273. Winter Holidays in the Big Apple

         Holidays in the Big Apple: people flock here, knowing it will be crowded and noisy, but they hope it will be joyous as well.  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas some five million visitors come, giving a year-end boost to the city’s businesses but clogging sidewalks, streets, and subways, where they rub well-bundled elbows with disgruntled locals.  The Fifth Avenue store windows are ablaze with magnificent displays, but getting through the crowds to see them isn’t easy; you’re lucky, with patience, to get the barest glimpse.  As for getting your four-year-old anywhere near Santa Claus at Macy’s requires angelic patience or devilish corruption.  Up on the eighth floor parents with kids make their way through a labyrinth of Christmas trees, stuffed reindeer, and caroling snowmen in quest of Santa, and some have been known to offer bribes of $20 to $50 to attendant elves in hopes of skipping ahead of the long lines.  The elves themselves are in evidence here and there throughout the city and in great demand; visitors want to be photographed with them in “elfies.”  They’ve even been dispatched along with traffic managers to help calm frustrated drivers in heavily congested intersections.

Santa and his elves arriving at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.
tweber 1

         One great attraction is the annual Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, which draws an audience of up to a million, though not all, thank heavens, on the same day.  I saw it once, long ago.  Of course they feel they have to celebrate the birth of the Savior, so a lackluster procession of shepherds, kings, and common folk are seen trudging across the stage, with even a camel or two, though I don’t recall any elephants.  Then, once this tribute to the occasion was been dutifully performed, they go secular in a flash of joy, with Christmas trees and brightly wrapped presents and of course, sooner or later (usually sooner), the celebrated Rockettes, kicking their long, shapely legs in marvelous precision.   To my knowledge, the Rockettes don’t show up in Bethlehem.

ralph and jenny

         Rockefeller Center, with its giant Christmas tree and sunken skating rink, is another great attraction and just as hard to access.  One woman trying to view it got trapped in a crowd on Fifth Avenue and had to give it up.  A young man from Nashville said he loves the hustle and bustle; that’s what the city is all about.  He confessed to spending more than $1500 on clothes and shoes at a number of stores, and said more money had poured out of his pocket in the past three days than in the past two months.  Now that’s the kind of visitor that New Yorkers – some New Yorkers – love.

Michael Vadon

         Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, has a Winter Village nestled among the midtown skyscrapers, with brightly lit shops offering jewelry, clothing, specialty foods, and other items suitable for gifts.  Knowing it only from mild summer days as a pleasant place with a broad green lawn and tables and chairs, I am amazed by its winter transformation.   Its free skating rink draws thousands of skaters, but in previous years they had to wait in long lines for two or three hours for their turn on the ice.  This year, thanks to a streamlined check-in process, the wait is shorter, and text messages inform them when they can skate.

Rhododendrites

         I experienced the crowds last Wednesday, trying to get back across 14^th Street to the West Village – usually a routine trip, whether by bus or subway.  I waited with many others for the 14^th Street bus, but when it came it was packed, and others got on first; I then got on, too – barely -- only to be told by the driver to get off and take the next bus.  More wimp than New Yorker on this occasion, I got off, but when the next bus came, it was just as jammed, so I turned to the subway.  When I finally got down to the platform and a train arrived, it too was so jammed I couldn’t get on.  After a long wait, I saw a second train approaching, but it was also jammed; there was no way to get on.  Then a third train came, not jammed, but it sailed right on past without making a stop.  Finally a fourth train came, and I was able to get on.  This was late afternoon, and 14^th Street is very commercial, so I assume that the crowds were heightened by kids getting out of school and New Yorkers throwing themselves into seasonal shopping.  The Internet is said to be stealing customers from real brick-and-mortar stores, to the point where malls all over the country are going bust and closing, but this doesn’t seem to be the case on 14^th Street in Manhattan. 

          Should we New Yorkers complain about the holiday crowds in the city? Absolutely not.  We want their business and their presence.  And they themselves don't complain; they come here for the bustle and excitement.

          Source note:  For some of the information in this post I am indebted to an article by Winnie Hu in the New York Times of December 23, 2016.

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          My poems:  For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.   

          My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

     

         Coming soon:  Once again, no idea.

