The New York Times Book of New York Read online

  PAGE 21

  So New York was the magnet for fast talkers and fast-money types, for movie stars and sports legends, for tycoons and heiresses and self-made everybodies. New York drew in the socialite philanthropist Brooke Astor and the rap star Biggie Smalls, the basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabbar and the artist Jean Michel Basquiat. It was home base for Phil Rizzuto, who needed no introduction at Yankee Stadium, and for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who needed no introduction, period.

  The people who make New York what it is are not all household names, though. There is the man who writes the weather forecasts for the National Weather Service, so when the radio announcer promises traffic and weather together every ten minutes, there is a forecast to read. Or there is the taxi driver who owned the last Checker cab—a big ride, like New York itself. That cab was more of a New York taxi than the rather conventional one that carried Audrey Hepburn up Fifth Avenue in the opening scene of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  But if there are eight million stories in the naked city, consider three who made the line about the eight million stories famous: the man who wrote the gritty short story “The Naked City,” the screenwriter who worked with him to turn it into a no-nonsense movie and the producer who read the famous closing line into a microphone off camera: “There are eight million people in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

  The short-story author was Malvin Wald, who set out to portray “a hard-working police detective, like the ones I knew in Brooklyn.” He found his inspiration, and the words “the naked city,” in a book showing crime-scene coverage by the famous tabloid photographer known as Weegee. He wrote the screenplay with Albert Maltz, who was jailed in 1950 after being blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten.”

  PAGE 46

  The producer was Mark Hellinger, a newspaper columnist-turned-movie maker for whom “the Mark Hellinger”—a Broadway theater—was named. Hellinger had been a hard-driving, hard-drinking reporter. Who pounded out staccato sentence fragments like this. Who lived in a world of shady characters. Who competed against Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon. And who went to Hollywood in the 1940s, but never forgot that he was a New Yorker. “Hellinger’s personal romance with the City of New York,” wrote Times movie critic Bosley Crowther when “The Naked City” was released in 1948, “was one of the most ecstatic love affairs of the modern day—at least, to his host of friends and readers who are skeptics regarding l’amour.” Crowther said that Hellinger fell for Manhattan “in a blissfully uninhibited way.” Crowther said “The Naked City” was “a virtual Hellinger column on film. It is a rambling, romantic picture-story based on a composite New York episode.” And what other kind of New York episode is there but rambling and romantic?

  Portrait of the New Yorker

  By SIMEON STRUNSKY | January 31, 1932

  Believe some of our national legislators, and New York City is populated by scheming international bankers. Believe some of our movies, and it is a city of sinful penthouses. And judging from sounds which go to the uttermost parts of the earth from radio broadcasting studios, New Yorkers must be a race of crooners, tuba players and night-club patrons. What, then, is the average New Yorker like?

  FOR THE PURPOSE OF ARRIVING AT THE “average” New Yorker engaged in leading his average life, we might imagine seven million people run through the wrong end of a telescope so that they suffer a numerical shrinkage in the proportion of 7,000 to 1. This particular ratio is suggested because it will give us the convenient number 1,000 for the total population of our sample New York.

  In this miniature New York, two policemen patrol the streets, direct traffic and arraign prisoners in court; they are two-thirds of our entire municipal police force, the other man being off duty. Our two policemen on their rounds are likely to stop for a moment to exchange news with the city fireman at work on the nickel trimmings of his engine. That fireman is our entire municipal firefighting force.

  Around the corner from the firehouse is a schoolhouse—the only one in our town of 1,000 souls and more than enough to accommodate the second largest group in the city’s population, the boys and girls of school age, now in due attendance. There are 185 of them all told. Elsewhere in our microcosm, this is what we see:

  60 white-collar workers in office, factory and store;

  60 men and women selling goods over the counter, of whom 25 are retailers on their own account and 35 are employees;

  50 men and women sewing clothes, shirts, boots and shoes, hats and pocketbooks—everything that men, women and children wear or carry for need or decoration;

  45 laborers;

  30 ironworkers, masons, carpenters and plumbers building houses and office buildings;

  25 chauffeurs;

  15 machinists and engineers;

  20 stenographers taking dictation;

  10 waiters getting ready to serve lunch in the restaurants and hotels;

  5 bakers providing the bread;

  15 printers and publishers turning out the reading matter to be bought during the lunch period and later;

  3 bankers and brokers exercising a firm control, according to report, over the lives and fortunes of the other 997 of us;

  3 elevator runners in the business buildings and apartments;

  1 foreman.

  Starting Salaries But Gotham Tastes

  By CARA BUCKLEY | May 25, 2008

  LAURA WERKHEISER KNEW SHE WOULD HAVE to make many sacrifices to live in Manhattan. Foremost among them was shopping for clothes.

  Anticipating, rightly, that her Manhattan digs would be cramped and her budget stretched, Ms. Werkheiser, 26, shipped 18 boxes of her clothes to her parents’ house in Omaha before moving here from San Francisco. When she feels she needs to freshen up her look, she has her mother ship her several outfits from what she dryly refers to as the “Nebraska boutique.”

