It’s a Wonderful Town

[DickZ]

It’s a Wonderful Town
Part 1

One of Frank Sinatra’s many big hits was from a musical in which he played an important part. This particular song that became a big hit was New York, New York, It’s a Wonderful Town, and the musical was called On the Town. Since it didn't have Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, some of you younger folks may not be familiar with it.

Well, New York, New York sure is a wonderful town. We’ll go through some of the sights that make it so. I say some of the sights, because it we did all of them, most people would give up before we even finished. Besides, I certainly don’t approach knowing them all.

One of the more recognizable features of New York City is the Statue of Liberty, which is the only major structure in the world that is named for a trick football play. Here is what the magnificent lady looks like to someone approaching the harbor from Europe, so this is the sight that many of our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents saw when first coming to our wonderful land.

http://www.visitingdc.com/images/statue-of-liberty-picture-2.jpg

http://www.ancienthouse.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/statue_of_liberty_3.jpg

The Statue of Liberty (formally called Liberty Enlightening the World) was given to the United States by the people of France back in 1886. The statue portion was sculpted by Frederic August Bartholdi, but there were several other people involved in various parts of this complex structure.

Most of the statue is steel covered with copper, except for the flame of the torch in her right hand, which is coated in gold leaf. The New Colossus is a poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, a few years before the arrival of the statue. Because the poem goes so well with the statue in welcoming new immigrants to our country, it has become a fixture on the statue’s base. The end of the opening verse reads:


Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!Nearby Ellis Island is another symbol of new immigrants arriving in our country. While Ellis Island is no longer used, it was the focal point for the waves of immigrants coming from Europe between 1892 and 1954. The overall complex includes 22 buildings, but the Main Registry Building is the most recognizable of them all and has come to represent the entire place:

http://www.visitingdc.com/images/ellis-island-picture-3.jpg

And here’s the Great Hall, where the immigrants stood in line nervously waiting their turns to be processed:

http://housecallsinthegardenstate.com/images/EllisIslandProcessing.jpg

Here’s what the recently-restored Great Hall looks like without the masses of immigrants being processed, but I think the picture with all the anxious newcomers is much better than this empty shell:

http://www.karenjay.com/ellis.jpg

Annie Moore, a 14-year old girl from Ireland, is considered the first immigrant to come through Ellis Island. Here’s a wonderful song sung in the Great Hall by the Irish Tenors, honoring Annie and all the others who came through this Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGZaAwD2Mls

Here’s a little more info on Annie, at the Ellis Island website, if you’re interested:

http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/Annie_Moore.asp

If you’d care to read a story about immigrants coming through Ellis Island, and a whole lot more, including where they started from, how they got here, and what they did after arriving, I would like to prevail on you to check out my story called Two Crossings, at the following site. It’s pretty long, but it’s structured so you can swallow it in small pieces:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30993

And if you’d like to get a lot more information on Ellis Island than I’ve given in this very brief summary, check out:

http://www.ellisisland.org/

To all of us older folks, the Empire State Building is probably second only to the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of the city. Younger folks may think of other buildings. It was completed in 1931, and got its name from the State of New York’s nickname. Now I’m figuring that whoever gave the state its nickname which must have had some kind of delusions about following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte, but I don’t know that for sure.

Having no less than 102 stories, this Art Deco structure was the tallest building in the world for more than forty years. It’s most scenic at night, and from the water:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Empire_State_Building_Night.jpg

Here’s a view from the top of the Empire State Building:

http://www.madphotoworld.com/2008/05/13/Top-Of-Empire-State-Building.jpg

And here is the very top of the building as it appeared in one of my favorite movies from my childhood:

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/americanstudies/kingkong.jpg

And here is the rescue of Fay Wray, whom the monster King Kong had taken to the top of the building in the movie that was named for him in that picture above. He was savagely gunned down by the airplanes that you see in the distance returning to their base:

http://www.cinemaisdope.com/news/films/kingkong/kingkong1933.jpg

After Fay Wray’s death in 2004, the Empire State Building was darkened for all of fifteen minutes. It seems like they could have done a little more than that.

Growing up in Texas, I always thought the term Grand Central Station was just an expression for a very busy and congested place, because that’s how everybody seemed to use this combination of words. I didn’t know there really was a place with the actual name of Grand Central Station until many years later, when I learned that it was a real railroad station that was completed in 1913, and has earned its own place in history and in movies. Here is its glorious exterior, which none of today’s architects could match because now everybody specializes in making plain boxes devoid of anything except straight lines:

http://www.ronsaari.com/stockImages/nyc/grandCentralStationExterior.jpg

And the famous Main Concourse, where much of the activity is centered, at least before and after the activity dealing with the trains themselves:

http://thisguysvoice.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/ny_grand-central-station_wide.jpg

Apparently the sunshine just pours into the concourse, as shown in this famous picture which I believe is from World War II days:

http://www.posters.com/i/c/401840_Grand-Central-Station.jpg

Next up: Pennsylvania Station, the U.S. Customs House, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 2

Even more glorious than the magnificent Grand Central Station was the Pennsylvania Station. These two stations joined into the fierce competition that raged between their respective railroads, namely the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Penn Station was designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, and was completed in 1910, before the art of constructing buildings was eventually lost, and it remains lost even today.

It was a masterpiece of Beaux-Arts style, looking like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Penn_Station3.jpg

Its waiting room even surpassed its counterpart in Grand Central Station, as it looked like this:

http://www.virtualnyctour.com/photos/34AndEmpire/images/PennStation2.jpg

The Clock was the title of a 1945 movie starring Judy Garland and Robert Walker. The timepiece from which the movie gets its name is the one in the photo below, which was in Pennsylvania Station:

http://www.photosofoldamerica.com/webart/large/157.JPG

While you can’t see the clock in this picture from the movie, you can see the two stars:

http://www.powwmedia.com/pennsy/images/theclock.jpg

In 1963, because railroad traffic was declining rapidly, the Pennsylvania Railroad found it difficult and expensive to maintain this mammoth station. In a gesture that outraged most of the civilized world, the station was demolished in 1963. This was done so that the new Madison Square Garden complex could be built for basketball and hockey games.

Demolition was limited to the building above the ground, but most of the actual railroad elements were underground. Here’s the entrance to the new Penn Station – the one that’s still there today beneath Madison Square Garden. Contrast this with the old one – which isn’t there anymore.

http://www.trainweb.org/amtrakonline/abrPennStation.jpg

And here’s the waiting room in the new Penn Station – compare that with its previous counterpart – the one that had magnificent columns and arches and ceilings and stairways:

http://collegeishard.tv/blog/new-york-penn-station-address-2.jpg

Buildings like Penn Station aren’t built anymore, a fact which added greatly to the outrage that followed the demolition. The New York Times came up with a great editiorial called Farewell to Penn Station in October, 1963, which ended with the words “... And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.” To be fair, those of us who were appalled at the demolition, but didn’t have to shell out any money to maintain a building that couldn’t be made profitable, had it somewhat easier than those who actually owned the building and were losing their shirts. Still, many can’t help but wish they had hit upon the solution that eventually saved Union Station in Washington, DC – namely setting up businesses in the station – restaurants and stores.

At least the demolition led to speedier adoption of architectural preservation criteria which now keep atrocities like this from happening again – as confirmed in the case of the next building in our discussion.

When the United States first gained its independence under the watchword No Taxation Without Representation, there was no way the new country was going to raise money by taxing its citizens. So in the early days of our country, the Federal Government, which already had considerable responsibilities for which money was needed, raised that capital by selling land to settlers moving west. We continued through the entire 19th century without having to resort to income taxes. In addition to the land sales, a major source of income to the Federal Government was through customs duties levied on imported goods.

I guess that was a rather roundabout way to explain how a building called the U.S. Customs House came into being, but I don’t see another way to explain it.

New York City was the most active port of our new country going into the 20th century, so in 1899, a piece of property was acquired by the Treasury Department to build a Customs House in a neighborhood called Bowling Green, and a competition was announced for building designs. The winner was Cass Gilbert, who would later also design the Woolworth Building, which we’ll discuss later since the Woolworth Building has nothing to do with the Customs Building but you should be watchful for this same architect appearing later in this story. Construction began in 1900 and completed in 1907. This is another example of Beaux-Arts style of architecture.

Here’s what the building looks like – first an overall perspective, and then a closeup of the main entrance:

http://freepages.nostalgia.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sponholz/nycustoms.JPG

http://www.earthdocumentary.com/new-york-city/alexander_hamilton_us_custom_house-01.jpg

The main feature of the interior is a large rotunda, which was beautiful to start with, but which was greatly enhanced during the Great Depression as part of the Treasury Relief Art Project. In this project, the Government hired out-of-work artists, and Reginald Marsh was commissioned to paint sixteen frescoes around the rotunda’s skylight.

http://pro.corbis.com/images/CH001277.jpg?size=67&uid=%7B6255A414-61AB-4E4A-BBBF-D1A650D03B28%7D

The larger sections portray eight successive stages of the arrival of an ocean liner in the harbor. Eight smaller panels depict famous explorers like Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, Giovanni da Verrazano and Henry Hudson.

Here’s a closer view of the murals, including a large section and a small one:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2372/2278637766_2cf4d5038d.jpg?v=0

Now the reason we’re discussing the Customs House right after Pennsylvania Station, is due to the fact that once income taxes were established in 1916, the importance of the Customs House declined rapidly. The building was eventually abandoned in the 1970s because income taxes were filling the Government coffers to overflowing, and there was no more need for customs to supplement the nation’s once-paltry income. Consideration was given to demolishing this classic building, using some of the extra money that they couldn’t figure out what to do with. But fortunately, the new preservation criteria established as a result of Penn Station’s demolition helped save the Customs House from a similar fate, and the building was restored in the early 1980s.