         ©   2016   Clifford Browder

272. Bob Dylan's Village

         First, a bit of shameless self-promotion.  My short poem “I Crackle” has been published in the fall/winter 2016 issue of the online mag South 85 Journal.  It’s a nice little poem, but the real treat is the photo of me – the best I’ve seen in years.  For this marvelous experience, go here.

         Also, for last-minute holiday shoppers, consider my two books mentioned at the end of this post.  The novel is for readers who like historical fiction with an LGBTQ twist, and the selection of posts from this blog is for people who love (or hate) New York.

         And now, to business.  (As if the above wasn't just that.)

         The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), an often embattled preservationist society of which I am a member, recently sent me a map entitled “Bob Dylan’s Village.”  This was prompted by Dylan’s receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he graciously declined to accept in person.  Early in his career Dylan was indeed a resident of the Village, especially my turf, the West Village, performing here and making various locations his crash pad.  This was during the 1960s, but I was here too, first as a visitor from uptown in the 1950s and then, from 1961 on, as a resident, so many of the names on the map spark reminiscences.  Here are some of them.

         The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street and West 11^th, but a block from where I live today, was frequented by writers, intellectuals, and wannabes.  It was also a haunt of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), a lyrical genius and accomplished alcoholic who, like so many talented but impecunious Europeans, came to this country several times to rake in the bucks from appreciative Americans.  I had heard him read and spout scandalous remarks my senior year in college, and had learned to love his richly imaged but needlessly obscure poetry, but in 1953, when time and alcohol caught up with him, I was too immersed in graduate studies in French uptown at Columbia University to be aware of his bibulous presence in the city.  Above all, I regret not having heard him and others read his radio drama Under Milk Wood, which was completed here and performed in the months prior to his death. 

         It was at the White Horse that Thomas imbibed a disastrous amount of liquor one evening and staggered back to the legendary Chelsea Hotel on 23^rd Street in a state of near-collapse.  Rushed by ambulance to St. Vincent’s Hospital, he arrived there in a coma.  Summoned from Wales, his loving spouse Caitlin, who matched him in outrageousness and alcoholism, arrived and asked, “Is the bloody man dead yet?”  He soon was, dying on November 9, 1953.   She then became so unruly that she had to be strait-jacketed and shipped off to a psychiatric detox clinic on Long Island, following which she was sent back to Wales and long outlived him.  But Thomas had left his mark, for a young musician named Robert Zimmerman, newly arrived in the city, was so inspired by him that he changed his last name to Dylan.

         The Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street near Bleecker was a rather shabby basement joint where the lesser Beatniks of the day performed.  To be closer to their antics I migrated from the Columbia campus down to the West Village, holing up in a drab little apartment on West 14^th Street.  From there I commuted to a job at the French Cultural Services on the Upper East Side, and in my apartment on weekends gobbled bitter peyote buttons sweetened with raisins that transformed the world outside my head, and in it, into Technicolor visions of entrancing beauty.  When not so transported, I went often to the Gaslight and heard the Beatniks – not Ginsberg, Corso, & Co., who had by now departed – but the lesser lights of the day, a grubby but amusing bunch who read their less-than-brilliant poetry with great zest to indulgent audiences.  Sometime after this, in the latter days of Beatdom, my partner Bob, coming from Jersey City, heard Diane di Prima read her poetry there, probably far surpassing the stuff I was treated to.  Did Dylan perform there to?  Not when I was around, but probably.  (For a fuller account of my peyote adventures, see chapter 14, “Babylon,” in No Place for Normal: New York, cited at the end of this post.)

         The Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street near Hudson, not far from my 11^th Street abode, was where Dylan was profoundly influenced by a performance of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, which opened there in 1954 with a memorable cast that included Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, as the prostitute Jenny.  Forced to close because of prebooking by another show, it reopened at the de Lys on September 20, 1955, with largely the same cast.  Just a day or two before that, returning from my first and only vacation at gay-ridden Provincetown with a tall, urbane Canadian from Toronto, I went to the theater with him and his knowledgeable artist brother, a New York resident who suggested that we go get tickets.  We arrived there to find it was the night of the dress rehearsal, and the doors swung wide open to admit some invited guests.  Seeing our opportunity, we followed them in and saw the entire rehearsal, which was almost a finished performance.  Worn out by the long trip back from P town, I was drooping and nodding off, telling myself, “This is wonderful; for God’s sake don’t fall asleep.”  I didn’t quite, but being groggy throughout, I vowed to get tickets and come back wide awake.  I did, and experienced one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen.  Was Dylan in the audience?  Who knows?

