I got a death threat yesterday.
This one was unlike any of the others in that it was given to me by a pedestrian. A pedestrian walking with his wife and daughter in the bike lane. I was coming down between Times Square and Herald Square in the new protected bike lane, which everyone loves, including pedestrians, who seem to figure it's OK to walk in it, since bikes can't kill them the way cars can.
I had picked up two Danish women at Paley Park on 53rd Street and was taking them down to the Pennsylvania, on Seventh across from Penn Station.
Paley Park is a little hole in the wall, a little space probably about 50' x 80' or 90'. Its side walls are lined with ivy vines and a waterfall forms the back wall. All these features combine to refract -- rather than reflect -- street noises in all directions, especially away from the ears of those seated within the park.
The children of Bill Paley commissioned the park. Bill Paley was the founder and longtime head of the Columbia Broadcasting System, now just called CBS. He died, I think, in the early 1970s. Frank Langella played him in the 2007 film, Goodnight And Good Luck. Blackrock, the CBS headquarters building, stands a block west and a half-block south at 52nd and Sixth. According to Justin Ferate, the guide who gave me the fam tour of the area, Paley's grown kids periodically visit the park, making sure it's clean and being maintained properly.
Perhaps I should have saved a block of biking by biking my passengers straight down Seventh Avenue. But, until it becomes illegal to do so, I'm going to choose that bike lane. And I'm going to call ahead to the pedestrians, "Please don't walk in the bike lane! Please share the bike lane!" And so on.
This guy stepped aside, saw what I was driving and said -- yelled -- "That's not a BIKE! You don't belong in the bike lane!" I quoted NYS law to him, that a bike is defined as "any two- or three-wheeled vehicle deriving power from a chain drive..." etc., but he was adamant. "That's a tricycle! You get out of the bike lane!"
"So you three can walk in it?"
"You don't belong in it!" He wasn't admitting that he didn't belong in it.
"I need it for my passengers' safety. You should either walk in the pedestrian zone or the sidewalk. Don't take the only path open to me."
"Tell you what, I drive a big truck on Sixth Avenue, and you guys always get in front of me. You get in the bike lane on Sixth, because I'm gonna come looking for you. When I see you I'm gonna run you over and KILL you!!"
"You hit me and you'll just lose your license and your truck."
"I'm gonna kill you!" --In front of my passengers, who could easily be witnesses.
I was getting pretty shaken up. I couldn't make a coherent reply and keep going. This guy wanted to rattle me. I wasn't scared, but I was worried for the time being that he really would come looking for me. It wouldn't be impossible to kill a cyclist with a truck, and get away with it.
Usually, motorists threaten to kill cyclists and then charge off in a cloud of diesel smoke. But there was the case of road rage earlier this year wherein an SUV driver struck and killed a cyclist after arguing with him. That guy's in jail, because there were witnesses to the argument.
So I went on, verbally defeated and very angry. This guy takes something that others need and he doesn't, then threatens to kill them when they take it back from him. He's an asshole.
It has taken me a day to stop being scared. There's a 50-50 chance he doesn't drive a truck. There's a 1-in-700 chance he can recognize my pedicab from behind, unless he just starts running over every pedicab in sight. And he was probably just mouthing off, saving face.
But I wish I'd been recording him, or that a cop had been in earshot, because when someone threatens to kill me, I want him caught and punished. What are my legal rights concerning a death threat? I've no idea.
This idiot is probably the tenth person to say he'd kill me for driving a pedicab. I got countless more death threats from motorists in the 1980s, when I was commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan, 18 miles a day. Motorists would honk, lean on the horn, rev the engine behind me at lights, do whatever it took to try and intimidate me into getting out of "their" way, even though I'd usually just pass them at the next light. I would taunt them then, too. Not a good idea, but I was younger then.
There was nothing I could do to this guy. I wanted to fight him, but I promised myself and my wife, that I wasn't going to fight anymore. So I asked, "What's your name, brave guy?" and went on.
A block later I pointed out a "ghost bike" chained to a pole at the corner of 36th and Broadway in honor of Alvaro Olsen, 54, who had been run down and killed by a truck as he delivered food by bike. I had come upon the scene a few minutes after they took his crushed and bloody body away. Cops and firemen were standing there, arms crossed, stroking their necks or faces, each alone in his thoughts about the poor cyclist. A four-inch-wide rivulet of blood led from the scene, down to the gutter.
I told my passengers that this protected bike lane had been in the planning, but was not put in until two months after Olsen's death. And we went on.
And pedestrians continue to take the lane from cyclists. Some family is walking in it right now, thinking what a liberating thing it is to walk in the street.
I bring this story up because a rule in the new pedicab law will soon make it illegal for me to use the bike lane, or any bike lane in the city. That means all 700 pedicabs will be forced to either bike in front of all the trucks, or face a fine and jail time. While a truck parked in the bike lane will get a fine of $115, the first fine for a pedicab will be $250. The fourth fine for a pedicab is $10,000 and two weeks in jail. The guy who threatened my life can park his truck in the bike lane and laugh at cyclists while pedicab drivers go to jail.
Now we are faced with a life decision: do we risk a $10,000 fine and jail, or stay in the traffic lanes and risk injury or death? Each year in New York City, roughly 20 cyclists are killed by cars. And all of us have been threatened by drivers, either through revving and horns, or outright verbal threats. The AAA announced in June of 2009 that New York drivers are the worst in the nation, and the rudest. A new rule that will force pedicabs to drive at 6 MPH right in front of the nation's worst drivers is a bad rule.
What I've decided to do is fight the rule. It's going to get pedicab drivers and passengers killed. I'm going to the media before November, when the entire law becomes enforced. I'm going to invite reporters to sit on the pedicab in car traffic, and then in the bike lane, and see which they prefer.
TourguideStan
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Repairing our image will take a while
The New York City pedicab business image has been damaged, over the past four or five years, by drivers who have been out to make all they can in the shortest possible time. We hear about 3-block rides that cost $40, "tours" of Central Park in which misinformation is passed, for $120. There are guys who try to charge $40 on every street hail. One guy told me that he tries to do it every time because, if he asks 30 people in a day and only four of them accede, he's got $160 in his pocket, and that's a decent day.
Our numbers have risen to perhaps 600 pedicabs on the streets. But no one really knows. It's rumored that Osman Zenk has 200 pedicabs (195 of them uninsured) but again, no one knows. The determination of numbers will be up to the Department of Consumer Affairs, if and when the Pedicab Owner Association lawsuit appeal (by the DCA) is decided. Then, registrations will begin.
When pedicabs finally undergo registration, they will be tested for basic safety equipment such as brake lights, hydraulic brakes, turn signals, seat belts. All pedicabs in the New York City Pedicab Owner Association already have everything that makes us street legal. When registration comes, we will stand, and they will fall.
But damage has been done to our reputation by these illegal fly-by-nights. It's going to take a long time to repair our image in the eyes of the riding public.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Ontarian limerick
There once was a group from Ontario.
Seriously, I once had a two-day step-on with a group from the far side of Lake Erie. I rattled off some poetry during the first day's step-on tour, and someone challenged me to make up a poem that would rhyme and would be specific to them, by the next day's tour. I worked on this into the night. Finally I recalled how a Buffalo-area radio DJ had always made fun of the town of Guelph, Ontario. He said it sounded like the voice of a diner in a restaurant, choking on his meat. "Guelph! GUELLLLPH!!"
