Our Town downtown
November 27, 2006
I can’t tell you what the extra $1.93 billion that the high court said must be spent by the state on the city’s schools is going to do for them. An earlier lower court decision had said the city should get a lot more than that every year, $4.7 billion. I don’t know what that would have done either. For sure it would do more, but more of what? What would move city public schools forward in a way not much has—in decades?
Here’s all I know from having taught a half dozen years in grade schools and high schools in suburbs and in the inner city as they called it in Cleveland then. (They weren’t public schools; they were all Catholic schools, but the black kids in the inner city schools were not Catholic.) I also have three grown daughters whose school days I watched closely. So here it is, after 30-some years of trying to pay attention:
At the big library downtown in Cleveland there’s a plaque at the entrance that says ‘Kids Who Read Succeed’. I think that too. That what I believe after my teaching and parenting experiences. Kids who read succeed. That may be the only thing I’m certain of from my time in the classroom and my time with my own kids.
So, I’d say take that $1.93 billion and do something about reading. I’d say screw social studies or cultural history and teach the kids to read. Don’t worry about calling part of the new Mets stadium Jackie Robinson this or that. Don’t worry about Arthur Ashe this or that or Roberto Clemente if you aren’t prepared to go to the wall for these kids to teach them to read. Those names are good names, but it’s too easy to feel good about ourselves with those kinds of gestures. These kids need to learn to read or they’re screwed.
A few years ago I taught juniors English in a Catholic boys’ high school here. It was a school for mostly poor kids that came in from other parts of the city. The guys were mostly black and Hispanic. Most of them wound up going on to college, but not really. They got in because the colleges needed bodies and maybe the school’s principal knew people in admissions. Many if not most of the kids dropped out of college. I know why, so do you. They couldn’t read well enough to do the work. It wasn’t because they didn’t know math. It wasn’t because they didn’t know science. That wouldn’t hold anybody back in their program. Not being able to read easily is what made school too tough for them.
Here’s what I told them one day in class. I don’t know why [italics that italics] day. I think it just came to me that day and I risked saying it.
I said if a bunch of Harvard freshman came into town and you wound up hanging with them for the weekend, you’d know your way around the world’s most dynamic city way better than they would. If they wanted to get a beer, you’d know ways to get that or drugs better than they would. If there were a fight you’d be better at it; you’re tougher. If there were a basketball and a court you could kill them. You can dance better than they can. You’re stronger and your teeth are better. You’ve got better hair. Many of you can speak two languages. You can probably talk to girls better than they can. You’ve probably had more sex. If you watched TV with them, you’d know more sports and could figure out the plot of Law and Order quicker than they could. So what do they have that you don’t? I asked them. I paused. Then I said, they can read better than you can. You can do every other boy thing better than they can. But they can read better.
So, I’d say the city schools should do something about making kids learn to read easily. Maybe I’d take the money and buy every kid a subscription to a magazine he liked. Maybe I’d give them a gift certificate for any three books they wanted from a local bookstore. Each semester they’d get to get three. I’ll bet the kids at Harvard had books and magazines around their house. The city should use some of the new money that’s coming to give its kids the same tools to succeed.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
Thursday, May 17, 2007
A Place To Be Thankful For
Our Town downtown
November 20, 2006
We give thanks in all sorts of ways every day, when we acknowledge, if only to ourselves, our gratefulness, our appreciation, our enthusiasm for the things we enjoy that someone else made possible for us. We’re lucky to live in this country and this city. We have a lot.
Here are some things that I’m thankful for here, in addition to friends and family of course:
Trees. You notice them more here than you do in a car somewhere else. You use them here, against the rain without an umbrella, against the sun on a park bench. In smaller cities and towns I’ve lived in, with more woods around, more lawns with trees, I never appreciated trees like here. Like I never appreciated flowers other places like I appreciate the colorful bunches of them outside little grocery stores here. Gramercy Park I live a block from and I seldom notice it with any appreciation when I walk by. The flowers in all colors a block away at the store get my attention way more often.
Walking lets you see the park and the trees and the flowers, and so much else at a pace you can absorb it at. You can fall in love for a second or two with a passerby. That doesn’t happen most other places. You have to give thanks for those times. And for the views up and down the avenues when you’re crossing the street. Maybe as residents we’re not supposed to look up at buildings like rubes, but looking uptown when you’re crossing the street is to see the massiveness of this place, and the beauty of its design and is a sight to be thankful for.