         My memories of the Theatre de Lys, alas, provoke a wee gripe.  In 1955 the financier Louis Schweitzer bought the theater as an anniversary present for his wife, actress and producer Lucile Lortel, who from then on was in charge of it and sometimes staged showcase productions of new plays for an invited audience.  One of her readers urged her to do a one-act play of mine, but she chose not to.  Later another reader urged to do the same play, but she still refused.  The play was never staged professionally in the city, and this and similar frustrations finally led me to give up playwriting, a decision I have never regretted, even though by then I had had a staged reading and a full production of full-length plays elsewhere in the country.  My revenge came when I was invited to a staging of an avant-garde play by a new writer at the de Lys.  Though I like to encourage fellow writers, this play was so lamentably over the top -- I remember the protagonist’s father dying, then getting up and dying again, and then again -- that I and several others had to fight hard to choke back our laughter, containing it until we were out of the theater and could guffaw immeasurably.  To my knowledge, the play was not done elsewhere, certainly not in New York.  In 1981, the year of Lucie Lortel’s 81^st birthday, the theater was renamed in her honor, thus reminding me, every time I pass it, of my play’s double rejection.  To be fair, the theater has also presented any number of deserving productions, and my memory of Threepenny, seen a second time, is overwhelming.

         Washington Square Park, with its magnificent arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue, was a mecca for students and performers in Dylan’s early days in the city and still is today.  In 1961 the Washington Square Association, made up of home owners around the park, appealed to the Department of Parks and Recreation to curb the hundreds of “roving troubadours and their followers” playing music around the park’s fountain on Sunday afternoons.  The Department then began issuing permits to limit the number of musicians and banning the use of drums.  When complaints continued, the Parks Commissioner stopped issuing permits altogether.  The musicians and their fans then protested in turn, provoking an assault by the police, who shoved and mauled the peaceful protesters and hauled a few of them off in paddy wagons.  The public then protested the police’s quelling of the protest, and the city resumed issuing permits, a practice that continues to this day.

         Bob Dylan, who had arrived in the city the previous January, was apparently not at these protests, nor was I.  But at various times back in those days I saw the heavy hand of the minions of order in the park.  An Italian-American man with a mandolin often turned up in the park on mild Saturday nights and played and sang for passersby, who gathered quietly around him – the most orderly and innocent gathering in the Village.  But  sometimes the cops turned up, stopped his playing, and dispersed the crowd, which they evidently deemed dangerous.  On another occasion I saw a squad car drive through the park on a pedestrian path, forcing people onto the lawn.  Then New York’s Finest stopped the car, got out, and yelled at the people to get off the lawn.  Not the finest moments of the Finest, those Saturday nights in the park.

         Such are my memories of Bob Dylan’s Village, as prompted by GVSHP’s suggestive map.  In 1961 Dylan was a 19-year-old Jewish kid from Minnesota whose Midwestern chutzpah prompted him to tell a tale of running away from home to join a traveling band – a story that of course turned out to be false.  But that same chutzpah got him his first gig at the Café Wha on MacDougal Street the very day of his arrival, and he was soon deeply involved in the flourishing Village folk music scene of the time.  All of which goes to show that New York doesn’t have a corner on chutzpah.

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          My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.

          My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

     Coming soon:  Maybe a post on the changing New York skyline, or the saga of the captive deer of Harlem, or both.