So I worked with that town's name, which easily rhymes with lots of words. Here's the finished product:
There once was a fellow from Guelph,
Who left hot chicken soup on a shelf.
When he got back in town,
He gulped it all down.
Then he threw up all over himself.
Seriously, I once had a two-day step-on with a group from the far side of Lake Erie. I rattled off some poetry during the first day's step-on tour, and someone challenged me to make up a poem that would rhyme and would be specific to them, by the next day's tour. I worked on this into the night. Finally I recalled how a Buffalo-area radio DJ had always made fun of the town of Guelph, Ontario. He said it sounded like the voice of a diner in a restaurant, choking on his meat. "Guelph! GUELLLLPH!!"
So I worked with that town's name, which easily rhymes with lots of words. Here's the finished product:
There once was a fellow from Guelph,
Who left hot chicken soup on a shelf.
When he got back in town,
He gulped it all down.
Then he threw up all over himself.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Someone asks for something to do outside of Manhattan on their third trip here.
What time of year are you coming? You could go down to City Hall and walk acros the Brooklyn Bridge. Once there, you can exit the staircase where the Bridge flattens out, and head down Fulton Street to the Fulton Ferry dock. Along the way you'll see an excellent pizzeria by the name of Grimaldi's on the right side, and an old, large orange-brick buiding with an arched brick opening on the left. That building was the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper Building, and they once had an editor named Walt Whitman.
Down at the dock, the rail around the perimeter is emblazoned with the words Whitman wrote about New York, "O city of spires and masts! My city!"
Stand at the dock and ask someone (others are there) to take your picture with the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or both as your backdrop.
Just a few steps away is The River Cafe, a restaurant on a barge. I'm not saying it's expensive but my wife and I went with another couple there for coffee and desserts, and the bill was $74. Bring lots of money.
If it's high summer, you could take the subway to the beach. Take the Q or B to Coney Island, a bay beach with small waves and brackish water and, in August, an infestation of little transparent jellyfish. The good side is that Coney has the Reigelmann Boardwalk, where you can stroll a mile back and forth, and partake of excellent American or Russian food, street food, the original Nathan's Hot Dogs -- that is to say, the original hot dogs! -- and fool around with bumper cars, shooting galeries and various rides.
Or take the A to Rock Rock, Rockaway Beach (make sure is the A to Far Rockaway, not the other A to JFK/Howard Beach). Mind you, the trip is well over an hour.
There are very few amenities, but Rockaway is a much better beach. This is an Atlantic beach. The water is clean, the waves are Alantic ocean surf: that is, long lines of big breakers. The surf is especially high if a hurricane is within a thousand miles or so. However, that means a rip tide, so bring something that floats.
If you don't mind walking a while, you can cross uot of the public beach to the Federal Recreation Area. Same beach, no people. Swimming isn't allowed, though.
TourguideStan
What time of year are you coming? You could go down to City Hall and walk acros the Brooklyn Bridge. Once there, you can exit the staircase where the Bridge flattens out, and head down Fulton Street to the Fulton Ferry dock. Along the way you'll see an excellent pizzeria by the name of Grimaldi's on the right side, and an old, large orange-brick buiding with an arched brick opening on the left. That building was the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper Building, and they once had an editor named Walt Whitman.
Down at the dock, the rail around the perimeter is emblazoned with the words Whitman wrote about New York, "O city of spires and masts! My city!"
Stand at the dock and ask someone (others are there) to take your picture with the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or both as your backdrop.
Just a few steps away is The River Cafe, a restaurant on a barge. I'm not saying it's expensive but my wife and I went with another couple there for coffee and desserts, and the bill was $74. Bring lots of money.
If it's high summer, you could take the subway to the beach. Take the Q or B to Coney Island, a bay beach with small waves and brackish water and, in August, an infestation of little transparent jellyfish. The good side is that Coney has the Reigelmann Boardwalk, where you can stroll a mile back and forth, and partake of excellent American or Russian food, street food, the original Nathan's Hot Dogs -- that is to say, the original hot dogs! -- and fool around with bumper cars, shooting galeries and various rides.
Or take the A to Rock Rock, Rockaway Beach (make sure is the A to Far Rockaway, not the other A to JFK/Howard Beach). Mind you, the trip is well over an hour.
There are very few amenities, but Rockaway is a much better beach. This is an Atlantic beach. The water is clean, the waves are Alantic ocean surf: that is, long lines of big breakers. The surf is especially high if a hurricane is within a thousand miles or so. However, that means a rip tide, so bring something that floats.
If you don't mind walking a while, you can cross uot of the public beach to the Federal Recreation Area. Same beach, no people. Swimming isn't allowed, though.
TourguideStan
Friday, December 19, 2008
2008 Christmas Windows Walking Tour, from www.oconnorgreentoursnyc.com
Here’s a wonderful walking tour for photographers who are here for the holiday season. I've done the kind of tour you ask about, but more on the pedicab (for two), rather than a walking tour (for a group). The tours are not offered on www.oconnorgeentoursnyc.com, since so few ask for them.
I'm no a pro photographer, but have lots of Flickr photo under the name TourguideStan, which you're welcome to copy, and more than 30 YouTube videos, also under the name TourguideStan. All these have been done on a Nikon Coolpix L14.
If you're here for Christmastime --oops, I mean holiday time -- You ought to take a ride up to Madison and 60th, and start there, taking pictures of Barney's theme windows, "Have a Hippie Holiday." Then walk one block west to Grand Army Plaza, where the world's largest Menorah will be up, topped with railroad lanterns, courtesy of the Lubavitcher community of Brooklyn.
Take pictures of Barney's theme windows, "Have a Hippie Holiday." Then walk one block west to Grand Army Plaza, where the world's largest Menorah will be up, topped with railroad lanterns, courtesy of the Lubavitcher community of Brooklyn.
You'll also see a cluster of lit Christmas trees arranged inside the Pulitzer Fountain, due south, and right out the main entrance of the Plaza Hotel, itself decorated for the season.
Cross Fifth Avenue to the left, to get the big teddy bear and Bobby the living toy soldier, at the front entrance of F.A.O. Schwarz Toy Store. Restrooms, second floor. I don’t recommend going into the store unless you love crowds.
Bergdorf Goodman is next, but which to choose? The Men’s Store on the same side of Fifth as FAO, whose windows feature boxing stuffed polar bears (not kidding!), or the much more decorated Women’s Store, whose theme is the seasons of the year? Somehow, all windows look wintry. I’d go for the women’s side.
…That’s right, Bergdorf’s has two stores.
You’ll want a shot of the Holiday Star over the intersection of 57th and Fifth, held up on guy wires by the four buildings on the corners: Tiffany, Vuitton, van Cleef & Arpel’s, and the building housing Piaget, Mikimoto and another jeweler.
Next to Tiffany is Trump Tower, with its giant wreath over the door. Trump’s TV show The Apprentice was the first that put pedicabs on primetime TV, for which the Donald deserves my thanks. Go inside and warm up. A café with many coffees and many sweets, in the basement, is not a Starbucks. You’ll see a three-story feldspar waterfall, and clean restrooms are down there too.
Cross Fifth to get a gander of van Cleef & Arpel’s windows. The goods displayed are in window boxes, but the windows themselves are outlined in silver tinsel with white LEDs, mixed into tiny tree branches, with big, windblown tree limbs painted silver overtop.
Cross 57th to Bendel’s, with its display of crowns and gowns by current dsesigners. And check out the upstairs milk-glass windows. They were by Lalique and are landmarked. Two other hot stores side by side with Bendel’s, but their names escape me.
