January - Peril in the Frozen North to Splendifferous Days in The Big Apple

Art and Paul decided to spend some time at "The Winter Palace" in Brooklin and I decided to horn in on the fun. They left right after the first with the dogs and I headed out a few days later.

Luckily my drive to a friend's house in northern Vermont was uneventful. I say "luckily" because inept work at the Subaru dealer in Raleigh left me without brakes. Luckily because I was at my destination.  Luckily because I was in Vermont, where every third car is a Subaru, many as old as mine,so they had the parts almost on hand and installed in less than an hour. The local mechanic was so amazed by what he saw that he took a picture of the brake caliper hanging by the hose. That's brake fluid all over the tire.

My overnight stay in Gorham, NH on the way to Maine was made the more thrilling by the -18 degree temperature and the 35 mile an hour wind. Your nose could fall off.

The new house proved to be quite winter-worthy even in the face of some very cold temps. Several of our friends there were either knocked out or on the recovery from some sort of cold thing, but we did get together with some of the others, so we didn't lose the thread of any of the major gossip headlines. I think these two snaps speak to the kind of weather we had. Just enough snow to be pretty, followed by bright blue skies.

Next stop - several splendid days staying with Chad & Matt in Jamaica Plain. We ate and drank and talked and laughed, both at home and in restaurants.  Chad arranged an after-work cocktail party in honor of my visit held at a bar named in honor of.....wait for it....  Carrie Nation the hatchet-wielding, anti-alcohol radical. Called herself a bulldog for Jesus.

There were ten of us in an enormous bar with who knows how many rooms. It was fun having my niece Emma and husband Andrew  join the fun with some of Chad and Matt's always delightful tribe.  After a few drinks several of us adjourned around the corner to the bar at the Omni Parker House and had a bit of a supper including the eponymous rolls.

Maggie Hunt and I had a fun lunch with Yo-Yo Ma at B&G Oysters. OK, he was a few tables away.  But the lunch was fun.  I wish I could retell one of the stories I heard, but think it best if it's told as part of a fiction. Return to Colony perhaps.

What followed for me was several action-packed days in the city with two names. The last several years I've been invited to tag along with Art and Paul and Karl and Katie for a long weekend of New York fun. This year my buddy Tom invited me to extend my time and stay with him at his great apartment. The intersection where he lives is either 110th & Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard or Central Park North & 7th Avenue. Guess which he prefers.

One day I walked 110th Street from the Hudson to the Harlem. West of Broadway the street is lined with lots of pre-war giant apartment blocks, some with wonderful decorations. That's me waving in the doorway.

   

Here we are crossing Broadway, where the street name becomes Cathedral Parkway as it passes close to St. John The Divine.....and the high rise built on the Cathedral's unused real estate.

Cathedral Parkway becomes Central Park North at Frederick Douglas Plaza which is also the northern end of Central Park West.

This wonderful quote is part of the plaza.

THE TYPES OF MANKIND ARE VARIOUS.  

THEY DIFFER LIKE THE WAVES, BUT THEY ARE ONE LIKE THE SEA.

You can then walk just inside the park for several blocks.

 past Tom & Paul's....

and the frozen Meer...

until we reach Duke Ellington Square at 5th Avenue....

which immediately becomes......

which marks the beginning of what is now called Spaha by real estate agents and called Spanish Harlem by the rest of us.

This is Park Avenue where the trains to Grand Central have come above ground.

Another name for the neighborhood.

And at the east end of 110th, gigantic modern apartment towers hanging on the edge of the Harlem River Drive.

Before we leave 110th, here's a snap taken from the apartment during the same week.

My, how I love being in The City. There could be so much to say about any given five minutes, but I'll just go through the week with one or two of the highlights of each day.

SATURDAYArt & Paul & I met  for a splendid, quiet, elegant  time at one of Art's traditional favorites,

Picholine.

