I WAS BORN AND REARED...
IN THE ONCE-PRISTINE CITY of Denver, Colorado with the majestic Rocky Mountain Range as its backdrop, which held luminous elegant rivers filled with trout and Aspen trees that made an about-face each and every Fall from green to a golden tan and flaring red, and where a summer's rain could bloom against a sky of blue with the sun blazing brightly, a regular Utopian paradise for any child; but the best-loved place I have ever lived and worked, is the long skinny island called Manhattan, a mysterious mixture infused of past and present, of memory and myth. I have an irrational love for the place, even if it is a city of daily annoyances, occasional terrors, hourly tests of conviction and audacity; a city where something always surprises you, something fills you with new admiration and bewilderment, a borough that is open to all.
You can stand on any Avenue and watch the passing show, as comely women saunter up and down Fifth-Avenue; or take a hike over to Times Square, the crossroads of the world, where Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach once played at a place called Birdland; then walk on over to Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the great midtown center of the diamond trade, filled with rich Orthodox Jews and the Hasidim; as well as sauntering from about Thirty-eighth Street and up toward Fifty-fifth Street on the West Side near the Hudson River, where you once descended into a grungy mess known as Hell's Kitchen, invaded by an Irish mob led by a man by the name of Jimmy Coonan, and filled with pizza counters, streetwalkers, and drugs.
There had been calls for reform for a long time, when two Mayors stepped up to the plate, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani. The clean up began, of course, with the attempt to save Times Square, starting at Forty-second Street. At first, the changes were small. The Port Authority was expanded, forcing regiments of vagrants off the premises, and The Deuce, as it is called, was becoming the visual symbol of changes that were taking place across the entire city. Welfare hotels closed, along with the porno shops. The Disney people announced grand plans for the decayed old New Amsterdam Theater, built in 1903, once home of the Ziegfeld Follies. Soon newspapers were running many stories of things to come.
Around the time that Disney and others were transforming Forty-second Street, similar changes were under way up in Harlem on 125 Street. The former basketball star Magic Johnson opened a thirteen-screen multiplex, video stores opened, and record stores, and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, along with clothing stores and restaurants. For Harlem, as for many other parts of New York, the plague years seemed to have ended; and way down on Fourteenth Street, a place once known for derelicts and knife artists, Union Square was for many years a spooky place, in the 1990's, it too changed. Barnes & Noble opened its flagship store, excellent restaurants abounded on the edge of the square and on its side street. Once more New Yorkers could loll in the sun or read on benches or sleep on the grass of a small park.
Like many New Yorkers, each day something always caught me off-balance, something else made me more inquisitive, and I tried to live the time of my life as fully as possible. But there was simply never enough of it to know all I wanted to know or to see all I wanted to see; like to attend a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, to stroll in Central Park for as long as I wished, or marvel at watching the Yankees play the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built; or climbing-up the steps inside of The Statue of Liberty, taking more time to stare at the Empire State Building and the Chrysler and browse through book-upon-book at the Strand on Broadway and Twelfth, or walk about in Chinatown, then sit in the darkness of a theater in Shubert Alley, the geographical center of Broadway, in absolute awe at the talent I saw on stage; to surrender myself to the city's magic at the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then hop aboard a New York Harbor Cruise, to see all of the spires and the bridges; to stroll over to Second Avenue, between St. Mark's Place and Ninth Street, to the place where the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library was once housed, which is still there, in its rich terra-cotta glory, a place whose doors first opened in 1884, built by a German American named Oswald Ottendorfer, a man who truly used his wealth to help others; and near the end of the day, with the sun heading out to New Jersey and the sky suddenly lavender, head back downtown again, to the place where the city was created...
And when I arrived there, I wished that I could hear the voices from the past and those who spoke them, that I could somehow wander back in time and witness those who marked their departures for the City of New York; the Jews and Italians and Belgians and Poles and Irish and Germans who traveled across land to the ports of Europe and then on to the creepy Atlantic and the distant harbor of New York; to walk with my Mom and see the amazement in her eyes, as she first set foot on Ellis Island and laid eyes on the Statue of Liberty; to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants play just one more time; and mingle with Peter Stuyvesant and the Knickerbockers as they worshiped at Trinity Church; or meet Robert Fulton, who did not live to see the enormous changes that came to New York in the wake of his Steamboat. To sit in Greenwich Village listening to Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and assimilate the birth of the Beatniks; to hear ragtime for the first time and see D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation at a Bowery theater back in 1915, then boo at what I had just seen, because it was the greatest recruiting device for a newly-minted Klu Klux Klan; or go back to a time when there were no electric lights, no typewriters, no telephones, and no telegraph, and I could imagine watching Horace Greeley and Stephen Crane and Edgar Allen Poe scribbling magnificent words in candlelight; or witness Abraham Lincoln give his Cooper Union speech in February of 1860, before he had become the President of the United States.
Yet, my favorite memory of all memories is that of sharing the time I spent with my Daughter; of walking arm-in-arm down a rain-soaked street, an umbrella hovering over our heads to protect us from the falling rain, the glistening street lights of night guiding our way, as we sang our favorite Broadway tunes with smiles on our faces and laughter on our lips; to watch her give a solo performance in an off-Broadway play at the Samuel Beckett Theater on Forty-second Street; or dine with her at a small restaurant on Second Avenue called The Tavern; to look across the water as we sat on a bench that ran along the west side of Battery Park City watching small blocks of ice moving long the river on a winter afternoon with a friend by the name of Barbara; to listen to music together from Evita and Chicago while lounging by the pool in her East Hampton home; or to just sit silently, watching her in wonderment, astonished that I could have such a breathtaking person as my daughter and thinking that the exuberance of the city I am ardent about has been incorporated into the soul of the Daughter I am wild about...