The next three blocks feature store after store after store, each with its own attractive display. The notable exception here is Abercrombie & Fitch, with its windows of slatted dark wood, like giant-size Venetian blinds--closed. The only noteworthy thing here is the horde of middle-American teens waiting outside for the chance to go in, shop, then proclaim their individuality by dressing just like every other teen.
Saint Thomas Church, Episcopal, comes up at 53rd Street. The church went up in 1916, when Fifth was lined with townhouses of the wealthy, not stores for the wealthy. With that in mind, check out the bridal entrance, closest to the intersection, for its sculptural joke: Over the door is Jesus reading from the Torah. Above him is a sculpture of what ought to be two wedding rings surrounding two trees. But it looks much more like a Dollar $ign.
Continue south on Fifth. At the intersection of Fifth and 52nd, get a diagonal shot of Cartier Mansion. It is wrapped in red LED-laced ribbon, with little sparkles here and there, and a giant bow over a third-floor window. Cartier Mansion was originally the LaPlante family home. They sold in 1919 to Cartier, for a pearl necklace. In 1922, Mikimoto announced to the world that they had been manufacturing “seeded” pearls, which sent the pearl market through the floor, and the LaPlantes sued. They lost.
You’ve been walking uphill ever since 58th Street. At the top of the hill is Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. The main doors are of bronze. The left door features Saint Patrick who, if you want to get nit-picky, was actually Welsh; Fr. Isaac Jogues, and Kateri Tekakwicha, a converted Mohawk. The right door has St. Joseph and two New Yorkers: Mother Cabrini and Mother Seton. Jesus is, as at St. Thomas, over the door. Those doors remain closed. Enter at the side entrances during the day. Try not to use flash when photographing the interior. Remember, St. Patty’s is a working church, with daily masses.
Before going in, get a shot of Atlas, who is standing guard at the entrance to Rockefeller Center’s International Building.
Go out the south entrance of St. Patrick’s and straight into the side door of Saks & Company. You can cross the block from 50th to 49th by going through here, or brave the thick, slowwww crowd out to see the windows, which feature the life journey of a snowflake named Mike.
At mid-block, turn and gape openmouthed at the lynchpin of all Christmas decorations on Fifth Avenue: straight across the avenue are the British Empire Building and La Maison Francais of Rockefeller Center. Between them is Channel Gardens. “Herald” angels with post horns salute the Rockefeller Center Tree, enwrapped with nearly five miles of LED lighs, and topped by a four-foot Swarovski Star, made of hundreds of Swarovski crystals.
Cross at 48th, 49th, 50th or 51st to go behind the Rock Center buildings and onto the Plaza for Tree viewing. The 49th Street crossing will have the thickest crowds.
Just south of the Rock, watch out for a store with the big GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign over the door. The sign had said INVENTORY CLEARANCE for the entire time I’ve been a sightseeing guide in New York (since 1995), and it went “out of business” early this year, only to reopen with pretty much the same goods inside, and the “INVENTORY CLEARANCE” sign again. Caveat emptor.
Continue south on Fifth, getting pictures of the New York Public Library’s main branch and, behind it, the wintry decorations and skating rink at Bryant Park. A little farther south on Fifth gets you Lord & Taylor’s animated windows, showing Victorian-era NYC scenes.
Then just walk downhill to the Empire State Building. Actually, cross to the left side of Fifth for the ESB’s better views. When the ESB is in front of you, turn right on 34th Street and walk one block west to Macy’s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgNuIuWTh28
Macy’s windows feature something for everyone. The Broadway side windows are clearly for kids, showing lots of whirly, brightly-colored objects. The 34th Street windows repeat last year’s display of animated scenes from the 1947 classic film, Miracle On 34th Street. I must say, the models in the windows do look remarkably like the actors, right down to Natalie Wood.
TourguideStan
I'm no a pro photographer, but have lots of Flickr photo under the name TourguideStan, which you're welcome to copy, and more than 30 YouTube videos, also under the name TourguideStan. All these have been done on a Nikon Coolpix L14.
If you're here for Christmastime --oops, I mean holiday time -- You ought to take a ride up to Madison and 60th, and start there, taking pictures of Barney's theme windows, "Have a Hippie Holiday." Then walk one block west to Grand Army Plaza, where the world's largest Menorah will be up, topped with railroad lanterns, courtesy of the Lubavitcher community of Brooklyn.
Take pictures of Barney's theme windows, "Have a Hippie Holiday." Then walk one block west to Grand Army Plaza, where the world's largest Menorah will be up, topped with railroad lanterns, courtesy of the Lubavitcher community of Brooklyn.
You'll also see a cluster of lit Christmas trees arranged inside the Pulitzer Fountain, due south, and right out the main entrance of the Plaza Hotel, itself decorated for the season.
Cross Fifth Avenue to the left, to get the big teddy bear and Bobby the living toy soldier, at the front entrance of F.A.O. Schwarz Toy Store. Restrooms, second floor. I don’t recommend going into the store unless you love crowds.
Bergdorf Goodman is next, but which to choose? The Men’s Store on the same side of Fifth as FAO, whose windows feature boxing stuffed polar bears (not kidding!), or the much more decorated Women’s Store, whose theme is the seasons of the year? Somehow, all windows look wintry. I’d go for the women’s side.
…That’s right, Bergdorf’s has two stores.
You’ll want a shot of the Holiday Star over the intersection of 57th and Fifth, held up on guy wires by the four buildings on the corners: Tiffany, Vuitton, van Cleef & Arpel’s, and the building housing Piaget, Mikimoto and another jeweler.
Next to Tiffany is Trump Tower, with its giant wreath over the door. Trump’s TV show The Apprentice was the first that put pedicabs on primetime TV, for which the Donald deserves my thanks. Go inside and warm up. A café with many coffees and many sweets, in the basement, is not a Starbucks. You’ll see a three-story feldspar waterfall, and clean restrooms are down there too.
Cross Fifth to get a gander of van Cleef & Arpel’s windows. The goods displayed are in window boxes, but the windows themselves are outlined in silver tinsel with white LEDs, mixed into tiny tree branches, with big, windblown tree limbs painted silver overtop.
Cross 57th to Bendel’s, with its display of crowns and gowns by current dsesigners. And check out the upstairs milk-glass windows. They were by Lalique and are landmarked. Two other hot stores side by side with Bendel’s, but their names escape me.
The next three blocks feature store after store after store, each with its own attractive display. The notable exception here is Abercrombie & Fitch, with its windows of slatted dark wood, like giant-size Venetian blinds--closed. The only noteworthy thing here is the horde of middle-American teens waiting outside for the chance to go in, shop, then proclaim their individuality by dressing just like every other teen.
Saint Thomas Church, Episcopal, comes up at 53rd Street. The church went up in 1916, when Fifth was lined with townhouses of the wealthy, not stores for the wealthy. With that in mind, check out the bridal entrance, closest to the intersection, for its sculptural joke: Over the door is Jesus reading from the Torah. Above him is a sculpture of what ought to be two wedding rings surrounding two trees. But it looks much more like a Dollar $ign.
Continue south on Fifth. At the intersection of Fifth and 52nd, get a diagonal shot of Cartier Mansion. It is wrapped in red LED-laced ribbon, with little sparkles here and there, and a giant bow over a third-floor window. Cartier Mansion was originally the LaPlante family home. They sold in 1919 to Cartier, for a pearl necklace. In 1922, Mikimoto announced to the world that they had been manufacturing “seeded” pearls, which sent the pearl market through the floor, and the LaPlantes sued. They lost.
