Raanan Geberer's Blog

Freddy's Dead--Or Is He? A Short Story

2017-07-12T06:52:00.003-07:00

By Raanan Geberer

When Freddy McFerrin, the longtime editor and columnist for the Allston-Brighton-Brookline Weekly Journal, died after a stroke and heart attack at the age of 70, everyone was sad—in the newsroom, in legislators’ offices and in the community. Since I’d worked at the paper for 15 years, I, too, was in mourning.

Everybody who’d been active in local public life for the past 25 years knew Freddy. He was tall and thin, and we rarely saw him without his tweed jacket, his tweed cap, his long tan overcoat and his cigar. And who could forget his stock phrase, uttered when he was surprised, shocked or otherwise taken aback: “Well, Madre D’Dee!”

Freddy, who made no secret of his dislike for organized religion, didn’t have a funeral, but he did have a memorial service that was attended by several hundred people. “There were three things Freddy was totally devoted to—the Boston Red Sox, the Massachusetts Democratic Party and Old Log Cabin bourbon, not necessarily in that order,” his wife told the crowd. “And I encourage everyone to drink up, because if there was anything that Freddy hated to see, it was someone with an empty glass.” The crowd laughed.

Freddy was born on Governors Island in New York Harbor, which was an Army base in 1934. As an Army brat—both his parents were officers—he moved around a lot as a kid. He spent some time in Hammond, Indiana, where the events immortalized in Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story took place, “although Shep and his friends were of course a lot older than me.”

He came to Boston to study journalism at Boston U’s School of Public Communication on Commonwealth Avenue, and also got heavily involved in the early civil rights movement—he wrote letter after letter imploring the Red Sox to sign their first Black player. Afterward, he worked as a reporter for the old Boston Traveler. When the Traveler went out of business, he became a public relations person for Massachusetts Bay Life Insurance. He always told people he left Massachusetts Bay Life because they moved and he didn’t want to commute to Framingham, but some people whispered that the company asked him to leave because of his heavy drinking. He ended up at the Weekly Journal, a community newspaper, soon afterward, and for the last 25 years of his life he called it home.

In his column, “News Notes,” Freddy commented on some of the issues affecting both the local areas we covered and the greater Boston region—with a twist. For example, when the Red Sox won the pennant after almost 100 years in 2004, he wrote about how well the police handled the traffic situation. A decade earlier, he had been a staunch defender of rent control in Brookline, pointing out that if it were repealed, that would make it much harder for students to obtain off-campus housing. Freddy usually called upon me to copy-edit his columns. When I cautioned Freddy about misspelled names or sentences that were too long, he didn’t seem interested. “On to the next thing!” he shouted in a mock-flourish.

Increasingly, after George Bush became president, Freddy turned much of his attention to national politics. “The minute he started repealing all of President Clinton’s executive orders, especially about the environment, I knew Bush was part of the radical right!” Freddy fumed, waving his arms. One time, when a particularly nasty thunderstorm was looming, he looked out the window and joked, “It’s so dark outside, it’s blacker than a Republican’s heart!”

Closely related to Freddy’s passion for politics was his being a history buff. The top of his always-messy desk usually had a few copies of U.S. Heritage and History magazine. One day, he walked over to my desk with a huge book that was obviously an antique. “Kid,” he said with a big smile, “This is a Brighton Town Directory from 1873, when Brighton was still a separate town. It lists all the residents, house by house, all the businesses, all the taverns. I brought it to the Brighton Neighborhood Association meeting last night and they went nuts over it!” That directory provided him with material for several weeks’ worth of columns.

But there was another side to Freddy. Although he disparaged conventional religion, at heart he was not only a person of faith but a mystic. Every morning around 10:30, we’d see him throwing the I Ching at his desk, and we knew to hold any calls for him until he finished. He loved to talk about the time, back in the ‘60s, when he took a three-month leave from the Traveler to study Zen with Alan Watts on the West Coast. His office bookcase contained copies of the Gnostic Gospels and The Tibetan Book of the Dead next to the books on history and politics and the old volumes of U.S. Heritage and History.

Then, there was the matter of his doppelganger. Several people reported seeing, around the neighborhood, a man who looked and dressed almost identically to Freddy. Katherine, one of our reporters, once caught up with him. “Do you know you look just like Freddy McFerrin?” she asked. “Yeah,” the man answered in a near-whisper, “I know!” He quickly turned a corner, and when Katherine tried to follow him, she couldn’t find him. He had seemingly vanished.

After Freddy died, the doppelganger seemingly died, too. No one saw him again—except once. A young reporter decided to do a feature on the Dugout on Commonwealth Avenue, which had been one of Freddy’s favorite watering holes. Along with the article, he took a few pictures. When Katherine, who was now the editor, saw one of the downloaded photos, she almost fainted. There, at the end of the bar, was the doppelganger—or Freddy—tweed cap, tan coat, cigar and all.

Life went on at the paper without Freddy, but about two years after he died, I had the most vivid dream I’d ever experienced—almost as if it were in 3D. Freddy walked into the office and announced, “I’m Freddy McFerrin and I write columns. Where in blue blazes is my computer?” We’d moved his 1993-vintage, pre-internet desktop to the basement soon after he died. “Never mind,” Freddy said, “I’ll take this one. Let me start typing.” The other reporters and editors stood around him in shock, wondering how this was possible. When I woke up, I felt so overwhelmed that I couldn’t move for at least five minutes.

Two months later I had a similar dream. Freddy came back to the newsroom. Although the dream was just two months later, he appeared older than he had in the previous dream—he had less hair and was more wrinkled. This time, he just sat down at the computer and began typing without announcing himself. “He used to be here and now he’s back,” Katherine explained to two new reporters.

But these dreams, startling as they were, don’t compare to what happened to me a few days ago. After a long day, I took a little walk near the reservoir on the way home. I’d received one message. When I put the phone to my ear, I was terrified. There was Freddy! There was no mistaking his distinctive, gravelly voice. “Kid,” he said, “I know you and your wife have been thinking about where to go on vacation this year. May I recommend the Virginia part of the Blue Ridge. I know you went to the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, but this part is also noteworthy—it has the Peaks of Otter….” He didn’t finish the sentence.

I froze—I’d just had a psychic experience. I hadn’t talked about my vacation plans with anyone except my wife. How could he know? I looked at the phone number and recognized a Chicago area code. What would happen if I called it back? When I did, it was almost comforting to hear the operator’s voice: “The number you have dialed is disconnected or no longer in service.”

I put the phone away and headed for the liquor store on Cleveland Circle. Tonight I was planning to work on one of those tedious freelance articles I sometimes wrote for that electronics magazine. To make things go easier, I often bought a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. But once in the store, my arm, as if it had a will of its own, reached for Old Log Cabin bourbon on the next shelf. Well, I thought, this is interesting.

When I reached home, I heard myself telling my wife, “You know those vacation plans we’ve been talking about? Well, I suddenly thought about Virginia—you know, near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Remember the great time we had when we visited the Blue Ridge in North Carolina? …. Oh, Madre D’Dee! There’s Bonnie on top of the bookcase! What a fascinating cat! I wonder what in blue blazes she’ll do next….”

Down and Out in Indianapolis

2017-04-03T06:20:00.006-07:00

By Raanan Geberer

Back in the early ‘80s, when I accepted a one-year job as an editor at a weekly Jewish newspaper in Indianapolis to get much-needed journalism experience, I didn’t have a place to live when I first got into town. So I thought I’d stay at the local YMCA until I got my bearings and found an apartment. I’d briefly stayed at a YMCA in San Francisco three years beforehand, so I knew what to expect.

The place was on the west side of town, on the fringe of the African-American area. In fact, it was near Crispus Attucks High School, the school that had produced “The Big O,” basketball star Oscar Robertson, in the 1950s. The Y itself was surrounded by empty lots, and there just wasn’t much around there.

There were no cooking facilities, and no supermarkets in the area either – not even a small grocery store. However, there was a convenience store attached to a nearby gas station, so I bought stuff like crackers, cheese, soda and canned sardines. Thank God that there were places to eat lunch near my office – especially Wendy’s which hadn’t yet made inroads back in New York, where I came from. Wendy’s was a step up from Burger King and McDonald’s, I thought, pleased. My newspaper was in an old industrial building in the semi-seedy downtown area –an area surrounded by junk shops-- but even that neighborhood was better than the one near the Y.

There were no laundry facilities near the Y either, so I took to washing my clothes in the sink with powdered detergent, then letting them dry. This gave my clothes a gray, wrinkled appearance. It also made them smell. “Hey, Ron,” Mr. Goldberg, the elderly publisher of the paper, said one day, taking me aside, “people are saying that you stink. You sure you take showers?”Mr. Goldberg, a tough-talking former boxer and Prohibition-era bootlegger, was not known for his sensitivity.

By and by, I got to know the people in the Y’s residence hall. There was a young, blond, long-haired guy who was recovering from meth and alcohol addiction. “You know,” he said in a semi-Midwestern, semi-Southern accent, “I used to sell my blood to get money to get high, but now, I’m really into the Scriptures. I’m really into meditation, too! I just like to sit back and meditate to Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Molly Hatchet!” What ever one thought of those groups, it was very hard to think of them as background music for meditation.

There was also an old guy who would leave the door of his room open and just look straight ahead with a bottle of beer in his hand. “You may think he’s a nice old guy,” Consuela, the middle-aged front-desk clerk said to me one night, “but he used to be a cop! If you met him 20 years ago and he stopped you and asked for your driver’s license, you wouldn’t think he’s so nice!” While there were often allegations of police brutality back in New York, I got the feeling that here in Indianapolis, the cops could get away with doing whatever they wanted – especially if you were Hispanic, like Phyllis, or black.

One day, walking down the hall in the Y, a tall, thin guy with brown hair and a beard who looked like he was about the same age as me introduced himself. “Hi! I’m Vince Grimaldi,” he said. He invited me into his room. It was filled with heavy-duty radical books – Marx, Trotsky, Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Thorsten Veblen. “Right now, I’m organizing for the Citizens Party. It’s a new party, founded by Barry Commoner. We need a party that’s not dominated by conglomorate business."

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Third parties have always come to failure, at least on the national level. Look at the Populist Party in the 1980s, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, the LaFollette party in 1924...” We had a lively discussion, and I started visiting him every night after work.

We talked a lot about Indianapolis and how conservative it was. I remarked on how all the businessmen I saw downtown wore gray suits. “What if one wore a brown or blue suit?” I asked. “They’d think he was from out of town,” Vince answered. We both laughed.

I wondered what Vince was doing here. One night, he wasn’t there. I opened the door and there he was, passed out on the bed, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. Now I knew what he was doing here.
On the weekends, I started looking for apartments. “Just walk up and down Meridian Street,” one of the secretaries at the newspaper said, referring to the main street of the town. “There are vacant apartments in every building!” I expected these buildings to be full of young, single people, but in Indianapolis, most of the young single people either lived with their parents or in one of the newer condos on the edge of town. “Most of our tenants here are elderly,” the manager of a once-elegant 1920s apartment building told me, looking at me with hostility. “We also have some mental patients who are placed here by a social service agency.” I passed.

As the weeks went on, I began to despair of whether I would ever find a place. “You look homesick,” Mr. Goldberg said. “Why don’t I order you some Hebrew National pastrami, corned beef, salami? We get it air-mailed from Chicago....”

On the fourth Saturday, I found an apartment in an Art-Deco-style apartment building a little further to the north, in a more “respectable” area at 39th Street and North Meridian. The owners, a middle-aged couple, were happy to have me as a tenant and rented it to me at half the price it would have gotten in New York, There was a Chinese restaurant a block away, a bar across the street, and best of all a Laundromat in the building. The next Monday, I talked to Mr. Goldberg, who knew a furniture-store owner who helped me rent some furniture. Now, all I needed was a car. On my last day at the Y, I packed my bags and promised Vince that I’d stay in touch.

Next weekend, I went shopping in the nearest supermarket. Walking down the wide aisles, examining the huge variety of food, it occurred to me that the last time I’d even been in a supermarket was a month and a half ago. After the way I’d been living for the past month, Just being there seemed like an untold luxury to me. Welcome back to the world, I thought.

The Gang's All Here

2016-09-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

By Raanan Geberer

Larry’s English-language summer course, “Sociology of Israel,” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Mount Scopus, was supposed to be an introduction to the people of Israel, but it was basically a joke. The only people in the month-long intensive were Americans, Canadians and British, and the class didn’t meet any Israelis except for a few guest speakers. It only included three field trips—a weekend in Tel Aviv and one-day trips to an archaeological site and to a kibbutz.

The professor was a jovial, bearded American immigrant, or oleh, who had three pet topics. The first was the once-privileged position of Egged bus drivers, and how that was now fading away. The second was that nothing gets done in Israel without protectzia, or political influence. The third was the kibbutz way of life and the diet prevalent in the kibbutzim—yogurt, white cheese, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, eggs, olives and pita.

He didn’t talk much about the conflicts between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Jews and Arabs, secular and Orthodox – the very things that interested Larry deeply. The only good thing Larry saw coming out of this class was the fact that the three course credits would be transferred to his own college, the State University of New York at Binghamton, that September, the September of 1972.

Larry began exploring Jerusalem on his own, including the Old City, where he saw an Arab vendor selling T-shirts with the legend, “Don’t Worry America, Israel Is Behind You.” He wondered how the guy could sell shirts whose message he almost certainly disagreed with. On the same trip, he also saw a guy with an outdoor schwarma stand who was oblivious to the flies buzzing around the meat. Didn’t he know there was something wrong?

In the New City, Larry spent a lot of time in Richie’s New York City Pizza, famous for its bulletin board where American teenagers left messages for each other. The pizza would never have passed muster in New York itself. The European-style cafes on Jaffa Road, like the Cafe Alaska, looked enticing, but Larry didn’t feel he belonged there. Despite several attempts to learn the language, he couldn’t get the knack of speaking and understanding Hebrew.

He did go to falafel places a few times, but some of the items on the menu confused him. He knew falafel and he knew kebab, but what was “chicken schnitzel?” Was that a cutlet? If, so, why the hell couldn’t they just say cutlet? It was clear that the Israelis’ frame of reference, at least that of the older generation, was European, not American.

Of course, Larry also went to the Wall, and to the Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl to visit the grave of his uncle, Nathan, who was killed during the War of Independence in 1948. His father insisted on that. The irony was that Nathan had been a member of a left-wing Zionist group, Hashomer Hatzair, that had believed in Jewish-Arab cooperation. But once the fighting started, of course, all bets were off.

Although most of Larry’s classmates were his age or a little older, in their early twenties, Robert, a balding, overweight man with thick glasses in his thirties, was assigned to be Larry’s roommate. Robert, a social studies teacher in an inner-city high school in Brooklyn, loved to talk about the music he grew up with in Brownsville – doo-wop.

