The first loft I lived in was on the north side of Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette. I sublet it for the summer of 1969 from an artist by the name of Jack Whitten. It was on the second floor. Up the stairs was a toy factory where they made children’s toys from steel sheets, painted and folded and held together by little tabs that fit into slots. You could hear them up there, hammering the stuff when something didn’t fit, and boxing it up, and occasionally I’d run across one of the workers carrying a cardboard box containing either the sheet steel the things were made of on his way upstairs, or the completed toys, like fire engines and dump trucks in new cardboard boxes on his way downstairs.
All that running around for a valve, but it reminded me how relatively simple Manhattan is when compared with Chicago and it's many diagonal streets; and how helpful people of NYC used to be. As a college student in the early 60's I used to go to NYC, usually with my girlfriend, a lot. I would pick her up at her school and then get onto Manhattan via bridge or tunnel. I used the Major Degan to get to the Roosevelt, Taft, or Biltmore, which sort of catered to college students with special rates. Then I'd garage my car for the weekend and just use cabs, which cost very little; half the cars on the street were cabs. I cannot recall a single incident of anyone being rude to us. And if I couldn't find some obscure place, I'd just ask a policeman, and they knew everything. It was a wonderful time and place to be.
In ‘67, or maybe ‘68, when I was 17--or 18--I housesat Gandy Brody’s loft at 32 Gansevoort for a summer and went barefoot on the streets with a kitten on my shoulder. The kitten came back home with me to the Virginia hills in the Fall when I got unceremoniously evicted for leaving such a mess. That little kitten grew to be so monstrously fat that my grandmother called her Meatloaf. An egregious slight to a lithe Galadriel, because of course I had named her that. Thanks for taking me back!
I really enjoyed your trip down memory lane. I grew up in Manhattan (Yorkville) and by my late teens (late fifties) I had discovered Canal Street, and the area around what became the World Trade Center. It was a bargain hunter and tinkerer’s paradise. I cobbled together my first ‘high-fi’ system (monoural) from parts I found there for almost no money, and would spend whole days exploring the endless variety of surplus goods stores, much of it military, that were concentrated there. As late as the early 70s when I was putting together a water quality lab I found much of what I needed there to build specialized equipment, again for almost no money. Those days are definitely gone, and I have no idea what that area is like today except that it’s probably unrecognizable.
Sep 2, 2023·edited Sep 2, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Looking backwards can provide a sense of perspective. It’s imperative to give depth to the one dimensional world which appears to be closing in around us. When things are perpetually falling apart, there’s a tendency to drift off into a distant past. We can forget about the dog shit and paint a more idealized version, a metaphorical allegory as counterpoint to the inconsistencies we ruminate over.
Wonder where this is going? My Australian grand babies are visiting with their parents and just passing through en route to somewhere else. We will be heading up-to Toronto in October for a semiannual visit to the older grands. By spreading out, our perspective becomes more inclusive and we start thinking outside the box. The box needs to be opened from time to time, so we don’t become so obsessed that we are incapable of moving forward.
Sep 2, 2023·edited Sep 4, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
The contrast to now—from manufacturing city to services city—would be unbearable to think about except for one thing. New Yorkers all ages are as kind and eager as ever to help strangers. I've long believed that the people who give NYC its can't-be-bothered rep are commuters—all those people who have vacated acres of office space. I wish I could simply say good riddance, but the $ they used to spend kept a lot of my favorite businesses solvent. I'll save for another day corresponding tales of Auslander's Hardware and a certain stripped crucial decorative set screw, and Zelf's machine rental, and Gancher's blocklong loftful of nothing but nuts and bolts on Wooster near Canal, and, and, and … all of it, I remember too. I remember.
Zelf’s! I spent a lot of time there. I lived in Tribeca on Franklin Street - Myron the Lycra King was across the street. You gaged a safe area by the number of women walking around after dark, because it was really dark. And no grocery store for blocks and blocks. But plumbing supplies, metal fittings, Canal Paint, molded plastics - it was a wonderland of filth and treasure.
When Pearl and Industrial Plastics closed their doors New York ceased to be New York for me. (i'd include Tunnel Stationary too, near Broadway.) An evil arbocidal neighbor ringed the ailanthus I loved in my backyard. It bravely tried to endure with new leaves the following spring, then in a matter of a few days it just died. After 9/11 I felt like J&R and Century 21 went the same way. I've read that C21 is back in a condensed form, but without the other juicy destinations we've noted I never go down there anymore. I half-lived between Houston and the Battery for decades.
correct about everything and easy to forget, especially when I get all rhetorical. people who only knew the city by its "reputation" aren't aware of the extreme goodwill and helpfulness that always characterized New Yorkers. sometimes a tad brusque but very, very helpful.
but those old stores from the great manufacturing era of NYC have pretty much vanished. it's been so long since I've been on foot or driving around the downtown area that I don't have any idea if there are, say, any of those lower Bowery restaurant supply places left. are there?