So are all the newsstands with the three great dailies, and papers and magazines from all over the world that you don’t see in other cities you’ve lived in. So are the bookstores here whose numbers are decreasing as people order on line or watch TV instead of reading. But there still are chain stores and independents that you can walk to from your apartment. I envy myself sometimes when I’m strolling up to Union Square at 9:00 at night to roam around four floors of books. Who of my friends or yours who live elsewhere can do that? It is a great perk of living here.
Cabs are another perk. I take one to work on Fridays. Just to go at a different pace and look out a window. It’s a treat, and I’m thankful that the cabs skim along the street in front of my building even if I don’t need them but once a week. I like their color; that yellow brightens up the street.
Other things I’m thankful for: The old people in my building. The East River a few blocks from my place. Rutgers for winning and giving college football fans here a local team to follow. Doormen. Molly’s on 22nd and Third. Pizza available every couple blocks. The Mexicans who make the pizzas and do so many other things here. The church bells at noon that I can hear from my apartment. AMC Loews’ $6-before-noon tickets on weekends. Steve ‘The Schmooze’ Somers on WFAN, the world’s nicest guy, who appreciates life like we all should. Stores I never go in for being open and giving color and variety to my walks. All the people on the sidewalks for giving color and variety to my walks. All the great old apartment buildings that make me and everybody else on those sidewalks look interesting.
It’s a great city to live in. We each give our own thanks all the time for our luck.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
November 20, 2006
We give thanks in all sorts of ways every day, when we acknowledge, if only to ourselves, our gratefulness, our appreciation, our enthusiasm for the things we enjoy that someone else made possible for us. We’re lucky to live in this country and this city. We have a lot.
Here are some things that I’m thankful for here, in addition to friends and family of course:
Trees. You notice them more here than you do in a car somewhere else. You use them here, against the rain without an umbrella, against the sun on a park bench. In smaller cities and towns I’ve lived in, with more woods around, more lawns with trees, I never appreciated trees like here. Like I never appreciated flowers other places like I appreciate the colorful bunches of them outside little grocery stores here. Gramercy Park I live a block from and I seldom notice it with any appreciation when I walk by. The flowers in all colors a block away at the store get my attention way more often.
Walking lets you see the park and the trees and the flowers, and so much else at a pace you can absorb it at. You can fall in love for a second or two with a passerby. That doesn’t happen most other places. You have to give thanks for those times. And for the views up and down the avenues when you’re crossing the street. Maybe as residents we’re not supposed to look up at buildings like rubes, but looking uptown when you’re crossing the street is to see the massiveness of this place, and the beauty of its design and is a sight to be thankful for.
So are all the newsstands with the three great dailies, and papers and magazines from all over the world that you don’t see in other cities you’ve lived in. So are the bookstores here whose numbers are decreasing as people order on line or watch TV instead of reading. But there still are chain stores and independents that you can walk to from your apartment. I envy myself sometimes when I’m strolling up to Union Square at 9:00 at night to roam around four floors of books. Who of my friends or yours who live elsewhere can do that? It is a great perk of living here.
Cabs are another perk. I take one to work on Fridays. Just to go at a different pace and look out a window. It’s a treat, and I’m thankful that the cabs skim along the street in front of my building even if I don’t need them but once a week. I like their color; that yellow brightens up the street.
Other things I’m thankful for: The old people in my building. The East River a few blocks from my place. Rutgers for winning and giving college football fans here a local team to follow. Doormen. Molly’s on 22nd and Third. Pizza available every couple blocks. The Mexicans who make the pizzas and do so many other things here. The church bells at noon that I can hear from my apartment. AMC Loews’ $6-before-noon tickets on weekends. Steve ‘The Schmooze’ Somers on WFAN, the world’s nicest guy, who appreciates life like we all should. Stores I never go in for being open and giving color and variety to my walks. All the people on the sidewalks for giving color and variety to my walks. All the great old apartment buildings that make me and everybody else on those sidewalks look interesting.
It’s a great city to live in. We each give our own thanks all the time for our luck.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
We’re Way Beyond Not Being in Kansas Anymore
Our Town downtown
November 13, 2006
Jack O’Shea is the guy the Chicago Tribune is sending to its paper-in-difficulty, The Los Angeles Times, to see if he can keep it together in the midst of declining readership, or figure a way to remake the paper for the new-and-getting-newer (you gotta’ say exponentially so) media world. He doesn’t promise miracles. He told the Tribune, ‘We’re all stumbling around in shifting sands. The business model is changing under our feet.’
