pelham Bay is famous for seeming completely outside of NYC, yet within the five boroughs. We parked the cheese bus and wandered around the Pelham Cemetery, purportedly the only final resting place in New York City right next to a body of water. We hiked our way down the 1.5 mile City Island Avenue to the southernmost point which was when we split for dinner. Some went the fried and greasy route, some went the burgers and fries route, I went the whole lobster & clam bake route. It was a well-earned crustacean.
There’s only so much All Boro a New Yorker can handle – so after yet another impossible to swallow cocktail, this one named for the Boogie-Down Bronx, we piled onto that magical cheese bus and slept our way back to the city. They said it couldn’t be done – All Boro in one day. Clearly "they" never messed with Flux Factory.

PERLFEST 08!

2008-07-21T19:50:00.000-07:00

I am a lucky New Yorker - I'm blessed with good health, steady income, solid friends, a neverending sense of adventure, cheap rent, and close family. That last one qualifies in both the emotional, tangible sense; IE I get along with practically every member, both near and far, of my local & extended family; but also in the geographical sense IE not only do my father and two brothers live in Brooklyn but my paternal Grandparents live on the Upper West Side; my second cousin Neal lives in Hells Kitchen; and my other cousins and nephews live in Larchmont, Riverdale and other suburban enclaves close enough to the pulsing heart of NYC.

The added benefit of all this local family is the invitation to lots of great parties. You got your basic holiday shindigs like Thanksgiving and Yom Kippur (held at Casa Levy in Flatbush), semi-regular dinners at Gramma's on Columbus and 95th, and the occasional blow-out shindig celebrating large-scale celebrations, such as the mutual birthdays of my second cousin Lee, who just turned 50, and his daughter (my second niece) Shauna, who turned 21. So, in classic Levy fashion (although Lee & Shauna go by the surname Perlman, we know there's a little Levy in their blood) they threw one hell of a party.
They called it PERLFEST 08, thrown a sliver over a month ago on June 20th, and let me tell you . . . it was the cultural / familial event of the season. The event was held in an industrial partyspace on the Far West Side - 31st street between 10th avenue and the Lincoln Tunnel city-bound lane (Dyer Ave!) The only way up to the rooftop soiree was via a massive freight elevator which gave off an idea of dilapidated industry & therefore no hint of the extravagance that was to follow. As the freight creaked and shuddered its way up flight after flight, the other elevator-trapped guests looked slightly frightened for what was to come; I knew better than to believe this tromp l'oeil of rusty mechanics. The party was going to be stunning.

Of course it was. Once the massive steel doors opened, we found ourselves on an outdoor patio 8 stories up, with equally jaw-dropping views of the Hudson River, coastal New Jersey, midtown industry and the skyscrapers of the financial district. Everyone looked fabulous - Shauna was bedecked in a glittering gorgeous silky violet number and Lee (always business even when he enjoys himself) was dressed in a fine jacket and unbuttoned shirt (proof of party - the tie-less uniform.) The remainder of the Perlman family - wife Linda and son Jake were dressed sharp as can be, while still relinquishing premier spotlight position for the birthday duo. The guests were split down the middle from corporate 40 year old couples from Brooklyn, Jersey and CT, as well as Shauna's gal pal crew fresh from college and probably living in Williamsburg, the LES or Park Slope.

Everyone was having a great time. There was an ice luge serving chilled currant vodka shots that us Levy boys had a special moment.
There were waiters serving the indoor / outdoor space, stocked with trays of delectable delights. We plied the fully stocked bar; Jonah and I surreptiously ascended up a ladder in order to snap some shots against the night skyline (note the New Yorker Hotel sign in the back;)
at some point Lee made the call and announced that the whole party was moving one flight down. So off and down the narrow staircase which led to . . . A DANCE PARTY!!! This was the part of the shindig that most closely resembled a Sweet 16, but substantially amped up on booze.
Notice the pictures of aby Lee and little Shauna everywhere.
Another wonderful part of my family is the intergenerational, multi-talented familyness of it all. We all work so well together that not only is there dancing with Gramma,
but there's also dancing with hot 22 year olds. (picture deleted.) At one point Jake jumped onto a table to sing a special Broadway showtune for his sister. At another point Linda presented Shauna with a massive fake Driver's Licence for her to symbolically chop-up.

The whole night was such a wonderful evening with beautiful people in a truly New York setting, and the fact that I not only know the individuals who hosted (and paid for!!) the party, but I am related to them by blood, as well as spirit and soul. That makes it particularly special. Thanks for the great night Perlmans one and all!

Lost in History vol. 69: Torch No More!

2008-07-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

In our last Lost in History, we discussed why Congressman Anthony Weiner’s proposal to reopen the Statue of Liberty’s Crown and viewing station is a poor idea. To recap, she’s a fire and safety hazard, and any minor malady suffered by an unsuspecting tourist would have enormous and unfortunate ramifications on the multitudes standing in a three-hour line to get to her head. But little attention is paid to the Statue of Liberty’s torch and its viewing platform, and there’s a good reason for that.

Yes indeed, the torch at the tippy-top of the beautiful Statue of Liberty (official name: Liberty Enlightening the World) once had a viewing station, which was basically a circular walkway surrounding the torch and provided spectacular views of the harbor, the skyline and the Atlantic Ocean. Three hundred and one feet up with nothing surrounding you can be a pretty phenomenal experience, and a fellow tour guide friend who shall rename nameless once flirted her way up there with a fellow Parks Service employee. They snuck up at sunrise because he thought he was gonna get lucky. (Did he? No way.)

When the Statue opened to the public in 1886, anybody could head up to the crown. The way up to the torch was only open by special request for dignitaries (although all sorts of people abused this privilege) via a rickety ladder that ran up the length of the armature. With so many pedestrians going up and coming down, the various nuts and bolts in the armature fell loose and the structure weakened. Then came the Black Tom Island Explosion of July 30th, 1916.
Black Tom Island used to exist in New Jersey’s harbor, at the southern point of Liberty State Park. It ceased being an island just before the start of the first World War, once the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company, which owned the pier and the island, connected it by landfill to the rest of Jersey. The island got its name from a black fisherman named (surprise!) Tom, who lived on the island in the 1800s. By the 1910s, the island was being used as an ammunitions depot, supplying the Allied powers with shrapnel, black powder, TNT and dynamite. And in the early morning of July 30th 1916, the various barges tied up at the island, carrying (by some estimates) over 2 million pounds of ammo, were set alight. The residents of Jersey City were rocked by a series of ginormous explosions — shrapnel hit the Statue of Liberty, windows were blown out in Times Square and repercussions were felt as far away as Philly. No one could ever ascertain the official cause of the explosion — whether it was a security lapse on the part of the guards, a “spontaneous combustion” event, or German sabotage. The only person accused of the event was Michael Kristoff , a 23 year old Slovak immigrant; it was said he accepted $500 in exchange for starting the small fires that rocked Black Tom off the map. He died in a peasant and was buried in a potter’s field in Staten Island, without ever admitting to the crime.
When the island blew up, it blew out all the nuts and bolts in the Statue of Liberty’s arm, and caused $100,000 worth of damager ($1.9 million today) to her infrastructure. The War Department (which had owned and cared for Miss Liberty since 1901) used the explosion as an excuse to close down the Torch to the public, citing terrorism concerns. This is fascinating: the very same thing happened post-9/11. The National Parks Service was looking for reasons to close the Statue to the public, but the outcry would have been too great. So after 9/11 happened, the NPS said “Whoa! Terrorism! No more go up in here.” (We’re paraphrasing, but yeah, that’s basically what happened.) So, Congressman Weiner we implore you: Don’t open that crown!

Lost in History vol. 68: Statue Arms and Statue Crowns, Leave the Tourists on the Ground

2008-07-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

This past holiday weekend was everything a holiday weekend should be: relaxing, rooftop bar-b-queing, all-day boozing, late-night schmoozing and non-stop raining (well, almost everything). We went to Coney Island and rode the Wonder Wheel, we defended American patriotism against some preposterous Brits on a BBC radio panel, we even drove down to Mystic, CT and learned about their oh-so-American historic seaport. But what would a perfect holiday weekend be without some jackass congressman’s report, released perfectly to compliment the nationalism of the Fourth, taking on common sense and inviting disaster — or at the very least impossible hours of lines — down upon us all? (And when I say “us all” I generally refer to the NYC tour guide community.)

I refer, of course, to the 9th District's Anthony Weiner (who is considering a run for Mayor – imagine the headlines if his campaign picks up steam – “Weiner on a Roll!”). Weiner released a report on Friday asking the National Park Service consider reopening the Statue of Liberty’s crown to tourism again. She’s been closed to the public since 9/11; however, in 2004, the top of the granite pedestal on which she stands was reopened to visitors. Specifically, those who don’t mind the additional hour wait on Liberty Island (that’s on top of a two- to three-hour hour wait to board the ferry) and extra security screenings. Weiner claims that to keep the crown closed to the public is un-American. He’s wrong — if not by a mile, then certainly by the 301 feet Lady Liberty stands above Upper New York Harbor.
Her crown and the postcard-size windows that provides miniscule views out onto the harbor simply isn’t worth ignoring the fact that she’s an enormous safety hazard. The 15-story double-helix spiral staircase that runs up where her spine should be doesn’t comply with any city, state or federal safety codes. Imagine the disaster if a fire broke out inside the SOL (as we in the biz call her). Not only would there be a stampede to get people down that staircase and out through the narrow doors at her feet, but since she’s a hollow lady, encased in 470 sheets of copper, then the whole thing could act like an oven, cooking the poor tourists inside. Not only was she never designed to handle the crushing numbers of visitors she receives on a daily basis, but Frederick August Bartholdi, the sculptor, never envisioned people clambering around his most magnificent creation. What’s more, any kind of minor malady suffered by a visitor — claustrophobia, asthma, vertigo, etc. — would cause a major calamity in removing the afflicted from their spot on the walkway up or down.

There are even more fascinating lost histories involving the Statue of Liberty and how her various (sexy) body parts were closed to visitors — in particular, the closing of the arm and torch one long-ago July. We’ll cover that very interesting anniversary in an upcoming LIH, which will include: a black man named Tom, his island in New Jersey’s harbor, its sudden explosion in 1916 and German anarchists. Stay tuned!

Lost in History vol. 67: New Yorkers Go to Hell and Back (by Way of Pennsyltucky, and a 50 lb. Cheeseburger)

2008-07-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

Flux Factory did it again. For the second installation of Going Places (Doing Stuff), Flux brought a busload of New Yorkers deep into the heart of Pennsyltucky. Can you imagine 35 funny-looking preposterously dressed, multilingual New Yorkers stuffed onto a yellow cheese bus and dragged into the depths of coal country? Would you believe that they had a hell of a time (literally) exploring an abandoned Pennsylvania town bursting with underground coal fires? You bet your sweet ass they had a blast. We would know — we hosted the first Going Places (Doing Stuff) Adventure to Staten Island event a few weekends ago, and we sure weren’t going to miss this one.
Sponsored by Flux Factory and led by artist (and PA native) Douglas Paulson, the whole idea behind Going Places (Doing Stuff) is as follows: throw a whole bunch of strangers onto a yellow cheese bus. Give them a vague idea of where they’ll be headed, how long it’ll take, and what provisions (bathing suit, nominal cash, water, whiskey) they’ll need. Take off. See what happens. In the last (which was also the first and only) Going Places (Doing Stuff), we spent the day on Staten Island, visiting a bunch of religious, spiritual and historical hotspots throughout the whole length of the island — and it’s a big goddamn island! This time Doug Paulson took the group to his home state, and then through and beyond Pennsylvania to the difficult-to-describe but easy-to-find Pennsyltucky (a pejorative yet affectionate term to describe the rural parts of the state of Pennsylvania, excluding the Pittsburgh & Philly areas.)
Departure was scheduled for 9am at the southeast corner of Bryant Park this past Sunday, and took off in classic NY fashion — half an hour late. The cheese bus was stuffed with peoples of all stripes — Germans, French, old(er), young(er), Mainers and Californians, native NYers and two-week greenhorns. After making the rounds and introducing ourselves, we learned about our adventure. First, a PA swimming hole. Then Centralia — host to underground coal fires burning for thousands of years and massive sinkholes in the streets. Afterwards, if we were lucky, the biggest hamburger any of us had ever seen. The stakes were pretty high. And only three hours til our first hop-off.It didn’t disappoint. Waiting for us in the wilds of Pennsylvania was a swimming hole with a 30-foot jumping rock. Visualize the hysteria when a whole busload of New York art freaks offload a bus stacked to the brim with delicious picnicking foods (queso blanco, apples, cucumbers and stuffed grape leaves) and drinks (water, OJ, vodka, the aforementioned whiskey) and descend on a rocky beach with soft water and a bitchin’ jumping rock. You bet it was spectacular. Picnics and rock-jumping ensued.
Another hour or so onwards and we got to Centralia, in the central part of western PA. Centralia, founded in 1866, was a major coal mining town until the 1960s, when it was discovered that most of the land directly underneath the township was aflame, thanks to rich deposits of coal. Various efforts to extinguish the eternally burning pits were met with failure, and as sinkholes opened up underneath residents’ houses and feet,, the federal government essentially left the place to burn itself out. In the 1980s the Feds relocated the over 1,000 residents to adjacent counties and bulldozed the land. As of the last census, Centralia has seven residents left, and practically nothing to show visitor — except for wreckage strewn-fields and improbably bizarre vents of coal steam issuing up from holes in the ground.
It was impossible to look upon the trash and rubble-strewn lots and imagine houses standing upon them. Even more outrageous was clambering down into the lots and sticking one’s face into a sticky hot vent of coal-fired steam hissing its way out of giant slabs of anthracite. Another unbelievable sight: an abandoned highway, carved off from the surrounding roads because of giant fissures that opened up in the middle of the double yellow lines. Unreal. We finally found something stranger-looking than us.
After two hours of exploring Centralia and taking more pictures of abandoned landscapes than normal people would put up with, we were tired and hungry. And we had to get out of Dodge and back to the city proper. But it was nearing dinnertime, and we certainly couldn’t pass up the opportunity to stop at the Clinton Station Diner in Clinton, New Jersey and consume the Mt. Olympus — a 50-pound hamburger.
That’s 25 pounds of beef, 25 pounds of cheese, tomato, lettuce, ketchup and bun: 50 full pounds of guilt and glory. With a dozen people chowing down, we couldn’t even finish half the thing. Rolling back onto the bus, there were 35 nutty NYers who had reached their fill of the world outside our city. If the real world consists of smoldering underground coal fires and 50-pound burgers, then I’ll take Manhattan.