You’ve been walking uphill ever since 58th Street. At the top of the hill is Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. The main doors are of bronze. The left door features Saint Patrick who, if you want to get nit-picky, was actually Welsh; Fr. Isaac Jogues, and Kateri Tekakwicha, a converted Mohawk. The right door has St. Joseph and two New Yorkers: Mother Cabrini and Mother Seton. Jesus is, as at St. Thomas, over the door. Those doors remain closed. Enter at the side entrances during the day. Try not to use flash when photographing the interior. Remember, St. Patty’s is a working church, with daily masses.
Before going in, get a shot of Atlas, who is standing guard at the entrance to Rockefeller Center’s International Building.
Go out the south entrance of St. Patrick’s and straight into the side door of Saks & Company. You can cross the block from 50th to 49th by going through here, or brave the thick, slowwww crowd out to see the windows, which feature the life journey of a snowflake named Mike.
At mid-block, turn and gape openmouthed at the lynchpin of all Christmas decorations on Fifth Avenue: straight across the avenue are the British Empire Building and La Maison Francais of Rockefeller Center. Between them is Channel Gardens. “Herald” angels with post horns salute the Rockefeller Center Tree, enwrapped with nearly five miles of LED lighs, and topped by a four-foot Swarovski Star, made of hundreds of Swarovski crystals.
Cross at 48th, 49th, 50th or 51st to go behind the Rock Center buildings and onto the Plaza for Tree viewing. The 49th Street crossing will have the thickest crowds.
Just south of the Rock, watch out for a store with the big GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign over the door. The sign had said INVENTORY CLEARANCE for the entire time I’ve been a sightseeing guide in New York (since 1995), and it went “out of business” early this year, only to reopen with pretty much the same goods inside, and the “INVENTORY CLEARANCE” sign again. Caveat emptor.
Continue south on Fifth, getting pictures of the New York Public Library’s main branch and, behind it, the wintry decorations and skating rink at Bryant Park. A little farther south on Fifth gets you Lord & Taylor’s animated windows, showing Victorian-era NYC scenes.
Then just walk downhill to the Empire State Building. Actually, cross to the left side of Fifth for the ESB’s better views. When the ESB is in front of you, turn right on 34th Street and walk one block west to Macy’s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgNuIuWTh28
Macy’s windows feature something for everyone. The Broadway side windows are clearly for kids, showing lots of whirly, brightly-colored objects. The 34th Street windows repeat last year’s display of animated scenes from the 1947 classic film, Miracle On 34th Street. I must say, the models in the windows do look remarkably like the actors, right down to Natalie Wood.
TourguideStan
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
You ought to do two things beside eating in Times Square if you want to see famous people: walk up and down Eighth Avenue between 6 PM and 7 PM and watch the people who walk alone and not very fast. They often are theater people on their way to work. Those who walk in groups are usually people going to the theater, and people walking fast are commuters on their way to the Bus Terminal or Penn Station.
The other thing you should do is go to a Broadway show. Doesn't matter which one. Though, the more serious the show, the greater the probability of actors being in the audience.
Examples: While waiting on my pedicab outside Broadway shows that are letting out I have seen Valerie Bertinelli, David Byrne, Cromwell (forget his first name, the cyclist/actor who just broke his collarbone while biking), and Marisa Tomei.
Get to the show at least 15 minutes early, put something in your seat to mark it as yours, then go down toward the stage and turn around to watch people get to their seats. Famous actors have enough money to go see other people's shows. For, how to better learn the craft of acting, than to go watch other actors?
The more time you spend on the streets of Times Square, the more actors and actresses you meet. While biking on my pedicab I've met Jeffrey Tambour and Richard Salkind, on their bikes. They probably live in Hell's Kitchen, the neighborhood west of Times Square, which is loaded with theater people, or the Upper West Side, a 10-20-minute bike ride away. They both, by the way, wear helmets.
One night in 2004, while giving a pedicab tour of Times Square to two tourist women, one asked if celebs lurk about. We then came upon the actor who played the taxi driver on Mars, in the film, Total Recall. They were delighted. "Hey, man, I got four mouths to feed!"
Katherine O'Hara and Governor Ann Richards have been taken home in my pedicab. I did a promo for Showtime several years ago with Mario Cantone sitting in my pedicab in the middle of Times Square, on the traffic island where the Naked Cowboy usually works during the day.
For actually seeing actors at dinner:
Joe Allen
Sardi's
A cop friend says Brian Dennehy eats at Angus McIndoe (W. 44th) on alternate Friday nights.
For actually seeing theater people and some struggling but fairly-well-known actors at late breakfast or brunch: The Edison Cafe, affectionately known as The Polish Tearoom, in the Edison Hotel's north side (at 47th Street). Take a booth, and look into the ceiling mirrors that allow you to see who's sitting at the counter. Do this on Wednesday, because shows start t 2 PM.
These are not promises. They are hunches based on past experience.
TourguideStan
The other thing you should do is go to a Broadway show. Doesn't matter which one. Though, the more serious the show, the greater the probability of actors being in the audience.
Examples: While waiting on my pedicab outside Broadway shows that are letting out I have seen Valerie Bertinelli, David Byrne, Cromwell (forget his first name, the cyclist/actor who just broke his collarbone while biking), and Marisa Tomei.
Get to the show at least 15 minutes early, put something in your seat to mark it as yours, then go down toward the stage and turn around to watch people get to their seats. Famous actors have enough money to go see other people's shows. For, how to better learn the craft of acting, than to go watch other actors?
The more time you spend on the streets of Times Square, the more actors and actresses you meet. While biking on my pedicab I've met Jeffrey Tambour and Richard Salkind, on their bikes. They probably live in Hell's Kitchen, the neighborhood west of Times Square, which is loaded with theater people, or the Upper West Side, a 10-20-minute bike ride away. They both, by the way, wear helmets.
One night in 2004, while giving a pedicab tour of Times Square to two tourist women, one asked if celebs lurk about. We then came upon the actor who played the taxi driver on Mars, in the film, Total Recall. They were delighted. "Hey, man, I got four mouths to feed!"
Katherine O'Hara and Governor Ann Richards have been taken home in my pedicab. I did a promo for Showtime several years ago with Mario Cantone sitting in my pedicab in the middle of Times Square, on the traffic island where the Naked Cowboy usually works during the day.
For actually seeing actors at dinner:
Joe Allen
Sardi's
A cop friend says Brian Dennehy eats at Angus McIndoe (W. 44th) on alternate Friday nights.
For actually seeing theater people and some struggling but fairly-well-known actors at late breakfast or brunch: The Edison Cafe, affectionately known as The Polish Tearoom, in the Edison Hotel's north side (at 47th Street). Take a booth, and look into the ceiling mirrors that allow you to see who's sitting at the counter. Do this on Wednesday, because shows start t 2 PM.
These are not promises. They are hunches based on past experience.
TourguideStan
Monday, August 4, 2008
How not to get hot, Part II
It was a hot and sunny day. Ed, citing Pat’s Irish background, insisted that I put the canopy up, to shade her (them) from the 2 PM sun in July, the most intense sun of the day. I demurred, promising I would stay in the shade wherever possible. The problem was that my rain jacket and someone else’s canopy front were both packed into the canopy sleeve behind the back of the pedicab. I had nowhere to put either of them, and I certainly was not about to put my rain jacket on, in hot, brilliant sunshine. I’m also of Irish descent, so it was in my own best interest to keep to the shady side of the street.
