The New York Times Book of New York Read online

  The New York Times

  Book of New York

  549 stories of the people, the events and the life of the city—past and present

  Edited by

  james barron

  Introduction by

  anna quindlen

  Supervising Editor

  mitchel levitas

  New York City has been written about, sung about, and talked about in every way imaginable, but there is no better single record of its many splendors than The New York Times. Meyer Berger, Gay Talese, Brooks Atkinson, Frank Rich, Ada Louise Huxtable, John Kieran, William Grimes, Jennifer 8. Lee, McCandlish Phillips, Clyde Haberman and hundreds more of the newspaper legends represented in the pages of this book have been recounting the major events, everyday lives, dynamic culture and off-beat treasures of the city for more than 150 years.

  This engrossing collection brings together the expected and unexpected—often on the same page. From Olmsted and Vaux’s winning 1858 design for Central Park to the depressed polar bear at the Park Zoo; from Ruth Reichl’s memorable review of Le Cirque to the family feud at Zabars; from the day Joey Gallo was shot on Mulberry Street to the day the “subway hero” jumped on the tracks to save another man’s life; from the building of the Chrysler building to the mission to save the “Moon-struck” house in Brooklyn Heights; from when the Dodgers left Brooklyn to the 2000 Subway World Series; plus profiles of New Yorkers like Martin Scorsese, Colson Whitehead, Phil Rizzuto, Eleanor Roosevelt and much more, the book is both historical and modern, at times serious and funny—an altogether fascinating new perspective on New York.

  Browsable and fully illustrated with recent and archival photographs from The Times’s own collection, the book touches on all topics related to New York—people, transportation, architecture and parks, arts and leisure, business, politics and government, crime, disasters, food, sports and neighborhoods.

  Whether you’re a lifelong New Yorker or you’ve never been, The New York Times Book of New York is a compelling look at the world’s greatest city as seen through the eyes of its most respected journalists—and as recorded on the pages of its most storied newspaper.

  A Note to Readers

  In his Foreword to a selection of Joseph Mitchell’s articles, mostly from The New Yorker, his colleague Calvin Trillin wrote that after Mitchell knew the city’s “grim specifics” as a police reporter, and “even after he knew it as an acknowledged master of its neighborhoods, he never lost an out-of-towner’s sense of wonderment.”

  That was our goal in choosing these articles, all but a handful by staff writers for The New York Times, from among the millions of articles about its own city that The Times has published over the years: to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of New York that residents, recent immigrants and visitors would find spontaneous and surprising, informative but not encyclopedic, and subjective but broadly inclusive. If we have come reasonably close to that goal, it is because Times reporters and editors have provided the skill and the judgment—day after day and year after year since the paper’s founding in 1851—to make a collection like this possible.

  That said, the pages here contain, for the most part, excerpts of the articles that appeared in The Times. Even in a book as thick as this one turned out to be, the available space was limited, and we had to give many of the stories a trim—but not, we believe, a buzz cut. We worked as carefully as possible to cut as few words as possible. We did very little rewriting or condensation—the words you will read here are largely the words that appeared in The Times on the dates indicated. We did take some liberties with deleting time elements like “yesterday” in passages where they seemed unnecessary in a book like this, published so long after the morning after the events described in the stories. We also rewrote some of the headlines to fit into the space available in the format of the book. But that is in keeping with what the copy editors who wrote the original headlines did in the first place: they were writing to fit the layout of a particular page. In all cases, we did our best to preserve the essence of what was originally published in The Times.

  Chief among our partners in the effort are the writers and photographers whose work is gratefully represented here. Among the publisher’s stalwarts, we are indebted to Lisa Tenaglia for indispensible, imaginative research into a mountain of newspaper clippings; Liz Van Doren for her editorial insight; Susie Tofte for her research—all under the guidance of J.P. Leventhal, the publisher. For The Times, we thank Alex Ward, editorial director of the book development program, for his continuing support; Phyllis Collazo, Ryan Murphy and Jeffrey Roth for their expertise in locating archival photos; and Tomi Murata for her managerial touch.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Anna Quindlen

