Elegy for Sandy

 

A car service is a distinctly New York City outer borough thing.  Cheaper than a Yellow Cab, and often cheaper than Uber, a car service is the cheapest and easiest way to get somewhere the Metropolitan Transit Authority doesn’t go.  In order to use a car service, you call them.  The dispatcher answers and assigns a driver to pick you up.

 

About 15 years ago I got priced out of Manhattan and moved to Brooklyn. Shortly thereafter my partner and I adopted Augie, a beagle/Brittany mix whom we rescued from Animal Care and Control.  We tried a series of daycare places, and finally lucked out with Paws in Paradise on Fifth Avenue. 

 

A car service is the easiest way to transport a medium-sized dog who weighs too much to take on the subway in a crate.  At our current car service we usually got one of three drivers.  One of them was Sandy.  He started driving us years ago, and during Covid-19 nearly every weekday.  Sandy was of average height, barrel-chested, wire-rimmed glasses, shaggy gray hair and a walrus mustache.  He was a few years older than me.  Like me, Sandy was divorced, an anti-racist Democrat and had lived in New York for a long time. 

 

Over the years, Sandy and I became close. Some mornings I’d wait for his car, thinking of what I needed to tell him.  Sandy always had a treat for Augie, and Augie always had a tail wag for him.  They actually grew quite attached to each other.  Sandy and I talked about our families, our health and politics.  We both had had all different kinds of jobs; Sandy had originally studied to be a social worker, then went into the restaurant business and wound up managing a parking garage on the west side of in Manhattan.  When we traveled, Sandy would pick my partner and I up from the airport and know to drive us straight to Paws in Paradise so we could pick up Augie.  After one long flight, Sandy picked us up with Burger King burgers because he thought we’d be hungry.  He always gave Augie a special Christmas treat.  One year, Sandy even gave gifts to my partner and me. 

 

In June 2021, Augie and Sandy both got diagnosed with cancer.  I worried about both of them.  Sandy went through multiple hospitalizations and endless tests.  Augie became unable to breath on his own anymore, and we had to put him down at the end of October.  When I had to tell Sandy, his eyes were brimming with tears.  “You see, since we both got diagnosed at the same time, Augie was my cancer buddy.  I needed him,” Sandy said.  He couldn’t talk about Augie anymore, he got too upset.  Sandy Seeman died last month.  It feels so strange not to be able to tell him things anymore, and that he won’t grow to love our new dog, Buddy.  I haven’t been able to find any kind of memorial for Sandy. So I wanted to write one of my own.  We miss him.            

And to Think that I Saw It on Middagh Street

Old, dear friends of mine gave me a copy of "February House", which I've just finished reading. It is the story of a group of artists who lived together in a now demolished house on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was dubbed February House by Anais Nin, because several of the tenants had February birthdays.
The house was purchased by sometime magazine editor George Davis, for his artist friends to experiment with communal living. I knew his name of course, but not until reading Sherill Tippins' book did I realize that he was the third Mr. Lotte Lenya (she married Kurt Weill twice). Ms. Tippins' prose is not particularly stylistically memorable nor always clear (she refers to a theatrical set design as naturalistic in one sentence and romantic in the next; I doubt it was both). But she does cram a lot of good stories, history and gossip into 258 pages. The house housed at one time or another Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Paul Bowles' cousin Oliver Smith (the set designer and Broadway producer), W.H. Auden (with and without Chester Kallman, and once in awhile his wife, Erika Mann or her brother Klaus).
My favorite story is about some circus performers that Gypsy Rose Lee recommended as tenants. They traveled with their trained animals, including a toilet-trained monkey. I don't mean a paper trained monkey, I mean the monkey rushed past tenants in the kitchen one morning, closed the bathroom door, used the toilet, flushed and skittered out again. Now That's a monkey!
There was also a great deal of pining- Carson McCullers pined for Katherine Anne Porter, Gypsy Rose Lee pined for Mike Todd, and Auden pined for Kallman. And a lot of traipsing down to the Sands Street bars by the Navy Yard. One of them gave McCullers the idea for "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." Lee wrote her first novel in the house, with Davis' editing ("The G-String Murders"); Britten wanted to write Broadway musicals (I can't imagine) and wound up beginning "Peter Grimes" instead; McCullers began Member of the Wedding; Auden wrote a lot of poetry, and the libretto for Britten's "Paul Bunyan" opera.
Davis bought the house in 1938, and the group began to break up as the war in Europe got worse. The death of the house was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Robert Moses strikes again!); it was torn down in 1945. As Tippins writes: "all that remains of the unusual brownstone is a triangle of grass, a square of concrete sidewalk, and a sign: NO STANDING."
Davis went on to bought another house in the neighborhood, which is the one where Capote lived as a young man (I'd assumed they were the same house).

