Because I can’t get enough of Saul Leiter:

“There are certain people who like to be in the swing of things, but I think I’ve been out of the loop a lot of the time. When Bonnard died, one critic accused him of not participating in the great adventures of Modernism. And Matisse wrote a letter in which he defended Bonnard, saying that when he saw the Bonnards in the Phillips collection, he told Mr. Phillips, ‘Bonnard was the strongest of us all.’

I’m not like those photographers who went up to the top of the mountain and hung over and took a picture that everyone said was impossible and then went home and printed it and sold 4,000 copies of it and then went on and on with one great achievement after another.

Max Kozloff said to me one day, ‘You’re not really a photographer. You do photography, but you do it for your own purposes – your purposes are not the same as others’. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I like that. I like the way he put it.”

There’s a slightly surreal quality to a subway station during the day when the light from outside falls inside–through a grate, or in this picture by our man Bags, through the stairwell.

Check out this BBC radio documentary on the great Damon Runyon.

Snow! Holy Cow, gettothestoregetfoodhurryhurry. Do you think we’ll make it?

Eh, it’s iffy. In the meantime, I saw this picture over at the always great site, Kottke. Like the shot, especially because it was taken in father’s old neighborhood.

More Grand Central goodness over at The Atlantic.

Here’s more on Grand Central Station’s birthday over at Kottke.

[Photo Credit: Adrees Latif/Reuters]

Hizzoner…

Good site: New York Neon.

New York pictures by Michael Sean Edwards.

Scouting New York does Mishkin’s.

Grand Central Station turns 100 next month.  Sam Roberts has a new book about the great old place. And here’s a preview in the Times.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

“Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet,” by Mark Jacobson. New York Magazine, 1975:

A driver I know named David is worried. David and I used to moan cab stories to each other when I was on the night line. Now he keeps asking me when I’m coming to work. After four years of driving a cab, he can’t believe interviewing people is work. David is only a dissertation away from a Ph.D. in philosophy, which makes him intelligent enough to figure out that job openings for philosophers are zilch this year. The only position his prodigious education has been able to land him was a $25-a-night, one-night-a-week gig teaching ethics to rookie cops. David worked his way through college driving a cab. It was a good job for that, easy to arrange around things that were important. Now he has quit school in disgust and he arranges the rest of his life around cab-driving. He has been offered a job in a warehouse for which he’d make $225 a week and never have to pick up another person carrying a crowbar, but he’s not going to take it. At least when you’re zooming around the city, there’s an illusion of mobility. The turnover at the garage (Dover has over 500 employees for the 105 taxis; it hires between five and ten new people a week) makes it easy to convince yourself this is only temporary. Working in a factory is like surrender, like defeat, like death; drudging nine to five doesn’t fit in with a self-conception molded on marches to Washington. Now David’s been at Dover for the past two years and he’s beginning to think cab freedom is just another myth. “I’ll tell you when I started to get scared,” David says. “I’m driving down Flatbush and I see a lady hailing, so I did what I normally do, cut across three lanes of traffic and slam on the brakes right in front of her. I wait for her to get in, and she looks at me like I’m crazy. It was only then I realized I was driving my own car, not the cab.”

David has the Big Fear. It doesn’t take a cabdriver too long to realize that once you leave the joy of shape-up and start uptown on Hudson Street, you’re fair game. You’re at the mercy of the Fear Variables, which are (not necessarily in order): the traffic, which will be in your way; the other cabdrivers, who want to take your business; the police, who want to give you tickets; the people in your cab, lunatics who will peck you with nudges and dent you with knives; and your car, which is capable of killing you at any time. Throw in your bosses and the back inspectors and you begin to realize that a good night is not when you make a living wage. That’s a great night. A good night is when you survive to tell your stories at tomorrow’s shape-up. But all the Fear Variables are garbage compared with the Big Fear. The Big Fear is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible show-case will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office every since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after twenty years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you’re becoming a cabdriver.

The typical Big Fear cabdriver is not to be confused with the archetypal Cabby. The Cabby is a genuine New York City romantic hero. He’s what every out-of-towner who’s never been to New York but has seen James Cagney movies thinks every Big Apple driver is like. A Cabby “owns his own,” which means the car he drives is his, not owned by some garage boss (58 per cent of New York’s 11,787 taxis are owned by “fleets” like Dover which employ the stiffs and the slobs of the industry; the rest are operated by “owner-drivers”). The Cabby hated Lind-say even before the snowfalls, has dreams about blowing up gypsy cabs, knows where all the hookers are (even in Brooklyn), slurps coffee and downs Danish at the Belmore Cafeteria, tells his life story to everyone who gets into the cab, and makes a ferocious amount of money. But mostly, he loves his work. There aren’t too many of them around anymore. The Dover driver just doesn’t fit the mold. He probably would have voted for Lindsay twice if he had had the chance. He doesn’t care about gypsies; if they want the Bronx, let them have it. He knows only about the hookers on Lexington Avenue. He has been to the Belmore maybe once and had a stomach ache the rest of the night. He speaks as little as possible, and barely makes enough to get by. He also hates his work.

Dig this New Yorker “Talk of the Town” item (May 1, 1943) by Joseph Mitchell.