You can stand on any Avenue and watch the passing show, as comely women saunter up and down Fifth-Avenue; or take a hike over to Times Square, the crossroads of the world, where Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach once played at a place called Birdland; then walk on over to Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the great midtown center of the diamond trade, filled with rich Orthodox Jews and the Hasidim; as well as sauntering from about Thirty-eighth Street and up toward Fifty-fifth Street on the West Side near the Hudson River, where you once descended into a grungy mess known as Hell's Kitchen, invaded by an Irish mob led by a man by the name of Jimmy Coonan, and filled with pizza counters, streetwalkers, and drugs.
There had been calls for reform for a long time, when two Mayors stepped up to the plate, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani. The clean up began, of course, with the attempt to save Times Square, starting at Forty-second Street. At first, the changes were small. The Port Authority was expanded, forcing regiments of vagrants off the premises, and The Deuce, as it is called, was becoming the visual symbol of changes that were taking place across the entire city. Welfare hotels closed, along with the porno shops. The Disney people announced grand plans for the decayed old New Amsterdam Theater, built in 1903, once home of the Ziegfeld Follies. Soon newspapers were running many stories of things to come.
Around the time that Disney and others were transforming Forty-second Street, similar changes were under way up in Harlem on 125 Street. The former basketball star Magic Johnson opened a thirteen-screen multiplex, video stores opened, and record stores, and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, along with clothing stores and restaurants. For Harlem, as for many other parts of New York, the plague years seemed to have ended; and way down on Fourteenth Street, a place once known for derelicts and knife artists, Union Square was for many years a spooky place, in the 1990's, it too changed. Barnes & Noble opened its flagship store, excellent restaurants abounded on the edge of the square and on its side street. Once more New Yorkers could loll in the sun or read on benches or sleep on the grass of a small park.
Like many New Yorkers, each day something always caught me off-balance, something else made me more inquisitive, and I tried to live the time of my life as fully as possible. But there was simply never enough of it to know all I wanted to know or to see all I wanted to see; like to attend a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, to stroll in Central Park for as long as I wished, or marvel at watching the Yankees play the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built; or climbing-up the steps inside of The Statue of Liberty, taking more time to stare at the Empire State Building and the Chrysler and browse through book-upon-book at the Strand on Broadway and Twelfth, or walk about in Chinatown, then sit in the darkness of a theater in Shubert Alley, the geographical center of Broadway, in absolute awe at the talent I saw on stage; to surrender myself to the city's magic at the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then hop aboard a New York Harbor Cruise, to see all of the spires and the bridges; to stroll over to Second Avenue, between St. Mark's Place and Ninth Street, to the place where the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library was once housed, which is still there, in its rich terra-cotta glory, a place whose doors first opened in 1884, built by a German American named Oswald Ottendorfer, a man who truly used his wealth to help others; and near the end of the day, with the sun heading out to New Jersey and the sky suddenly lavender, head back downtown again, to the place where the city was created...
And when I arrived there, I wished that I could hear the voices from the past and those who spoke them, that I could somehow wander back in time and witness those who marked their departures for the City of New York; the Jews and Italians and Belgians and Poles and Irish and Germans who traveled across land to the ports of Europe and then on to the creepy Atlantic and the distant harbor of New York; to walk with my Mom and see the amazement in her eyes, as she first set foot on Ellis Island and laid eyes on the Statue of Liberty; to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants play just one more time; and mingle with Peter Stuyvesant and the Knickerbockers as they worshiped at Trinity Church; or meet Robert Fulton, who did not live to see the enormous changes that came to New York in the wake of his Steamboat. To sit in Greenwich Village listening to Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and assimilate the birth of the Beatniks; to hear ragtime for the first time and see D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation at a Bowery theater back in 1915, then boo at what I had just seen, because it was the greatest recruiting device for a newly-minted Klu Klux Klan; or go back to a time when there were no electric lights, no typewriters, no telephones, and no telegraph, and I could imagine watching Horace Greeley and Stephen Crane and Edgar Allen Poe scribbling magnificent words in candlelight; or witness Abraham Lincoln give his Cooper Union speech in February of 1860, before he had become the President of the United States.
Yet, my favorite memory of all memories is that of sharing the time I spent with my Daughter; of walking arm-in-arm down a rain-soaked street, an umbrella hovering over our heads to protect us from the falling rain, the glistening street lights of night guiding our way, as we sang our favorite Broadway tunes with smiles on our faces and laughter on our lips; to watch her give a solo performance in an off-Broadway play at the Samuel Beckett Theater on Forty-second Street; or dine with her at a small restaurant on Second Avenue called The Tavern; to look across the water as we sat on a bench that ran along the west side of Battery Park City watching small blocks of ice moving long the river on a winter afternoon with a friend by the name of Barbara; to listen to music together from Evita and Chicago while lounging by the pool in her East Hampton home; or to just sit silently, watching her in wonderment, astonished that I could have such a breathtaking person as my daughter and thinking that the exuberance of the city I am ardent about has been incorporated into the soul of the Daughter I am wild about...
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