Earlier Today

It was so dark this afternoon, I was sure we were going to get serious weather. The Kentile sign seemed like it was glowing. But it all blew over.
I know Gowanus Lounge could have gotten a better photo from the pool- I really miss it.

The Power Broker

As we grow up, we collect habits and rituals to help us deal with the world around us. One of my later habits is when faced with the worst possible emotional stress, find a big book to escape into. When the surgeon told me that I was indeed going to have breast surgery (which turned up nothing malignant), it was immediately after 9.11, and I was living in Manhattan, smelling the smoke coming up from downtown every day. I thought I was going to lose my mind. But I didn’t- my business partner at the time lent me Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans” instead. I read that, and was completely absorbed by it.

The past few weeks saw the death of one of my closest friends (not the business partner; alas, she died four years ago). So when I’ve been able (even grief needs a break), I’ve been reading “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s 1974 epic on Robert Moses and how he changed (and in Caro’s and my opinion, severely damaged) New York, city and state. It is 1162 pages long, not counting the end notes. That said, it’s obvious why it won the Pulitzer that year. The writing is clear and lively; Caro writes incredibly well about emotion- not a trait you find in all historians. The editing is so good- I had forgotten how well books used to be edited, before publishers started merging.

I’ve read some New York City history, but there is plenty in “The Power Broker” that I didn’t know. For instance, Jones Beach was named for a Revolutionary War officer. Caro gives details about one of the elevated highways, the Gowanus, I see outside my kitchen window (the other, later one is the Prospect Avenue Expressway). If you’ve ever been on that road, or underneath it, you’ve never seen a highway quite like that: what it’s elevated by is odd looking, but also the way the lanes are set on it doesn’t seem quite right either. It turns out a four lane elevated highway was built on top of the supports of the Third Avenue El train, destroying a northern chunk of Sunset Park (then a working poor neighborhood full of Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Irish and Germans). It was opened November 1, 1941. Once the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened, the highway got congested fairly quickly, so Moses added a lane on each side, which gave it the overhang feeling it has now. The dripping water that runs down the supports on Third Avenue, over near Costco? That was happening in the 1940s as well; it’s condensation.

Because Moses was able to amass so much power because he was able to hold his offices for so long (Al Smith gave him his first Commissioner job in 1924), and act with so much autonomy (he had never been elected, and never had to worry about being re-elected) he changed the landscape of New York City, Long Island and New York state forever. He literally moved rivers. Moses not only had a hand in building all that public housing that lines the East River (using only the cheapest materials, and eschewing “luxuries,” in which he included toilet seat lids and closet doors), but nearly everything else you can think of built in that era: Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, the newer part of Bellevue, NYU Hospital, the U.N., Rockefeller University and New York Hospital. And that’s just on the East River.
It’s a long book- it’ll take at least another blog.

Update on the Prospect Park Zoo

Okay, this is what the hyraxes (hyraxi?) look like. Photos by Tom Bovo.
Are they creepy, or what?

“It’ll Be Just Like Venice!”

Even before I moved to Gowanus, every few months I’d read in the New York Times how the Canal offered such wonderful development opportunities. It was only a matter of time until the Gowanus was a destination in itself.

The Canal has improved, I’ll admit. It has lost that extraordinary shade of green (the glowing color that a vial of poison should be in a Warner Brothers’ cartoon), and the aroma is less intense. A headline in this week’s Park Slope Courier-Life boasted: “New Gowanus Canal: Not as stinky as before.” Well, that’ll have ‘em lining up to buy tickets.

Back in December, Ben McGrath wrote a Town of the Town piece in the New Yorker (link above) about the City efforts to, as he put it: “raise the Gowanus’s quality, at a cost of about $140,000,000, to Class I, so that it will join merely filthy waterways such as the Harlem River and Coney Island Creek.”

It’s been a busy Gowanus year in the news. There was unfortunate demise of the minke whale, back in April. There was the Revolutionary War era submarine dive by Duke Riley, which my mother and I found hilarious, but the N.Y.P.D. and my boyfriend did not. There are also the three strange if brave men who insist on swimming (shudder) in the Canal.

My personal favorite scoop of last year was the New York Institute of Technology students who analyzed the water, and, among other bacteria, found gonorrhea. Who knew gonorrhea could survive in a body of water?