In 1987, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York occupied the building, probably to help with all the people who couldn’t pay the income taxes that now dwarfed the government’s income from customs duties. And in 1994, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian took over two floors of the Old Custom House.

There are lots of museums in New York, and we’ll eventually discuss the major ones. But we’ll space them out among other sights so we don’t get museum fatigue, which is easy to do if you look at too many museums all at once. We’ll start with my favorite, since I’m the one writing this story – that’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This museum started operations in 1870, and is located just east of Central Park, which we’ll visit in the next episode.

Someone told me that this museum has over two million works of art in its permanent collection, which is pretty phenomenal because there are also lots of short-term exhibits that come from other museums around the world. It would take a whole day to see all of the two million items, so I think it’s better to go on days when there aren’t any traveling exhibits. Then you can concentrate on the permanent exhibits. Before we get into some of the exhibits, let’s take a quick peek at the building’s façade, of the Beaux-Arts style. This façade was completed in 1926:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Image-Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art_entrance_NYC_NY.JPG

They have impressive collections from classical antiquity, with specialties in Egyptian items, which means they are even older than I am, and range in time up to the current period. The next site will give you an overview of all the permanent displays, and let you examine in detail any display you might be interested in:

http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/curatorial_departments

For example, here’s the one for American decorative arts, which features lots of beautiful antique furniture, vases, and pottery items:

http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/american_decorative_arts

Here’s an overview of the current special exhibits, as well as a heads-up on what special exhibits will be coming soon. There’s also information on special exhibits that you have already missed either because I posted this too late, or you didn’t bother to check it out until the exhibits had already been taken down:

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/index.asp

For example, here’s a favorite topic of mine on current display, since I collect old postcards from San Antonio, Texas, which is where I grew up. Postcards are a great way to check out sights at any time in the 20th or 21st centuries:

[Use the link above, and select WALKER EVANS AND THE PICTURE POSTCARD.]

Or if you prefer royal porcelain to postcards, you might want to check out this one:

[Use the link above and select ROYAL PORCELAIN FROM THE TWINIGHT COLLECTION.]

Now when we were doing our tour, there was this young girl in our group who was talking on her cellphone, saying something like this: "Hi, Andrea, it’s me and I’m on this you know like really boring tour in this crummy museum so I wanted to talk to someone and let all the people on this tour what a total buffoon I am and I really wish they hadn’t wasted all the ink they have in these pictures on the walls because with that ink we could all have lots more of our charming tattoos like the Aflac Duck that I just got on my neck and I’m going to get some you know like new piercings in my right eyelid so I can get ahead of everyone else in the piercing department … “ Now the girl kept talking, so the tour guide pushed a secret button and the girl fell through a hidden trap door into the repository for all the oblivious cellphone talkers in the museum. Any of you who plan to take the tour should be aware that these hidden trap doors are all over the place, so you probably should keep your cellphone put away.

Here’s the museum’s website – I would suggest you explore a little on your own, because there’s quite a bit available to see, and besides, you can do it without having any people in your tour group talking on their cellphones:

http://www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

Next up: Central Park, the Tavern on the Green, the Algonquin Hotel, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and Carnegie Hall.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 3

While we had a Central Park Mall with all kinds of great stores back home in San Antonio, I don’t think that had anything to do with New York City’s Central Park. At first I thought maybe they had copied us, but I found out that New York’s came before the Civil War, which meant that our mall was eventually built a lot later. The park is right in the middle of the city, and it’s unusual (at least for me) to see some of the sights that combine rural and urban scenes. It’s entirely landscaped and created, even though there are very natural looking ponds and lakes.

Here are some of the scenes I could find on the internet – these are all large images and as such, they are sometimes very slow in downloading. If it seems to be taking too long for a picture to download, you might want to think about moving on to the next one:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Central_park_newyork.jpeg

http://www.gdavis.net/Central_Park.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Central_Park_Reservoir_(1797734474).jpg

http://www.centralpark.com/usr/photos/large/sun_antonianelson.jpg

Putting these little armchair tours together is educational for me, and I learn all kinds of things I never knew before - just by doing enough research to explain some of the sights. For instance, I just recently learned that Alice in Wonderland is memorialized in Central Park:

http://www.travelswithbaby.com/images/press%20photos/central_park.jpg

There is actually a Central Park Zoo, at which we’ll take a quick peek. But we’ll save our wild animals until we get to the Bronx Zoo a little later, because it is so much more extensive than the one in Central Park. Here’s Gus, the polar bear, who could be considered the major attraction at the Central Park Zoo. You can see that he’s resting up from a pretty hard day of work – I’m not sure what they have Gus do to earn his keep, but whatever it is, it sure poops him out:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Central_Park_Zoo_NYC1.jpg

The Loeb Boathouse is on one of the artificial lakes:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/walkbigapple/SCCtfKgRt0I/AAAAAAAADXk/Za67x2pwgE0/s800/DSCN5323.JPG

About eighty years after Central Park was established, the Tavern-on-the-Green - which is a restaurant in the park – was started in 1934. It has lots of distinguished rooms with different decors – such as The Elm, The Rafters, and The Chestnut Room.

The outside of the place is as magnificent as the inside – now I would have guessed this shot was taken around Christmas time, but I don’t see any snow anywhere:

http://image04.webshots.com/4/5/52/95/56355295qXpftD_fs.jpg

Here is a view of a room that is none of those listed above, but is rather the Crystal Room:

http://www.nyc24.org/2005/centralpark/play/images/tavern_photo.gif

And here’s a horse who pulls a buggy – I think his name is Rusty. He takes people around the streets near Central Park, and he really likes to eat something called Beef-A-Reeno.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/02/nyregion/02tavern_650.jpg

Not so far from here is the famous Algonquin Hotel. The second-most important fact about this hotel is that it hosted a group of writers called the Algonquin Round Table back in the 1920s. While the hotel has been there since 1902, it didn’t gain great notoriety until this round table began. The members of this particular round table included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Heywould Broun, and several other notable writers of that era. Even if you’re young and don’t remember much from that era, you might remember Dorothy Parker, who once said “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.” She said lots of other things but we won’t list them all here because they would take up too much room.

The first-most important fact about the hotel is its resident cat – currently a Ragdoll named Matilda. The very first cat at the hotel appeared in the late 1930s, when the Great Depression forced a destitute feline into the hotel because he couldn’t sell his apples on the street corner. You can check out the history of the line of cats that have reigned in the Algonquin (male cats are always called Hamlet and female cats are always called Matilda):

http://www.algonquinhotel.com/algonquin-cat

Here is the current Matilda on a recent birthday of hers, maintaining order in the lobby as she frequently does:

http://www.newyorkology.com/archives/images/matilda.jpg

Matilda has gone high tech and is very proficient with e-mail. If your cat would like to exchange pleasantries with Matilda via cyberspace, you can contact her at the address below. Just be forewarned that Matilda likes to use the word purrfect in her e-mails:

[email protected]

But it might not go as smoothly as you hope. Here’s a view of a cat somewhere who had trouble with her printer after exchanging e-mails with Matilda:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvBiSW5QFKY

And if you want to know more about the Round Table, you can check out this spot:

http://www.algonquinhotel.com/pop_roundtable.html

I’m Jewish and the only time I go to Catholic church is when I go with the nice lady to Christmas Eve Mass at her church in Arlington, Virginia. Additionally, I have picked up a few things from Aunt Shecky’s stories, but not a lot. So most of what I knew about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral before undertaking this story was what I had learned from old classic movies, such as Miracle in the Rain dating back to 1956. Saint Patrick’s appears in lots of those movies. But I learned even more stuff by checking Saint Patrick’s out on the internet, such as that the cathedral appeared in the movie Spiderman, which I won’t watch until it hits the Turner Classic Movies channel.

The Cathedral is the seat of the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, who sounds like a pretty important person to me. The building we see now was begun in 1858, but work was held up by the Civil War, and the cathedral was finally dedicated in 1879. Various additions and renovations have been made over the years, and continue.

Here are a few views of the Cathedral, first from the outside, and then from within:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/NewYorkStPatrick03.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Saint_Patrick_NYC_inside.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/St.Patrick%27s_Cathedral_NYC4.jpg

Here’s the Cathedral’s website if you’d like to get more information:

http://www.saintpatrickscathedral.org/

I always had a mental block against the concert venue Carnegie Hall, because of the old joke in which a tourist asks a native New Yorker “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and the New Yorker answers “Practice, practice, practice.” It always reminded me of those terrible few years when I was taking piano lessons, and was forced to practice, practice, practice.

Anyway, it was built by Andrew Carnegie in 1891 – you might remember that he advanced the steel-making world by leaps and bounds and wound up quite wealthy. He gave away just about all of his money to philanthropic concerns such as this music hall, and built lots of libraries all across the country.

Here are some exterior and interior shots of the building:

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/4235615.jpg

The Main Hall is called the Isaac Stern Auditorium:

http://www.lafavre.us/mom/017_14.JPG

http://danlipton.com/images/Carnegie%20night.jpg

Here’s a brief virtual tour of the building:

http://www.carnegiehall.org/common/virtual_tour.html

Here’s the hall’s official website, which offers some sample music and a history of the place (check Online Resources):

http://www.carnegiehall.org/SiteCode/Intro.aspx

Next up: Eldridge Street Synagogue, Lincoln Center, and the American Museum of Natural History.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 4

The Eldridge Street Synagogue opened in in the Lower East Side in 1887, just in time for the Jewish High Holidays. It was the first great synagogue built by Eastern European Jews in New York, as the earlier houses were built either by German Jews or by Sephardim. When masses of Jewish immigrants were flowing into the Lower East Side from Eastern Europe, the Eldridge Street Synagogue achieved great acclaim.

