My father was a schvitzer. Schvitz is a Yiddish word for sweat. His mother was a schvitzer too (but only on one side of her face, it was the strangest thing). I remember calling the old man during the summer months. “How you doin’, Pop?”

“Wet,” he’ say, or “Damp,” or “Moist.”  Sometimes he’d just say, in his best Zero Mostel:  “HOT.”

I thought of the great family schvitzer last night watching Alfredo Aceves on TV. I have never seen a baseball player sweat like that. The bill of his cap was water-logged after a few batters, thick drops of perspiration falling in his face. Aceves was in trouble in the sixth inning, but then Brett Gardner froze at third on a passed ball, Derek Jeter to hit into a double play. Aceves didn’t stop sweating but he saved the rest of the bullpen and finished the game.

Hey Aceves, this schvitz’s for you.

[Photo Credit: Weegee]

Dig this cool ass photo gallery of old New York over at Neat Stuff.

Next Thursday, the National Geographic Channel will air, “Break it Down: Yankee Stadium,” an exclusive look at the demolition of the Stadium.

Looks like a must-watch for us.

Dag…

Via the Gothamist, check out this footage…I was 15 that summer (thanks to Bronx Rob, now Brooklyn Rob, for passing this along).

There is a new book out from W.W. Norton, “The Times Square Story,” by Geoffrey O’Brien that looks like a keeper.

Over at Bombsite, O’Brien is interviewed by Banter favorite, Luc Sante, where the talk is about the old Times Square:

LS Times Square has been the madcap entertainment capital of the world since at least 1906. But there is a special potency to the postwar era. It seems like the one that will be engraved in collective memory; there’s an enormous subculture based on Times Square in the 1950s and ‘60s—books, videos, CDs, Psychotronic…

GO It’s the old seediness, the old sordidness, which has a completely different meaning now. Part of what changed in Times Square was the advent of hard-core pornographic movies at the end of the 1960s, which put the previous movies in a very different light. It’s as if everything up to that point had been a long, complicated tease and then finally the tease was over. The character of Times Square changed drastically in the ‘70s; by the early ‘80s it was a pretty scary place. It certainly was a different place to walk around in than it had been in the ‘60s. Having grown up in suburban Long Island, I had never seen anything like that. There was really a sense of, Oh, this is the culture I live in. This is what our culture is really thinking about underneath everything else: gigantic forms, enormous shapes, all the hot buttons being pushed, the beautiful unsubtlety of everything. At the same time, there were all kinds of strange subtleties to be discovered. I’m thinking about the movies I watched in the ‘60s, Italian horror movies, science fiction movies, all those spy movies that you and I both seem to have been marked by.

…LS Now, in a way, Times Square is everywhere.

GO Times Square was a kind of zoo of images which are available everywhere now. There is almost no more need for Times Square in the same way there was no need for porno theaters after video came out. You rent movies now about mad doctors dismembering people or people being held in South American prison camps or whatever your particular fancy is. So Times Square is everywhere in this sort of disembodied form, but without the smoke, without the hot dogs, without the peripheral population of people which made it human and which made it seem like part of the world. Now it seems like some weird hyperspace culture of self-replicating images.

LS That is the shape of the future. All of culture is disembodied. You and your 75 friends on the Internet who are interested in H0-scale railroads have never actually met. In city after city, whatever was the equivalent of Times Square is gone, though you can see its vague outline. I was in Seattle last month and realized my hotel was on what used to be that strip. You could tell because across the street there was still one pawn shop and one gun shop. All the movie theaters were gone.

GO I had a similar experience in San Jose, which has otherwise been dismantled and rebuilt as a theme park called Downtown San Jose. I went wandering and found a strip with some funky little stores that were selling bizarre memorabilia and old knickknacks. That general air of rotting paper is always a clue you’re getting near. The only beautiful building I saw in San Jose was a battered old movie theater, which I was told was the subject of a massive political struggle between the people who wanted to preserve it and the developers who wanted to tear it down. It had become the battleground for the preservation of some kind of ancient, sleazy, downtown culture.

The book is about the 1960s but I remember the Times Square of the early ’80s.