  “If I shop,” she said, “I can’t have a social life and I can’t eat.”

  Having one’s mother mail rotating boxes of old clothing is just one of the myriad ways that young newcomers to the city of a certain income—that is, those who are neither investment bankers nor being floated by their parents—manage to live the kind of lives they want in New York. They are high on ambition, meager of budget and endlessly creative when it comes to making ends meet.

  Some tactics have long been chronicled: sharing tiny apartments with strangers, for example. But there are smaller measures, no less ingenious, that round out the lifestyle: sneaking flasks of vodka into bars, flirting your way into clubs, subletting your walk-in closets, putting off haircuts.

  Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make.

  “For a little while I only ate grape-fruits for my lunch,” said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, “because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day.”

  He has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.

  “To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city,” he said. “You’ve got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what’s out there.”

  Blimey! Locals to the Manners Born

  By JAMES COLLARD | June 27, 1999

  IT WAS ROBERT BURNS WHO NOTED WHAT A remarkable gift it would be to see ourselves as others see us. As a Londoner who has just spent over a year living in New York but who is now safely back in England, I’m in a good position to bestow a gift of this nature on New Yorkers. With due warning, then, that something well meant but vaguely unpleasant is coming, I now have to deliver a huge blow to the pride New Yorkers take in being rude and feisty, and that is to tell you that in comparison to Londoners, you come across as exceptionally polite and extremely well behaved.

  Arriving in
New York after 12 years of living in London, I was bowled over by the good will, pleasant manners and overall graciousness of Manhattanites. It was like finding oneself suddenly in the middle of a courtly but particularly good-natured Japanese tea ceremony, and I spent the first few weeks learning to replace my rude London ways with the cheerful, charming courtesies of New Yorkers: holding doors open, not cutting in line, saying “thank you” and generally trying not to behave like a savage at a cocktail party, throwing punches to get to the canapes.

  I had to adjust rapidly to a world where people smile breezily on the street (although they laugh less), hold the elevator and say, “Have a nice day.” And mean it.

  Some of this can be ascribed to the fact that Manhattan, unlike London, has a culture of tipping waiters and bartenders; very little in life is as sure to put a smile on someone’s face as the prospect of money.

  But New Yorkers’ good nature goes beyond that. This wasn’t just an impression formed during a dewy-eyed honeymoon period in my new home. A succession of visitors from the old country agreed with me: New Yorkers are, well, nicer.

  IMMIGRANTS AND CITY WORKERS

  A Great-Great-Great-Great Day For Annie and Her Heirs

  By SAM ROBERTS | September 16, 2006

  Visitors look at vintage photographs of immigrant families at the Ellis Island Museum.

  FOUR GENERATIONS OF DESCENDANTS OF Annie Moore Schayer, the first immigrant to be processed on Ellis Island, gathered for the first time to celebrate her rediscovery—and their own—and to raise money for a headstone for her unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

  The first contributions, of $500 each, came from Brian G. Andersson, the city’s commissioner of records, and Patricia Somerstein of Long Beach, N.Y., Annie’s great-niece. They donated their share of a $1,000 reward they received from a professional genealogist who had been seeking clues to support the suspicion that a woman who died in Texas in 1923 and had been embraced by history as the Ellis Island Annie Moore was somebody else entirely. It turns out the Texan Annie Moore was not an immigrant at all.

  In fact, the Annie Moore who was 15 in 1892 when she came to the United States from County Cork, Ireland, never moved west. She lived the rest of her life within a few square blocks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and died at 99 Cherry Street. One of her granddaughters lived in a public housing project in the neighborhood until her death in 2001.

  Annie married the son of a German-born baker at St. James Church on James Street in 1895. Her husband was identified as an engineer and salesman at the Fulton Fish Market. They had at least 11 children, 5 of whom survived to adulthood.

  Annie died of heart failure in 1924 at 47 and is buried with six of her children at the cemetery in Woodside, Queens, flanked by markers for a Maxwell and a Jimenez.

  Of Annie’s newly confirmed first-immigrant status, a great-great granddaughter, Maureen Peterson, 61, said: “We knew it was the truth, but we couldn’t prove it.”

  The Face Behind the Bagel

  By MIRTA OJITO | September 18, 1997

  ON HIS WAY TO WORK AS A SUPERVISOR AT A downtown deli in the mid-1980’s, Fahim Saleh, an Afghan refugee with an easy smile, would buy coffee from a chatty Greek vendor in a pushcart at Lexington Avenue and 43rd Street. Mr. Saleh had fled Afghanistan in 1980 and, while he liked his job at the deli, he wanted something to call his own. A business.

  He dreamed of opening his own restaurant, but finances got in the way. Then Mr. Saleh learned that his new friend made a comfortable living selling coffee and bagels from his pushcart. Mr. Saleh liked the hours, 3 a.m. to 11 a.m., and the independence—working alone in a small space, no boss hovering over the coffee machine. He found a dilapidated pushcart for $600, spent another $500 fixing it up and, 10 years ago this month, parked it at Lexington Avenue and 41st Street. For four weeks, he barely covered expenses.