SUNDAY

Matinee of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time". Every person I know who read the book said they were sure they could never make a play out of it. Well, I haven't read the book, and they did make a play of it. One-word review...."Breathtaking". 

Afterwards, in company with Stephen Pascal, we adjourned for a bite and some chat to 

You don't necessarily go to Sardi's for the food, although I do go for the Steak Tartar and the well built cocktail. You go because you can relax surrounded by theater/New York history. Stephen has traveled in some of the more rarefied atmospheres of The City, so always brings something fun to the conversation.

MONDAY

Matinee of the movie "Boyhood". One word review ..."Touching"

A bite at Fiorello's, which has become our default restaurant near Lincoln Center.

Overheard along our banquette: Two women, one with a baby, talking about the father of the baby and his disapproval of her relaxed control of said baby, "Well, I don't know what he's complaining about. I never let her near the harpsichord."

Evening performance of "The Bullpen" , a one man show performed by the author, who inhabits 18 characters, mostly locked up, involved in two trials. One-word review..."Extraordinary!!"

TUESDAY

While Paul & Art were up to their own diversions, I took myself down to Grand Central for an Oyster Pan Roast at The Oyster Bar and walked The High Line, which is a spectacular re-imagining of industrial waste, in this case abandoned elevated train tracks.

Karl and Katie got to town and we all attended "The Merry Widow" at the Met. And while it's always great to be in the house, and yes the singing and yes the orchestra, still, the One-word review...."Meh"

WEDNESDAY

Prime seats for "The Book of Mormon". It was right on the edge of painful to laugh that much for that long, but it's the kind of pain I can live with. One-word review....."Everything-I-want-in-a-musical."

Follow theater like that with a meal in this room and you will have had a pinnacle New York day.

The pool

The Four Seasons

THURSDAY

Tom finally had some time in his schedule, so we went to see "Birdman". After attending several live shows already, it was quite fun to peek behind the curtain, albeit through a somewhat surreal lens. One-word review....."Interesting".

FRIDAY

The day was occupied by the walk across 110th. I think you could do something like that on every block of this awesome island. 

Friday night the Metropolitan Museum is open until 9PM

This area in front of the Museum is now the David Koch Plaza

I went there in particular to see

  Thomas Hart Bentons America Today Mural

City Life and Subways

is one of nine large panels, framed and sectioned with aluminum.

SATURDAY

Matinee of "A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes"

These actors prepare for and serve a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving Dinner 

without a single prop or piece of funiture

with a set that is the window you see here and another one just like it above it.

The seating is like a sports event.  The floor in front of the two windows, where most of the action takes place, looks like a basketball court, and while the family is  working its way through every mini-crisis ( add a leaf to the table?, where's the special dish? what do mean she's coming?), in the window above sit two men dressed as sports announcers, calling each of the "moves".  One-word review......"Funtastic" 

Evening performance of "It's Only a Play". An updated Terrence McNally classic with, as is apparently necessary, a star studded cast. A play about a play seemed an excellent finish to the week, and was.   Even if a performance or two seemed phoned in, the One-word review..."Irresistible"

The next morning I decided to skedaddle in advance of the Blizzard of the Century - which missed The City.

By the end of the week, which was also the end of January I was into my four day drive to Arizona, almost all of it on Intersate 40. Aside from the much needed respite with Fred and John in Albuquerque, the countryside went by in a 75 MPH blur, but I do remember the states by the billboards I saw.

North Caroline - Tobacco & Furniture

Tennessee - Loretta Lynn & Horses 

Arkansas - Guns & Jesus

Oklahoma - A new Nation & A new Casino every 50 miles

Texas - Loans for farmers & Special seeds

New Mexico - How many miles/hours to Gallup, Winslow, Flagstaff & How many motel rooms each one has.

Arizona - The distance to natural amazements. Meteor Crater,  Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon.

I hope you've enjoyed traveling along.

ARRESTED ! ! !