Here are some views of the synagogue, first some exterior shots and then some interior:

http://garylucas.com/www/pict/image/EldridgeGreatDay2.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/37/110944932_77be8f058e_o.jpg

http://www.eldridgestreet.org/images/experience-eldridge-street-synagogue.jpg

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/16/nyregion/16synagogue.large.jpg

The two main characters in my story of Jewish immigrants met each other in this synagogue at a bar mitzvah in 1911, but since I already inserted a plug for Two Crossings in Part 1 of It’s a Wonderful Town, I’m hesitant to plug it again.

The synagogue was recently restored over a 20-year period, and you can check out all kinds of details, including tours of the facility, at the following site:

http://www.eldridgestreet.org/

Note that if you click on Explore the Synagogue at the very top of the home page above, you can get a slideshow that’s just like a guided tour of the synagogue.

I always thought the Lincoln Center was some kind of memorial to Abraham Lincoln like the one in Washington, DC, but it turns out that it’s actually the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and they have lots of different theaters and arenas for staging live shows. It’s a relative newcomer to the city as it was established in the 1950s, and the first structure to come on line started up in 1962. There are twelve different facilities here, so we’ll just cover a few because I’m pretty sure that lots of us have limited attention spans and could never make it all the way through twelve different things.

The Metropolitan Opera House is now part of Lincoln Center, but this is actually the second generation of that esteemed institution. The first one, which was much more glorious than the current one, lasted from 1883 until the new one opened in 1966. The Met puts on something like 27 different operas every year, which leads to an astounding 220 performances annually, so they stay really busy all year long.

As I understand it, the first Metropolitan Opera House reached its acme when Mario Lanza played the part of Enrico Caruso in the movie The Great Caruso. I think that Caruso himself actually sang in the Met as well. Here’s the old Met exterior, the one where Caruso sang at the turn of the 20th century:

http://ephemeralarchives.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/metropolitan-opera.jpg

And the interior, at the last performance of the Old Met:

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/f?q=old+metropolitan+opera&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dold%2Bmetropolitan%2Bopera%26hl%3Den&imgurl=dc07297029641e44

Here’s the New Met, from the outside, which to my mind falls a little short of the original. To me at least, this exterior shot looks something like the interior of the men’s room at an airport:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Metropolitan_Opera_House_At_Lincoln_Center.jpg

And the interior:

http://pro.corbis.com/images/U1528084.jpg?size=67&uid=%7BA81021A0-E23E-4A4E-AC22-8CAEA21062A3%7D

Here’s the Met’s website if you want to keep tabs on what’s being performed when, including their Saturday radio performances which you can hear without actually being in New York, if your hometown radio station carries the broadcasts:

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/

Avery Fisher Hall is the new home of the New York Philharmonic, and it was designed primarily for acoustical qualities. However, lots of pressure was exerted to increase the seating capacity, which was initially limited to 2,400. The acoustic specialists warned that doing this was going to ruin the acoustics, but these specialists didn’t offer to pay the company as much money as 350 additional seats would bring in, so the changes were made against the technical advice.

Controversy still exists today as to whether or not the acoustics are as good as they could be – with some experts saying YES and others saying NO. At one time it was intended that this hall would replace Carnegie Hall, which you might remember we visited in an earlier episode. But Carnegie Hall still stands in all its glory, because everybody agrees on its acoustical qualities.

This is the very creative exterior, which resembles a building my six-year old grandson made last week using his Tinker Toys:

http://youreinthepicture.com/Avery%20Fisher%20Hall%20.jpg

And here’s the interior:

http://www.andreagallo.info/images/IMG_5873.jpg

The David Koch Theater is home to both the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera, so it requires great coordination on the part of management to make sure that the swans from Swan Lake never dance on the stage while Madama Butterfly is belting out Un Bel Di Vedremo. The theater opened in 1964, but wasn’t called the David Koch Theater until 2008, when somebody donated $100 million over a ten-year period. I don’t know who it was that made the donation, but it was a very generous gift, so I'm going to do some investigating to find out who the benefactor was.

The exterior:

http://www.clearcom.com/news/news_2009/news09_images/koch_theater.jpg

The lobby:

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/9046/kochtheaterlobby.jpg

And the theater itself:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/New_York_State_Theater_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

Lots of musicals have been revived here at the Koch Theater after long and successful runs on Broadway. Some of these are South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, and Carousel.

Here’s the Lincoln Center’s website if you care to look for more information, particularly on the other nine facilities that we skipped over just to keep this short, since lots of us can’t take too much without falling asleep before we even get to the end:

http://new.lincolncenter.org/live/

The American Museum of Natural History opened in 1877 on the Upper West Side, and something that I just learned was that Theodore Roosevelt’s father was one of the founders. There are now 25 buildings, but it all began with only one. The main displays of the natural history museum are such things as mammals from North America, Asia, and Africa, as well as creatures from the sea, and jewels from places other than Tiffany’s. There is also a planetarium. We’ll quickly peek at a few of these things, and then you can explore to your heart’s content at the museum’s official website at the end of this brief writeup.

Compared to the buildings of Lincoln Center, the museum is classical in architecture, so I won’t be ranting about its exterior like I sometimes do. You just can’t get much better than this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Natural-history-museum.jpg

It has lots of things similar to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, an institution that was discussed in my Washington, DC story called A Capital Tour. For example, there are many dinosaur skeletons, of which the following is an example sitting in the lobby:

http://static2.bareka.com/photos/medium/20965217.jpg

And one of the more recent guys:

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/mythiccreatures/land/images/29-Gigantopithecus-model_lg.jpg

And a fully-equipped transportation section:

http://blog.nj.com/entertainment_impact_arts/2008/05/large_horsy.jpg

Here’s the museum’s own website, if anyone wants to explore more thoroughly:

http://www.amnh.org/

Next up: The Woolworth Building, Broadway and its shows, Radio City Music Hall, and Times Square.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 5

Before we begin checking out the Woolworth Building, we’ll pause for a minute to go over the background which led to this building’s construction.

Frank Woolworth started his business of five-and-ten-cent stores in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1879 - after the failure of his first store in Utica, New York, a few months earlier. Over the years, Woolworth expanded this single store into an incredibly large enterprise throughout the United States and abroad, despite experiencing numerous individual store failures along the way. Mr. Woolworth had an unbelievable work ethic, which is surely the reason for his great succcess, but he didn’t really invent the concept of the five-and-ten-cent store. There were several others who tried that approach before he did, but they never achieved the same kind of success that he did. A few imitators who followed him were also successful, but not to nearly the same degree as Woolworth.

Let’s take a little side trip just to demonstrate graphically the success of the F. W. Woolworth Company. If you ever saw the musical Annie in movie form, you might remember the stately mansion where Daddy Warbucks lived in abject modesty. Well, the building the movie folks used in order to make everyone’s jaw drop, first belonged to Hubert T. Parson, who took over as the President of the F. W. Woolworth Company after Mr. Woolworth died in 1919. The mansion was built in 1929 and was called Shadow Lawn when Parson lived there and worked for the Woolworth Company, and here’s its magnificent exterior:

http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/7/4/4/3/ar118064571334472.jpg

Here’s a little more info on Shadow Lawn, which was later called the Wellington Mansion, including a few views of the interior:

http://wellingtonmansion.blogspot.com/2008/04/shadow-lawn.html

By 1913, Woolworth was sitting quite high in the world of business, and wanted to create something that would keep his name alive long after his departure from this world, so he called it the Woolworth Building. It was designed by Cass Gilbert, who also designed the U. S. Customs House which was discussed earlier in Part 2. At the time it was built, this was the tallest building in the world. Here’s what it and its surroundings looked like when it first opened:

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SCC/SCC19-woolworth_pc.jpg

Here’s the lobby, which is nicer than the modern lobbies built today:

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/5879809.jpg

And while we’re on the subject of Woolworth’s, it would be a shame not to show some of the stores that contributed to the once-mighty empire - here’s the exterior of a Woolworth store in Utica, New York. This is the city where Woolworth’s actually began, but the first store here failed, so Woolworth packed up and moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to open his first successful store:

http://postcards-from-the-id.typepad.com/my_weblog/images/2007/12/31/woolworths_business_section_utica_p.jpg

And this one was in Chicago:

http://chicagopc.info/Chicago%20postcards/Retail%20-%20Office%20Bldgs/small%20businesses/f%20w%20woolworth.jpg

And finally, here’s the interior of an Anaheim, California Woolworth store, back in 1922:

http://www.oac.cdlib.org/affiliates/images/cana/kt2199p9w7/hi-res/P10622X.jpg

We had a street called Broadway in San Antonio, where I grew up, but despite how much I like our Texas version of Broadway, even I have to admit that the Broadway in New York is somewhat more impressive. There are lots of theaters concentrated here, and I mean the kind that put on live performances rather than motion pictures. New York’s Broadway and London’s West End are considered the center (in London, centre) of theater in the entire world.

Even though New York’s theater history goes back to at least 1750, it is still a youngster compared to its London counterpart, but this particular story is about New York and not London. And furthermore, Broadway as the center of the U.S. theater world didn’t really come into being until the 1920s. I recently learned that colored light bulbs burned out very quickly when placed on the signs outside Broadway theaters to attract customers, so only white lights were used there, leading to the nickname The Great White Way. Here are some representative white lights, along with one of the most elaborate street signs you’lll find anywhere in the world:

http://www.rudimateyka.com/images/dsc00018.jpg

Motion pictures came along to rival the live performances, and with talkies making it into production by the end of the 1920s, Broadway had to step up its quality in order to compete with movies. Unfortunately for Broadway back then, movies of that vintage were not like some of the mindless garbage of today but instead were creative, so Broadway had to be creative too. Can you imagine how much easier it would have been for Broadway to compete with material like The 40-Year Old Virgin?