All that said, imagine my surprise this morning when I was procrastinating by skimming the Gowanus Lounge (http://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com), and saw that Toll Brothers is coming to this part of Brooklyn- they’ve already built luxury condos in Greenpoint. And that’s Toll Brothers as in the company that sponsors the Met Opera broadcasts, not the chocolate chip cookies though I guess that would make them Toll House Brothers, which doesn’t sound quite right. Okay, so pretend you’re a rich person, and you want to buy a luxury condo in New York City on the water. Do you buy a place over the Fairway in Red Hook? No, you’re an urban pioneer- you want to buy in Gowanus on the Canal, so that every time there’s heavy rain the sewers empty into the Canal (it doesn’t just smell like a toilet, it is one; although to be fair, the Venetian Canals have the same function) and even when there’s not a storm, there’s gonorrhea living in the water.

Has the world gone mad?

It Is All Happening at the Zoo

Yesterday morning, I felt like I needed to get out of the house. I’d taken the day after Valentine’s off, we’d been very efficient in our errand-running, and I’d turned in a 1000-word piece that was due Friday. So it was confront the MacBook screen or legal pads with no cigarette in hand, or get out!

So my boyfriend Tom Bovo (the Meerkats’ new best friend, judging from his photos) and I went to the Prospect Park Zoo. The sea lions are the centerpiece of the zoo, just like the one in Central Park (though there are fewer of them in Brooklyn). Somewhere I’d read that a theory for the origin of mermaids was some really horny, really tired sailor hearing a sea lion call from a rock. Yesterday, we heard quite a vocal sea lion, but his utterance sounded like the worst beer belch from the nastiest old drunk you can imagine- nothing like Ariel. We saw kangaroos (though we didn’t see the newborn joey sticking his head out of his mother’s pouch), two remarkably well-trained porcupineswho come when called, peacocks, pea hens, active red pandas, a big black swan and stolid looking red hawks, like the kind that fly around Manhattan.

In the Animal Lifestyles building, we had several memorable encounters. The baboons are behind plastic, but are remarkably close to you. (There were also some badly behaved children we thought of feeding to them.) There was a strange creature with a deranged looking photo on the Zoo’s website called a Rock Hyrax. It’s about the size of a cat, has no tail though it looks vaguely rodential. It is not, we learned later. It’s actually most closely related to manatees and elephants. I think the manatees and elephants lucked out in the looks department, because these things are creepy. In looking at the hyraxes, and the case next to them, there was a mouse who kept wandering back and forth between the hyrax case and the other looking for lunch. Tom thought the mouse might be a hyrax lunch, but it turns out they are vegetarians. I would hate to have to see that thing on a regular basis.

Then we came to the Animals in Our Lives building, and the petting zoo. My oldest niece was very fond of these meerkats when she was little. They are quite engaging, that’s for sure. Again, they look like they might be rodents, but they’re not. Meerkats are closely related to mongooses. The derivation of the name, which has always made me crazy because it looks like “cat of the sea” which they are obviously not, dictionary.com says is Middle Dutch, and originally meant “monkey,” because monkeys come from across the sea.” Huh? Anyhow, thy sleep all lumped together like puppies, and one stands watch over the others, just like the ads for “Meerkat Manor.”

Khalil Gibran Lives On

There was a very interesting New Yorker article last week by the reliable Joan Acocella about Khalil Gibran. He is the third-best selling poet of all-time, after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. My parents have two books of his; at various points in my life I’ve had up to three copies of “The Prophet” (all gifts). But I knew nothing much about him. Turns out he was from what is now Syria; his mother brought him and her other children to Boston’s South End (where Chinatown is now).

The place where I see his name most frequently these days is in reference to the public Arab school in Brooklyn, officially known as the Khalil Gibran International Academy. The previous, founding principal, Dhaba “Debbie” Almontaser, was fired after controversy surrounding her wearing a t-shirt that said Intifada NYC on it.

Be that as it may, there’s been a lot of press coverage of her, the school, reactions of parents, etc. There is also an underlying assumption that Arab school, in this case, equals Muslim school. Many female students and mothers wear scarves on their heads. So I was more than a little surprised when I read in the Acocella article that Khalil Gibran and his family were Maronite Catholics. One source I read said his grandfather was a Maronite priest. It doesn’t surprise me that there are Arab Christians- I certainly knew more Arab Christians than Arab Muslims when I was growing up. But it does surprise me in our religiously polarized world that a, at the very least, nominally Catholic poet’s name is on the front of the Arab school. The woman who replaced Almontaser is Holly Anne Reichert, who has taught in the Middle East, and previously had mentored ESL teacher.

One More Season!

The Associated Press reported today that Astroland at Coney Island has gotten a one-year reprieve. Link above.

The Wild Parrots of Brooklyn

Some years ago my brother and his family were living in a house in Pasadena. My little niece was very taken with the wild parrots that lived in the neighborhood. You couldn’t always see them, but you could certainly hear them. Later I read about the wild parrots of San Francisco, so I assumed parrots were a California thing.

