My mother had a print of this 1931 photograph of Greta Garbo by Clarence Sinclair Bull hanging on the wall behind her desk in her office for years.
Wednesday
December 25, 2024
Since 2002
Monthly Archives: March 2014
New York Minute
I spent a lot of my teenage years slumming around used bookstores in New York, especially on the Upper West Side. But Manhattan is no longer a place for bookstores of any kind.
Julie Bosman has the depressing details in the Times:
When Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson bookstore in Lower Manhattan, set out to open a second location, she went to a neighborhood with a sterling literary reputation, the home turf of writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Nora Ephron: the Upper West Side.
She was stopped by the skyscraper-high rents.
“They were unsustainable,” Ms. McNally said. “Small spaces for $40,000 or more each month. It was so disheartening.”
Rising rents in Manhattan have forced out many retailers, from pizza joints to flower shops. But the rapidly escalating cost of doing business there is also driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers.
“Sometimes I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my feet,” said the biographer and historian Robert Caro, who is a lifelong New Yorker.
[Photo Via: Afar.com]
Dollars and Sense
Over at Deadspin, Barry Petchesky breaks down the 2014 payrolls and salaries for every team in baseball.
[Photo Via: Daily Dot.com]
Sluggo
Via Baseball Researcher and Richard Sandomir of the New York Times: Ruth hits.
[Photo Credit: Baseball Fever]
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Biblioklept is just a great site. Bookmark it.
Today gives Flannery O’Connor’s great story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
[Picture by Heinz Straeter via Lushlight]
The Real Harlem
Darryl Pickney reviews a terrific book of photography for the New York Review of Books:
Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down.
Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy told me that at his corner of 124th Street and Lenox he once saw the garbage collectors in their truck nodding from heroin. They were parked for hours, the trash uncollected when they finally left. Delivery trucks at stoplights got held up. Sometimes a driver would be enticed by a woman to a room where he was then tied up. Down in the street, an orderly line was forming for the sale of his truck’s contents.
Drug money circulated fiercely. People could get shot in the middle of the afternoon and if you chanced to be on the street where it happened, you knew that you had seen nothing, heard nothing, and would say nothing. Many gave up because the streets and the schools were so bad, especially middle-class blacks who could at last go elsewhere. But jobs were plentiful in the city. If you didn’t like your boss, an old head told me, you could quit and have a new job by the end of the day. Some people had jobs as well as welfare. Blacks felt that they ran the place. You could pass out on a traffic island in Harlem and no one would bother you all day long. The only people around in those days were black, old heads say. If whites found themselves in Harlem, then they had to run. But you can meet whites who have spent their lives in Harlem, in their family homes, tolerated because they’d always been there, hadn’t run.
Buy Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto here.
Morning Art
“Cups” by Diebs [Via Bo Fransson]
Afternoon Art
“The Cocktail Party” by Alfred Leslie (1967-78)
Saturdazed Soul
[Photo Via: Ned Hepburn]
Beat of the Day
Finally Friday.
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver