Please go here. Much fun if you have a spare hour or three.

Yo, if you haven’t seen this dope site: NYC Corners, well, get going.

Git.

p.s. My brother, sister and I spent many hours in this greasy spoon with our old man when we were kids.

How to Be a Retronaut has a photo gallery of New York from the year I was born.

Pictures by Gentle***Giant.

I saw an old couple walking up 238th street this morning. I said good morning. The man  said, “Hanging in there.”

He looked at me and said: “Hang-ing.”

And they walked away.

You would have liked watching this dude walk. Nice strut, full of New York confidence. Some might call it arrogance but he wasn’t showing off. He was just, wearing it, and wearing it like it fit.

Yankee pride. You know how it goes.

Hey Sal, how come you got no pictures of no brothers on the wall here?

Down at Arturo’s, pride still matters.

[Picture by Bags]

I know I’ve brought the Gookie up before but it’s worth mentioning again.

From “Harpo Speaks!”:

The man who first inspired me to become an actor was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theatre. He rolled cigars in the window of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue.

This was the store with card games and bookmaking in the back room, the nearest thing to a social club in our neighborhood. It was Frenchie’s home away from home and, along with the poolroom, Chico’s too. Since gambling was never the obsession with me that it was with Chico, I didn’t spend much time in the back room. Where I had the most fun was on the street, in front of the store.

Gookie worked at a low table, facing the Avenue through the window. He was a lumpy little man with a complexion like the leaves he used for cigar wrappers, as if he’d turned that color from overexposure to tobacco. He always wore a dirty, striped shirt without a collar, and leather cuffs and elastic armbands. Whether he was at his table in the window or running errands for the cardplayers, Gookie was forever grunting and muttering to himself. He never smiled.

Gookie was funny enough to look at when he wasn’t working, but when he got up to full speed rolling cigars he was something to see. It was a marvel how fast his stubby fingers could move. And when he got going good he was completely lost in his work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out, and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves.

I used to stand there and practice imitating Gookie’s look for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, using the window glass as a mirror. He was too hypnotized by his own work to notice me. Then one day I decided I had him down perfect–tongue, cheeks, eyes, the whole bit.

I rapped on the window. When he looked up I yelled, “Gookie! Gookie!” and made the face. It must have been pretty good because he got sore as hell and began shaking his fist and cursing at me. I threw him the face again. I stuck my thumbs in my ears and waggled my fingers, and this really got him. Gookie barreled out of the store and chased me down the Avenue. It wasn’t hard to outrun such a pudgy little guy. But I’ll give Gookie credit. He never gave up on trying to catch me whenever I did the face through the window.

It got to be a regular show. Sometimes the guy behind the cigar store counter would tip off the cardplayers that I was giving Gookie the works out front. When they watched the performance from the back-room door and he heard them laughing, Gookie would get madder than ever.

For the first time, at the age of twelve, I had a reputation. Even Chico began to respect me. Chico liked to show me off when somebody new turned up in the poolroom. He would tell the stranger, “Shake hands with my brother here. He’s the smartest kid in the neighborhood.” When the guy put out his hand I’d throw him a Gookie. It always broke up the poolroom.

I didn’t know it, but I was becoming an actor. A character was being born in front of the cigar-store window, the character who was eventually to take me a long ways from the streets of the East side.

Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I’ve “thrown a Gookie” at least once. It wasn’t always planned, especially in our early vaudeville days. If we felt the audience slipping away, fidgeting and scraping their feet through our jokes, Groucho or Chico would whisper in panic, “Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!” The fact that it seldom failed to get a laugh is quite a tribute to the original possessor of the face.

The little cigar roller was possibly the best straight man I ever had. He was certainly the straightest straight man. If Gookie had broken up or even smiled just once, my first act would have been a flop and the rest of my life might not have been much to write a book about.

You’ve had a long day and seen hundreds or maybe thousands of people, faces that you’ve barely registered. You are tired and distracted and then, alone on a subway platform there’s a woman. She’s dolled-up, a vision.

Yes, life is good.

[Picture by Ramin Talaie via the New York Times; thanks to This Isn’t Happiness (again and again)]

The Frick Collection, on the low. Secrets of the great museum from Gothamist.

[Photo Credit:Jake Dobkin/Gothamist]

Today’s New York Minute is brought to you by Ted Berg.

[Picture by the most-talented Larson Harley]

Hoops documentary directed by Adam Yauch.

Checkout counter at Fairway.

I ask the older kid, “How much for a case of seltzer?”

He says, “One hundred dollars.”

“How much for your brother?”

“He is for free.”

Seen on 23rd street last night. And homegirl on the left was wearing a Hello Kitty backpack, too.

Never a dull moment.

I saw a security guard in my office building this morning. Knicks fan.

“You heard about Amare?” I said.

He looked up from a small pad of paper he was writing on. “No, what happened?”

“He punched a glass case after the game.”

“Why did he do that?”

“He was frustrated I guess.”

The guard looked at me and titled his head to the side. Squinted his eyes.

“He couldn’t hit something soft?”

Logical question. The big dope.

I sat in the barber’s chair yesterday morning and heard a father talk to his young son. The boy was maybe five-years-old. They were behind me and I couldn’t see them.

The father said, “Punch me here, right here in the face. You don’t want to? It’s okay, right here.” He laughed and I heard him show the boy how to make a fist. “You hit with your knuckles. Like this.”

While my barber changed the blade on his straight razor I half-turned and saw the father, a fat guy with a doughy face. My barber then used the razor along my neck and I heard the father say, “Do you want me to give you a beatin’?” It wasn’t said in anger but in a soft, kind voice. My barber put the razor down and I half-turned again and saw the father’s arm around the boy. He pulled his son close and kissed him on the head.

“After we’re done here I’ll get you that fire engine.”

[Photo Credit: Matt Wilson]

The green on the trees, that green is popping; the flowers, even those you see planted on the street, are vibrant.

The city feels so cheerful, hopeful, this time of year.

Strawberries on the IRT. Because  sometimes you’ve just got to bring breakfast from home.

The Museum of the City of New York gives us: Stanley on the Train.

My friend Joey will not commit to a relationship with a woman. He’s over 40 now and he still won’t settle down. He’s tried but something always distracts him.

“Bro, I fall in love on every block,” he told me one day.  “It’s the city, Dude. It’s this place. I can’t help it.”

Gotta love this town.

From “Here is New York,” by E.B. White:

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn’t attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn’t even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this airshaft to fly over. The biggest ocean-going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with six hundred and fifty miles of water front, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I’ve happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. The Lions have been in convention. I’ve not seen one Lion. A friend of mine saw one and told me about him. (He was lame, and was wearing a bolero.) At the ballgrounds and horse parks the greatest sporting spectacles have been enacted. I saw no ballplayer, no race horse. The governor came to town. I heard the siren scream, but that was all there was to that — an eighteen-inch margin again. A man was killed by a falling cornice. I was not a party to the tragedy, and again the inches counted heavily.

I mention these merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that ever event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions. The Lions are overwhelming; the event is unavoidable. A cornice falls, and it hits ever citizen on the head, every last man in town. I sometimes think the only event that hits every New Yorker on the head is the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is fairly penetrating — the Irish are a hard race to tune out, and they have the police force right in the family.

If you’ve never read this slim volume, do yourself a favor and cop it, pronto. It’s a keeper.

[Photo Credit: Todd Webb via Kateoplis]