I've said this before, but for me, when I think of growing up in NYC, I immediately flash on that old typewriter guy with the booth just behind the fancy candy store (was it Loft's?) on the Northeast corner of Fifth and 42nd. I spent dozens of hours talking to him. there was a guy on the other side of my building here, in Jackson Heights named Walter Fletcher who got an entry-level job on the NYT when he graduated CCNY in 1929. when I knew him, he was long retired and the Times was still letting him cover the Dog Show. one night, he locked himself out of his place and we let him spend the night here. he was so grateful, he let me accompany him to dog shows for a few years. I did the driving. it was wonderful. dog shows (when you attend as any sort of "insider") are tremendous fun ("Best in Show" was almost JOURNALISTIC in its resemblance to the Real Deal).
for me, this stuff was the best thing this burg had to offer and I like being one of the current "old guys" when I spend time with people who are just coming up. but they know, almost as well as I do, that it's just NOT the same.
When you think about it, the restaurant supply stores' customers are among the last businesses that can pay NYC street-level rents. Last time I was on the Bowery—pre-covid—several seemed to be doing fine. That area is morphing into a downtown mini-museum district, New, photography, Chinese culture—come to town, spend a day.
Your adventures with Walter Fletcher are a reminder of how much fun reporting can be—life on the choice side of the barriers.
O, God -- I was reminiscing about old apartments just today. I'd better not get started!
I do remember riding with someone to New York City to collect some people who were coming back to PA for a visit. I saw their apartment. They lived in West Beth, which seemed madly glamorous to me at the time.
Sep 2, 2023·edited Sep 2, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Is that where they manufacture Martins? Let me check, why assume you care or know either way, right!
"Martin guitars are made in Nazareth, Pennsylvania with the exception of the X Series, Backpacker Series, Road Series, Dreadnought Junior, PA5 models, and select ukuleles which are made in our plant in Mexico."
Well praise the lord, that explains the unconscious train of thought, anyway.
EDIT: Spoon Phillips "came all the way to P.A." to demo this Martin D-28, gives you some idea why these guitars are so prized by musicians. *****
Martin Guitar D-28 Satin Amber Burst DEMO | NEW for 2023! In this Martin Guitar DEMO, Spoon Phillips discusses & demonstrates the NEW Martin D-28 Satin Amberburst. The D-28 Satin Amberburst is the same as the legendary D-28, with the only difference being the satin finish on the back, sides & top, vs the gloss finish found on the current standard D-28 Ambertone. Does the satin finish make an audible difference? We invite you to see for yourself. Check out our comparison video: Martin D-28 VS D-28 Satin Ambertone here:
So Angela Paolantonio liked my comment, I navigated to hcl.org, entered "The Ghosts of Italy," checked out her memoir as an e-book, had choices between two formats, don't have or use a Kindle (yet anyway: I need a format where I can view content via "Dark Theme" and resize it on the 43 inch TCL Roku TV I use as a PC monitor, or any reasonable facsimile of this process), shows up via library's "Overdrive" system, well, I was at least able to read one of the best summaries of what I have termed my own "Existential Taoism" ever, from Italo Calvino, the prefatory note (there's a better lit term but I dunno what it is off-hand!):
WHAT COUNTS IS WHAT WE ARE AND HOW WE DEEPEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE
WORLD AND WITH OTHERS, A RELATIONSHIP THAT CAN BE BOTH ONE OF LOVE FOR ALL THAT EXISTS AND A DESIRE FOR ITS TRANSFORMATION.
So my ongoing process of being able to (1) Access the e-books in the Hennepin County Library's connection (and when it comes to that, the connected libraries of one of my alma maters, Macalester College, and the rest of most of the local colleges, and the U. of M's gargantuan collections, maybe including the world's largest collection of Sherlock Holmes material...you get the point, it would rock the joint!) and (2) Set up that digital, wireless or wired path to view it copacetically, aesthetically, and not so damn pathetically, finis! for now.
One way or another as Blondie put it I will read the memoir, though.
Westbeth is the old Bell Labs building in the extreme West Village which was converted into inexpensive artists' housing. I had many friends who lived there, and it was unbelievably hip, full of good company, lots of studios and more than a little intrigue.