No kidding. Don’t you feel that way, about all sorts of things? Stumbling. Shifting. Maybe it was those planes with passengers in them torpedoing the sides of the World Trade Center that shook our world and has it still rumbling beneath us. Or maybe it was a lot of things in the last few years. I think that’s it; it is a lot of things in addition to the planes crashing into us. Even in addition to Iraq. We’ve sped a long way from even not being in Kansas anymore.
First. Computers have changed the landscape, the office, school, home. If I look out of my office which I’m doing right now with one eye at the main office floor with writers and editors and salespeople and distribution people and graphics people, they’re all looking at the computers on their desks. For a break they (we) all check e-mail and some sites that matter to us. That’s a lot of time in front of a little screen. If we saw such a world in a sci-fi movie we’d find it sterile and scary. At night we watch another screen till sleep time when we’re increasingly finding it difficult to sleep.
Cell phones are more a watershed than the computer maybe. Think about it. They’re an illusion of course. We aren’t as close to home, or to each other, as we think.
Steroids have us hesitating to have heroes. Plastic surgery is redefining what we see in another person. Viagra is redefining something too (Maybe there is a time to just hang it up.)
HBO, TiVo, iPods, Blackberries, satellite radio, digital cameras, phone cameras, blogs, Netflix. It’s all come fast. Faster than ever before. You pick up the phone to call the Marriott here to make reservations for your parents who are coming for a long weekend next month and you get a voice—a nice voice no doubt—who you so know is in India that you don’t even bother to ask anymore. How could the business model not be changing under our feet? The newspapers where we’ve always kept up with changes are changing themselves. Soon the Times pages size will be as small as the Albany paper. The Wall Street Journal is trimming its size too. Do you even know what Google is up to? Wikipedia? What should I do with my red Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition that has a page up front with a list of editors who maybe taught at the University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins or Columbia. These were older guys. The Google guys and the Wikipedia guys are younger guys. Should I keep my red dictionary, in case the lights go out or a fuse blows? I think I will. But that may just be me. My kids if they still have dictionaries I gave them over the years probably couldn’t lay their hand on them. Should I give them a set of Wikipedia for Christmas? Shouldn’t every house have a set? That’s becoming a long-time-ago notion, like Kansas. And there’s no going back. That’s why Jack O’Shea knows to make no promises.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
November 13, 2006
Jack O’Shea is the guy the Chicago Tribune is sending to its paper-in-difficulty, The Los Angeles Times, to see if he can keep it together in the midst of declining readership, or figure a way to remake the paper for the new-and-getting-newer (you gotta’ say exponentially so) media world. He doesn’t promise miracles. He told the Tribune, ‘We’re all stumbling around in shifting sands. The business model is changing under our feet.’
No kidding. Don’t you feel that way, about all sorts of things? Stumbling. Shifting. Maybe it was those planes with passengers in them torpedoing the sides of the World Trade Center that shook our world and has it still rumbling beneath us. Or maybe it was a lot of things in the last few years. I think that’s it; it is a lot of things in addition to the planes crashing into us. Even in addition to Iraq. We’ve sped a long way from even not being in Kansas anymore.
First. Computers have changed the landscape, the office, school, home. If I look out of my office which I’m doing right now with one eye at the main office floor with writers and editors and salespeople and distribution people and graphics people, they’re all looking at the computers on their desks. For a break they (we) all check e-mail and some sites that matter to us. That’s a lot of time in front of a little screen. If we saw such a world in a sci-fi movie we’d find it sterile and scary. At night we watch another screen till sleep time when we’re increasingly finding it difficult to sleep.
Cell phones are more a watershed than the computer maybe. Think about it. They’re an illusion of course. We aren’t as close to home, or to each other, as we think.
Steroids have us hesitating to have heroes. Plastic surgery is redefining what we see in another person. Viagra is redefining something too (Maybe there is a time to just hang it up.)
HBO, TiVo, iPods, Blackberries, satellite radio, digital cameras, phone cameras, blogs, Netflix. It’s all come fast. Faster than ever before. You pick up the phone to call the Marriott here to make reservations for your parents who are coming for a long weekend next month and you get a voice—a nice voice no doubt—who you so know is in India that you don’t even bother to ask anymore. How could the business model not be changing under our feet? The newspapers where we’ve always kept up with changes are changing themselves. Soon the Times pages size will be as small as the Albany paper. The Wall Street Journal is trimming its size too. Do you even know what Google is up to? Wikipedia? What should I do with my red Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition that has a page up front with a list of editors who maybe taught at the University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins or Columbia. These were older guys. The Google guys and the Wikipedia guys are younger guys. Should I keep my red dictionary, in case the lights go out or a fuse blows? I think I will. But that may just be me. My kids if they still have dictionaries I gave them over the years probably couldn’t lay their hand on them. Should I give them a set of Wikipedia for Christmas? Shouldn’t every house have a set? That’s becoming a long-time-ago notion, like Kansas. And there’s no going back. That’s why Jack O’Shea knows to make no promises.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
How Many Times Can You See Madonna’s Kid?