     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

     

271. Wild New York

         They are typical New Yorkers, smart, sociable, feisty, and loud-mouthed, shunning bright, cheery colors while showing a distinct preference for black.  But they aren’t groundlings, their realm is the sky overhead, where you may recently have heard their raucous croak – cr-r-uck or prruk – or what has been described as a metallic tok.  Crows?  No, these guys are bigger and more solitary.  This croaker is the common raven (Corvus corax), whom most of us know only from a line in Poe's poem "The Raven: "Quoth the Raven 'Never more.' "  The real, unliterary raven typically frequents the forests, coastal cliffs, and tundra of Canada.  Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, 4^th edition, 1980, reports it as expanding its range in the Appalachians, but only a casual visitor on the East Coast south of Maine.  When I used to vacation on Mohegan Island, off midcoast Maine, I would often see them soaring overhead, but never saw them in the vicinity of New York.  Even just a decade ago they were unknown down here, but recently their croak has been heard in various locations, one has been spotted on the roof of the Flatiron Building, and they are reported nesting in a water tower near Forest Park in Queens, at Co-op City in the Bronx, on the Brooklyn waterfront and in that borough’s Prospect Park.  Once a rural resident, the raven has followed a worldwide human trend in migrating to the cities – at least, to this one – where they now nest on such manmade structures as bridges and cell towers. 

                                                                                                                             Ken Billington

         But you may also have heard the more familiar caw of the crow (Corvus brachyrhyncos), once common throughout this country but decimated in the early 2000s by the West Nile virus.  Fortunately, this noisy cousin of the raven is making a comeback, appearing in numbers close to what it was before the West Nile outbreak.  Watch for crows in parks, since they like trees for nesting and open spaces for foraging.  And what, by the way, does brachyrhyncos mean?  It’s a kind of bastardized Latin, derived from ancient Greek: brachus + rhyncos = short + beak.  Short?  It looks pretty long to me, but who am I to argue with ornithologists?  If they say it’s short, it must be, but short compared to who or what?

         And now for another bit of urban wildlife.  STRAPHANGERS  GO  BERSERK  AFTER  WOMAN  TOSSES  BUGS  IN  SUBWAY  CAR screamed the headline of the New York Post.  It seems that a videotape showed a woman on the D train trying to sell worms and crickets out of a bucket.  When some teenagers bumped into her, she got angry and dumped the crickets and worms into the train.  Someone pulled the emergency brake, causing the train ,unhelpfully to stop on the Manhattan Bridge.  Skeptics later tracked down the woman who posted the video and got her to confess that she had posed as the cricket lady, doing “performance art” on the subject of homelessness; a confederate had knocked the bucket out of her hands.  So it was all fake, and the woman has been arrested on a charge of reckless endangerment.  The chirp  of the cricket is not likely to be heard on subway trains.

         This incident was faked but, in addition to singers and acrobats, the subway has witnessed chickens, frogs, goldfish, cats and dogs, buckets of dead crabs, a monkey, a used condom tied to a pole on the F train, and a man with a duffel bag full of snakes that he silently took out and draped on fellow passengers, except for one middle-aged woman who shrieked and screamed in protest.  And none of these were faked.  And so, dear tourists and visitors, ride our subways and have an adventure!

         Not that crickets are alien to the city.  The fall field cricket (Gryllus pennsylvanicus) can be found throughout the city in grassy fields, woods, garden beds, abandoned lots, playgrounds, schoolyards, and even tree pits (small plots of soil near a curb where a tree is planted).  And as autumn brings cooler temperatures they sneak inside buildings, crawling through cracks in foundations and gaps in window frames.  We hear them at night, when the males rub their wings together, the best of them dazzling females with their perfect pitch and regular song pattern.  But we don’t hear their chirp for long, since by Christmas they succumb to old age or starvation.  If only cockroaches would do the same!

         And in the sky above, you can see more than an occasional raven, or a bunch of crows, their floppy black wings beating the void.  Anywhere near water, as on Staten Island or in Jamaica Bay, you can see the outspread black-and-white-patterned wings of the osprey soaring overhead or diving to snatch a fish out of the water.  Almost eliminated by DDT in the 1980s, this magnificent avian has made a dramatic comeback.  In 2015, 21 osprey nests in and around Jamaica Bay produced 45 young – far more than before the onset of DDT.  I have seen those nests: big twiggy affairs   with mamma and the little ones peeking out, and dad nearby, bringing home the bacon, or rather, the fish.  New York is, in fact, a very “birdy” city, being situated at the junction of the Atlantic and Hudson Valley flyways, with wooded sanctuaries like Central Park (especially the North End and the Ramble) squeezed in among the asphalt and concrete of the urban wasteland. 

An osprey, preparing to dive.