Aha, I wondered, wrongly enough as it turned out, if it was short for "West Bethlehem Pennsylvania," being already hazy (and allergy meds taken in unusually higher doses than usual to counteract godawful air quality here lasting for days on end, connected with record heat NYC is about to be getting through Thursday, in the Twin Cities, that didn't help) very hazy, no pun intended, about where the rightfully legendary Martin Guitars are manufactured. Damn, could have "just googled it!" - anyway that led to my confusion.
Sounds like West Beth was a destination location in that era, and maybe still is?!
Better intrigue than tedium, but even better is intriguing discussions and/or affairs that don't
needlessly exploit anyone's vulnerabilities, given some of us, some people, are much too blithely open to experiment with every last trendy drug (or "brilliantly curated cocktail" that has enough calories and high proof liquor to last for 3-4 HOURS, which they are consuming far faster) despite blatant examples right in front of them of what can go wrong, etc.
Or people similarly ready to get involved with "charming borderline psychos," somehow I am immediately reminded of themes in Scorsese's After Hours, neighborhoods in that film must be within blocks of West Beth, but since I didn't spend any time there for all I know the film sets were IN West Beth!
Btw I also "had to" change my diet to help maintain my recovery begun in late March, meaning essentially a drastic reduction of eating red meat (gone, done, over) and stuff like pizza (and I LOVE really well made pizza), it has really helped, that's for sure, but a connected effect may be going too long between fortifying meals, gotta watch any number of dynamic variables to keep keeping on with what really matters, etc.
Westbeth was (is?) EXTREMELY glamorous. I understand that my old friend Peter Trachtenberg (to whom I haven't spoken in many years, but for whom I will always harbor affectionate feelings) has been working on a history of the place, where he was lucky enough to live for a bunch of years. I think I read somewhere that it's done, so let's hope.
Thanks for the memories! I now live in the West Village near Chelsea and used to go to get my curly hair cut and colored at a place on Crosby Street. However, they closed down last year, June 2022 after the pandemic! It was a very enjoyable read of all the streets that I am so familiar with now in Soho!
It is almost now a cosmic law of nature that the humanoid life form known on this third planet from the local sun as "Donald John Trump" - known to Starfleet Command as the spawn of Denuvian slime devils, aka Agent of Perpetual Chaos for the Klingons - has done something heinous, Captain.
Would you like Scotty to beam you up for some R&R?
I made some major life changes ("it would take to long to explain" so I will likely blog some about that) for the good in late March, chnages that have reenergized my system. Once I can just work through the Substack contracts and sign up I will be blogging, with everything free for at least two months.
I want to make sure I have some idea how to proceed in my own way, without pointless and noticeably less astute duplication of what a number of experienced writers - LKTIV is a perfect example - are already doing superbly about crucially important issues.
Also want to draw attention to opinion pieces I notice elsewhere, like this one for example:
Trade deals have brought cheaper goods. They’ve also destroyed millions of US jobs and caused US wages to stagnate
Tue 29 Aug 2023 06.07 EDT
President Joe Biden is making a break with decades of free-trade deals and embarking on an industrial policy designed to revive American manufacturing.
This has caused consternation among free-traders, including some of my former colleagues from the Clinton and Obama administrations.
For example, Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, last month called the president’s thinking “increasingly dangerous” and expressed concern about what he termed “manufacturing-centered economic nationalism that is increasingly being put forth as a general principle to guide policy”.
Whether or not he is convicted, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president
Lloyd Green
Read more
Well, this veteran of the Clinton administration – me – is delighted by what Biden is doing.
Clinton and Obama thought globalization inevitable and bought into the textbook view that trade benefits all parties. “Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off,” Clinton explained in 2000. “It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water.”
But “globalization” is not a force of nature. How it works and whom it benefits or harms depends on specific, negotiated rules about which assets will be protected and which will not.
In most trade deals, the assets of US corporations (including intellectual property) have been protected. If another nation adopts strict climate regulations that reduce the value of US energy assets in that country, the country must compensate the US firms. Wall Street has been granted free rein to move financial assets into and out of our trading partners. *****
Thanks! It will stay free-free-free! as this character I worked with 20 + years ago used to exclaim to exhort the essentially "co-workers" he was nominally "managing" to phone all over the USA (including also larger cities in Canada and the U.K.) selling whatever was on the latest agenda, the bizness also handled surveys.
In the spirit of your support, here's the poem I just sent off as part of a trifecta of links, it follows the first two and thanks again, this matters coming from you, as I'm five months and 6 days in on my self-designed recovery, Excelsior! is my motto for that...