There were all kinds of wonderful shows produced by people like Florenz Ziegeld, who came up with entertaining song-and-dance revues with performers like Fanny Brice. Lighthearted musicals came into their own in the 1920s, and continue to this day.

Here are some present views of Broadway:

http://www.carlosmanuel.com/blog/uploaded_images/Broadway-758789.jpg

http://www.tropicalisland.de/NYC%20Broadway%20by%20day_b.jpg

http://eatandbehappy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/broadway-i.jpg

In recent years, Andrew Lloyd Webber has had some really big musical hits on Broadway and London, not the least of which was Cats. Now my cat Eleanor (that’s her picture in my profile) nagged me and nagged me about going to see that show, but we wound up having to listen to it from one of my CDs, because I couldn’t take her all the way to New York. Well, the third time Eleanor heard the line “Was there ever a cat so clever as magical Mister Mistoffelees?” she went over and turned off my stereo.

Here’s a website to check out if you want more information on Broadway than my limited perspective allows, or if you want to buy tickets for tonight’s performances:

http://www.broadway.com/

Now I had heard of Radio City Music Hall since I was a youngster, and believe me, that was a long time ago. In fact, it was so long ago that nobody had television sets in their homes yet. I figured that when television finally came along, that there would soon be a Television City Music Hall to go along with its radio counterpart, but I don’t think that there is such a place even today.

It turns out that the name Radio City Music Hall actually came from the Radio Corporation of America, who invented the abbreviation RCA. Back in the 1920s, the invention of the radio was considered to be one of the most important of all new creations to date. It was the first medium to bring entertainment into the living rooms of regular folks out there. This is because reading books was never considered to be a form of entertainment in most people’s minds, I guess. Those of us who have the internet and television and those marvelous iPods might have a hard time imagining radio to be a major step forward, but it certainly was just that back then.

The Music Hall opened in 1932 with a live and lavish stage show. The place has almost 6,000 seats, and showed films alternating with live performances for many years, repeating the film and live performance four times each day. Somewhere around 1979, the movies started falling off and now the place is used almost exclusively for live performances.

Here’s what the building looks like from the outside – it has what’s called an Art Deco style of architecture.

First during the day:

http://ingeniousguys.com/images/DSC00767.JPG

And then at night:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Radio_City_Music_Hall_christmas_2006.jpg

A partial view of the spectators enjoying a show:

http://clearwisdom.net/emh/article_images/2008-2-3-nyshow453-01.jpg

The Rockettes have been astonishing the spectators since 1933, and still perform five times a day during the Christmas season:

http://todaysseniorsnetwork.com/Rockettes%20Christmas%20Dreams.JPG

And one of the great Wurlitzer organs of the entire world is here – this instrument achieved great notoriety in accompanying silent movies, and this model at Radio City is the largest ever built for a movie theater:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iYpVH2fQEhw/SacVnVOVOSI/AAAAAAAAA10/ziW3_TtHZjw/s400/Ben_RCMH_Feb09-2.jpg

Here’s Radio City’s website if you want to explore in more detail:

http://www.radiocity.com/

Times Square is actually just an intersection of streets in Manhattan, and a newspaper that happened to be right there gave its name to the square. If the Boston Globe had been located there, the place would probably be called Globe Square now instead of Times Square, but the Boston Globe is actually in another city. The newspaper that is there in Times Square puts out some great crossword puzzles.

It was in 1904 that the newspaper moved to this location, and since there aren’t too many of us who were around before that, we won’t go into what the square was called before the newspaper arrived.

Lots of celebrations take place here in Times Square – celebrations for things like the end of World War II. Here’s what it looked like right after the end of the war was announced:

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/94.1/images/hariman_fig01b.jpg

Here’s what it looks like these days, having achieved the ultimate in high-tech and low-taste advertising:

http://www.picturecorrect.com/wallpaper/photos/cityscapes/times-square-1024x768.jpg

New Year’s Eve celebrations have been held here since 1907, and are attended by the most courageous party-goers I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how these people put up with the crowds and the cold, but they somehow come through in the end. Since 1908, a lighted ball descends and when that ball reaches the bottom, the New Year begins. And starting in 2008, the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square featured a new energy-efficient LED ball to slash energy use and improve the climate quality of the entire world.

Here are some past New Year’s Eve scenes:

http://sporeflections.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/249981.jpg

http://timessquarenyc.org/media/images/NYE07Verticle.jpg

Next up: Columbus Circle, Wall Street, the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, the Frick Collection, and the Flatiron Building.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 6

Columbus Circle was built to honor the city of Columbus, Ohio. Lots of people mistakenly think it has something to do with the explorer Christopher Columbus but those people aren’t aware of the modern thinking which says that Columbus was a villain who spread disease among the natives and killed them in other ways as well, so he should be condemned to eternal damnation. None of the people who think that way ever fail to take the day off for Columbus Day, though. Furthermore, all of those folks have a hard time crossing the street, whereas Columbus the explorer actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean several times, and successfully made it back again almost as many times.

The circle and its monuments were created in 1905 before we knew that Christopher Columbus was an ogre with all those faults, so back then the people who conceived and built the circle thought it was for the explorer. It is located at the intersection of Broadway and Eighth Avenue at the southwest corner of Central Park.

Here’s what it looks like from a distance so you can see where the circle part of the name comes from:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3030/2583204685_35c414c0a7_o.jpg

You probably noticed that the picture above was taken from a minimum-security prison cell in the Time Warner Building, where management must be concerned about the employees escaping.

The statue in the center of the circle was created by an Italian sculptor named Gaetano Russo. It was built before the circle itself, in 1892 when the country was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to the New World when people still thought that voyage was a noble venture worth remembering.

And a street-level view from the opposite direction as the above photo, showing the Time Warner Building in the background:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/TWC_and_Columbus_Circle.jpg

I was going to defer my discussion of Wall Street until a later date because the people who work on Wall Street are viewed with such disdain at the present time. This unfortunate situation is due to Wall Street’s impact on the current economic condition of the country, and on the world as a whole. However, I decided that the discussion of Wall Street had to be in Part 6 and could not be held off until Part 24, so here it is.

Wall Street runs east from Broadway to South Street on the East River, but I don’t even know why South Street would be on the East River since geography was never my strong suit.

Wall Street is where the American financial industry is centered. It was work here on Wall Street that allowed developments such as the railroads that brought our nation together. Other endeavors that were facilitated by Wall Street backing include the steel industry, the oil industry, the radio and television industries, the automobile industry, and the airlines industry. Some of us view these to be agents that improve our lives – others of us view them as thieves whose sole aim in life is to steal from the unsuspecting populace. But we won’t get into any of that here.

The major point is that none of those life-enhancing industries, nor lots of other important businesses would even be in existence today without financial help from the people on Wall Street. Here is a view of Wall Street building exteriors during the workday when the pace here is frantic:

http://admissionsync.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/wall-street-ny.jpg

And at night when all is peaceful:

http://joergengeerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/2008-03-wall-street-nyse-700.jpg

You can see in this 1867 view that Wall Street was thriving even back in those days:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Wall_street_1867.jpg

And here is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when there’s trading going on. I don’t understand all the complicated stuff about buying and selling stocks, so don’t worry – I won’t be talking about how all that works.

http://dy999.acm.jhu.edu/pictures/Business%20Today%20NYC%2011-22-03/nyse%20trading%20floor3.JPG

And here’s Wall Street with Trinity Church in the background – I only show this as a lead in to Trinity Church:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/TrinityChurch_and_WallStreet.jpg

Trinity Church is an Episcopal church that has been operating as a neighbor to Wall Street since 1846. Its spire served as a landmark to ships entering New York Harbor, back when it was first built, before it became surrounded by skyscrapers:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Trinity_Church_Bird%27s_Eye_View_New_York_City_184 6.jpg

And here’s what it looked like in 1914, when taller buildings were becoming a common sight:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Trinity_Church,_Lower_Manhattan,_Wall_Street_1914_ New_York_City.jpg

And here’s what it looks like today:

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/17009128.jpg

One of the more influential Wall Street movers back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a man by the name of J. Pierpont Morgan. He was noted for numerous financial activities, with a couple of the more notable ones being his influence in forming United States Steel and averting the Panic of 1907 by coordinating the efforts of all the large banks at the time. It seems that in Morgan’s day the banks bailed out the government.

Well, in addition to his love of the financial scene, he must have been an avid reader as well. He had an incredibly elegant library built, called the J. Pierpont Morgan Library - that looks like this – Morgan is of course the man whose picture is in the foreground:

http://www.antiquorum.com/images/vox/2002/john_pierpont_morgan/john_pierpont_morgan.jpg

The building was designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, who really knew how to do their work. Mr. McKim had the lead on this particular project. It has a very beautiful interior as well:

http://z.about.com/d/gonyc/1/0/J/W/morgan_library.jpg

http://the-morgan-library.visit-new-york-city.com/The-Morgan-Library-2.jpg

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/agc/7a17000/7a17800/7a17899r.jpg

The library was always well stocked with rare books and with works of art. Here’s a page from the Geese Book produced around 1510 in Germany, which qualifies as both a rare book and a work of art:

http://www.acmrs.org/ACMRS_WEBIMAGES/GeeseandWolf.jpg

And a couple of pages from the Ramsey Psalter produced in England in about 1310:

http://libraries.slu.edu/archives/digcoll/manuscripta08/images/c4-16.jpg

And you can even have a banquet for 60 of your best friends here:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/12/arts/artsspecial/12events600.1.jpg

After Morgan’s death in 1913, much of his collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which we discussed briefly in Part 2. Some of it was taken over by the Frick Collection, which we’ll touch on next.