Lots more pictures, of swimming holes, smoking crevasses and 50 lb. cheeseburger demolition can be found here on my Flickr set!

Lost in History vol. 66: Art Revival, by way of Queens

2008-07-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

On the corner of Onderdonk and Harman streets in southern Ridgewood lies a church façade. As spelled out bilingually on purple canvas, the previous occupant of this space was the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, a Roman Catholic Latino congregation. The new occupants of the space are also called the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, but with an entirely different bend to their professed spirituality. There hasn’t been a straight-up religious sermon in the Center for years, but this past Saturday night, a different kind of sermon was held, spiritual in nature but preaching art and aesthetics, noise and performance, and the very strange story of a very famous artist and his attempts to buy oddly shaped lots at tax auctions in NYC.
We know the backstory because we are friends with the occupants of the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, and they asked us to emcee the evening’s events. The good men who live at the Sanctuary — three literary and visual artists by the names of Matthew Blair, Lech Szporer and Andrew Wingert — have built lofts and incorporated the layout of the former church into a communal performance space. They opened on Saturday with a Revival that featured installation art, sculptures, music, tap dance, mime, an exercise bike that masturbated a man in a lazy chair, feedback noise, preaching, and a mysterious excursion that led to a former piece by the aforementioned very famous NYC artist. Lesser known (but no less serious) artists included yours truly, along with David Button, Trevor Lukert, Superman’s Guestlist, Marisa Mickelberg, Issac Zal, the Buddy Hollyco$t, Amery Kessler, Carrie Fox, Shana Paleologos, Andrew Hurst, Phillip Battikha, Ryan Brown, and Justin Horne. And of course, Gordon Matta-Clark.
Matta-Clark was not present at the opening — he died in 1978, at the age of 35, of pancreatic cancer. During his short but powerful life he was known for various artistic experiments and performances as well as for catalyzing SoHo as an artistic neighborhood during the derelict 70s. His works, called “anarchitecture”, involved removing pieces and slivers of buildings before they met the wrecking ball; he opened a restaurant/ongoing performance piece in SoHo called Food, staffed entirely by working artists; he also purchased tiny, unusable slivers called “gutterspace” of NYC real estate during the city’s regular purging of such lots. Due to surveying, zoning and public-works anomalies, various infinitesimal slices of real estate came to be owned by Matta-Clark, who found in them a perfect bureaucratic extension of his own anarchitecture. Fourteen lots were located in Queens and one in Staten Island. Unfortunately, Matta-Clark passed away before he could do whatever he was intending to do with these lots, and the ownership passed over to his wife, who eventually stopped paying taxes on them; control reverted back to the city. One of these lots — Lot 116 — is walking distance from the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, and the evening’s high point included a walk to the Lot, and a sermon about separate spaces.
As the preacher-on-site, we weren’t all that prepared for the crowd of 100 artists, gallery fags, rockers, intellectuals, confused locals, friends and family. We also didn’t know that much about Matta-Clark, or how to talk about this sliver space —2’3” wide by 355’ long – in order to make it applicable to the crowds and the evening’s events. We eventually focused on the relationship between this sliver space and the rest of the alley, and how it reflects the separate spaces inside each of us, and how they relate to the rest of us. It was complicated. Whiskey fueled most of the preaching. But it was intense. We had a few Amens! and Hallelujahs! Afterwards, when the crowd had calmed down, we all returned to the church to continue that perennial method of moving with the spirit — we had a dance party.

Lost in History vol. 65: Staten Island Adventures!

2008-06-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

We here at Lost in History delight in adventures within the outer boroughs. Especially when said adventures take us to places we haven’t been before; little known secret gardens and hardly-visited museums that revel in the urban idiosyncrasies that make NYC such a marvelous place to live and work. What better excuse to forge such an excursion then being asked to do exactly that: run an all-day adventure to parts unknown, courtesy of Flux Factory! Which is exactly what happened this past Saturday.
Flux Factory is an arts space with a sense of humor located in Long Island City, Queens. Previous installations have included Grizzly Proof – a multimedia show involving various artists’ interpretations of a Grizzly-Bear-Proof suit; and NY NY NY – another multimedia show in which artists recreated the Queens Panorama of the City of New York, and which your author engaged the masses in a psycho-geographical trivia. For their current show, Going Places (Doing Stuff), Flux was taking the project outside, by asking various artist-performers to invent their own adventure, stuff a buncha people onto a cheese bus without revealing too much of the ensuing journey, and take off. Flux asked yours truly to kick the summer-long series off, and informed the participants that the tour would a) stay within the five boroughs, b) last all day, and c) be led by a native New Yorker and licensed NYC tour guide with “knowledge of New York City and a rambunctious personality (that) make him the greatest guide you could wish for.” Aw shucks.
25 people met up at the City Reliquary Museum and Civic Organization in Williamsburg at half-past 11am, to peruse the museums holdings before the adventure began. Flux had been smart enough to ensure that our cheese bus had A/C so we wouldn’t swelter, and our driver was a very friendly Haitian gentleman named Marcus. As soon as we hit the BQE westbound, it was pretty clear where we were going – not to the Bronx or Manhattan or Queens. And although we were driving through Brooklyn, we sure weren’t going to spend our time there. We were headed to NY’s smallest borough in population (less than half-a-mil) but the 6th largest island off the coast of the country; the one, the only, the 40% Italian – Staten Island!
First stop on our magical mystery tour was the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Grotto, in Rosebank, right near the VZ Bridge. Built in 1937 by the local fraternal order, the Grotto is a handmade collaged and stucco’d outdoor sculpture built from concrete, seashells, bicycle reflectors, religious statues and ceramic chips, dedicated to their namesake saint. Open year-round, the Grotto in Rosebank is quite powerful, and as a work of handmade, devoted, religious art, it is also the first Traditional Cultural Property listed in NY State.
Second stop was the Castleton Hill Moravian Church Labyrinth, farther inland on Victory Boulevard. Contrary to what many people think, a labyrinth is not a giant three-dimensional walled-in maze designed to lose its travelers. Instead, a labyrinth is a flattened two-dimensional path that, through it many twists and turns, will always present a way out. This particular one was laid out on the courtyard of the Church, and acts as a meditation tool; as one walks the labyrinth, one should experience peace and spiritual enlightenment. While various members of our adventuresome group strove for those lofty goals, by taking their turns in the 90-degree heat, assisted by the very friendly Pastor Lynnette Delbridge, other intrepid SI explorers marched down the block to order a half-dozen pies from the legendary Joe and Pats Pizzeria. Ricotta with broccoli rabe; Pepperoni; Scungilli with fresh garlic; cheese-free with arugula with cherry tomatoes and onions; plain; those Staten Islanders sure know how to craft heaven into eight slices loaded with fresh toppings.
We voraciously attacked our pizza back on the bus and headed off to adventure number three, deep in the heart of the island atop Lighthouse Hill – arguably the highest natural point on the Eastern Seaboard (although this is a long-running argument between the residents of Lighthouse Hill and the residents of Todt Hill). Amidst the opulent mansions and private driveways snaking up and down the gorgeous land lies the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art. A publicly funded institution with as idiosyncratic a history as its location, the entire place deserves its own Lost in History column, and will receive one, in due time. However, there’s more adventure to our Staten Island, so after a 45 minute docent-led tour of the tiered gardens and art & antiquities collection, we headed off.
Rumor has it that there is a privately designed, privately owned Frank Lloyd Wright house atop Lighthouse Hill. I had never heard of such a thing until Moe, another tour guide and New-York-ophile, inquired of Jessica, the docent. She obliges and gives walking directions, so off we march through the lush SI forest to find the thing. In the midst of the hunt it begins to downpour, but Marcus, ever-ready at the helm of the cheese bus, picks us up and we manage to find the home. It looks like a Maine summer house at the edge of a lake, but one that got left in a medieval stretcher a bit too long.
We also discover the Victorian lighthouse that gives the Hill its moniker – the towering monstrosity is just chilling in another privately owned backyard.
The adventure is almost over – adventurers are getting Staten-Islanded-out. We attempt to find the Conference House, which is in Tottenville at the absolutely southern-most point of NY State. On Sept 11th, 1776, this country estate, the only surviving pre-Revolutionary manor house, acted as the final meeting place between the American and British Forces in a futile attempt to call off the War. Unfortunately, thanks to a series of dead-ends, and a busload of hungry, sun-stroked, tired, cranky, non-islanders, we said screw it, and made our way to Killmeyers Bavarian Beer Hall and Garden – the oldest beer hall cum restaurant in the borough. It was there that we feasted on schnitzel, bratwurst, hefeweizen, German Chocolate Cake, and raised a collective toast to the amazing, underappreciated, overlooked and friggin enormous Staten Island. And it only took two hours to get back to Brooklyn. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but not for aother couple of years. I love you Staten Island!
more pictures can be found here on my Flickr page.

Lost in History vol. 64: Bums, Slums and Geeks

2008-06-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

On Thursday we attended a free NYC Department of Parks & Recreation lecture in Columbus Park, Chinatown, featuring historian Warren Shaw, an excitable New Yorker who seemed to be even more excited that his lecture, linking the old Gangs of New York culture to the culture of today, was taking place on the physical spot where it all happened. Geek-o-licious! But this is a city filled with geeks, especially ones who love their city history, so the newly renovated Columbus Park pavilion was filled to capacity with about 60 New Yorkers who were all ears and eyes on Mr. Shaw’s PowerPoint discussion.

Titled Bums, Slummers and Swells: The Birth of American Popular Culture on the Lower East Side, 1825-1855, the lecture argued that the youth culture of the notorious Five Points neighborhood had a enormous impact on the development of urban street culture, and therefore all of American culture.

The Lower East Side of the day (what would today be roughly everything from Chatham Square to 14th Street, and from the East River to Broadway) was a crime-ridden cesspool, filled with degradation, sin and vice, squalor and disease, Catholics, Blacks, Irish and the working class. But it was also a colorful neighborhood, with local fraternity organizations sporting DIY uniforms and spouting dialects unheard of in other parts of American or the world. There was a forced camaraderie here unseen anywhere else — because although the Irish and the Blacks didn’t necessarily like each other, they were destitute, so they didn’t have much of a choice, and had to live together. This made the old Five Points the first racially integrated neighborhood in the country, as well as the densest.

Mr. Shaw pointed out that with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, connecting the Great Lakes and the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean, this architectural and engineering marvel cemented New York as the capital of America’s shipping empire. Now grains, livestock, timber and everything else the bountiful Midwest had to export could be sent abroad; the Erie Canal also allowed New York City’s cultural customs and fashions, slang and dance, drinking, drugging, and colorful fighting to be spread to populated areas west of the Hudson. There was no cultural locus point for the country, as there was no common dialect. Now, along with dictating the countries’ economic trade, NYC was mastering the cultural trade as well.

Another interesting point that Mr. Shaw effusively described was the “flash talk” or slang of the gangs. Just as a member of the Crips today wouldn’t want to be caught slinging Bloods slang, the various gangs had their own vernacular, some of which survives today. “Kicking the bucket” and “Coppers” are two of the slang phrases that stick with us today, invented back in the old Five Points. ("Kicking the bucket" was how one helped an enemy off himself, by knocking the victim unconscious, stringing up a suicide noose, tossing the bozo on top of a bucket and through the loop, then kicking aforementioned bucket to leave ‘em dangling. A "Copper" was exactly that — a copper badge worn by volunteer cops, and therefore hardly intimidating or worth any respect.) Along with flash talk, the Gangs had their invented heroes, their larger-than-life characters who were inspirational figures to anyone looking to rise out of the slums. For the youth of the day, it was Mose, a tough-talkin, wise-crackin’, no-nonsense Irish B’hoy (slang for Bowery Boy) with a heart of gold. Mose can certainly be seen in various heroes of today, including Bugs Bunny, Holden Caulfield, Superman, and (this was a stretch, but) RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan.

All in all it was an interesting, exciting, geektastic lecture, not just because the words were happening on the block where these figures fought, drank, drugged, loved, danced and invented American street culture. Even though, as King of the NYC Geeks, we knew most of what Mr. Shaw was extrapolating, regardless it was wonderful to see so many other people geeking out with us.

(originally published on 6/9/8 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 63: Uptown Song & Dance

2008-06-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

It’s a safe assumption that many New Yorkers have never been to Washington Heights. Tucked up far away at the northern-most end of Manhattan, accessible by the A, C and 1 trains, Washington Heights has for the past 40 years been one of the few immigrant enclaves in Manhattan that still sees hardworking, lofty-dreaming, high-strivers arrive monthly. Chinatown in Lower Manhattan is the another such hustling and bustling ‘hood (and your urban journalist’s favorite Manhattan neighborhood) — but Chinatown’s never seen the lights of Broadway. With the arrival of the incredible new musical In The Heights, which we had the pleasure of seeing last week, it’s time to tell the vibrant story of this north side ‘nabe — both historically and through song and dance.