Our Town downtown
November 6, 2006
Beyond the time-killing, time-wasting, sit-you-in the-same seat-for-hours-on-end nature of television, there is the issue of its repetitiveness. I generally only go to it for sports now, but I can remember how it all works from watching the games. The end of the Jets game a week ago: The catch-not-a-catch in the end zone to maybe tie it up at the end of regulation was shown so many times, you thought maybe the receiver Chris Baker was going to turn to the camera and say I’m not going to do another one. But he’s not Marshall McLuhan and I’m not Woody Allen, and the replays continued from all angles.
I was somewhere the other night where I saw John Kerry on the tube in front of microphones. I didn’t hear what he was saying so I don’t know if what I was seeing was the original gaff where he was, they say, trying to be a jokester; or was I watching his defense of his gaff? Whichever it was, I’m sure it was shown as much as the end-zone-catch-not-a-catch. I’ll bet you could turn to any of the news channels and news-funny shows like you could the sports shows on that Sunday night and see the Kerry scene tens of times. That’s a skewed view of the world, isn’t it?
To see an event replicated like that. What does that do to us? TV now in essence clones an event and parades it before us like identical new sheep. Or wait, yikes, is it we who are the sheep? If we’re sitting where we always sit in the same position, only the clothes are changed, are we clones of ourselves or just very similar to everyone else who’s sitting somewhere watching in their same seat, same pose they always sit in?
Maybe, unless it’s the Zapruder film or Willie Mays’s 1954 catch, we really don’t need to see it more than once. Did your father ask you to come down the stairs in your gown five times in a row on your wedding morning? Did your mother pick up your report card a dozen times and scrutinize it? How many times did you lose your two front teeth? Why do we want to see so many TV clips over and over? Or do we just sit down in that one place we always sit and strap ourselves in for the night and take what the box gives us? Even if we think we’re masters of our time with TiVo, sitting is sitting. As I say to those kids who sit with a cardboard sign on the sidewalk asking for money, when I see ‘em sitting down early—for the day—on a nice sunny morning, I say (and this is made up, but that doesn’t really matter), I’ve got a friend who’s crippled and he’d give anything to be able to walk around on a nice day. Why do you want to spend your day like this?
Think how many times you’ve seen Madonna and the baby lately, Red Auerbach and his cigar, the end zone ‘catch’. As I write this it’s early on a Friday morning and I noticed on the way into work both tabloids had Tom Cruise on the cover about his new mogul-ness. At this moment for sure he’s being talked about on the morning shows, at least every time the news is updated on the half hour, and likely there’s a special segment with a movie insider/reporter on each network talking to the host about Tom and what it all means, and they’re probably showing him hopping on the couch again. Tonight they’ll have it on the nightly news if they didn’t last night and you’ll get to see him hopping again. He only hopped that one time though.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
November 6, 2006
Beyond the time-killing, time-wasting, sit-you-in the-same seat-for-hours-on-end nature of television, there is the issue of its repetitiveness. I generally only go to it for sports now, but I can remember how it all works from watching the games. The end of the Jets game a week ago: The catch-not-a-catch in the end zone to maybe tie it up at the end of regulation was shown so many times, you thought maybe the receiver Chris Baker was going to turn to the camera and say I’m not going to do another one. But he’s not Marshall McLuhan and I’m not Woody Allen, and the replays continued from all angles.
I was somewhere the other night where I saw John Kerry on the tube in front of microphones. I didn’t hear what he was saying so I don’t know if what I was seeing was the original gaff where he was, they say, trying to be a jokester; or was I watching his defense of his gaff? Whichever it was, I’m sure it was shown as much as the end-zone-catch-not-a-catch. I’ll bet you could turn to any of the news channels and news-funny shows like you could the sports shows on that Sunday night and see the Kerry scene tens of times. That’s a skewed view of the world, isn’t it?
To see an event replicated like that. What does that do to us? TV now in essence clones an event and parades it before us like identical new sheep. Or wait, yikes, is it we who are the sheep? If we’re sitting where we always sit in the same position, only the clothes are changed, are we clones of ourselves or just very similar to everyone else who’s sitting somewhere watching in their same seat, same pose they always sit in?