The problem in staying shady was that the Sun was almost directly overhead. We were headed north and wouldn’t be in Central park until about 5:00. It was now 2:00. What to do? We turned to start the trip up Trinity Place, headed north. The building from Men In Black was pointed out for what it really is, an office having to do with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Indeed, motor vehicles in the trench were speeding under it. North we went, in direct sun, there being nothing to our left (west) except the trench that leads to the tunnel. They saw the building where top American footballers like OJ Simpson have picked up their Heismann trophies. Passed the street named for government official, rich speculator, man-about-town and general ladies’ man and bon vivant Gouvernor Morris, Exchange Place, which I believe to be the narrowest street in Manhattan, at about 10 feet.
Then Richard Upjohn’s chocolate-colored Trinity Church, built of brownstone just when the stone was becoming popular. The third commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps was buried in the corner plot with the little US flag over it. No flag, but a pyramid stone for Alexander Hamilton, sitting Secretary of the Treasury when he deliberately lost a duel against Vice-President Aaron Burr, by shooting into the air and letting Burr shoot him. Burr aimed low. Hamilton was gut-shot, meaning that his intestines opened up, and he died in his own poisons, which took until early the next morning to kill him, one of the most painful ways to die. Burr left town for Ohio, and stayed away for years, fearing a murder indictment.
Hamilton was also a lawyer, with a practice on Broadway right where the Standard Oil building is now.
Imagine: a vice president of the United States, shooting a lawyer and getting away with it.
Ahead to the left lay a construction site with a perimeter fence covered in green netting: the site of the once and future World Trade Center. They were shown the remaining buildings about the periphery. First #7, rebuilt just over a year ago, with sky-blue windows that currently reflect nothing, the Twin Towers being gone. But someday in the not-distant future those walls will reflect the Freedom Tower.
Moving north, and looking back to the southwest is the rapidly-diminishing
We cruised forward, northward, and I told them of Century 21, considered the finest discount store in NYC, which opened up five months to the day after The Attacks of September Eleven. Every store, every building in the perimeter of the blast had lost windows. The Millenium Hilton had lost every pane in its curtain wall, cascading the contents of room after room into the first floor and basement. An airline radio was found in the jumbled debris of those seven floors, afterward. The government then arrested an Egyptian hotel guest and took him to Guantanamo, where he eventually confessed to having that radio and being an accomplice to the two fellow Egyptians and 17 Saudis who attacked us. Afterward, an airline pilot who had also been staying at the Hilton called them and asked if they ever found his airline radio, which he said had been lost in the rubble. This led to one of the most embarrassing spots the Bush administration had put itself into. I don’t recall ever hearing an apology for their colossal error of judgment, and I told as much to my customers Pat and Ed. What do you suppose our government put that poor guy through, in order to get that fake confession?
Across the open space to the left stood the non-matching tower tops of the World Financial Center. One domed, one pyramidic, and one the shape I don’t know what to call it: the top was smaller than the base, like a pyramid sliced horizontally in half, and the top removed. A trapezoid?
They had lost their windows to the sixth and seventh floor as well. Virtually every edifice directly across the street from the WTC had lost windows. All but one: Saint Paul’s Chapel. St. Paul was run by Trinity, a third of a mile to the south. It opened in 1767 and served as the church of Trinity Parish when the larger structure burned in the Great Fire of August 1776. In fact, when Washington was inaugurated in 1789, he and his entourage marched (he rode) up Broadway to St. Paul’s, where Washington prayed for the future of our nation. Our nation has done very well. Looks as though prayer works.
Saint Paul’s is set back from the immediate perimeter of the WTC by a tree-covered graveyard. Those trees mitigated the sheer force of flying debris and wind, into the trees themselves. The Chapel escaped without a scratch. Though when the leaves fell that November, one could easily look up and see things that had come to rest in those trees: a bicycle, some Venetian blinds, pieces of sheet metal and whatnot. Things that had been in parts of the Twin Towers way high up, and come crashing down, to be entrapped by the up-reaching tree limbs. The trees truly saved the Chapel of Saint Paul.
When people were allowed back to the scene a week after The Attacks, some of the more religious of our people marveled that St. Paul’s was virtually unscathed; that it had only lost the uprooted tree in the blast. They took this to be a sign of God’s providence, and they took the girders that came down shaped like crosses as another great sign from The Lord that He was present and spared the chapel out of his grace and love. Some went so far as to use the cross-shaped girders to “prove” that God is the Christian God, and not the Muslim one.
These people who make religious (non)sense out of anything they see have been totally ignoring the fact that another church, that of Saint Nicholas, was totally and completely obliterated when the South Tower fell on it. I am largely skeptical of religion because of people who ignore one truth while touting another.
If you want to see a cross-shaped girder, one is set into the sidewalk on Church Street, just west of Saint Peter’s Church, the oldest Catholic church in the city, which dates from 1804. This church had a role in The Attacks as well. Father Mychal judge, the chaplain of the FDNY was the first known victim of the fall of the towers. Firemen brought his still body to Saint Peter’s and laid him respectfully on the altar.
So we rolled along, and my people heard all these sad stories of what New York was like on that terrible day.
They asked, “Where were you when it happened?”
“I was home watching it on TV like everyone else. I lived in Brooklyn about five miles away. By noon, the stench of the fire had wafted over to my neighborhood, and it stayed there all day. I went shopping for long-term staples, not knowing if this was only the first wave of a series of attacks. I thought I should be ready, just in case. I got back to the house by about 3 PM, and little white pieces of paper, scorched around the edges, were beginning to flutter down over the neighborhood.“ Later we learned that papers had even come down on Coney Island beach, a good 12 - 13 miles from the WTC. I saved one of the papers that fell on my block. It’s part of a prospectus for Deloitte & Touche.
BTW I also saved a baggie of September 11th dust from the corner of Cedar and William Street that I collected a week after the event. It would be interesting to test it and see if the EPA was lying when they said there was nothing harmful in all that dust.
On we went, taking a right just past St. Paul’s, to Nassau Street, then going he wrong way in the bike lane to Centre. I told them the story of the corrupt Democrat government of NYC in the 1860s, and the clean-up role of The Tribune’s Horace Greeley, whose statue was just east of City hall, gazing across Centre Street at the Brooklyn Bridge. We took another right on Worth Street and headed uphill, for Chinatown.
As we entered Chinatown, I took pat & Ed to what I believe is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Western Hemisphere, that of Sheareth Israel. It is peppered with 17th-c. gravestones written in Spanish and Portuguese. Talk about your religious bigots: These Ladino Jews were forced to come to the open-minded Dutch colony on Manhattan because of the Spanish Inquisition. Jews captured by the Inquisition were typically given their choice of three options:
1. Leave forever.
2. Convert to Roman Catholicism.
3. Be hanged.
So they had come to Nieuw Amsterdam, which didn’t give an Amster-dam about their religion. Their descendants are here to this day, safe and sound.
The Chinatown corner housing the little graveyard is really a microcosm of the American-immigrant experience. Within sight of the gravestones are a gun shop frequented by members of nearby NYPD HQ, a Methodist church where a Cuban Catholic priest got the Irish immigrants to found the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Baptist church for sailors, a Catholic grade school, housing projects and a Mahayana Buddhist temple.
We turned the pedicab past a memorial to the Chinese nationalist who tried to prevent the Americans, French and British from selling opium to his countrymen, and went into the warren of little Chinatown streets.