Larry himself was a closet doo-wop fan (closet because most people his age either ignored or belittled the music). Back home, he listened to radio oldies shows. He bombarded Robert with questions about the music.

“There were lots of group collectors in the old days,” Robert patiently explained in his deep voice, which no doubt was an asset in the classroom. “They listened to everything on the radio—Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Elvis—but they only bought songs by the groups.”

“Who was your favorite group?”

“The Harptones! They lasted a long time, and their songs came out on a million different labels.”

“Do you remember any songs that didn’t become hits, but were personal favorites of yours?”

“One of them was `Three Kinds of People in the World’ by the Vocaltones.” Larry had heard “Two Kinds of People in the World” by Little Anthony and the Imperials, but “Three Kinds of People” was a new one for him. He’d have to give it a listen.

“Yeah,” Robert told Larry the next day, “I really loved those old ‘50s songs. “Earth Angel,” “In the Still of the Night,” “A Thousand Miles Away,” “Can I Come Over Tonight” by the Velours, “Walk Away Renee” by the Left Banke….” Robert’s memory was playing tricks on him, Larry thought. Not only was “Walk Away Renee” from the mid-‘60s, it had a totally different sound than the 50s songs he’d just mentioned. Larry let it go.

When Robert wasn’t talking about music, he was talking about his experiences as a teacher. Unfortunately, like many of his generation, the experience of the 1968 teachers’ strike, which pitted the largely white teachers’ union against a black school district, left him with a bitter attitude toward black people in general.

“Half of these kids, they don’t want to learn, and there’s no way you can get them to speak good English,” Robert said. “I be doin’ this, I be doin’ that—and last term, one of the kids told me that a friend of his was called Jewboy.”

“Did you ask him why?” Larry asked.

“No, I didn’t bother to do that. If I did, he’d probably just say, `Because that’s his name.’”

Robert told Larry about a job interview he’d had with a black principal, whom he accused of anti-white and anti-Semitic bias. “Yes,” he remembered the principal saying, “We want a good mix of teachers here, some male, some female, some black, some white…” Larry couldn’t see how that could possibly be construed as anti-white. Instead of arguing with Robert, he asked him why, if he felt the way he did, he didn’t transfer to a school in a more middle-class area. It turned out that Robert had several disciplinary write-ups on his record that worked against him.

In the dormitory as a whole, the summer English-language students spent most of their time in each other’s rooms. They had hour-long bull sessions, fueled by endless bottles of Maccabee Israeli beer and occasional hits of Arab hashish. The Canadian students loved to criticize America because of the Vietnam War.

“There are two words that define America—arrogance and pride!” said Steve, a kid from Toronto with shoulder-length reddish hair. Although Larry was opposed to the Vietnam War, he still felt hurt by these remarks. There was more to America than just Nixon and Vietnam, Larry protested inwardly.

Two of the Canadian guys were Orthodox, wouldn’t turn on the lights on Shabbat and wore tzitzit under their shirts. Still, their religious beliefs didn’t prevent them from getting hold of a watermelon and carving it into the shape of a female breast, to the amusement of the other guys.

Indeed, other than classwork, the students’ main activity seemed to be trying to pair up with members of the opposite sex. Since guys outnumbered girls by two to one, this wasn’t an easy task. Only two couples got together. In the first, Al, a smooth-talking guy in his mid-twenties with mid-length blond hair and a goatee, took up with Gigi, a thin, nervous, olive-skinned girl.

When he wasn’t with Gigi, Al sometimes talked about the sexual experiences he’d had as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria. “You sit down at a table in a cafe, and Nigerian girls come up to you, and you talk to them and then say, `Let’s get it on.’ Most of them have never been with a white guy before, and to them, it’s a new thrill,” he said.

The other couple consisted of Marc, a tall British guy of 19 who was already starting to lose his hair, and Olivia, a 32-year-old New Yorker who was one of the few non-Jews in the bunch. Everyone was shocked because of the difference in their ages, but Steve, the guy from Toronto, wasn’t surprised. “It’s that suave English accent of his that gets her,” he explained. These two couples were often seen together in the campus snack bar.

Larry did come close to being in a relationship, or at least he thought so. But the encounter was still-born. One day, while Larry was walking around Zion Square after class, an American girl around his age approached him. She had long brown curly hair and was wearing jeans, a peasant blouse and sandals. She walked up to him:

“Hi! I wonder if you can help me. I was going to fly back to Seattle on Sunday, but I left my bag on an Egged bus, with my passport, money, everything. I need a place to stay while I contact the American Embassy and get everything sorted out. And I need to get back there soon—I have a kidney infection.”

Larry was a little suspicious of her story, but she seemed open and honest. But his room was so small. And what would Robert think about this? Would he be angry? Then there was the matter of her kidney infection. Could that be contagious in some way? He wasn’t sure, since biology wasn’t his strong point. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no….

“Um, I don’t think I can help you. I live in a tiny room in a dormitory and I share it with another student.”

A few days later, Larry saw the same girl on Ben-Yehuda Street. She was smiling. “I met a man with an apartment here, a journalist. He has a big apartment, and he’s helping me,” she said. Mazel Tov, Larry thought enviously.

As the semester neared its end, Steve said, “There’s a lot of positive energy in this country. Remember the weekend we all went to Tel Aviv? I went to Haifa the next weekend, and I visited my cousins in Netanya on the way back.”

“Did you hitchhike?” Larry asked. “Professor Brodsky said…”

“Listen, I know what Professor Brodsky said, that everybody hitchhikes, and that might have been true six, seven years ago. But the last few years, since the ’67 war, things have changed. There have been some incidents. Everyone’s more security conscious.”

“I can see that.” Larry, who had gone on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations at home, found it hard to take the sight of Israeli soldiers, most of them his own age or a little older, casually carrying their submachine guns in public.

“As far as this semester is concerned,” Steve continued, “forget about it! I didn’t find any girlfriends whatsoever! What’s the last time you heard of a 19-year-old taking a vacation and not finding a girl?”

Larry laughed. “Would you ever consider living here?” he asked Steve. He thought of his own parents, who, as Labor Zionists, lived in Israel for two years, from 1949 to 1951.

“I don’t know, Larry! I very well might retire here. But I don’t think I’d spend my productive years in Israel.” Larry was unsure, so he just nodded.

On the last day of class, he said goodbye to Robert in his room

“I envy that guy Al, the one who used to be a Peace Corps volunteer, the one who’s hooked up with that shy, nervous chick,” Robert said. “He travels all over the world, and no matter where he goes, he seems to have a great fuckin’ time!”

“Uh, what about you?” Larry asked. “At home, I mean. You have a girlfriend?”

Robert sighed. “No, haven’t had a girlfriend in a few years. I go to a lot of Jewish singles socials and dances, you know, like Temple Beth El in Great Neck. But I can’t seem to meet anybody.”

Maybe if he lost about 50 pounds he’d be in a better situation to find someone, Larry thought. Robert sensed that both of them were uncomfortable with this topic and started discussing music again.

“Did I tell you,” Robert asked, “that when I was a student in Thomas Jefferson High School in the ‘50s, the Italian guys were so much into rock and roll that they formed little groups in the lunchroom, just like the Black kids did? Yeah, you’d see a group of Italian kids singing at one of the tables, with a lead singer, a falsetto and a bass….”

Since they both lived in New York, Larry and Robert exchanged numbers. But Larry knew they wouldn’t see each other again. Robert was 32, or 12 years older than Larry. There was the Generation Gap to consider. When Robert was Larry’s age, people over the age of 18 didn’t wear T-shirts or jeans in the street unless they were “beatniks,” girls were supposed to wait until they were married before having sex, young adults were expected to live with their parents until marriage, and if you even mentioned the word “socialism,” you were suspected of being a communist. A whole different world.

A few days later, Larry waited for his flight at Lod Airport. The place was jammed with hundreds of kids—kids going back to New York, to Philly, to Montreal, to Chicago, to Los Angeles and to a hundred other places.

Two young women with too much makeup and too-tight blouses and jeans were approaching anyone their age in a state of near panic. They had bought bottles of arrack, an Israeli liquor, for all their friends, but they belatedly found out that they could only take a few with them before they had to start paying a tax. They were looking for someone who could take the remaining bottles in their luggage, then meet them at JFK Airport and give them back. Larry just steered clear of them. Why look for trouble?

He was wandering around the terminal absent-mindedly when he heard his flight called. Clutching his bag, he walked toward the gate, back to his family in the Bronx, back to a summer job waiting for him in a local supermarket, back to friends old and new -- back to America.

The Windermere Revives in Manhattan

2016-08-04T06:42:00.003-07:00

First Published in Straus News chain, July 2016

By Raanan Geberer

The once-elegant Windermere apartment house on West 57th Street and Ninth Avenue, for years an empty, deteriorating hulk, is coming back to life. Through construction netting, one can see a refurbished brick exterior, newly installed windows, and once-again prominent architectural details that had been obscured for decades.

In between its construction in 1880-81 and now, the building has had several incarnations, including as one of the city’s most upscale, elegant residences; housing for independent “bachelor girls”; and a down-and-dirty SRO.

The Windermere was probably named after Lake Windermere in the English Lake District. At eight stories, it was one of the first large apartment houses in the city. Not only did it have three elevators, rare enough in the early 1880s, but it had telephone service, which is extraordinary when you consider the fact that the city’s first telephone exchange was established just two years beforehand. Each apartment had five or six bedrooms, and the building boasted uniformed servants and marble fireplaces.

Still the building was soon overshadowed by larger, grander and more modern apartment buildings such as the Chelsea Hotel and the Dakota. In addition, a series of fires plagued the Windermere in its first decade.

Around 1890, the building’s policy changed, in part due to the hiring of superintendent Henry Stirling Goodale, described as “a man of artistic tastes,” and the father of two young women who wrote poetry. Goodale began to rent rooms within the suites to respectable young, single, employed women, as well as a smaller number of young single men. By 1900, the U.S. Census reported only four families in the building.

After Goodale’s departure, more men and families began to move in once again. Many families took in “roomers.” Census records of the building’s occupants in the first few decades of the 20th century, according to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, reveal a somewhat mixed tenant body, including stenographers, clerks, a railroad conductor, a nurse, a detective, medical students, a plumber, a doctor, a dressmaker, actors, and several chauffeurs and waiters.

The Windermere, from its earliest days, also had a reputation for housing artists. During the 20th century, some of these included Quinto Manganini, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for his opera “The Argonauts”; sculptor, painter and photographer May Mott-Smith; and photographer Alonzo Hanagan, known as “Lon of New York,” whose semi-erotic photos of male bodybuilders often got him in trouble with the law.

By the 1960s and early 70s, the Windermere was basically a rundown SRO. Among those who lived there when they were first starting out were actors Steve McQueen and Yaphet Kotto. In 1970, Kotto told The New York Times in 2002, he was filming “Across 110th Street” when he heard a knock on his trailer door. There stood his old landlord from the Windermere saying “McQueen owes me money.” Kotto paid the landlord several hundred dollars. He told the Times that one of the happiest days of his life was when he left the Windermere.

The Windermere’s worst days were still to come. In 1980, Alan B. Weissman took over. According to court papers and testimony, tenants’ rooms were ransacked, doors ripped out, and prostitutes deliberately moved into the building, presumably in an effort to empty the building. The Times wrote that several of Weissman’s building managers went to jail, and Weissman himself, earned a spot in the Village Voice’s “New York’s Worst Landlords” series in 1985.

By the early 2000s, only about half a dozen residents were left. I remember walking by the building and encountering one of these residents, who was having a sidewalk sale. Almost all the windows were covered with aluminum sheeting, and the former stores on the ground floor had been boarded up long before. By this time, the Windermere was owned by a Japanese company, Toa Construction.

In 2005, the city designated the building as a landmark, but that didn’t help conditions there. Two years later, the Fire Department evacuated remaining residents, saying the building was unsafe. Toa Construction had to pay nearly $4 million in penalties and lawsuits related to the building’s condition, The Times reported in 2007.

In 2009, Mark Tress bought the building for $13 million, announcing that he would convert it to an upscale hotel, with some affordable housing and stores on the ground floor also included.

Hell’s Kitchen has become fashionable again, and the Windermere is finally going along with it.

The 9th Avenue El--the 19th Century's High Line

2015-11-22T07:46:00.001-08:00

By Raanan Geberer--originally published in Chelsea-Clinton News/Our Town/West Side Spirit

Ninth Avenue in Chelsea is a pleasant street, with restaurants, bakeries, several important housing developments, a supermarket, the Church of the Holy Apostles, two diners directly across from each other. Further up the avenue, north of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the avenue is filled with young people going to bars and restaurants.

Now, picture the same avenue with a noisy elevated train line overhead. Hard to do? That was the reality of Ninth Avenue for seven decades, when the Ninth Avenue El was as much a part of people’s day-to-day reality as Penn South, Gristedes and the Rail Line Diner are today.

In the mid-19th century, horse-drawn street traffic in Manhattan was becoming unbearable. Charles T. Harvey, in 1866, formed a “West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway Company” and in 1868 finished construction on an overhead line from Dey Street to 29th Street along Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue. The line was powered by a cable-car mechanism.

According to “The New York Elevated” by Robert C. Reed (A.S Barnes & Co., 1978), Harvey planned to connect his el to the Hudson River Railroad’s (the ancestor of today’s MetroNorth Hudson Line) old terminal at West 30th Street. But malfunctions of the cable mechanism and lawsuits doomed the scheme. In 1870, the el was bought by new investors, who soon replaced the cable mechanism with steam engines pulling wooden cars.

By 1880, the el stretched from South Ferry to 155th Street. Other els sprung up along Second, Third and Sixth Avenues. Indeed, the Sixth Avenue line eventually swung west on 53rd Street and linked up with the Ninth Avenue El. By 1903, all four Manhattan els were absorbed into the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), which was then building the city’s first subway. In 1918, the Ninth Avenue line was extended into the southwest Bronx, where it joined with the IRT’s Lexington-Jerome Avenue line at 167th Street.

From the very beginning, the els were highly criticized, especially by newspapers. Critics said they blocked sunlight from the street, created noise, frightened horses and made buildings shake. Cinders from their steam engines, they said, fell on pedestrians and blackened the façade of nearby buildings. When the steam engines were replaced by electric power after the turn of the century, things improved — a little.

The worst disaster in the history of the Manhattan els involved the 9th Avenue line on Sept. 11, 1905. According to Wikipedia, a downtown Ninth Avenue train mistakenly switched onto the curve for the Sixth Avenue line. The train was going 30 mph, nearly 20 mph faster than recommended for that portion of the track. The motorman realized his error and slammed on the brakes, throwing the second car down to the street. The third car came to rest against the front of a nearby apartment building, and some of the passengers were able to escape through the windows. Thirteen people were killed, with 48 seriously injured.