I've been in jail in a few places in the course of my checkered ( no... harlequin ) tumble through life and though I have no scars from those incidents, I do have a few good stories.  I decided to share this one because I have pictures to go with it. Sorry about the quality some of the snaps, a lot of them are from 30 year old slides.

It started like any number of Sundays in 1984. I was living downtown and a few of us had gathered at Ratner's on Delancey. It closed in 2002 - R.I.P. chocolate babka, awesome onion rolls, smoked fish platters, latkes with apple sauce, and most famous of all, grumpy old waiters who could bang a coffee cup and saucer on the table and not spill a drop.....or not care if they did.

  
Among the party was Moi ( rhymes with "boy", or since we're starting at Ratner's, "goy" ) whose name and parentage are Chinese, but whose attitude is 100% American artist. Later that day she was joining a class of Chinese people studying English who were going around Manhattan on the Circle Line. We made a plan for me to take pictures as they passed by Delancey Street some hours later. 

I knew a great place to take that photo.

I loved that bicycle. It was absolutely the best way to get around the neighborhood.

In the background is the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River at the end of Delancey, carrying subways, cars and pedestrians from the old Jewish immigrant neighborhood to the new Jewish enclave in Williamsburg.  When it was built it was the largest suspension bridge in the world and probably the last one built with horses in mind. Today it's known for carrying the most bicycles of any bridge in the city.

Here's another picture of the bridge, from the other side of the river, looking toward where I'm located on the one above.

The place where I  went to take the pictures is the top of the bridge tower on the right in this photo. 

No, it was not open to the public. 

However, sometime earlier in the year while taking a ride to nowhere in particular,

I saw this door

which was, I discovered after scampering over a few lanes of traffic,

UNLOCKED!!

What could I do but take the stairs as far as they would go?

As it turned out, they went 355 feet to the top, through the inside of the structure surrounding the cables and to a ladder with access to the roof of that structure.

Here's a view of the top.

Between the two cables is a nice flat spot for sunning and reading, but you could also get on the very top.

That is the Circle Line boat coming up the East River

I'll finish the story in a bit, but here are a few of the scenic delights which made me so fond of this secret spot.

Looking back to Delancey Street

Note the seagull in the bottom left

Kinda makes you dizzy, no?

I'm pretty sure I was the only person in New York who knew about and used this location. 

So on that Sunday, I packed up my shoulder bag with camera, water, smoking material, and reading material ( In this case Candide ), and headed up the tower. And sure enough, just about when I expected them, up the river came the Circle Line boat.

That's part of the already abandoned Navy Yards in the background.

As they passed under the bridge, I could tell that Moi was on board because I could see a white scarf or shirt being waved back and forth. I responded by doing the same with my Hawaiian shirt.....this may have been a mistake.

 They continued on with the circumnavigation of Manhattan.

 

I continued with my top-of-the-world indolence.

As it was a pretty hot summer day, and the breakfast at "Ratty's" was fairly epic, and the climbing 35 stories, and the etc., before too long I had fallen asleep.  I'm not sure how much time passed but this is what I saw when I woke up.

I wondered why there would be a helicopter so close to the top of the bridge, so I got up and looked down and, sure enough, traffic was at a complete standstill. "Must have been an accident." , thought the innocent. The helicopter flew away and I returned to my reading. Not too long after that I heard someone shouting, "HEY, YOU!!!"

Imagine my surprise when I looked and saw a policeman, in flack jacket and helmet, walking up the cable and holding on to the two smaller cables on either side of it ( see above as the boat goes under the bridge ). Now that would be scary!  After I acknowledged him with a wave while he was still quite a way from the top, he shouted "COME DOWN!!".  Another wave and I slipped down the ladder into the structure, parted with the hash and pipe, scurried down the stairs to the waiting arms of some of New York's Finest and their squad car ( which had come up the automobile part of the bridge in the wrong direction from Manhattan ),  and wondered what would be next as we backed down the bridge and pulled off just a block or so from the start of the story. 