  Eight Million Stories: People

  Immigrants and City Workers

  Characters

  Famous New Yorkers

  Entertainers, Artists and Writers

  Take the A Train: Transportation

  Trolleys and Rail Stations

  Subways and Buses

  Bridges and Tunnels

  Taxis, Pedestrians and Cyclists

  The Cityscape: Architecture & Parks

  Famous Buildings

  Tourist Attractions

  Mansions and Brownstones

  City Parks

  Lullabies of Broadway: Arts & Leisure

  Museums and Public Art

  Musicals and Plays

  Opera and Music

  Nightlife, Film and TV

  The Business of NY: Business

  Wall Street

  Real Estate

  Labor

  Fashion, Publishing and Advertising

  City Hall and Beyond: Politics & Government

  Tammany Hall

  Mayors

  Scandals and Corruption

  Ordinances

  Mean Streets: Crime

  The Infamous

  The Mob

  Riots and Robberies

  The NYPD

  Victims and Heroes: Disaster

  Blackouts

  Terrorism

  Fires and Firefighters

  Plane Crashes and Construction

  A Bite of the Big Apple: Food

  Pizza, Cheesecake and Bagels

  Street food and Vendors

  Ethnic Food and Markets

  Restaurants

  Damn Yankees: Sports

  Baseball and Football

  Basketball and Hockey

  Tennis and Boxing

  Marathons

  All Around the Town: Neighborhoods

  Manhattan

  Brooklyn

  Queens

  The Bronx

  Staten Island

  Introduction

  By ANNA QUINDLEN

  ONE SPRING AFTERNOON YEARS AGO I STOOD on a Manhattan corner peering at a street map, miming confusion. The experiment was part of a story; the point to count how many New Yorkers would stop to offer advice or assistance to what looked like a befuddled tourist. In an hour there were 21, unless you count the man in rags who bellowed “Gimme some change” and spit extravagantly at my feet when I ignored him.

  New York City is everything people say it is, and everything they persist in believing it is not.

  New York City is everything people say it is, and everything they persist in believing it is not. It’s passersby who look locked in a Lucite box of indifference, and those who will snap out of it in a second if you really seem to need help. It’s a city of faceless glass-and-steel monoliths and a village of single-family houses and volunteer school safety patrols. It’s places to eat where the tab defies belief, and corner falafel stands with a line down the st
reet at lunchtime. It’s tough and it’s friendly and it’s terrifying and it’s homey. From the shores of Staten Island to the northernmost reaches of the Bronx, it’s more or less everything, sometimes all on the same block.

  And because of that it can be the easiest city in the world in which to be a reporter and writer. For three years I wrote a column for the New York Times called About New York, which is perhaps the best gig in daily journalism—two columns a week about anything you want, anywhere in the five boroughs. When, occasionally, the ideas evaporated, when there was no firehouse closing or hot dog-eating contest to investigate, I knew exactly what to do. I rode the subway to a random stop—Rockaway Boulevard, Parkchester—and began to walk. (Once, when I was expecting my first child, a patrol car followed me around a dicey area of Brooklyn, because, the cops said, it would be a real mess if a pregnant reporter was mugged on their patch.) Trust me: within a 15-minute walk of any subway stop in New York there is a beauty salon with a proprietor who has stories to tell, or a community garden with volunteers who can’t wait to have someone notice their urban zucchini, or a playground with moms who have a bone to pick about the school system, or simply a bus stop with a sampling of New Yorkers. The benches along the boardwalk in Coney Island were my lodestone, filled with elderly men who knew the story of the city better than some historians; I had only to take a notebook and a pen from my bag, and the world, or at least a detailed and richly remembered part of it, was mine.

  The pitfall for reporters is that there are as many clichés in the city as there are bodegas. Those elderly retirees, with their jaded view of the changing neighborhood and their mahjongg-playing wives, have long been staple of sitcoms and movies. Neon signs, crusty waiters, extravagant graffiti—it’s all been done. Luckily the city itself provides a fresh perspective because of its never-ending metamorphosis. The bench sitters of my youth have been replaced in some areas by a new incarnation—black instead of white, Baptist instead of Jewish, former bus drivers instead of print shop owners. New Yorkers are always remaking themselves, and New York, too. The elegant and iconic main building of the New York Public Library, with the pair of stone lions guarding the entrance, looks as though it has always been there. But in fact it was built on what was once a reservoir, the park behind it a battle site in 1776 and a Potter’s Field 50 years later. When I was a neophyte reporter that park was known mainly for drug deals and monster rats; today it is a beautifully manicured place to have a cup of coffee or a meal al fresco.

  Lower Manhattan from the Empire State Building’s observation deck, 2002.

  And yet even when New York changes there are some core principles that stay the same. New Yorkers are usually from somewhere else: Indiana, India. Washington Heights, once the destination of choice for displaced German Jewish families, is now the home to Dominicans looking for a new life. The funky downtown vibe of the Lower East Side has gotten an upwardly mobile gloss; there are limos idling in front of its restaurants now. Funky moved across the river, to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, although there are people living there who will tell you that it’s already spoilt and the action is in Astoria, Queens. Live in New York City long enough, and someday you will pass an apartment building where you once rented a one-bedroom and discover it has become 24-karat cooperatives. Stay a little longer, and the area may become shabby, out of favor. Here is how old I am, and how fluid the city: I predate the very notion of a neighborhood called TriBeCa.

  In a metaphysical feat, the more you know New York, the smaller it feels. Flying over it on the way to Kennedy or LaGuardia, the size of the sprawl is overwhelming, but at ground level it’s intimate. A borough becomes a neighborhood, a neighborhood a block, and a block a single family in a single apartment. Real New Yorkers know that they live in the biggest little small town in America, in which anonymity vies always with knowingness, and usually loses. Just because neighbors don’t acknowledge one another by name or even eye contact doesn’t mean they don’t acknowledge the fights they hear through the walls, the routines of leaving for work and arriving home, even the contents and timing of the grocery deliveries. We’re a laissez-faire tribe, perhaps because the city is so diverse. The street scene includes people in wheelchairs and people in drag, women in clown suits and women in Chanel suits. A subway car at rush hour often looks like a general assembly session at the United Nations.