It's the Same the Whole World Over · The Pearly Kings & Queens
English Pub Songs, I'll have the pub's standard pint o' bitter, only vicariously which is a vast improvement in my case, no doubt - mais chacun a son gout, live and let live...}
And THIS GUY - THIS POET, "on another level":
Sunday Morning
BY WALLACE STEVENS
I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
anybody posting "Sunday Morning" is jake with me. in fact, ANY Wallace Stevens is going to incline me in a very positive direction on pretty much any day.
so thanks again, Richard. you're DEFINITELY on a very good roll...
If you don't know Taegan Goddard's politicalwire.com, take a look. I don't think it can be matched, let alone improved on, but you may be able to devise a variation. Good luck!
Thanks for the good wishes, thing is that's exactly (heavy "political" blogging about ongoing struggles) what I am not interested in blogging about, though - politicalwire looks great, Lucian's as well, emptywheel is valuable on some aspects on the Hunter Biden laptop nonsense to the exclusion even of the NY TIMES and WAPO, whom Marcy Wheeler has corrected about important mistakes, so why would I try to devote hours and hours on it?
Not interested in trying to duplicate, much less "surpass" (what a joke that would be!) any of that - my blog will be very different, in fact, I outlined a good part of it already, in a reply to Patris some days ago, and amplified it a bit earlier yesterday.
I'm most deeply educated in and fascinated by philosophy, not politics, so it's a natural way of proceeding, besides which it will be free for at least several months, maybe much longer - I don't need the money, fortunately. I COULD use having some highly skeptical critics post their best arguments against my views on various perennial philosophic questions, though.
That's in fact FREE RESEARCH in itself, intrinsically valuable when I re-enroll (at $10 a tuition credit, astoundingly enough, so an advanced symbolic logic or aesthetics or Italian Philosophy of the Renaissance that would usually cost a student over $700 plus the usual student fees, for a 5 credit course, is $50, plus similar fees).
Ditto more advanced French, Spanish, or German language courses. Purchased several Russian for Beginners texts in 2020, thinking pandemic would end in 2021, could REALLY challenge myself with starting in on Russian! After Feb. 2022 invasion, I would rather study Ukrainian of course. Not sure if U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities offers it. Anyway interacting with critics of what I write is vital for the process of producing thesis papers for the three-paper route to finishing my M.A.,, left languishing when I went to law school.
Bottom line is difny, is sincere thanks for alerting me to Taegan G's blog, but what I am planning is very different kind of writing. Not sure who I would be emulating, maybe past philosophy profs who were instructors in courses on Nicholas of Cusa (and translated his writings) like Jasper Hopkins, that's challenge enough!
Arguably the most important German thinker of the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) was also an ecclesiastical reformer, administrator and cardinal. His life-long effort was to reform and unite the universal and Roman Church, whether as canon law expert at the Council of Basel and after, as legate to Constantinople and later to German dioceses and houses of religion, as bishop in his own diocese of Brixen, and as advisor in the papal curia. His active life as a Church administrator and bishop found written expression in several hundred Latin sermons and more theoretical background in his writings on ecclesiology, ecumenism, mathematics, philosophy and theology. Cusanus had an open and curious mind. He was learned and steeped in the Neoplatonic tradition, well aware of both humanist and scholastic learning, yet mostly self-taught in philosophy and theology. Nicholas anticipated many later ideas in mathematics, cosmology, astronomy and experimental science while constructing his own original version of systematic Neoplatonism. A whole range of earlier medieval writers, such as Thierry of Chartre, Ramon Llull and Albert the Great, influenced Nicholas, but his important intellectual roots are in Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite. In spite of his significance few later thinkers, apart from Giordano Bruno, understood or were influenced by him until the late nineteenth century. **** Scroll down to the bibliography and you'll see why Prof. Hopkins was so prepared to teach the course I took.
Feeling every bit of this. We were uptown but were often in the village and all over the city in 1969. Like you young, pretty much literal explorers not questioning the way the city worked.
Sending this to my oldest who lived not far from where you were - with his girlfriend in a walk up - but in 1999. Thanks for it. Looking up your other pieces.
A few days ago I finished reading "Rules of Civility", the fine book by Towles. I liked seeing a picture from the area where much of the story took place. I too can recall those pre-Home Depot days where one made such purchases. Good story. It doesn't top the Thanksgiving with a surprise guest, but a good story nonetheless.
You are really good at this. Word pictures: I vicariously walked those streets with you as I read it. Thanks, Lucian
Ditto. Thank you Lucian!
Indeed!
All that running around for a valve, but it reminded me how relatively simple Manhattan is when compared with Chicago and it's many diagonal streets; and how helpful people of NYC used to be. As a college student in the early 60's I used to go to NYC, usually with my girlfriend, a lot. I would pick her up at her school and then get onto Manhattan via bridge or tunnel. I used the Major Degan to get to the Roosevelt, Taft, or Biltmore, which sort of catered to college students with special rates. Then I'd garage my car for the weekend and just use cabs, which cost very little; half the cars on the street were cabs. I cannot recall a single incident of anyone being rude to us. And if I couldn't find some obscure place, I'd just ask a policeman, and they knew everything. It was a wonderful time and place to be.