But some of the original collections remain, and the place is now open to the public and is called the Morgan Library and Museum. It has its own website if you care to learn more about the place.

http://www.themorgan.org/

I always thought that Frick was simply half of the old comedy team Frick and Frack (which most of you younger folks probably never heard of), but I later found out that there were other Fricks around besides the comedian. One of them Henry Clay Frick, who made a lot of money with Andrew Carnegie back in the days when they were advancing the steel industry by leaps and bounds, well before Carnegie Hall was even built. Well, Mr. Frick built an art collection as well, which is what lots of the magnates of those days did.

It is called, appropriately enough, the Frick Collection, and it’s housed in a magnificent building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that was completed in 1914:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Frick_collection_jan06.jpg

http://adadguppi.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/fragonard-frick.jpg

http://nycgo.com/cms/uploadedImages/devnycvisitcom/venue/The-Frick-Collection_V1_460x285.jpg

http://www.gardenvisit.com/assets/madge/frick_garden_court/original/frick_garden_court_original.jpg

There’s a painting named Hans Holbein the Younger, by Sir Thomas More, a painting which hangs in the Frick Collection. Note that you can distinguish him from his Elder counterpart by the fact that he has no gray hair, like some of us are starting to get whether we want to or not:

http://www.umsl.edu/~schreyerk/Images/TMore.jpg

If you would like to explore the Frick Collection more extensively on your own, here’s a pretty good place to start:

http://www.frick.org/

One of the earlier skyscrapers is actually named the Fuller Building, but it’s called the Flatiron Building, even though it isn’t actually flat, nor is it made of iron either. But it’s kind of flat, and it does have some steel in it, because that metal enabled the construction of skyscrapers that wouldn’t fall over in a strong wind. It was completed in 1902, even before my father was born. This architectural style was very popular for a long time, and there are several buildings in this country which look something like the Flatiron Building.

Here’s what it looked like back when it was young:

http://argenteditions.com/images/large/new-york/new-york-flatiron-building-20923-700.jpg

Here’s what it looks like today, and the building is still serving as an office building, for some book publishers:

http://www.new-york.me.uk/Flatiron%20building%201.jpg

This closeup gives you at least an idea of the artistic attention that went into buildings like this.

http://www.new-york.me.uk/flatiron%20building%203.jpg

Next up: The New York Public Library, Grant’s Tomb, Herald Square, Washington Square, the Plaza Hotel, and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 7

The New York Public Library is important enough to have its own acronym (NYPL) so you know it is way up there in the overall hierarchy of things. I won’t try to figure out a comparison to the Library of Congress, which is also pretty high on the ladder of important libraries. The Library of Congress is discussed in my tour of Washington, DC, called A Capital Tour, right here in this forum.

One of the earliest benefactors of the Library was William Tilden, a former New York State governor who also made it into newspaper headlines by running against Rutherford Hays in the 1876 presidential election, and losing the race due to some questionable shenanigans. We won’t get into the details of that race, since we’re here to discuss the Library and not politics. He made his bequest available to the library at the time of his death in 1886, leaving about $2.4M.

The current main building was begun in 1902, but wasn’t completed until 1911. It is a classic Beaux-Arts structure:

http://raz.cx/1999/11/19/19991119_161302.jpg

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1664406.jpg

There are two lions guarding the entrance to keep non-desirables and people with loud cellphones out of the building, not that those two kinds of people are mutually exclusive. Here’s a closer look at one of the lions:

http://www.sensationalcolor.com/liveinfullcolor/wp-content/uploads/LiveInFullColor/AprilClark/public_space_bryant_park_bathroom/New_York_Public_Library.jpg

Here is the Main Reading Room – that classic reading room look that so many libraries moving into the so-called “modern” age are losing. May this room forever remain just as it is now:

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/NewYorkPublicLibrary.jpg

Of course this building is just the Main Library, and there are more branches than I could even begin to count. Unfortunately, lots of these branches will have their operating hours cut this summer due to the current economic times. But that’s true of libararies all over the country, and maybe even the entire world. I know they’re talking about cutting back on the branches of the Arlington County Library here in Virginia, as well.

If you ever studied U.S. history, you might recall that Ulysses S. Grant led the Union armies to victory in the Civil War and later became the 18th president of the United States. Well, we’ve had other army leaders and other presidents before, but Grant’s legacy seems to exceed most of the rest. There’s a monument in New York City that is officially called the Grant National Memorial, but its more familiar name is Grant’s Tomb. It was dedicated in 1897, and over one million people attended the dedication. It houses the remains of Grant and his wife Julia.

For those of you who might have forgotten about Groucho Marx’s quiz show called You Bet Your Life back in the 1950s, there was always a consolation question that Groucho would ask if someone failed to get anywhere in answering the regular questions. He just didn’t want anybody to leave empty-handed. That question was “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Well, the answer was almost always Grant. But actually, I think Groucho gave the contestant a consolation prize even when he/she missed the consolation question.

Here’s what the monument looks like:

http://wirednewyork.com/guide/grant/general_grant.jpg

http://www.ronsaari.com/stockImages/nyc/Grants%20Tomb.jpg

Herald Square is another New York City area named for a newspaper. The newspaper is no longer in existence, and there are probably lots of other papers in the U. S. that are having a hard time staying afloat these days.

Here’s what the Herald Building that gave the square its name looked like in 1921, shortly before it was demolished in the name of progress – it had been completed in 1894, which was actually the year that George Orwell wanted to write about before his dyslexia made him come up with something else.

http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=1558177&t=w

And here’s what the square looked like from a distance back then:

http://www.historyimages.com/Vintage-NY/i/Herald-Square.jpg

http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=836663&t=w

Here’s Macy’s flagship store, which has been an anchor of Herald Square for more than 100 years and which is still the largest store in the world:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/f/f8/20081220172952!Macy%27s_Herald_Square_LC-USZ62-123584.jpg

This used to be a major shopping area – home to many well-known stores. But most of them are gone now, such as Gimbels.

Here’s what Herald Square looks like today – Macy’s flagship store is still there:

http://henningthomsen.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/broadway.jpg

Washington Square Park is one of the better known of all the public parks in New York City, and there are plenty of those. It is situated at the foot of Fifth Avenue, where the incredible mansions of the wealthy used to sit, and where lots of wonderful stores are these days. The most impressive structure in the park is the Washington Arch, which was built to commemorate the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration as our first president – the centennial was in 1889. The arch was designed by McKim, Mead, and White and was completed in 1891.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Washington_Square_Arch_by_David_Shankbone.jpg/800px-Washington_Square_Arch_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

A tiny new leaf from one of the trees in the photo above played a major role in my story of Jewish immigrants, one of whom worked in a sweatshop a block from the Washington Arch in 1911. That story is called Two Crossings, but the leaf doesn’t perform its dramatic work until Part 9. Here’s Part 1 of the story:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30993

The Plaza Hotel is one of the more famous hotels in the world, and has been the site of several movies – not that being in lots of movies is the ultimate index of sophistication. But several of these movies were actually quite good, even though the Plaza can’t be given credit for making them so.

It was built in 1907 and lots of famous people have lived there on a permanent basis, in addition to all the temporary hotel guests. If you’re old enough, you might remember all the stories about Eloise, a fictional young lady who lived there in the 1950s and got into all sorts of trouble right there inside the hotel.

Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

http://www.hdo.com/europe_1999/071799/071799_Plaza_hotel_new_york/Dsc00030.jpg

A view of the exquisite Palm Court:

http://www.hotelchatter.com/files/1425/plaza25.jpg

And the famous Russian Tea Room, even though I didn’t know there was such a thing as Russian tea. Nobody ever says 'all the tea in Russia.'

http://www.johnmariani.com/archive/2007/070204/russian%20tea%20room=albert%20bitici.jpg

The Waldorf-Astoria is another famous New York luxury hotel with a long history, with the present building having been completed in 1931. It is situated on Park Avenue, a street that has absolutely nothing to do with Park Place, which is only in the game of Monopoly and in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Here’s the entrance:

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/5569880.jpg

And the lobby:

http://www.ronsaari.com/stockImages/nyc/waldorfAstoriaHotelInterior.jpg

Next up: The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, and Chinatown.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 8

When large numbers of immigrants were coming from Europe around the turn of the 20th century, many of them lived in squalid conditions on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The immigrants had almost no money at all, and lived in tenement building apartments. So they could afford the rent, a family often took in a few boarders, and you could wind up with 20 people occupying a two-bedroom apartment. The bathroom would be down the hall, and you had to share it with the other 80 tenants or so that lived on the same floor as you did, and there was no cable television or cellphones.

Here are a couple of pictures showing the activity on the streets of the Lower East Side:

http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/modern%20woman/Hester%20Street1903.jpg

http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v2n1/bhavnagri/dpa21-01.jpg

This life was so difficult that nobody actually wants to re-live it now, even for just an hour or so, and it’s actually quite doubtful that anyone now could even comprehend how bad it was in those days. Still, it’s good to make some kind of attempt to appreciate what things were like back then. The Tenement Museum takes a shot at doing this, but the typical apartment in the museum is much nicer than what most of the actual apartments were like 100 years ago. If you’d care to check out this museum, you can explore this website (note that by clicking PLAY on the main menu, and then VIRTUAL TOUR, you can see what is now called a typical apartment):

http://www.tenement.org/

I’m not going to plug my story about immigrants who lived on the Lower East Side again – if you haven’t taken a look at it yet, then I should give up on you as hopeless.