What was it like to ride on the Ninth Avenue El? The “classic” el cars were 19th century century wooden “gate cars.” They had open platforms at both ends, protected by gates. At each station, a conductor had to open and close the gates for the passengers. In the early 1920s, some of these cars were retrofitted with enclosed vestibules and sliding doors. The stations were built in Victorian, “gingerbread” style. And in the winter, they were heated by pot-bellied stoves.

For years, civic reformers had sought the removal of the Manhattan els – both to give nearby residents a break and to raise property values along the avenues, according to the “Encyclopedia of New York City.” When the city’s own Eighth Avenue subway opened a block away from the Ninth Avenue El in 1932, the writing was on the wall. The City of New York purchased the IRT in June 1940 and ended service on the el. A small section from 155th Street to the Bronx was preserved as the ‘Polo Grounds Shuttle,” but that, too, was discontinued after the baseball Giants left the Polo Grounds for San Francisco.

A masterful depiction of the Ninth Avenue El can be found in Henry Roth’s novel “A Diving Rock on the Hudson” (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), based on his experiences as a high school student and college freshman in the ‘20s. Taking the el uptown to his friend’s house near Yankee Stadium, Roth and his friend daringly stood on the outside platform at the rear of the last car, which was “windier than windy.” The two chums had “their fedoras jammed down on their heads, topcoats buttoned up to the collar” as they strained to talk to each other above the howling wind and as the train clattered up the West Side. Rest in peace, Ninth Avenue El.

The Other Halves--a Short Story

2015-11-22T07:43:00.002-08:00

“Where to?” asked the overweight, T shirt-wearing and balding cab driver, as we prepared to go to the retreat center in the Hudson Valley. I usually rented a car when we went away on weekends in the tri-state area, but my wife insisted that we experiment with taking a Trailways bus this time. So we got off the bus in New Paltz and took a cab.

The cab trip took about 15 minutes. As we proceeded through the mainly rural area, the driver, who introduced himself as Ronnie, turned down his country-music radio station and started talking about himself. “I’ve never had the advantage of an education like you city people,” he said, with a slight Southern accent. “I’ve done everything. I worked in a factory, I drove trucks, I’ve been a salesman – sold stuff out of the trunk of my car – and now, a cab driver. So, we’ll see how this works out.”

“Have you always lived around here?” my wife asked.

“No, I’m from Florida, originally,” he answered, lighting up a cigarette, “but I moved around a lot.” He briefly looked back at us and smiled, then turned his attention back to the road. “I was married twice, but that didn’t last. When I get to a new place, I find a few rooms above a store, buy a few broken-down pieces of furniture, fix ‘em up, and it’s home!” After we passed a large mock-log cabin bar-roadhouse with lots of pickup trucks and SUVs parked outside, he made a turn and went up a hill.

A question kept popping up in my mind, and I finally couldn’t help but ask it. “If almost everybody has cars around here,” he said, “how does the cab company stay in business?”

He turned back for a second, put out his cigarette, then kept driving. “Well,” he said, “You see that bar we passed? Lots of people go there on at night, but they’re in no condition to drive home because they had a few drinks. So we take them home.” We passed a fishing bait-and-tackle shop.

“Then, the next morning,” he continued, “they call us again, and we drive them to their cars. Some of these old boys, they call us two, three times week. This Saturday, there’s going to be a band playing, so there’s gonna be a lot of action!” He turned up the radio again.

Somehow, I knew the band had to be country and western. I decided to change the subject and bring up something I’d heard from a friend who’d grown up around here. “I heard the police chief in Accord races cars himself in the stock-car races there.”

“Yep,” Ronnie said, smiling. “He’s always there with his car, just like everybody else. I really enjoy goin’ to the raceway—when I can afford it! Oh, here we are. Hey, let me help you take your bags out of the trunk. And when you decide to leave, here’s my card. Just call this number.” He turned around and waved goodbye.

· * *

After the retreat weekend was over and Ronnie drove us back to the bus stop, we found ourselves on a spacious, new bus headed back to the city. My wife and I marveled about how comfortable it was --- not like the cramped buses I used to take back and forth to the State University at Binghamton way back when.

Apparently the people in back of us had similar thoughts. “That was a wonderful idea for an experiment, to take the bus,” I heard a man with a British accent say. “It’s very clean, very spacious, very punctual, very convenient.” I sneaked a look back. The man was gray-haired, in his fifties or sixties. He was with a dark-haired heavy-set woman who was slightly younger, maybe in her late 40s or early 50s. She was wearing a silk blouse and a pearl necklace; he was wearing a white shirt with a light-blue tie and an expensive watch.

“I’m definitely finding it quite satisfactory,” the woman answered. She was definitely American, but she had an upper-crust, private-school accent, a little like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies. “And I engaged that cab driver, Ronnie, to do some work in my house.” Hey—that was the same cab driver we had, I realized with a smile.

“So,” the man asked, “do you want to talk about the weekend?”

“Well, unfortunately, the deal fell through. A pity—it was such a lovely house, right on the edge of the woods and near a lake. And, I was telling you before, it was a million-dollar deal.”

“You know, that reminds me about my son. He built a vacation rental property in the south of Spain, then, with the proceeds from that property, he built six condos. You’ve got to have that stream of income coming in!”

Wow, I thought. These guys are the antithesis of Ronnie!

“Now, for pleasanter things,” the woman continued. “I took along something for us to eat during the trip. It’s a salad of root vegetables with fresh Swiss chard and goat cheese in a balsamic vinegar and truffle-oil dressing. It’s in this plastic container. I brought these two forks.”

There was a brief silence, and then the man said, “Delicious!” The bus rolled through Newburgh.

“I’m glad you liked it! I’ll put it away so we can have the rest later,” the woman replied.

“I think I’ll do some reading. I’ll take a look at the Wall Street Journal.”

“And I’ll have a copy of Distaff.” I reflected, how, years ago, I worked for an energy technology magazine published by the same magazine group that put out “Distaff.” My editor at the tech publication had told me that “Distaff” was a high fashion and lifestyle magazine geared to wealthy, middle-aged women. Sounds about right, I thought.

The bus proceeded through one New Jersey town after another. My wife took out her copy of the New York Times Book Review, while I looked out the window, observing the red, yellow and brown leaves on the trees. I used to get a kick out of going through Paramus because it was home to the Paramus Roller Staking Rink—something I remembered passing numerous times during my college bus trips to Binghamton. But this time, I didn’t see it. Must have gone out of business, I thought. I dozed off to sleep.

I was awoken by the bright lights of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Behind me, the older couple began to speak again. “Where would you like to eat tonight? Something Italian?”

“Sounds marvelous!”

“I know a wonderful Italian restaurant, the Tuscan Villa, on the Upper East Side. It’s highly rated by Zagat -- It’s worth going to just for the wine list!” They both laughed. I wasn’t looking forward to going back to work at the newspaper the next day, but I put that out of my mind. I dozed off to sleep.

The driver opened the doors, and people started grabbing their bags and moving up to the front, trying to get to the head of the line. Outside the bus, many people waited for friends or loved ones. My wife and I went to the baggage compartment on the side and waited for the driver to open the door. Suddenly, we heard a loud crash.

“How terrible!” I recognized the voice of the Englishman who had been sitting in back of us.

“A catastrophe! Oh, I’m terribly sorry!”

And there, with passengers carefully avoiding it, were the remains of a salad of root vegetables with fresh Swiss chard and goat cheese, splattered on the bus terminal’s concrete floor.

The History of the High Line

2015-09-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Chelsea News/Our Town/West Side Spirit

The High Line is certainly the most popular attraction in west Chelsea today, attracting 5 million visitors annually. Most local residents know that the High Line itself was originally a freight railroad. But its history goes back well before the elevated structure was even constructed. Where tourists now walk, cowboys once rode on horseback.
In the 1840s, the Hudson River Railroad, the ancestor of today’s MetroNorth Hudson Line, built a street-level railroad with tracks on 10th and 11th avenues. After the line was merged into the New York Central in 1869, most passenger trains were re-routed into Grand Central. A local train known as the “Dolly Varden” provided passenger service to the West Side until around 1930, but in the main, the route became a freight line.
But even in horse-and-carriage days, operating a street-level railroad was dangerous. In 1852, a law was passed stating that a mounted “cowboy” had to ride in front of the trains to alert pedestrians and vehicles. That still wasn’t enough. According to the rail fan website www.kinglyheirs.com, in 1908, the city’s Bureau of Municipal Research reported that since 1852, the trains had killed 436 people. Both 10th and 11th avenues became known as “Death Avenue.”
Protests were mounted, plans were made, but it wasn’t until 1929 that the city agreed to build the High Line to replace the street-level freight tracks below 34th Street (the northern portion of the former freight line is now used by Amtrak trains heading to Albany and Buffalo). A brochure from 1934, celebrating the New York Central’s opening of the High Line, describes the original terminal on Spring Street, which had eight tracks and 14 elevators, and gives the names of the freight customers (such as Nabisco, whose building is now the Chelsea Market).
Perhaps the most innovative feature of the High Line was the fact that it went right through many of the buildings that it served, off-loading goods inside these openings. One of these openings can still be seen at the former Bell Laboratories building between Bank and Bethune streets, now the Westbeth residential complex. Some street-level rail traffic persisted for years, possibly to serve customers that the High Line couldn’t access. The last street train ran in 1941, according to the New York Times, and that trip’s “cowboy,” George Hayden, wore a 10-gallon hat to celebrate.
The High Line prospered for many years, serving the Meatpacking and Printing districts. But beginning in the 1950s, truck traffic began to eat into its volume. The freight terminal and the line south of Bank Street in Greenwich Village were abandoned in the 1960s. When the line was taken over by Conrail, which was created by the government to run bankrupt freight lines, the writing was on the wall. The last train, which carried three cars of frozen turkeys, ran in 1982.
In 1984, rail fan Peter Obltetz, described by the Times as an “eccentric neighborhood visionary,” bought the line for $10, but after owners of businesses underneath the structure, who favored demolition, mobilized against him, the federal government reversed the sale. In 1991, the Times reported, another section of the line, between Bank and Gansevoort streets, was sold for real estate development. Meanwhile, the line continued to deteriorate, attracting vandals, prostitutes and arsonists.
In 1999, two Chelsea residents, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, had the idea of making the unused structure into an elevated park and formed Friends of the High Line. Around 2001, this writer attended a debate at a local political club between the Friends, who displayed their plans for the park, and the Chelsea Property Owners Group, who complained of debris falling from the line and a lack of drainage that meant that “when it rained, it poured.”
Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, like the property owners, wanted the line demolished, but the Friends had the advantage of celebrity. A 2004 fundraiser covered by the Times was headlined by Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and Edward Albee, among others. In 2005, the Bloomberg administration assumed control of the former rail line, and ground was broken in 2006. The High Line Park opened in sections, in 2009, 2011 and 2014.
Today, on the High Line, visitors can experience t’ai chi, walking tours, meditation, comedy, music, gardening and even boxing. But there’s two things they won’t see. The first is a freight locomotive—and the second is a cowboy.

Whatever Happened to Student Power?

2015-09-16T05:47:00.000-07:00

From Tikkun Magazine

What will the high school of the future be like? Different. It will surely be freer; students will be more independent. High school students of today haven’t reached any peak of possible maturity. The students of tomorrow will be more mature than we are. Just as administrations have already become more liberal about dress codes, so tomorrow they will become more liberal about studies. And `formal education’ will become less formal.

These words from the anthology “Our Time Is Now,” circa 1970, edited by John Birmingham, call attention to a part of history that is all but forgotten: the student power movement in American high schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The stereotype is that all the action as far as demonstrations were concerned took place in the universities, and that if it did spread to high schools, those younger students were copying their elders. Another stereotype is that students were mainly protesting the “big” issues, like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.

Maybe that’s how the protest era started, but once it did, students, especially high school students, were also seeking reform of their schools, demanding a bigger voice for students in how these schools were run. In my own high school, circa 1969 or 1970, a group of radical students issued a list of “10 demands.” The only two I remember – the right to go out for lunch and the right to have soda machines in the schools – seem laughable today.

But these demands, and others like them across the country, were part of a movement that was called “student power.” This movement is barely remembered today and has very little counterpart in today’s high schools.

The 1960s was an age of protest, and many young people began to look at themselves as a vanguard of change. Inevitably, kids began to make connections between the hierarchical nature of American society and that of their high schools. Faculty and administrators usually had the right to overrule student governments and censor student newspapers, unilaterally impose behavior and dress codes on the students and, in some cases, inspect students’ lockers without permission. As a student at the Bronx High School of Science during that era, even during a “free” period, I couldn’t go from the study hall to the library without showing my program card.

An essay by Mike Fox, then a student at John Bowne High in Flushing, N.Y., that was first printed in an underground newspaper and then anthologized in “Our Time Is Now,” compared life in the school to his experiences working on a farm during the summer. “The farmer doesn’t give a damn about his cows,” Fox wrote.

“The only time farmer X—- (presumably the school principal) cases about us is when it involves out production. We produce marks and grades instead of milk. We are also bred for further production outside of Bowne. When a farmer notices that a cow isn’t producing well enough, he calls her out and sells her to the slaughter house. In the same way, we are called out after Bowne, into college, or remain with the herd or into the army to be slaughtered.”

As we’ve mentioned, many of these mini-revolts were at least partially instigated by things that we might consider trivial today, but at the time were considered important parts of young people’s identity. In Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest by Gale Graham, Graham mentions how some school districts forbade long hair and facial hair not only for male students, but also for male teachers. She quotes Geoff Burkman, who was a student at a Cincinnati high school in the late ’60s, as saying, “We pushed things as far to the limits as we could …. For instance, if the code said no sideburns below the bottom of the ear,
then we all made sure we grew our sideburns right down to that line.” Pants for girls were
another battleground. Graham recounts how female students at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn organized, risked being sent home, and called for days when they all wore pants to school.

In time, the rebellious mood spread even to schools where students weren’t really political. Jean Schaffer, who taught in Boston and New York City schools for thirty years, in the late ’60s was teaching at East Boston High School, which served a conservative, working-class neighborhood. Toward the end of the year, the freshmen, sophomores and juniors were required to stay in their home-room classes for several days so they wouldn’t interfere with the seniors’ rehearsals for graduation. One student, says Schaffer, started to loudly object, and the others joined in. Schaffer encouraged them to write down their dissatisfactions. They soon turned their writings into an underground newspaper, with Schaffer as advisor, which they distributed off-campus because of school rules.