  Since then, with the proceeds from the pushcart, Mr. Saleh has supported his growing family—his oldest child is 16 and his youngest is 4—and brought to the United States his five siblings, his parents and even his grandparents. Two brothers, Ali and Bashir, now own their own pushcarts.

  In the mad rush from apartment to subway to the office, the coffee vendor’s face is often the first face New Yorkers focus on every morning. Yet New Yorkers know very little about the person behind the counter, except that the steaming cup of coffee is delivered quickly.

  Mr. Saleh says he was the first Afghan in New York City to own a coffee and bagels pushcart. “I tell all my friends that it’s an easy business to get into,” Mr. Saleh, who estimates he has introduced about 70 friends to the business, said in fluent English. “All you have to know is ‘coffee doughnuts thank you have a nice day.’ That’s it. Something else: the coffee has to be good and you can’t forget to smile.”

  Promised Land, Broken Dreams

  August 12, 1906

  YOU CAN RUN THE ENTIRE SCALE OF human emotion in the deportation division in the big federal building on Ellis Island. A little Russian boy, ill-shapen and pale from long suffering, was found packed in among a number of his fellow countrymen in a large room on the upper floor of the immigration building. He could not have been more than 16 years old, and yet his pain-pinched features made him appear much older. He was eager to talk of his shattered hopes and to tell his story of bitter disappointment.

  Less than two months ago this boy left the town of Kishinef in Russia. He could not make a living at home because he was a cripple and too weak to go into the fields. No one wanted to look on him, for his bent and twisted figure was unsightly to the superstitious peasants.

  Then a letter written by an uncle arrived from America. This letter told of the great opportunities awaiting those who should hasten across the ocean. The hunchback boy’s parents had saved a sum sufficient to send the little fellow to America. The uncle’s address was written at the end of the letter, and with this the hunchbacked boy started on the long voyage.

  When the big liner steamed slowly past the Statue of Liberty the boy stood on the forward deck. “Now they tell me I must return home,” he said, “for they cannot find my uncle.”

  Guardians of the Sleeping City

  By ANNA QUINDLEN | December 28, 1978

  THE LIGHTS BEGIN TO GO OUT ALL OVER THE city, in Brooklyn Heights, Forest Hills, Greenwich Village, Co-op City. The sidewalks grow still. Much of the city sleeps.

  Thousands of people stir.

  They are the night workers, those who go to work in the dark and travel home at dawn. They commute against the morning rush, sleep days, breakfast at dinner time, shower and shave in the evening. The Federal Labor Department estimates that there are 200,000 of them in Manhattan alone.

  In Brooklyn, Rosa Lewis is surrounded by the darkness. She cleans the small office building in the downtown area with her shoulders set tight with fatigue and fear, convinced that somehow the ultimate felon she has constructed out of night noises will come up behind her when she is mopping and put her to sleep for good.

  Mrs. Lewis picks up her bucket of cleanser, glass cleaner, smudged cloths and ammonia and trundles down the hall. “You know what I like,” she says, cleaning another desk top. “I like taking the A train home in the morning when everyone else is coming to work. I just think: ‘Fools! I’m done for the day.’”

  • • • • •

  It is an average night in the emergency room at Beekman Downtown Hospital. A blind woman is reliving much of her life in loud, one-sided conversation punctuated with piercing screams, three Bowery derelicts have come in with one complaint or another to spend the night in a clean bed and a warm room, and a pretty girl in a torn silk dress and bare feet wanders in and out of the hospital lobby. She says that when the office Christmas party was over, a man pulled her into a car and raped her, not far from the hospital on Wall Street.

  • • • • •

  By a counter that holds a tray of bloodied instruments and an artificial Christmas tree with a few strands of sad tinsel, Officer William
Donohue of the First Precinct stands, holding his uniform jacket, the plaid flannel short he wears making him seem more a man, less a cop.

  • • • • •

  The control tower at La Guardia Airport, a glass room that looks like the inside of a spaceship, makes every cliché about the lights of the city seem fresh. The airport at night is like an evacuated city—shiny, perfectly equipped, silent, deserted. So too are the night skies.

  At 2 a.m., Gene Rodrigues and Chris Michaels, the two controllers on duty, stare at a sickly green radar-scope that shows almost no tiny airline blips for hours at a time. The calls they get are from ground crews who want to tow a plane from one place to another.

  “Every controller here counts his planes,” Mr. Rodrigues says. “It’s not satisfying at night. I mean, would a writer rather write five words or five hundred?”

  The Lesson For Bus Drivers: Grin and Bear It

  By ARI L. GOLDMAN | February 18, 1983

  SOME PEOPLE WAITING FOR BUSES WILL swear the bus drivers aim for the slush puddles as they pull into a stop. Or that they like to close doors on old people trying to catch a bus. Or prefer to keep their bus’s destination a secret from people seeking directions.

  These situations—and what to do about them—were among the topics discussed around a table by 10 drivers at a two-day Bus Driver Sensitivity Training Course given by the Transit Authority.