My old man lived in Weehawken for a year in 1981-82 and we often walked across 42nd street from the Port Authority on 8th Avenue to Grand Central on the East Side, where he’d put us back on a train to Westchester. I always felt safe with my dad but I remember feeling danger and unease every step of the way. I’ll never forget the signs for Kung Fu movies and the Porno theaters–what was the difference between X and XXX, anyway?–the hookers with bruises on their legs and the men looking at you with screwed up faces.

“The Times Square Story” is out now. Check for it.

Say it ain’t so…

[Photo Credit: Radaris, Nabok]

I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s on the Upper West Side a few weeks ago and we got to talking about Morris, the deli counter man at the old Daitch Shopwell that used to be on Broadway. They loved Morris and the little old ladies who would visit him. This is what they overheard, back when.

Old Lady: Is the potato salad fresh?

Morris: Yes, we made it today.

Old Lady: It looks like yesterday.

Morris: Lady, you’re from yesterday.

Old Lady: How’s the roast beef?

Morris: It’s gorgeous.

Old Lady: Give me a half of a quarter pound of baloney.

Morris: You’re having a party?


Check out this cool post from the always cool spot, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.

Last night on the uptown IRT, packed train, rush hour. As we approach 181st Street, the conductor says, “I would advise the passenger who is smoking to get off at the next station. The authorities have been notified.”

I’ve seen people smoke on the train before, kids used to love smoking blunts in the last car back when. Mostly, anyone who smokes on the subway is furious or crazy or both. But to do it on a crowded train? That takes chutzpah.

[Photo Credit: John F. Conn]

Bags hipped me to a most cool site called Scouting New York.

Dig these two then-and-now posts on “Taxi Driver” and “Ghostbusters”:

Every once in a while something comes along that is so unbearably tremendous that I can’t help but feel rejuvenated, filled with enthusiasm and faith in the world.

Like this story…

…About the guy who found a treasure and is now sharing it with the world.

Dig this piece by Nora O’Donnell for Chicago Magazine:

On an unremarkable day in late 2007, John Maloof, a young real-estate agent, spent some time at a local auction house, RPN Sales in Portage Park, combing through assortments of stuff—some of it junk—that had been abandoned or repossessed. A third-generation reseller, Maloof hoped to find some historical photographs for a small book about Portage Park that he was cowriting on the side. He came across a box that had been repossessed from a storage locker, and a hasty search revealed a wealth of black-and-white shots of the Loop from the 1950s and ’60s. There’s got to be something pertinent in there, he thought. So he plunked down about $400 for the box and headed home. A closer examination unearthed no scenes of Portage Park, though the box turned out to contain more than 30,000 negatives. Maloof shoved it all into his closet.

Something nagged, however—perhaps a reflex picked up from working the flea market circuit as a poor kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago. Though he knew almost nothing about photography, he eventually returned to the box and started looking through the negatives, scanning some into his computer. There was a playfulness to the moments the anonymous artist had captured: a dapper preschool boy peeking from the corner of a grimy store window; an ample rump squeezing through the wooden planks of a park bench; a man in a three-piece suit napping, supine, in the front seat of his car, his right arm masking his face from the daylight. Whoa, Maloof mused. These are really cool. Who took them?

Vivian Maier, a French ex-pat, that’s who:

After a call to the Tribune left him with a faulty address and a disconnected phone number, Maloof didn’t know where to turn. In the meantime, though, he started displaying Maier’s work on a blog, vivianmaier.com. Then, in October 2009, he linked to the blog on Flickr, the photo-sharing website, and posted a question about Maier’s pictures on a discussion board devoted to street photography: “What do I do with this stuff (other than giving it to you)?”

The discussion went viral. Suggestions poured in, and websites from around the world sent traffic to his blog. (If you Google “Vivian Maier” today, you’ll get more than 18,000 results.) Maloof recognized that this was bigger than he’d thought.

He was right about that. Since his tentative online publication of a smattering of Vivian Maier’s photographs, her work has generated a fanatical following. In the past year, her photos have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England. There have been exhibitions in Denmark and Norway, and a showing is scheduled to open in January at the Chicago Cultural Center. Few of the pictures had ever been seen before by anyone other than Maier herself, and Maloof has only scratched the surface of what she left behind. He estimates that he’s acquired 100,000 of her negatives, and another interested collector, Jeff Goldstein, has 12,000 more (some of them displayed at vivianmaierphotography.com). Most of Maier’s photos are black and white, and many feature unposed or casual shots of people caught in action—passing moments that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion. And Maier apparently ranged far and wide with her camera—there are negatives from Los Angeles, Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, the American Southwest. The astonishing breadth and depth of Maier’s work led Maloof to pursue two questions, as alluring in their way as her captivating photographs: Who was Vivian Maier, and what explains her extraordinary vision?