As Graham points out, many of the gains students made during this era were the result of lawsuits and court decisions, often involving the American Civil Liberties Union and its state affiliates. The ACLU backed the Tinker vs. Des Moines case, in which students successfully sought the right to wear black armbands to mourn the dead in Vietnam, and the Goss vs. Lopez case, in which students in Cleveland who were punished with suspensions won the right to due process. In 1968, the organization issued a Guide to Student Rights for young people.

What happened to student power? Just like the overall protest movement, it may have been a victim of Kent State, the recession of the 1970s, the increasing competition to get into colleges, the higher cost of college education and resultant student debt, the conservatism of the Reagan era or all of the above. Many of the situations that the high school rebels of the ’60s objected to, like cops in the school and dress codes, are still in place.

Frank M., who taught high school studies in Suffolk County, N.Y., from 1999 to 2013, says that
at his school, there was little censorship of the student newspaper. Students had a voice when
issues like dress codes or electives were being discussed, but the school board had the last word. Told about the “60s students” demands that current issues be discussed in the classroom, he said, “They are discussed in some classes, but overall, there are other outlets for that, like the Model U.N. Club.” Overall, he said, students who view themselves as a revolutionary force or part of a vanguard are “very few and far between.”

Julia Judge, who graduated from Onteora High School in Woodstock, N.Y., in 2011, recalls, “From what I understand, everything publicly organized at my school had to be approved by a higher up, either a teacher or a principal or someone otherwise employed by the school.” She does remember a student petition for a “senior lounge” in the basement of the school, but that was shot down by the administration. “A lot of the small changes that occurred over the years, dress code included, seemed to be more because of pressure from parents than students.”

Jean Schaffer, who moved from Boston to New York City in the ’70s and taught there, remember that in the ’90s, many students in her school became very active in a “Stop the Violence” club, but the impetus for the club came from the principal, not the students themselves.

Will a new student power movement emerge? In today’s increasingly competitive world, students often look on high school as a mere way station to college and career. In these circumstances, it doesn’t seem likely. Still, the student power movement touched untold thousands of lives and, in this way, made a lasting contribution to society.

–

Why Are the Republicans Ignoring Bernie Sanders?

2015-09-12T05:58:00.002-07:00

Originally published in "Tikkun" online blog

Why are the Republicans seemingly ignoring Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president?

As an admitted socialist who believes in universal health care, requiring companies to provide maternity leave, sick leave and vacation time; taxing financial transactions, breaking up big banks and expanding Social Security benefits, Sanders seems like the perfect target for the almost-completely-right wing Republican Party.

Despite all that, Republicans don’t seem particularly interested in taking the bait.It seems logical that given the upsurge in Sanders’ support, the Republicans would view him as a serious threat and act accordingly. In August, Sanders drew a record-breaking 27,000 people in Los Angeles and 28,000 people in Portland, Oregon — the largest turnout for any 2016 presidential candidate up to that time. A Politco poll in July of New Hampshire Democratic voters showed 47 percent favoring Hillary Clinton, but Sanders gaining on her with 34 percent.

During the Fox News-sponsored GOP candidates’ debates in early August, which featured 17 candidates, I didn’t notice any mention of Sanders at all. It was all Hillary, Hillary, Hillary as the anti-Republican- as the candidate to beat.

If you search for Hillary Clinton on the Republican National Committee site, 577 entries show up. You’ll also find 579 entries for Joe Biden. If you search for Bernie Sanders, you’ll find a mere 10. Some of these mention him only in passing and two repeat criticisms he’s made of Hillary.

Only one, “The 5 Flavors of Bernie Sanders,” by Raffi Williams, gives us the type of attack we’d expect from the Republican Party. Playing on the fact that Sanders and the ice cream entrepreneurs Ben and Jerry both hail from Vermont, Williams, accompanied by drawings of ice cream cones, names these flavors: “Taxes and Cream, “Socialist Swirl” (with a “Taste of Europe”), ” “Nutty Professor,” “Taxpayer Dough” and “Bureaucratic Bonanza.”

Searching the web for statements from state Republican parties, we don’t find much either. When Sanders visited Wisconsin, the local GOP there put up a billboard that didn’t really address Bernie specifically, but just characterized Hillary Clinton and her as “Left and Lefter—Yesterday’s Candidates, Extreme Policies.” Hillary and Bernie’s heads were superimposed on the bodies of the two actors from “Dumb and Dumber.”

The most obvious answer about why the Republicans are virtually ignoring Bernie Sanders is that Hillary is still leading in the polls, and they expect her to be the nominee (and if not her, then Joe Biden). But there may be other answers. I asked the question to two people, one a Republican activist and professor from Brooklyn, the other a respected political consultant, also from New York, who has advised countless political campaigns.

Bob Capano, a former aide to then-Congressman Vito Fossella, political science instructor at the City University of New York, and former Republican City Council candidate, agreed with the conventional wisdom: “Republicans just don’t believe Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee. If Hillary Clinton continues to falter, another Democrat with the real ability to win the general election will jump in the Democratic primary. Specifically, Vice President Joe Biden.” Capano characterized Sanders as a socialist who would only appeal to the “far left” of the Democratic Party. He does seem to be on the mark about Biden, although, as a left-liberal Democrat, I would disagree with most of Capano's interpretation.

George Arzt, president of George Arzt Communications- a public relations firm that has represented a number of high-profile Democrats in their campaigns for office- has an interesting interpretation. “It’s difficult for the Republicans to `run against’ Bernie Sanders,” he says, “since Bernie Sanders is mainly in the race to run against Hillary Clinton. For the Republicans, it’s better to run against Hillary Clinton, especially for fundraising purposes—and they’re looking for money right now.”

In other words, nothing gets the Republican base more agitated and willing to donate than the mention of Hillary, one of their main targets for many years.

There’s a lot of truth to Arzt’s statement, but I believe there’s more to it than that. The Vermont Republican Party may have hit a nerve in its statement in response to Sanders’ entry into the race:

“For many years here in Vermont — the entire time Senator Sanders has been in public life — costs have been rising far faster than incomes. The gap between the rich and the poor has been expanding faster here than in most places. The working class has been getting smaller. And we lose a higher percentage of young, talented residents every year to the appeal of hope and opportunity elsewhere than any other state in the Nation.”

Wait a minute- the “gap between the rich and the poor”? The “working class”? These are phrases that are straight out of Bernie’s playbook. In fact, they were not part of most DEMOCRATIC PARTY candidates’ rhetoric until two or three years ago. It sounds like the Vermont Republicans, in this very atypical statement for the GOP, are trying to “head Bernie off at the pass.”

It seems that as long as GOP leaders attack Hillary, they’re on familiar ground. The issues they associate with her, namely gay marriage, abortion, and Benghazi, are familiar to everyone and can be used to whip up support among their base. Bernie, however, concentrates on economic issues. The Republicans know that’s where they’re most vulnerable.

If, even when responding to some of Sanders’ positions on income inequality, they bring up these issues, Republicans might upset their donors, most of whom favor the unsustainable status quo. In my opinion, that’s one very important reason that the Republican Party can’t afford to focus too much attention on Bernie Sanders, no matter how popular he becomes.

On the Road Again

2015-06-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

By Raanan Geberer

It was an ordinary day at the office of the Section 8 Leased Housing Bronx Team No. 2 at the New York Housing Authority’s Central Office. Today was one of the two days a week Rob Bergman went out on apartment inspections. First he’d have to wait for his partner, Manuel Enriquez. He opened his copy of the Daily News and started reading. More on the Iran hostage crisis, another demonstration against Mayor Koch, speculation about who President-elect Reagan would appoint to his cabinet—nothing new.

“Hey, Rob,” said Mike Gerson, a pudgy, balding fellow management assistant from Queens Team No. 1. “You know this one, babe? `My own true love..’” he began singing a horribly out-of-tune version of the Duprees’ 1962 hit. Since he’d learned that Rob was into oldies, Mike kept quizzing Rob with his renditions of ‘50s and early ‘60s songs.

“Hey, you wanna go to the next Ralph Nader show at the Garden?” “Maybe,” Rob answered. “I’ll let you know.” Mike was the problem child of the Section 8 office. While all the assistants were expected to do eight reports a day, Mike could barely manage three. At age 40, Mike still lived with his parents, and his only real interests were oldies, betting on sports and betting at the racetrack. He was now on probation—Rob hoped he made it.

Behind Rob, Rick, the unit’s token hippie, was taking to Lou, who had walked over from the Manhattan unit. “This summer, I’m going to be going back to The Farm for a few weeks. I try to get there every year.”

“A farm?”

“No, THE Farm. It’s a giant commune in Tennessee, man. You live on the land. It’s nice to get back to the land, man…..” And across from Rick, Jolene, a middle-aged black woman, was talking to someone on the phone about her latest cruise-ship vacation.

From across the room, Rob saw Mr. O’Leary, the team manager, walk in his direction. “Ah, Rob!” he said. “The man who can do everything! Annual reports, apartment inspections, transfer requests, move-ins, move-outs, you name them, he can do them. Listen, Rob, can I ask you for a favor?”

“Sure! What?”

“I know it’s not your day to do interviews, but one of the housing assistants at Bronx Team No 1 isn’t here, and there’s this tenant waiting. I’ll give you her folder. I heard from Manuel—he’ll be a little late—so there’ll be plenty of time, provided it’s a short interview. Here’s the folder.”

Rob sighed. “OK!” After a few seconds, a buxom, heavy-set woman in her late 20s or early 30s wearing a white blouse and dark skirt came to his desk and sat down. Rob looked at the folder. Irina? Hmm. A Russian. The notes in the folder told him that she was a substitute teacher but also a masseuse.

The conversation went fairly quickly. She felt her studio apartment was too cramped, and she wanted a voucher for a two-bedroom apartment, where she could use the other room as an office. The case was fairly cut-and-dried: Since she was only one person, she was only entitled to a studio or one-bedroom.

“You sure?” she said. “If you give me a transfer, I can give you a special massage.”

Rob got the point, but shook his head and said no. As she left, he reflected that this would be a great story to tell the guys at home.

Mr. O’Leary approached Rob’s desk. “Manuel’s here. He’s waiting for you in the garage. Better go downstairs so you can get a jump on those apartment inspections.

” * *

Rob and Manuel were speeding up the Sheridan Expressway with Manuel at the wheel. Manuel was a short, stocky Puerto Rican guy who wore an Army jacket. At 34, he was six years older than Rob. The two of them had seven inspections today. The Section 8 program’s inspections, Rob reflected, were the easiest ones known to mankind. The assistants didn’t have to inspect the condition of the apartments or anything—they just had to verify that the apartment had the same number of rooms as the record stated and that the person whose name was on the lease was still living there. There was another funny thing about Section 8, Rob reflected. You would think that as a government subsidy program, the main people it helped would be the very poor, but instead, the clients included a lot of immigrants, retirees, single parents who had jobs, people who worked part-time….

“So, I was telling you about my son?” Manuel asked, interrupting Rob’s thoughts. “I was changing his diaper, and he pissed in my face! Yeah, I knew it would happen sooner or later. I got christened!” Manuel smiled.

“You get angry?” Rob asked.

“Naah,” said Manuel, “He don’t know what he’s doing!” Rob was sometimes jealous of Manuel because he had a wife and a family. ”Hey—what’s the first address.”

“The one on Webster Avenue near 181^st—Mrs. Sanchez.”

“Oh, no! Not again!”

They had been to Mrs. Sanchez’s place two or three times before, and she was never home. Her apartment, in a decrepit two-family wooden house, had two buzzers jerry-rigged next to the outside door. They always rang the one closest to the door—the other one was just too high up to be functional.

Manuel got onto Webster Avenue and proceeded up through the South Bronx. “Hey,” he asked Rob. “You ever wanna be a cop?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, in the eyes of a lot of the people around here, you are one! We got the official car with the New York City license plates—as far as they’re concerned, we’re cops…Hey, I see a space near 180^th Street, coming up. That’s as close as we’re gonna get.” They got out of the car and walked up to the house.

“Mrs. Sanchez isn’t home again!”

“Okay, we’re going to have to tell Mr. O’Leary. Who’s next?”

“Mrs. Fierro. Fordham Road. Right near Fordham University, across from Arthur Avenue.”

“Cool.”

Mrs. Fierro lived on the third floor of a five-story walkup. She had long, flowing black hair and Native American-type features. As soon as she saw Manuel, she started talking to him in Spanish. They had a brief conversation, then Rob and Manuel looked at the apartment to make sure it had the right number of rooms. Rob gave her the annual inspection form, she signed it and we headed back to the car.

“You know what?” Manuel asked as he started up the car. “She’s Ecuadorian. I can tell by the way she looks and the way she speaks Spanish.”

“OK! So?”

“So a lot of Ecuadorians don’t like Latins! The minute she saw who I was and that I had, you know, a fairly high position in the Housing Authority, she started to make with that Spanish, to get me on her good side. But I know….”

Rob didn’t know what to say. As far as he knew, Ecuadorians WERE Latins. But why get involved in something he didn’t know about? They headed under the tunnel, then past the zoo, heading for the Pelham Parkway area, where the next inspection was scheduled.

The first stop was an apartment occupied by an elderly Russian-Jewish couple, recent immigrants. Their income was SSI and a subsidy from an immigrant-aid group. Rob talked to them in the rudimentary Yiddish he learned in college. They both got a kick out of the fact that they had a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking management assistant. “In Russia,” the man said, “you no see any Jewish person in any important job, government job!” This inspection, too, went basically without incident.

“Wanna eat lunch?” Harold asked after they left.

“Sure,” Rob said. This was his territory—his grandparents used to live around here. He directed Harold to a pizza place on Lydig Avenue. Rob had an eggplant parmesan; Harold had a Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwich. In the background, the radio played WABC.

“You know,” Harold said in between bites, “I remember when pizza first started coming out of the Italian neighborhoods and spreading all over the city, maybe about 1962. Sitting in a pizzeria and eating a slice while listening to the jukebox play the Four Seasons, something like, `Walk Like a Man,’ that was something else! That was the mood!”

Rob just nodded his head. As an oldies and doo-wop fan. he regretted that he was too young to really remember the pre-Beatles era in depth. He remembered a song here, a song there, but those six years in age between him and Harold really made a difference.

After about a half hour, Rob and Harold got on the road again. The first stop was an older Italian-American woman who lived in a two-family house near Allerton Avenue. The whole time they were in her apartment, Rob kept staring at an elaborate, small doll, depicting a very young child, inside a plastic bubble. Finally, he just had to ask.

“What’s that doll you have there?”

The woman shuddered, as if he had committed a terrible faux pas. “That’s the baby Jesus!” she exclaimed.