In ‘67, or maybe ‘68, when I was 17--or 18--I housesat Gandy Brody’s loft at 32 Gansevoort for a summer and went barefoot on the streets with a kitten on my shoulder. The kitten came back home with me to the Virginia hills in the Fall when I got unceremoniously evicted for leaving such a mess. That little kitten grew to be so monstrously fat that my grandmother called her Meatloaf. An egregious slight to a lithe Galadriel, because of course I had named her that. Thanks for taking me back!
A slice of real life, thanks, makes some interesting and welcome relief from the news we can't avoid, and which you explain so acutely.
I really enjoyed your trip down memory lane. I grew up in Manhattan (Yorkville) and by my late teens (late fifties) I had discovered Canal Street, and the area around what became the World Trade Center. It was a bargain hunter and tinkerer’s paradise. I cobbled together my first ‘high-fi’ system (monoural) from parts I found there for almost no money, and would spend whole days exploring the endless variety of surplus goods stores, much of it military, that were concentrated there. As late as the early 70s when I was putting together a water quality lab I found much of what I needed there to build specialized equipment, again for almost no money. Those days are definitely gone, and I have no idea what that area is like today except that it’s probably unrecognizable.
I love your personal stories! Thanks for this one.
Love this. Everything about the details and tone. Wonderful. I’m there with you.
I saw a photo of Mercer street back in the day on Facebook. Noticed the lovely bluestone sidewalk. Got me thinking.
I'm glad it got you thinking. That was a beautiful piece of writing.
I remember. And I love bluestone.
Looking backwards can provide a sense of perspective. It’s imperative to give depth to the one dimensional world which appears to be closing in around us. When things are perpetually falling apart, there’s a tendency to drift off into a distant past. We can forget about the dog shit and paint a more idealized version, a metaphorical allegory as counterpoint to the inconsistencies we ruminate over.
Wonder where this is going? My Australian grand babies are visiting with their parents and just passing through en route to somewhere else. We will be heading up-to Toronto in October for a semiannual visit to the older grands. By spreading out, our perspective becomes more inclusive and we start thinking outside the box. The box needs to be opened from time to time, so we don’t become so obsessed that we are incapable of moving forward.
The contrast to now—from manufacturing city to services city—would be unbearable to think about except for one thing. New Yorkers all ages are as kind and eager as ever to help strangers. I've long believed that the people who give NYC its can't-be-bothered rep are commuters—all those people who have vacated acres of office space. I wish I could simply say good riddance, but the $ they used to spend kept a lot of my favorite businesses solvent. I'll save for another day corresponding tales of Auslander's Hardware and a certain stripped crucial decorative set screw, and Zelf's machine rental, and Gancher's blocklong loftful of nothing but nuts and bolts on Wooster near Canal, and, and, and … all of it, I remember too. I remember.
I know you do. Even 424 West Broome when you could walk blocks down there after 6 pm and never see a soul.
The streets there were like a visit to Mars.
Zelf’s! I spent a lot of time there. I lived in Tribeca on Franklin Street - Myron the Lycra King was across the street. You gaged a safe area by the number of women walking around after dark, because it was really dark. And no grocery store for blocks and blocks. But plumbing supplies, metal fittings, Canal Paint, molded plastics - it was a wonderland of filth and treasure.
The movie Brazil comes to mind.
When Pearl and Industrial Plastics closed their doors New York ceased to be New York for me. (i'd include Tunnel Stationary too, near Broadway.) An evil arbocidal neighbor ringed the ailanthus I loved in my backyard. It bravely tried to endure with new leaves the following spring, then in a matter of a few days it just died. After 9/11 I felt like J&R and Century 21 went the same way. I've read that C21 is back in a condensed form, but without the other juicy destinations we've noted I never go down there anymore. I half-lived between Houston and the Battery for decades.
correct about everything and easy to forget, especially when I get all rhetorical. people who only knew the city by its "reputation" aren't aware of the extreme goodwill and helpfulness that always characterized New Yorkers. sometimes a tad brusque but very, very helpful.
but those old stores from the great manufacturing era of NYC have pretty much vanished. it's been so long since I've been on foot or driving around the downtown area that I don't have any idea if there are, say, any of those lower Bowery restaurant supply places left. are there?