Maybe, unless it’s the Zapruder film or Willie Mays’s 1954 catch, we really don’t need to see it more than once. Did your father ask you to come down the stairs in your gown five times in a row on your wedding morning? Did your mother pick up your report card a dozen times and scrutinize it? How many times did you lose your two front teeth? Why do we want to see so many TV clips over and over? Or do we just sit down in that one place we always sit and strap ourselves in for the night and take what the box gives us? Even if we think we’re masters of our time with TiVo, sitting is sitting. As I say to those kids who sit with a cardboard sign on the sidewalk asking for money, when I see ‘em sitting down early—for the day—on a nice sunny morning, I say (and this is made up, but that doesn’t really matter), I’ve got a friend who’s crippled and he’d give anything to be able to walk around on a nice day. Why do you want to spend your day like this?
Think how many times you’ve seen Madonna and the baby lately, Red Auerbach and his cigar, the end zone ‘catch’. As I write this it’s early on a Friday morning and I noticed on the way into work both tabloids had Tom Cruise on the cover about his new mogul-ness. At this moment for sure he’s being talked about on the morning shows, at least every time the news is updated on the half hour, and likely there’s a special segment with a movie insider/reporter on each network talking to the host about Tom and what it all means, and they’re probably showing him hopping on the couch again. Tonight they’ll have it on the nightly news if they didn’t last night and you’ll get to see him hopping again. He only hopped that one time though.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
Things That Go Bump In The Night
Our Town downtown
October 30, 2006
The mail room in my 20-story apartment building near Gramercy Park has a bulletin board with various notices on it, like ‘math tutoring available’ and ‘coffee table for sale’ (with an unflattering Polaroid-quality photo of the table, hinting at an overweight cat somewhere just out of range). For months there were more intense messages there; updates about the noise coming from two popular bars across Third Avenue that was driving the street-facing tenants nuts.
I live in the back of the building and heard none of the noise. It bugged me to read the Cindy Sheehan fervor these note-makers were going on about it with. Jesus, I thought, if you don’t want clubs near you, live in Elmira. But then all I had to do was throw my junk mail into the shiny trash receptacle and head up one flight to my silent one-bedroom retreat. I didn’t have to live with it. I knew I was being insensitive, but I just couldn’t feel their pain. To me they were being a pain. I had to stop reading their updates.
Eventually they stopped. The messages, that is. The noise hasn’t, at least nothing is different from the look of things across the street. The two bars draw a crowd. One has even drawn me in occasionally with its Monday mug-of-Bud-for-a-dollar deal (you’ve never seen mugs so small or thick-walled). Here’s what I noticed as I sat on a stool there a few Mondays ago watching the ESPN pre-game in the not-yet-crowded place: The noise almost drove me out. I’ve spent more time than my kids know in such places over the years and I’ve never been so bugged by the noise. Two young ladies catching up on their weekend a few feet away sounded like they were screaming they were so loud. But they weren’t screaming. There was just nothing to absorb the sound of their conversation, which increased in volume as it bounced off bottles and a varnished floor and a tin ceiling, and out the door upward toward the Munch-ish faces trying to keep it together in the front of my building.
I almost put a note on the bulletin board the next day telling what I’d discovered about the bad acoustics. I wanted to let them know it wasn’t the kids’ fault, it wasn’t the smokers at 1:00 in the morning huddled outside; it was simply the lack of curtains on the bar windows and a rug and a ratty couch or two. But I didn’t say anything. Maybe I only half-believed that acoustics were the root cause of their sleeplessness.
I’ve recently had guests. One guy for a week, another guy the next. They both snored—unbearably. I almost didn’t sleep a wink. I wanted to kill. I gained sympathy for the note-makers. I knew I was going to be guest-free soon, but that didn’t help as I tossed and turned my radio on to all-night sports talk to take my mind off the noise. I couldn’t live that way for long.
The people upstairs from me who I don’t know and who must be new or have a new job that brings them home every weeknight at around three a.m. have been waking me up for weeks with their footsteps, shoeless as they are. They also sound like they might be decorating Christmas cookies up there every night; I hear the faint dropping onto the floor of what sounds like the little red hot candies you’d use to make buttons on the snowman cookies. It’s like a payback from the tenants on the Third Avenue side.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
October 30, 2006
The mail room in my 20-story apartment building near Gramercy Park has a bulletin board with various notices on it, like ‘math tutoring available’ and ‘coffee table for sale’ (with an unflattering Polaroid-quality photo of the table, hinting at an overweight cat somewhere just out of range). For months there were more intense messages there; updates about the noise coming from two popular bars across Third Avenue that was driving the street-facing tenants nuts.