“Man, I should have told you,” Harold said, laughing, as they got into the car. “We celebrate the big holidays, but I stopped believing in the church when I was with the motorcycle gang, and we asked the priest to bless our colors. He did it, no questions asked. Later, I got to thinking. We were doing a lot of bad shit, and maybe the priest should have asked us what we were doing and tried to straighten us out. But no, he just blessed our colors….”

“Wait a minute,” Rob interjected. “I knew you were in a gang, but not a motorcycle gang. Were they the same?”

“No. The first gang was back in high school – it was a neighborhood thing. The motorcycle gang, that was after I got home from the ‘Nam. A few guys I knew got me into it. I thought it was just a motorcycle club, but by the time I realized it was a gang, I had gotten deep into it already. The only way I could get out of it was that I started taking classes at City College. Once they knew I was back in school, they left me alone…”

Next stop was Deborah Horowitz. Rob remembered her from last year. Deborah was a single woman in her twenties who lived in a studio apartment and was on psychiatric disability. She was attractive, had a pleasant smile and acted friendly, although she seemed somewhat spaced out. The last time he’d visited her apartment, they had a brief conversation, and Rob was sure she liked him.

Rob felt a commonality with Deborah--she, like him, she was an introvert and an underdog. The fact that she was Jewish was another plus. Until recently, Rob had few friends. He was rarely invited to parties, he had trouble finding a roommate in college and he had fairly bad luck with young women. Deborah, as he saw it, was the ultimate underdog. He wanted to start a relationship with her and guide her to happiness.

When they got to the apartment, he found his scheme foiled. Her mother was there, sitting at the kitchen table. Had Deborah sensed that Rob had tried to get too familiar with her during the last inspection and called her mother in for protection? Probably. Rob and Harold looked around, gave Deborah the papers to sign and left.

“You know,” Manuel said as they rode the elevator down, “I saw you looking at her. I think she would be a nice girl for you.” Rob, who had never told Manuel about his infatuation with her, said nothing. He felt hurt.

The next three inspections, and the last of the day, were in the predominantly black area north of Gun Hill Road. They were all within walking distance of each other, so Rob and Manuel could park the car and take care of them all in one shot.

First up was Saundra Washington, a middle-aged woman who lived in an elaborately furnished apartment in a co-op. Her write-up said she had three kids, but they were all in school today. “You know, I work for the Housing Authority, too,” she said.

“Is that right?” Manuel asked.

“Yes, I work over at Baychester Houses. I started as a teller and I worked my way up to supervisor. You see everything here? Working for Housing helped me buy all of it. I could never have dreamed of it when I was growing up in Harlem. I’m so happy I work for the Authority!”

“Congratulations,” I said. She signed the papers and we wished her good luck.

As they walked to the next place, five blocks away, Rob asked Manuel, “What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m gonna have dinner with my family, then go to the karate dojo to work out,” Manuel said proudly.

“I’m taking a t’ai chi class over at Lehman College,” Rob offered meekly. He assumed that a tough guy like Manuel would look askance at t’ai chi, which took a more gentle approach to self-defense than karate. He was wrong.

“Hey! I’m really glad for you, man. I’m impressed.” Manuel said. “I hope you become a martial artist. I really do!”

The next visit was to an old guy, around 85 years old. Rob remembered reading his folder in the office—he was a retired railroad employee. The apartment was sparely furnished. The guy, Mr. Wilson, answered “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to all their questions.

When it came time to leave, Mr. Wilson insisted on not only giving them their coats, but helping them put them on by holding their coats over their shoulders. Rob felt embarrassed. The guy probably had been taught to act subservient to whites on the job way back when, over and over until it became part of his personality. Rob resented being put in the role that Mr. Wilson was forcing him into, but Manuel just took it in his stride.

The last inspection, in the same building, was Jim Barnes, a tall, bearded guy who reminded Rob a little of Marvin Gaye. As Rob and Manuel stepped into his apartment, both were overwhelmed. On every wall were whimsical, colorful abstract paintings, punctuated here and there by black-and-white photos of street scenes. Although he tried not to, Rob couldn’t stop looking at a photo of a two half-naked, provocatively posed male dancers. Jazz was playing in the background—Rob was able to identify it as Sonny Rollins.

“Come, sit down,” said Mr. Barnes. “Hey, I’m glad to see you’re admiring my work. When I actually worked at a job, I did architectural drafting. Then, I had the bad luck to go to ’Nam.”

“Hey, I was in the ‘Nam too!” Manuel exclaimed. “Where were you?”

“Mostly in Saigon, but I was all over. I was in the Air Force—an aircraft mechanic. I worked on Huey helicopters, Boeings, Douglasses, Grummans….”

“Yeah, I was just regular Army. A grunt here,” Manuel answered.

“Anyway, I got injured, I really didn’t have the stamina to work full-time anymore. I’ve been using my time to take classes at the Art Students League. I had a few exhibitions—the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem. Doctor says my rehabilitation is going real good and I can go back to work next year. Then, you guys won’t see me no more.”

Rob and Manuel took a perfunctory look around the apartment, then gave Mr. Barnes that paper to sign. Mr. Barnes looked at them.

“Are you real guys?”

Rob and Manuel looked at each other. “Real guys?”

“Real guys. Do you do herb, drink wine?”

“Oh!” Manuel smiled. “He does herb,” he said, pointing to Rob. “I drink.”

“Well, OK. Just a minute.” Mr. Barnes disappeared into the kitchen, then returned with a glass of red wine in one hand, a hash pipe in the other. He handed the glass to Manuel and the pipe to Rob.

“Thanks very much,” said Manuel. “I’ll drink the solution, and he’ll do the pollution!” Everybody laughed. Manuel finished the glass. Rob took a few deep puffs, then left it alone.

On the way back to the car, Rob commented, “Now, that was interesting! By the way, did you catch the photos of those two male dancers?”

“Absolutely! In fact, when he said, are you two real guys, I thought he meant gay guys. But, to each his own, I say.”

As they got to the car, Manuel asked whether Rob whether he’d do the drive back. Rob agreed. After Rob had been driving west for a while, Manuel asked, “How far are we from the parkway?”

“We’ll be there in two or three minutes. There’s the sign for it over there.”

“You can see that far? It doesn’t look clear to me at all.”

After they came closer to the sign, Manuel acknowledged, “Hey, you were right! You know, we could have used someone with your eyesight in the gang. We could call you `Eagle Eyes!’” Rob smiled.

Once Rob had turned onto the parkway, Manuel turned on the radio. He fiddled with the dial until he found Christopher Cross’ “Sailing.” He started to sing along with it: “ Sailing, takes me away, wo wo wo wo….’ Hey, Rob, I love this song. It’s so peaceful, so mellow.”

Rob couldn’t believe that Manuel liked this song, which he considered to be overly slow and sentimental. He thought that a macho guy like Manuel would like either heavy funk like Parliament-Funkadelic or the Ohio Players, or loud, driving rock like the Stones or Deep Purple. Clearly, Manuel was a complicated guy. Rob remembered Manuel telling him that when he was a kid, he had been a model student and an altar boy. But after his parents moved to a new neighborhood, they had to take him out of Catholic school because of a technicality and put him into a public school. The other kids picked mercilessly on Manuel, who soon realized he had to get tough in a hurry. Maybe, Rob theorized, Manuel’s softer side went underground, but came out in his music.

After Rob and Manuel got back to the Housing Authority building, parked the car and went up to the office, Mr. O’ Leary told them they had a guest—Mrs. Sanchez! The one whom they had visited several times, but was seemingly never home.

“Why you no come to see me?” she asked. “I stay home three, four times, but you no come.”

“We rang the bell,” Rob answered. “The bottom bell. It looked like the right one.”

“Bottom bell no work,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “You gotta ring the top bell.”

Rob, Manuel and Mr. O’Leary all had the same idea simultaneously. “Um, Mrs. Sanchez,” Mr. O’Leary asked, “would you mind coming with us to the conference room?” Mr. O’Leary picked up a form, and the four of them walked down the hall and into an unused room with a round table and chairs.

“Now Mrs. Sanchez,” he said, “why don’t you look this form over and sign it? And if anyone asks, tell them that Mr. Bergman and Mr. Enriquez came to your apartment.” She signed the form as Rob and Manuel smiled.

As they left the conference room to go into the hallway, Mrs. Sanchez turned to the three of them.

“Happy Thanksgee’vee, everybody!”

125th Street--the West Side's unique elevated station

2015-04-21T19:51:00.002-07:00

NOTE--This was one of two transit history columns I wrote as an "audition" for an Upper West Side weekly. The publisher originally wanted me to write two a month. When she changed their tune and said she couldn't pay me for them, I told her I wasn't interested--RG

By Raanan Geberer

Once, elevated lines traversed Manhattan. We had four of them: the 9^th Avenue El, the 6^th Avenue El, the 3^rd Avenue El and the 2^nd Avenue El. One could look out the window (or, if you were daring, from one of the wooden elevated cars’ open platforms) and see City Hall, the Financial District, the Empire State Building, the great department stores and more. And as the trains rattled through the old tenement districts, you could actually see through people’s windows.

The last of the Manhattan els, the 3^rd Avenue El, was torn down in 1955, although a portion in the Bronx lasted until 1973. Transit riders today, unfortunately, don’t have the experience of seeing Manhattan from a moving train – well, almost. There are several elevated stations in Manahttan today – three at the northern tip of Manhattan, and the 125^th Street station on the Number 1 line.

Tourists are often surprised that the 1 train comes out of the tunnel for one stop at 125th, and even longtime city dwellers who are used to it sometimes wonder why this is so. It turns out that the train doesn’t climb to the surface at all. It stays totally on a level grade, says Charles Seaton, a spokesman for MTA New York City Transit.

What changes is the topography. At 125^th, we are in the middle of the Manhattan Valley, a natural depression running east to west across Manhattan. For the line to stay underground, the transit planners of the early 1900s would have had to put it in a deep tunnel with steep approaches and descents at either end. Building an elevated viaduct allowed the line to stay at grade.

And what a viaduct! Its centerpiece is an arch that the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has called “a testament to the skills of the engineers and contractors who built New York’s first subway between 1900 and 1904" and “the most imposing and visually impressive above-ground engineering structure of the IRT subway system.” The station itself sits right above the arch.

The arch was built both for aesthetic reasons and to avoid obstructing traffic at the busy intersection of 125^th and Broadway, according to information provided by the LPC’s Elisabeth de Bourbon. And while the construction of the underground sections of the subway took place out of the public’s sight, the building of the viaduct drew large crowds of spectators. In 1981, the LPC declared the viaduct a New York City landmark, and in 1983 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today, says Seaton, the station serves the northern part of Columbia University, the New York City Housing Authority’s Grant Houses, the 125^th Street shopping district, Grant’s Tomb and more. It is in walking distance of both the revived Cotton Club, named after the 1920s and ‘30s-era Harlem nightclub that helped launch the careers of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway; and the Old Broadway Synagogue, the last remaining European-Jewish synagogue in Harlem.

Because it is in such a busy location, it is also fairly heavily used. In 2012, according to the MTA, it had 2,560,513 riders and was the 181^st most-heavily used station in the transit system, out of 468 stops.

Today, when you’re riding on the Number 1 train and look out the window just north or south of the 125^th Street station, you’ll see a varied streetscape – once-elegant old apartment houses, the projects, the shopping district, garages, warehouses and more.

These vistas may change in the future, in this ever-changing city. But to riders on the Number 1 line, the train’s “coming up for air” (even though it stays at grade level) will continue to be a welcome relief.

A Requiem for Sheepshead Bay’s El Greco Diner

2014-12-25T14:12:00.003-08:00

Sheepshead Bay elicits a warm feeling for me. It was one of the first areas of Brooklyn I ever got to know, thanks to an early girlfriend and several co-workers at the New York City Housing Authority. In those days, the highlights were Lundy’s, Pips Comedy Club (where my stand-up routine bombed, but a young Andrew Dice Clay, on the same bill, got tremendous applause), Joe’s Clam Bar and Captain Walter’s.

Today, as the Eagle’s Lore Croghan wrote recently, the highlights along Emmons Avenue include the Cherry Hill Gourmet Market, the Turkish restaurant Liman, Randazzo’s Clam Bar (which was also there in the old days), the Opera Cafe and more. And, of course, on the other side of Emmons Avenue is the bay itself, with its fishing boats.

Throughout the years, one mainstay on Emmons Avenue, much less exotic than many of the locales named above, has been the El Greco Diner. When someone walks from the subway to the bay, the El Greco is one of the first things they encounter. But not for long! As Sheepshead Bites, Gothamist and a host of other media outlets have reported, the owners plan to close the diner by the end of this week, reportedly to make way for a “new residential tower with ground-level commercial space.”

Many of the aforementioned restaurants are geared to both locals and visitors, but the El Greco, it seems to me, was mainly for locals. I can’t see anyone making a trip to go there. It’s not that different from other Brooklyn diners, including the Park Plaza in Brooklyn Heights, the Purity Diner in Park Slope, the Green Pavilion in Bensonhurst, the excellent Three-Star Diner on Avenue U and more.

The menu at the El Greco reveals a lot of variety but few surprises – mainly the usual burgers, omelets, pancakes, sandwiches, pasta, dinner specials and so on. Online reviews of the food there are mixed—Yelp gave it an average of only two stars and Google reviews gave it an average of three stars.

But classic New York City diners aren’t meant for fine dining. They’re meant as a place to go for breakfast, on the way to the bay, after a date, after a softball game, for a late-night snack or to meet old friends and family members. They offer solid, hearty food. And if a diner has a back room or large tables, chances are you’ll find all kinds of groups meeting there, from political discussion groups to poetry readings to board-game fanatics. Just check meetup.com.

It’s not just the El Greco that’s closing. In the past few years, diners have been closing all over the New York area. In Brooklyn, these have included the Kings Plaza Diner, the Americana Diner in Dyker Heights and, unfortunately, one of my favorites, the Celeste Diner in Concord Village.

Diners have traditionally occupied a “middle ground.” They attract people who aren’t accustomed to upscale restaurants or can’t afford them on a regular basis, but who demand something better than fast food.

For all of these reasons, I’m lamenting the closing of the El Greco Diner. Time to raise your glass of Diet Coke, say a toast and wait for the last turkey burger or spinach omelet with French fries to arrive.

That Thar Bebop--a Short Story

2014-09-08T06:23:00.003-07:00

Rob couldn’t believe his luck. The first car – actually, a pickup truck – that came by picked him up. A student at the State University of New York at Binghamton, he had a gig with his amateur rock band with his hometown friends back in the city. And in moment of daring, he’d decided on the spur of the moment to hitch hike all the way down.