A few summers ago, long before I had a clue I’d be transplanted to Gowanus, my boyfriend and I were walking to our favorite diner near his house in Bay Ridge. As we’re walking along a sidewalk that borders Leif Erikson Park, I looked down at the grass. And there, six feet from me, was a youthful-sized green parrot.

The parrots have been in Brooklyn since the early 1970s. The species (monk parrots, also called Quaker parrots) is originally from Argentina. No one seems to really know how they got here, though some say they escaped from a cargo at JFK. Their original home was at the Brooklyn College athletic field. They made their nests up in the light towers. Near Leif Erikson is a baseball field called the Dust Bowl, and we’ve watched the parrots building their nests in the light towers there.

The parrots’ third Brooklyn home is closer Gowanus, and that’s in the Gates of Eternity leading into Green-Wood Cemetery. They just love those Gothic spires, and they are quite squawky in their greetings to visitors.

There are many photographs of the parrots in Brooklyn and New Jersey at www.brooklynparrots.com. My personal favorites are the ones of them eating pizza; they also seem to enjoy bagels. There’s also a Brooklyn parrot video: http://www.loftinpro.com/animalplanet.htm. And a slide show of photos to watch while you listen to “The Ballad of the Brooklyn Parrots.”

The Great Brooklyn Theatre Fire

On the 4th of July, we did not go away, since my boyfriend and I had to work Tuesday and Thursday. Instead, we made a short trip to Green-Wood Cemetery, , which is about ten blocks from where I live. It's enormous, has four lakes (some bigger than others), a Gothic-looking chapel, hilly, lots of trees, great view of lower Manhattan. Really interesting funereal statuary, not to mention more mausoleums than I've ever seen in one place in my life.

We did some walking, and some slow driving (it kept raining). The nice guard at the entrance gave us a map, and we hunted down former Gov. DeWitt Clinton, but had less luck with Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the first important classical composer in the U.S.

One monument I noticed was what I thought was a memorial to the victims of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire. There was a large theatre called the Brooklyn Theatre; it looks like it was what's now in the southwest corner of what's now the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On the evening of Dec. 5, 1876, a kerosene lamp ignited a stage drop in the middle of a performance of "The Two Orphans". There were no fire escapes. The fire went up the drape to the ceiling of the theatre, and turned the building into a conflagration. Over 300 people died. Underneath the monument in Green-Wood are the victims whose bodies couldn't be identified. I thought I knew a lot of theatre fire history- in the 19th century, there was a massive fire at theatre Barnum rented (the menagerie was in the basement) on 14th Street and Irving Place (later the Academy of Music and then the Palladium), killed people and animals. And I've read about the Ringling Brothers fire in Hartford in the 1940s- the whole tent went up. But I'd never heard of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire before.

For contemporary newspaper accounts, go to:
http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Newspaper/BSU/1876.Bklyn.Theatre.Fire.html

Sodom by the Sea, Part Deux

So my friend Mark, my boyfriend and I made the pilgrimage to Coney Island on Friday afternoon. The breeze made it a little cool, so there were no old, roly-poly Russian guys wearing Speedos smaller than a dinner napkin, marinating on the sand. There were people fishing from the pier; several crabbers with traps baited with fair-sized chunks of raw chicken; and lots, lots of little kids with their parents. The seagulls were competing with the crabbers- they'd swoop down to the water, catch a crab in the beaks, and then fly back to the paved parts of land to smash the shells and feast on the meat.
I tried to envision it all gone- the food places (there's a great place called Ruby's with amazing fried clams), the bars (there aren't many other places in NYC where you can drink a margarita and walk at the same time without risking arrest), the Hit the Freak game (the freaks never seem too freakish- I look at least that bad awoken from a deep sleep), the bumper cars, Nathan's Famous. I couldn't do it. Those pieces of Coney Island seem inextricably linked to the land they're on. My understanding is the Cyclone is landmarked (I don't think anyone builds wooden rollercoasters anymore), but that's the only piece that is.
There was an article in the "Times" this week, and another in "The Brooklyn Paper" about the developer's new plan. He won't build condos, since there was widespread criticism of the condo idea. He'll build ... three luxury hotels! Three? I'd have thought one was a dicey idea. Unless he can build them as luxury hotels, and then convert them to luxury condos once he can't fill the hotel rooms. Pretty clever, eh?
Won't the Mermaid Parade have lost something if they promenade in front of luxury condos? Hardly seems an inspiring setting for live theatre, does it? Because I think that's what really gets me about Coney Island. You got the ocean, the boardwalk, the little businesses, the rides, the games, and then all of these people, as different as you can imagine, interacting in this setting that isn't like anywhere else. And for the most part, everybody gets along.
It's pretty miraculous, if you think about it like that.