The “Washington” in Washington Heights is Fort Washington (the “Washington” in Fort Washington is General George), which once occupied the highest point on the island, making it a natural defense line against the Brits during the Revolutionary War. The Fort was constructed by the Continental Army and almost immediately seized by the British during the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16th, 1776; the site of the Fort is now a park, Bennett Park, just north of the George Washington Bridge. As the Industrial Age gave way to the Gilded Age, Washington Heights became popular amongst the monied crowd because of the spectacular views on the high ridge along the Hudson. When the IRT Broadway line reached the southern edge of the hood in 1904, it brought immigrants, mostly Greek and Irish, with the Jews were soon to follow. Along with the working classes came major organizations, such as the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, museums and scholastic institutions at Audubon Terrace and Yeshiva University.

As is always the story in 1960s, 70s and 80s New York City, out flowed the Jews and Irish, in came the black and Latino communities; in particular, Washington Heights became the go-to neighborhood for the surging Dominican population. There were Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans moving in as well, but throughout the 1980s, no other area in the city attracted more people from the DR than Washington Heights — it was the largest DR community in the country and substantially larger than the Dominican Republic itself. Racial strife was prevalent throughout these decades, and in order to give these NY citizens a more substantial voice on the City Council, the district lines were redrawn in 1991; the same year, Guillermo Linares became the first elected official of Dominican heritage in the country.

That’s the past to Washington Heights. The present is reflected in the phenomenal In The Heights. Conceived by 28-year-old wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the lyrics and music to most of the show as a sophomore at Wesleyan University seven years ago, In The Heights is the standard immigrant striving story of trying to make it in an unforgiving city, surrounded by the people you love. The twists and turns that it takes in the interim are aided by the supernova energy of the young cast and the hyperkinetic choreography that reflects modern break-dancing, hispanic meringue, classic Jerome Robbins-style dancing and standard street moves. The songs, a powerhouse charge of salsa, hip-hop, power pop, American Idol-style solos and Broadway group numbers had one woman in the audience screaming out her passion as if she were at a concert. Upon walking out of the theater I felt revitalized and energized, that I had just seen the new face of the modern Broadway musical. And best of all, it’s a new New York musical. In The Heights is a lock for the TONY for Best Musical (who else is going to take it? Xanadu!?). And it’s about time that more of ethnic NYC got its turn on the big stage.

(originally published on 6/2/8 on www.thelmagazine.com)

Bicycle Fetish Day and After-Disaster!

2008-05-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hooray for Bicycle Fetish Day! Hooray for the City Reliquary! Boo for 5 stitches over two lacerations in one's right (that is to say: typing & writing) hand. Boo for a suspension of posts on ActionDirection blog. Lets show some pretty pictures and briefly explain a) Bike Fetish Day and b) how I ended up with abovementioned stitches.

A) Bike Fetish Day is the single largest community event the City Reliquary hosts all year. It's a day long celebration of bike culture and events, and we have a block party, where local bike gangs ride their tricked-out and bedecked two wheelers:

Where we have a blazin Bar-B-Que:

Where I acted as the MC for a bunch of great and goofy bike awards, like Ugliest Bike, Smallest Two Wheeler, Most Tricked Out Bike, Best in Show, etc etc.

We also had the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, a politico-radical-marching-band perform, as well as a Brazilian Drum Core group.

It was an overall blast. Maybe 250-300 people showed up, ate watermelon, rode their bikes, boogied to the DJs Stacher and Dirtyfinger, and it is generally surmised that everyone had a glorious time. I also agreed to host and manage the after-party, in the CR's backyard. Most of the other Reliquarians wanted no part in the party, but BFU Marin Tockman agreed to bartend. Here's where disaster strikes.

B) As I'm stocking an ice cooler with beer for the party, I shove a bottle into the cooler with too much force and it explodes in my hand. Blood everywhere. Dave, CR Prez wraps a gauze pad around the gaping slashes in my palm and we call the ambulance. The EMTs determine I need stitches and its best to get them done now. Here's my bloody claw in the ambulance. Note the arrow indicating the damage.

I might be all smiles in this picture (and the snazziest dressed mofo at Woodhull hospital),

but the ensuing evening, in which I missed the party I was supposed to host, was spectacularly depressing. 2 hours in the ER, another 2 in the Triage Unit, watching a mounting battle of empty threats between two alkies (druggies? possiblys.) who were screaming in their respective English and Spanish, that they were going to fucking kill each other. No matter that the one speaking English didnt understand a word of Spanish; no matter that the one speaking Spanish couldnt comprehend a word of English; regardless, these two screwshits were hollering muerte y puta de madre and all sorts of angry mania directly from the mouths of two men, knocked clear out of the ballpark I dont even think they came to the hospital together. All I wanted was for my hand to get stitched and to crawl into a cab, back to my pad.

Which, 4 hours after strolling into the joint, finally occured. 3 stitches in the top gash, two smaller in the lower, and frustrated, angered, infuriated and depressed, i got the holy hell out of there. Marin and other reliable sources say the party was lowkey but cool, and i didnt miss much. What I missed was the whole thing - the party I was hosting for my museum. But now I can tell people I got into a bar fight with a beer bottle, however it wasnt a bar, but a Community Museum, and it wasnt a fight with another patron, but a battle with the bottle.

The hand's all better now (you can see the scar right under the index finger if you squint),

but for the last few weeks it was too stressful to type or write, as too much flexing of the index and mid fingers have caused pain and frustration. Thanks to all who helped me through the night and ensuing weeks.

Lost in History vol. 62: You Say Hanami, I Say Huhwuzzi?

2008-05-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

Spring is finally swinging its gorgeous pendulum ever closer to our neck-napes: Warm breezes, shorts, and slathered sunscreen all prove that the median temperature, along with people’s flirtation levels, is on the rise. Another certain indicator of spring springing eternal is the Cherry Blossom Festival at our beloved Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a perennial favorite amongst romantics, botanists, horticulturists, New Yorkers and tourists alike. The peak cherry blossom moment just hit on Sunday, and with the largest collection of cherry blossoms in the world outside of Japan, the BBG was the place to be.

Founded in 1910, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was established on an ash dump, sandwiched in between the Brooklyn Museum, originally called the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences, and Prospect Park. It was intended to be the green, outdoorsy compartment to a top-notch museum. (The BIAS was supposed to be the largest single museum complex in the world, with an unsurpassed collection of art, natural history and science objects. The Great Consolidation of 1898 put an end to all that.) Although hardly the first botanical gardens in the city — the first one in the country was founded in 1801 on land that would become Rockefeller Center — the Bot (as we native Brooklynites like to call it) was developed over the beginning of the 20th century and “became known for its emphasis on plant physiology and genetics and for its efforts in public education: the world’s first children’s gardening program was established in 1914.” (Per the Encyclopedia of New York City.) Dr. Charles Stuart Gager was the main man responsible for the development of the Bot, especially its beloved Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, which was the first Japanese garden to be landscaped in an American public gardens — in 1915, by immigrant Takeo Shiota. The cherry blossom trees, although not within the original confines of the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, have since been incorporated into the greater schematic of the Garden and are now considered a part of the whole East-meets-West aesthetic.

The Japanese have a term for the “viewing and cherishing each moment of the cherry blossom season” (as the BBG’s website puts it): Hanami. Along with being a fabulous one-word sales pitch, Hanami is also a lovely microcosm for our lives as New Yorkers as the temperature climbs into the 70s and 80s. We cherish the switch from hot to iced coffee, the swish of summer. We become aware of each moment spent outdoors, away from our computers and cubicles, in the glorious weather that envelopes us. Hooray for Hanami, cherry blossoms and springtime!

(originally published on 5/6/08 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 61: Happy 150th Birthday Central Park!

2008-05-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

Two weekends back, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Central Park Conservancy held a celebratory series of events dedicated to reminding New Yorkers just how near and dear Central Park is, and just how impossible its 20-year prehistory of invention and construction was. It’s a welcome reminder, as today, April 28th, is the 150th anniversary of the selection of Olmstead and Vaux’s Greensward Plan by the Commissioners of Central Park, a body of elder statesmen who had the final say in the 600 acres (eventually enlarged to 843) at the center of Manhattan.

Fifty-one blocks long and three avenues wide, or two and a half miles long and a mile wide, or slightly larger than the country of Monaco, Central Park almost wasn’t so central. As the city’s elders were determining what kind of general green space to build for the city, the prospect of building such an enormous area of un-rentable real estate practically shot the idea dead in the water. It was the aristocracy of Gilded Age NYC who demanded a park to match the ones in Paris and London. So in 1853, the state legislature authorized the city to use eminent domain to take the land between 59th and 106th Sts, evicting the 1,600 Irish, German and African-American residents, including all the inhabitants of Seneca Village, a substantially developed colony of Free Blacks with three churches and a schoolhouse. With them out of the way, the space could be landscaped so as to feature terrain other than the rocky outcroppings of schist, swamp and scrubland that preceded the park as we know it today. Problem was: who to design Central Park?

The easy choice was Andrew Jackson Downing, a preeminent landscape and editor of the The Horticulturalist. A celebrity in his time, Downing was one of Frederick Law Olmstead’s role models as a landscape designer, and Calvert Vaux — eventually Central Park’s other prominent architect — emigrated to the U.S. and opened his own architecture and landscape design due in part to Downing’s direct encouragement . Downing was one of the major supporters of Central Park well before the land was purchased; there’s no doubt his design skills would’ve been put to work landscaping the park, had Downing not drowned while trying to save his mother-in-law during a freak steamboat explosion on the Hudson River in 1852.

Next up in the line to design this “New York Park” was Egbert Viele, the Chief Engineer for the park as of 1857, and most noted for his bad-ass map, initially known as the “Sanitary and Topographical Atlas of the City and Island of New York," but more commonly known as the Viele Map, made in 1865. When the park commissioners released their plans in that year, it was Viele’s layout that made the cut — a collection of green spaces without a larger unified motive. If it hadn’t been for Vaux — by then an established green-chitect working in Newburgh, New York, who successfully lobbied the park Commissioners to open up a contest for park designs — our park today would look a lot different. Vaux, who had been in conversation with Olmstead, worked on the Greensward Plan; theirs was the last entry submitted, on March 31st, 1858. The original ten-foot long map is on view at the Central Park Armory. Voila! One hundred fifty years ago today, the Greensward Plan was selected as the park for New York City! Now all they had to was build the thing. But that’s another Lost in History altogether.

(originally published on 4/28/08 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 60: A Big Fat Greek Art Installation.

2008-04-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

For those of you in the know, another role we are proud to fill is that of Events Coordinator and Official Tour Guide for the City Reliquary Community Museum and Civic Organization in Williamsburg. We’re essentially a collection of collections of NYC stuff, from vintage Brooklyn seltzer bottles to the “2nd Ave” sign from the original 2nd Avenue Deli. The founders of the home-grown museum, Dave Herman and Bill Scanga, are two collecting-obsessed NYC nerds (god bless ‘em) who wanted to share their personal collections with the rest of the world. It started as a window-front museum on the corner of Grand and Havemeyer streets in 2003 and has since moved into a storefront space just around the corner, at 370 Metropolitan Avenue. Every so often, another city organization learns about the CR, and has Dave and Bill out to give a mini-lecture about the stuff in our museum. So it was that we found ourselves in Bay Ridge last Wednesday night, giving a talk to the Bay Ridge Historical Society.The talk went smoothly, as it generally does, in a room full of senior citizens who were eager to hear anything about their New York of old. We talked about the Croton Reservoir while showing off a brick from pipelines; we told the story of the Brooklyn Bridge, and passed around some U-bolts from the underside of the walkway; we related the history of the Statue of Liberty and displayed a book of vintage SOL postcards. Afterwards, VP of Collections Bill Scanga and I took off by bike for old-school red sauce Italian joint the New Corners Restaurant (open since 1936). But we were sidetracked, fortuitously enough, by the massive art installation of the island of Crete, by local artist George Kortsolakis, on 79th St between Ridge Blvd and Third Ave.For the past twenty years, Kortsolakis, an immigrant from Greece, has been living and working on his dream: rebuilding a miniature version of his homeland in the front yard of his Bay Ridge home. Sheltered in an ornate gold-painted shack, Mr. Kortsolakis’s Crete is a majestic, multi-hued thing, with cobalt blue pebbles making up the ocean, broken chunks of cement for the roads, plants for trees, little Lego men and toy ships in the harbor, even a miniature Icarus, with wax and feather wings, lounging on the beach. His island of Crete is just seven feet long, but within it lives an exhaustive universe of houses, cars, and creatures, including the krikri, a wild goat-type creature that is said to leap from sheer mountainside to mountainside.
Although it was nearing 10pm on a weeknight, we walked up to Mr. Kortsolakis’ front door and rang the bell. A tiny, stoop-shouldered old man, complete with glasses, thinning hair and a bushy white moustache came to the door. We inquired if it was his artistic creation, and he resoundingly replied “Yes! Is mine! You want to see? Wait, I turn on the lights for you!” Five minutes later, the installation was awash in blinking Christmas lights. Mr. Kortsolakis proceeded to give a history, in his thick Greek accent, of his ever-evolving obsession. We tried to tell him that we run a museum in Williamsburg where this would be a perfect fit, but there was no getting a side word in between his excited life-and-art story and explanation the incomparable model below. Just as well — to remove the model from the man’s front yard would be as foolish as a certain mythical figure flying too close to the sun.

More pictures from the evenings events can be viewed here.

(originally published on www.thelmagazine.com on 4/23/08)

Lost in History vol. 59: Happy Birthday, Mr. Teletrophono!

