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My apartment overlooks Broadway, the longest street in Manhattan, and if I move to one side of my window — and particularly if I hang my head out — I can see Grace Church, on the east side of Broadway between 10 th and 11 th Streets, right where Broadway curves for its long straight plunge downtown. Grace Church was built in the 1840s based on a design by James Renwick (1818–1895). Renwick was educated as a structural engineer rather than an architect. A competition was held in 1843 to design a new church; Renwick studied European gothic churches, submitted a design, and won. He later went on to design the Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington DC and St. Patrick's Cathedral. I recently acquired a book about the street over which I live entitled Broadway: The Grand Canyon of American Business (Broadway Association, 1926), and by "acquired" I mean "found." Sometimes when New Yorkers want to get rid of something, they don't dispose of it properly but instead put Read More...
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Five years ago the Metropolitan Museum mounted an extraordinary exhibit of Renaissance tapestries, and they've followed up with a new exhibit entitled Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (described online here ). Deirdre and I saw the exhibit this morning. The exhibit covers the period from 1590 to 1720 with about 40 tapestries — some of them over 20 feet wide that sprawl across the walls of the museum in breathtaking detailed panoramas. Tapestry is mostly associated with the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands), but wars and other events caused the technique and artists to bounce from country to country. Whole rooms in the exhibits are devoted to tapestries of France, Germany, Italy, and even England (James I was a fan). Most of the tapestries feature biblical or mythological scenes and were designed for large courts or palaces, but the exhibit also includes more tranquil scenes on a papal cope, a table carpet, and a bedcover. Here's an early 17th-century tapestry Read More...
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I live in a neighborhood of New York City called Greenwich Village, or often just The Village. We don't seem to get visited by Presidential candidates very much. Maybe some of them take us for granted; maybe others don't even bother. The neighborhood does tend to be a little . . . but let's leave politics out of it. Politics can be divisive, and the last thing we need is another 8 years of Rovian divisiveness. I suppose I could be forgetting about plenty of other Presidential candidate appearances in my neighborhood, but the last one I remember was Gary Hart, and that was the 1980s. So it was a real treat to learn that Barack Obama would be speaking at a outdoor rally in Washington Square Park this evening. I showed up rather early to get in line, and when they let us into the park at 4:30 I planted myself on the rim of the fountain, maybe about 50 feet from the elevated stage they set up for the occasion. Here's a view from Google maps . Over the next two hours, the park got more and more Read More...
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Today was the New York City Department of Sanitation / Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling Fall 2007 Electronics Recycling Event for the borough of Manhattan — time to make our tiny New York City apartments just a little bit roomier by getting rid of electronic junk. We didn't have much — a scanner with its own SCSI board and two inkjet printers, one HP, one Epson, with parallel port cables and three unused cartridges. We loaded the stuff on a handtruck and walked it to the north end of Union Square Park, joining the parade of other handtrucks, to the docking area where they were unloaded by young men who sorted the items into tall neat stacks of system units, keyboards, printers, notebooks.... On the way back home we passed an open window and heard a distinctive click, click, click. "Did you hear that?" We stopped walking, but it was now quiet. After a pause: click, click, click... click, click. A typewriter! An actual manual typewriter! Interesting tool, the Read More...
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About 7 or 8 years ago, I was having dinner with a couple friends in EJ’s Luncheonette, a glorified diner on 73 rd Street and 3 rd Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In walks Mayor Rudy Giuliani with his daughter (maybe about 9 or 10 years old) and they sit down in a booth for dinner just like regular people. Maybe in some smaller cities it’s common to be eating at the same restaurant as the Mayor, but it had never happened to me. The closest I ever came was attending some of the same tennis matches as David Dinkins. Nobody except the waiter approached Giuliani’s table. But everyone I told the story to later indicated that they would have taken the unique opportunity to confront the man with some pointed opinions and character assessments. (At that time, Giuliani had not yet gained his superpowers by inhaling 9/11 dust, and he was often referred to with a compound epithet common for law enforcement personnel who do not have a positive influence on race relations.) I now realize Read More...
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Anyone in 1976 reading The Village Voice or John Rockwell's reviews in the New York Times knew that there was something interesting going on in New York City's rock music scene, and the epicenter was a little bar named CBGB on Bleecker and the Bowery. While the rest of the pop music industry was degenerating into arena rock, gimmicks (KISS comes to mind), and the sterility of the studio (e.g., disco), the stripped-down bands at CBGB focused strictly on the music, and very raw music it was. When CBGB first entered my consciousness in 1976, I had been working for the past year as an Actuarial Student at New York Life Insurance Company. Some of my fellow Actuarial Students (particularly my friend Eli, but also Clark and Bruce) were interested in checking out CBGB to hear some of this stuff first hand. It was Eli who had the brilliant idea to call for reservations. I don't know how he figured this out, but here's the story: CBGB was long and narrow. As you entered from the street, the bar was Read More...
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One Sunday in 1983 I opened the New York Times Arts & Leisure section to find a two-page ad announcing the grand opening of Tower Records on 4th Street and Broadway, proudly open 9 AM to Midnight seven days a week. That address was about a 5-minute walk from my apartment and it was after 9 AM already, so I quickly put on some clothes and trotted down. Up on the top floor of Tower Records was the large classical section, and customers that opening day were literally walking around in a daze. "What have we done to deserve this magnificent gift?" they (and I) seemed to be asking. Of course, there were other places to buy classical records in NYC before Tower. When I was in college in the early 70s I used to take the Path train into the city to go to the Sam Goodys on 43rd and 3rd, whose whole basement was devoted to classical music. There were specialty stores as well: The famous Discophile on West 8th Street seemed to have permanent customers who spent the day arguing about great opera Read More...
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For a mathematician, Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) led a rather eventful life. He turned 21 in 1789 — l’année cruciale of the French Revolution, and the beginning of the most turbulent era of French history. He soon got involved in politics, and had a hard time staying out of trouble with the various factions of the Revolution. He was arrested on 4 July 1794, then freed, and then rearrested on 17 July. Fourier spent a nervous ten days in jail and was saved from probable execution only by the fall of Robespierre himself on 27 July and his execution on the following day. Fourier was arrested again on 7 June 1795 for his past involvement in the Revolution, but was released from jail after a royalist scare shifted prevailing sentiment leftwards again. He taught for awhile, and then in March 1798 received a letter from the Minister of the Interior that would change his life forever. Citoyen , the letter began, using the address that had replaced Monsieur by decree of the Convention in 1792. Citizen, Read More...
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I had never been to a taping of a TV show, so a few months ago Deirdre set into motion the process of Read More...
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It was Deirdre's idea that we would try to do something in New York City every week that reminds us why Read More...
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As a kid, I was fascinated with looms and weaving. I even had a little plastic loom that let you weave Read More...
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Deirdre and I are trying to do some "New York City thing" at least once a week, not necessarily to justify Read More...
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We are back in Manhattan — that little island, in Spalding Gray's words, off the coast of America. Read More...
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Tomorrow we make the end-of-summer transition from Deirdre's house in the Catskills back to our studio Read More...
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