It’s a perfect miniature of his work–a poem, really–his book of revelations:

An air-raid warden we know, a young woman who holds down the desk in her sector headquarters in Greenwich Village twice a week from nine to midnight, is occasionally visited by the policeman on the beat. This policeman, who is elderly and talkative, dropped in the other night, sat down, grunted, placed his cap and nightstick on the desk, and said, “I’m a man that believes in looking ahead, and I been walking around tonight thinking over the biggest police problem this great city will ever have; namely, the day the war ends. I got it all figured out. I know exactly what’ll happen. Half an hour after the news gets out there won’t be a thing left in the saloons but the bare walls. Then the people will tear down the doors on the liquor stores and take what they want, a bottle of this, a bottle of that. Then they’ll go to work on the breweries; they’ll be swimming in the vats. Old ladies will be howling drunk that day. Preachers won’t even bother to drink in secret; they’ll be climbing lampposts and quoting the Bible on the way up. And some young fellow will trot up to the Central Park Zoo and break the locks. The elephants will be marching down Fifth Avenue, and the lions and the tigers, two by two; we’ll be six weeks getting the monkeys out of the trees. And they’ll ring all the church bells until they crack; they’ll jerk the bells right out of the steeples. And you know that big sireen in Rockefeller Center; somebody will get hold of that, and he won’t be torn loose until they shoot him loose. And they’ll unscrew the hydrants all over town; the water will be knee-deep. And people will be running around with their shoes off, wading in the water and singing songs. I can see the whole scene. And the ferryboat captains will give one toot on their whistles and run the ferryboats right up on dry land, and the bus drivers will run the buses right into the water. And the passengers will take charge of the subway trains, and they’ll run them right up into the open air. You’ll hear a racket and a roar, and you’ll look around, and here’ll come a subway train shooting right through the pavement. And husbands will be so happy they’ll beat their wives, and wives will beat their husbands, and the tellers in banks will gang up and beat the bank presidents, and and the ordinary citizens will tear down big buildings just so they’ll have some bricks to throw.” The policeman laughed and slapped his knee. “What a day of rejoicing!” he said. “What a police problem! I hope to God I live to see it!”

Miss Subways on NPR. Listen.

The classic Upper West Side revival house. Used to feel like sitting in the mouth of a whale, all the blood rushing to the back of your head.

This would have been a good double feature to catch, though, huh?

[Photo Credit: Old New York]

I was downtown on Fifth Avenue. The first bit of news I got, I thought, “He’ll make it.” You know, “It’s just a flesh wound.” And then, later on, the news really came. He wasn’t just a mate of mine, he was a mate of everybody’s, really. He was a funny guy. And you realize that you’re stunned. You really don’t believe it. And you think, “God, why can’t I do anything about it?” I got well drunk on it. And I had another one for John. Then there was the confusion, the phone calls, trying to find out if Yoko was OK. There were the Beatles, and there was John. As a band, they were a great unit. But John, he was his own man. We got along very well. We didn’t see each other very often, but he would sort of turn up at your hotel. Usually, if I was in the city, I’d stay at the Plaza. If John turned up, that meant John wanted to party. He didn’t come there to discuss, you know, philosophy – although it would end up like that. I would just get into town, and there’d be a knock at the door: “Hey, man, what is going on around here?” We would get the guitars down and sing. And, in our spare time, discuss world domination. He’s rubbed off on me as much as anybody. A bit of me rubbed off on John, too, you know. He took it with him. My father just passed away, and he winked at me just before he died. I really feel a lot better about death now. I’m getting off on that wink. I’d give the wink to John.
-Keith Richards

I was nine-and-a-half when John was murdered. Funny, but at the time I thought of him as a New Yorker–an Upper West Sider, to be precise–first and a Beatle, second.

[Quote Via; photo by Ted Barron]

More Sandy photos from Eye Heart New York–a terrific site.

More NYC history over at Narratively.

I had a cousin who visited New York when he was a teenager and was determined to win at three card monty. I didn’t understand. Those were games you just couldn’t win. And even if you did win you’d get jumped rounding the corner so what was the pernt?

He lost, of course, and then played again. Lost again.

Don’t see those games around too much anymore.

Drawing by Will Eisner.

Over at Narratively/NYC, check out this story by Shamanth Rao:

Lloyd Ultan does not use email. He doesn’t own a cellphone. He doesn’t eat in restaurants, drive a car, or even have a driver’s license, for that matter. “I have the longest chauffeur-driven limousine on the highway: it’s called the bus!“ he says with a roaring laugh.

Truth be told, Ultan would have little use for a vehicle, as he rarely leaves the borough where he has lived for all of his seven-and-a-half decades. Ultan is an author, researcher, and the Borough Historian of the Bronx, an official position appointed by the Borough President, and one he has held since 1996.

“By state law, I am paid a six-figure salary,” Ultan says. “Unfortunately, by the same state law, all six figures are zero!” he adds, erupting into another fit of laughter. In each of the five boroughs, the post of official historian is an unpaid but highly respected position. Instead, Ultan pays his bills by teaching and writing books.

[Photo Credit: Luisa Conlon]