Finally, some shade. It had been an hour of direct sunlight. We went left up Mulberry Street with the Chinese funeral homes on the right and Columbus park on the left, and I told the story of attending the Chinese funeral of my Chinese uncle-by-a-previous marriage. Upstate brothers-in-law had asked if I could represent the family there.
Technically I was doubly not part of the family, since their sister and I had divorced a couple of years before, and since she had died the previous month. The brothers-in-law had used up all their free days caring for their dying sister, though, and had no time to spare for a 7-hour drive to NYC from Rochester NY, and back up. It was February, the off season for tourism, and I had nothing better to do with my time. So I went to the Ng Fook Funeral Home and listened as family members talked about the times they had had with Uncle Lou. Sat with his kids as they rolled up paper shopping-bags full of gilded paper squares for the incense fire on the altar. Photos by the hearse, and of the photo on TOP of the hearse, a photo of uncle Lou, owner of the Cathay Pagoda Restaurant in Rochester, where my late father-in-law had been chef.
The park to the left was built in 1895 to relieve the Five Points neighborhood of a good third of its population. How? By razing their tenement homes, and giving them no homes to go to afterward, which made the problem of overcrowded tenements even worse! Interestingly, I pointed out, with the destruction of three blocks of tenements, one could look from the five corners (for which it was called Five Points) northward and see The Tombs, the city lockup. The fact that The Tombs was built right next to the worst neighborhood in town was probably no mistake!
There’s a quote in the 1895 book “How The Other Half Lives” by a Chinese immigrant living in Five Points in that year. He said to the author, who was himself a Danish immigrant, “Dem Irish very, very bad!” Perhaps a good quote from one ethnic outsider to another, as retold by one Irish-American to another. And, for all Pat O’Brien and Stan O’Connor know, our ancestors may have rubbed filthy elbows, down in Five Points. Or perhaps they bent their elbows.
Anyway, we went uphill on The Bowery to the Manhattan Bridge and Daniel Chester French’s marble archway, “Gateway To Brooklyn” which incongruously is graced by a bas-relief of Indians on horseback hunting buffalo. Then we coasted downhill on Canal, for what I hoped was our last foray under the direct sun. I thought of taking them up Elizabeth to Bleecker, then up into the East Village.
But NO, I thought! Why not go two blocks farther west, then up Mulberry so they could roll past the restaurants and Catholic Church of Little Italy? So that’s what I did, and was dismayed by.
Street fair. Of course. I forgot that Little Italy in the summer is one three-month-long street fair, centered on Mulberry Street. Shit.
So on west and downhill we went on Canal, with me apologizing and sweating and trying to think for a northbound street that would be out of the sunshine. I was getting winded. Thank God for this downhill. We finally turned up Centre again. I could have skirted all of Chinatown and just talked about it, and stayed in the shade. But no, I had to be the good tour guide. Heavy sigh. At least we were out of the sun now, until we got to Cleveland Place. Then two blocks of wide esplanade, staying on the right. And then we were able to go to the bike lane which, like all bike lanes on one-way streets, is on the left side.
SHADE!
I showed them Lauren Hutton’s building. At the time, I described that I’d once been to the home of a famous model from the 1970s, but I could not for the life of me remember her name at the time. Unknown why “Lauren Hutton” comes into my head now, with no problem. Maybe it was the heat. The customers still don’t know to whom I was referring.
Pat and Ed saw the new blue condos at Astor Place, shaped like stacked pianos because Schirmer Music Company had been the previous longtime presence on the lot. They saw the colonnaded music hall where immigrant backers of one Shakespearean actor rioted against nativist fans of another, right out there on Lafayette Street. They saw the nearby theater of Blue Man Group, and we discussed differences between the NYC show and the Chicago show.
We continued north through Astor Place, and I told them of a date I’d had several years ago. The girl had wanted me to meet her “In the Starbucks on Astor Place.” Turns out there were two Starbucks, a fact that neither of us were aware of as we made exasperated cell-phone calls to each other, one in each Starbucks.
Came up to the Wanamaker Building. I asked if they were familiar with Kmart? They were. …Why?
“Here is the Wanamaker Building ahead of us. John Wanamaker ran the biggest store in the world until Macy’s eclipsed it in 1902. Think of the square-footage of your typical Kmart. A Kmart is now in the basement and the first floor of the building. Imagine about eight Kmarts, and you have the size of the original Wanamaker’s!” My customers were suitably impressed.
I pedicabbed them up Fourth Avenue, now paralleling Broadway. Blew the horn at pedestrians who stood in my bike lane, texting. The peds all yelled at me for my impudence and bad manners. I shouted back, “Should I go on the sidewalk, or should you?”
Earlier on Lafayette & Bond, I called ahead at a cluster of people who stood in the bike lane ahead chatting as if they were the sidewalk. As I passed, the oldest guy there said to the passengers, “You’re riding in a death-trap!” (Thank you, David Letterman!) And to me, “Why don’t you get a helmet, asshole!?”
At this, I turned and started arguing with him. He walked away, insulting me over his shoulder while fleeing, unwilling to admit that he’d been standing in my way, and inferring that I was automatically a bad driver because I drove a pedicab. Yes, and in the bike lane …where he had stood, ignoring those who needed the bike lane for their safety, the hypocrite idiot. Why couldn’t they have stood on the sidewalk where they belong? And why couldn’t these hipster texters at Astor and LaFayette? I had to yell to get their attention, so they yelled back after stepping back onto the curb that they should have been on all along.
I’m not trying to take THEIR space. They are taking MINE and I need it. Will they ever learn, or do we have make it illegal to stand in the bike lane? Or will I have to someday make a snap decision between the safety of my passengers and the safety of a cell-phony typing in the street?
Off the stump. Back to the tour. I was planning to take the people up to 14th Street and show them Union Square, but that would have meant more sunshine. We’d just passed a thermometer that read 94. So instead, we turned down Broadway from 14th, and went into Greenwich Village, doing a little of my Greenwich Village Comprehensive Tour. They got to see the teddy bear in the window of the townhouse that student activists had (accidentally) blown up, followed by the second cemetery of the first Jews in the western hemisphere.
Then the site of The Grapevine, a civil-war-era coffee shop known for the passing of Union and Confederate information, and the origin of the phrase, “…heard it through The Grapevine.”
Finally, north on semi-flat and shady Sixth Avenue, with a bike lane from here, clear to 42nd Street. We passed the Victorian style library branch, and I took them aside to view Patchin Place, where Theodore Dreiser and e.e. cummings lived (not together). They heard the story of the granting of civil rights for NY State women in 1871 as a result of the Ladies’ Mile shopping district’s campaign for the street safety of female shoppers. This library was built in 1872 to be the first women’s jail. It was converted to a library in 1930.
So on, up through the townhouses and stores of The Village. Crossing 14th Street and into Chelsea, first developed by its landowner Clement Clarke Moore. Google him right now; you may get a kick out of it.
Now we were on the more speedy route. The plan had been to start at The Battery, come north five miles to Central Park, tour around the park for an hour, and drop them off at their midtown hotel. We had crisscrossed lower Manhattan as far as the Village, and now would go straight up 6th to the park, a straight shot. BTW if you’re not a New Yorker and are looking at the map of the city, what I call Sixth Ave is what the outside world (and the USPS) calls “Avenue Of The Americas.”
Okay, that’s just over seven pages at 12-point. That’s more than enough for now. I’ll finish this tour report on the next post.