I live in the back of the building and heard none of the noise. It bugged me to read the Cindy Sheehan fervor these note-makers were going on about it with. Jesus, I thought, if you don’t want clubs near you, live in Elmira. But then all I had to do was throw my junk mail into the shiny trash receptacle and head up one flight to my silent one-bedroom retreat. I didn’t have to live with it. I knew I was being insensitive, but I just couldn’t feel their pain. To me they were being a pain. I had to stop reading their updates.
Eventually they stopped. The messages, that is. The noise hasn’t, at least nothing is different from the look of things across the street. The two bars draw a crowd. One has even drawn me in occasionally with its Monday mug-of-Bud-for-a-dollar deal (you’ve never seen mugs so small or thick-walled). Here’s what I noticed as I sat on a stool there a few Mondays ago watching the ESPN pre-game in the not-yet-crowded place: The noise almost drove me out. I’ve spent more time than my kids know in such places over the years and I’ve never been so bugged by the noise. Two young ladies catching up on their weekend a few feet away sounded like they were screaming they were so loud. But they weren’t screaming. There was just nothing to absorb the sound of their conversation, which increased in volume as it bounced off bottles and a varnished floor and a tin ceiling, and out the door upward toward the Munch-ish faces trying to keep it together in the front of my building.
I almost put a note on the bulletin board the next day telling what I’d discovered about the bad acoustics. I wanted to let them know it wasn’t the kids’ fault, it wasn’t the smokers at 1:00 in the morning huddled outside; it was simply the lack of curtains on the bar windows and a rug and a ratty couch or two. But I didn’t say anything. Maybe I only half-believed that acoustics were the root cause of their sleeplessness.
I’ve recently had guests. One guy for a week, another guy the next. They both snored—unbearably. I almost didn’t sleep a wink. I wanted to kill. I gained sympathy for the note-makers. I knew I was going to be guest-free soon, but that didn’t help as I tossed and turned my radio on to all-night sports talk to take my mind off the noise. I couldn’t live that way for long.
The people upstairs from me who I don’t know and who must be new or have a new job that brings them home every weeknight at around three a.m. have been waking me up for weeks with their footsteps, shoeless as they are. They also sound like they might be decorating Christmas cookies up there every night; I hear the faint dropping onto the floor of what sounds like the little red hot candies you’d use to make buttons on the snowman cookies. It’s like a payback from the tenants on the Third Avenue side.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
You Can Not Be Hopeful About Stuyvesant Town
Our Town downtown
October 23, 2006
In one of the last scenes in ‘Rudy’, the father (Ned Beatty), having finally entered Notre Dame Stadium for the first time in his life, to watch the unlikely event of his son playing in a game, looks out on the legendary field and sighs, ‘This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.’
If Mr. Ruettiger were to go to a game there today, he’d find a different place, one not quite so beautiful. The stadium has since been enlarged to accommodate 20,000 more fans with souvenir-buying money in their pockets. It’s too big now. But money rules, even on hallowed ground that you thought would never be tampered with.
Everywhere it seems the hallowed is giving way to the dollar. Homes, once thought of as stately mansions, are now bought and razed and replaced by over-sized, three-car-garaged, two-glass-backboards-in-the-driveway monstrosities. I recently read that the beach road in Fort Lauderdale where Spring-breakers trolled for years past T shirt shops and small Elmore Leonard motels now has an over-sized St.Regis hotel (no wet T shirt or limbo contests there) taking up most of a block.
Here on Astor Place, a tall curvy apartment building that looks like it jumped off the real estate ads in the Sunday Times Magazine for new South Florida condominiums, gleams like an alien spaceship, its ground floor wholly taken up not by an independent bookstore or a vegetarian restaurant but by a Chase bank branch. To many in the neighborhood, it sits obdurately, incongruously on hallowed ground.
Up the street from me the comfortable Gramercy Park Hotel used to offer reasonable rates on rooms. It had its traditions. It was a place to suggest to friends who were coming to visit. That’s all over now.
Which is all to say that despite the assurances that have been given by the new owners of Stuyvesant Town that traditions will be honored, you gotta’ wonder. Do you even have to wonder? There’s no stadium that isn’t being torn down or altered to squeeze in more luxury boxes. What’s the chance Stuyvesant town will stay the way it is. There’s no mountain resort that isn’t going against the cowboy tradition and luring in Ritz Carltons. The trends don’t bode well at all for Stuyvesant Town staying the way it is.
