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07.20.01
Friday

I met up with a friend from West Michigan who was in town for the MacWorld convention and talked him into taking in a Yankee game. He said it was his first major league game, and I insisted he appreciate the fact that it came at such a monument as Yankee Stadium. 

My enthusiasm for the venue notwithstanding, as we discussed politics and philosophy in the bleachers (in an odd juxtaposition) I did nothing to resist my socialist impulses, and heartily rooted for the visiting Toronto Blue Jays. They represented, to me, an alternative to the slimy greed of capitalism, which the Yankees embody. So I was most satisfied to witness at 10-4 defeat of the world champs.

07.19.01
Thursday

In the late 1600s, the British landed on Manhattan and informed the Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam that they had 12 gunboats in the harbor, and the simplest thing would probably be to just hand the island over. It was thus the worst robbery at gunpoint of a string of such events in Manhattan’s long history. Peter Stuyvesant saw it the British’s way and signed on the dotted line. Soon after, New Amsterdam was renamed after James York, and henceforth known as New York.

That’s roughly how our tour guide put it on a twilight walking tour of Lower Manhattan today. It was refreshing candor after the stuffy prose and sterilized narrative of Edward Ellis’ Epic of New York City, which I’ve been working through this summer. 

We began at Bowling Green, the southern origin of Broadway across Battery Park from the South Ferry. Bowling Green is Manhattan’s oldest park, originally a grazing ground for the livestock of Dutch New Amsterdam. Eventually a statue of King George was erected there, and, when he got nervous about rebellious rumblings in the area, put up a fence that still stands as New York’s oldest. When George Washington read the Declaration of Independence aloud in the nearby commons, a group of colonists got all riled up and toppled the statue. Supposedly, it was shipped to Connecticut to be turned into musket balls. 

After similar Revolution-related stops along the way, through narrow streets seemingly frozen in their appearance from a hundred years ago, we ended up in the middle of what all those rebels were fighting for, in financial district. There was J.P. Morgan’s bank, still dented from an exploding snack cart in the 1920s. Morgan said to leave the damage as a reminder of the threat of Italian anarchists. Across the street is the “cathedral of capitalism,” the Stock Exchange – its pillars lamely trying to capture the religious awe of the Parthenon. I’d heard the classic story about Abbie Hoffman dropping dollar bills onto the floor from the observation area (prompting the area to be glassed off ever since), in one of the great moments in American street theater. But our tour guide added another anecdote about security in the building: not only do layers of barricades prevent large vehicles from parking in the street, but she said she had seen a couple businessmen coming back from lunch with a pizza in a box, and security ran the box through metal detectors.

Nearby, a steeple – just a steeple – sits oddly in the cemetery next to Trinity Church. It turns out it was erected for no other purpose than to block a road the city wanted to build through the yard in the mid 1800s. After all, the graveyard was the resting place for runaway slaves and some other no-names, so what was to stop them? The church hastily put up this monument to Revolutionary War soldiers, which was a random act of sudden patriotism some 70 years after the war’s completion. But who could think of tearing down something so darned American as a Revolutionary War monument? The road was built outside the graveyard. 

07.18.01
Wednesday 

I’ve been making the rounds on 45th Street, having seen Stones In His Pockets and The Dinner Party and planning on Les Miz. Tonight I completed the street by going to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Although I hadn’t seen the movie and I guess it’s regarded as a classic, I doubt I would have gone had it not been starring Gary Sinise. And Sinise is even better on stage than in any of the movies I’d seen him in. I didn’t know he was such a theater animal, but it turns out he’s been acting, directing and producing for most of his life. 

From the moment Sinise explodes onto the stage as the roaring, back-slapping, wise-cracking main character, he owns the stage and the narrative. He plays the audience like an instrument with histrionics, and, as though seeing him on stage wasn’t an intimate enough encounter, he even moons the nurse at one point. So now, in a statement I’d like to put on a T-shirt, I can say I’ve seen Gary Sinise’s bare buns. I thought movie stars signed contracts about that or something. 

As uproarious as the show is with Sinise and an adequate supporting cast, it shows signs of the darkness Stanley Kubrick infused into it when he made the dark movie. With stream-of-consciousness interludes focused on the Chief, in which lighting tricks and echoing sound bring a bad dream to life, and, of course, the fate of Sinise’s character, the story deflates as well as entertains. 