Not that this was uncommon – in the early ‘70s, everybody hitchhiked. It was sort of a reverse status symbol for many young people, kind of like wearing one’s jeans or flannel shirt for three days straight. But this was the first time that Rob would hitchhike to the city, rather than just around the Binghamton area. When Mark, the freakiest guy in the dorm, the guy with the longest hair, congratulated him, Rob joked, “It’s easy for you! You’ve been a hippie for five years, or whatever! For me, it’s only been a few months!”

So here he was, holding his third-rate bass guitar in its cloth case in one hand and his shoulder bag containing his schoolbooks in the other. Beside him sat two farmers. “You wanna hear the radio?” one asked. Rob nodded, and the driver turned on a country music station. “You like that?” “Yeah,” Rob answered in a weak voice. “He wants to hear that thar bebop!” said the other man “Yeah, he wants to hear some o’ that thar bebop!” The two farmers laughed good-naturedly. Rob knew they meant rock and roll rather than “bebop,” but he didn’t want to spend the time correcting them.

He looked out the window. “Bunn Hill Road,” the street sign read. How odd. Where he came from, in the Bronx, there was a street called Gun Hill Road. From Gun Hill Road to Bunn Hill Road! The story of his life. But he didn’t even want to be here. After eight months up here, he was ready to transfer to a college back in the city if his parents would let him. Most of the other students up here were upper-middle-class kids from Long Island, and he found their ultra-confident way with girls, their fancy stereos and cameras, their recent-model cars, their trips to Europe and to California, hard to take. He preferred his Bronx friends, who didn’t have any of their pretentiousness. He’d made only one friend at Binghamton – Danny Weissberg, a really short kid from Brooklyn who wore a black leather jacket and talked like a tough guy. Rob got to know Danny because they liked the same music – ‘50s rock, Commander Cody, J. Geils – and the same R. Crumb underground cartoons. Sometimes Rob felt guilty about laughing at Danny’s crude racial and sexual jokes, but most of the time he was just grateful that he had a friend, period. Danny also played the bass, and when he bought a new instrument he gave Rob his old one – the very bass guitar he was now carrying in its bag.

“Sorry, buddy, but this is as far as we go,” one of the farmers said, laughing. Ron picked up his bass and his shoulder bag and jumped out. He was still on a country road, not even on the highway yet, but at least it was a start.

After about 20 minutes without a ride, he got worried. After all, this place was somewhat off the beaten track. What if he was here for one, two hours and no cars came? Not only wouldn’t he get to the gig, he wouldn’t get anywhere. When the sun went down, he’d be all alone and forgotten. The thought was terrifying. He grew more and more nervous. He began to rock back and forth.

Suddenly a car slowed down. Ron couldn’t believe it–he ran as fast as he could and got in the front seat. The driver was an older black guy in a suit and tie, and yes, he was going to Route 17. He looked like a lawyer or something. As they proceeded down the road, the guy turned on his radio. The sounds of “When The Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” the Supremes’ first semi-hit, filled the car. “I haven’t heard this in such a long time,” Ron said, hoping the guy would think of him as an OK white guy, not the prejudiced kind, the kind of white person who appreciated black culture. But the guy said nothing, driving on. Perhaps he was tired of young whites trying to impress him with how hip they were, Ron thought. The guy kept on driving. Finally, he let Ron off near Deposit, or as the upstaters pronounced it, “Dee-paah-sit.” It wasn’t anywhere near where he wanted to go, but at least it was on the highway.
Once again, Rob stood by the highway with his thumb out, but this time it was busy Route 17, whose traffic included huge trucks as well as cars. He didn’t expect any of the trucks to pick him up, but you never knew. Hey, here’s a Pinto that’s slowing down. Deliverance! He ran up and got into the front seat.

This time, the driver was a sloppily dressed, half-bald guy who looked like he was in his late 20s or early 30s, “old” to the 19-year-old Rob. “I can drive you all the way to the Red Apple diner,” the guy told him. For at least 15 minutes, they drove in silence. Finally, the guy asked, “Where do you go to school. By the way, my name’s Joe.”

“My name’s Rob, and I go to SUNY Binghamton.”

“Hey! I’m from Binghamton myself! Do you hang out in any bars there?”

“Well, sometimes my friend and I go to the pub on campus, sometimes we go to the bars on Clinton Street or to Poncho’s Pit. My friend Danny, he just discovered this bar called the Turf Exchange Motel. Ever hear of it?”

Joe made a face. “It’s OK, if you want to get your dick sucked!” Something about the way he said it made Rob nervous.

“I thought the gay guys in Binghamton go to the Cadillac,” Rob said, trying to appear cool and not rattled.

“They sometimes go there, too. Where you from? You from New York City?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever been to that Port Authority Bus Terminal? That’s where the guys hang out in New York, right?”

Rob saw what the guy was driving at, and was trying as hard as he could not to show any anxiety. “Yeah.”

“Hey, nothing personal, but what would you do if I asked you to suck my dick?”

“I don’t think I’d be interested.”

Joe drove on for another minute or two. “Well,” he said, pulling over, “I guess I’ll leave you off here.” It wasn’t even halfway to the Red Apple, but Rob felt relieved.

Another hitch, desperate for a ride, and another driver. This guy drove a blue VW and was a musician. At last, someone interesting. He was also older, but Ron felt he could talk to him. The guy played alto saxophone and preferred to play jazz, but found himself playing in wedding bands most of the time.

“So, who do you like on alto? The Bird?”

“Yeah, you know, the Bird, Sonny Stitt, Cannonball, Lee Konitz ... yeah, it’s a tough life,” the musician answered. “Here, let me take a little drink.” He took out a bottle that was lying on the seat next to him, took a swig, then put it back. Ron admired his chutzpah, but was a little concerned about his driving ability.

“Hey, you want a drink, too?”

“Um, no thanks.”

“What’s in that case, a guitar or a bass?”

“A bass.”

“I thought so. My brother plays bass. He used to play with Stan Getz.” And the guy went off on a tangent about all the famous musicians that he
knew, or met, or played with, or just missed playing with. He was going to look up some of his old friends when he hit the city and have an all-night jam session. Rob wished he could go, but his own gig took priority.

“Yeah,” the musician continued, “It’s a tough life. When you play club dates – that’s what we call weddings – they really don’t want you to play solos, and you have to play songs they already know. Even if you play a song by an artist they like, but one that’s less well-known, they look at you like there’s something wrong with you. Yeah, being a musician is a tough life.” He picked up the bottle and took another swig.

By this time, the car was wavering back and forth in the lane. Rob didn’t want to get into an accident. On the other hand, he couldn’t just say, “Please stop the car and let me out, because you’re drunk.” That would be an insult. What should he do? Rob’s anxiety was building up, minute by minute. He started to have breathing problems and had to take out his asthma inhaler. Then, around the bend, far away at first but getting closer, a rest area appeared. Rob knew had to make his move fast.

“Oh, excuse me,” Rob said, turning to face the driver, “but I’ve decided to get off at this rest area. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. I’ll be able to get another ride from there.”

The musician shrugged his shoulders, took another drink and said, “OK! Cool, man!” He slowed down and let Ron out. As the car sped away into the distance, Ron heard the sound of brakes squealing and saw the VW stop short, just inches from another car. He felt incredible relief.

Rob walked over to the main building, took a much-needed piss and then got a cheeseburger and a Coke. There were a lot of interesting things for sale and he would have liked to have looked around, but he couldn’t – he had to be at the community center in two hours. He walked absent-mindedly back to the side of the road. Here, this brown Maverick is slowing down. Better run to it.

The Maverick had two girls in front and another long-haired guy in the back. Because the girls were constantly talking to each other and not to the guy, Ron correctly guessed that he was another hitchhiker. They were going all the way to New York. What great luck!

One of the girls, the one who wasn’t driving, turned around. “Rob, is that you?”

“Definitely!”

“I heard you were up at Binghamton, too. I saw you on campus a few times. I’m Reena Greenstein. You remember, right?”

Ron remembered. He’d known her, although not very well, since junior high school. Something about her made him – and a lot of other kids –somewhat uneasy. Her father owned a hole-in-the-wall candy store that carried a lot of girlie magazines, and he was known to take bets on the side. It was rumored that one time in ninth grade when her parents weren’t home, Reena had made out with four guys, one after the other. In her first year in high school, she had gone out with Joey Fernandez, a neighborhood guy at least 10 years older than her who eventually OD’d on heroin. True, she was smart in school, but still ... She and the other girl, the one who was driving, had started talking to each other again. Rob started to eavesdrop on what Reena was saying:

“I might as well start having good relationships with my professors now, so I can get good recommendations for graduate school a few years down the road. I’m completely sure now that my future is in anthropology, probably cultural anthropology, teaching and doing research, and having relationships with people in the anthropology community. I’m trying to get a summer internship in New Mexico.”

Ron was surprised. Now she’s reinvented herself as some kind of prissy “A” student type! Well, this “B” student salutes you. Maybe she should get together with Danny Weissberg. That would be something – Danny, who tries to act like a hood, and Reena, who actually had been a hood! Something to think about.

Rob looked at his watch. He’d be back in the city in plenty of time. When they got to the toll to the Tappan Zee Bridge, he generously kicked in two dollars for the tolls. For the first time since he’d left his dorm room, oh, it was only a few hours ago but it seemed like a month ago, Rob began to relax and to be filled with positive energy. Soon, he’d be at the community center with his friends, doing one of the few things that really mattered to him – playing music. “Back in the USSR,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Watching the River Flow,” “Beware of Darkness,” “Smoke on the Water,” “Ramblin’ Man.” His girlfriend would be in the audience. And Binghamton? It was 300 miles away. He was happy at last.

Mr. FInkel--a tale of an aging Jewish gangster in the 1954 East Bronx

2014-08-07T07:14:00.003-07:00

Mr. Finkel paced up and down in his spacious apartment on Crotona Park East. He lived in the best building in the area, an elevator building that had been built just before the crash in ’29. It had a marble lobby, three staircases, a big courtyard with a statue in the middle and a laundry room . It was one of the few things that gave him solace nowadays. In the background, his wife watched the Army-McCarthy hearing on TV.

He’d been out for two years already and was itching for some action. He kept his job as a Wall Street clerk that he’d been given as a condition for his release, but let’s face it, there was no future or real money in that. He wanted to get back in the game in the worst way, but his parole officer wouldn’t even let him go to Tillie’s candy store, with its two-bit bookies and its penny-ante pinochle games. His wife’s brother owned a big commercial laundry on Allerton Avenue and White Plains Road, and both his wife and his brother-in-law both wanted him to become a partner.

But so far, he resisted. After all, he’d been in the outfits since he was 17 and Dutch Schultz hired him to work on the truck delivering barrels of beer. He was still only 52 years old—he had a lot of years ahead of him. Some of the guys he used to run with, like Meyer Lansky, Longie Zwillman and Doc Stacher, were making millions in Florida, in Vegas, in Havana. Why not him? It just wasn’t fair! He wasn’t ready to throw in the towel and become a square.

On top of it all, his wife kept pushing him to move to a better neighborhood, to the Concourse or Pelham Parkway. But Mr. Finkel resisted. Yes, the neighborhood was changing. But the changes hadn’t reached his block, or any of the adjacent blocks. He’d lived in this building ever since he moved up here from down-and-dirty Fox Street. He knew the butcher, the baker, the appetizing store guy, the newsstand owner, the local movie theater. No, he’d stay here for the time being – unless, of course, he got his big break and moved to Miami or Vegas.

Suddenly, he got the call he’d been waiting for. It was Mr. Vellela. He wanted to see him tomorrow in his suite at the Concourse Plaza. They agreed on a time. He wouldn’t miss this for anything in the world!

“How you doin’, Sol,” Mr. Vellella greeted him as he walked into the office. “You want a drink? Scotch,

bourbon, rye, anything? A martini, maybe? My girl will make it for you.”

“Just a Canadian Club and soda,” Mr. Finkel answered, sitting down in the plush armchair. “What took yiz guys so long?”

“Well, we’ve been a little preoccupied. Frank Hogan, the Manhattan DA, is startin’ to make some noise again. Also some tension between some of the families. Don’t worry about it—it’s a Sicilian thing. But let’s let bygones be bygones. You up for a little proposition?”

“Sure. You know me,” said Mr. Finkel eagerly, sipping his Canadian Club. He was finally going to get some action. “Watcha got in mind?”

“We want you to run some numbers for us.”

It wasn’t much, but at least it was a new start. “Sure! Where?”

“In your area, you know, East Tremont, West Farms, Crotona Park.”

Mr. Finkel frowned. “I dunno. About half the neighborhood is P.R. now. Those people want to bet with their own kind.”

Mr. Velella smiled. “That’s why we want you to partner with this kid, Jesus! He’s smart, he’s resourceful, he knows the lingo, he knows the people.”

“His name is Jesus? You bullshittin’ me?”

“It’s pronounced Hay-Zoos! Lots ‘a Puerto Ricans have that name.”

“Whatever.”

The next day, Mr. Finkel met Jesus, whose family owned a private house near the old railroad tracks south of 180^th Street. He was impressed with his intelligence, his organizing ability, the way he had a backup plan ready if anything went wrong. Jesus would organize the street operation, recruit local teens as runner and do the collections, while Mr. Finkel would do the bookkeeping and deal with Mr. Vellella and the other higher-ups.

“You and me, Jesus, we’re gonna make mucho dinero!”

“That’s Hay-Zoos!”

“Whatever.”

For awhile, things went great. It was almost like the old days before the war, although not quite. Because he didn’t want to attract too much attention from the parole board, Mr. Finkel wore suits from Robert Hall nowadays, not the $100 suits of yesteryear. For the same reason, he didn’t drive a Packard anymore, just a more plebian Oldsmobile.

After about six months, however, things began to go sour. Jesus became late with some of his payments and became increasingly difficult to find. And, of course, Mr. Vellella put the pressure on him. He decided to take things into his own hands. Going through his ledgers, he focused on one address that was two months behind in payments. He decided to go there himself. He was a little nervous about going that far south, to 169^th Street, but why should he be afraid? Wasn’t he the same guy who had personally bumped off three hijackers when he was riding shotgun for the Bugs and Meyer Gang back in the ‘20s? He might be a little more overweight and a little more gray, but he was still the same guy, he told himself. He headed out. Just to make sure, he put his gun in his pocket.

Walking up the tenement stairs to the apartment where that particular numbers drop was located, he had the sense that something was wrong. Suddenly, he found himself face to face with five Puerto Rican teenagers.

“Where you going,” one of them asked. “You don’t live here.”

Thinking fast, he said, “I have to visit someone. I’m a Welfare investigator.”

“No you’re not,” said the same kid, whom Mr. Finkel gathered was the leader of the gang. “We know who you are. As soon as we saw you on the street, we followed you here. You’re Mr. Finkel, right?”