I’m not really intimate with the place, even though I walk by it daily. I’ve run through it occasionally on an exercise jaunt. A guy I taught high school with a few years ago lived there with his wife who was also a teacher. A young guy who went to Fordham with my nephew lives there with his wife who’s in law school. I read a book a few years ago, a memoir by a woman who grew up there. I go to a bar across First Avenue from there to watch sports on TV and eat great bar food and I’ve always assumed the people who come in there are mostly from Stuyvesant Town.
That may be why I like the place. I choose to go there over the many other Irish bars that are closer to my apartment. I tell my friends that it’s a ‘real’ neighborhood bar. By that I mean that the neighborhood uses it for food and drink and wedding anniversary meals. It’s named after a fireman who was killed on 9/11. It’s that kind of neighborhood. If the Ruettigers lived in Manhattan, they’d go into such a place. They’d likely live in Stuyvesant Town.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
October 23, 2006
In one of the last scenes in ‘Rudy’, the father (Ned Beatty), having finally entered Notre Dame Stadium for the first time in his life, to watch the unlikely event of his son playing in a game, looks out on the legendary field and sighs, ‘This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.’
If Mr. Ruettiger were to go to a game there today, he’d find a different place, one not quite so beautiful. The stadium has since been enlarged to accommodate 20,000 more fans with souvenir-buying money in their pockets. It’s too big now. But money rules, even on hallowed ground that you thought would never be tampered with.
Everywhere it seems the hallowed is giving way to the dollar. Homes, once thought of as stately mansions, are now bought and razed and replaced by over-sized, three-car-garaged, two-glass-backboards-in-the-driveway monstrosities. I recently read that the beach road in Fort Lauderdale where Spring-breakers trolled for years past T shirt shops and small Elmore Leonard motels now has an over-sized St.Regis hotel (no wet T shirt or limbo contests there) taking up most of a block.
Here on Astor Place, a tall curvy apartment building that looks like it jumped off the real estate ads in the Sunday Times Magazine for new South Florida condominiums, gleams like an alien spaceship, its ground floor wholly taken up not by an independent bookstore or a vegetarian restaurant but by a Chase bank branch. To many in the neighborhood, it sits obdurately, incongruously on hallowed ground.
Up the street from me the comfortable Gramercy Park Hotel used to offer reasonable rates on rooms. It had its traditions. It was a place to suggest to friends who were coming to visit. That’s all over now.
Which is all to say that despite the assurances that have been given by the new owners of Stuyvesant Town that traditions will be honored, you gotta’ wonder. Do you even have to wonder? There’s no stadium that isn’t being torn down or altered to squeeze in more luxury boxes. What’s the chance Stuyvesant town will stay the way it is. There’s no mountain resort that isn’t going against the cowboy tradition and luring in Ritz Carltons. The trends don’t bode well at all for Stuyvesant Town staying the way it is.
I’m not really intimate with the place, even though I walk by it daily. I’ve run through it occasionally on an exercise jaunt. A guy I taught high school with a few years ago lived there with his wife who was also a teacher. A young guy who went to Fordham with my nephew lives there with his wife who’s in law school. I read a book a few years ago, a memoir by a woman who grew up there. I go to a bar across First Avenue from there to watch sports on TV and eat great bar food and I’ve always assumed the people who come in there are mostly from Stuyvesant Town.
That may be why I like the place. I choose to go there over the many other Irish bars that are closer to my apartment. I tell my friends that it’s a ‘real’ neighborhood bar. By that I mean that the neighborhood uses it for food and drink and wedding anniversary meals. It’s named after a fireman who was killed on 9/11. It’s that kind of neighborhood. If the Ruettigers lived in Manhattan, they’d go into such a place. They’d likely live in Stuyvesant Town.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
The Day The Music Died
Our Town downtown
October 16, 2006
When the sketchy report of a small unidentified plane crashing into an Upper East Side apartment building eventually clarified into the death of Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, I thought about kids who were coming home from school that afternoon and hearing the news. Here's why my thoughts went that way.
On February 3, 1959 I'm a 12-year-old kid at home alone. I've either got the Asian flu that's going around or I'm faking some sickness to get out of school that day. My mother's gone down to Main Street in our rural town to get me some lemon sherbet and maybe some sports magazines to keep me occupied. There is no TV on during the day for kids then and she feels bad for me lying there in my pajamas with nothing to do but thumb through old baseball magazines that I had saved in a high stack in the nightstand next my bed.