Greenwich Village is so well known that really cool people just call it The Village, having no need to tack on any superfluous modifiers because what other village could it possibly be? It’s on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, where Washington Square Park is located. I hope that you still remember that we discussed Washington Square Park in the previous episode. In fact, before the place was named Greenwich Village, it was actually called Washington Square. Then later it was named after the city Greenwich in England, the one which sets the standards of worldwide time.

To people of my generation, Greenwich Village was where all the great folk music in the 1950s and ‘60s came from. The group called the Mamas and the Papas met there, and Bob Dylan lived there writing his soon-to-be-famous songs. Other notable denizens included singers like Barbra Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and The Kingson Trio.

Dylan Thomas, who is not related to the aforementioned Bob Dylan (note that this relationship statement is a downright theft by me from an earlier Aunt Shecky quiz), collapsed after what most people considered an excessive amount of drinking in Greenwich Village’s White Horse Tavern in November, 1953. Four days later, he was dead – providing another example in the endless string of talented people who need some sort of crutch to make it through the night because it’s just so hard without the crutch. Luckily for us, he had already written Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night a couple of years before he did himself in.

Here’s a typical street scene in the Village, with this one showing the Cherry Lane Theatre. This place opened in 1924, and is the longest continually-operating off-Broadway theater in the city:

http://iguide.travel/photos/New_York_-28city-29/Greenwich_Village-4.jpg

One of the nicer features of Greenwich Village is something called the Jefferson Market Library, which used to be a courthouse but it started being a library sometime around 1945. It was built in 1833, and here’s what it looks like now. I guess they don’t keep books in the round tower, though.

http://wotan.liu.edu/~amatsuuchi/images/color_jmr.jpg

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/17151694.jpg

As was often the case with older buildings, demolition was considered in the 1940s, before the library moved in. Fortunately, the building was saved and can still be used and admired today.

There’s a neighborhood in Manhattan called Little Italy, which I learned after lots of study on my part, was predominantly settled at one time by folks who came over from Italy during the great surges of immigration to the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s. While it’s no longer as overwhelmingly Italian as it used to be, there are still lots of Italian restaurants on Mulberry Street. Here’s a typical Italian eating establishment, but be careful walking here because there’s some snow and ice on the street:

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/4955/littleitaly1.jpg

And here’s a place called Puglia Ristorante, whose inventive color scheme is thought to have given Italy the basis for designing its national flag:

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/4007/pugliaristorante.jpg

Near Little Italy in Manhattan is a place called Chinatown, and if you’ve been following my stories the way I wish you would, you’ve been through discussions of Chinatowns in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. You’re probably getting tired of so many Chinatowns, and asking yourself if they will ever stop, so if you are, just feel free to skip over this one.

Chinatown dates back probably to the 1850s, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is really sure. The principal types of businesses were restaurants and laundries, which is probably based on the premise that people will always be hungry and will always have dirty clothes, and I would guess that it has been proven to be a factor in the success of these places.

Here are a few sample views of what the place looks like:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/39/104370727_b7fef17f39_b.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Chinatown-manhattan-2004.jpg

Next up: A couple of synagogues, a little bit about classic brownstones, and the Dakota Apartments.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 9

I don’t know exactly how many synagogues there are in New York City, but don’t worry – we’re not going to go through all of them. There are quite a few, but we’ll confine our attention to just two here in Part 9. However, if you remember, we talked about the Eldridge Street Synagogue back in Part 4. Thus the Eldridge Street Synagogue, along with the two discussed here in Part 9, brings the grand total of synagogues discussed in this story up to three. But who’s counting, anyway?

Temple Emanu-El was the first Reform Jewish congregation in the city, but we won’t get into the details of what Reform Judaism is all about – it would probably be more than what most of you are interested in. Since it’s so large and well-known, it has been the unofficial flagship congregation for this faction of Judaism for more than 150 years. The current building has been around since 1868 and is classified as the Romanesque Revival style of architecture. It is located on Fifth Avenue.

Here are some views of the lovely building, starting with the outside:

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1718314.jpg

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/4052659.jpg

And a closer view of the detail over the entranceway:

http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/3987/detailbethel.jpg

The interior on a day that's obviously neither Rosh Hashanah nor Yom Kippur:

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/2701/bethelinterior.jpg

And the beautiful ark where the Torahs are kept:

http://www.brianrose.com/journal/06.jpg

Just as a quick aside, the current temple is built where there was once a mansion owned by John Jacob Astor IV. Here’s what the mansion looked like before it was torn down (I don’t have a picture of what it looked like after it was torn down), so it’s a shame that it suffered demolition to make room for something new, however glorious that something new might be:

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/socialdiary/2006/07_30_06/images/Astor-Mansion.jpg

Congregation Ahavath Chesed is also called the Central Synagogue, which doesn’t sound nearly as pious as its Hebrew name. It is on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and was completed in 1872. It is of the Moorish Revival style of architecture.

We’ll look first at the exterior:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/124777835_5a5067c8c9_o.jpg

http://www.wirednewyork.com/images/central_synagogue_front_3feb02.jpg

And then the interior:

http://www.classicaldomain.com/archive/art/centralsyn.jpg

And the synagogue’s ark:

http://www.imagesofanthropology.com/images/_DSC1145_copy_copy.jpg

This building was designed to resemble Budapest’s Dohány Street Synagogue, so I can’t resist showing a few views of the magnificent interior of the Hungarian predecessor:

http://llworldtour.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/synagogue_3_2_1.jpg

http://www.davidpride.com/Europe/Hungary/images/Hungary_04_139.jpg

http://bancroft.library.ca.gov/diglib/images/wiesenthal/web_images/dohany_st_synagugue_03.jpg

I’ve always been intrigued by brownstones, but I’ve never lived in one. So I figured that in the process of putting this little tour together, maybe I could actually learn something about this fantastic building material which seems to lend so much character to whatever home it happens to cover.

Here’s a brief look at some brownstones before we launch into a narrative background of this material. Since it’s got interesting colors, and can be readily carved, it was a popular material for late 19th century homebuilding – especially in New York City. Now that nobody does any carving on their building exteriors which are all flat surfaces with no imagination or creativity whatsoever, or cares that much about color either, brownstone isn’t used anymore.

In this picture, the trees get in the way a bit, but you can still get the idea:

http://rickeygalloway.com/home/media/family/20060922/DSC05822.jpg

Here’s one without trees obscuring the building:

http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/4493/brownstone1.jpg

Brownstones began appearing in large numbers during the building boom of the 1870s and ‘80s. Possibly due to considerable overbuilding, brownstones started going out of fashion in about 1900. Brownstone quarrying is now making a comeback, primarily for maintaining the existing brownstone homes.

Here’s a rather disgusting example of the old statement Brownstones don’t have to be brown. But in my humble opinion, the brown looks a whole lot better than the pink:

http://img1.planeteye.com/users/1/57/107/3650126232267.jpg

And some closeup details highlighted by afternoon sunlight in the autumn:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/27/53714157_cc109af046.jpg

Here are some Brooklyn brownstones, which are just as nice as their Manhattan counterparts:

http://www.coloraddict.com/images/brownstoneLg.jpg

When I first heard of the Dakota Apartments, I figured they were somewhere in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory out west. So I was surprised to hear they were located right there in the urban setting of Manhattan. However, I wasn’t as far off with my initial thoughts as you might surmise. It turns out that the name was given because the Upper West Side of Manhattan back then had very few people and buildings, and some jokingly said it was as remote as the Dakota Territory itself.

In fact, it looks somewhat desolate back when it was first built, because it was the only thing in the entire neighborhood:

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1035/dakotaold.jpg

It was designed by the same firm that designed the Plaza Hotel, and was completed in 1884 near Central Park. Its architecture is North German Renaissance in character, and looks something like what some of us studied in school - those Hanseatic townhalls where all the guilds and leagues did whatever it was that they did.

But the subsequent building boom eventually caught this area up with the rest of the city:

http://accommodationapartments.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/the_dakota1.jpg

While the building has had some famous tenants, unfortunately the resident everyone remembers best was John Lennon, who was shot and killed right outside the entrance in 1980.

Next up: The South Street Seaport and a few of the buildings designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White, namely the Century Association, Metropolitan Club, and the Harvard Club of New York City.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 10

The South Street Seaport is located near the East River, and close to the Wall Street Financial District that we talked about in Part 6. Since I already expressed my confusion about why South Street would be next to the East River, I won’t do that one again. By the way, this is exactly the spot that the original New York seaport occupied back in the days when it first opened up as a trading center.

This project is an interesting example of reviving something that was long gone. Many of the buildings here are early 19th century commercial buildings, and they were restored to retain their original appeal without looking like dilapidated 200-year old buildings. In fact, the seaport is said to be the greatest concentration of restored buildings from that timeframe in the entire city.

There are also some restored old ships to make the seaport live up to its name. To give you an idea as to the advanced age of some of these old ships, a few of them exceed the combined ages of Aunt Shecky and myself, which puts them way back into the 19th century.