As they weren't sure if I was a jumper, a shooter, or some other kind of crazy ( guilty, your honor ), they asked some questions, often accompanied by incredulous eye rolls.  The names involved alone.

"What's your name?"

"Forest Hunter" (eye roll)

"What were you doing up there?"

"Taking pictures of a friend on the Circle Line."

"What's his name?

"Her name is Moi."

Eye roll accompanied by "Really!?"

They wanted to know who was playing the baseball game of great importance today. I confessed I had no idea.

"You were up there chokin' the chicken, weren't you?"

"No. You guys got there so fast I hadn't gotten around to it."

"Don't get smart with me. I can send you to Bellevue, you know."

Profuse apologies from the soon to be incarcerated.

By the time the cuffs were on, they all realized that this wasn't going to be any of their worst nightmares and we were headed to the local precinct.  The cop driving ( a bit of a cutey, I remember, let's call him "Officer Jimmy" ) allowed as how I was the best ( easiest ) collar he'd ever had. "Collar?" said I. "Yeah, you know arrested, taken by the collar."  He said that once we got to the station he was going torture me and then his girlfriend was going to torture me because he was supposed to watching The Game with her. He also offered the following advice for when we arrived at the station, "Tell the Sargent he looks like the kind of guy that would beat baby seals to death. He'll think it's funny." I allowed as how " I don't think this is a good place to check on somebody's sense of humor."  But as I approached his desk, Officer Jimmy said " This guy said you looked like somebody who would .. etc........."  Apparently everyone was relaxed.  While the Sargent was busy filling out forms I offered that if they didn't want people up there on the bridge, perhaps they should lock the door.  His response, with a gesture to an indiscriminate corner of the room, was, " The suggestion box is over there." I had to laugh.

Once in the day room, I was given  my own cozy iron barred relaxation area and waited while they called my local reference and finished all the necessary paper work for someone who had closed one the major bridges in the city.

When they asked for my belt and shoelaces I couldn't help but note that if I was going to kill myself, I had been in a pretty good position for that just a while ago. They had to laugh.

There was another major eye roll, this one accompanied by a sigh when Officer Jimmy, inspecting the contents of my bag, pulled out a package of Zig-Zags. Happily for me, he decided he didn't need to see anything else, put the papers back in the bag,closed it, and put it on the floor by his desk.

They teased me that if I had a better camera (at that time meaning German ) they could let me go as a photographer, "....but with this Japanese piece of shit.? No way."

I was told that there were laws on the books prohibiting the taking of photographs from the bridges. "Oh, is that left over from WWII and the Navy Yards?" Informed that I was correct I offered that I had actually taken some pictures of the Navy Yards from there. He shouted to the other end of the dayroom, "Hey, we got a communist here, taking pictures of the Navy Yards." The response from the other end was, "No, he's from Arizona. It's all just old conservative assholes!"  Some things never change.

During this time a DEA directive called Operation Push was trying to rid the Lower East Side of all the dangerous drugs sold on the street. Anyone arrested within a red-lined area was drug tested and examined at Bellevue.  When the suited agent came to collect me for testing, Officer Jimmy, Sweet Officer Jimmy,  sent him away as follows, "No, he was outside your area. We arrested him over the river."

I was charged with Reckless Endangerment and released without bond. On the way walking to Sally's  I looked through my bag and found a rolled joint.  I smoked it.

When I got to Sally's, Mikey, the 10-year old  New Yorker, offered this sage advice, "Well you should have known better than to be up there waving your shirt around on Sunday. That's the busiest day for that bridge."

After three court appearances, it became clear that Officer Jimmy had done a terrible job of keeping track of the paperwork and the city had no choice but to drop the charges.

I have not returned to the scene of the crime, so I hope when they were renovating the bridge the right person found that pipe.