TourguideStan
Google me!
www.oconnorgreentoursnyc.com
The problem in staying shady was that the Sun was almost directly overhead. We were headed north and wouldn’t be in Central park until about 5:00. It was now 2:00. What to do? We turned to start the trip up Trinity Place, headed north. The building from Men In Black was pointed out for what it really is, an office having to do with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Indeed, motor vehicles in the trench were speeding under it. North we went, in direct sun, there being nothing to our left (west) except the trench that leads to the tunnel. They saw the building where top American footballers like OJ Simpson have picked up their Heismann trophies. Passed the street named for government official, rich speculator, man-about-town and general ladies’ man and bon vivant Gouvernor Morris, Exchange Place, which I believe to be the narrowest street in Manhattan, at about 10 feet.
Then Richard Upjohn’s chocolate-colored Trinity Church, built of brownstone just when the stone was becoming popular. The third commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps was buried in the corner plot with the little US flag over it. No flag, but a pyramid stone for Alexander Hamilton, sitting Secretary of the Treasury when he deliberately lost a duel against Vice-President Aaron Burr, by shooting into the air and letting Burr shoot him. Burr aimed low. Hamilton was gut-shot, meaning that his intestines opened up, and he died in his own poisons, which took until early the next morning to kill him, one of the most painful ways to die. Burr left town for Ohio, and stayed away for years, fearing a murder indictment.
Hamilton was also a lawyer, with a practice on Broadway right where the Standard Oil building is now.
Imagine: a vice president of the United States, shooting a lawyer and getting away with it.
Ahead to the left lay a construction site with a perimeter fence covered in green netting: the site of the once and future World Trade Center. They were shown the remaining buildings about the periphery. First #7, rebuilt just over a year ago, with sky-blue windows that currently reflect nothing, the Twin Towers being gone. But someday in the not-distant future those walls will reflect the Freedom Tower.
Moving north, and looking back to the southwest is the rapidly-diminishing
We cruised forward, northward, and I told them of Century 21, considered the finest discount store in NYC, which opened up five months to the day after The Attacks of September Eleven. Every store, every building in the perimeter of the blast had lost windows. The Millenium Hilton had lost every pane in its curtain wall, cascading the contents of room after room into the first floor and basement. An airline radio was found in the jumbled debris of those seven floors, afterward. The government then arrested an Egyptian hotel guest and took him to Guantanamo, where he eventually confessed to having that radio and being an accomplice to the two fellow Egyptians and 17 Saudis who attacked us. Afterward, an airline pilot who had also been staying at the Hilton called them and asked if they ever found his airline radio, which he said had been lost in the rubble. This led to one of the most embarrassing spots the Bush administration had put itself into. I don’t recall ever hearing an apology for their colossal error of judgment, and I told as much to my customers Pat and Ed. What do you suppose our government put that poor guy through, in order to get that fake confession?
Across the open space to the left stood the non-matching tower tops of the World Financial Center. One domed, one pyramidic, and one the shape I don’t know what to call it: the top was smaller than the base, like a pyramid sliced horizontally in half, and the top removed. A trapezoid?
They had lost their windows to the sixth and seventh floor as well. Virtually every edifice directly across the street from the WTC had lost windows. All but one: Saint Paul’s Chapel. St. Paul was run by Trinity, a third of a mile to the south. It opened in 1767 and served as the church of Trinity Parish when the larger structure burned in the Great Fire of August 1776. In fact, when Washington was inaugurated in 1789, he and his entourage marched (he rode) up Broadway to St. Paul’s, where Washington prayed for the future of our nation. Our nation has done very well. Looks as though prayer works.
Saint Paul’s is set back from the immediate perimeter of the WTC by a tree-covered graveyard. Those trees mitigated the sheer force of flying debris and wind, into the trees themselves. The Chapel escaped without a scratch. Though when the leaves fell that November, one could easily look up and see things that had come to rest in those trees: a bicycle, some Venetian blinds, pieces of sheet metal and whatnot. Things that had been in parts of the Twin Towers way high up, and come crashing down, to be entrapped by the up-reaching tree limbs. The trees truly saved the Chapel of Saint Paul.
When people were allowed back to the scene a week after The Attacks, some of the more religious of our people marveled that St. Paul’s was virtually unscathed; that it had only lost the uprooted tree in the blast. They took this to be a sign of God’s providence, and they took the girders that came down shaped like crosses as another great sign from The Lord that He was present and spared the chapel out of his grace and love. Some went so far as to use the cross-shaped girders to “prove” that God is the Christian God, and not the Muslim one.
These people who make religious (non)sense out of anything they see have been totally ignoring the fact that another church, that of Saint Nicholas, was totally and completely obliterated when the South Tower fell on it. I am largely skeptical of religion because of people who ignore one truth while touting another.
If you want to see a cross-shaped girder, one is set into the sidewalk on Church Street, just west of Saint Peter’s Church, the oldest Catholic church in the city, which dates from 1804. This church had a role in The Attacks as well. Father Mychal judge, the chaplain of the FDNY was the first known victim of the fall of the towers. Firemen brought his still body to Saint Peter’s and laid him respectfully on the altar.
So we rolled along, and my people heard all these sad stories of what New York was like on that terrible day.
They asked, “Where were you when it happened?”
“I was home watching it on TV like everyone else. I lived in Brooklyn about five miles away. By noon, the stench of the fire had wafted over to my neighborhood, and it stayed there all day. I went shopping for long-term staples, not knowing if this was only the first wave of a series of attacks. I thought I should be ready, just in case. I got back to the house by about 3 PM, and little white pieces of paper, scorched around the edges, were beginning to flutter down over the neighborhood.“ Later we learned that papers had even come down on Coney Island beach, a good 12 - 13 miles from the WTC. I saved one of the papers that fell on my block. It’s part of a prospectus for Deloitte & Touche.
BTW I also saved a baggie of September 11th dust from the corner of Cedar and William Street that I collected a week after the event. It would be interesting to test it and see if the EPA was lying when they said there was nothing harmful in all that dust.
On we went, taking a right just past St. Paul’s, to Nassau Street, then going he wrong way in the bike lane to Centre. I told them the story of the corrupt Democrat government of NYC in the 1860s, and the clean-up role of The Tribune’s Horace Greeley, whose statue was just east of City hall, gazing across Centre Street at the Brooklyn Bridge. We took another right on Worth Street and headed uphill, for Chinatown.
As we entered Chinatown, I took pat & Ed to what I believe is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Western Hemisphere, that of Sheareth Israel. It is peppered with 17th-c. gravestones written in Spanish and Portuguese. Talk about your religious bigots: These Ladino Jews were forced to come to the open-minded Dutch colony on Manhattan because of the Spanish Inquisition. Jews captured by the Inquisition were typically given their choice of three options:
1. Leave forever.
2. Convert to Roman Catholicism.
3. Be hanged.
So they had come to Nieuw Amsterdam, which didn’t give an Amster-dam about their religion. Their descendants are here to this day, safe and sound.
The Chinatown corner housing the little graveyard is really a microcosm of the American-immigrant experience. Within sight of the gravestones are a gun shop frequented by members of nearby NYPD HQ, a Methodist church where a Cuban Catholic priest got the Irish immigrants to found the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Baptist church for sailors, a Catholic grade school, housing projects and a Mahayana Buddhist temple.
We turned the pedicab past a memorial to the Chinese nationalist who tried to prevent the Americans, French and British from selling opium to his countrymen, and went into the warren of little Chinatown streets.