Here are some daytime views of the old ships next to the pier:

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/8229/southstreetseaport1.jpg

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/5303/southstreetseaport2.jpg

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/8381/southstreetseaport3.jpg

And a nighttime shot with some kind of trick photography which ‘bends’ the picture in an interesting way – or at least I think it does:

http://newyorkpanorama.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/2008-04-south-street-seaport-w1800.jpg

And one of the shops in the restored old buildings:

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/741/southstreetseaportshops.jpg

And you can do some real serious shopping here, so if you’re like me and have an aversion to shopping, leave your credit cards at home.

http://z.about.com/d/manhattan/1/0/X/D/seaportshopping.jpg

Here’s the schooner Pioneer, which dates back to 1885 and which has been restored to the point that she can get underway and even carry some passengers:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Schooner_Pioneer.jpg

A museum opened here at the seaport in 1967, and here is its website so you can check it out more thoroughly on your own. It has a good rundown on the history of this particular seaport, as well as some general interest maritime tidbits:

http://www.southstreetseaportmuseum.org/

I was lucky enough to be there at the South Street Seaport when some shady-looking politician was talking to a small crowd of interested on-lookers. This politician must have seen the musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, which came out in the early 1960s, because he was spouting off with a line that he must have lifted directly from that musical. He was offering Free False Teeth for All, and he even handed out said free false teeth to anybody in attendance who wanted them. It turned out that all those who accepted the free false teeth had immediate complaints about them, and wanted even better free false teeth that were actually custom-made for themselves. The politician promised to get working on that program due to the importance of being able to promise free stuff for everybody because everybody deserves lots of free stuff.

If you’ve been following this story and some of my others, you already know I am a loyal fan of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, because nobody in the last 100 years or so can design buildings like they could anymore. I guess it’s academic because nobody today could build those intricate designs anyway. We’ll run through just a few examples of buildings designed by this firm, although there are many more than these typical ones in New York City.

The Century Association is a club that’s been around since 1847, as a place where authors and artists can congregate without having to deal with the unwashed masses who don’t appreciate their magnificent work anyway. William Cullen Bryant and Winslow Homer are just two examples of the esteemed members over the years. Stanford White, who represented the last part of his architectural firm’s name, was also made a member. My theory on this is that he was invited to join just so he would design a club building that would be worthy of its other members. The building designed by White opened in 1891.

Here’s what Mister White was able to come up with, which surely pleased the members and made them so happy they thought to include him in their club:

http://cusack.norumbega.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/clubrny2.jpg

And a closeup of the main entrance:

http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20090118/images/Features/privates/2.jpg

And finally, the entrance decorated for the arrival of a guest by the name of Aladdin:

http://taylorreedbranson.com/On_The_Road/Site%2024/Images/2006_06_25_century.jpg

Unfortunately, there are no interior photos posted on the parts of the internet that I’m allowed into, but I can vouch for the fact that the interior is even better than the exterior.

The Metropolitan Club is another private social club, but this one was formed in 1891 by J. Pierpont Morgan, the fiinancial titan whose library which we discussed in Part 6. It was also designed by Stanford White, but I don’t know if he was asked to join the club in order to get him to come up with this design. It’s on Fifth Avenue, giving it a very exclusive address:

The building’s exterior – I’m sorry but I can’t find a larger picture on the web:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2314/2532513340_2e299010c7.jpg?v=0

The entrance to an open courtyard:

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/UES/UES008-03.jpg

Hosting a nice dinner for the London Symphony Orchestra in 2008:

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/partypictures/05_20_08/lso/0358_08061.jpg

And another interior view, showing what’s called the Presidents’ Foyer:

http://www.seppleaf.com/Files/prideofplace/2006/Winners/11InteriorCommercialGilding.jpg

And the Main Reception Gallery hosting a bunch of people in which I’m not included:

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/socialdiary/05_22_07/authorsguild/CIMG0033.jpg

The Harvard Club of New York City is a club that won’t let you in unless you graduated from Harvard. I tried to get in based on the fact that I once took a tour of the Harvard Yard, as chronicled in my story Weekend in Boston which is elsewhere in this forum, but they said that touring the place wasn’t enough. So I’m not a member, but at least I was able to find out that it started out in 1887, and was designed by Charles Follen McKim.

Here’s a rendering of the exterior:

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SPEC/NY-HarvardClub.jpg

And some photos of the exterior:

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1151/harvardclubexterior.jpg

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/Midtown059.jpg

Some interior shots, all of which show the beauty of the place, but are very small photos:

http://www.mimifroufrou.com/scentedsalamander/images/Harvard%20Club%20New%20York%20City.jpg

http://www.virtuefoundation.org/cms/upload/bilder/SquarePhotos/harvard_club1.jpg

Here’s the magnificent Harvard Hall, which is said by those who should know, that it’s the best clubroom in the entire world:

http://www.hbs.edu/schwartz/images/noflashart/dowjim69.jpg

Next up: Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace, the Bronx Zoo, and Yankee Stadium (the real one - the one they don’t even use anymore).

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 11

Lots of us are familiar with Theodore Roosevelt, since he was the 26th President of the United States, and is still the youngest ever to have served as president. Well, he was born in a Manhattan brownstone way back in the year 1858, and the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace has been reconstructed (the original was demolished in 1916 to make room for a commercial building) so it can serve as a reminder of this man who had such a significant influence on our country at the turn of the 20th century. It’s now run by the National Park Service and has lots of Roosevelt’s own furniture and other possessions, donated by his widow Edith.

His father was a rather wealthy man as he was an importer/exporter. Or was it an exporter/ importer? This was a relatively comfortable house, and our future president lived here until he was fourteen years old.

Here’s the outside:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2318/2280362371_510bb731dd_b.jpg

Roosevelt led a very exciting and interesting life, and loved being in the limelight so much that someone once said of him “He wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” But we won’t go into detail to analyze that description of the man, because there are lots of books out there that can explain it very well. In my humble opinion, the best is a pair of books by Edmund Morris - one covering Roosevelt’s life before becoming president (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt), and the other covering his presidency (Theodore Rex). Don’t worry - I won’t check and see if you actually read these books, though, because I don’t even have the slightest idea who reads these little stories. So I couldn’t check up on you even if I wanted to.

And here’s a website for the birthplace, for those of you who want to learn more about the house:

http://www.nps.gov/thrb

The Bronx Zoo has been getting lots of acclaim ever since it was established in 1899, and it keeps on getting it today. The zoo started out with only 843 animals, but the collection has grown to over 4,000 now. I always associate the zoo with Marlin Perkins, who had a weekly television show in the 1950s called Zoo Parade. Now that show came from Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, but I’m pretty sure there were a few episodes in the series shot at the Bronx Zoo. Of course, that was so long ago that I certainly can’t be positive, but it sure seems like Mr. Perkins talked about the Bronx Zoo at least a few times.

Here’s the Zoo Center, where lots of special exhibits are held on a rotating basis:

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/7329/bronxzoocenter.jpg

Even the tigers here have their own cellphones, although this one left his behind when he went to check out this fallen tree trunk:

http://www.rangatan.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/SSA50785.JPG

And the photographer of this King Kong pretender got so close to the gorilla that he (the photographer, that is) was apparently shaking enough to make the picture come out rather blurry. Well, I don’t want to sound critical of the photographer since I could not have gotten nearly as close as he did:

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9130/gorillabronxzoo.jpg

This much younger gorilla is a lot less scary looking:

http://buddydon.blogspot.com/Gorilla_02_Bronx_Zoo.jpg

The lions’ house was recently renovated, and is not even in risk of foreclosure. So now it’s ready for another 110 years of service. I hear the lions are really getting soft because the new house has lots of amenities that the old one never did.

http://joergengeerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/2008-10-bronx-zoo-west-side-360-degree.jpg

The cheetah can walk on tree branches about as well as my cat Eleanor can walk on the back of my sofa, which is very well:

http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Business/images-2/bronx-zoo-cheetah.JPG

I was a little surprised to learn that the zoo has its own grocery store, and the animals are allowed to get whatever they want, even if it’s not the healthiest choice on the menu:

http://marshallc.com/images/Bronx-Zoo2.jpg

Here’s the zoo’s website if you want to check and see if any of your relatives are permanent residents of the place:

http://www.bronxzoo.com/

The most storied athletic venue in the United States since the 1920s has been Yankee Stadium, and that’s coming from me - an avid Boston Red Sox fan. In 2009, the Yankees moved to a new home, and it boggles my mind that they would even think about doing this. More baseball history has happened in the old Yankee Stadium than at any other sports arena in the entire country, so in this case, the relentless march of progress is ludicrous, at least in my opinion. I doubt that the old Yankee Stadium was so far gone that it couldn’t have been saved.

Anyway, it’s no coincidence that Yankee Stadium is in the Bronx, not all that far from the Bronx Zoo. That’s probably why former Yankee pitcher Sparky Lyle wrote a book that was about the baseball team, but its title was The Bronx Zoo. I haven’t read the book yet, since I’m a Red Sox fan, so I don’t understand what that’s all about.

The historical park opened in 1923, and was called The House That Ruth Built because Babe Ruth was smacking the ball out of the park on a frequent basis, and in so doing, he brought lots of paying customers into the new ballfield.

An artist’s conception of the outside of the park on its first opening day back in 1923:

http://yankeestadiumseats.com/db5/00417/yankeestadiumseats.com/_uimages/ysframedstretchcanvasart6-18-07.jpg

The playing field that has seen so much history - including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson, and all the others:

http://kzgrbs.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/yankee-stadium-1.jpg

An aerial view in 1953:

http://www.nydailynews.com/features/thestadium/img/wallpaper/wallpaper04_1024.jpg

While The Babe actually hit the first homer in this park back in 1923, I couldn’t find any pictures of him doing it on the web. But here’s one of him hitting one out of another park - in Washington, DC against the Senators:

http://exposermont.unblog.fr/files/2007/05/ruthatbat1.jpg

Here are Ruth and Gehrig together in 1932, but not at Yankee Stadium:

http://www.nydailynews.com/features/thestadium/img/wallpaper/wallpaper01_1024.jpg

And here’s Joe DiMaggio in 1936, aka The Yankee Clipper:

http://www.nydailynews.com/features/thestadium/img/wallpaper/wallpaper08_1024.jpg

This is the stadium where Sarah Feingold, in my story Two Crossings about Jewish immigrants, held up her sign for all to see whenever the Red Sox were visiting Yankee Stadium back in the 1930s when she was no longer struggling just to make ends meet. Her sign said “Red Sox are Meshuganeh!”