I've said this before, but for me, when I think of growing up in NYC, I immediately flash on that old typewriter guy with the booth just behind the fancy candy store (was it Loft's?) on the Northeast corner of Fifth and 42nd. I spent dozens of hours talking to him. there was a guy on the other side of my building here, in Jackson Heights named Walter Fletcher who got an entry-level job on the NYT when he graduated CCNY in 1929. when I knew him, he was long retired and the Times was still letting him cover the Dog Show. one night, he locked himself out of his place and we let him spend the night here. he was so grateful, he let me accompany him to dog shows for a few years. I did the driving. it was wonderful. dog shows (when you attend as any sort of "insider") are tremendous fun ("Best in Show" was almost JOURNALISTIC in its resemblance to the Real Deal).
for me, this stuff was the best thing this burg had to offer and I like being one of the current "old guys" when I spend time with people who are just coming up. but they know, almost as well as I do, that it's just NOT the same.
When you think about it, the restaurant supply stores' customers are among the last businesses that can pay NYC street-level rents. Last time I was on the Bowery—pre-covid—several seemed to be doing fine. That area is morphing into a downtown mini-museum district, New, photography, Chinese culture—come to town, spend a day.
Your adventures with Walter Fletcher are a reminder of how much fun reporting can be—life on the choice side of the barriers.
Thanks for this.I needed “something” and this was it!
O, God -- I was reminiscing about old apartments just today. I'd better not get started!
I do remember riding with someone to New York City to collect some people who were coming back to PA for a visit. I saw their apartment. They lived in West Beth, which seemed madly glamorous to me at the time.
Is that where they manufacture Martins? Let me check, why assume you care or know either way, right!
"Martin guitars are made in Nazareth, Pennsylvania with the exception of the X Series, Backpacker Series, Road Series, Dreadnought Junior, PA5 models, and select ukuleles which are made in our plant in Mexico."
Well praise the lord, that explains the unconscious train of thought, anyway.
EDIT: Spoon Phillips "came all the way to P.A." to demo this Martin D-28, gives you some idea why these guitars are so prized by musicians. *****
youtube.com/watch?v=882IIovxgBo&ab_channel=Maury%27sMusic
2,378 views Mar 27, 2023 #martinguitar #D28
Martin Guitar D-28 Satin Amber Burst DEMO | NEW for 2023! In this Martin Guitar DEMO, Spoon Phillips discusses & demonstrates the NEW Martin D-28 Satin Amberburst. The D-28 Satin Amberburst is the same as the legendary D-28, with the only difference being the satin finish on the back, sides & top, vs the gloss finish found on the current standard D-28 Ambertone. Does the satin finish make an audible difference? We invite you to see for yourself. Check out our comparison video: Martin D-28 VS D-28 Satin Ambertone here:
So astute!
So Angela Paolantonio liked my comment, I navigated to hcl.org, entered "The Ghosts of Italy," checked out her memoir as an e-book, had choices between two formats, don't have or use a Kindle (yet anyway: I need a format where I can view content via "Dark Theme" and resize it on the 43 inch TCL Roku TV I use as a PC monitor, or any reasonable facsimile of this process), shows up via library's "Overdrive" system, well, I was at least able to read one of the best summaries of what I have termed my own "Existential Taoism" ever, from Italo Calvino, the prefatory note (there's a better lit term but I dunno what it is off-hand!):
WHAT COUNTS IS WHAT WE ARE AND HOW WE DEEPEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE
WORLD AND WITH OTHERS, A RELATIONSHIP THAT CAN BE BOTH ONE OF LOVE FOR ALL THAT EXISTS AND A DESIRE FOR ITS TRANSFORMATION.
ITALO CALVINO
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino
*******
So my ongoing process of being able to (1) Access the e-books in the Hennepin County Library's connection (and when it comes to that, the connected libraries of one of my alma maters, Macalester College, and the rest of most of the local colleges, and the U. of M's gargantuan collections, maybe including the world's largest collection of Sherlock Holmes material...you get the point, it would rock the joint!) and (2) Set up that digital, wireless or wired path to view it copacetically, aesthetically, and not so damn pathetically, finis! for now.
One way or another as Blondie put it I will read the memoir, though.
Westbeth is the old Bell Labs building in the extreme West Village which was converted into inexpensive artists' housing. I had many friends who lived there, and it was unbelievably hip, full of good company, lots of studios and more than a little intrigue.
Aha, I wondered, wrongly enough as it turned out, if it was short for "West Bethlehem Pennsylvania," being already hazy (and allergy meds taken in unusually higher doses than usual to counteract godawful air quality here lasting for days on end, connected with record heat NYC is about to be getting through Thursday, in the Twin Cities, that didn't help) very hazy, no pun intended, about where the rightfully legendary Martin Guitars are manufactured. Damn, could have "just googled it!" - anyway that led to my confusion.