Finally, some shade. It had been an hour of direct sunlight. We went left up Mulberry Street with the Chinese funeral homes on the right and Columbus park on the left, and I told the story of attending the Chinese funeral of my Chinese uncle-by-a-previous marriage. Upstate brothers-in-law had asked if I could represent the family there.
Technically I was doubly not part of the family, since their sister and I had divorced a couple of years before, and since she had died the previous month. The brothers-in-law had used up all their free days caring for their dying sister, though, and had no time to spare for a 7-hour drive to NYC from Rochester NY, and back up. It was February, the off season for tourism, and I had nothing better to do with my time. So I went to the Ng Fook Funeral Home and listened as family members talked about the times they had had with Uncle Lou. Sat with his kids as they rolled up paper shopping-bags full of gilded paper squares for the incense fire on the altar. Photos by the hearse, and of the photo on TOP of the hearse, a photo of uncle Lou, owner of the Cathay Pagoda Restaurant in Rochester, where my late father-in-law had been chef.
The park to the left was built in 1895 to relieve the Five Points neighborhood of a good third of its population. How? By razing their tenement homes, and giving them no homes to go to afterward, which made the problem of overcrowded tenements even worse! Interestingly, I pointed out, with the destruction of three blocks of tenements, one could look from the five corners (for which it was called Five Points) northward and see The Tombs, the city lockup. The fact that The Tombs was built right next to the worst neighborhood in town was probably no mistake!
There’s a quote in the 1895 book “How The Other Half Lives” by a Chinese immigrant living in Five Points in that year. He said to the author, who was himself a Danish immigrant, “Dem Irish very, very bad!” Perhaps a good quote from one ethnic outsider to another, as retold by one Irish-American to another. And, for all Pat O’Brien and Stan O’Connor know, our ancestors may have rubbed filthy elbows, down in Five Points. Or perhaps they bent their elbows.
Anyway, we went uphill on The Bowery to the Manhattan Bridge and Daniel Chester French’s marble archway, “Gateway To Brooklyn” which incongruously is graced by a bas-relief of Indians on horseback hunting buffalo. Then we coasted downhill on Canal, for what I hoped was our last foray under the direct sun. I thought of taking them up Elizabeth to Bleecker, then up into the East Village.
But NO, I thought! Why not go two blocks farther west, then up Mulberry so they could roll past the restaurants and Catholic Church of Little Italy? So that’s what I did, and was dismayed by.
Street fair. Of course. I forgot that Little Italy in the summer is one three-month-long street fair, centered on Mulberry Street. Shit.
So on west and downhill we went on Canal, with me apologizing and sweating and trying to think for a northbound street that would be out of the sunshine. I was getting winded. Thank God for this downhill. We finally turned up Centre again. I could have skirted all of Chinatown and just talked about it, and stayed in the shade. But no, I had to be the good tour guide. Heavy sigh. At least we were out of the sun now, until we got to Cleveland Place. Then two blocks of wide esplanade, staying on the right. And then we were able to go to the bike lane which, like all bike lanes on one-way streets, is on the left side.
SHADE!
I showed them Lauren Hutton’s building. At the time, I described that I’d once been to the home of a famous model from the 1970s, but I could not for the life of me remember her name at the time. Unknown why “Lauren Hutton” comes into my head now, with no problem. Maybe it was the heat. The customers still don’t know to whom I was referring.
Pat and Ed saw the new blue condos at Astor Place, shaped like stacked pianos because Schirmer Music Company had been the previous longtime presence on the lot. They saw the colonnaded music hall where immigrant backers of one Shakespearean actor rioted against nativist fans of another, right out there on Lafayette Street. They saw the nearby theater of Blue Man Group, and we discussed differences between the NYC show and the Chicago show.
We continued north through Astor Place, and I told them of a date I’d had several years ago. The girl had wanted me to meet her “In the Starbucks on Astor Place.” Turns out there were two Starbucks, a fact that neither of us were aware of as we made exasperated cell-phone calls to each other, one in each Starbucks.
Came up to the Wanamaker Building. I asked if they were familiar with Kmart? They were. …Why?
“Here is the Wanamaker Building ahead of us. John Wanamaker ran the biggest store in the world until Macy’s eclipsed it in 1902. Think of the square-footage of your typical Kmart. A Kmart is now in the basement and the first floor of the building. Imagine about eight Kmarts, and you have the size of the original Wanamaker’s!” My customers were suitably impressed.
I pedicabbed them up Fourth Avenue, now paralleling Broadway. Blew the horn at pedestrians who stood in my bike lane, texting. The peds all yelled at me for my impudence and bad manners. I shouted back, “Should I go on the sidewalk, or should you?”
Earlier on Lafayette & Bond, I called ahead at a cluster of people who stood in the bike lane ahead chatting as if they were the sidewalk. As I passed, the oldest guy there said to the passengers, “You’re riding in a death-trap!” (Thank you, David Letterman!) And to me, “Why don’t you get a helmet, asshole!?”
At this, I turned and started arguing with him. He walked away, insulting me over his shoulder while fleeing, unwilling to admit that he’d been standing in my way, and inferring that I was automatically a bad driver because I drove a pedicab. Yes, and in the bike lane …where he had stood, ignoring those who needed the bike lane for their safety, the hypocrite idiot. Why couldn’t they have stood on the sidewalk where they belong? And why couldn’t these hipster texters at Astor and LaFayette? I had to yell to get their attention, so they yelled back after stepping back onto the curb that they should have been on all along.
I’m not trying to take THEIR space. They are taking MINE and I need it. Will they ever learn, or do we have make it illegal to stand in the bike lane? Or will I have to someday make a snap decision between the safety of my passengers and the safety of a cell-phony typing in the street?
Off the stump. Back to the tour. I was planning to take the people up to 14th Street and show them Union Square, but that would have meant more sunshine. We’d just passed a thermometer that read 94. So instead, we turned down Broadway from 14th, and went into Greenwich Village, doing a little of my Greenwich Village Comprehensive Tour. They got to see the teddy bear in the window of the townhouse that student activists had (accidentally) blown up, followed by the second cemetery of the first Jews in the western hemisphere.
Then the site of The Grapevine, a civil-war-era coffee shop known for the passing of Union and Confederate information, and the origin of the phrase, “…heard it through The Grapevine.”
Finally, north on semi-flat and shady Sixth Avenue, with a bike lane from here, clear to 42nd Street. We passed the Victorian style library branch, and I took them aside to view Patchin Place, where Theodore Dreiser and e.e. cummings lived (not together). They heard the story of the granting of civil rights for NY State women in 1871 as a result of the Ladies’ Mile shopping district’s campaign for the street safety of female shoppers. This library was built in 1872 to be the first women’s jail. It was converted to a library in 1930.
So on, up through the townhouses and stores of The Village. Crossing 14th Street and into Chelsea, first developed by its landowner Clement Clarke Moore. Google him right now; you may get a kick out of it.
Now we were on the more speedy route. The plan had been to start at The Battery, come north five miles to Central Park, tour around the park for an hour, and drop them off at their midtown hotel. We had crisscrossed lower Manhattan as far as the Village, and now would go straight up 6th to the park, a straight shot. BTW if you’re not a New Yorker and are looking at the map of the city, what I call Sixth Ave is what the outside world (and the USPS) calls “Avenue Of The Americas.”
Okay, that’s just over seven pages at 12-point. That’s more than enough for now. I’ll finish this tour report on the next post.
TourguideStan
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www.oconnorgreentoursnyc.com
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