Here’s David Dunlap in the New York Times:

What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

Even if you don’t think Ms. Maier has the makings of a minor master from the mid-20th century whose work can now be appreciated, you’ll probably be affected by at least a few of her photos.

And if you’re nearing 60 and grew up Chicago, you’re almost bound to feel — as I do — that a precious past has been rescued that we didn’t even know existed; thousands of blinks of the civic eye, tens of thousands of beats of the public heart.

Thank you, John Maloof. You are doing a great public service.

Here’s the website:

Enjoy.

I thought of the old New Yorker theater the other day because it is where my brother and I saw “Tron.” Our old man dropped us off outside the theater and we asked some grown ups to get us in. Later, I saw “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” there. This was well past the theater’s prime, but I am fortunate enough to remember a bunch of the old movie theaters on the Upper West Side.

My favorite was The Regency which showed double features of old Hollywood movies. I’ll never forget seeing Harry Langdon’s “The Strong Man” (directed by Frank Capra). My bro did a spot-on imitation of Langdon by the time we got home.

 I also remember the Metro and the Cinema Village and the Thalia, and downtown there was St. Marks 80. What were some of your favorite spots?

Flicks of Keith Haring…bombing, over at Subway Art Blog.

I was in a book store on Friday night and this caught my eye: Denys Wortman’s New York: Portrait of the City in the 30s and 40s.

I’d never heard of Wortman before but I was immediately taken with his work.

Yesterday, the Times ran a long feature about Wortman who is the subject of a show at the Museum of the City of New York through March:

If there is a single constant in the creative world, it is that fame has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight. One prime example is the cartoonist Denys Wortman, who from 1924 to 1954 contributed six drawings a week to The New York World and its successors.

His feature, “Metropolitan Movies,” was admired for its strikingly naturalistic portrayal of daily life in Gotham. Using a single panel and a conversational caption, Mr. Wortman adroitly summoned up an entirely believable world of housewives talking across fire escapes, girls in the subway hashing over last night’s date, and men and women trying to make a buck in diners, offices, music halls and factories — or struggling to keep afloat during the Great Depression. Mr. Wortman’s drawings were also beautifully composed and finely worked, a legacy of his art school years, when he studied alongside future Ashcan school painters like Edward Hopper and George Bellows, and with their guru Robert Henri.

Even then “there was nothing quite like it,” said the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who enjoyed the drawings as a boy. “His work didn’t seem studied. It was as if you were looking out the window — or my window in the Bronx.” And because it was syndicated nationwide (as “Everyday Movies”), Mr. Wortman’s world spread far beyond the Hudson.

But in 1958, four years after his retirement, Mr. Wortman died of a heart attack. By then cartooning had become character-driven and graphically streamlined (think of Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts”) while art was ruled by the Abstract Expressionists. And when The World’s successor The World-Telegram and Sun folded, he was as forgotten as yesterday’s fish wrap.

The book and the show look like a must.

Nice post on the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s work over at the New Yorker’s Photo Booth.

Here’s more:

From the New York magazine archives, here’s a 1969 piece by Nicholas Pileggi on the Renaissance of the Upper West Side:

Five years ago, the West Side of Manhattan bore the stigma of decline, to the point where understanding what is a grantee of a Riverside Drive property was more about liability than opportunity. Invitations to social gatherings there were often declined, large rent-controlled apartments were relinquished, and services like Chicken Delight would not dare to venture in. Today, the landscape has transformed. Despite lingering challenges, a palpable optimism has supplanted the old fears. Merchants, real estate professionals, bankers, theatre owners, city planners, restaurateurs, newsdealers, and trustees of private schools find common ground in a sentiment privately shared by Mayor John V. Lindsay: “The Upper West Side is probably enjoying more of a renaissance today than any other single neighborhood of our city.”