Sounds like West Beth was a destination location in that era, and maybe still is?!
Better intrigue than tedium, but even better is intriguing discussions and/or affairs that don't
needlessly exploit anyone's vulnerabilities, given some of us, some people, are much too blithely open to experiment with every last trendy drug (or "brilliantly curated cocktail" that has enough calories and high proof liquor to last for 3-4 HOURS, which they are consuming far faster) despite blatant examples right in front of them of what can go wrong, etc.
Or people similarly ready to get involved with "charming borderline psychos," somehow I am immediately reminded of themes in Scorsese's After Hours, neighborhoods in that film must be within blocks of West Beth, but since I didn't spend any time there for all I know the film sets were IN West Beth!
Btw I also "had to" change my diet to help maintain my recovery begun in late March, meaning essentially a drastic reduction of eating red meat (gone, done, over) and stuff like pizza (and I LOVE really well made pizza), it has really helped, that's for sure, but a connected effect may be going too long between fortifying meals, gotta watch any number of dynamic variables to keep keeping on with what really matters, etc.
Westbeth was (is?) EXTREMELY glamorous. I understand that my old friend Peter Trachtenberg (to whom I haven't spoken in many years, but for whom I will always harbor affectionate feelings) has been working on a history of the place, where he was lucky enough to live for a bunch of years. I think I read somewhere that it's done, so let's hope.
Thanks for the memories! I now live in the West Village near Chelsea and used to go to get my curly hair cut and colored at a place on Crosby Street. However, they closed down last year, June 2022 after the pandemic! It was a very enjoyable read of all the streets that I am so familiar with now in Soho!
Memory lane Lucian, you colored it nicely. I enjoyed the ride, thanks 🙏
Well did you say “Hi from Jimmy,” or not? Also, did Trump do anything heinous today? You’re not going soft on him are you?
It is almost now a cosmic law of nature that the humanoid life form known on this third planet from the local sun as "Donald John Trump" - known to Starfleet Command as the spawn of Denuvian slime devils, aka Agent of Perpetual Chaos for the Klingons - has done something heinous, Captain.
Would you like Scotty to beam you up for some R&R?
You are too funny, Justice Turnbull! I follow Lucien, TC, Hubbell and HCR, see you posting your wisdom, experience and knowledge. Thank you.
I made some major life changes ("it would take to long to explain" so I will likely blog some about that) for the good in late March, chnages that have reenergized my system. Once I can just work through the Substack contracts and sign up I will be blogging, with everything free for at least two months.
I want to make sure I have some idea how to proceed in my own way, without pointless and noticeably less astute duplication of what a number of experienced writers - LKTIV is a perfect example - are already doing superbly about crucially important issues.
Also want to draw attention to opinion pieces I notice elsewhere, like this one for example:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/29/biden-is-turning-away-from-free-trade-and-thats-a-great-thing
First paragraphs, setting the stage:
Trade deals have brought cheaper goods. They’ve also destroyed millions of US jobs and caused US wages to stagnate
Tue 29 Aug 2023 06.07 EDT
President Joe Biden is making a break with decades of free-trade deals and embarking on an industrial policy designed to revive American manufacturing.
This has caused consternation among free-traders, including some of my former colleagues from the Clinton and Obama administrations.
For example, Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, last month called the president’s thinking “increasingly dangerous” and expressed concern about what he termed “manufacturing-centered economic nationalism that is increasingly being put forth as a general principle to guide policy”.
Whether or not he is convicted, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president
Lloyd Green
Read more
Well, this veteran of the Clinton administration – me – is delighted by what Biden is doing.
Clinton and Obama thought globalization inevitable and bought into the textbook view that trade benefits all parties. “Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off,” Clinton explained in 2000. “It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water.”
But “globalization” is not a force of nature. How it works and whom it benefits or harms depends on specific, negotiated rules about which assets will be protected and which will not.
In most trade deals, the assets of US corporations (including intellectual property) have been protected. If another nation adopts strict climate regulations that reduce the value of US energy assets in that country, the country must compensate the US firms. Wall Street has been granted free rein to move financial assets into and out of our trading partners. *****
thanks for posting this. count on me to subscribe, Richard.
Thanks! It will stay free-free-free! as this character I worked with 20 + years ago used to exclaim to exhort the essentially "co-workers" he was nominally "managing" to phone all over the USA (including also larger cities in Canada and the U.K.) selling whatever was on the latest agenda, the bizness also handled surveys.