2008-04-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

Celebrations come and go in New York City. With so much history, so many events to commemorate and remember throughout the five boroughs, it’s easy to forget a brilliant human being or their spectacular accomplishments. That’s why we weren’t all that surprised to learn that we were some of the only people who arrived at the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum in Rosebank, Staten Island yesterday to celebrate the 200th birthday of Antonio Meucci, the true inventor of the teletrophono in 1849!What the hell is a teletrophono? A teletrophono is an invention, resembling two tin cups attached via an electrically charged wire that enabled two persons to communicate while standing in entirely separate rooms! Mr. Meucci discovered this incredible modern marvel while living in Cuba and treating sick patients through “electrophonic” experimentation, where he would send small electric shocks through charged wires from his mouth to the mouth of the afflicted. Once, while standing in a separate room, he heard & felt the shout of pain inside his own mouth, coming from the gentleman in another room being treated, Meucci realized he’d discovered something great – namely that sound can travel short distances through electric wires. In 1849, as Meucci started work on what would become the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell (booo!) celebrated his second birthday.

In 1850, Meucci and his wife emigrate to New York, settling in the bucolic farming community of Rosebank, Staten Island. Meucci patents smokeless candles and produces them in a little factory in his backyard.
Slowly, Ester Meucci’s body succumbs to arthritis, and she is relegated to her second-floor bedroom. So Meucci creates a mini-telephone system hooked up around the house in order to speak with her as he continues his candle production and works on various inventions. In order to keep up rent on the property, the Meuccis take in boarders, most legendarily Giuseppe Garibaldi, “Hero of Two Worlds” and subject of a previous L.I.H.Over the next 20 years, a series of extraordinarily bad luck, fraudulent investors, popular anti-Italian sentiment, court cases ruling against his inventions and one steamboat explosion (the Westfield, in 1871) prevent Antonio Meucci from renewing patents and holding onto important documents proving him the true inventor of the telephone. (After the Westfield explosion, Meucci was so badly burned that Ester had to sell the original teleptrophono models to a second-hand dealer for six dollars in order to pay the hospital bills.) In 1872, Meucci submits his plans to the District Telephone Company of NY for assistance in proving his invention; after two years of persistent visits to the Company, he learns the papers are lost. Twenty days after this injustice, Bell applies for his patent in the creation of the telephone. Meucci’s remaining years are spent in his cottage in Staten Island, tinkering on inventions and engaged in futile court cases trying to prove his primacy in the telephone patent. He dies penniless in 1889, ever confident that “the telephone, which I invented and which I first made known and which, as you know, was stolen from me.”
Although popular culture and the history books tell us about Bell’s invention as the first telephone, there is a marvelous little museum, owned and operated by the Sons of Italy, chock full of artifacts and displays proving otherwise. So when better to go, then on the man’s 200th birthday!? We sang “Happy Birthday Dear Antonio,” watched an inspirational film about his life and times, took a private tour of the collection with the wonderfully informative (S.I. native) Robin Cocozza (and her awesome Staten Island accent), and we snapped pictures like crazy. Highly recommended for any fans of homegrown museums and / or teletrophonos.

(first published on 4/14/8 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 58: A King of a Theater, Awaiting a New Court

2008-04-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the 1980s and ‘90s had left me with some serious envy of previous eras. I missed (by more than a generation, but who’s counting?) Brooklyn’s heyday of the 1940s through the 60s, when the borough had it all: blue-collar employment via the Navy Yard and North Brooklyn’s ubiquitous factories; multi-cultural down-to-earth heroes, by way of the Brooklyn Dodgers; a world-renowned epicenter for the birth of live rock and roll with Murray the K’s concert extravaganzas at the Fox Theater on Flatbush and Dekalb avenues. Now most of these venues are long gone: – the The Brooklyn Navy Yard was closed as an active shipbuilding yard in 1966,; the Dodgers left for LA in 1957 and the Fox theater is now part of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. But every so often I would bike past a shuttered part of history and wonder about its future.This would happen most frequently when zooming past the abandoned, derelict Loew’s Kings Theater. Built as one of the NYC region’s’ five “Wonder Theaters” in 1929, the Loew’s Kings was considered to be the most extravagant and opulent of the five (the other four are the Valencia in Queens, the Jersey Theater in Jersey City, the Paradise in the Bronx and the 175th Street Theater, uptown) and was designed by the distinguished architecture firm of Rapp and Rapp. Built in an over-the-top French Renaissance style on the bustling commercial stretch of Flatbush Avenue between Tilden Avenue and Beverly Road, the Kings was said to be inspired by the Palace of Versailles and the Paris Opera House. At capacity, the Kings held close to 3200 movie-goers, the majority of whom enjoyed orchestra seating, which was unusual for an urban movie theater. Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler and Barbara Streisand were all high school ushers (but not at the same time). The lobby paneling was carved out of Mahogany Oak and the entire place had extravagant art deco etchings, details and accouterments, which helped ticket-holders escape the dreary Depression.Through declining attendance, the Kings lasted lasted into the ‘50s, at which point its attendance declined until the ‘77, when it was locked, shuttered, sold to the city and left for dead. Which is how I always zoomed past it, wandering the exterior, searching for a way in, legally or not. But with the renaissance of the Paradise in the Bronx, now a live music and events venue, as well as the resurrection of the 175th Street as a live concert hall slash Evangelical House of Worship, we might very well see the return of the Loew’s Kings to something like its former glory. The NYC Economic Development Corporation held an open house and invitation for RFPs to turn this majestic, ghostly wonder palace into a living performance space once again. Although I don’t have the $70 million that the city is asking as a leasing price, let alone the cost it would take to rehabilitate the thing, I showed anyway, to take pictures of the decaying monstrosity. The massive velvet curtain was sagging, the plastered walls were crumbling and the seats were rotting away, but the ornate-ness and grandiosity were very much intact. Whatever questionable future the Kings has, and however long it takes, there is a very good chance that it will be royalty once again.
(originally published on www.thelmagazine.com on 4/8/8)

Lost in History vol. 57: Double your Cantilever, Double the Fun!

2008-04-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

What’s worse than a NYC-obsessed nerd who gets super-excited about a slideshow lecture on the building of the Queensboro Bridge, held Monday at the Parks & Recs building on East 54th Street? An NYC-obsessed nerd who can correctly point out that the roof tiles used in the underside of the QBBridge, in the open-air marketplace underneath the Manhattan approach, are the exact same tiles used in the ceiling of the room where the lecture was taking place. To be fair, we’re talking about some pretty amazing tiles: Guastavino to be precise, the same kinds used in Ellis Island and Grand Central Terminal. But this lecture wasn’t about tiles (although you have to check out the Whispering Corners in Grand Central!), it was about bridges. Specifically, the Queensboro Bridge, built between 1903 and 1909 as the third of four bridges to span the East River.

The lecture was presented by the NYC Parks and Recs department, with Robert Singleton of the Greater Astoria Historical Society providing the first thirty minutes of history (essentially the bridge’s first hundred years); following Mr. Singleton, Judith Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society spoke for an additional half-hour on the subject of trolley cars and railways from the Manhattan side of the QBBridge to points east.

The mighty Queensboro (note: first called the Blackwell’s Island bridge; then the 59th Street Bridge until after WWII: the dropping of “ugh” from “boro”) happened sometime in the 50s) is the only East River bridge that isn’t a suspension. This was because of the length that needing crossing (3700 feet, not counting the approaches, almost three times the length of the Brooklyn bridge), as well as the price (cantilever is cheaper than suspension, and the bridge was built during a rare moment of anti-Tammany honesty) and the space allowed (thinner too!). When the bridge was opened — 99 years ago from Sunday — it tremendously catalyzed the wide-open spaces of the decade-old borough of Queens, which until (and after) Great Consolidation of 1898 was simply a collection of outlying farms and local villages, strung together by postal and shipping roads. Once this bridge was opened up to the masses, the immigrants came soaring over to plant their feet in the rich Queens soil. Old timers (really old) from Queens will remark that the borough only has two time periods: B.B. and A.B. (Before & After Bridge).

A work of industrial beauty (unlike the hideous Williamsburg Bridge), the QBBridge used to have a mess of trolley cars running across the thing. At the start they were part of the elevated rail system, since the Second Avenue El ran right up to and across the bridge. There was a smaller looped system that brought passengers to the middle of the bridge, at which point they could take a passenger elevator down to Blackwell’s-cum-Welfare-cum-Roosevelt Island. This all changed with the construction of the “Upside-down Building,” placed immediately next to the bridge so that vehicles could drive straight onto the rooftop, and take freight elevators down to the island. The “Upside-down Building” was demolished in 1970, well after the Welfare Island bridge was built in 1953, establishing a direct land-link to the sad little island in the middle of the East River. There’s more story to tell about the QBBridge, but this is only the 99th anniversary – as they said in Ebbets Fields, “Wait Til Next Year!”

Lost in History vol. 56: Armchair Exploration

2008-04-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

Urban Exploration – that is, the art of adventuring inside of abandoned, derelict and forgotten spaces – is a super cool, only-for-the-gung-ho type of human activity that breaks boundaries, proves its subversion in and of itself, and is a perfect antidote to the over-commodified lifestyles so many of us are chained to. UE is the type of exciting hobby that everyone wants to get involved in, but hardly anyone follows through on, because it’s preposterously illegal, and in today’s Secure Homeland, it can easily get you incarcerated for a long, long time.

Last night, Anthology Film Archives hosted a one-night-only screening, Report From Ghost City, in which The Disembodied Theater Corporation, hand in hand with Ars Subterranea, presented a few short films and multimedia presentations on the subject.

The first was a PowerPoint-styleslide lecture about some friends adventuring atop of the High Line freight rail in Chelsea, narrated by Ross Lipman and featuring the pre-recorded screechy abstract noise compositions of Laura Steenberge. Following the story of youthful indiscretion, we ventured to abandoned insane asylums, where we followed the half-invented, half-autobiographical storylines of mental patients, displayed in graphically altered photographs so as to mimic a graphic novel, page by page. The miscreants of Ars Subterranea starred, in storylines by Julia Solis and Tom Kirsch, the couple that run A.S. Following three short stories in this vein, we had an extended adventure through an abandoned hospital complex, titled Met State, by Brian Papciak, the filmmaker who documented the A.S. trips.

The High Line production, No Way Out But Onward, was an unfortunate dud. What could and should have been a B&E101 lesson was instead a dead boring narrative, illustrated by lukewarm amateurish photography and narrated in mellifluous tones and impossibly clichéd metaphors about finding oneself and choosing paths whilst avoiding a beat cop above the High Line. It was trite and overwrought and infuriatingly long. The three Ars Subterranea psych ward photo-sets were all very pretty and fun to watch, if a bit gothy. Reports from the Sanitarium had an engaging storyline buried within the greater (unfinished) plot; Funeral Play felt like an intricately unfolding set of dead Russian nesting dolls; Irma, excerpts from a postmortem diary

Without a doubt, the most professional production out the evening was Brian Papciak’s Met Life. It’s a smaller, self-sustained piece of an ongoing documentary titled American Ruins, and the cinematography, the space and sounds, the stop-motion animation of wheelchairs raising each other down an abandoned Hospital ward, the time-lapse photography — all of it was masterful and majestic. One felt the creep of desiccation and atrophy while simply sitting in those plush East Village theater seats in the East Village. This is why enjoying UE in the confines of a movie theater is infinitely preferable to tromping through the insane asylums themselves. Unless that kind of thing turns you on. In which case, I have some new friends to introduce you to.

(originally published on 3/25/08 on www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 55: Top of the Rock!

2008-03-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, Elliot Spitzer. How could you? How could you lie to your wife, your children, the good people of NewYork? How could you spend thousands of dollars (hopefully, we pray, thousands of your own dollars, as opposed to public taxpayer cash), over eight months, for a little whack in the sack? How could you shock and awe the nineteen million hardworking residents of the State of New York (state motto: Excelsior!) into a total legislative standstill when the state budget, currently standing at a $4.7 billion deficit, has mere weeks to get balanced and passed? Maybe it has something to do with you being reckless. Maybe it has something to do with you being “a fucking steamroller.” Or maybe, just maybe, you were psychically following in the steps of previous NY State Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was also caught dead (literally) in the act of action with a much younger woman who most certainly wasn’t his wife. Let’s flash back, shall we?

Nelson Rockefeller, grandson of Big Daddy John D. Rockefeller, was born in 1908 to tremendous wealth and privilege, just like all the other members of the Rockefeller clan (this is, after all, the family of the richest man in American history, at a net worth of $200 billion in today’s cash.) Therefore, Nelson was taught to share his wealth with those far less fortunate. At the age of 24 he became at trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (which eventually built its garden on the site of Nelson’s childhood home,), and this developed into a lifelong passion for collecting and developing modern art. He became president of MoMA in 1939, one year after he also assumed presidency of Rockefeller Center. His political power and prestige began to grow in the mid-1930s when he invested time (and, one presumes, moniesmoney) in Creole Petroleum, the Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil, the business that got Grandpappy Rock rich.

After bouncing around certain appointed posts for inter-American relations under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Nelson became New York State Governor in 1958 by defeating the incumbent W. Averell Harriman. Always setting his sights on the Republican presidential nomination, he was turned down for the post in 1960, ’64 and ’68, but re-elected Governor in 1962, ’66, and ’70. In fact, Nelson was the first Governor to establish a permanent office here in the city, using Albany as mostly a hop-stop to pass legislation. Our Man Mr. Rockefeller also established the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1968, absorbing the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and dealing the death knell to Robert Moses. Eventually, Nelson got himself elected appointed Vice President under Gerald Ford, but that was the farthest along the political train the man got. All this is well and good, but (I can hear you asking out loud) what does this have to do with our perv of an ex-Governor?