  It’s a city of strangers, as Stephen Sondheim wrote in one song; that’s our wildlife.

  The only thing that seems to disconcert New Yorkers is nature, perhaps because we’ve usurped it so with macadam. It’s why a coyote that has wandered down into the Bronx, the occasional pet boa let loose in the plumbing, a pair of nesting hawks in Central park, all make for a surefire story. I’ve covered New York since I was 19, and the only day I was truly speechless was the morning several years ago when I came around a midtown corner just after dawn and saw three camels and a donkey standing in the street. They were participants in the Christmas pageant at Radio City Music Hall, out for some air.

  It’s a city of strangers, as Stephen Sondheim wrote in one song; that’s our wildlife. And it’s not the exotica that is really the backbone of the place, the naked cowboys, the sunglass-wearing celebs. New York belongs to the ordinary Joe, not the mayors or the millionaires. Its newspapers write plenty about politics and sports, but it’s when the shortstops and the Senators can be seen as little guys—or cut down to size—that New Yorkers are happiest with them. Otherwise it’s the working man and woman who make the town, the executive secretaries, the cab drivers, the track workers in the subway, the cops in the police car. New York likes rich people best when they get that way by winning the lottery, or are discovered to have money after years of living in a walk-up with cats and clipped coupons.

  The stereotype is that we’re hard and cold, and there’s no question that loneliness is an omnipresent specter even though company is all around. New Yorkers have learned to mind their business, but they’ve also gotten good at knowing when their business extends further than the zone of privacy circumscribed by their shoulders and elbows. Witness those 21 who helped me with directions so many years ago, or those thousands who helped one another on September 11, 2001. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center is known as our great tragedy, but it is also a day that illuminated what New York City truly is, not just because of the diversity of those who died and those who responded, but because of the empathy and connection that enshrouded its streets more indelibly than the dust of destruction. New Yorkers turned inwards to the small communities that make up this largest of American cities. We packed sandwiches and brought dog food for the firehouse in the neighborhood, stood outside and talked among ourselves as evening fell and the sky in lower Manhattan was lit with a hellish red-gold glow. One old man said he recognized the smell of the smoke, and it turned out afterwards that he was a survivor of a concentration camp. One young man trudged past our house every night smudged and slump-shouldered, and it turned out he was a firefighter digging in the ruins for his co-workers.

  We were frightened, and we were heartsick, but we knew that the city would prevail because that is what it does. Once it was a wilderness of hills and streams, with the Dutch huddled at one end behind the wall that would become Wall Street. Someday it will be something else entirely. Those of us who write will try to pin it down with our pens, and sometimes we will tell it true and even make it fresh. But we will never get it all. There will always be new immigrants, new neighborhoods, new businesses, new restaurants, new street chic, new night terrors. Like the strata of the earth beneath the concrete, there will be new layers of New York over time, and newcomers who try to tell its story as, evanescent, its story changes.

  Anna Quindlen

  Anna Quindlen is the best-selling author of five novels and seven works of nonfiction, most recently Good Dog. Stay. She joined The Times in 1977 as a metropolitan reporter and was subsequently a columnist (About New York and Life in the Thirties). She later moved to the Op-E
d page of The Times, where her column, Public and Private, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Ms. Quindlen’s commentary in Newsweek appears every other week. She lives in New York City.

  Eight Million Stories

  PEOPLE

  There are eight million stories in the naked city. In this chapter there are 48 of them.

  The larger-than-life characters who strut across these pages are a singularly New York bunch: by turns charismatic, idiosyncratic and pragmatic. All the other things that non-New Yorkers say about New Yorkers are probably true, too: New Yorkers are contentious and cantankerous, aggressive and aggravating, tasteful or tasteless, thoughtful or thought-provoking or thoughtless. It’s a big city. You don’t have to look far to find someone who fits the description.

  New Yorkers are accustomed to the city’s bigness—the density, the relentlessness, the tabloid headlines, the extra zeroes in their paychecks and their bank accounts. New York has been the world’s largest city since before most of them were born—New York stole the title from London in 1898, when five counties and a jumble of small municipalities on either side of the East River joined together.

  PAGE 42

  The historian Kenneth T. Jackson maintains that there are ten ways that New Yorkers are different from people in every other city. Number One on his list is tempo. New Yorkers really do walk faster, work longer, eat later and, as he put it, “compete harder” than people in other cities. Certainly there are empirical measurements on the first three. You disagree about the fourth? Well, let’s step outside and settle it. For his part the Tennessee-born Jackson, who still has something of a Southern drawl despite nearly forty years at Columbia University, even says that New Yorkers have been talking faster since at least the eighteenth century. Jackson quotes one colonial-era Bostonian who complained that New Yorkers “talk very loud, very fast and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out on you again and talk away.”