         Not so lucky is the monarch butterfly, easily identified by its orange wings with black tracery, which I have often seen, two or three at a time, fluttering around the well-named butterfly tree in a little park near the Hudson River here in the West Village.  Their numbers have declined because the milkweed, a common summer wildflower, is declining in the Midwest, though I have found it at various locations, always dry and sunny, in and near the city.  Female monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed, and the larvae feed on milkweed sap, which is toxic to other creatures, including humans; less milkweed means fewer monarchs.  The greatest danger to the monarchs used to be the loss of their forest habitat, the goal of their annual autumn migration in the Mexican state of Michoacán, which was devastated by illegal logging until Mexican authorities stopped the logging by offering different job opportunities to the locals. 

         But now a new threat to the monarch looms: a boom in avocado farming, inspired by a growing demand for avocados in the U.S.  Farmers in Michoacán are cutting down the oak and pine trees of the monarchs’ winter sanctuary to create avocado orchards.  It is said that the authorities are turning a blind eye to this development, either because of bribes or because they are fearful of organized crime and its links to the avocado industry.  To offset deforestation, trees are being planted in large numbers, but the monarch’s fate is, as of now, uncertain.  The next time I see avocados in a supermarket, I will think of these endangered creatures, so beautiful to behold, especially when they migrate in the autumn.  I’ve never seen the migration at its height, when waves of monarchs flutter through the fields, but I’ve seen any number of them feeding on asters on Monhegan in the early autumn – a sight that I hope will continue for years to come.  But will it?

         Bees too are in danger, though they can now be kept legally in the city, and a stand at the Union Square greenmarket on Wednesdays sells locally harvested honey from rooftop colonies throughout the boroughs.  U.S. beekeepers now lose some 30 percent of their colonies each winter, because of global warming, habitat loss, parasites, and insecticides far more deadly than DDT.  Why should this matter to people living cozily in cities, if they don’t yearn for honey?  Because bees pollinate 71 of the 100 crops providing 90 percent of the world’s food.  In short: no bees, no food.  At least, no plant-based food.  Big Agriculture is fighting hard to prevent bans on the insecticides here in the U.S., but the European Union has banned several of them, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is phasing them out on the public lands they manage.  

        A personal note: When I was about to graduate from college long ago, the dean called me in to discuss my future plans, which were vague at best.  Learning that I was an aspiring writer, he told me of a woman writer who kept bees.  "In the summer I keep bees," she said, "and in the winter they keep me."  She earned enough from selling honey to keep her home heated and meet other expenses, so that she could pursue her writing without a regular job.  Did I miss my calling?  Perhaps, but I've been fond of bees ever since.

         Obviously, some forms of wildlife are declining, while others thrive.  Among the latter are those black-masked sneaky creatures with striped tails that now abound in Central Park, coming out from the bushes at night in startling numbers, as many as 22 in one sighting at the edge of the Pond in the park’s southeastern corner.  Raccoons, of course.  These nocturnal prowlers have now become a tourist attraction, rivaling MOMA and the Met; people flock there nightly to feed the animals soft pretzels, organic gummy bears, potato chips, bits of hotdog, stale bagels from a bakery, and other goodies, and try to pose with them for selfies.  And the raccoons don’t mind; in fact, they flock there too in anticipation of goodies.  Though it’s not illegal, feeding them is not approved of by city authorities, since raccoons can carry rabies.  Nor do raccoons need these freebies, since they do quite well on their own, devouring plants, smaller animals, and insects.  But there they are, receiving free eats nightly from the unwary fingers of tourists, while in the nearby distance the buildings of Midtown Manhattan soar mightily, their many windows ablaze with light.  Once again, where but in New York?

D. Gordon E. Robertson

         A note on the Donald:  It’s not easy, getting him out of your mind.  And who is this arch foe of the establishment appointing as cabinet members and staff?  Among others, a hedge fund manager and a graduate of Goldman Sachs.  No comment.  But for Goldman Sachs, one of the two top companies I love to hate, see my post #158 of December 21, 2014:  “Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid or Martyred Innocent?”  (And the other object of my hate?  Monsanto, of course.)

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          My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.

          My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

         Coming soon:  Bob Dylan's Village.  Reminiscences of the 1950s and 1960s.

         ©   2016   Clifford Browder