Nelson Rockefeller died on January 26th, 1979. Rumors had it he had collapsed of a heart attack while working in his midtown office. The official story is that Nelson died while working, but it certainly wasn’t in his office, and the verb “working,” could also be argued. Truth was, Nelson Rockefeller was in the midst of a sexual tryst with one of his assistants: 27-year-old Megan Marshak, who, to this day, has never come forward with her story or explained what she was doing underneath the former Vice-President of the USA. It might’ve helped that in his will, Nelson left her the deed to his townhouse at 13 West 54th sStreet, as well as $50,000. An unsubstantiated rumor states that the coroners noticed Nelson’s shoes crammed onto the wrong feet at the scene of his demise —– this was the first indication that the man hadn’t simply passed peacefully.

We wish new Governor Paterson a smooth transition into office. It seems as if the man has a lot to live up to.

(first published on 3/18/8 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 54: Childs Restaurant A-Go-Go!

2008-03-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

Roller skating will return to Coney Island! At long last, a glimmer of hope at this terminally threatened oceanfront paradise: the addition, on the boardwalk, of an all-ages, wholesome family activity won’t spur constant complaints about the death of working-class amusement parks and “the way things used to be.” What a relief that not everything at Coney is going out via Thor Equities’ wrecking ball — we’ll always have lace-up skates and a booming sound system, hopefully playing Brooklyn locals the Bee Gees. And what better place to have it than in Childs — the historic and landmarked restaurant space at West 21st sSreet on the boardwalk, on the western fringe of the amusement district.

Childs was a famous New York restaurant chain at the turn of last century — sort of a local, franchised Korean-owned buffet-style deli market. Opened in 1889 by William and Samuel Childs, the eateries were known for their oysters, white tile walls (which emphasized cleanliness and discouraged loitering) and self-service standards. Their first shop opened on Cortlandt Street, which has a non-functioning subway stop for the R and W trains, but no actual street: Cortlandt was de-mapped when the Twin Towers were built in 1971. Later Childs restaurants even had table service and more expensive menus, catering to the moneyed crowd – the flagship Childs, opened in 1925, was at 604 Fifth Avenue. (Thanks, Encyclopedia of New York City!) In 1961, the Riese corporation bought out the Childs empire, and converted many of the stores into fast-food joints — in fact, the flagship Childs is a T.G.I. Friday’s today, smack in the heart of Rockefeller Center.

Luckily (depending on how one sees luck,) no such Fridayification was in store for the Coney Island Childs. Built in 1923 by the architects Dennison & Hirons, the space is a huge open-air single-level hall, moderately interrupted with pillars, which are necessary to support the roof. The terra-cotta façade has whimsical nautical themes of lobsters, fishes, ships, seahorses and more; four gorgeous crests adorn the front wall, including Neptune and his trident, a Venetian Galleon, curious fishes and other maritime images. The terra cotta adornments were glazed with bright colors, some of which are visible on the building even today. The Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, in their September 1924 publication, referred to the Childs building as being reminiscent of Coney in its “carnival spirit [which] demands color; it permits almost anything. Childs Restaurant strikes a new note of beauty in surroundings that are naturally festive.”

And it’s going to be a roller rink! After decades of derelict abandonment and ugly graffiti (unlike Creative Time’s Dreamland Artist Club, a 2005 project that can still be seen today), Taconic Investments, the other big-name development organization down at Coney (one with a little bit of public support behind them for, you know, not ramming high-rise lux condos down Coney’s throat), offered Diana Carlin, aka Lola Staar , the space to develop the rink after she had won a "make your dreams come true" contest sponsored by Glamour magazine and Tommy Hilfiger. (So sayeth the Post, via www.gowanuslounge.blogspot.com) Taconic has a 49-year lease on the building. The rink is scheduled to open March 22nd. That’s two weeks away! Strap on those skates kids, and have a drink at Ruby's, the last historic dive on the boardwalk — because next spring there’s a good chance that one of the two will be gone. Definitely not Childs.

(originally published on 3/10/8 on www.thelmagazine.com)

CREAMPUFF CATASTROPHE! on the UES - 3/6/8

2008-03-05T22:04:00.000-08:00

Darcy Savat is a dear, sweet friend, one of the first new friends I made & still have, upon my return to NYC in 2003. She now lives on the Upper East Side with her MAD Magazine staff writer boyfriend Dave, in a swank pad on the 5th floor of a walkup on E 92nd btwn 1st and 2nd avenues. She's a very serious person when it comes to work (Development at MTV but hopefully not much longer) and a very silly person when not at work. She also speaks in a whimsical little-girl-type voice that always manages to express amazement and wonder at some of the most mundane scenes around the city, while not being annoying or grating in the least. A truly wondrous, wonderful human being. We always have ridiculous fun whenever we're out. And I hadn't seen her since November and I missed her dearly. So we planned a dinner-date: delicious & cheap sushi near her pad, and lots of catching up & gossip.

Following the sushi, the craving for sweets hit and hit hard. Cupcakes in particular, but any homebaked cookie/or/cake-type thing would suffice. And this is the Upper East Side . . . they have everything up here! So at a quarter to 10 we set off for cupcakery. The first bakery was pulling down the gates as we approached. I dropped onto my knees on the sidewalk, raised my fists to the air, and proclaimed to the heavens "CUUUPPCAAAKKEESSS!" The young buck drawing the gates grinned and remarked "We've been closed for an hour, dude." I told him an hour ago we were shoving sushi down our gullets. He said try the French place around the corner. We did, to no avail. A third bakery was also closed. At this point, the need for any kind of sweet-cake-type-product-or-anything was unavoidable. So Darcy casually remarks "Well, there's a creampuff place around the corner that-a-way. . ."
Creampuffs?!? Why are we wasting our time with cupcakes when we could be creampuffing our way off this mortal coil? "Cupcakes sink to the bottom of your stone like a stomach, Darcy dear. Let's trip the light fantastic with some creampuffs!!" I hollered at the poor girl. So we hustle-muscle to the creampuff joint (actually a coffee/creampuff place called Choux Coffee on 1st Avenue nr 86th Street) and arrived to a locked door. No good. Two latina teenage employs are sweeping the creampuff crumbs off the floor. There is a fully loaded bag of creampuffs tied up and sitting on the glass counter, ready for the trash.I knock on the door. The girls say "We're closed." I say "I know. I want that bag of creampuffs." Darcy, behind me, shrieks "GIVE US THE CREAMPUFFS!" The following interaction ensues, across the closed, locked glass door of Choux Coffee and us on the sidewalk:

Me: We want those creampuffs!
Darcy: GIVE US THOSE CREAMPUFFS!
Employ 1: I cant.
Me: But they're for the trash, right?
Employ 1: Right.
Me: So give us the creampuffs.
Darcy: WE WANT THE CREAMPUFFS!
Employ 1: But I'd get in trouble with the manager.
Me: Is the manager around?
Employ 1: No.
Me: And those are just going to be thrown out, right?
Employ 1: Right.
Me: So give us the creampuffs.
Darcy: WE NEED THOSE CREAMPUFFS!
Employ 1: But there's no cream in them.
Me: We dont care. We want those creampuffs.
Darcy: WE NEED THOSE CREAMPUFFS!
Employ 1: I dunno.
Me: Look. (Pulls $5 bill from wallet) Look. I'm going to leave this five dollar bill right here (places five dollar bill sticking out of the Come And Eat Creampuffs stand-up sign parked right outside entrance) as a tip for whomever comes and takes it. And we're just going to stand outside this storefront, waiting for a bus. And we hope that somehow, someone just happens to leave a plastic bag filled with cream-less creampuffs at our feet, for the trash, while we're waiting for the bus, and the five dollars just disappear. That's what we're going to do, and we hope that you get the drift and just place those creampuffs outside for the trash. That's what we hope happens, and we hope you hope it happens too.
(Employ 2 just looks on incredulously as this whole scene unfolds. Employ 1 walks around behind the counter to talk to Employ 2. Me and Darcy take three steps towards the curb and pretend to wait for a bus. As we're waiting, we hear the sound of a door unlocking and sneakers hitting the pavement. All of a sudden there's a plastic bag at out feet. We ignore it. We hear the door close behind us. We pickup the plastic bag filled with creamless creampuffs and turn to walk away. I notice that the $5 bill is missing from the sign. We make off like bandits, calm, cool, collected bandits, with a plastic bag stuffed with creampuffs between us. )

END SCENE.

We then proceed to the local Gristede's, buy two cans of Redi-Whip Whipped Cream (one heavy cream, one chocolate) and a box of strawberries, sit down on some wooden pallets outside the supermarket next to an outrageously enormous plexiglass pear, and proceed to DIY our own goddamn creampuffs. Its the most delicious thing in the whole Upper East Side. Passersby are eyeing our DIYpuffs with envy and delight. We laugh and laugh and stuff our face with puffs.

(no camera was on hand to document our creampuff catastrophe, but these pix were shot by my photographer roommate Valeria Forster.)

Lost in History vol. 53: Red All Over

2008-03-05T21:14:00.000-08:00

Amidst the luxury boutique shopping up and down the landmarked Ladies Mile Historic District on Fifth Avenue, the frenzied haggling over at the Chelsea Flea Market on West 25th Street and the foaming-at-the-mouth gallery-goers headed west for a Sunday spent gaping at the newest, most sensationalist life-portraiture by some unknown schmo in LIC, you’d never guess that the forty or so blocks between 26th Street, 14th Street, Eighth Avenue and Union Square were a hotbed of Communist activity! Who would’ve thought that Gay Chelsea, Art Chelsea, Fabulous Chelsea, Big Box Store Chelsea is all sitting on land formerly and currently occupied by those Red Menaces? Not this intrepid, God-fearing American. So it was with a mixture of awe, wonder, trepidation and downright New York skepticism that we took a ninety-minute walking tour of Communist Chelsea this past weekend.

The tour was sponsored by the Common-Room Art Gallery in the Lower Lower East Side (Grand and East Broadway). Our guide was a smart, sharp young Russian photographer, Yevgeniy Fiks, and we were strolling the streets to admire buildings Mr. Fiks has photographed (on view at Common Room through this Friday). We started at 235 West 23rd Street, immediately across from the Chelsea Hotel. This unassuming, staid structure just so happens to be the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Although they’ve only been in this building since the 1970s, CPUSA owns the whole building, as well as the Utrecht Art Shop on the ground floor (though the materials are not cheap). Although they used to occupy the entire building, they’ve been downsized since the 70s and now operate on only three floors. There are forty full-timers in the office, and in fine Marxist-Leninist stance, all the employees receive the same salary.

The history of Communism in NYC is rooted in the immigrant poor, who very much wanted to rise above their station, along with all the rest of their destitute brethren. They had also come from the collective shtetls and ghettos (the original) in the old worlds of Poland, Russia, Lithuania and the Baltic States, to mention only a few. For these people to come to America and witness the discrepancy of Haves and Have-Nots? CPUSA hardly had to advertise for volunteers.

Right across from 235 West 23rd is the famous Hotel Chelsea — one-time home to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Thomas Wolfe, Bob Dylan, Eugene O’Neil, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and, let’s not forget, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Miss Flynn was a radical labor leader who was the first female chairwoman of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) between 1961 and1964, as well as a founding member of the ACLU in 1920. She lived in the Hotel Chelsea for a short period in the late 30s while writing a column for the CPUSA journal The Daily Worker.
Among the other points of interest the heavily-accented Mr. Fiks pointed out to the fifteen interested individuals on tour (some of whom, we thought, seemed to know a little too much about the inner machinations of the CPUSA. . .) was 23 West 26th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the former HQ of CPUSA during the 50s and 60s, which meant this was the hotbed of activity during the McCarthy witch hunts, the ascent of the Soviet Bloc (particularly Hungary and Czechoslovakia), as well as the civil rights movements of the 60s — all making this the go-to spot for young revolutionaries. Now the building is privately owned. We also scoped out 200 Fifth Avenue, home of the League of Women Shoppers, an innocuously named group that acted as a front for the CPUSA in the 40s. In reality, the League investigated unsafe working conditions for women, and organized consumers to support unions and their rights as human beings. 225 Fifth Avenue was home to the publisher B. W. Huebsch, who produced Marxist lit in the 10s and 20s. The magnificent building nearby on the corner of Fifth and 14th was the operating base for the Young Pioneers of America, a group that recognized the importance of educating immigrant youth in Communist dialectics, — as well as American history and the all-important English language.

Last stop on the tour was the ever-important Union Square Park — home to beatboxers, breakdancers, portraitists and some of the most important union rallies this city has ever seen. Union Square hosted annual May Day Rallies for dozens of years, from the late 1800s up to WWII,. The largest and most tumultuous was in 1930, when 30,000 protestors were broken up by 300 cops when the rallying troops wanted to march down to City Hall. To think: this bucolic, peaceful urban center was the site of mass protests and head-crunching cops. Come to think of it, it still is — been to any Critical Mass rides lately?

(originally published on 3/4/8 on www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in Histories 52: A New Yorker in the White House?

2008-02-27T20:37:00.000-08:00

It’s too bad we’ve had to give up our wild mad dreaming of a three-way race to DC between three spectacularly different New Yorkers. What would’ve been a Subway Series for the political world would also have thrust New York back into the spotlight utilizing different talking points, as opposed to the standard triumvirate of money, media and fashion. Alas – it is not to be: for better or for worse (Florida was saying “for worse”, but we know better) we have “Benito” Giuliani finally out of the public eye, possibly for good. First strike, yerr out. Then our Mayor-turned-third party hopeful Bloomberg turned out to be treating the whole thing as a flight of fancy: if the man had been serious at any point in the game, then we wouldn’t have put up with over half a year of dilettantish media posturing and “will he or wont he” journalistic grab-assing. Second strike. I can certainly tell you that if I were to run for Prez, there’s no way I’d fool around for even a second in the stages of the setup — zero-sum game. And now, with the unstoppable juggernaut of Obama barreling through eleven straight state wins, it seems like our last shot with at putting a New Yorker into the White House — she might be from the Midwest, but Senator Hillary Clinton’s been working for New York — might not make it past March 4th. The whole thing reminds us of a little bit of forgotten NY history, most notably a brilliant, doomed politician named Al Smith, nicknamed “The Happy Warrior."