But The House That Ruth Built is gone now, and I still don’t know why.

Next up: Brooklyn.

[DickZ]

It's a Wonderful Town
Part 12

When I was growing up in Texas during the 1940s and ‘50s, I always thought that the borough of Brooklyn was named after the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, but it turns out that the borough actually existed a long time before baseball was even conceived. And there are more Brooklynites than there are residents of any of the other boroughs comprising New York City. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of them, when speaking, can actually be understood by people from places other than Brooklyn.

Two famous Brooklynites who are easily understood by non-natives are Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand. They went to Erasmus High School at the same time and sang in the same chorus but as I understand it, they didn’t really know each other back then.

Now I should make it clear that all of what I know about Brooklyn came from the parents of my son’s wife, since they grew up in Brooklyn long before they had the daughter who would eventually become my son’s wife. I hope this isn’t confusing anyone, because it’s confusing me and I know these people. I don’t see how you folks who don’t know them can even begin to comprehend what I just tried to say.

The Brooklyn Bridge has been bought and sold a lot more frequently than any other major bridge in the world, but all of those transactions turned out to be bogus. It connects Manhattan, which we’ve been discussing in most of the previous episodes of this story, with Brooklyn, which we’re discussing in this episode. The East River separates these two boroughs, so the bridge makes it easier to go from one to the other without getting wet. Construction began in 1870, and the bridge was finally completed in 1883, long before the invention of the automobile. This was so that the bridge would already be in place when cars came along later, and would be effective in creating massive traffic jams.

The reason the bridge took so long to build was that several cutting-edge technologies had to be established through trial and error in the course of construction. There were lots of accidents, many of them fatal, and considerable experience was gained that would be useful in finishing this project and in undertaking others. As of the time this story is being written in 2009, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing - something you can’t say about many of the other bridges built before 1900.

Here’s what it looked like back in 1883 - the opening was a major event celebrated with fireworks:

https://woodward8.wikispaces.com/file/view/brooklyn-533.jpg

And here’s what it looks like these days:

http://sonofbillbrasky.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/nyc_new_york_brooklyn_bridge_from_world_trade_cent er_b.jpg

It looks fantastic at night:

http://www.jeffandchristina.com/brooklynBridge_img2.jpg

And here’s a view in which you should recognize the South Street Seaport that we discussed a while back, but which you should remember even if there’s not going to be a test. This picture might even be good to use for your computer desktop wallpaper - especially if you have a widescreen monitor:

http://studiophototrope.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/brooklyn-bridge_wp4.jpg

Brooklyn Borough Hall is what’s called City Hall in other places. The building was completed in 1849, and is a very attractive structure. Here’s what it looked like in 1908:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Brooklyn_Borough_Hall_LC-USZ62-92622.jpg

And here’s what it looks like now - a few minor changes have been made over the years, but it remains a classic and beautiful building:

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/20587826.jpg

Coney Island used to be an island, but now it’s a peninsula. I don’t know how it happened that an island turned into a peninsula, but apparently it did. Nonetheless, probably just for the sake of tradition, it’s still called an island. It was most noted for its amusement parks and beaches back before World War II, but went downhill after the war. Since the 1990s, it’s been on a slow climb back to its former glory, but it still has a long way to go to reach that point again.

Here’s Dreamland Tower, with Dreamland being the point at which seaborne visitors would enter the island. It was said to be modeled after the Giralda in Seville, Spain. Built in 1904, it unfortunately lasted only until 1911, thanks to a raging fire:

http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/dreamland-tower.jpg

While Dreamland Tower is gone now, lots of other attractions are still there. Here’s The Cyclone, which is a scary roller coaster - well, to me ALL roller coasters are pretty scary, but we won’t go into all that right here:

http://coneyislandplaygroundoftheworld.files.wordpress.co m/2009/03/cyclone2.jpg

And The Wonder Wheel, which is a Ferris wheel:

http://www.sophiadembling.com/uploaded_images/wonder-wheel-touch-766724.jpg

In this old photo, you can see the beach, as well as the roller coaster and an enclosed funhouse:

http://ahistoryofnewyork.com/coney-photo-undated.jpg

And there are some gourmet eating establishments, such as Nathan’s Famous Coney Island Frankfurters, which are greatly superior to hot dogs:

http://coneyislandplaygroundoftheworld.files.wordpress.co m/2009/02/nathans.jpg

And here’s a pretty nice website, which shows the history of Coney Island, with lots more pictures, for those who might want to delve deeper into the subject:

http://history.amusement-parks.com/coneyislandpages.htm

Brighton Beach is a community in Brooklyn which was established soon after the Civil War, and was named for the place in England that bears the same name. I know it best from a Neil Simon play after it became a movie, called Brighton Beach Memoirs. But lots of people know it better than I do - I’ve never even actually been there. So I won’t get too carried away here since I don’t want to be tripped up by someone who really knows the place. You could get there by train starting in 1878, and there was even a racetrack for horses there. Neil Diamond’s father had a small clothing store here before Neil became a big star. It’s now heavily populated by Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, as well as non-Jews such as Armenians and Georgians.

Here you can see the beach and backdrop from a distance, taken from a point out in the water:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2322/2525158253_120fcd5fc0_o.jpg

The elevated train is an important part of the life of those who live here - at least that’s the impression I got from Brighton Beach Memoirs:

http://renegadeboxingclub.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/nycs_bmt_brighton_beach.jpg

The Brooklyn Museum is second in size only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the city, has one and a half million art objects. It was designed by my favorite architects McKim, Mead, and White, despite the fact that you’re getting tired of hearing about them:

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/museumimages/thumbnail1.php/9nt200740124140arc_pht.jpg

The museum’s website, where you can get an idea about what’s on display:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/

Prospect Park is one of the many public parks that grace the city. I once shared an office with a guy who grew up in a house situated across the street from the park, but I doubt that this fact makes me an authority on the place. Anyway, here goes.

The park’s attractions include something called the Long Meadow, which is believed to be the largest meadow in any U.S. park, and here’s a great widescreen view:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/ProspectPark_Brooklyn_Nethermead.jpg

The Boathouse, situated on the only lake in the park:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2227/2103764496_eba5e785b6_o.jpg

The Camperdown Elm is a favorite attraction, and was taken from a cutting in 1872 from a tree in Camperdown, Scotland:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Camperdown_Elm_Prospect_Park_Brooklyn.jpg

While strolling through the park one day, I came across a group of people angry about something. I couldn’t really understand what they were saying because it sounded like some kind of a foreign language, with youse being the most commonly-used word. However, they were very passionate in whatever it was they were discussing, which included lots of screaming. All I could make out was that they were going to slash something by 10% before the year 2030, and by 40% before the year 2090. I’m not sure I’ll be around that long, so I wasn’t too concerned about missing out on exactly what they planned to reduce. But whatever it was, it was something that everybody else was supposed to reduce, as apparently they excluded themselves from having to make any cutbacks in anything.

The park has a website for those of you who may want additional information:

http://www.prospectpark.org/

Now for me, a rabid baseball fan - although my team is the Boston Red Sox - the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field are the most important parts of Brooklyn. Of course, the Dodgers moved west to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, so they aren’t even here anymore. Perennial losers to the New York Yankees in the World Series, the team still maintained an incredibly loyal fan base.

The history of the team goes way back to the mid-1850s, but don’t worry – we won’t cover the whole thing. We’ll confine ourselves to the 1940s and ‘50s, and will be extremely brief even at that.

The Dodgers played in a shrine called Ebbets Field:

http://www.brooklynonline.com/images/ebbets.jpg

Here is the playing field on Opening Day in 1942:

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/9113/ebbetsfield1942.jpg

The Dodgers broke the color barrier when they signed Jackie Robinson to open the season in 1947. After Robinson joined the team, several other black players were signed (Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Joe Black), and the Dodgers found this to be much to their benefit. They proceeded to the World Series numerous times after assembling this team.

We won’t go through all the painful years when the Dodgers kept losing the World Series to the Yankees, mainly because there were lots of other teams that didn’t even come close to the World Series, so those teams and their fans had little sympathy for the Dodgers’ ‘failures.’ But the Dodgers finally came through with a World Championship in 1955, and the entire borough erupted in ecstasy. Here’s a six-and-a-half minute highlight film from that World Series. The sound doesn’t start right away, so don’t give up too hastily. It comes on after a few seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3JkjHxJp_w

And two years after this fantastic World Championship, the team left Brooklyn to go west. Ebbets Field was flattened, and an apartment building was put up in its place.

There’s a website for baseball junkies to exchange ideas about the game in general, as well as their favorite team. It’s called Baseball Fever, and it’s in the exact same format as the LitNet Forum – the only thing different is the color. The Brooklyn Dodgers have a very active group, despite the fact that the team has been gone for 50 years now. This group has several fantastic writers, and there are lots of very interesting discussions and pictures re-living the days when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn. Here’s the Dodgers’ forum:

http://www.baseball-fever.com/forumdisplay.php?f=43

Well, that about wraps up everything I know about this part of the world. Thanks for taking the time to have gotten this far with all my rantings.

THE END

[AuntShecky]

Did you know that Coney Island got its name from the little rabbit-like creatures who'd made it their habitat?

This was an excellent thread. It almost makes me want to visit the Big Apple someday.

[DickZ]

Thanks, Auntie, for taking the time to comment. No, I didn't know about how Coney Island got its name.