On the top of the nightstand is a gray plastic GE radio that I had on constantly whenever I was in bed. I'd fall asleep at night to the sounds of baseball and basketball games that I could find then on stations from places like St. Louis or Pittsburgh and on real clear nights I could get Chicago. New York City stations were hard to find from my room in my remote small town west of the Finger Lakes. But I could hear the Yankees on local stations and I followed the exploits of my favorite player Gil McDougald. I kept a scrapbook on him and wore his #12 all through Little League.
In the mornings and after school on rainy days and in the evenings when I was supposed to be studying spelling words or doing a page in my math workbook I listened to a music station. I liked Jackie Wilson and Bobby Darin best. I knew a lot of songs that were popular because my four-year-older sister watched American Bandstand and she and her girlfriends drooled over Elvis and Fabian and Frankie Avalon who they listened to on her record player with the thick spindle that held stacks of 45s.
So, while my mother is gone in search of some treats for me, I lie there and listen to tunes, waiting to hear Ray Charles or the Everly Brothers, mostly wanting to hear Lonely Teardrops or Sea Cruise or La Bamba. I imagine being a teenager and hanging out like the big kids do in Homer Schafer's Candy Kitchen on Main Street with its shiny rainbow-lighted jukebox.
At some point while I'm alone in my reverie, the disc jockey interrupts a song and tells about a plane crash way out in Iowa. He says Buddy Holly was on the plane and so was Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and he says they're reported to be dead. I first think of my older sister who's away at a Catholic boarding school. I think of her and her friends the previous summer in a cottage we had rented and I see them putting a Buddy Holly record they'd just bought on the record player and singing along to it. I wonder if she had heard. Then I think of my buddies across the street at St. Joe's grade school and I want to tell them that the Big Bopper died in a plane crash, and Richie Valens. And Buddy Holly. I want school to be out so I can call them. I have never had such news to tell.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
October 16, 2006
When the sketchy report of a small unidentified plane crashing into an Upper East Side apartment building eventually clarified into the death of Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, I thought about kids who were coming home from school that afternoon and hearing the news. Here's why my thoughts went that way.
On February 3, 1959 I'm a 12-year-old kid at home alone. I've either got the Asian flu that's going around or I'm faking some sickness to get out of school that day. My mother's gone down to Main Street in our rural town to get me some lemon sherbet and maybe some sports magazines to keep me occupied. There is no TV on during the day for kids then and she feels bad for me lying there in my pajamas with nothing to do but thumb through old baseball magazines that I had saved in a high stack in the nightstand next my bed.
On the top of the nightstand is a gray plastic GE radio that I had on constantly whenever I was in bed. I'd fall asleep at night to the sounds of baseball and basketball games that I could find then on stations from places like St. Louis or Pittsburgh and on real clear nights I could get Chicago. New York City stations were hard to find from my room in my remote small town west of the Finger Lakes. But I could hear the Yankees on local stations and I followed the exploits of my favorite player Gil McDougald. I kept a scrapbook on him and wore his #12 all through Little League.
In the mornings and after school on rainy days and in the evenings when I was supposed to be studying spelling words or doing a page in my math workbook I listened to a music station. I liked Jackie Wilson and Bobby Darin best. I knew a lot of songs that were popular because my four-year-older sister watched American Bandstand and she and her girlfriends drooled over Elvis and Fabian and Frankie Avalon who they listened to on her record player with the thick spindle that held stacks of 45s.
So, while my mother is gone in search of some treats for me, I lie there and listen to tunes, waiting to hear Ray Charles or the Everly Brothers, mostly wanting to hear Lonely Teardrops or Sea Cruise or La Bamba. I imagine being a teenager and hanging out like the big kids do in Homer Schafer's Candy Kitchen on Main Street with its shiny rainbow-lighted jukebox.
At some point while I'm alone in my reverie, the disc jockey interrupts a song and tells about a plane crash way out in Iowa. He says Buddy Holly was on the plane and so was Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and he says they're reported to be dead. I first think of my older sister who's away at a Catholic boarding school. I think of her and her friends the previous summer in a cottage we had rented and I see them putting a Buddy Holly record they'd just bought on the record player and singing along to it. I wonder if she had heard. Then I think of my buddies across the street at St. Joe's grade school and I want to tell them that the Big Bopper died in a plane crash, and Richie Valens. And Buddy Holly. I want school to be out so I can call them. I have never had such news to tell.
-- Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com
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