Born in 1873 in the multi-ethnic, multi-culti Lower East Side neighborhood, Al’s earliest memories were of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Smith had Irish, German, Italian and English grandparents, but he most closely identified with his Irish-American roots. When Al was fourteen, his father was killed, and Smith dropped out of St. James Parochial School (in today’s Chinatown, off Chatham Square) in order to work at the Fulton Fish Market — twelve-hour days, seven days a week to support his family. He never returned to formal schooling, so that later in life he was proud of boasting that he “graduated from Fulton Fish Market Academy.” It was here, in the heart of NY’s working-class shipping industry, that Smith decided to dedicate his life to serving the people as a public servant.

Smith soon became tight with Tammany bigwig Charles F. Murphy, also known as Silent Charlie, for his teetotaling and restrained personal lifestyle, also his clean(er than previous Tammany Hall Chief) political relations. Under the auspices of Tammany Hall, Smith was elected to the NY State Assembly, where his first big break was as vice chairman of the commission formed to investigate the horrendous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911. Smith, along with future Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr, were seen as practically starting FDR’s New Deal in NYC, pushing heavily for immigration and work hour reforms. Smith was elected Governor of NY State in 1918 and served four terms.

Smith was tremendously proud of his achievements in progressive politics: rent control, tenant protection, low-cost housing, improved workers’ compensation and work hours all forged forward under his stewardship; his oft-repeated catchphrase was “The cures for the evils of Democracy is more Democracy!” Moreover, Smith was damn proud of being the first Irish-American and Roman Catholic Governor in America, and saw himself as representing the teeming immigrant millions. He looked the part too, with a bulbous honker of a nose, a spattering Noo Yawk accent — “his was a voice with trumpets in it – it summoned people to a cause,” per Ric Burns — and a perpetual cigar end chomped out of one side of his mouth.

In 1928 Smith decided he could do more for the country than just for the city, and he ran in the primaries for the Democratic ticket, and won in a landslide. This, however, was the beginning of the end for Al Smith. What worked in NYC most certainly wasn’t working for the rest of the country, and as Smith traveled by train from state to state he learned that his big city ways of liberal accomplishments and pro-immigrant speechifying weren’t welcomed anywhere else. He was despised in some places — his campaign train route rode past burning crosses in Oklahoma, courtesy of the KKK. He was insulted, derided, savagely attacked, and seen as a caricature of the loathed NY immigrant face, which was a complete stranger to the Midwest and South. Smith’s campaign was a dismal failure — in a competition between the country and the city, the country won overwhelmingly. Although Smith carried the twelve largest cities in America, he lost practically every single state, including his own, to Republican candidate Herbert Hoover. Then, less than twelve months later, under the stewardship of President Hoover, the stock market crashed, and we all know what happened then.

(originally published on www.thelmagazine.com on 2/26/08)

Ruth Weiss Levy, 7/11/49 - 2/18/98

2008-02-18T20:53:00.001-08:00

(the plaque reads: Ruth Weiss Levy
In Life She Sought And
Freely Gave Wisdom, Truth,
Beauty And Love. In Death
She Encompassed The Light)

I Love You Mom.

NYC Tour Guide goes to ABA Convention in VA Beach; Calamity Ensues.

2008-02-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

Well, not really. What it was, was a week spent in gorgeous Virginia Beach, attending a humongous convention and learning the fine art of corporate schmoozing and all-out networking, in order to refine my skills in the perplexing but engaging world of group travel. ABA stands for American Busing Association, and it is made up of the people who get groups (students. senior citizens, adults) to travel across the country, mostly by motorcoach, and go sightseeing & travelling & spending their hard earned money. It is a multi-billion dollar business, and it encompasses thousands of people - this convention had 3200 delegates present. It happens every year in a different city, and each year grows larger and more extravagant. The convention lasts a week, and is chock full of leadership seminars, website optimization lessons, sightseeing around VA Beach, evening events with free food and open bars, broadway showtune lunches, and speeches by corporate honchos while one stares into their grilled tuna salad. The entire thing leads up to the extremely important 7 minute speed-networking sessions. But, lets start at the start.

After almost missing my plane down to Norfolk, I sat down in one of the many available seats and took out my book for the 45 minute flight, when the nice middle-aged couple next to me turned and said "Excuse me, are you Matt Levy?" to which, in my absolute incredulous disbelief, I responded "Of course I am. Do I know you?" It turns out that their 12 year old son, from Fairfield, CT, was on one of my Ellis Island Immigration Heritage Tours last June, and my grinning face made it into their 8th grade yearbook, and my tour was one of the highlights of the year, and I'm something of a minor celebrity back home. The grinning parents insisted on taking my picture via cellphone, as their son "Simply wont believe we ran into you." It was an auspicious beginning to an awesome week.
Picked up at the airport by one Rick Feneis - a totally awesome 40 year old party maniac and graduated Beach Bum who lives with the love of his life Cheri, and the cutest dog in known existence, Tiki Joe. They live in this perfect re-creation of a Miami Beach Bungalow with brightly painted walls and mosaics, they also strive to spend as much time as possible on OTBs (other people's boats.) Their 3 kids (from previous marriages) are all off on their own, and Rick & Cheri are hosting a Somalian "Lost Boy" named Yakk in their pad for 6 months and have been to many of the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, including a bunch I didnt even know existed. I met them through Couchsurfing, and they are quite simply dolls and darlings. They treated me as one of their own, with my own bedroom and bath, an ample supply of beer, and they also were so kind as to drive me around to the convention on certain days when they could afford to, as well as take me out to local seafood joints where I stuffed myself stupid on steamed shrimp and snow crab, tuna tacos, and the best Oysters Rockefeller I've ever had.Sunday was sightseeing day - I opted for a hiking & biking afternoon in which a busload of 40 were zipped out to First Landing State Park, near the site of Christopher Newport and the Virginia Company colonists when they arrived in the New World. It was nice, but probably not nearly as awesome as the offered adventure of Biking & Kayaking. It was just too cold that Sunday (60 degrees, normal for February in VA Beach.) After the hike & bike was the POLAR PLUNGE!

A Polar Plunge is where a group of people, for whatever reason, decide to charge into the Atlantic Ocean wearing whatever they may choose. The Polar Bear Club does it every January down in Coney Island, they do it for chutzpah. We did it to raise money for the American Cancer Society - and I promised everybody who donated a minimum of $25 that I would do it in my Speedo (so named Blue Lightning) and send the donators pictures. Suffice to say, it was cold. 42 degrees Fahrenheit cold. Numbing the skin and the fingers and toes cold. Especially as I was wearing nothing BUT BLUE LIGHTNING. The pictures and movie do a far better job than my chattering lips and frozen tongue could do.

Sunday night was a Superbowl party in the company of Pittsburg Steelers fans. And even though I'm a native New Yorker, I went to college in Boston and became a Red Sox fans while there, and therefore my heart was with the Pats, and it broke just as easily in those last two minutes.Monday came along, and it was business-time. The Convention building has two floors - the ground floor is divided between the Marketplace Trading Floor and the Meeting Floor. The Trading Floor is where CVBs (Conventions and Visitors Bureaus - basically the selling team for any small town, city or state) and attractions (anything from the Colonial Williamsburg camp to Broadway Showtix to Blue Man Group to Atlantic City Casinos setup their info tables, chock full of free crap - grilled Spam, courtesy of the Minnesota Tourism Board? Have a can of Dr. Pepper, thanks to San Antonio, Texas! Free mini shredded chicken sandwiches, by way of Birmingham, Alabama. Drive a mini-racecar, paid for by Charlottesville NC, host of the 2009 ABA convention.The Meeting Floor is the heart of the convention - where buyers (motorcoach operators and tour companies) sit behind tables and listen to sellers (sales people like myself) pitch either a city, hotel, attraction or service. The second floor is all small meeting rooms for the free conferences, like High Five Strategies for Website Optimization, and Are You a Poser or a Closer? inspirational talks (which, despite its twerpy name, was awesome and highly motivational.) I attended a fair share of these, some while hungover, over the next few days. I also found time to drive my rental car over to Colonial Williamsburg and wander their 18th century streets for a few short hours.

Along with motivational speakers there was a lot of research to do when my turn came in front of the Buyers. When one can whip out some information about their company in the middle of an interview, it makes the interviewee sound sharp, prepared, and ready for a business relationship. In order to bust out with "I see that you send approximately 50 groups to NYC a year, 65% of which are seniors and the rest are split between students and adults," well, it makes one sound like a damn good business prospect. And it worked (we hope.) During the 7 minute networking sessions (in which the sellers have to scurry between 8 different rows of Buyers sitting behind tables and leave some sort of lasting impression as these people meet thousands of sellers over 4 days, all pitching essentially the same product - either a hotel, a restaurant or an attraction - well one has to stand out somehow. Luckily for The Levys' Unique New York! we happen to have two excellent things going for us.1) People will always come to NYC. We arent some tiny little town in the middle of the Ozarks trying to sell their Appalachia Bluegrass Festival (which sounds awesome by the way). People want to come to NYC, will always come to NYC, there's no sell needed for that. And
2) We're selling ourselves, selling New York. And who is better at being Matt Levy and selling Matt Levy than Matt Levy? It's what I made my Graduate thesis out of, people! Being Matt Levy! We happen to sell a product (young, energetic, enthusiastic, entertaining and educational tour guide) that syncs well with my personality. So it just came naturally. The most important trick I had to remember was to eventually shut-up and listen to the Buyer to see what they needed, what they wanted in a tour guiding company. I walked away from my 20 + 7-minute appointments with a sense of confidence and pride that I love what I do for a living, and I'm working hard at making a living at it. And with some serious follow-thru and a continuation of all the things I've done so far, this convention should turn into a rousing success for LUNY!

Along with some more boozing, schmoozing, stacking up on free stuff (Wisconsin cheese stickers anybody?) manic dancing, losing car keys, finding car keys, enjoying a day with 82 degree weather, hitting an awesome Salvation Army and buying some badass felt fedoras, and impressing the hell out of everybody with those manic dance moves, that pretty much rounded up the week in Virginia Beach. I flew home with my head high for the family biz.

Lost in History vol. 50 - Year of the Rat? Don't we got Enough of them Already?

2008-02-13T06:12:00.000-08:00

And another Chinese New Year came and went, with firecrackers in the air, bright bursts of multi-colored party decorations festooning what few trees are left in Chinatown, confetti in the gutter, oranges on the cheap paperboard signs promising untold good luck and the glitter of gold paint everywhere. Unfortunately, we missed it, as we were down in Virginia Beach at a tourism convention. And we hate missing street carnivals and joyful celebrations, especially celebrations in Chinatown, our flat-out favorite neighborhood. So when we learned that the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) was hosting a Chinatown walking tour with a particular focus on the signs, symbols and good fortunes of the Year of the Rat, we gladly signed up to get down with our four-legged furry friend. Only in New York would people pay good money to spend time with these scurrilous creatures.
Our guide was Erica Jee, an interested and interesting Chinese-American from California, and a former educator at MOCA who was back in town to help out with the local festivities as well as the museum’s events. She was visibly sad to be on the East coast during the Chinese New Year, as it meant she was missing her family get-together and feast back home. Regardless, it was her pleasure to provide an hour-and-a-half walking tour of Chinatown for a small group of twenty people, mostly New Yorkers, but with the occasional out-of-towner. All of us were interested in the cultural meanings of the public revelry on display in one of just two working-class neighborhoods in Manhattan that still receives immigrants on a regular basis. (The other would be Washington Heights.)

Our tour started in Columbus Park, at the intersection of Bayard and Mulberry streets in the heart of “Old Chinatown,” and catty-corner to MOCA’s tiny museum space. Erica explained that the newly refurbished park has many amenities for the dozens of Chinese seniors and residents who utilize the green-and-asphalt: tai chi, checkers and cards, reading the paper, feeding the birds and talking about current events. The park was particularly empty this Saturday, which might have been due to the gray skies, but was more likely due to the fact that during the Chinese New Year, people spend lots of time at their family homesteads. For the Chinese, their New Years is like Christmas and Thanksgiving combined: feasts and gifts, which include money, flowers, fruit and toys.

The Chinese New Year, Erica went on to explain, was based on the Lunar Calendar, so that the date changes from year to year. What’s more, the cycle runs by twelves, so every twelve years, the dates switch back, as do the personifications of each year. The Year of the Rat, the first symbol of the dozen zodiac signs, therefore invites a season of change and renewal. While crossing through Chatham Square we heard the pop and burst of small-scale fireworks, which are traditionally used to scare off evil spirits. (At least symbolically. Never underestimate the thrill and fun of fireworks to bring crowds together. The Chinatown fireworks pre-Giuliani used to be much larger, but now it’s a small, controlled burn in the center of Chatham Square.)
We headed towards the Bowery, but ducked into tiny Doyers Street, one of the most whimsical streets in the city, as it runs one block long, and at a sharp right angle. Decades ago, it was far from whimsical, as it was known as “Bloody Doyers,” as the ninety-degree turn allowed Chinese Tongs (Mandarin for “hall” as in “hall of brothers”) to sneak up on each other, but nowadays has multitudes of barbershops. Chinese custom maintains that one should always get one’s hair cut before the New Year, so that one doesn’t cut away the good luck approaching. Erica wouldn’t say anything with certainty, as she maintained that customs shift from family to clan to region, as well as mutate over the centuries.