“What’s it to you?” Mr. Finkel asked in a oud, aggressive voice. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. You don’t know the people I’m connected with.”

The gang laughed. “We’re not afraid of anyone, man,” another one said. “We’re the Diablos!”

“You’re making a mistake,” Mr. FInkel said, yelling even louder. “I’m gonna tell Jesus about this!”

They laughed again. “That’s Hay-zoos, man. He’s working for us now!” the leader bragged. “He’s been with us for about a month.”

So that was why the money wasn’t coming in, Mr. Finkel thought.

“Look,” the leader of the Diablos said in a suddenly conciliatory voice. “We don’t wanna hurt you. We give you respect because we know you’re one of us. You’re a player. But your Jew gangsters and your Italian compadres don’t run things about here no more. We do! So why don’t you just go home?”

Mr. Finkel was packing heat, but he knew he couldn’t take on five guys. As he started going down the stairs, he heard the Diablos’ boastful chant:

“Out came the Diablos

From the coconut trees

They were bad motherfuckers

In their BDVs!”

When Mr. Finkel got home, he was shaking. “What’s wrong?” his wife asked. “Something happen to you?”

“Nothin’,” he said brusquely, waving her concern away with his hand. “Just gimme a Canadian Club and soda, will ya?”

Mr. Finkel stayed awake all night, thinking. If he left the life, Mr. Vellella would be pissed, but Vellella knew enough about him to know that he wouldn’t start running to the cops and the DA. Maybe it was time, he thought. In the morning, he woke his wife up with a smile.

“Rachel,” he said, “Tell your brother I’m goin’ in with him in the laundry. And so we can be closer to the place, we’re movin’ ta Pelham Parkway!”

Bay Ridge--a Brooklyn Success Story

2014-06-30T11:03:00.004-07:00

Originally from Brooklyn Daily Eagle

A recent Brooklyn Daily Eagle article by Paula Katinas states that “Bay Ridge is such a desirable neighborhood to live in, people will do anything to live there.”

Many buyers are purchasing one- or two family homes, gutting them, then transforming them into multi-family housing with as many as eight apartments. In some cases, says Katinas, the buyers claim they’re only making minor improvements, get permits for the work, but then redo the house from top to bottom.

If they are caught doing so, they should pay the penalty. But the question remains—what is it about Bay Ridge that makes the area so attractive? It’s common to see third- or fourth-generation residents living in the area – something that can’t be said about most neighborhoods.

One reason is that Bay Ridge has a mix of private homes, two-family houses and apartment houses. The smaller houses range from spacious wooden homes to row houses that in many cases are as appealing as those in Park Slope and nearby areas. The apartment houses are generally solidly built, many are elevator buildings, and they are generally well maintained. This is not the situation in some nearby neighborhoods where the single-family homes are well cared for, but many of the older apartment houses are somewhat rundown.

Another factor in Bay Ridge’s success is its nightlife. The bars and restaurants of Bay Ridge don’t feature famous singers and musicians, but they make the neighborhood as lively at night as during the day. If a neighborhood has crowds of people walking around at night, crime is less likely to occur. The clubs and bars contribute to a sense of community, and many of the bands have a local fan base. If one particular bar is a problem, the community moves into action, but the majority of them are solid, law-abiding enterprises.

In addition, Bay Ridge and nearby Dyker Heights have a very high number of people who are actively involved in local affairs. Political clubs (of both types), churches, Boy Scout troops, PTAs, youth baseball leagues, amateur arts groups, community gardens and more all have very high rates of participation.

Why this is the case I don’t know, but this type of cohesiveness may easier to maintain when you have large numbers of people who have grown up together and known each other for many years. One Bay Ridge resident who works for the Eagle once told me that most residents know who their local politicians are. By contrast, when I went petitioning to get my assemblyman back on the ballot in my own neighborhood, quite a few passers-by didn’t know who he was – even though he’d been in the Assembly for more than 25 years.

Finally, Bay Ridge is a community where small business thrives. A case in point is Hinsch’s, now known as Mike Hinsch’s Greek-American Diner. There used to be hundreds of places like Hinsch’s all over the city, but it’s not an accident that Bay Ridge is where this one has survived. Yes, chain stores are making inroads on 86^th Street and other Bay Ridge arteries, but not as much as in some other neighborhoods.

This type of small-town living isn’t for everybody, but it appeals to enough people to make Bay Ridge a Brooklyn success story. No, builders shouldn’t cheat to get more people in – but can you really blame them?

My Memories of Long ISland College Hospital

2014-06-12T13:33:00.003-07:00

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Now that LICH is closed, regardless of when or in what form it will eventually reopen, it’s time to reflect on the past.

I first heard of it when I moved from my basement apartment in a two-family house in the Bronx to an Art Deco apartment house in Midwood, Brooklyn. At the time, I was suffering from serious asthma. That was why I moved out of the two-family house – my place was next to an open boiler, and I believed it was exacerbating my condition.

Once in Brooklyn, I started to look around for a new doctor. My previous doctor was a well-known pulmonary specialist at a prestigious Bronx hospital, but it was clear he was doing nothing for me – I was still going to the emergency room frequently and wheezing and getting out of breath constantly. I decided to try an allergist, and found an allergy practice in Brooklyn Heights. I knew very little about the Heights at the time, but I reasoned that it was about halfway between my new home and my job in Midtown Manhattan. The doctor was affiliated with what was for me a new hospital – Long Island College Hospital.

For the first time since childhood, I found myself taking allergy injections on a regular basis. No offense, but these allergists didn’t really help my condition, and I was actually admitted to the hospital a few times. After changing jobs to what is now the Brooklyn Eagle, my health plan changed and I had to find another doctor. My new doctor was also a LICH-affiliated physician with an office in the Heights. He stopped the injections, and put me on the road to recovery, a road that improved as new medications were added to my regimen. Even though I soon got married and moved to Manhattan, I kept my Brooklyn doctor for a few years.

Along the way, I had two operations at LICH. The first was to take out nasal polyps. My doctor exclaimed that they were growing at such a rate that they not only endangered my breathing, they would push into my brain area. The operation was a success. The second operation was also a success, but the aftermath was extremely painful.

There was also the time that I was taken to the LICH emergency room from the Eagle’s old office on 30 Henry St. after I attempted to open a Snapple bottle, only to have the bottle break and cause a wide gash in my wrist. The Eagle’s production manager at the time filmed the whole thing with his digital camera and suggested that I sue Snapple. I did, but my lawyer gave up after Snapple kept insisting on more and more documentation.

Even before LICH’s recent financial crisis, we wrote stories about the hospital. I once wrote a feature on the Lamm Institute, a division that provided services to developmentally disabled children. The building has since been sold. I also interviewed a new high-powered chef at LICH whose goal it was to bring gourmet food to the hospital cafeteria. Sadly, it couldn’t last. On a third occasion, I interviewed a group of doctors who were introducing a new machine to detect osteoporosis. They tried it out on me, and to shock, it turned out that I had a mild case of the disease. They told me that years of taking asthma-related steroids had taken their toll.

At any rate, these are some of my memories of LICH.

In Praise of Landmark Districts

2014-06-08T07:38:00.001-07:00

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Claims that landmark districts are holding back the city are exaggerated.

In an article in the Eagle about a forum sponsored by Crain’s New York Business, Matthew Taub quoted Kenneth Jackson, professor at Columbia University, as saying that “History is for losers…Boston and Philadelphia, Savannah and Charleston lost out keeping their gracious streets and their old buildings. New York is a world city–you want to live in a world city? You have to accept change.”

The cities Jackson named are very different from each other. Boston seems to be doing OK. There are about 60 colleges and universities in greater Boston, and I doubt that they would be prospering if Boston were a town for “losers.” The Red Sox seem to be doing all right, too. As for Savannah, it was the subject of a best-selling book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” by John Berendt.

There are about 25 officially designated historic districts in Brooklyn, most of them in an area stretching from Prospect Park north to Brooklyn Heights and then east to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Many of these districts are well known: Brooklyn Heights itself (the first in the city), Cobble Hill, various parts of Victorian Flatbush, Stuyvesant Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope. Some of them encompass fairly large areas. Others, such as the Borough Hall Skyscraper District, only consist of a few blocks or half-blocks.

Landmarking regulations can be a pain to homeowners within the district – for example, they have to replace a window or door with the same type of window or door, and they often have to get approval even to install a window air-conditioning unit. Yes, things sometimes get out of hand. But, homeowners who need to make repairs to their landmarked houses needn’t fret. There’s an entire industry of contractors, designers, etc., who specialize in this type of work.

If one looks at the sheer size of Brooklyn, the landmarked districts take up about a tenth of the borough, if that much. And it’s not as if the districts are imposed on residents – there is a formal hearing process, where both proponents and opponents of landmarking have their say. Often, as in the cases of the Heights and Park Slope, residents led the effort to declare the area a historic district. In the case of the Skyscraper District, many of the owners and tenants of the skyscrapers opposed the effort, saying that landmarking could hurt business. While their objections weren’t successful, they were seriously considered.

In Taub’s article, Professor Jackson is quoted as saying, “I have been leading tourists and teaching students for 40 years. I have never heard a single person say they wanted to go to see a historic district.” I think Jackson is splitting hairs--maybe the students never said it in those terms, but I bet plenty wanted to go see Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope or Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. And landmarking has done a lot for those neighborhoods. If Brooklyn Heights were dominated by 40-story buildings, fewer tourists would come to the Promenade because they wouldn’t even be able to find it.

Clearly, not every neighborhood deserves to be landmarked. But in general, landmarking has done far more good than harm.

Learning to Drive in Inwood

2014-05-22T07:07:00.001-07:00

By Raanan Geberer

I never lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. But we lived in Marble Hill, just over the bridge on the Bronx mainland, and most of my learning-to-drive experiences took place in Inwood. And what experiences they were – painful at the time, but sometimes humorous in retrospect.

During senior year at Bronx Science, everyone was learning to drive. Because Science didn’t have its own driver’s ed program, you could take driver’s ed at any nearby high school and Science would give you credit. The closest school to me that offered driver’s ed was the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Mary, a Catholic girls’ school in Inwood. I was a little nervous about going there, thinking I would be out of place, but I needn’t have been. The class was co-ed, and there were several other non-Catholics. I was one of three Jewish kids in the group – the other two were Jewish greasers from George Washington High School who wore black leather jackets and looked like something out of “Da Fonz.”

We first went out in the car in the “industrial area of Inwood” east of Broadway, north of 207^th Street. The neighborhood was dominated by the subway yards, warehouses, garages and a pet cemetery. There were few people on the streets and there was plenty of room to practice. As we became more comfortable behind the wheel, the teacher, whose name I don’t remember, took us into the nearby Bronx. We went to Jerome Avenue, as far as Bronx Science itself. He also took us up and down the steep Kingsbridge Road hill, which in retrospect was a foolish choice when dealing with inexperienced drivers.

It soon became apparent that I was as klutzy as a driver as I had been in sports. Making fun of the way I frequently took my foot off the gas pedal, braked and then put it on the pedal again, the teacher invented a name for me: “Herky-Jerky.” Once, when he criticized me and I began a sentence with “I have,” he yelled, “Here’s what you don’t have! You don’t have control of the car, you don’t have awareness of the other cars, you don’t know how to turn…” When it finally came time to take the road test, I went up onto the curb and failed.

“Okay,” my father said, “from now on, I’d better start giving you some lessons myself.” Once again, I found myself in the industrial area of Inwood, but this time with my father as the teacher. My father had just bought a used ’64 Lincoln Continental. When this model car first came out, it had been my favorite, but now it was 1971, seven years later. Dad had bought the car for a ridiculously low price, but with gas prices going sky-high, it still cost him more than it was worth. To top it off, the car was so big, it was difficult to park.

When I was younger, Dad, who had once been sergeant in the Military Police, had taught me how to play the piano. Now, behind the wheel, I found that his teaching methods hadn’t changed: “You idiot! You’re going to back right up into the curb! What? Don’t you signal before you turn? You drive like a lunatic! There’s a car right in front of you—you want to get yourself killed? What’s the hell’s the matter with you!....” In August, I took the test a second time, and just like the time before, I failed.

My father apparently realized that a kinder, gentler approach was called for. The next year, I was up at the State University at Binghamton as a freshman, but in June he took me over to a driving school, again in Inwood, owned by an acquaintance of his, Jerry Kristol. I’m not sure how he knew Jerry – it may have been through his job or at the synagogue – but Jerry was a good teacher. The fact that the driving school was on 207^th Street, next to Francesca’s Ice Cream Parlor, didn’t hurt. After each lesson, I had a cherry lime rickey at Francesca’s. The next time I took the test, I failed again, but only by a few points.

My father, undaunted, sent me for more lessons with Jerry Kristol during the winter and spring breaks. To augment these lessons, he gave me a few lessons of his own, and actually let me drive part of the way to and from Binghamton on Route 17 a few times. By the summer, our family had moved to Co-op City, but I still took the long ride on the 12 bus to the driving school on 207^th Street. In July, I was ready. I took the test again in the all-too-familiar industrial area of Inwood, and this time I passed. Within a few months, I was the owner of a 10-year-old clunker, a Pontiac Tempest. And that was how I learned to drive in Inwood.