In the 64-block-long area west of Central Park between Columbus Circle to the south and Columbia University to the north, the evidence is visible. Not only are there new low-and middle-income housing developments now where the rubble of abandoned buildings and slums stood just five years ago, but hundreds of the area’s crumbling rooming houses have been renovated to accommodate increasing numbers of middle-class tenants, and even a few of the neighborhood’s middle-European rococo hotels have been steam-cleaned. The same kind of young, successful and relatively affluent middle-class families that moved to the suburbs 20 years ago and to the East Side 10 years ago are moving to the West Side today, and while the neighborhood still has an ample supply of teenage muggers, parading homosexuals and old men who wear overcoats in July, the over-all mood of the area seems to have changed.

…Statistically the West Side’s 1968 crime figures place the area in the unenviable top third of the city’s 76 precinct-house totals. The 20th Precinct on West 68th Street and the 24th on West 100th encompass most of the Upper West Side, and their combined records show 36 homicides, 86 forced rapes, 8,478 burglaries, 1,097 felonious assaults, 3,233 robberies (muggings and stickups) and 6,762 larcenies (mostly pocketbook snatches) last year. The bulk of the West Side’s street crime today is the work of roving bands of 14-to-20-year-olds who mug, jostle and threaten their victims around or near the neighborhood parks during the evening and early morning hours. The effect of these crimes, committed, it sometimes seems, on everyone, or at least a friend or relative of everyone on the West Side, has been to create an atmosphere in which sudden noises produce quick frightened looks.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

[Photo Credit: Christian Monotone]

It’s Wait ‘Til Next Year for the Yanks.

They were a good team in 2010, but they didn’t play well down the stretch and got hammered by the Rangers in the 2010 ALCS.

Were they too old? Did they play tight–a reflection of their manager according to Joel Sherman? Did they just not have heart or character or those championship intangibles?

Nah, they just got their asses kicked, that’s all. Happens, man, even to the best of them.

“John grew up in the shadow of a father who was a great writer,” said A. J. Liebling. “This is a handicap shared by only an infinitesimal portion of any given generation, but it did not intimidate him.”

When John Lardner was ten-years old, he wrote a short verse that appeared in a F.P.A column:

Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey,
Both sultans of the swat.
One hits where other people are,
The other where they’re not.

John Lardner was born in Chicago but raised mostly on the east coast. He went to the Phillips Academy in Andover (his three brothers would follow), spent a year at Harvard and another at the Sorbonne, before he returned to New York and got a job at the New York Herald Tribune in 1931. He was nineteen-years-old. His father, Ring, who was already ill with the tuberculosis and heart diesee that would kill him a few years later, sent a note to Stanley Walker, a Texan who’d made the Tribune into the best writer’s paper in New York.

“You will find him a little reticent at times, but personally I never felt this was a handicap.” Walker later said that John “came close to being the perfect all-around journalist.”

John worked at the Tribune until 1933, the year his father died. The two men were close in Ring’s final years and the old man was proud of his son’s early achievements. “We are all swollen up like my ankles,” Ring wrote in a letter to his nephew, Richard Tobin. John was offered a syndicated sports column when he was twenty-one for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Carried locally by the N.Y. Post, Lardner wrote about sports, and then the war, for NANA until 1948.

(more…)

Dark Harbor, Nathan Ward’s riveting book about the New York Waterfronts, got a good review in the New York Times over the weekend:

For a writer of history, there is always a risk in telling a story that’s been told before. In this case, the bar is especially high, because Ward presents a tale that has been told not just often but quite well, first by Johnson and then in the Oscar-winning movie.

To make his challenge even greater, Ward brings no huge trove of new information to his account, and he offers no novel grand view to reshape our thinking of this chapter in American history. But he does have a few weapons at his disposal — namely, meticulous reporting, a keen eye for detail and an elegant writing style — and he uses them to make the tale seem new again.

Check out the book and dig Ward’s blog.

[Photo Credit: E.O. Hoppe]

When I was a kid one of the activities that I hated most was “browsing.” My mother would say, “Oh, let’s just go browse.”

Are you serious, lady? Why don’t you buy me something? What is this browsing?

What a horrible word: browsing. It didn’t make any sense to me.

Of course, now I can buy what I want–within reason–but I like to browse, at least bookstores and record shops.

Diane hipped me to this piece on the death of browsing. Sad, really.