One difference my friend, who had seen the movie, pointed out was that this director is not so dark. In the movie the nurse was cold-hearted and pure evil, on stage, played by the doting mother in Rookie of the Year, which is odd to begin with, the nurse has a shred of light and you have to give her the benefit of intentions. The ending changes some of the details, but still gives you a glimmer of hope to keep you from getting completely depressed.

07.17.01
Tuesday

I had been put in contact with a veteran associate editor at Sports Illustrated, and when I e-mailed him to see if we could talk, he said, “Sure, but you’d better hurry – I’m retiring on Thursday.” Well, then. I hurried up to his office and found him packing boxes. He had just accepted a Time Inc. buyout. How rewarding to ask him to look back on his career as he cleaned out his office – a longtime Time reporter, he remembered being at Mount St. Helens after the blast and seeing the Exxon Valdez spewing oil out of its ruptured side, as well as heading a downsized staff overseas as Bosnia and Rwandi beckoned. He also gave me a sobering reality check as he looked over my writing samples, the equivalent of an well-worn baseball manager sizing up a raw walk-on and telling him to spend a few more years in the minors. 

07.16.01
Monday

I still haven’t been to Lincoln Center, but I got a taste of it by going to the Great Lawn in Central Park for the New York Philharmonic’s summer outdoor performance. I enjoyed reclining on the grass and staring into the sky, but I soon realized that since the stage was a half mile away, and I was relying on speakers that had been set up nearby, this was basically the equivalent of listening to a boom box play classical music at a picnic, and didn’t feel bad about leaving early. 

What a picnic, though – probably the biggest I’ve been to, at least the biggest with this many wine bottles and vegetarian food. I hiked back to Belvedere Castle to survey the Lawn, and the glowing orchestra’s tent looked like a spaceship that landed in a sea of people. 

I couldn’t concentrate, anyway,  because I was hatching a new Web project and couldn’t get it out of my mind: thesoup. It has to be seen to be both believed and explained. I’ll wait till Chicago to decide whether to launch it.

07.15.01
Sunday

No, Harlem is not just one big poverty-encrusted slum.  It’s no Forest Hills, but reality nags and goes beyond the stereotypes, as I found out on a Big Onion walking tour of Harlem’s history. 

Open farmland until breakthroughs in mass transportation, Harlem was first developed as a standard middle-class white suburb. The color line was broken around 1910 when a black Episcopal pastor moved his church, St. Philips, to Harlem, and looked for a place to house his congregation. He passed as a white man, since his skin was light enough, and bought some tenement buildings on 135th Street next to the YMCA. He rented to the neighborhood’s first black tenants, and when the white residents discovered the “invasion,” they tried to resist and then fled rapidly. With the ensuing wave of black migration from the oppressive South, Harlem was born as the capital of African America. 

Our tour started at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, next door to those tenements. Schomburg was a black historian who accepted the challenge of elitist white colleagues to find evidence of black culture (at the time, blacks were seen as inferior and uncivilized because of their supposed lack of arts and literature, a perception the Harlem Renaissance would devastate). The Center is now a branch of the New York Public Library and houses over five million items. 

We continued to Abyssnian Baptist Church, one of the most famous in Harlem, where black political leaders like current New York congressman Charles Rangel first stirred listeners. On the next corner is the old Renaissance Ballroom, “The Renny,” boarded up and disregarded, long past its thumping days as a swinging dance club. 

After more rows of townhouses and boarded-up nightclubs – including one where Malcolm X was once a waiter, we ended on 125th Street, which is an open-ended destination in Harlem. Considered by some to be Harlem’s southern border, containing the iconic Apollo Theater, the street is controversial for all the national chains that have landed there: Wendy’s, Old Navy, Krispy Kreme. Controversial because the bland commercial invasion goes against the grain of organic creativity that highlighted the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, even as it revives. Indeed, the people streaming through the streets – still mostly African-American – can be seen with cell phones to their ears or punching Palm Pilots at bus stops. This is not a simple place, if it ever was. Indeed, after the influx of white residents to Harlem who, during the nineties boom, starting taking boards off windows for lack of other places to rent in Manhattan, some say that in ten or 20 years we’ll be talking about Harlem in the past tense as a distinctively black neighborhood.

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