The Observer Tackles Brooklyn

2014-05-18T16:44:00.001-07:00

From Brooklyn daily eagle

The New York Observer has focused its latest issue on Brooklyn. Its front page carries the New York Observer logo, but the words “New York” are crossed out and “Brooklyn” is written above it. The bottom of the page reads, “Heading for Brooklyn: 128 important, influential and interesting people to know now.”
In the spirit of the late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who critiqued every Manhattan-based publication when it focused on Brooklyn, I will do the same for this issue of the Observer.
“In many parts of the world,” the main article reads, “Brooklyn is shorthand for ‘cool,’ but shaggy beards aren’t the borough’s only exports. Its talent is all over TV, its tastemakers are dressing Hollywood, and its tech visionaries are redefining social media.”
The Observer is accurate in that its list of 128 influential Brooklynites represent the Brooklyn of today. You won’t find Barbra Streisand or even Jay-Z on that list. No mention of egg creams will be found.
Many of those on the list are people whom I heartily agree should be there. Among these are Steve Hindy and Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery; Karen Brooks Hopkins of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Andrew Kimball, former president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard; Dr. K.R. Sreenivasan of NYU Polytechnic; director Spike Lee; Brooklyn Bridge Park planner Regina Myer; and former Prospect Park Administrator Tupper Thomas.
These are all people who have solid accomplishments. The paper also has a section on politicians, headed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, although that doesn’t stop the Observer from bashing him in several editorials for being too pro-tenant.
The article begins to lose me when it starts talking about restaurants, culture and real estate. Two restaurateurs, Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, are praised for updating the old “retro red-sauce joints.” Traditional Italian restaurants of the type the Observer means are hardly dead—they’re alive and well in places like Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. However, the Observer barely acknowledges that such neighborhoods exist.
Garth Risk Hallberg, a writer who sold a book to Knopf for $2 million last year, is profiled, but what about other authors, such as Paul Auster, who have been writing books for years? Jake Dobkin, the founder of the news blog Gothamist (of which I am a fan) is profiled, but why not local bloggers? There are any number of blogs, such as Pardon Me for Asking, Brokelyn and Sheepshead Bites, that have been doing consistently good work.
The writers also seem to have little appreciation of the type of quirky charm that marks the borough’s traditional neighborhoods. At one point, the Observer writes of a zoning change that helped transform Greenpoint from a neighborhood dominated by “the Polish National Home and 99-cent stores.” I’ve been to Greenpoint, and to me, thrift stores and Polish bakeries are what make the neighborhood interesting.
Try as it might, the Observer, in its Brooklyn edition, can’t shake its bias favoring wealth, glitz, glamour and big-time success. A friend of mine says there are actually four Brooklyns: Trendy Brooklyn (stretching roughly from Williamsburg to Prospect Park), Immigrant Brooklyn (Sunset Park, much of Bensonhurst, Brighton Beach, etc.), African-American Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, most of Flatbush, etc.) and Traditional Brooklyn (Midwood, Bay Ridge, Marine Park, etc.). To the Observer, only the first Brooklyn seems to be real.

A Healthy City Must Provide for All Its Citizens

2014-04-27T11:09:00.001-07:00

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The fact that many Brooklyn neighborhoods have received such an influx of wealthy people that they rival such well-heeled Manhattan neighborhoods as Chelsea, Midtown and Greenwich Village is perhaps inevitable, and isn’t really news to people who have been following Brooklyn real estate.
In a recent Brooklyn Daily Eagle article, reporter Mary Frost summarized a report by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer that revealed that the median apartment rent has risen by 75 percent since 2000, while real incomes have declined by 4.8 percent. By contrast, the report says, rents in other parts of the country only rose 44 percent during the same time period.
Frost’s article also mentioned that while real incomes are dropping, a number of Brooklyn neighborhoods are getting richer. She names Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens as being “increasingly posh” neighborhoods. (I thought that Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope had been growing progressively more upscale since brownstone enthusiasts discovered them in the ‘60s and ‘70s.)
What’s behind this? Simply speaking, it’s the fact that New York is becoming more and more of a magnet for people from all over the world. It is perceived as a glamorous, exciting, dynamic city, with its financial district, film and television industries, high-tech companies, trendy restaurants and so on. When New York was down and out, in the 1970s and ‘80s, you didn’t see many ambitious young people from prestigious colleges coming to the city – indeed, they were leaving the city. Now, the game has changed.
Supply follows demand, and the expensive condos that are being constructed in some parts of Brooklyn wouldn’t be there if there weren’t a large number of successful professionals, businesspeople and artists who could afford to live there. The very successful have always had their own neighborhoods, and that doesn’t bother me any more than the fact that, say, Satmar Hasidim or Pakistani immigrants have theirs.
What does bother me is that the robust growth in upper-income housing isn’t being matched by middle-income and working-class housing. Neighborhoods like the one where I grew up in the Bronx, and where many readers doubtlessly grew up in Brooklyn, are increasingly a thing of the past.
Yes, the city has made efforts to increase the amount of affordable housing. But why should such an effort even be necessary? Back when the city had a healthier economy, builders put up middle-income apartment houses in Canarsie and Midwood as well as high-rises on Park Avenue – and made a profit from both.
Comptroller Stringer’s report, officially titled “The Growing Gap: New York City’s Housing Affordability Challenge,” contains more grim statistics, which were quoted by Frost in the Eagle. While the median home value has doubled, nearly 360,000 apartments renting for $400 to $1,000 per month disappeared from 2000 to 2012. Also, the number of New Yorkers living in shelters has risen from around 31,000 in 2002 to more than 52,000 today.
A city, to be viable, must contain a healthy mix of occupations and income groups. There’s nothing wrong with the Lincoln automobile, but do you think that Ford Motor Company would be viable if it only made Lincolns? I think not. The same is true for New York City.

Asthma Is a Serious Problem, But What Are the Causes?

2014-04-09T19:16:00.001-07:00

From Brooklyn Daily eagle

Asthma is costing New York's Medicaid system more than half a billion dollars a year, according to a report by the state Comptroller’s Office quoted in an Associated Press article that has been posted on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle website.

The cost to the state is estimated to be $1.3 billion a year, the article continues. A large percentage of this cost is due to Medicaid expenditures. The only good news seems to be that asthma deaths have dropped by nearly 23 percent in the past decade.

There are several causes for asthma. One is hereditary. I have asthma, so did my mother and so did half the people in my mother’s family, to varying degrees.

Another is environmental. Asthma has been blamed on air quality, mold in old apartment buildings, roaches in the same buildings, lack of exercise and many other factors. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, New York County (Manhattan), Brooklyn and the Bronx all are in the Top 10 for cancer risks caused by airborne chemicals. The city is also one of the 25 in the country in ozone pollution.

On the other hand, a survey by then-Mayor Bloomberg’s administration last year found that air pollution in New York City has reached its lowest levels in 50 years, For example, the level of sulfur dioxide in the air dropped 69 percent since 2008, possibly lowered by new emissions regulations that phased out obsolete “heavy” fuels like Number 6 oil. The city’s air quality may still be higher than most of the country’s, but these figures show a step in the right direction.

As we’ve mentioned, roaches have also been mentioned as a cause of asthma. According to the American Lung Association, “Roaches produce substances, or allergens, that aggravate asthma and cause allergic reactions in people who are sensitive to those substances ... These tiny particles can become airborne and contaminate the air in your home.”

Molds, also common in older buildings, are another asthma trigger. Molds send out tiny spores that float through the air. And of course, there’s also the danger of smoking and second-hand smoke.

While I don’t pretend to be a scientist, the problem with many of these explanations is that these conditions were often worse in the past. I know that air pollution is often horrific, but I find it difficult to believe than it’s any worse than it was during most of the 20^th century, when factories and incinerators within most apartment buildings released smoke into the atmosphere day and night.

And smoking? The percentage of Americans who smoke has gone down from 45 percent in 1953 to a mere 22 percent in 2010. You can’t tell me that there’s more second-hand smoke today than there was in the days when people smoked in buses, at the office, in restaurants and even in doctors’ offices.

Perhaps the answer lies elsewhere. Several scientists have remarked on the links between obesity, which has been rising steadily since the mass introduction of high-fructose corn syrup, and asthma. Food additives are another possible cause. The Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America has identified several common additives that may cause reactions, including sulfites, aspartame, MSG, tartrazine (a common food dye used in desserts and beverages) and others.

Whatever the cause is, the problem of asthma is a serious one that deserves more study.

Give Former Journalists Policy-Making Positions

2014-03-23T21:24:00.003-07:00

By Raanan Geberer

An old movie I once saw on TV focused on the relationship between a crusading lawyer and a crusading journalist. Soon, the lawyer is elected to office. But the journalist remains a journalist, seemingly forever consigned to his role on the sidelines.

Traditionally, journalism, unlike law, does not open the door to new careers. But this state of affairs is dramatically out of date. According to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the number of newspaper jobs declined from 52,600 in 2007 to 38,000 in 2012. And that doesn’t even take into account magazine jobs.

In addition, an article in the February-March edition of the American Journalism Review reported that of those journalists who left or were laid off from newspapers, only 6 percent found other newspaper jobs. “the rest are doing everything from public relations to teaching to driving a bus and clerking in a liquor store,” the article reads. And we doubt that it’s gotten better since then.

Since so much of what journalists do involves reporting on city, county, state and federal governments, why shouldn’t elected officials or government agencies hire more journalists in managerial or administrative positions? This sometimes happens, but the journalist usually finds himself or herself relegated to the “ghetto” of press secretary.

Why should a journalist or former journalist who has spent 30 years covering education and schools NOT be appointed to a decision-making position with the Department of Education? As it is, these positions are not always filled by education or teaching professionals. A veteran education reporter knows most of the people in important positions, knows the issues, knows the controversies and probably has some opinions on what should be done. He or probably knows a lot more than some lawyer or MBA with little or no direct experience in the field.

The same thing goes for commissions that are appointed for a specific purpose – for example, to investigate the need to clean up a polluted body of water or to look into building a light rail line or to examine why a particular business district is losing money. If there is a journalist or former journalist who is an expert on the relevant topic, why not appoint him or her to the commission? Unfortunately, in most municipalities, the same people – elected officials, business leaders, attorneys, heads of community organizations – are appointed to these bodies over and over and over again. Why not give someone else a chance?

People go into journalism for a variety of reasons, but most will say that one of the reasons is that want to make a difference in their communities. Often, their decision to go into the field made in their teens or early twenties. For veteran, long-time journalists, there is no way they could have foreseen the decline in journalism jobs. Just because they now find themselves in a landscape where new positions in the field are few and far between, does that mean that the knowledge they have gained over the years should be thrown in the trash can? Definitely not! Many have already begun to reassess their roles during the past few years.

In general, society should invite older journalists and former journalists in from the sidelines to become active participants in the political and governmental processes. It can only benefit.

Inanimate Objects react to the snow

2014-02-23T08:01:00.003-08:00

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

By now, we’re all used to weather reports predicting heavy snowfall. This has happened maybe five or six times this winter, and there’s probably more to come. We know how people feel about the snow. But how do inanimate objects feel about it?

I have several pairs of shoes and several coats. One of the coats, a nice green coat, is perfect for normal winter weather, say, the 40s or 30s. I have a much heavier coat, but normally, I only wear it in extremely cold weather, in the teens or 20s.

This winter, however, is throwing my coat routine way off balance. Instead of wearing my extra-heavy coat two or three times, I’m wearing it more often than the other one. As for my third jacket, the one that’s appropriate for temperatures in the high 40s or 50s, I’m not wearing it at all.

And if this is the case for my coats, then, what of my shoes? I have two “regular” pairs of shoes, one pair of sneakers and one pair of heavy boots. Most of the time, I rotate the two pairs of shoes and wear the sneakers on weekends. During normal winters, I only wear the heavy boots maybe four or five days, when there’s a heavy snowstorm.

But this winter is different. This winter, I’m wearing the boots, which I think of as being for abnormal weather, more often than the shoes.

I haven’t even mentioned my pants. I have two pairs of heavy corduroy pants that I usually wear two or three times for the entire winter. This winter, I find myself wearing them a lot more than that.

It’s plain to see that my regular shoes, jackets and pants are jealous of my heavy-duty clothes. They’re accustomed to being worn on a regular basis. Being inside the house most of the time, they don’t know about the constant snowstorms, and they blame me for not wearing them enough. If I’m not careful, they’ll start a revolt, and I’ll come home to find my clothes scattered all over the bedroom floor.

Also in the bedroom, there’s a small toy polar bear that we’ve had for years. Usually we don’t pay much attention to it, except when the cat decides to play with it. But now, the little polar bear is looking forward to the time when real polar bears will come to New York if this weather continues, and it’s getting ready to join them. One day, we’ll come home and the toy bear will be gone.

If you think that’s bad, you should see what’s happening elsewhere! Over in the Museum of Natural History, the mock-ups of the wooly mammoths behind glass have come to life. For maybe 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, they’ve felt out of place. Now’s their chance. The snowstorms have awakened them, they think there’s a new Ice Age, and they’re beginning to move about in their display cases when no one’s looking. Soon, they believe, they’ll be roaming the Arctic tundra once again.

Clearly, the snowstorms are disrupting people, animals, stuffed animals, coats, shoes and everything else. It’s time to tell the weatherman, “Enough already!” Tell the scientists to bring back global warming. Anything’s better than this!

Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'

2014-02-14T07:53:00.001-08:00

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 2013

It’s Christmas time, and once again we’re treated to showings of the holiday favorite “A Christmas Story.” The film has become so much a classic that it’s been turned into a Broadway play, and the house in Cleveland that was used as the Parker family’s house has been turned into a museum. Characters like The Old Man, bully Scott Farkas and the hillbilly Bumpus family, not to mention inanimate objects like the leg lamp, have become part of American folklore.

Lost in the shuffle, however, has been the author and narrator of the story—Jean Shepherd. Many of the millions of people who have seen the film, perhaps most, are only familiar with him through “A Christmas Story.” And that’s sad, because as good as it is, it only represents a small portion of Shepherd’s work.

Jean Shepherd was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Hammond, Indiana (called “Hohman, Indiana” in the film). The late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who lived there during part of his youth, knew Shepherd and his friends, although they were older than him. While the film takes place around 1940, the real events upon which it is based took place about seven or eight years earlier.

Like most men of his generation, Shepherd served in the military during World War II (his Signal Corps stories have recently been collected as “Shep’s Army”). Afterward, he drifted into TV and radio, but he didn’t become famous until the mid-1950s, when he began broadcasting one of the first talk shows on WOR-AM. About half of his show was dedicated to tales of his Indiana childhood and his Army days. The rest consisted on his observations of the passing scene. He commented on advertising, popular music (he loved jazz, disliked rock), sexual mores, suburbia, all-night diners, beer and almost everything else. He avoided politics, but at times he “got serious,” as he did after JFK’s assassination and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. In between it all, he played hokey Dixieland jazz songs, accompanying them on the kazoo and Jew’s harp, and recited old-time folk poetry like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

In one of his best-known pranks, he began to talk about a non-existent sexy book, “I, Libertine,” supposedly written in the 18^th century. He told his listeners to ask for it in bookstores. Eventually, the demand was so great that a publisher hired several authors (including Shepherd himself) to ghost-write the book.

Shepherd continued on, broadcasting every weekday at 10:15 p.m. and on Saturday nights from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Thousands of young New Yorkers listened to Shep on their transistor radios under their pillows when their parents thought they were asleep. In 1977, he quit his radio gig. By this time, he was becoming known nationally. He wrote stories for Playboy and published several short-story collections. He also had a public television show, “Jean Shepherd’s America,” in which he visited different parts of the country. There was even an unsuccessful follow-up to “A Christmas Story,” called “My Summer Story.”

Shep died in 1999. After his death, his dark side was discovered: He had two children from an early marriage, neither of which he had seen for 30 years. In fact, he often denied that he had children at all. Still, I prefer to celebrate his contributions to American culture. Quoting Shep’s most famous catch phrase, I proclaim to everybody concerned, “Excelsior, you fatheads!”

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Inanimate Objects react to the snow

Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'