One thing that has stayed true through the ages is the symbolism of fruit and flowers in the New Years’ iconography. Since the Mandarin language is pictorial and glyphic, there are a lot of homonyms inherent in the system. The ubiquity of oranges in Chinese culture makes sense when one understands that "orange" sounds like "fortune" in Mandarin (and, come to think of it, English as well). "Fish" sounds like "abundance." "Bat" means "luck" and "green" also means "wealth." As the tour rounded up, we stopped to purchase an orange or two for fortune’s sake, as another burst of confetti exploded above us. Happy 4709, everyone!

(originally published on 2/12/8 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 49 - The Few, The Proud, The Idiots

2008-01-29T18:12:00.000-08:00

My body hurts. My joints ache. My leg muscles occasionally cramp up on me and when I walk from room to room (because I dare not leave my apartment for fear of the real world outside), my hobbled habits resemble those of an old man, bent at the waist, making tiny little footsteps as each hop hurts. My elbows and kneecaps are bruised. I have a nasty blood-red gash on the bridge of my nose and I can’t quite recall how it got there. My clothes (and before that glorious shower, my body) are covered in an impossible combination of flour, sugar, soy sauce, fish guts, sticky rice, blue, green and orange paint, silly string, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, Crisco, blood, sweat, mucus and god knows what else. Ladies and gentlemen, I am an Idiotarod survivor, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. It’s More fun than Halloween, New Years, the Black Label Bike Kill and my birthday combined. Unfortunately for me, I’ll have to wait another 363 days for this glorious event to hurtle round again. I think I have post-Idiotarod depression.

The fifth annual Idiotarod was just held this last Saturday on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and is best summed up with a comparative explanation. The original Iditarod is an 1100-mile dogsled race across the frozen tundras of Alaska. Replace the frozen tundras of Alaska with the icy streets of NYC, replace the sled with decorated and disguised shopping carts, replace the dogs with idiots in costume, and replace the necessary supplies one would need to race across Alaska (health supplements, space-age parkas, portable fire) with copious amounts of alcohol and various kinds of sabotage. Every year the route changes, mostly to keep the cops off our trails. Every year it gets more and more disgusting. And every year yours truly throws together a team and runs with the best of them.Started in San Fransisco in 1994, but exported to New York a decade later, the first two Idiotarods were run by Precision Accidents, a loosely-knit group of spectacle planners and organizers. After Team C.O.B.R.A. won in ’04 and ‘05, Precision Accidents passed the torch along to their special brand of madcap genius, and they’ve organized and hosted the two races since. And it is a race, people. An insane, psychotic, brilliant and absolutely revolting race, but a race nonetheless. The starting point had to be changed three times (from four separate points in Brooklyn/Queens to Ft. Greene Park to Chinatown) to keep the good ole boys in blue away from disrupting the event; at no point did C.O.B.R.A.actually hand out directions or checkpoints prior to the race starting; it was just on your mark, get GO! GO! GO! and the race was off.Our team was a hand-selected and hard(ly) trained squadron of ten individuals, dressed head-to-toe in black, sporting a spectacular silk-screened logo and wielding such weapons as (foamcore) nunchuks, (cardboard) ninja stars, (homemade) grappling hooks, a box of soy sauce-wasabi-water balloons and our proudest achievement: a dozen homemade smoke bombs. That’s right, the Staten Island Ninjas were a formidable team of high-kicking, hand-chopping, whiskey-drinking, sake-smashing, sushi-tossing, Wu-Tang blasting bad-ass idiots indeed.

The race itself? Impossible to describe. I remember a lot of flying projectiles. About eight miles in total, dragging a shopping cart, loaded with supplies, heavily fortified with whiskey, picking fights along the way with other Idiots. A lot of fights. An Amish team throwing dried corn. A “Give Peas A Chance” team throwing wet peas. A lot of wigs. Pop culture references galore. Pictures do a million times better than any nouns, verbs or adjectives. In the end, the Staten Island Ninjas didn’t win any officially prizes. (However every year I award myself certain hard-earned titles. This year I won the “Most Aggressive with Total Strangers” and the “Most Makeouts with Pretty Ladies” award, totaling in at 3 and between 3-5, respectively.) However, when it comes to the Idiotarod, everyone’s a winner. Except for the NYC Sanitation Department (see LIH vol. 48), who presumably has to clean up the aftermath.

More picture of the Staten Island Ninjas can been seen on my Flickr page.

(originally published on www.thelmagazine.com)

An outstanding NYC weekend - art, bike rides, dancing, drinking, lectures, and pantslessness.

2008-01-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

Matt Levy and Dave Wajsfelner, sans pants. pic courtesy of Dave Wajsfelner.

It was a truly wonerful, extraordinarily jam-packed New York City weekend for this adventurer / writer / biker / dancer / partier / eater / drinker / no pants wearer. Enough to warrant its own breakdown blog post. Here we go. Follow the boucning Matt Levy . . .

Friday: Work, N-Y Historical Society exhibit, 2 hrs down time, Bklyn > Queens Bike Ride, Secret Art Show, Queens > Bklyn Bike Back, Dance Party, Sleep.

A solid day in the office. Many friends and accomplices inquire as to what gets done in the "Office" when we're not putting together tours or tour packages. Well, a bunch of things, sometimes all at once, and hectically, which is generally what happens when you put more than one Levy in one room working on more than one project all at the same time. Friday's task list consisted of an email blitz to possible clients with whom I'll be schmoozing and boozing at a tourism conference in Virginia Beach during the first week of February. Another project was spent putting together a Press Kit for guidebooks to list our services to the average tourist. The Levys' Unique New York! was recently featured in Time Out's Guidebook to NYC 2008 (and not just a listing, but a 3/4s page interview with Gideon, reprinted from last spring's TONY issue,) which is stellar news as it gets out foot in the door for all the other guidebooks . After compiling press clipping and heading to our local graphic designer for part one of making them look professional and engaging, I tromped my way uptown to the New-York Historical Society for their free Friday night shindig titled "Let Them Eat Cake.".

The N-YHS, which is NY's oldest museum (founded 1804) is jumping on the free-Friday night bandwagon, but their catch is snacks and drinks for sale that compliment the current exhibit, which is "French Founding Father: Lafayette Returns to Washington's America." and is up through August. The foodstuffs for sale that night included pissaladiere (a French flatbread-type pizza), madeleine, fruit tarts and coffee, all from Bakery Soutine, on West 70th street. I pitched a cultural / food review of the exhibit to the Onion, and they bit down hard. This is what had me spending a solid two hours at the Lafayette exhibit Friday night, scribbling copious notes. The man was a rock star. Born into wealth, married into power, in 1777, at the age of 20, he set sail for America to help with the revolution. He quickly became Washington's right hand man and surrogate son, spent a quarter of a million dollars of his own money (in 1777, mind you) to clothe and arm his troops. By the Battle of Yorktown, the last stand for the British Troops, nearly half the ground forces were French. For the rest of the Lafayette story, check out the exhibit, and better yet, read my article - it hits the street on XXX.

Following the exhibit, I headed back to Bushwick for some down & dinner time. Exhausted, but semi-recharged by the presence of out-of-town friends whom I hadnt seen in years (plus whiskey), at 11pm I jumped on the bike and zoomed off to Long Island City, with trusty friend Marin, to check out a totally top-secret Flux Factory art exhibit in an abandoned warehouse. By invitation only and in small groups of 10 we were lead down an alley and behind a chainlink fence into a raw industrial space for a gorgeous and necessarily short walkthrough of a wild 1-night only installation. More, unfortunately, cant be said, as the producers of the artshow told us, under strict penalties, that no specific detail could be mentioned about the event, under threat of recrimination. This wrapped up around 1, and should have been the end of the night, if it weren't for a Black Label related dance party at a new nameless artloft space on Morgan Avenue in the no-mans lands east of East Williamsburg but north of Bushwick and South of Greenpoint. You know the stretch - facing the projects and chock-fulla lumber yards. Somehow, someone got hold of an raw space over there and turned it into an artloft. Ridiculous, drunken, late night flinging around and stomping down. Made it into bed, wild but wiped out around 4am.

Saturday: TCB, No Pants Subway Ride, No Pants Burger and Beer, City Reliquary Birthday Party Hosting, Bklyn > Bklyn Bike Ride, Crazier Dance Party, Bklyn > Bklyn Bike Back, Sleep.

Thank god, a nice late wakeup and tcb: breakfast, emails, clean-up, chitchat with the roomies. Around 3 its time to head into the city for the No Pants Subway Ride 2008, also to meetup with Dave from San Fransisco for the first time in a year or more. The No Pants 2K8 is organized by Improv Everywhere & has been going on for 8 years now; its exactly what it sounds like. A whole lot of people (300? 400?) all board various subway lines and take off their pants, acting like nothing is wrong. The schematics are complicated, mostly dealing with exiting the first train one boards, dropping trou on the platform, reboarding the next train which already has pantsless people on board, so on so forth. The end result is a totally ridiculous in-joke on the pantsless peoples and a what the hell is going on on the part of the regular commuters. The inherrent problem with this dynamic is that when you have a subway car with 100 passengers, and 85 of them arent wearing pants, the joke is reversed on the pantsless participants. It becomes a joke on a joke - an Oh, I get it. All these people arent wearing any pants and theyre acting normal. Thats (not-so) funny. It's all about the percentage breakdown of spectators to those involved in the spectacle. If the % veers too far towards the latter, then the joke isn't on the audience, its on the performer. All in all, a fun spectacle, but with its critical function ineffective, simply due to the sheer popularity and attendance of the event. Following the No Pants Subway Ride, a group of friends (with word about our destination spreading quickly) and I marched our way over to an excellent new Burger Joint called Stand on 12th and University. Good hearty tasty burgers, delicious micro-brewed beers, and 40 diners, all without pants. It was deleriously wonderful. And absolutely normal. Without pants.

Following the No Pants Beer and Burger extravaganza, I had to haul ass - with Dave from San Fransisco - over to the City Reliquary Museum and Civic Organization, in Williamsburg to setup for a birthday party. I'm the Events Coordinator and on the Executive Directors Board, and we had rented out our space to a friend of the CR, who was hosting her birthday party in our museum. For those of you unaware, the City Reliquary is a community museum that celebrates the forgotten history and collected ephemera of NYC. Its a collection of collections of awesome New York City stuff - like vintage Seltzer bottles, and a complete collection of subway tokens, and the "2nd Ave" sign from the original 2nd Avenue Deli. The birthday party was no big deal, twenty people, young professionals, drinking wine and beer, eating hot dogs and tater tots, and exclaiming mirthfully over our idiosyncratic exhibits of NYer's Geology, the History of Burlesque inside an old storage locker, and the current exhibit, a History of Rosendale Cement. That wound down about 12:30am, but with cleaning and lockup, we were back on bikes by 1am.

This should have been the end of tonight, but come now people, this is NYC! So there was yet another dance party to attend. Another Black Label related psychotic, presposterous blearly-eyed weak-kneed party spectacular, this one existed in an old speakeasy from the 70s under a hardware store under a walkup apartment building in Bed-Stuy. With about 80 people crammed into a rawspace the size of a walk-in cooler, the tunes were absolutely slammin', the bodies were young, lithe and pounding into one another, too much smoke in the air (which is what happens when one is attending an illegal, underground speakeasy dance party in NYC - people are thrilled they can still smoke while dancing and do so, egregiously), but finally, once in a too-long while, one discovers a dance party where everyone is dancing! The likes of those are few and far between, and I made good my promise of living to dance. Hours later, I biked my exhausted ass home, and crashed, again, around 4.

Sunday: CR shift, Relax Time, Lecture on Sanitation Department, Korean BBQ, Home, Done.

Not too late in bed, as I was in charge of opening up the CR for the 12noon - 3pm gift shop shift. It was a mildly-busy day, about 30 visitors and some good sales, but on the whole, enjoyed the quiet and peace and sewed a lovely little bird onto my favorite sweater. After the CR, I metup again with the same wonderful friend from far away and we chilled in some strange girls' apartment. 6pm was a lecture of the history of the NYC Department of Sanitation (which has alread been blogged - see below) and following that was a feast at a Korean Bar B Que joint on 35th street with old and new friends alike. Stuffed, exhausted, drizzly rain, talked-out and simply tired of moving, Dave from San Fransisco and I jumped the subway back to Bushwick where we spent the evening catching up on lives respectively, and laughing until the crazy early hours of 2am. It was the most unconcsious crash Ive had in quite some time.

And thats how one spends a busy NYC weekend.

Lost in History vol. 48 - Trash, Trash Everywhere and not a Seat to Sit

2008-01-15T05:36:00.000-08:00

It was a packed house Sunday night in East Chelsea. There were seats for about forty, and easily twenty more interested and interesting New Yorkers crammed into every available corner (and window sill, and behind the projection screen, and perched on the info table, and standing in the hallway). The walls were covered with photographs and descriptions, the half-dozen glass cabinets were chock full of artifacts and documents: pictures from the last hundred-plus years of the our city streets; two faux bottles of wine, one of which read "Pinot Garbage" in a loopy font; crisp, clean uniforms from the turn of the century; a scale replica of an old NYC barge, Hudson River-bound. This wasn’t some photography show about Old New York, nor was it an art opening of any kind. No, good people, this was a talk on garbage.

It’s a proud and perplexing site to stroll into a lecture about the history of the Department of Sanitation of New York (DSNY) fifteen minutes early, and only be able to snag one of the last half-dozen seats in the room. The talk was on the history and future of the DSNY as well as the cataloguing and display of the treasure trove of artifacts collected and exhibited in the room. Led by two excitable and excited masters on the subject of trash: Robin Nagle, Ph.D., DSNY Anthropologist-in-Residence, and Haidy Geismar, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology at NYU, the lecture ran an hour long, with a half-hour overflow of questions from the mostly older crowd. You know how cocky New Yorkers get – give them a soapbox about their Community Boards and NYC Municipal Services, and they’ll give you the world.