In the spirit of your support, here's the poem I just sent off as part of a trifecta of links, it follows the first two and thanks again, this matters coming from you, as I'm five months and 6 days in on my self-designed recovery, Excelsior! is my motto for that...
www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/02/everything-is-ahead-of-us-ukraine
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBYhDwqF_XI
{It's the Same the Whole World Over -
It's the Same the Whole World Over · The Pearly Kings & Queens
English Pub Songs, I'll have the pub's standard pint o' bitter, only vicariously which is a vast improvement in my case, no doubt - mais chacun a son gout, live and let live...}
And THIS GUY - THIS POET, "on another level":
Sunday Morning
BY WALLACE STEVENS
I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13261/sunday-morning
anybody posting "Sunday Morning" is jake with me. in fact, ANY Wallace Stevens is going to incline me in a very positive direction on pretty much any day.
so thanks again, Richard. you're DEFINITELY on a very good roll...
If you don't know Taegan Goddard's politicalwire.com, take a look. I don't think it can be matched, let alone improved on, but you may be able to devise a variation. Good luck!
Thanks for the good wishes, thing is that's exactly (heavy "political" blogging about ongoing struggles) what I am not interested in blogging about, though - politicalwire looks great, Lucian's as well, emptywheel is valuable on some aspects on the Hunter Biden laptop nonsense to the exclusion even of the NY TIMES and WAPO, whom Marcy Wheeler has corrected about important mistakes, so why would I try to devote hours and hours on it?
Not interested in trying to duplicate, much less "surpass" (what a joke that would be!) any of that - my blog will be very different, in fact, I outlined a good part of it already, in a reply to Patris some days ago, and amplified it a bit earlier yesterday.
I'm most deeply educated in and fascinated by philosophy, not politics, so it's a natural way of proceeding, besides which it will be free for at least several months, maybe much longer - I don't need the money, fortunately. I COULD use having some highly skeptical critics post their best arguments against my views on various perennial philosophic questions, though.
That's in fact FREE RESEARCH in itself, intrinsically valuable when I re-enroll (at $10 a tuition credit, astoundingly enough, so an advanced symbolic logic or aesthetics or Italian Philosophy of the Renaissance that would usually cost a student over $700 plus the usual student fees, for a 5 credit course, is $50, plus similar fees).
Ditto more advanced French, Spanish, or German language courses. Purchased several Russian for Beginners texts in 2020, thinking pandemic would end in 2021, could REALLY challenge myself with starting in on Russian! After Feb. 2022 invasion, I would rather study Ukrainian of course. Not sure if U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities offers it. Anyway interacting with critics of what I write is vital for the process of producing thesis papers for the three-paper route to finishing my M.A.,, left languishing when I went to law school.
Bottom line is difny, is sincere thanks for alerting me to Taegan G's blog, but what I am planning is very different kind of writing. Not sure who I would be emulating, maybe past philosophy profs who were instructors in courses on Nicholas of Cusa (and translated his writings) like Jasper Hopkins, that's challenge enough!
plato.stanford.edu/entries/cusanus/ Excerpt:
Arguably the most important German thinker of the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) was also an ecclesiastical reformer, administrator and cardinal. His life-long effort was to reform and unite the universal and Roman Church, whether as canon law expert at the Council of Basel and after, as legate to Constantinople and later to German dioceses and houses of religion, as bishop in his own diocese of Brixen, and as advisor in the papal curia. His active life as a Church administrator and bishop found written expression in several hundred Latin sermons and more theoretical background in his writings on ecclesiology, ecumenism, mathematics, philosophy and theology. Cusanus had an open and curious mind. He was learned and steeped in the Neoplatonic tradition, well aware of both humanist and scholastic learning, yet mostly self-taught in philosophy and theology. Nicholas anticipated many later ideas in mathematics, cosmology, astronomy and experimental science while constructing his own original version of systematic Neoplatonism. A whole range of earlier medieval writers, such as Thierry of Chartre, Ramon Llull and Albert the Great, influenced Nicholas, but his important intellectual roots are in Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite. In spite of his significance few later thinkers, apart from Giordano Bruno, understood or were influenced by him until the late nineteenth century. **** Scroll down to the bibliography and you'll see why Prof. Hopkins was so prepared to teach the course I took.
so pr
Feeling every bit of this. We were uptown but were often in the village and all over the city in 1969. Like you young, pretty much literal explorers not questioning the way the city worked.
Sending this to my oldest who lived not far from where you were - with his girlfriend in a walk up - but in 1999. Thanks for it. Looking up your other pieces.
A few days ago I finished reading "Rules of Civility", the fine book by Towles. I liked seeing a picture from the area where much of the story took place. I too can recall those pre-Home Depot days where one made such purchases. Good story. It doesn't top the Thanksgiving with a surprise guest, but a good story nonetheless.