Dr. Nagle detailed the compact history of the DSNY, complete with black and white slides, throughout the last hundred years. Before the 1890s “New York was deeply filthy,” Dr. Nagle explained. The city had absolutely no municipal sanitation department and hardly any proper sewage disposal services; ship captains and their crew could pick up the pungent waft of trash from 6 nautical miles out. In fact, “The Big Onion” was a common derogatory (but affectionate) nickname for our city well before “The Big Apple” came around. Slaughterhouses, tanneries, coal firing plants and smelting yards would live side by side with residential tenements. Refuse piled up three feet on the dirt streets. Dead horses would lie in rotting in the streets for days if not weeks before a locally paid layabout would cart it off to the dump or the river. It wasn’t a pretty site.

Enter Col. George Waring in 1891. Elected by Mayor Strong under the reform party, Col. Waring (he fought in the Civil War) organized the city’s first Sanitation Department, and did so under the auspices of a military design: the men wore pristine white uniforms (giving them the nickname “the White Wings”) and helmets that matched the helmets of the police; they marched in formation in city Labor parades. Waring reduced nepotism in the civil servant boards that ran the White Wings, and welcomed feedback from the citizens of New York. Like Robert Moses on a much smaller scale, Col. Waring and his White Wings were a self-sustaining subset of the municipal government – beholden to no other political organizations and answering to nobody but the people, they cleaned up the city like nobody before. (It also helped that the impossibly brilliant uniforms made these men stick out in a dirty city – therefore, less opportunity for lazing around).

Professor Geismar and her class of Museum Studies students took a more hands-on and culturally exploratory approach to the talk, detailing the various things that make up the life of a San Man, from the “Mongo” they acquire (reclaimed trash from the streets that for whatever purpose, is kept and treasured) to the lockers and artifacts where they store their change of clothes. Because Trash Men are people too!

From Col. Waring’s White Wings to the carts, trucks and barges used today, Professor Nagle detailed the transformation of a rarely seen city service: “We are mostly invisible. The cops, the firefighters aren’t, but as soon as I put on a DSNY uniform, I disappear from the streets,” she explained. With 3,000 civilian employees and 7,000 uniformed men hauling trash out from your house to the dumps and barges (there was a nice breakdown on the history of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill and the park it will eventually become), the DSNY is a tremendous city agency, one that most of us take for granted. Remember next time you truck out your kitchen bin: there’s an army of men and women doing the dirty (and smelly) work for you.

(originally published 1/14/08 in www.thelmagazine.com)

Lost in History vol. 47 - Ghost Bikes

2008-01-07T21:22:00.000-08:00

(Ryan the Boy affixes flowers and candles to Anthony's Ghost Bike)

The crowd massed on an semi-derelict corner in Bushwick, at least eighty strong, straddling their various two-wheelers: simple road bikes, complex mountain machines boasting thirty gears and sets of shocks, fixies, single speeds, a clutch of homemade mutant tall bikes and urban choppers. The mood was somber, like the overcast gray skies, but tinged throughout with a glimmer of hope. The group’s collective attention was focused on a small BMX bike with thick tires, painted all in white, covered with flowers and surrounded by candles, at the corner of Palmetto and Central Avenues. Placed underneath the bike’s frame was a little wooden placard, which read:

Anthony Delgado
13 years old
Killed by SUV
April 29th, 2007
Rest in Peace

Then one of the organizers of the day’s procession took to a overturned milk crate, a black bullhorn held aloft. In a clear voice laden with emotion and tension, she began.

Today we gather in honor of those killed on New York City streets. This past year countless pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles. On average, one pedestrian is killed every other day on the streets and at least twenty-three cyclists have been killed in 2007. We are riding in honor of Anthony Delgado, Jeffrey Moore, Mark Grichevsky (GRE-CHEV-SKY), Juan Solis, Luis Ramos, Carolina Hernandez, Elijah Wrancher, Habian Rodriguez, Craig Murphey, Sam Hindy, David Smith, Franco Scorcia, Ronald Mortensen, eleven unnamed riders and the countless pedestrians and cyclists whose deaths go unreported and unrecognized. We ride with love in our hearts, with sadness for what has been lost, with rage that these crashes didn't have to happen, and hope that we never have to do this again. With these ghost bikes and memorials we want to raise awareness about a bicyclist's right to the street and pedestrian's right to safe passage in the hopes that New Yorkers can change the climate on the road and learn to respect each other.

The bicycle advocate then went on to tell us that on April 29th, 2007 Anthony Delgado was riding his bike home with a friend from a local baptism. An SUV pulled out of the lane in order to pass a slower-moving car and hit Anthony head on. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The ghost bike, marking the point of impact where Anthony was struck, is his neighborhood memorial.

(two mourners, Marin and Riley. Neither knew Anthony Delgado,
nevertheless, the emotional pull was strong.)

This ongoing, worldwide project is called Ghost Bikes. According to its stark, simple, yet emotional explanation on the website, “Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists' right to safe travel.” Originally started in St. Louis in 2003, Ghost Bikes have been seen throughout the five boroughs since June 2005, thanks to the NYC Street Memorial Project and the arts collective Visual Resistance. VR is an open alliance of artists and activists who understand that one needs more than soapbox oration and take-it-to-the-streets activism to engender change in any stultified community. They were the ones who arrived on scene minutes after the car crash that took the life of Elizabeth Padilla in ’05, and they were the ones who brought a bicycle, painted it white, and locked it to the lamppost on the corner where the victim lost her life. An impromptu memorial with deep repercussions, the idea soon took off. In 2007 the project shifted hands to the NYC Street Memorial kids, who consolidated the various efforts that it takes for each ghost bike: research on the crash itself (which often involves talking to reticent cops or delving into various reports), contacting the families and loved ones, constructing and painting the bike, bringing it to the intersection and finally, upkeep. Everyone involved is an active member of NYC’s cycling community, and all are 100% volunteers, from conception to presentation. (photo of Craig Murphey memorial, Ten Eyck and Union)

Back to that blustery morning in Bushwick. This was the third anniversary of the Memorial Ride, and each year the ride commemorates lives lost the previous year. Most of today’s riders had started in Bensonhurst, and had ridden up to Bushwick stopping at various Ghost Bike Memorials along the way. Other rides of the same design were happening throughout Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan, with a general convergence at the Williamsburg Bridge, for a procession and rally at City Hall to make NYC’s streets safer for cyclists. But at that moment, with Anthony Delgado’s mother on hand, making small thank yous amidst her choked-up chest, with gospel blaring from the Ford Explorer and Anthony’s smiling face airbrushed onto the hood, with eighty-plus cyclists raising their bikes in a moment of silence, the social movement, the politics, the activism was only about one thing – the life of a thirteen-year-old boy, taken too soon. (a silent bicycle raise to honor the victims)

(originally published 1/07/08 on www.thelmagazine.com)

On Sale, for one day only, THE MAGNA CARTA!

2007-12-23T20:02:00.000-08:00

My last Tuesday went something like this:
8:30am, up and scanning emails, checking voicemails. Open up one that says Sotheby's is hosting the sale of the Magna Carta at 7pm that evening. Get really excited; its the Magna fucking Carta! Check the Sotheby's website - they open at 9am.
8:45, hit the shower, make some coffee and toast.
9, call Sotheby's. Yes, they're selling the Magna Carta, yes its free for observers and yes it starts at 7pm, but get there early cause there's gonna be a lot of watcher-ons like myself.
9-3 or so, take care of business, personal and professional. Attempt to find a date for the auction via Craigslist Missed Connections page, posted with the title: "Are You Sexy? Are You Smart? Do You Want To See The Magna Cart(a)?" No-one responds.
3-5 or so, errands in the city, including swiping a pair of $25 fuzzy slips from TJ Maxx.
5-7, all the way uptown to 72nd and York. Drink a beer and make some phone calls to California about some upcoming tours for a group travel company called Contiki that I also work for. 7pm rolls around, I manage to convince my new roommate Marcelo as well as this funny quirky bird of a girl, named Ivana, also a building friend, to showup.
The place is packed. This is a single-item bid, its just the Magna Carta, and they're expecting it to fetch between $20 and $30 million dollars. This particular M.C. dates from 1297 and is the only one existing in the Western Hemisphere - out of the complete set of 17 Magna Cartas, 15 are in England and are never leaving; one is in Australia and is never leaving. This is the only one in the Western Hemisphere, previously owned by Ross Perot since 1984 and on display at the National Archives. Ole Perot decided to sell his copy, with the proceeds going to his children's charity. This is, quite honestly, the only time a single document of this much importance will ever go on sale, ever. This is what brings us to Sotheby's on a Tuesday night for the public sale of one of history's most important documents.

David Redden, Sotheby's VP and the auctioneer took the stage and the crowd, its 20 cameras and 30+ reports hush up. He says "Well. The Magna Carta. What can I say?" I expect him to start giving an expedited history of the document, something along the lines of "written in 1297, it is the definitive document that rebukes the Monarchical system by indirectly introducing the Common Law of Man . . ." but no. Instead, he launched straight into the bidding. "Do I have $12 million? $12, $12, $12, I have $12, How about $12.5? $12.5 I have $12, I have $13 yes I have $13, $14 . . . etc." It climbed to $19 million and held. Held. Held. And in less than 3 minutes it was over. $19 million dollars for this sheepskin parchment, riddled with holes, hanging onto a massive wax seal attached via tattered ribbon, and one of the three most important documents in America's history (the other two being the Declaration o Independence and the Bill of Rights, of course.) Sudden. Quick. It was truly heartracing.

Afterwards there was a Q&A session with the new owner, a David Rubenstein of the Carlysle Corporation, an equities fund company, or something to that effect that I'll never understand or have to worry about. He was very sincere, almost blushing. He was phoning in his bids, as he had flown in from DC and his plane and cab were late and he almost missed the entire auction. He made some very tender and patriotic statements about keeping this document in the Western Hemisphere, on view at the National Archives for public viewing, and how he couldn't let any foreigner or outsider take this document away from hardworking Americans. It wasn't clear if he spent his personal money or his company's money. After a couple of questions including "Do you speak any Latin?" & "What's your favorite passage?", I shot my hand up and inquired "So, do you plan on spending any alone time with the Magna Carta?" and the gathered crowd had a chuckle. Mr. Rubenstein remarked "This IS my alone time!" and gestured to the cameras convened.A few more questions and then he had to pose for individual pictures and we all took to the streets. It was some of the most exciting 3 minutes I'd spent in a long time.

Lost in History vol. 46 - Unsilently Parading Through Our NY Night

2007-12-19T20:25:00.000-08:00

It was cold on Saturday night. Not freezing-wind-to-the-bone cold, but a numb-the-ears-and-nose-if-uncovered-for-too-long cold, a cold that seeped into shoes and made walking uncomfortable, a cold that stiffened knee joints and made one’s eyes water if they stayed unblinked for too long. And the two or three hundred people that had gathered around the Washington Square Arch, bundled up and bearing boomboxes, probably wouldn’t have wanted the weather any other way. If it’s too warm, then Unsilent Night doesn’t feel right, like celebrating Hanukkah in June. If it’s too cold, then the hour-long event feels like it’s taking forever, and the all-pervasive cold distracts people from the magic and aural audacity of Unsilent Night.

Unsilent Night is the work of Phil Kline , a musician and visual artist who, every year since 1992, has created this city-block-long sound system slash roving party slash impromptu parade slash subtle protest against the commercialization of Christmas. On the second or third Saturday of December (essentially, two Saturdays before Xmas itself), Kline gathers people in Washington Square Park and has them bring their audio-playing machines. Old-school Radio Raheem shoulder blasters, iPods plugged into $600 Bose minispeakers, trenchcoated-John Cusack--holding-up-his-heart-on-a-mixtape-in-a-boombox-style sound-machines, laptops, short-wave radios, guitar amps, Sesame Street plastic tape players, you name it, if it plays music, then there will be someone carrying it. Kline himself prefers cassette players to CD and digital players, as there’s more of a music-recorded-onto-magnetic-tape authenticity to the sound than in a digital encoding, but he takes what he can get. Kline also organizes a few dozen boomboxes to lend to people, but as the event’s grown organically over the last fifteen years, he’s had to rely upon people bringing their own. And they do.

We congregated at a quarter to seven. People schmoozed, sipped tea, sipped whiskey, reconnected with busy-bee New Yorker friends. At seven the procession started. Kline had everyone, on the count of three, press Play. Some hit the button a split second earlier, some a split second later. All of a sudden, washing over Washington Square Park was this gorgeous, glorious orchestra of sound. Wind chimes, a piano tinkling, stringed instruments plucked, is that the sound of icicles breaking? With the tapes, CDs, iPods, radios, players and humans all playing, we started the procession. From Washingon Square we headed east to 4th Street, north on Lafayette, a nice wide diagonal cut across Astor Place to Cooper Square, continuing east on St. Marks Place to Tompkins Square Park. It was a simple, easy route; hardly over a mile of city streets, but covering an incredible amount of history. Allen Ginsberg read HowlTriangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. That’s where Abraham Lincoln made a\his famous "Might Makes Right" speech denouncing slavery in 1859, which got him onto the NY Republican ticket and eventually into the White House. That building used to be called the Electric Circus, and it was where Andy Warhol debuted the Velvet Underground with Nico in 1966. And so on and so on.

Of course, none of this was running through my head as I walked with my date and the crowds and the boomboxes and the sounds. I was just listening. With my head, my heart, my body, my whole being. Repeatedly (and quietly) shushing the talkers. Hustling ahead and dropping behind to catch different syncopations of the same sound. Positioning myself between two boombox speakers to try and live right between each note. And enjoying the cold of the night, the warm arm looped through mine, the sounds of Phil Kline’s endless song, and the contentedness of two to three hundred New Yorkers all experiencing the same wintertime magic.

(originally published on Dec 17th, at www.thelmagazine.com)